Read Online The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour - Free Book Online
Authors: David Gilmour
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passes and film tickets for her. Exactly a year later, festival time again, I was driving my eleven-year-old stepdaughter home from a birthday party (there were boys this year). I took my usual route along Bloor Street. We passed a movie theatre; there was a crowd gathering on the sidewalk. A camera crew interviewing a bearded young man. A young man on top of the world in a way he may never be again; people were reaching over the red ropes calling his name, and it’s true, I still felt that slightly sickening pull; I always will. But I didn’t look away. I rolled down the window, I let my gaze rest on the people, on their excited faces, on their hands reaching over the ropes; and then the traffic light changed, the intersection cleared, and the car ahead of me moved forward into the evening.
4
The House with the Broken Spine
W hen I think about myself as a young man, I picture a large, dishevelled bird, the kind that flies into the house, knocks over lamps, disturbs people at their meal and then, after a few destructive spins around the room, shoots back out the window. Of course, that’s not how I appeared to me then . Then I entertained (and not always privately) the idea that my life was a novel, that “people” watched my trajectory with head-shaking admiration. What’s he up to next? It makes me blush to say all this because the truth, as we all know, is that, apart from my arrivals and exits, no one thought about me very much at all.
Oddly enough, as the years have gone by, it seems that life itself , not I, has come to resemble a novel. Characters appear and disappear, resurfacing later in the story in a way that often beats the pants off fiction. When War and Peace appeared in 1862, Tolstoy’s sisters were outraged to find verbatim transcripts of their dinner-table conversation. His response: a shrug. If you don’t want to read about yourself, don’t have dinner with a writer.
Speaking of War and Peace , do you remember Justin Strawbridge, the boy who took me to the Place Pigalle the day of my execution at the hands of Clarissa Bentley? You do? Well, this’ll surprise you. It sure surprised the hell out of me.
Almost a year after the visit to my old boarding school dormitory, my wife, Rachel, and I, having spent a bickerish week or two, decided to take a holiday together. And this holiday, it turned out, provided me with a chance, however unwitting, for another “return.”
We didn’t plan on going too far away. Just enough of a habit breaker to clear off the barnacles that grow on any married couple if they don’t pay attention. So we booked a splashy, overpriced room at a country inn an hour north of the city. We couldn’t really afford it—it had been an expensive summer (new roof, broken water pipe, unemployed children)—but we couldn’t afford new spouses, either. So it was an easy decision. And it worked. We went for walks in a dark forest, rented a canoe for the afternoon, played pool in the guest room, ate a fabulous dinner, drank a second bottle of wine back in the room, fooled around in our jammies, and then, with the river rushing below our window, slept like logs. By the end of three days we remembered why we’d liked each other in the first place. Coming back to town, even after so short a time, covered the city in a spanking-new coat of paint.
But I see that I’m getting ahead of myself again. On our way out of town, as we left the city behind and moved into the green countryside, I noticed certain things—a red barn, a deserted crossroads, a silo, a descending field—that seemed familiar, albeit distantly. Passing a road sign— Sweet Cherry Lane—I realized I had, in fact, been there before.
You never quite make friends again the way you do in your youth. And later in life, when, for one reason or another, those friendships chip and fade away, they are like a missing tooth. You never replace them. The great friendship of my life—and my life’s greatest disappointment—
4
The House with the Broken Spine
W hen I think about myself as a young man, I picture a large, dishevelled bird, the kind that flies into the house, knocks over lamps, disturbs people at their meal and then, after a few destructive spins around the room, shoots back out the window. Of course, that’s not how I appeared to me then . Then I entertained (and not always privately) the idea that my life was a novel, that “people” watched my trajectory with head-shaking admiration. What’s he up to next? It makes me blush to say all this because the truth, as we all know, is that, apart from my arrivals and exits, no one thought about me very much at all.
Oddly enough, as the years have gone by, it seems that life itself , not I, has come to resemble a novel. Characters appear and disappear, resurfacing later in the story in a way that often beats the pants off fiction. When War and Peace appeared in 1862, Tolstoy’s sisters were outraged to find verbatim transcripts of their dinner-table conversation. His response: a shrug. If you don’t want to read about yourself, don’t have dinner with a writer.
Speaking of War and Peace , do you remember Justin Strawbridge, the boy who took me to the Place Pigalle the day of my execution at the hands of Clarissa Bentley? You do? Well, this’ll surprise you. It sure surprised the hell out of me.
Almost a year after the visit to my old boarding school dormitory, my wife, Rachel, and I, having spent a bickerish week or two, decided to take a holiday together. And this holiday, it turned out, provided me with a chance, however unwitting, for another “return.”
We didn’t plan on going too far away. Just enough of a habit breaker to clear off the barnacles that grow on any married couple if they don’t pay attention. So we booked a splashy, overpriced room at a country inn an hour north of the city. We couldn’t really afford it—it had been an expensive summer (new roof, broken water pipe, unemployed children)—but we couldn’t afford new spouses, either. So it was an easy decision. And it worked. We went for walks in a dark forest, rented a canoe for the afternoon, played pool in the guest room, ate a fabulous dinner, drank a second bottle of wine back in the room, fooled around in our jammies, and then, with the river rushing below our window, slept like logs. By the end of three days we remembered why we’d liked each other in the first place. Coming back to town, even after so short a time, covered the city in a spanking-new coat of paint.
But I see that I’m getting ahead of myself again. On our way out of town, as we left the city behind and moved into the green countryside, I noticed certain things—a red barn, a deserted crossroads, a silo, a descending field—that seemed familiar, albeit distantly. Passing a road sign— Sweet Cherry Lane—I realized I had, in fact, been there before.
You never quite make friends again the way you do in your youth. And later in life, when, for one reason or another, those friendships chip and fade away, they are like a missing tooth. You never replace them. The great friendship of my life—and my life’s greatest disappointment—
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