Famous Last Meals

by Famous Last Meals (Candidates; Famouse Last Meals; The Woman in the Vineyard) (v5. 0) (epub)

  At one point Adam caught Pookie’s eye. She was sitting with her group, his old PMO buddies, on the opposite side of the auditorium. She and Gilles waved back. The others looked Adam’s way and turned back to the stage, as if to acknowledge him now were a treasonous act. Emma refused to look at him.

  When they got home we found that Monica had left a message on Mrs. Fallingbrooke’s machine, asking if he would please return his PMO identification necklace at his “earliest convenience,” a phrase she invested with all the weight of a diplomatic communiqué charged with the highest level of concern for the health of future relations between sovereign nations. Adam would keep the necklace, he decided, as a memento.

  LB had lunch with Laura Bowen and she gave him a cheque for $50,000 for his campaign. It didn’t matter to her that the election was only a day away.

  On voting day LB was nowhere to be found. He called a week later from Cape Town to find out how he had done. He was more curious than anything else. He was back home and was going to use the money to build an AIDS hospice.

  “What if you had won?”

  “Then you would sit in my place. I would appoint you,” said LB, who sounded as if he were speaking from the next room.

  “I don’t think that’s allowed.”

  “Why the blazes not? It should be. I can’t be in two places at once. How is my empress?”

  Adam told him that Mrs. Fallingbrooke had taken the loss quite hard. LB lost by fewer than two hundred votes. The only consolation was that Don Feeney had not won either. The victor was the first-year political-science student, the independent candidate. His win was a remarkable feat given that most of the city’s student population was still scattered, working at summer jobs across the country.

  Mrs. Fallingbrooke recovered from the defeat after a night’s sleep and a strong cup of percolated coffee. She bought Adam a first-class plane ticket home, since he had had to relinquish the unused portion of his refundable ticket after leaving the Feeney campaign. She told him to do something he had never done before.

  “Go west, work in a lumber camp, wash dishes at the Banff Springs Hotel, prospect for gold in the Yukon. Then you should come home and get a job in the city. Not in government and not in politics. Ideas. Publishing. You would make a good editor, Adam.”

  “How do you know that? You haven’t seen me edit or even write anything.”

  “Trust me. I know. The qualities of a good editor and publisher are ones primarily of character: the ability to judge, to see the value beneath an imperfect exterior, to take a chance, gamble, cross the floor even if by doing so you lose something dear. You crossed the floor, Adam Lerner. You followed your instinct.”

  “Is he really going to build that clinic?”

  “Yes, I do believe he is.”

  “Then it all worked out.”

  “Dear boy, I must draw your attention to your annoying penchant for stating the obvious. Please divest yourself of that habit before you undertake your next adventure. I insist.”

  He promised that it would be the first thing about himself that he would change.

  “One final matter.”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “When it is the nadir of winter, and snow and ice are all around you like a hard white coffin, promise me you will have put some money aside—you must earn it, I’m not going to give it to you—to spend a week in the sun. It doesn’t matter where: Martinique, Paros, the Galapagos. Go and be warm so that you may return with a full and magnanimous heart. Because, you know, this—what we tried to do here—it’s not finished.”

  Yes, he promised her, he would begin to save his pennies for just that necessary extravagance.

  Famous Last Meals

  It was Chandra’s idea that we should call our dinner parties, “Famous Last Meals,” each a re-enactment of the final meal of a famous person who had died before the age of thirty. Three friends, acquaintances or family of the soon-to-be deceased would complete the table. I suggested Famous Last Suppers, but Max, a devout Catholic, vetoed it. Beth added that Christ was thirty-three when he died and that no women had been present when he urged his disciples to perform their rite of metaphorical cannibalism.

  “Mary Magdalene was there,” said Chandra. “Look at the figure sitting to Christ’s right in da Vinci’s painting.”

