The Film Club by David Gilmour Page A

sour than California Cabs. (Important stuff.) What else? To eat with your mouth closed (patchy), to brush your tongue as well as your teeth in the morning (catching hold). To rinse the tuna juice from the side of the sink when you’re finished making your sandwich (almost).
    Oh, but listen. He loves Gary Oldman’s psychotic charge down the hall with a shotgun in The Professional (1981). He loves Marlon Brando sweeping the dishes off the dining room table in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). “My place is cleared. You want me to clear your places?” He loves Swimming with Sharks (1994), not the early moments, “That’s just shtick,” but the end part. “That,” he says, “is where it gets quite profound!” He loves Al Pacino in Scarface (1983). He loves that movie like I love the parties in The Great Gatsby . You know they’re naughty and shallow but you want to go to them anyway. He watches Annie Hall (1977) over and over. I find the empty DVD case on the couch in the morning. He knows it almost line by line, can quote from it. Ditto with Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). He was knocked cold by Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1997). He wants it for Christmas. Are these things I should feel happy about?
    Yes, in fact.
    But then one day, snow falling outside the living room window, we’re watching a replay of Scarface , the scene where Al arrives in Miami, when Jesse turns and asks me where Florida is.
    â€œHuh?”
    He says, “From here. How do you get to it from here?”
    After a judicious pause (is he joking?), I say, “You go south.”
    â€œToward Eglinton or toward King Street?”
    â€œKing Street.”
    â€œYeah?”
    I proceed carefully but respectfully in the tones of one who might at any second be ambushed by a practical joke. But this is no joke. “You go down to King Street and you keep going till you get to the lake; you cross over the lake and that’s the beginning of the States.” I wait for him to stop me.
    â€œThe United States are right across the lake?” he says.
    â€œUh-huh.” Pause. “You keep going down through the States, maybe fifteen hundred miles, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia (still waiting for him to stop me) until you get to a finger-shaped state that sticks out into the water. That’s Florida.”
    â€œOh.” Pause. “What’s after that?”
    â€œAfter Florida?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWell, let’s see. You go right to the bottom of the finger until you hit another patch of water; you keep going another hundred miles, you hit Cuba. Remember Cuba? That’s where we had that long conversation about Rebecca.”
    â€œThat was a great conversation.”
    â€œStay with me,” I say. “You go past Cuba, a long way past until you get to South America.”
    â€œIs that a country?”
    Pause. “No, that’s a continent. You keep on going, thousands and thousands of miles, jungles and cities, jungles and cities, all the way down to the end of Argentina.”
    He stares into space. He is seeing something very vivid in his imagination, but God knows what it is.
    â€œIs that the end of the world?” he asks.
    â€œPretty much.”
    Am I doing the right thing here?
    It was spring now on Maggie’s street. The trees, budding at their very tips like fingernails, appeared to be extending their branches toward the sun. It was in the course of showing one of these highfalutin art movies that something very odd happened, a perfect illustration of the very lesson the movie was trying to teach. It started when I heard the house next door was for sale. Not our through-the-wall neighbour, Eleanor—the only way she was leaving her place was feet first with a Union Jack clamped to her forehead—but the couple on the other side, the snake-slim woman in the sunglasses and her bald husband.
    Entirely by coincidence I picked that week to