Famous Last Meals

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

  “What’s your name, Miss?”

  “Jane.”

  “Jane What?”

  “Burden.”

  “Burton?”

  “With a ‘d.’ D-e-n, as in heavy load.”

  “Do you know what happened to you, Jane Heavy Load?”

  “More or less.”

  “Sir? Sir? Somebody tell him—no, you have to—hey! Hey! Stop him—I can’t believe this—don’t let him drive away before he talks to us. Do you know that guy?”

  “Who?”

  “The one who drove you here.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She thought about what he had said: “You sure are pretty. I’m sorry this happened to you. I didn’t touch you. While you were out.” Miss Jane, while you were out a strange man from a trailer park did not violate you in any way. But he did take the car you were driving. It’s only fair, you have to agree. As payment. Of a sort. No, not for saving you, since he was as much a contributor to your injury as you were. This must be the cost of remaining...what? I was going to say, “healthy,” but it may not be the best word to describe someone in your condition. Maybe this is the price women have to pay from time to time to ensure that they stay alive. Small price? Certainly, a pittance to pay for one’s continued existence. Especially since it wasn’t your car to begin with. The person you borrowed it from, understanding bloke, is he? She. Splendid. It did look to be something of a beater. You did her a favour in disposing of it, then. Say it went over the side and down to the bottom. Not even worth retrieving. Let oxidation do its work. Except that the authorities and their representatives tend to be sceptical types. Police officers and insurance investigators and that ilk, they like to see for themselves. Chances are they’re going to send a diver or two down with powerful flashlights. Who can say what they’ll find? Now, let’s go over your story again, shall we.

  I waited for the boom to fall. I didn’t think it would be anything like a large heavy object falling out of nowhere to smite me for my stupidity. Our stupidity. Retribution of that sort would’ve been too biblical for the likes of Chandra and me. I was pretty sure Beth knew. Beth and Max were known to phone each other from the folds of their workday, just to say hello or ask a question, about Zulu head-dresses or cold remedies, the latter being her bailiwick. If Max didn’t know, then he was more of a deserving cuckold than I assumed he was. Beth would make me pay, in high emotional currency and physical isolation, for What I Did. Beth would never say, “make love.” Scots-Dutch hybrids like her are too earthy and straightforward for the likes of that. She liked honest, diligent, hard-consonant Anglo-Saxon words. She would say that Chandra and I had “fucked like two barn cats in heat.” Fair enough. I wished she would just come out and whack me with it. It was the waiting that was murder.

  I was never sure about Max, who had told me about his junkets to Thailand, his perverse gorging on the young. He even went so far as to tell me about the night he killed the girl he was having sex with. It wasn’t his fault, he insisted. We were into our third snifter of cognac in the Cellar, a place to sit by the fire after work on a cold day and avoid going home.

  He began by saying that Chandra was punishing him for something she’d learned. Normally she didn’t get angry with him for merely being away for a week or ten days at a time, unless he forgot to return with a gift, which he rarely did. She wouldn’t have found out about his latest side trip, from Johannesburg to Bangkok, had the airline not left a message for him on their home phone stating a change in his departure time. He tried to explain it away by saying that he had heard about an art dealer who had recently moved his operation from Pretoria to Thailand. Still dealing in the same artefacts as before, carved African masks, the dealer found he could move them in a far greater volume in Asia. It was wobbly, as lies go. Wondering why he didn’t tell her that he had gone there to price Thai masks or some such thing, I reminded him that his wife, by dint of being a professor of English literature, was a student of depravity as well as of saintliness, and would most certainly have known why so many European and North American men suddenly had business in Thailand. Sometimes it seemed that Max truly did not know the woman he had married.

  Apparently forgetting his wife’s ire, he began in that intimate way men have of trying to impress their friends with tales of conquest. He lowered his voice, forcing me to lean closer.

  “Their muscle control, it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt, Colin.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “You’re coming with me, next time I go. I’m serious. It will make you believe in heaven. It’s beyond comprehension.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of bringing home something bad?”

  “You’re always dwelling on the negative. I do believe that wife of yours is rubbing her clinical pessimism into you. Speaking of which, have you convinced her to be somebody other than that crazy dancer? One day the bad karma of our little gastronomical skits is going to turn and bite us on our four asses. I picture poor Dr. Beth, robes entangled in the wheel spokes of her motorcycle.”

