The Film Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

in?”
    He was lying on his side under the blankets, facing the wall. I turned on the bedside lamp and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.
    â€œI got you something to eat,” I said.
    He turned over. “I can’t eat, Dad, really.”
    I took out a croissant. “I’m just going to have a little bite then myself.”
    He looked hungrily at the bag.
    â€œSo,” I said (munch, munch), “what’s up.”
    â€œNothing,” he said.
    â€œIs this about Rebecca?” I said.
    He sat bolt upright. His thick hair standing on end like he’d been hit by lightning. “She had an orgasm,” he whispered. I recoiled. I couldn’t help myself. This wasn’t the sort of conversation I wanted to have with my sixteen-year-old son, not in that detail anyway. (That’s what his buddies were for.) But I could also see that having said those words, just by getting them to the surface and into the light, he had released a dose of poison from his body.
    I hid my discomfort by taking a large mouthful of dough almost whole.
    â€œBut you know what she said afterwards?” he asked.
    â€œNo, I don’t.”
    â€œShe said, ‘I really like you, Jesse, but when I hug you, it’s like hugging a friend.’”
    â€œShe said that?”
    â€œExactly. I swear, Dad. Like I was some kind of girlfriend or gay or something.”
    After a moment I said, “You know what I think?”
    â€œWhat?” He looked like a convicted man waiting to hear his sentence.
    I said, “I think she’s a troublemaking little bitch who loves to torment you.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œReally.”
    He lay back as if the awfulness of the situation had just re-occurred to him.
    â€œListen to me,” I said. “I’m going to have to go out pretty soon, I’ve got some things to do and you’re going to start thinking about this stuff again. . . .”
    â€œProbably.”
    Weighing my words, I spoke carefully. “I don’t want to have an inappropriate conversation with you, we’re not pals, we’re father and son, but I want to say this to you. Girls don’t have orgasms with people they’re not physically attracted to.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œYes,” I said emphatically.
    (Is that true? I wondered. Doesn’t matter. Not today’s problem.)
    I took Jesse to see Sexy Beast (2002) with Ben Kingsley at the Cumberland theatre. I could tell he wasn’t watching the movie, that he was sitting there in the dark thinking about Rebecca Ng and that “hugging a friend” business. On the way home, I said, “Did you get a chance to talk about all the stuff you wanted to talk about today?”
    He didn’t look at me. “Absolutely,” he said. Door closed; mind your own beeswax. We walked the rest of the way to the subway in a curiously uncomfortable silence. Talking, we’d never had a problem with, but now it seemed as if we’d run out of things to say to each other. Perhaps, even at his young age, he intuited I couldn’t tell him anything that was going to make a difference. Only Rebecca could do that. But it seemed he’d forgotten how his own nervous system worked, that just putting things to words released him, partially, from the distress they described. He was sealed off from me. And I felt a curious reluctance to barge into rooms where I wasn’t invited. He was growing up.
    The weather, the way it always is when you’re heartbroken, was terrible. Rainy mornings; colourless skies in the afternoon. A car had squashed a squirrel in front of the door and you couldn’t go in or out of the house without looking, involuntarily, at the furry gore. At a family dinner with his mother and my wife, Tina, he fidgeted with his steak and mashed potatoes (his favourite) with polite, if slightly mechanical, enthusiasm. He looked wan, like a sick child, and drank too much