Free The Film Club by David Gilmour Page B

the bottle; it literally changed the whole style of American acting.”
    â€œYou could feel it,” Karl Malden, who played Mitch in the original Broadway production, said years later. “The audience wanted Brando; they came for Brando; and when he was offstage, you could feel them waiting for him to come back.”
    I realized I was getting dangerously close to overselling the film so I forced myself to stop talking. “Okay,” I said to Jesse, “you are really going to see something today. Buckle up.”
    Sometimes the phone rang; I dreaded that. If it was Rebecca Ng, the mood would be shattered as certainly as if a vandal had thrown a rock through the window. One afternoon—it was a honey-hot day in late August—Jesse disappeared to take a call in the middle of Some Like it Hot (1959); he was gone twenty minutes, returning distracted and unhappy. I put the movie back on but I was acutely aware of his absent attention. He had settled his eyes on the television screen as a kind of anchor so that his worried thoughts about Rebecca might roam freely.
    I snapped off the DVD. I said, “You know, Jesse, these movies were put together with a great deal of thought and love. They were meant to be watched in one sitting, one scene flowing out of another. So I’m going to make a rule here. From now on, no phone calls during the movie. It’s disrespectful and it’s shitty.”
    â€œOkay,” he said.
    â€œWe don’t even look at the number when it comes up, okay?”
    â€œOkay, okay.”
    The phone rang again. (Even at school, Rebecca seemed to sense when his attention was elsewhere.)
    â€œYou better take it. This time anyway.”
    â€œI’m with my dad,” he whispered. “I’ll call you back.” A buzz like a small hornet trapped inside the earpiece. “I’m with my dad,” he repeated.
    He put down the phone.
    â€œWhat is it?” I said.
    â€œNothing.” Then with an exasperated exhalation, as if he had been holding his breath, he said, “Rebecca always picks the strangest times to want to talk about stuff.” For an instant I thought I saw tears misting up in his eyes.
    â€œWhat stuff?”
    â€œOur relationship.”
    We went back to the movie but I sensed he wasn’t there anymore. He was watching some other movie, the bad things Rebecca was going to do because he’d pissed her off on the phone. I turned off the television. He looked at me startled as if he might be in trouble.
    â€œI had a girlfriend once,” I said. “All we ever talked about was our relationship. That’s what we did instead of having one. It gets to be a real bore. Call her back. Clear it up.”

6
    One morning after a heat wave that had lasted nearly a week, the air was suddenly different. There was dew on the car hoods; the clouds seemed unnaturally vivid in their procession across the sky. Autumn, not tomorrow or even the next week, was irreversibly on its way. I was taking a shortcut through the Manulife building on Bloor Street when I spotted Paul Bouissac sitting alone in the café beside the escalator. He was a short, owl-faced Frenchman who had taught me a university course in Surrealism thirty years before and who had maintained a mildly insulting commentary on my career in television ever since. It was beneath him to watch me, he implied, but his boyfriend, a damp-handed nightmare, was a great fan. (Which I rather doubted but never mind.)
    Bouissac raised a plump, white hand and waved me over. Obediently I sat down. We talked about this and that, me asking the questions ( comme d’habitude ), him shrugging at their naive provenance. This was the way we conversed. When the subject of Jesse arose ( “Et vous, vous tuez la journée comment?” ), I launched into my spiel, how a distaste for school was “hardly a pathology,” perhaps even “ quelque chose d’encourageant ,” how I