This Is Running for Your Life (38 page)

It came at you two ways, but primarily as a problem of archetype, of being perceived first and foremost as young and a woman. If an abundance of options is oppressive, feeling cornered by one in particular produces a slow-burning discomfiture. It was also the embarrassment of wanting to be more assured, more substantive, more whole, of moving to tap resources that simply weren't there. The limits were absolute and the expectations implied but definitive; you couldn't escape them because you couldn't escape the conditions of time.

Because they defied my usual tricks on that score, more and more I held myself apart from the unruly collaborations of the everyday world, where I was first and foremost a young woman. They presented as the enemy of discipline—my wife, as a family friend used to say of his, and former sweetheart. Rafe, his shy smile, and hopeful, high-beam gaze formed a kind of isosceles threat.

After the film ended, Jeanne Moreau having driven herself and her long-suffering lover off a bridge as her Austrian husband looked on, Rafe and I stepped through shallow ponds of lamplight on the way to the St. George subway, stunned and mostly silent. For us there was still revelation when unknown films from what felt like the distant past turned out not to be musty historical objects but vital in unimagined and frankly devastating ways. To analyze and perhaps admire was the hope; to be ravished on a coronary level was completely unexpected. We both knew the story, or versions of it, but Truffaut's telling put a fresh edge on the blade: it appeared the damage we could do to each other was incalculable when it wasn't total.

During the gap between my afternoon and evening classes I headed over to Yonge and Bloor, where a cluster of movie theaters offered refuge in the form of a single ticket spread two or three ways. The field of independent filmmaking had undergone heavy mulching in recent years, and 1995 was a season of high harvest. I've never been an omnivore at the cineplex—I don't have the nerves for horror or the chromosomes for science fiction—but even at that, there always seemed to be a respectable way to fill the afternoon. In high school, the lingering effects of a preteen fixation on River Phoenix had moved me to rent (abetted by my bemused father) and furtively watch what turned out to be my first art film, Gus Van Sant's
My Own Private Idaho
. (Unless you count
9½
Weeks
, a film my best friend and I spent entire evenings plotting to extract from the local Videoflicks with the aid of her mother's car phone and a pince-nez impression of an adult.) A few years later we were all in the theater for
Pulp Fiction
; dying of Kevin Costner fatigue, a generation of viewers was radicalized by ersatz sixties dancing and the déjà-vibe of surf guitar.

Devoted to Van Sant ever since
Idaho
, his
To Die For
, David Fincher's
Se7en
, and Bryan Singer's
Usual Suspects
required watching that fall. I reported for action most days, preferring, as with running, to fly solo. The previous winter I had made my first sortie to the box office on my own, determined to see Richard Linklater's
Before Sunrise
on the big screen. The girls at the dorm would have laughed if they'd known: movies were supposed to be social, like every other part of life. I used to think so too.

As a wee parochial tot, a lonesome fascination gripped me whenever the older women who crashed our school masses sat among us in the pews. In grade four I joined the funeral choir—an elite, macabre little group, we were excused from class to sing mourning hymns at parish funerals—and was piqued to find that the women audited those services too. One in particular stood out. She wore a dove-gray trench coat through every season, had an impeccable, mesmerizingly passé pageboy bob, and made what I thought to be the flamboyant and—given her age and proclivity for skirts—potentially disastrous gesture of dropping to her knees before the monsignor whenever she took Communion. Even more boggling than the question of who went to mass when they didn't have to: Who went alone?

The year I spent in the funeral choir was also the one dedicated, in our school, to the sacrament of penance. We learned about what it meant to sin—which, as it turned out, was what it meant to be alive—and spent most of the preparatory classes memorizing the preamble and combing God's forgiveness policy for loopholes. When it came time to log our first confessions, we coated up, formed a solemn double line, and marched the couple hundred feet across the schoolyard to the church. As we filed into the back rows, close to the confession booths, I saw the hunched form of the gray lady up front, kneeling alone at the end of the second pew.
Jesus Mulvaney
, I thought.
How bad can one person be?
Aware of sinning right there under the twelfth station of the cross, I returned to the litany I had been rehearsing, which had mainly to do with my brother and my bottomless loathing for him.