  “That was John the Evangelist,” said Max. “He had the face of a girl. Besides, if Mary had been there, the food would have been better.”

  “She was there and it wasn’t to cook,” said Chandra with a wink.

  Chandra could imbue the driest fact with the urgency of warm, moist, smooth, flushed skin. Knowing that knowledge is sensual she extracted it from obscure niches the way a pickpocket can lift cash out from under a tight garter.

  We were discussing, over dessert, the subject of our next month’s dinner. When Beth, who had not yet had a chance to play the doomed personage, suggested she be Isadora Duncan, Chandra pointed out that the dancer had been almost fifty at the time of her death.

  “Who made this before-thirty rule?” said Max. “I say we throw it out.”

  The age restriction did limit our pool of choices. When we first formulated the concept, we had wanted to be able to identify easily with the subjects and also to flirt with mortality. Thirty is the gateway to adulthood. Once past that milepost, we have to leave the nursery forever and accept time’s icy breath on the backs of our necks.

  I had one foot or perhaps a toe still in the nursery the year I met the reincarnation of Isadora Duncan. I was twenty-three, a recently graduated B.A. with no prospects to speak of. I had spent the summer painting houses. Two houses, to be exact. To the many job queries I sent out, over the course of a fallow fall and winter living once again at home, I got few responses and just one interview, with a business-reporting firm in Toronto. My lack of knowledge of the world of business was to my naively optimistic mind no impediment. To make a good first impression I bought a navy blue blazer with a faux nautical crest on the pocket, grey flannel trousers with wide cuffs, and a new pair of Italian shoes, black, pointy-toed and half a size too small, the salesman having convinced me that the supple leather would quickly stretch with use.

  On the phone the woman who scheduled the interviews had said, “Expected salary. Ballpark.”

  I guessed a figure.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is it too low?”

  “You are aware, aren’t you, of the kind of work we do?”

  I wasn’t, even after looking through the company’s prospectus for that year. “You rate businesses. You write reports and the like.”

  “Why don’t we try again,” she said.

  “You predict market trends? You’re a consumer watchdog?”

  “What do think would be a reasonable starting salary, given your...” I heard the rustling of paper, then her dismissive sniff, “…qualifications?”

  I lowered the number by what I thought was a considerable amount. She made a different nasal sound, repeated the time and place of the interview, which she must by then have been thinking about as potential entertainment for her and her colleagues, and abruptly closed the connection.

  I took an early train from Kingston and, never having taken the subway, decided to walk north along Yonge from Union Station to Carlton Street and east along Carlton past Maple Leaf Gardens. By the time I got to the company’s office, the backs of my heels were bleeding into my decidedly not supple new shoes and I was walking with an abbreviated and pigeon-toed stride, trying to keep the pressure off my heels by not letting them touch the ground. Barely on time for the interview, I immediately asked to be directed to the washroom.

  “Are you all right?” asked one of three men assembled to conduct the meeting.

  “Oh yes, fine. Absolutely. I’ll be right back.”

  In the washroom I took off the shoes and gingerly peeled my blood
-caked socks away from raw blistered skin. I rinsed the socks in the sink, wrung them out and slipped them on over makeshift bandages made of folded paper toweling. The shoes, when I tried to put them back on, had apparently shrunk. I was not getting them back on without suffering a procrustean adjustment, and so, careful to remove my resumé first, I jammed the shoes into my thin, zippered, leatherette portfolio.

  She came through the door so confidently that I was sure I was in the wrong washroom. No, I thought, eyeing the porcelain fixtures on the wall, those were definitely for stand-up types like me. She was about my age and dressed in a well-fitting, summer-weight, light-blue suit with the top made to resemble a Nehru jacket and the skirt short enough, ending mid-thigh, to be covered by the jacket when viewed from behind. Her red hair, almost orange in the soft light coming from recessed pots in the ceiling, reached to the small of her back. In heels she was about an inch taller than I. Her long legs were bare and tanned, with the sculpted calf muscles of a runner or a cyclist.

