commercials in Winnipeg or promotional docs for Caribbean time-shares. Because of Malcolm’s sneaky little affair with Sloan, among other things, Fife feels sorry for her. He’s always felt sorry for Diana, from back when she was his student at Concordia and Malcolm was his teaching assistant and seduced her by convincing her that he was more talented than she, when Fife knew the opposite was true. Diana could have become a real filmmaker, but instead she fell in love with Malcolm and married him and became his producer and made him the filmmaker. Even then, Diana was honest, and Malcolm was not.
Same as Emma and Fife.
Why are women more honest than men? he wonders. It ought to be the other way around. Men have so much more power in the world, you’d think they could at least take a shot at being honest. What do they have to lose? Look at Sloan, who is probably convinced that she’s in love with the short, shifty, bald-headed, fifty-year-old married man, and she thinks he’s in love with her, or she wouldn’t sleep with him. Even Sloan is honest.
Of course, it’s possible that she’s just cynical and believes that Malcolm can advance her career a whole lot faster than some attractive, unmarried guy in his twenties. But Fife doesn’t think so. The girl is honest.
Alicia Chapman of Richmond, Virginia, she was honest, too. All the women Fife ever loved were honest. And from his first love to yesterday’s, he was not.
Fife says, I’m sorry, Diana. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just, this is hard. Keeping focused. Not letting my fucked-up dying body distract me. My body wants my complete attention. Just like you and Malcolm, my body resents it when I pay attention to my remembered, hidden past.
Speaking of which, Malcolm says, we have all these questions written out that me and Diana put together for you. Like for posterity, my man. The definitive Leonard Fife interview.
The final interview.
No, c’mon, dude, don’t say that. It’s just, I mean, this story you’re telling. It’s not exactly what we planned on. I mean, it’s interesting and all, and there’s a lot of surprising material back there. The first marriage to the southern woman, Alicia, and all that, wow, that’s news. But we want to connect it to your work, man. This is supposed to be about your films.
My second marriage. Not my first.
Oh. Okay, second, then. But we’ve got questions on process, for example. Like, the Gagetown Support Base story, In the Mist, your first film. Tell about them testing Agent Orange way the fuck out there in Gagetown back in the sixties, and how the film permanently pissed off both American and Canadian governments and Dow Chemical. Or was it Monsanto? I can’t remember. And how you almost went to prison for it. It would be really interesting to learn how you first got onto that story, like when it was still totally top secret in Washington and Ottawa. You were just a kid then. What or who tipped you off to it? You never said. The Gagetown Agent Orange defoliant story is our shared history, Leo. One of Canada’s guilty secrets. The fucking Americans, testing Agent Orange on Canadian soil before using it in Vietnam, that was important for us to know about, man. We were supposedly neutral on Vietnam, as you knew better than almost anyone. People need to hear you talk about that today. Now.
Yeah, well, Fife says, Gagetown’s not top secret anymore, is it? It’s public knowledge. Half a dozen films have come out since the story broke, and as many books and parliamentary hearings and investigations have dug into it, and there’s even a batch of niggardly payouts made by the government to some of the cancer victims’ families. Forget top secret, Fife says. It’s not even a guilty secret now.
He thinks it’s funny—no, not funny, ironic—how, when a guilty secret is finally revealed, the guilt quickly dissipates and gets replaced by a cleaner, more acceptable emotion. Anger, usually followed by denial. Once their secret was out, the US and Canadian agencies that were responsible for decades of spraying Agents Orange, Purple, and White on their own soldiers at Gagetown Support Base didn’t feel guilty anymore. They felt angry. And their anger let them refuse to apologize. It let them deny they did it with intention or anticipation of the consequences. The devil made them do it. Acknowledgement without apology.
Fife wonders if that’s the reason he’s returning, not to his Canadian past, where Malcolm and Diana want him to go, but to his distant American past, where no one wants him to go, where his own guilty secrets were embalmed and mummified and, until now, for all intents and purposes permanently entombed. He wonders if by means of disinterring his past, he’s trying to swap out guilt for anger and denial. As if to say, Yes, it’s true, I did all those bad things, I’m guilty as charged. But, people, it wasn’t my fault, I had a terrible childhood, I was the victim of circumstances. The devil made me do it. Everything is contingent. And now, since I’ve confessed and can be angry at my parents and at circumstances and at the devil, at my fate, now everyone has to forgive me. Acknowledgement without apology.
There’s lots he could tell the camera about making In the Mist that would satisfy Malcolm and Diana and impress Vincent, their impressionable DP, and might make Sloan reconsider her attachment to Malcolm. Fife is under no illusion that it would invite her to transfer her affection and admiration over to him, a sick and dying old man who hasn’t tried to seduce a pretty young woman in a decade. He believes the implicit comparison between him and Malcolm as filmmakers would diminish Malcolm in her eyes. That would please Fife. Sick and dying and old, maybe, but he still competes with other men for the affections and admiration of young women. It’s in his DNA. Like everything else that’s wrong with him, it’s not his fault, right? Acknowledgement without apology.
Sloan thinks Malcolm is a guerrilla filmmaker. It’s what he calls himself, despite having bankrolled his soft-stroking films—thanks to Diana’s money-raising skills—with support, as they like to call it, from multinational corporations and government film boards and private foundations and millionaires. Fife could show Sloan how a real guerrilla filmmaker works. He could tell her mic and Vincent’s camera the truth of how and why he was led to uncover the Gagetown spraying, instead of sitting here telling them who he was before he became a Canadian.
He could tell them how he first heard about the mysteriously desiccated crops up there in Gagetown, New Brunswick, from the US Navy deserter who’d become a truck farmer on land adjacent to the support base. The deserter was called Ralph Dennis, a tall, pear-shaped Oklahoman in his early thirties with a gentle smile and hippie spectacles and a permanent peach-coloured blush on his cheeks. Fife met him late one mid-April night at the Montreal Council to Aid War Resisters down on Alymer Street, where he went for help finding his first job in Canada. There’s a blousy, wet snow falling, the kind that marks the start of spring more than the end of winter. In front of a three-story greystone town house, tight to the sidewalk, outside the painted yellow door of the Yellow Door coffeehouse near McGill, where the Montreal Council keeps office space on the second floor, Fife enters and Ralph Dennis exits, and the two literally bump into each other.
Fife apologizes, and the man apologizes back, and Fife recognizes his Oklahoma drawl, though he thinks it’s probably Arkansas or Missouri, possibly Tennessee. It’s definitely not Anglo- or French Canadian. Fife thinks of himself as an expert on American accents. He asks the man if he’s American.
One hundred percent. I guess you must be one of us, too, the man says. It’s more a question than an observation.
Yes.
The fellow asks Fife where he’s from, and Fife hesitates and then says New England.
Just up here for a visit?
Yes. Sort of. His answer hangs in the air a few seconds.
They’re closing up inside, but there’s still time for a coffee. Care for a coffee, brother?
Fife
