The Perfect Order of Things (13 page)

“We’re ready over here,” the producer said.

Harrison drummed on the arm of his chair and looked up pleasantly.

“So George,” I began, my mind wiped clean as an after-school blackboard, “what was it like being in the Beatles?”

The room sagged. The producer looked paralyzed with dismay. Even the cameramen, trained like pointers, flinched. Harrison paused. He looked away, thinking of an answer, determined to take the question seriously, and with it, the person who asked it.

“Well, you know, for a
first
job, it wasn’t too bad.”

Everyone relaxed. With a guy like that, you can’t go wrong.

My memory of what he said after that is patchy. Luckily, I kept the raw footage, and looking at it today, I see a kind and thoughtful Harrison responding with playfulness, while off camera a voice (mine), a full octave higher than normal, asks overly complicated questions punctuated by explosions of pointless laughter (again mine). We talked about all sorts of things: his older sister whom he visited in Canada at the outset of Beatlemania, the late Brian Epstein, gardening, Eric Clapton, Monty Python, even the American playwright Tennessee Williams. Were his last plays bad or was it just the critics? Harrison wondered aloud, an elegant, pre-emptive defence of his new album and the hostility it would no doubt provoke among young reviewers eager to show their flashy irreverence.

I mentioned
Shanghai Express
, the dopey movie he produced with Madonna and Sean Penn. “Wrong cast, wrong script, wrong director. Where did we go right?” he asked with an amused chuckle (big, healthy teeth). You could tell he loathed Madonna personally but was too adult to indulge it on camera with a stranger, although I sensed it wouldn’t have taken more than a nudge to get him going.

We talked about his ten-year-old son Dhani who, on hearing the new album, asked Dad why he hadn’t written a “really good song” like “Blue Suede Shoes,” to which a touchingly embarrassed Harrison replied, “He’s got a point.” We talked about a recent Paul McCartney sulk (again he was diplomatic) and, of course, about John Lennon. Responding to my question about whether he now feared for his life, Harrison frowned with the authentic discomfort of a modest man and replied, “No. The truth is, I’m not important enough.” I remembered that when, ten years later, a deranged fan broke into his house in the middle of the night and stabbed him. Mrs. Harrison subdued the intruder with a single downward swing with the business end of a lamp.

Our interview concluded, Harrison stayed put, chatting with the crew and producer, and then wandered off back downstairs, stopping in the doorway to talk some more. He was on his way, he said, “to meet Eric and Ringo for dinner.” (There’s a dinner I’d have liked to go to.)

I never met the other three Beatles. I saw a bearded Ringo once in the lobby of a New York hotel reading the newspaper, but I left him alone. You don’t break in on a guy when he’s taking a few minutes to read the paper. I had a few one-person-removed encounters. I interviewed Yoko Ono when she came through Toronto with a dreadful, howling album. She was very much what I’d been told to expect, a suspicious, controlling woman who interrupted the interview twice to inquire, “Would you ask that question to Bruce Springsteen?” (No, but then the Boss doesn’t write songs that sound as if an animal had caught its foot in a trap.)

No one ever knows what goes on between a man and a woman and I can only assume Yoko must have been a whole lot more fun with John Lennon than she was that day with me. Sexual chemistry forgives all.

I interviewed Albert Goldman in Rome, where he had fled after publishing an ugly-minded biography of John Lennon in 1988. The whole thing stank of a publicity stunt, especially the armed guard who sat glum and bored in the corner of the hotel suite.

But I liked Goldman a lot. He was an effervescent New Yorker, a gifted phrase-maker and a wonderful conversationalist who had made a major life miscalculation: he had not understood that for a Beatles book to sell well, Beatles fans have to
like
it. At that moment in Rome, his book was number two on the
New York Times
bestseller list, but it was already falling like a lead pipe. Sensing that something very bad was coming his way, Mr. Goldman sought to anaesthetize his distress with balloon-sized glasses of red wine before lunch. It didn’t help. The book ruined his career and not long afterwards he died on an airplane in mid-flight.

Near the end of our chat in Rome, though, as he was walking me somewhat unsteadily to the elevator, I remarked that the Lennon biography had taken him five years to write, which was the same amount of time that Flaubert had taken to produce
Madame Bovary
. Had it, I asked, been a prudent choice of subject matter? Given that, as a writer, you don’t get those years back. He replied that he didn’t know.