  She smiled and looked down at the wet spot my socks were leaving on the tile floor. I opened my mouth to let her know that I was a visitor, that I was there for a job interview, that I was a Libran, a lapsed Anglican, a romantic, a humanist, a believer in Northrop Frye’s literary universe and Joseph Campbell’s connective threads of myth, and that I was open minded about most things including the changing roles of men and women and certainly the right of a woman to do whatever she wanted and go wherever she pleased. Custom and law would simply have to catch up. I stood there, a perfect mute.

  She moved smartly to the nearest stall, opened the door and removed a few squares of toilet paper from the roll. Then she went to the first urinal in the line, hiked up her skirt, removed her underwear in a deft motion that left me doubting my eyes, turned, straddled the receptacle, leaned forward while thrusting her hips backwards, and relieved herself, all the while looking directly at me as if to say, ‘I bet you’ve never seen anything like this and probably won’t again, not for a long time. But hey, stay tuned.’

  I was heading for the door when she said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  The same sense of impotent propriety that had made me avert my eyes kept me standing there.

  “You can turn around now.” I hesitated before I did turn, wondering if she was going to be standing there naked. She had smoothed down her skirt and was running a brush through her hair while looking in the mirror. “I was going to do that whether you were here or not.”

  “That’s fine,” I replied, thinking that she must not value her job very much. What if I had been someone who worked there? What if, instead of me, her boss had been there?

  Two weeks later, after we had become friends and she had begun to unravel every assumption I had ever held about life, thought, social intercourse and love, I did ask her those questions.

  “I needed to experience it, that’s all,” she replied. We were sitting on the grass in Allan Gardens, eating lunch. She was a member of a small new dance company called Red Bugatti. It was research, she said. “If the CEO had been there and called Security on me, well, I was prepared for that, too. Anything can happen. Anything will happen. Be open, Colin. That’s all a person can do.” The new dance she and her colleagues were learning required several of the women to adopt male personae and postures. I didn’t tell her that hers had been the least male posture I could imagine.

  My interview, predictably, did not go well. By the time I had returned to the meeting room, I had forgotten about my sore heels and was oblivious to the fact that I was standing in sock feet, pant cuffs wet and dragging on the floor. All I could think about was Jane, what she had done in the men’s room and what she said after we introduced ourselves.

  “We should eat lunch,” she said. It was all of nine-thirty in the morning.

  I told her my reason for being there.

  “That’s fine, I’ll wait for you.”

  “Where...what office do you...?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find you. That’s one less thing you have to worry about.”

  “One thing fewer.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder for balance as she slipped off first one shoe then the other, “a grammarian. One thing fewer. This is going to be fun.” She kept her hand where it was, then moved it to brush the hair near my ear. I remember shivering. We were standing eye-to-eye now.

  “What is?”

  “Your transformation.”

  Isadora Duncan’s two children, Patrick, three, and Deirdre, five years old, along with their governess, a Scotswoman named Annie Sim, drowned fourteen years before Duncan herself was killed. The three were trapped in a car that rolled backwards into the Seine. Jane told me this while we drove together in a borrowed car across the Saint Lawrence River on our way to her father’s summer place outside of Waterbury, Vermont. The driver, Paul Morverand, had brought Isadora’s children to luncheon, at an Italian restaurant in Paris, with their mother and Patrick’s father, Paris Singer. Afterwards, Isadora returned to her studio in Versailles to rehearse. Jane could hardly keep her hands on the wheel as she told the story.

  “Imagine. To have that wound the rest of your life. It must never have closed over. And to have had the privilege of owning that grief and sublimating it and directing it in her work.”

  “You talk as if you envy her.”

  “Oh, but I do! How could anyone not?”

  I looked down at the water as we crossed the bridge at Cornwall, Ontario, and felt an overwhelming vertigo. I was on the verge of telling her to stop to let me out when she continued the story.