Of all the sacraments in my repertoire, penance is second only to Communion in conceptual flair. I had known few performative terrors like that of stepping into a darkened closet to speak through a perforated screen to the invisible man installed next door. Even so, in its total the act was a whopping letdown. The first time out, we virgins felt a little scandalized that our notes compared so blandly. With a few more monthly purges under our elastic rainbow belts, it became clear that no matter what was confessed—from foul brotherly thoughts to lunch-box theft—the penance amounted to a handful of the prayers we said every day anyway. Though the intrigue of praying alone lingered on—for fourth graders the idea of gaining a sacred privacy was key to the sacrament's allure—we had expected something, somehow,
more
. And if the gray lady in the second pew wasn't saying the world's longest penance, what in Krishna's name was she doing there?

Our local Catholic school board's motto—“The spirit is alive”—invokes the one thing a religious education cannot instill in a child. The rituals, culture, and doctrine of faith combine in a child's experience to form a burden—if she is pious, as I was, a glorious burden. What it is not is a quest—which is to say a choice—though we might strive to make it so. That part tends to come of its own necessity, and is attended by the hunger—if not the dogmatic zeal—of the convert.

While preparing for my First Communion at age seven, I became a student of the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Along with the rest of the day's assignments, at night I went over the story in my head, transfixed by its barbarism and especially stuck on quantifying the pain of such a death, making it comprehensible. I vowed to work, over time, to claim that suffering, beginning with the self-administering of a long, ruthless pinch under the covers each night—my idea of the hurt of a single thorn. I continued for some time, in this private, piecemeal fashion, to offer myself as His disciple, to trade His suffering for mine. Eventually, maybe half a crown in, the pinching stopped—without a clear equivalent for crucifixion, it just seemed like bad math—though two years later I recalled it proudly as a better run at penance than rifling through a few rosary beads.

One fourth-grade night, after being tucked in by my father and told to say my prayers, I called out mildly as he left the room, “But why?” The reaction was instant: “Don't you ask me that,” he hissed, wheeling around at the door. “You just
do it
.” I was startled, angry maybe, but not scared. What scared me were the Sundays when we returned to our pew after Communion, and I watched my dad praying with his head in his hands, not moving his lips or anything.

I abandoned confession after elementary school, when it was no longer mandatory. Though my guilt about that had largely abated by the time I entered university, even as I eluded Loretto's nuns and other sisterly comforts, I found myself visited by the memory of the gray lady, ever kneeling. Along with her hypnotic coif and majestic genuflections, I recalled the confidence of her belonging in that church and the calm of her attention—the outward aspect, perhaps, of what Kierkegaard called “passionate inwardness,” a faith that was no burden but a choice that marked “the highest point of individual freedom.” I was acing philosophy, to the incredulity of my TA, who capped a private interrogation about my inaugural paper with a feeble pass, ending my short career in the field.

And then, on a February evening a few months later, a disciple lacking a deity sat alone in her church for the first time, watching the ripe faces of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy tender their youthful promises, waiting to disappear long enough that she might be filled by something holy.

*   *   *

Having acquired the idea that this new, Radiohead-loving, hothouse breed of boys were as apt to expire as laugh if a girl worked a little blue, I began telling Rafe the most vulgar jokes I could think of on our postclass walks, watching for signs of wilt.

