“With Mrs. Whitcomb? Might’ve been a multitude of things, some more likely than others. But I’m inclined to think she took the easy way out—just stepped out of the wreck of her life, doffed her famous veil, and left by the doors, along with everybody else. Without the veil, no one would ever have recognized her. She’d have been free.”
“Free to do—what?”
“Oh, I’d like to believe she settled down, changed her name, had more children. Anything but the obvious.”
“Which is?”
“That train was going full speed, Mrs. Cairns. To get off mid-jaunt would have been suicide, literally. But then again, maybe that’s what she wanted, eh? To be with her boy again.”
“Best-case scenario, sure. If he was even dead.”
“Exactly. We don’t know—and odds are, we never will.” Balcarras shook his head, sighing. “Poor girl. Poor, foolish girl.”
We sat there together a moment while I tried to think of anything else to ask. Then he leaned across the table, giving what he might have thought was a charming leer. “You’re very easy to talk to, my dear,” he told me. “Who was it you said you wrote for, again?”
Lip Weekly I could have said, at one point; Deep Down Undertown, had I wanted to tell the truth. Instead, I found myself blurting out, before I could think better of it: “Oh, well . . . these days, myself, mainly. I guess.”
“No publisher’s contract yet, eh? All this work done on spec, so to speak?”
“Not really, no. And—yeah.”
“Hmmm.” He patted my hand, as if in consolation. “Something to look forward to then.”
I walked back from Balcarras’s Cabbagetown house with my mind racing, eyes full of stars from suddenly re-emerging into daylight from the dim, paper-parched atmosphere of the old man’s book-lined office. I was organizing words in my head, cutting and pasting, trying to figure out where to put what I’d learned. Chapter One, maybe? How long could I make people wait, trusting them to read along while I blathered toward some point, without even a hint of the mysteries to come?
These narrative structures have to be thought out beforehand, you see—strategized, methodically, according to content. Because a story, in the main, dictates its own telling.
In hindsight, it wasn’t my fault that I just didn’t know what kind of story I’d been dropped into, head first and kicking.
That book I thought I was writing would’ve made my meandering parody of a career: as a former film critic and pseudo-film historian who’d somehow managed to stumble into teaching the subject for ten-plus years without the benefit of a film studies degree, or any other sort of qualification beyond an autodidact’s instincts allied with having already watched upwards of three thousand movies while taking notes upside-down. It would’ve been a triumphant tale of luck, anecdata disguised as objective fact, like almost every other Canadian cinematic text. The strange but true tale of how, while reviewing a program of experimental films shown in downtown Toronto, I had accidentally discovered that Mrs. Arthur Macalla Whitcomb had apparently made a series of early motion pictures employing special effects techniques similar to those of science fiction and fantasy film pioneer George Méliès—thus making her Canada’s first female filmmaker, and the Vinegar House (not only her home but her production studio) a site of great historical significance.
Documentaries, awards, speaking engagements . . . everything, all the time. The impossible dream. That book would’ve been my legacy.
Not this one, though. Not in the same way. Which is just how things work out sometimes—completely the opposite of how you thought they would. The chance comes, and then it’s gone; the moment turns and you don’t know why. Nothing’s ever the same.
Still, it’s not like I’m not sort
of used to that happening by now.
The night I saw one of Mrs. Whitcomb’s films for the first time, I’d already made my son cry twice. It was Friday, yet another goddamn P.D. Day—first of a three-day weekend—and as usual it hit me like an unpleasant surprise, because I hadn’t been paying attention. It’d been in his communication book, right there, written down in black and white: Friday off, no school. Make arrangements accordingly. But my mind had been elsewhere, on other things—I’d filtered it away, pretty much the same way he did all the time, with everything.
“You should’ve asked,” my mom reminded me, as though I couldn’t possibly have connected those dots myself. “You’d’ve probably seen it if you checked the Toronto Catholic School Board website, too. They put notifications like that on page one.”
“Yes, Mom. I know.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because I’m a fucking idiot?”
“The problem is, Lois, that that just isn’t true.”
Selfish then, rather than stupid. That we could certainly both agree on.
That morning, Clark’s brain was full of static. He jumped and ran and laugh-screamed up and down our tiny apartment, caught in a perfect storm of reference and imitation, sliding from Kesha to Star Trek to Frozen to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to various random TV commercials “OH DEAR!” he yelled, as I tried to simultaneously shoehorn him into a pair of pants and force him to eat his bacon. “OH NO! DO YOU WANT TO BUILD A SNOWMAN? SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER! BRUSH MY TEETH WITH A BOTTLE OF JACK! SEXUALLY BASED CRIMES ARE CONSIDERED PARTICULARLY HEINOUS! CEE ESS EYYYYE NEW YORRRRK!”
I’m aware that it looks pretty funny, written down like that. Sort of like how he always looks cute while doing it, thank Christ.
Songs and stories, rhymes and repetition—that’s what my son has, instead of a vocabulary. He speaks mainly in echolalia; haphazardly grafting great chunks of memorized dialogue from movies, cartoons, commercials, and songs together to get a point across. Sometimes he succumbs to what I’ve come to call “jazz speech,” imitating the rhythm, pitch, and intonation of a phrase so expertly that meaning completely disappears, treating it like a phrase of music, or lyrics in another language.