  On the way home from the restaurant, the car in which Deirdre and Patrick were riding stalled beside the river. When Morverand got out to crank the motor, he realized that he had left the vehicle sitting in reverse gear. I felt an immediate affinity for the man, who had made such a careless, momentous blunder, a mistake that on a level stretch of road would have been inconsequential. Anyone might have done it. Perhaps the slope was not even noticeable. Why had he not engaged the hand brake? I needed more details. Had they just crossed a bridge and were they headed up the embankment on the other side? Had they been following a road that hugged the shore?

  We reached the American side of the bridge. We had been four hours in the car and had stopped only once, outside of Belleville, and so pulled into a large gas station and restaurant complex. I looked across the roof of the car at her as she stretched. She clasped her hands behind her back and, keeping her arms straight, bent forward so that her interlaced fingers pointing skyward were all of her that remained visible.

  Although I failed to get the job with the business-reporting firm, one of the interviewers, sensing that I was not at my best that day, took pity on me. He was the most senior of the three men and wore a better-tailored version of my hopelessly conservative ensemble. He escorted me out, rode the elevator with me to the lobby, and as he shook my hand goodbye gave me the card of a small publisher located three blocks north. “Use my name,” he said. “They owe me a favour or two.”

  I thanked him. As the man turned and walked back to the elevator, Jane emerged from where she had been sitting in a chair behind a large fern. Still barefoot, shoes in hand, she asked me how the interview had gone.

  “I think it went pretty well. We put on dresses and watched porn. Then we tried out some different bidets.”

  “We’ll go back up and I’ll explain everything to them. I’ll demand they give you another chance.” I almost believed she could work that miracle. I told her about the kindly old gentleman and the lead he’d given me. “More up my particular alley.”

  She repeated that she was starving. She knew of an organic restaurant not far from there. “Take those off,” she said, pointing at my socks. She grabbed them, yanked the shoes out of my portfolio and threw them all into the first trash bin we came to. A few doors down the street she pulled me into
a shoe store, where she bought us each a pair of sandals. “Isadora never wore shoes,” she declared.

  In the restaurant she took hold of my feet one at a time under the table. “These are the most important part of a dancer’s body. Cramp the toes, allow the arch to fall, fail to keep all the joints, ligaments and tendons in tone, and your entire instrument seizes up.” As she massaged, she told me what each pressure point on the sole governed. “This is connected to your liver. Feel that? It’s helping drain the toxins away.”

  “I don’t really...” I bit my lip. Gradually I relaxed. She took some hand cream from her purse and rubbed it into the raw blistered area at the backs of my heels. I closed my eyes. She talked about movement the way an evangelist speaks rhapsodically about prayer. “You’re so tight. You hold too much in,” she said, pressing suddenly on a spot on the ball of my left foot. A tongue of pain flicked at the base of my skull and I cried out. “See how locked you are?” she said.

  Our food arrived, and while we ate she showed me how to stretch my neck and shoulders. Going rag doll, as she called it, I let my head hang loosely so that my chin dropped towards my chest. Jane reassured the waitress that I was not having a stroke. I brought my shoulders to my ears, released them and thought about her stunt in the washroom. What sort of person had to experience everything? If I held out my hand, would she nuzzle or bite it? Our food disappeared. I didn’t want to leave. She talked about dance, how it felt to exhaust herself in rehearsal, lose her identity in the role, learn each movement and sequence, not as something stored in the mind but as a memory held in each cell of each muscle of her body.

  The day before she died, Isadora Duncan reportedly saw a girl who reminded her of her daughter. “I cannot live in a world where there are beautiful blue-eyed, golden-haired children,” she told her friend Mary Desti. When I reported the details relating to the death of Isadora Duncan’s children, Beth immediately wanted our next Last Meal to be that fateful lunch in 1913. It had been April, the city unfolding in soft floral splendour.