  “Sports car.”

  “Either way, dead.”

  Without pause Max recounted his most recent junket. He made a point of saying that the girl had been nineteen, the same age as his eldest niece. She was someone Max had been with before, and he asked for her by name. She spoke no English but enough French that they could communicate. She was on top, the most comfortable position for each of them given the difference in body weight. She weighed less than a hundred pounds.

  The whore—so ancient a term for one so young—knelt astride Max, facing his feet as he lay on his back beneath her. I pictured low light, a ceiling fan, bamboo walls, reed mats, a gecko frozen on the wall beside the doorframe.

  “My God, the humidity, it is there like a third person in the room,” said Max. “No, strike that. It is there like a planeload of British soccer fans returning from Spain after their team’s defeat.” He had been so slick with perspiration that he hardly felt the girl moving, that is until she tensed those famous muscles.

  “I don’t know how to explain it. I was anticipating it but she still surprised me. I suddenly have the worst charley horse I have ever experienced, in the thigh near the back of the knee. And man! I have to flex, you know? Or I’m going to fucking scream.”

  He lifted his leg straight up with a violent jerk, involuntarily, like someone with a jolt of adrenaline lifting a huge weight to extract someone trapped beneath it. The girl, who had been prone, still kneeling but now lying face-down flat on his legs, tickling his feet, playing with his toes, sucking on them, was launched sideways off the bed, a high, European-style frame with mattress and box spring, reserved for the foreign “businessmen.” Her head struck the hard edge of a porcelain sink basin at the temple. She probably died immediately.

  The police investigation consisted of Max being questioned briefly the next day in his hotel room. The dead girl had no bruises on her body to suggest that she had been in a struggle. It appeared that she had died just as he had described. The policeman said that he had every reason to believe that no charges would be laid.

  “No reason to believe,” said Max, as if clarifying a point.

  “As I said, sir. Any further investigation would be merely a formality.”

  “Formality. Yes. Ah,” said Max, nodding. He reached into his pocket and took out his wallet.

  “They love Yankee greenbacks, Colin. Aussies, if you don’t have those. First time I tried paying for something with Canadian money the man thought I was kidding. “Kiddie toy,” the shop owner said. “Playtime money. Monopoly, yes?””

  I didn’t ask him how much the girl’s death had cost him. “Did you go to see her parents?”

  “No.”

  “Did you even think of it?”

  “Of course I thought of it. What good would it have done? Her family probably sold her into
the life. It’s usually the case: they’re farmers with too many hungry mouths to feed. To them a daughter is a liability at home. Sell her to the city. Get something substantial for her.”

  “Nobody should die that way.”

  “What way? It was an accident. It couldn’t be helped, I told you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Do you hear yourself talking?”

  “Don’t. Don’t tell me that if I hadn’t gone there that she might still be alive, because that kind of cause-and-effect bunk, it’s for the birds. Listen. If not me, it would have been someone else, some other circumstance, maybe one not so nice.”

  “Some other hairy dude with a leg spasm.”

  “No, some mean bastard with dark issues in his brain. Some venomous rat with a blade.”

  “This is all becoming so much clearer, Max.”

  “What is?”

  “Your motivation for going there. You’re not in it for the sex. It’s the power. The danger. You like to picture yourself in the place of the venomous rat. You get off on it. Maybe you get a little rough from time to time.” From the little Chandra had told me, Max was a placid, sensitive lover. “Cuddly,” was the word she’d used.

  “Outside,” he commanded, standing, swaying slightly as he sought equilibrium. “You can’t speak that way to me. I demand satisfaction.”

  “Sit down before you hurt yourself. You’re pissed.”

  “Damn right I’m pissed. I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

  “Oh, you’re going to refute my allegation, are you? You’re going to prove what a pacifist you are by hitting me. That makes a whole lot of sense, Max.”

  “You come outside with me, Colin. Colon. Sphinctoid. You come and defend yourself while I proceed to kick your holier-than-thou ass.”

