The First Three Pages from My Manuscript

1.    Dov & Julian

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; he’d be there late into the night. In palliative they don’t limit visitor hours and the day before Dov had been there for the better part of fourteen hours and 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. 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. Not only because of how happy they look with life, with each other, but rather in the dumbest, most shallow way possible Dov was fixated on how good and trim and young they looked. Because they were; they were twenty-five.

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 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. Julian’s mother picked up and Dov felt instantly warmed, listening to 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.

It took Dov right back, to the Sargon’s North Toronto bungalow. For a brief moment he was fourteen again. 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. He wasn’t to ask. The snack drawer ever full, as many Chips Ahoy Chewy cookies or Fruit Roll-Ups as you wanted. A house Dov would always envy something deep, and not just because of the snacks, 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. Jules’ mom and dad loved one another as much as they loved their children. After each summer he spent at Camp Shemer, Jules invited Dov to come stay with Jules’ family 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, twice, 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. He welled up for the first time since his mom had been admitted to hospital the night before, and told Julian’s mother through tears 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 these last couple years, but that it was almost over now. He thought Julian should know.