I sighed. “’Cause I was mainly concerned about the thing with my eyes, ’cause every professional thing I do is kind of contingent on me being able to see? Besides which, you know he doesn’t like it when you ask about two things at once—”
I could almost see Mom’s gesture, shrugging this off as though flicking away flies. “Pssh! I don’t care what that man likes; this is his job, and he’d better damn well do it, if he knows what’s good for him. You’ve got Clark to look after—can’t be running on five hours or less all the time. You need to get this solved.”
“I know I do.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, Mom, Christ. You think I want things this way, tired all the fucking time? Think if there was a switch I could turn to reset my own clock I wouldn’t?”
“You know, you’re impossible to talk to when you get like this.”
“So you’ve told me,” I said, and hung up. Adding in my head: Too many times to count, in actual fact, and most especially when I’m—
Could you really call it “working,” though, if nobody was actually paying you to do it? This was the wall Mom and I kept slamming up against, weirdly and contradictorily from my angle, considering she’d been freelance longer than I’d been alive. But acting was—is—an art form, and artists keep odd hours, routinely giving to get back, treating their careers as a type of infinitely extended gamble; journalism just isn’t. Film criticism isn’t. Except for how, these days, it really is.
What I was doing right now I saw as being like applying for a grant—studying the body in question’s internal jargon, its lingo, before finding the most socially acceptable way of saying what I needed the money for. The primary person I’d have to apply to would be Jan Mattheius, of course, and I didn’t want to go in there empty-handed. I wanted to go in armed to the teeth, my thesis unshakable, all guns blazing; till I could, I’d just have to keep on researching. And that struck me as far more important than whether or not my sleep cycle remained screwed up, considering how long I’d already had to live with that particular reality.
But you have a child, Mom would have said, had I ever been stupid enough to voice any of the above to her. A child with special needs, who needs you, his mother. How can you be so selfish, so careless with your own health, your own time, your own life? How can you justify it?
Well: when you put it that way, I suppose I couldn’t, so I didn’t. Because I’d already learned a long time ago how the way other people thought about whatever I was doing at any given time was always the most important thing, and that when it came to my own desires—my own needs—there was no contest, none at all; they came last, always, not first. She’d done it for me, after all, so now she got to police me as I did it for somebody else—i.e. Clark. And that was just called being a parent.
What you need to understand about my mom and I is that for a long time, we were everything to each other—all either of us had, often quite literally. She met my dad—Gareth Cairns—at theatre school, at the age of seventeen; he was seven years older, here from Australia to escape the draft, rightly reckoning that Canada was about as far away as you could get from Vietnam. She married him by the time she was twenty-two, had me at twenty-four. It took them seven more years to divorce, and she was the one who initiated it. “Only good thing ever came out of us being together was you,” she used to say sometimes, back in her drinking days, when she’d finish off a six-pack alone and demand I sit up with her, having long conversations she couldn’t remember afterwards. How could I disagree, exactly? If she’d never been with him, I wouldn’t exist, no more than Clark would if I’d never met Simon. No matter the relative heartbreak both births may have caused, therefore, I can’t say I’m ever inclined to favour either of those scenarios.
Sometimes she wanted me to sing to her, stuff like Juice Newton’s “I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can,” or Linda Ronstadt’s cover of James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes,” and we’d both cry, hugging each other. But it didn’t really mean anything; nothing got any better or worse because of what I did or didn’t do, not until she finally wanted it to. Much like my own later flirtations with addictive behaviour, that part of her life probably lasted exactly as long as was needed, and while the mere fact of my existence might have had some theoretical bearing on her eventual decision to clean up, none of my direct actions seemed to make a single bit of difference. In retrospect, the most useful piece of advice I ever picked up concerning other people’s problems was from one of the books Mom read while she was in recovery, a self-help text called (I shit you not) If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!, which pointed out how you can’t really change anything for anyone else, no matter how much you love them. All you can ever do is make yourself available in terms of emotional support, while they do the majority of the heavy lifting themselves.
