The First Few Pages (of my manuscript)

1.    Dov & Julian, Summer 2012

 The nostalgia box was filled with the usual love letters from first girlfriends, bad poetry attempts Dov had never shared with anyone, and printed pictures taken from actual cameras of real people he’d once loved. This is how he came upon the photograph of him and Julian in a Tokyo bar alley, their arms round one another, a night on the town, two best friends. Dov had meant to put it in an album years before but here it was still stored loose among stacks of other photos in the shoe box he’d kept since high school, a hiking boot box actually. He’d found it in his mother’s basement weeks before but brought it to the hospital only today because his Ima wasn’t speaking anymore and Dov was desperate to find what to pass the time.

In palliative they don’t limit visitor hours and the day before Dov had been there for the better part of fourteen hours. He hadn’t been able to read one page of the novel he’d brought for company. And Dov was the kind of person for whom novels, like music, had always been company.

He held the picture up, really studying it, before turning to show it to his mother, asleep in the hospital bed beside him. “Ima, look.” He said to her as if she could hear. “Jules.” The last time he and Julian had been together was in Tokyo, in December of 2002, over a decade earlier, when Dov lived and worked teaching English in Japan. He’d been there just over a year to that point. Julian, Jules to his friends, was visiting for the first time. He had been flown over for a film premiere. His first premiere abroad! This was after all the Hollywood fanfare, the red carpets, the after-party Jules took Dov to at the five-star club in Shibuya, the buffet table with lobster tail and as much Kobe beef as you could plate. The photograph was taken forty-eight hours later, the two of them, in their regular clothes, in jeans, the last night of Jules’ trip. You can’t see it but they’re just outside the narrow little yakitori place where they were about to eat with Jules’ fashion model friends who were working in Tokyo at that time. Despite how Dov acutely remembered the shit night that immediately came after the shot was taken, he was still loving the picture, if bittersweetly. Loving how happy they look with life, not to mention how good and trim and young they looked (superficial as that may have been) but really it was how happy they clearly were to be with one another. Not that Dov didn’t have other photos of the best friends, at camp, at the Sargons after, or later, in the university years when there were three of them in the pictures, with Tomoko. What made this particular photo Dov held bittersweet, a photograph taken by a kind Japanese fellow passing by with his buddies, was that it happened to capture nearly the literal last moment Dov and Julian were friends.The shit evening starting in the yakitori place was just about to begin and only many, many hours later, long after they’d gone back to the five star hotel they’d put Jules up at, after a fight that took them, like lovers, late into the night, was Dov so angry at Jules that his final (sucker) punch was to take off the next morning leaving only a note, in which, two years after the fact he revealed to Jules that he’d slept with Tomoko. Not that Tomoko and Jules had been together at the time. They never had been. It’s just that Jules was still in love with her then, and Dov knew, Dov knew it all, had been there from the start.

Ten years later Dov was headed down a hospital hallway to make the call, to the so-called Lounge area, this small, square room mercifully empty of other hospital visitors. It had a TV in it and little else. He sat on one of the padded bench-like seats that looked straight out of the 70s, covered in a plasticky-pleathery material with brown seats and orange seatbacks, furniture in other words so dispiritingly dentist office-worthy (or worthy of the dentist office Dov waited nervously in as a child) as to almost be funny. The cell number Dov had for Jules was a decade out-of-date. He tried it anyway, which was stupid because there was no chance it would work. Even if the number had been a few months old it wouldn’t likely have worked because famous people have to change their phone numbers that frequently. One learns these things when they have, or had, a friendship with such a person. Dov was calling, or failing to call, Julian’s old Manhattan number. The number, a recorded voice told him, was no longer in service, leaving little choice if Dov wanted to get hold of Jules, and he did.

Dov found himself dialling Julian’s parents’ house in Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years. Turned away from the muted TV and the endless news scrawl across it, he adjusted the phone at his ear waiting for it to ring and looked out the only window in the room instead. It faced the brick wall of another part of Ottawa’s largest hospital. My mother is dying, he thought, looking at that wall, the thought evoking as much emotion as the view. Things had suddenly gotten very real and Dov had felt bleached-bone-dry of any feeling at all. Then Julian’s mother picked up the phone and just hearing Cheryl Sargon, her wonderfully distinctive South African accent she’d never lost despite being in Canada for decades, the accent but a vessel through which this loving person put out her cheerful glow to the world, Dov was instantly changed, warmed. It took Dov right back. For a brief moment he was fourteen again, at the Sargon’s North Toronto bungalow. It was 1989 and he was drinking in Julian’s mom’s chatter like so many glasses of milk, in the kind of house where Dov really did feel welcome to take as he pleased. A house Dov would always envy something deep, and not just because of the junk food drawer, but also the easy laughter in that little cozy cottage-like place, Jules’ parents who were so clearly one another’s best friend. A far cry from what Dov’s parents had been. After each summer he spent at Camp Shemer, Jules invited Dov to come stay in Toronto for a week. A tradition Dov would enjoy as much for the adventures Jules took him on into downtown, browsing head shops on that sketchy stretch of Yonge Street just north of the Eaton Centre, playing pool and smoking first cigarettes in the dingiest of basement pool halls, as he did for the extended and always meaningful conversations with either or usually both of Jules’ parents in their bright, little kitchen, most often after a breakfast that Jules’ mom would lovingly prepare, her famous French toast. Once again it was like Dov wanted never to leave that house, that space, that is until the inevitable, when Cheryl’s chatty update came to its natural end, a code yellow was called over the hospital intercom, and Cheryl asked, “And you, Dov? How are you doing? How are your parents?”

It was impossible for him to feign even a hint of chipper brought back to the plasticky- pleathery bench-seat reality of the very air-conditioned place where he was. “Me?” he said. His voice cracking when he did. He’d have killed to continue the charade, to say things were just swell, to get through the call without having to get into it, but that was impossible with his mother dying just down the hallway from where he sat. He hadn’t managed to say anything more and some good few seconds passed. Cheryl asked if he was okay and Dov admitted he wasn’t. The answer surprised him because until he’d heard her voice he’d felt totally fine, not close to tears even after his mom had been admitted to hospital a day and a half earlier. What Cheryl Sargon had broken through in him made it almost impossible not to cry but Dov was determined. He was the kind of sensitive man who should have been a good and healthy crier when in fact he was pretty terrible at it. Tears rarely came when they should and if they did at all it would be in the darkness of a movie theatre or because of something in a song he heard. In other words, he never cried at the right time which made the call all the more precarious. But he managed to hold it down, telling Julian’s mother about his mother’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, about returning to Ottawa after nearly ten years living in Japan so as to care for his mother this last year, but that it was almost over now. He thought Julian should know.