The Film Club Read Free Page B

into a very expensive car. You could smell the new leather from here.
    â€œI didn’t look like I was coming on to her or anything, did I?” he asked.
    â€œNo, not at all.”
    â€œNot nervous or anything?”
    â€œNo. Were you?”
    â€œJust when I look closely at her. The rest of the time I’m fine.”
    â€œYou seemed pretty on top of things to me.”
    â€œI did, didn’t I?” And again you could see a kind of lightness come into his limbs, a holiday in a minor key from that blur of worry and second-guessing to which, as if pulled by gravity, he would return. How little I can give him, I thought, just these little apple slices of reassurance, like feeding a rare animal at the zoo.
    Through the wall, you could hear our neighbour, Eleanor. She was rattling about in her kitchen, making tea, listening to the radio. A lonely sound. Half listening to her, half thinking about my own worries, I found myself fitfully recalling Jesse’s first “date.” He was ten, maybe eleven. I supervised his preparations; watched with crossed arms while he brushed his teeth, tapped his tiny underarms with my deodorant, put on a red T-shirt, brushed his hair and set off. I followed him, ducking behind bushes and trees, staying out of sight. (How beautiful he looked in the sunlight, this little stick figure with purple hair.)
    He appeared in the driveway of a towering Victorian house a few moments later with a little girl beside him. She was slightly taller than him. I followed them to Bloor Street where they turned in to a Coffee Time and then broke off my surveillance.
    â€œYou don’t think Rebecca’s out of my league, do you, Dad?” Jesse asked, catching sight of himself in the mirror, his face distorting.
    â€œNobody’s out of your league,” I said. But my heart fluttered when I said it.
    I had a lot of time on my hands that winter. I was hosting a little documentary show that no one watched, but my contract was coming to an end and the executive producer had ceased returning my mildly hyperventilating e-mails. I had the uncomfortable sensation that the bottom was falling out of my television career.
    â€œYou may have to go out and look for a job just like everyone else,” my wife said. That scared me. Going around hat in hand asking for work at age fifty.
    â€œI don’t think people see it like that,” she said. “It’s just a guy looking for work. Everybody does it.”
    I called a few colleagues from the old days, people who had admired (I thought) my work. But they had moved on to other shows, wives, new babies. You could sense their friendliness and at the same time your irrelevance.
    I had lunch with people I hadn’t seen for years. Old friends from high school, from university, from racy times in the Caribbean. Twenty minutes in, I’d look over my fork and think, I must not do this again. (I’m sure they were thinking the same thing.) How exactly, I wondered privately, am I going to live out the rest of my life? Add five or ten years onto my present situation, it didn’t look so good. My easy confidence that things were going to “sort of work out” and “end well” evaporated.
    I drew up a grim little chart. Assuming no one hired me ever again, I had enough money to live for two years. Longer if I stopped going out to dinner. (Even longer if I died.) But then what? Substitute teaching? Something I hadn’t done for twenty-five years. The thought made my stomach plunge. The phone ringing at six-thirty in the morning, me leaping out of bed with a racing heart and a foul taste in my mouth; into my shirt, tie, and mothbally sports jacket; the sickening subway ride to some brick school in a neighbourhood I didn’t know, the too-bright hallways, the vice-principal’s office. “Aren’t you the guy who used to be on television?” Thoughts that made you want to pour a stiff drink at eleven