The Film Club by David Gilmour Read Free Book Online

well, I worried, have disqualified herself from Jesse’s imagination because she didn’t fuck him around enough. Besides, you can’t compete with a ghost, and the ghost of Rebecca Ng crashed around the house at night like a poltergeist.
    That June we went to Cuba, the three of us, Maggie, Jesse and me. A divorced couple taking a holiday with their beloved son. My wife, being the only one with a regular job, stayed at Maggie’s. To outsiders or to her occasionally unforgiving friends, it must have sounded a tad peculiar, this family trip, but Tina understood it, understood that the days of Maggie and me sneaking into each other’s bed were long behind us. Still, the fact of her remaining behind in my ex-wife’s house while the rest of us tootled off to the Caribbean—how odd life can be.
    It was a last-minute thing. Just when I’d given up the ghost, when I’d spent a few minutes that very morning kicking impotently at the furniture and bleating my unemployment woes at Tina (the job at the documentary channel having floated, dead, to the surface), I got a message on the answering service. It was from a tubby, beet-faced, passive-aggressive South African named Derek H. He was producing an hour-long documentary on, get this, Via-gra, and wanted to know if I was interested in “fronting” it. Fifteen thousand bucks, travel to Philadelphia and New York with a few weeks in Bangkok where, according to Derek, old men were literally “fucking themselves to death.”
    We “took a meeting,” I met the crew, picked out a hotel by the river in Bangkok and discussed a timetable. Early July. Shook hands all around. I went out that night, got ecstatically, knee-walking drunk and dreamed up the idea of Jesse, his mom and me going to Cuba.
    Departure day, Claire Brinkman came by on her inline skates to say goodbye; got there just before the limo arrived. Her red-rimmed eyes worried me.
    We took a couple of fancy rooms in the El Parque Hotel in Old Havana. Swimming pool on the roof, fat dressing gowns in the cupboard, a Roman-banquet buffet every morning. The expense made Maggie nervous—she was a prairie farm girl whose heart fluttered if a long-distance call went more than a minute—but I insisted. Besides, how many more trips did we have with our son? How much longer would he want to travel with his parents?
    It happened on our third night there. That afternoon I’d taken Jesse to the Museum of the Revolution, looked at the boat that Castro and his sixteen revolutionaries snuck back to Cuba in, saw a photo of dead Che Guevara; had a boozy dinner on the balcony of a private residence overlooking the Prado; stumbled down Calle Obispo for a Mojito nightcap, the three of us, a band flailing and wailing in the boxy, fly-specked room; and then, my eyes closing from the heat and the booze, we returned to the hotel. It was nearly three in the morning. Maggie went to her room. Jesse and I watched television for a while. Then it was snoozy time.
    â€œCan I keep the TV on with the sound down?” he asked.
    â€œWhy don’t you read something instead,” I said.
    We turned out the light; I could feel him lying there, awake, restless. Finally I turned the light on. “Jesse!”
    He couldn’t sleep. He was too excited. Could he go out and have a cigarette? Right over there, just across the street, that bench on the edge of the park? You can see it from here, Dad. Finally I agreed.
    He dressed quickly and hurried out. I lay there for a few moments; turned off the light, then turned it on. Got up and went over to the window and opened it. The air conditioning stopped. The room went silent. Suddenly you could hear everything very clearly, cicadas, a few voices in Spanish, a car slowly cruising. A trolley passed by in the hallway outside the door, cups rattling.
    I stood by the window, looking out over the dark park. Figures moved in the shadows. Hookers walking slowly