The Film Club by David Gilmour

Author:David Gilmour [Gilmour, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780091937997
Publisher: Ebury Press
Published: 2010-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

9

In reading over what I’ve written, I realize that I may have given the impression that I had little else going on in my life except watching movies and kibitzing at the side of my son’s life. That wasn’t the case. I was getting a little work by now, book reviews, a documentary that needed polish, even a few days of substitute teaching (dismaying by implication, of course, but not the vanity-smashing experience I’d feared).

I sold my loft in the candy factory and with the windfall that came with it, my wife and I bought a Victorian house on the edge of Chinatown. Maggie finally returned home. Such happiness; it had been more than a year. She still, however, felt Jesse needed to “live with a man.” So did I. So, mercifully, did my wife. At a family party over Christmas, a diminutive, sparrow-voiced aunt, the retired principal of a high school, had told me, “Don’t be fooled. Teenage boys need as much attention as newborns. Except they need it from their fathers.”

Jesse followed me and Tina across town with three industrial-strength garbage bags of clothing and dozens of caseless CDs. He moved into the blue bedroom on the third floor, from which you could see all the way to the lake. It was the best room in the house, the quietest, the best ventilated. I bought him a print of John Water-house’s naked maidens swimming in a pond and hung it on his wall between posters of Eminem (a homely-looking fellow when all is said and done), Al Pacino with a cigar (Scarface) and some thug wearing nylons on his head and pointing a 9mm pistol in your face, the caption reading: Say hello to da bad guyz.

In fact, as I write this, I am only a few yards down the hall from Jesse’s blue bedroom, empty now, one of his discarded shirts still hanging on the back of the door. The room is tidier these days, a DVD of Chungking Express ranged away in his night table alongside Middlemarch (still unread), Elmore Leonard’s Glitz (at least he didn’t sell it), Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (my idea) and Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits, which he left here the last time he and his girlfriend spent the night. I find the presence of these things comforting, as if he is still here, in spirit anyway; that he will, indeed, be back someday.

Still, and I don’t want to get maudlin here, some nights I walk by his bedroom on the way to my study and I take a peek inside. The moonlight falls over his bed, the room is very still, and I can’t quite believe he’s gone. There were other things we were going to do to that room, other prints, another clothes peg for the wall. But time ran out.

Fall in Chinatown; the leaves turning red in the giant forests north of the city. Gloves appeared on the hands of the women who rode their bicycles past our house. Jesse

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