Then again, maybe I’m talking out my ass, as usual. One way or the other, I’ve never found anyone’s emotions as easy to process as my own—and considering how goddamn hard I find doing that, even at the best of times, that’s really sort of sad.
That was the day I went to see Balcarras, after which I set up an interview with Jan Mattheuis because I definitely wanted to hear his version of that “funny story” Wrob Barney had alluded to. Much like old Hugo, Jan got back to me far quicker than I’d expected, which was excellent—and better yet, he set the time for ten the next morning, with Clark already safely off to school, thus giving me exactly as much time to quiz Mattheuis as he was willing to cooperate with.
Located in an outwardly undistinguished office building two doors from the corner of Yonge Street and right where College turns into Carlton, the NFA is an astounding research resource that most Torontonians (predictably enough) remain unaware even exists. The Archive was founded in 1995, partially as a response to then-Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s virtual scuttling of the Ontario Film Development Corporation’s budget back in 1993—according to his so-called “Common Sense Revolution,” the making of Canadian films was a culturally protectionist luxury, unworthy of draining provincial funds during an economic downturn (though to be fair, he also slashed the amount of money made available for the Ontario Film Investment Project, our tax-rebate program, thus eating into runaway production profits as well). Since then, the NFA has managed to weather various governmental changeovers by keeping itself well-insulated within a cocoon of private monies, selling itself to private investors as a good donation recipient for both reputation-boosting and tax shelter purposes.
I’m always amused by the fact that at no point along the curve, however, has any of this money gone into installing some sort of lobby-level sign indicating where exactly to go for people walking in off the street. Instead, they’re supposed to somehow pick up, via osmosis, that if they wander up a flight of stairs at the back of the elevator-bank waiting area, they’ll eventually reach a pair of glass doors flanked by cabinets full of classic CanCon props: on your right, the titular faux-Aztec face covering from Julian Roffman’s The Mask (1961, Canada’s first 3D movie); on your left, the cursed Catholic oil dispenser from Harvey Hart’s The Pyx (1973, with Christopher Plummer and Karen Black). It’s like a J.K. Rowling riddle: if you have to ask, you’ll never know; if you know, you don’t have to ask. And I already know.
Upstairs, Chris Coulby was at the front desk, like usual. “Jan’s in his office,” he told me. “Coffee?”
“Got some already,” I replied, raising my cup. “But thanks.”
“Yeah, go ahead and make me feel useless, why don’t ya.”
I rubbed thumb, index, and pointer together at him, as though playing the world’s tiniest violin. “The tears of men are tasty, boyo,” I remarked as I passed, to which he simply snorted, shooting me the double finger.
Mattheuis was a smaller guy than you’d expect, given his reputation—smiley but broa
d, with heavy glasses and a greying, slightly furled goatee, sort of the Gimli of Canadian film studies. “You mind?” he asked, and then gave me a brief yet apparently sincere hug. “Lois Cairns! Been an age, hasn’t it? I used to turn to your pieces first, back when; Lip’s definitely suffered for your absence.”
I smiled. “Must be why they’re The Centrist, now.”
“No, I’d put that down to a classic case of Web versus Dead Tree, myself. But if we’re going to talk shop, let’s make it about a slightly more interesting subject. I hear you want to know about our silver nitrate initiative.”
“Wrob Barney dropped a few hints about it during our interview, re: Untitled 13. Sounded intriguing.”
“Oh yes, that’d be the way he’d phrase it, I’m sure. Given the amount of sheer intrigue he channelled into concentrating our attention on Lake of the North over the last few years.”
“Turned out fairly well for you, though, didn’t it? In terms of—”
“Sheer yield? Absolutely. Wrob’s almost as good at giving people what they think they want as he is at getting what he really wants. It’s practically his superpower.”
I sat down, pulled out the tools of my trade, and got to it. “So,” I said, as he did much the same, “what you’re saying is, Wrob’s goal all along was copying the footage?”