A few months before his death, a colleague phoned me one evening, said he had a message from Albert Goldman, whom he had just interviewed. It was about the Flaubert question. Goldman had assured my friend that I would understand. “Just tell him no, it wasn’t,” he said.

There have been almost five hundred books written about the Beatles. Remember, this is a group of young men who disbanded forty years ago and who recorded, in total, about ten hours of music. Only
ten hours and twenty-eight minutes
, to be precise. You would have guessed so much more!

But still, by 2005, I’d had enough of them. It’s not true that you fall in love only once in your life; but it
is
true that you only fall in love a certain way, with a certain absoluteness, once. And I thought that’s maybe what had happened. Sometimes I’d hear “No Reply” or “Help!” or “Don’t Let Me Down” on the car radio and I’d think, That’s a terrific song, but I couldn’t be bothered listening all the way through, to that corny last chord of “She Loves You,” or even the delicious chorus in “Here, There and Everywhere.” I’d switch channels.

Then, a few months ago, a funny thing happened. I dropped into a second-hand bookstore, a grungy underground place in my neighbourhood. I was flipping through
The Alexandria Quartet
—it always reminds me of my mother—when I heard through an overhead speaker the final, dramatic bars of “When I Get Home,” a song from
A Hard Day’s Night
. And when John Lennon got to the hook, the hair stood up on my arms.

It was barely English, but I again felt it: it was back, that odd mixture of euphoria and sadness, of being close to but still on the
outside
of something terribly, terribly important.

7

Another Day in Paradise;
or, How Many OxyContins
Do I Have Left?

I
t must have been thirty years ago when I met Nessa Cornblum. Nessa, the rabbi’s daughter. She was working at the Rose Heights, an exclusive club for elderly Jewish women. She served high tea in the afternoons. Of course, she hated it. Nessa was at her conversational best when she was hating things, putting things down. She’d go still as a snake while her brain cooked with inventive cruelty—so-and-so’s weak chin, so-and-so’s sagging bosom—and then, finding just the right condemning phrase, when she hit the target and
knew
she hit the target, her Egyptian face slid open with a dazzling smile. Lord, she was pretty, though, that caramel skin, an almond face on which the centrepiece was a long, beautiful nose. You can talk about a woman’s behind, her smell, her breasts, her fingers, she had all that, but the masterpiece was her nose. It was a sexual virtue all on its own.

I was in the Bamboo, a lively, crowded bar down on Queen Street, the night I met her. I was at a table with a handful of people: Justin Strawbridge, Dexter Alexander, a medical intern, I forget his name, a night dentist, a computer programmer, an actor, somebody’s younger brother (then studying to be a helicopter pilot) and a dancer from the Danny Grossman troupe. Everyone was drunk, but in a young, happy way. Nessa Cornblum was there too, sitting with a couple of young women a few tables over. She must have felt she was with the wrong crowd, that she was missing out on something, because she kept looking this way, waiting for an in, an eye she could catch, a joke she could tag, something that would let her dump her pals (“Be right back”) and join us. Which she did.

I wasn’t especially attracted to her, not at first anyway, which she could sense, and that, coupled with my age—I was thirty, she was nineteen—intrigued her.

I don’t know who brought up Isla La Mar, maybe it was the intern or maybe a piece of music came on, but Dexter shouted, blowing a lungful of smoke at the ceiling, “Let’s go back! Let’s get on a fucking airplane and just
go
!”

The intern said he couldn’t take a Caribbean vacation just now, the dentist couldn’t either, but Justin Strawbridge, with that rich mother of his, sat back in his chair looking like a man who’s just remembered something. “Well, fuck
me
,” he said, and clapped his hands. It was a small gesture, that clap, but it sealed the trip. I shared a taxi home that night with Nessa; it stopped first at my apartment on Euclid. She lived further north, up in Forest Hill with Rabbi Cornblum and her two sisters. After we said good night and I got out of the cab, she wound down the window. “Do you have anything to drink at your house?” she said.