As romantic disincentives go, the one about the Newfie, the dildo salesman, and the mistaken thermos seemed like a solid choice. But Rafe was grinning by the door the next week, just the same. He later told me that after we parted on those days, he would add some new embellishment to a deeply architected fantasy of my life. He had me heading straight to my boyfriend's place—my virile, varsity boyfriend, who lived among the bohemian swells in Toronto's deciduous Annex neighborhood—where we snickered over my poor, smitten classmate as I heated up Bagel Bites in the kitchen of his exquisitely distressed Victorian town house. He could see us watching television, washing dishes, heading out to the bar—laughing all the way. It seemed incredible to me that anyone could even gin up such a scenario; it seemed evidence of how completely we can be deceived, if we are willing.

After our final class we faced each other in the same spot on the same corner and exchanged vows to see
Flirting with Disaster
. Rafe asked for my address and said he'd write; if all went as planned, he would wind up in London for teachers college. We wished each other luck on our final papers and turned to our respective directions for the last time.

I had written about
Mean Streets
,
unpacking
Scorsese's use of point of view with a terminally psychoanalytic reading of the film and its lead character, Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel in his satyr youth. Reading it today, I'm struck by the baldness of my feints: finding conflicted-Catholic Charlie's idea of penance to be “wishy-washy,” I taunt him for being “cowardly” and “weak” on every other page, accuse him of “continually feeding his reality through a movie projector in an attempt to stave off his problems,” and cite Charlie's belief that “nothing is private” as an excuse for using the world and the people in it as vessels for the spiritual crisis he's too chickenshit to face on his own.

The previous semester I had turned in a similarly aggressive paper, titled “Comedy of Errors or Tragic Surrender? The Dichotomy of the Hawksian Couple in
Bringing Up Baby
and
Monkey Business
.” Still feeling around inside the liberties of auteur theory, I felt no compunction about challenging the likes of Stanley Cavell and his
Pursuits of Happiness
, a book that examined the “comedy of remarriage” and the cinematic construction of a curiously autonomous “new woman” via several classic Hollywood films, including
Baby
. Cavell, whose background ran to philosophy and classical studies, applies a Shakespearean trope—that of young lovers retreating into the wild, then returning, clarified, to regenerate society—to several of the films, with varying success. The romance between starchy scientist David (Cary Grant) and brazen, regressive Susan (Katharine Hepburn) in
Bringing Up Baby
fits both more obviously and less strictly into the mold.

Cavell admits as much, but I saw something much darker in the couple's final, dangling embrace. In the Hawks universe, I thought, love could result in a fate worse than death:
having no fun
. “Love exacts one's security and individuality” was my take on the ending, “no comfort is taken in it.” In the youth-serum caper
Monkey Business
, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers play a married couple so comfortable they're comatose. Romance—the “adult affliction”—ultimately ruins fun, unless it's child's play, in which case one can't call it romance at all, can one? I wrapped up by invoking a different Shakespearean cycle, where every comedy is sown with the elements of the tragedy that will succeed it. “Hawks is deftly, if a little sadly, aware” went the last line, “that once one has come full circle, there is nowhere to go but around again.”

This is all to say that I peaked early in my academic career. I remember feeling proud of the first essay but a little purged by the second, as though I'd pushed my interpretative flexor farther back than it was willing to go, and I'd never walk quite the same way again. I was back to grades I hadn't seen since the penance years—school had resurged as a life-structuring force—and though I left Authorship in Cinema 224Y a practicing agnostic, in arguing Hawks's sly antiromanticism I had struck upon something I actually believed. The nebulousness of the auteur theory had cleared a space for a form of passionate inwardness, where the willing might commit themselves to a leap of faith. Yet the result of that kind of commitment is so personal it's almost painful to see, more so when private belief is reified on academic terms. It felt crafty at best and dead dishonest at worst: Can a faith and its Church be separated? Didn't I just do this?

My father, an English professor, had been recruited into his school's makeshift film department that year. Our reading lists were compared for degrees of difficulty, and raids of his essay piles yielded a depressing sense of the mean. Cinema studies was desperate for scholars, he often hinted, and would be only more so in a decade, when his cohort retired. The professor's life is a good one, he'd say, coming as close as he ever would to persuading me to do anything.