Foregone. Russell Banks
gotten away with it for fifty years. He can easily keep it buried for the few weeks or days he has left to live, and no one will be the wiser.
It’s the cancer that has freed him to dig up and expose the lie. There’s no longer any undone future work to protect and promote. No unrealized career ambitions. No one left to impress. Nothing to win or lose. He hasn’t a future anymore, and without a future, there’s nothing his past can sabotage or undo.
Nothing, except her. Emma. Her love and respect and admiration. Acquired illegitimately and under false pretenses, starting with In the Mist, which first brought them together. At Concordia, where she studied under him, her final thesis was “In the Mist” and “Man with a Movie Camera”: Metacinema and Reflexivity in the Films of Leonard Fife and Dziga Vertov.
This is his last chance to stop lying to Emma, his last chance to hand back to her in public everything she gave to him in private. If he dies without having told her the truth of how he came to be the man she thinks he is, the man she has loved and worked with all these years, and tells it in public like this, before the world, on-camera, miked, to be edited, soundtracked, packaged, sold, and distributed all across Canada and even in the States and maybe Europe as well, if he dies without having told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then she’ll have loved and married and been the forty-year partner of a purely fictional character. He’ll have turned her into a fool. He will have taken everything from her and given nothing back. Her love and marriage and professional partnership will have been wasted.
He mustn’t let that happen to her. Not after everything else he’s done to her.
Fife speaks into the darkness. Emma? Are you still here, Emma?
We ready to go, Vincent? Malcolm asks.
Ready.
Malcolm claps his hands in front of the camera. Okay, Leonard Fife interview. April 1, 2018. Montreal.
Fife speaks into the darkness again. Emma? Are you there, Emma?
Yes, Leo. I’m still here.
4
Alicia? You awake, babe?
I am now, she says.
Malcolm interrupts Fife’s account of his memory and tries to turn him back to the making of In the Mist. He’s recalling a piece in Cinema Canada that he read when he was at Concordia about the influence of Fife’s film on Apocalypse Now, and he wants to know how Coppola—Malcolm calls him Francis—managed to see the film in the 1970s, when, as far as he knows, In the Mist was never screened in the States.
Diana notes that In the Mist was shown outside of competition at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1976, back before it turned into TIFF.
Okay, so Francis must’ve been there, Malcolm says. He would’ve been editing Apocalypse Now around then. How did Leo get Francis to see it? he wonders. Did Leo have some kind of connection through the guys running the festival? That would’ve been Bill Marshall and Dusty Cohl, right?
Fife ignores him. He enters their bedroom, his and Alicia’s bedroom in Richmond. He shuts the door behind him. The room is dark except for the pale glow of a nightlight from the adjoining bathroom. He feels his way over to the edge of the king-size bed and pats his wife’s hip through the covers. He smiled all the way up the stairs from the library, and he’s still smiling.
Sorry to wake you, babe. But you are not going to believe what just happened. Down there with your father and uncle. Un-fucking-believable.
Alicia rolls over onto her back for a second and groans and turns the rest of the way onto her other side, facing away from him. Goddammit, she says, I’ll be happy when this baby comes out! Okay, tell me what happened. You smoked a cigar, didn’t you? You really stink, Leo. Go wash your hands.
He stands and heads for the bathroom.
And your face! she calls after him. Wash your face, too.
He flips on the row of makeup lights above the mirror, a set of low-wattage warm pink bulbs designed to soften the harsh overhead fluorescents. It’s a schoolgirl’s bathroom, outfitted for extended periods of mirror-gazing. Whenever Fife and Alicia stay at her parents’ home, they sleep in Alicia’s childhood bedroom suite. Beyond the bathroom is Nanny Sally’s bedroom, and beyond that the nursery, where Cornel sleeps. There are other suites, one for Alicia’s parents and one for guests, each with a dressing room and bathroom and sitting area. There are several back staircases, storage rooms, pantries, sleeping porches, library, parlour, dining room, TV room, and laundry, sewing, and maid’s rooms. The house, especially at night, seems to go on and on endlessly.
Fife stands at the sink, soaping his hands. He leans forward and stares at his reflection in the mirror. He tries to imagine how he would look with a proper businessman’s short haircut, his moustache and sideburns gone. Like a white suburban realtor, he thinks. Or a guy inheriting from his wife’s father and uncle a company that makes foot powders and arch supports. With his hair cut short and moustache gone, he will look like what at bottom he will have become, an accidentally successful Richmond businessman, instead of what he wants to be, which, with his drooping moustache and shoulder-length chestnut hair, is what he looks like tonight. Not a hippie protester or a political radical but a serious young man, a politically serious, artistically engaged, well-educated young man. He wants to be taken for an intellectual artist, a cool contemporary version of the 1950s Greenwich Village and San Francisco Beats, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He models his clothing and hair and affect after them and after photographs of French existentialists sitting in Saint-Germain cafés smoking and drinking apricot cocktails and wrestling with the philosophical and moral consequences of political and religious disillusionment. He wants to be what he believes he looks like.
But in the mirror tonight, even the surface looks phony. He is a man outfitted for a costume party with a wig and a fake moustache, a man who, without the costume, is that callow youth living off his southern wife’s family money. He’s not even a competent actor playing a role. He dries his face with a towel and erases his face from his gaze and returns to the bedroom.
He sits at the edge of the bed and rests his hand on Alicia’s hip again. She lies on her side the way he left her, facing away from him.
Cornel okay? he asks her.
He never has nightmares when he sleeps in this house, she says. He just zonks out for the night. On account of Sally sleeping in the next room. His guardian angel. Alicia says she was the same. Still is. As long as Sally’s on the other side of the wall, she sleeps like a baby. Except when her beloved husband comes up smelling of alcohol and cigars, she says, her voice turning soft and affectionate. She reaches back without looking at him and touches his forearm with her fingertips. Tell me what you were saying before. About Daddy and Uncle Jackson.
Fife likes his wife’s oddly exaggerated Tidewater accent: Aboot Daddee and Oncle Jakeson, is how he hears it. Or does he like it? It’s slightly bizarre. No one else in the Chapman family, no Virginian he’s ever met, speaks with such an extreme version of the accent. He believes she jacked it up when she first arrived at Simmons College and realized how exotic she sounded to her New England and Manhattan classmates, and in the years since has made it her own. She was studying theatre arts, like most of the strikingly beautiful Simmons girls, and was trained early on how to speak in any accent the role required. Unlike most people, she knows what she sounds like. She’s an actress. It’s closer to a seventeenth-century British accent, especially in her pronunciation of “u” and “ou,” than to a typical twentieth-century southeastern American accent. Fife’s father and his Nova Scotia uncles, aunts, and cousins pronounce those vowels in a similar way, but much diluted. They say aboot the hoose, instead of about the house. Alicia adds a lot of breath and volume to her version.
Fife himself speaks with a broad Massachusetts working-class accent, like his mother. He likes to think that living in the South these six years has softened his sound, given it a Tidewater tint. But like most people, except Alicia, he can’t hear himself unless he’s tape-recorded. When he hears himself on tape, it makes him squirm in embarrassment.