That was the first time we were together, and it wasn’t much, to be honest. A touch of theatre on her part. I have nothing against hollering and writhing and saying naughty things, but over the years I’ve discovered that just wanting to be there is what makes a good lover, not a 9.8 gymnastics routine.

While Nessa lay under the sheets, I poured myself a vodka, plopped in an ice cube and began to discuss, of all things, Scott Fitzgerald. The chatty gregariousness of the sexually sedated. “The reason
The Great Gatsby
feels like a longer book than it actually
is
”—here I pause for effect— “is that all the characters know each other
before
the story starts. So you’ve got thirty or so different relationships all going on at once.” Another sip and a ruminative look out the window. (I’d said this before.) “That’s what gives the book its remarkable density, why it feels like a five-hundred-page novel.”

“How would you guys feel about me tagging along with you to Isla La Mar?” Nessa said, propped up on one elbow. A breast revealed.

“In what capacity?”

“Just one of the guys. But I can see you’re hesitating. You’re worried you’re going to have to look after me down there. That I’m going to latch on to you like a lamprey.” “Did you know that lampreys almost annihilated the entire salmon and trout population of the Great Lakes?” I said.

“No, I didn’t know that.” Here she sat up in bed, the sheet falling entirely from her breasts, and lit a cigarette.

“And that it was a Canadian who invented a special poison which killed the lamprey larvae in the stream beds?”

Puff, puff.

“Can you imagine the ingenuity of a formula which kills only
one
species of egg and leaves everything else intact?”

“Uh-huh.”

“A Canadian guy.”

“So you said. But what’s your answer?”

I said, “I can’t look after you there. Just as long as we’re clear on that.”

Thinking back on that conversation now, at the age of sixty, I don’t understand why I wasn’t more alarmed about my future, why I didn’t understand that I was dangerously close to ending up like one of “those guys” whose company you sought out in the university cafeteria but whom, fifteen years later, you glimpse in an all-night doughnut shop: he’s still doing it, still talking up a storm, riffs about the second gun in the Kennedy assassination, riffs about how Brando saved Al Pacino from getting fired from
The
Godfather
. But it’s three o’clock in the morning, the company’s different now, and he’s said it all before.

So we caught an early morning flight to Isla La Mar and then took a minivan to San Agatha, a fishing village on the north coast. It had been three years.

In the daytime, Justin, Dexter, Nessa and I snorkelled in the green-water caves. At night, we drank overproof rum in the Hotel La Mar bar and saw ourselves as extraordinary people. Sometimes Nessa came to my room and got into bed without a word. Behind the hotel the foliage was overgrown and gave off a mild rotting smell and sometimes you could hear things moving around in there at night.

Then one night Nessa Cornblum didn’t come.

I saw her in the hotel bar the next morning; she was having breakfast alone. The sun had darkened her skin, and sitting there in a sleeveless black T-shirt she looked so beautiful that I was scared of her.

I said, “So where were you last night, young lady?”

Young lady.
You can see what I was trying to do—to get back to that zone where I had lived so effortlessly for weeks, ever since the night on Queen Street. But all that seemed like a foreign country now. And that funny, inauthentic sound of my voice? She must have heard it, must have understood what it meant.

“I got in late. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“Did you fuck him?”

“Yes,” she said, and returned her eyes to her omelette.

“Who?”

“Some French guy.”

“The guy with the tattoo on his arm?”

“Yes,” she said, relaxing as if we were on the verge of talking shop. A week before, we could have been.

“Good-looking guy,” I said.

“He sure is.”

I heard a voice in my head say, Do you think
I’m
good-looking? I got to my feet. “Okay,” I said.

“Be careful with yourself today,” she said.

Three girls from the University of Southern Mississippi spilled into the bar. One of them had a very red face. She’d fallen asleep on the beach. Children played on the patio while their parents ate breakfast and frowned. It was a family hotel.

“Meaning what?” I said.

Nessa looked up and frowned too. It was getting worse, like a rope running through my hands. I couldn’t get a grip on it.

I went up to Justin’s room on the second floor, beside mine. The door was open. He was sitting on the bed, barefooted, playing a guitar the colour of sunset. Writing down the lyrics and the chord progression. He looked at me and then back down at his notebook and then quickly back up to me. “I hope you haven’t fallen in love with her,” he said.