The Film Club by David Gilmour

was dealing with a kid who didn’t watch TV or do drugs. That happy children go on to have happy lives, etc., etc., etc. I went on a bit and while I spoke, I found myself experiencing a strange shortness of breath, as if I had just run up a flight of stairs. Bouissac waved me to silence and I could feel my little car, so to speak, pull to the sidewalk with an ungraceful lurch.
    â€œYou are being defensive,” he said in heavily accented English. (Forty years in Toronto and still sounding like Charles de Gaulle.) I insisted I wasn’t and then grew more so. Explained things that didn’t require explaining, defended myself against criticisms which had not been levelled.
    â€œThere is a period for learning. After that it is too late,” said Bouissac with the intolerable finality of the French intellectual.
    Too late? Does he mean, I wondered, that learning is like the mastery of a language, you have to “get” the accent before a certain age (twelve or thirteen) or you never get it right? Distressing thought. Should we have sent him to a military school?
    Losing interest (and showing it) in my startled reply, Bouissac wandered off in search of a pair of new oven mitts. He was hosting a dinner party for a clutch of international semioticians that very night, the smug little prick. The encounter left me surprisingly jarred. I felt as though I’d betrayed something; had sold myself short. Was I being defensive about Jesse or about myself? Was I boasting like a ten-year-old in the schoolyard? Was it that transparent? Perhaps so. But I didn’t want anyone to think I was doing Jesse a bad turn. (I couldn’t shake that image of him piloting a marijuana-clouded cab.)
    Three teenage girls swished by, smelling of gum and cold air. Perhaps, I thought, the influence we have over our children is an overrated thing. How exactly do you force a six-foot-four teenager to do homework assignments? No, we had already lost that one, his mother and I.
    A dislike for Bouissac, like a sudden, unexpected gust of wind, passed over me and I had a feeling that down the road this curious student-like behaviour of mine, this habitual deference, was going to undergo a rather nasty metamorphosis.
    Right there at the table, I got out a pen and made a list on a napkin of all the young men I’d gone to university with who hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans. There was B., who drank himself to death in Mexico; G., my boyhood best friend who shot a man in the face with a shotgun in a drugged stupor; M., a whiz kid at math, at sports, at everything, whose days were now spent masturbating in front of his computer while his wife worked in a downtown law firm. It was a comforting, dramatic list. There was even my brother, my sad, sad brother; track star, frat king in university, who now lived in the corner room of a boarding house, still railing, even after all these years, about the iniquities of his education.
    But what if I’m wrong? What if Jesse didn’t come charging out of the basement one of these days and “grab the world by the lapels”? What if I’d allowed him to fuck up his entire life under some misinformed theory that might just be laziness with a smart-ass spin on it? Again, I saw a taxi driving slowly down University Avenue on a rain-slicked night. The graveyard shift. Jesse, a guy they know in the all-night donut store. “Hey, Jess. The usual? That should do her.”
    Had he learnt anything over the last year under my “tutelage.” Was any of it worth knowing? Let’s see. He knows about Elia Kazan and the House Un-American thing, but does he know what communists are? He knows that Vittorio Storaro lit the apartment in Last Tango in Paris by putting the lights on the outside of the windows rather than inside on the set, but does he know where Paris is? He knows that you leave your fork face down until your meal is over; that French Cabernets tend to be slightly more