expected, Dick was raging when we arrived. On the set, a few of the actors — Avril Page, Bill Doran, Kathleen Hart, and Trevor Wheeler — stood at the end of the set, in silence, coffees in hand, while cameramen and technicians busied themselves, pulling cables, adjusting the lighting for the umpteenth time. With an expansive, angry gesture, Dick encompassed them all. “You know how much these delays cost me? I’m not a fucking bank!”
Ann walked towards Dick, trying to calm him. Dick was short, brown, and as impulsive as a southern Italian; he was also practically bald, and his fingers were like sausages. Ann told him about Gail, and he grumbled a few ill-intentioned apologies (for Dick, it was always business first, before family drama and death) and told me, without looking at me, “The scene, you haven’t forgotten about it, right? We’re going to do as we said we would. Whether you’re there or not.” And Matt appeared, a New York Knicks cap on his head, a New Yorker with whom I shared a number of affinities. He was six feet at least, no more than an inch taller than me, with brown hair and a quick wit. From time to time we would be mistaken for brothers, though he was younger than me, and larger. The Knicks cap on his head wasn’t just for show; he wasn’t like those fat sedentary guys who spend their time drinking beer, never far from the ball cap of their favourite team. Matt had actually played basketball, and at a pretty decent level, with the Red Storm of St. John’s University, Queens. Each season he’d played with the team, they’d won four times as many games as they’d lost. He had Irish roots and the same Catholic education I did. And with this education came our shared aversion for what the church had tried to stuff down our throats — hell and all the nonsense on masturbation, the usual bullshit. So we felt the same pleasure in making In Gad, as if we were taking revenge on the era we were born in, thinking of the shy, inhibited boys we’d been, thankful at having lived through it without too much lasting damage. After all, many of our generation had never had an opportunity to break the shackles of their atavism, the chance to free themselves and laugh about the whole thing — laugh about the whole thing on TV.
Matt would take care of Trevor. I regretted not being able to settle the problem myself, even if I had total confidence in Matt. He had tact, he was a team player, like in his days with the Red Storm, and Ann would reinforce the message, “A small modification. No, not censorship, why would you even think that?” And Matt might toss out one of his theories about film direction, one that fitted with his former basketball career — intensity, look, and physical presence often more important than the text itself.
After all, I’d be gone for only a day or so.
I was about to kiss Ann and head for the exit when Dick caught me by the sleeve and said, as if uttering a threat, though his eyes were filled with compassion, “Don’t come back depressed, okay?”
Los Angeles International Airport. On a Monday morning. Filled with businessmen and tourists. A group of young nuns caught my eye, Latinas mostly, and I asked myself whether, in their congregation, they ever prayed that In Gad might be removed from the airwaves. One of them smiled at me, a mouth full of small white teeth, a kindly smile I tried to return. Why would such young women become nuns in 1995? The newspapers had written, in reference to In Gad, that in Hollywood, film and TV people had this idea that Christians were potentially dangerous citizens, fanatics — a misconception created out of a total misunderstanding of the values of a large portion of the population. All part of the culture wars. There might be some truth in that, though who was I to say? I made my way to the American Airlines counter, as usual. The girl there recognized me, “New York?”
“No, Montreal.”
She seemed caught off guard, though kept smiling. “First time there?”
“Yes,” I lied, to end the conversation.
A ticket to Chicago, then Montreal. Take-off in thirty minutes, no luggage.
Thirty-three thousand feet in the air, flying to another country, mine, I guess, a country I had fled in complicated circumstances in 1962. The question hit me suddenly: had I ever loved Gail Egan? I remember this one time in Métis Beach, after an afternoon spent at the Riddingtons’ home with my father, destroying a nest of carpenter ants and replacing a portion of the rotten railing that they had colonized. After, my old man had driven back home in our Chevrolet Bel Air, one hand out the window, letting me pedal back home on the brand new bicycle my mother had given me at the beginning of the summer, making me swear I’d take care of it “just like Dad does with his Chevrolet.” I was thirteen and finally tasting newfound freedom on my new bicycle, wandering about as I pleased in Métis Beach, carefully watching the properties with their cars in their large gravel driveways, hoping beyond hope to hear a shout from the other side of that border. Come on, Romain! Come play with us! A fool’s hope.
The young people of Métis Beach never saw us unless we were with our fathers, repairing something or other in their homes; for them, we were some sort of subspecies, perhaps even untouchables, Dalits. They couldn’t even imagine spending time with us.
At least that’s how I saw things. How I interpreted their cold indifference.
Flying along on my new red bicycle with white mud guards, I saw her walking along Beach Road, tennis racket in hand, looking lithe, self-aware, already conscious of her beauty, in short white shorts, far too short for the French Village, fine thighs, tanned, very tanned. I followed her at a distance, full of pride on my new racer, as proud as those vacationers from Métis Beach who paraded the beautiful cars they had received for their sixteenth birthday. My brand new CCM bicycle! None of those cheap brands that you found in low-cost bike shops, imported from Czechoslovakia, a Communist country as poor as its people, sad like the eyes of children condemned to ride around on terrible bicycles.
Unknown to her, I was riding behind her, zigzagging carefully so as not to put my feet on the ground, carving into my mind every detail of her, my head churning wild thoughts, guilty ones: her sculpted calves, firm thighs, the bulge there, just over the thigh, inside.…
“Gail, look who’s following you!”
Johnny Picoté Babcock. Came out of nowhere. His redhead face, splashed with rust. Gail had whipped around brusquely, forcing me to brake hard, and I almost flipped over my handlebars. Johnny Picoté burst out laughing, and went on aggressively, “What the hell are you doing, eh?” I mumbled something like, “Rien … Nothing.” And he walked towards my bicycle, a malicious grin on his lips, his fist closed around a rock he dragged across my mud guards, a scratch some four inches long that was like a knife in my side, a sharp pain that reached all the way to my heart. Gail said, “Leave him alone, he doesn’t speak English.” It wasn’t entirely true. I understood quite a few words, and could even speak a few of them, including some pretty complicated ones: lawn mower, rake, shovel, gutter. Spending so much time with the English, I ended up learning a few of their words. Red with shame and anger, I got back on my CCM and was about to go on my way, when Johnny Picoté Babcock planted himself in front of me. Like the bad guys in a Western, he gave me a long, hard stare, the sort that says, next time, you won’t get off so easy. I understood then that I would never be able to rival the boys of Métis Beach.
Sure, it was pretty early to be asking the flight attendant for a drink, but I did anyway, a screwdriver in a tiny plastic glass. From the seat next to me, a woman of forty, quite pretty and clearly in shape, threw me an amused grin, So early? Afraid of flying? I thought back to that time, long ago now, when Dick had tried his hand at political analysis, pitching the line that the Watergate scandal was not as bad as the media were trying to make it seem. I asked him, surprised, “You’ve never been to Washington? Or New York?” He avoided the question by mumbling something about Woody Allen, “Allen Stewart Konigsberg, that’s his real name, you knew that, didn’t you?” I hadn’t known it. “That shuts you up, right? Well, there’s no need to go to New York to know that.” In the end he admitted, defeated, that he had a phobia about
