The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour

assumed we were talking), his features, how he felt about me, underwent a dramatic transformation that produced two back-to-back sensations in my body: one, a kind of glowing pleasure, glory by proxy, followed immediately by disgust with myself, a strange hollowing sensation as if I hadn’t eaten that day. So it’s come to this, I thought. Your life achievement: standing beside a movie star and people mistaking you for his friend. And I again had that sensation of having missed an important train. A train that, when you’re young, feels as though it only comes once.
    Turning slightly, I said, “Excuse me, Mr. De Niro, you don’t know me, but I believe you know my wife, M.?”
    “M.?” he said, frowning. (I knew that frown; I’d seen it in Taxi Driver .) “M. as in M. here ? In Toronto?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    He recrossed his arms and shifted his weight, looking straight ahead. A sign the conversation was over.
    “She’s my wife,” I said.
    Pause. Then: “M. is your wife ?” he said. And in that curiosity I heard what I had sometimes suspected those mornings when my eyes opened and I realized sleep, at least for that day, was a subway car I could not get back on. “M.,” it implied, “is married to a loser like you ?”
    I felt the floor open under me. Nobody likes me, I thought.
    The bathroom door opened and a beefy figure stepped by me, brushing my shoulder, no excuse-me, not anything, just Harvey Keitel pushing into the shadowy room in body language that said, So? A few moments later a doe-like young woman with big tits and a tiny brain—she was a festival regular—came out looking as she always did, stupid and desirable.
    “Be seeing you,” De Niro said, not, of course, because we’d be seeing each other but because, like many movie stars, he didn’t want to leave a smouldering campfire behind him. You don’t want someone showing up at your office in SoHo with a long memory and a Magnum .357.
    I went home with a waitress that night—she had a speech impairment from a failed suicide attempt—and the debacle was complete.
    Then, life being life, I won a few hands that I needed to win. It makes me vaguely woozy when I think how much luck had to do with it. I got a job on television talking about movies; it was “bar chat,” of course, with the intellectual rigour of a guy with a martini in his hand— except that here the guy with the martini in his hand, so to speak, was on television; and being on television imparts, even to a cretin, a strange legitimacy. I was aware of the fraudulence but of insufficient character to not be delighted by it.
    I wrote a few books, none of which sold many copies, but just the fact of them, the fact that they existed in the world, even in small numbers and never at the front of the store, made me feel that I had had a decent life, that I hadn’t ended up like that “other” guy.
    Many years went by.
    And then one September night last year, the film festival raging like a forest fire throughout the city, I was in the back of a taxi going to meet friends for dinner. We slowed down in front of a movie theatre. It was a gala night, spotlights swirling on the sidewalk, movie stars descending from limos, and I remembered how awful it all used to make me feel. It struck me with a flush of almost physical excitement that if there was ever a place that called out for a revisit, it was the Toronto Film Festival. What fun to bask in old scars and slights and the knowledge that I had survived them.
    I dropped around the festival office the next day. “Weiner,” Billy, my ex-wife, M., were all long gone, but I knew the new director, Peter Jensen, a pleasant man with a sourceless English accent. I told Peter that I was writing a novel about the early days of the film festival, would it be okay if I hung around a bit: went to some films, some press conferences, a few parties, just to “get the feel” again. He said yes, of course. His assistant, a little troll whose head