  He didn’t wait for me to respond. I grabbed our coats off nearby hooks, paid the bill with cash, and followed him outside. It was snowing lightly. I put my coat on and held Max’s out to him.

  “I don’t want that.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “No, you suit yourself. Me, I choose shirtsleeves. Now, where shall this trouncing take place?” He peered with exaggerated intensity up and down the sidewalk, his chin raised. He was daring the sagging sky itself to stop him.

  His phone rang in the pocket of his overcoat. He stood a few paces away, squinting down a narrow alley between the buildings. I took out the phone and said hello.

  “Max? Who is this?”

  “Colin.”

  “Colin? Where’s Max? Are you two being bad?”

  “We’re outside the Cellar. He’s looking for a place to

  fight me.”

  “Put him on, please.”

  I held the little device up in the air. “It’s your wife.”

  “You talk to her. You’re good at that.”

  “She would like a word.”

  “Tell her that we men have some business to attend to. Tell her that for once I choose not to share.”

  “He says for once he chooses—”

  “I heard him. You tell him that I am here, waiting. Remind him that I have tickets, our regular seats at Place des Arts, and the symphony begins in thirty-nine—no, thirty-six minutes.”

  “The symphony,” I informed him.

  “Mahler,” he groaned. “God help me.” He grabbed his coat from me and shuffled in a circle trying to fill his sleeves.

  “This isn’t over,” said Chandra.

  “It isn’t?”

  “I’m talking about you explaining, at some later date and in exact detail, why my husband wanted to strike you with his bare knuckles in a public place.”

  “Yes,” I said, “sure. Later.”

  “This isn’t over,” he said as he got into a cab. I pushed his head down the way the police do to protect the captive, and slipped the phone back into his coat pocket.

  “Yes it is, you big bully. Just get home safely.”

  I closed the taxi door and heard him say my name.

  “What?”

  Tears dripped from both cheeks. He looked at me imploringly, unable to speak. The driver made an impatient noise in his throat. I made sure the hem of Max’s overcoat wasn’t hanging out before closing the car door and thumping twice on the roof.

  About a dancer one must believe this above all else, that the physical laws governing the rest of us do not apply. Thus a leap hangs longer than gravity should allow; a fluid bend, the yew-bow give of it, is in each frame frozen in the eye contrary to its fleeting passage; and a body can pass unchanged through another, be at once repelled and attracted, and can change shape with the elusiveness of smoke. All this we can say about the artistry of Jacoba Wyndham without contradicting a different portrait of her, that of an ugly terrorist upon the stage, for she was that accomplished, that committed to her art, that she could subvert the beauty of her body’s genius, make it submit to the most difficult of all aesthetics, one that threatened to exclude her audience and exile her to a far, unreachable place.

  Unlike Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham, Jacoba does not draw upon mythology for her dances. To call her a mere contortionist, as have some lazy reviewers, is unfair. Similarly she is more than a shock artist, for she takes the time to prepare both the idea and the ground in which she means it to take root. The root in her case is a killing one, the relentless and indestructible tap that drills into the hardest substance, the least penetrable cant, the ruling spitefulness of our time. Think of Goethe writing about the mind of Hamlet: like a tree planted in a delicate container, eventually it must burst forth, shattering that which has tried to hold it.

  When she was still Jane she cracked the husk encasing my mind. Her body combined with mine, setting alive every nerve, teaching it new ways to transmit sense and me to move without movement, to both reflect and be a larger mind, the boundary between our duality erased. Can it be that I had her to myself for so short a time, the eight or ten weeks of a blast-furnace summer in Toronto? How naïve of me to think that I had had her to myself. No one, not her parents, her brother, her fellow dancers in Red Bugatti or her teachers, had exclusive access to or sway over her, exclusive possession of her attention.

  In one of her dances, choreographed in conjunction with the Danny Grossman Company to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Les Ordres, Jacoba illustrates that sense of her being entirely communal, owned by none, shared by all, alone and yet woven into society’s cloth. On stage she is backlit, creating an aura around her as she stands in loose-fitting black clothes, a shirt and trousers resembling the Chinese Communist Party uniform. Her face lies obscured in shadow. The light moves with her. It is such a sophisticated piece of equipment that it can be programmed to anticipate her every movement, and yet she has decided to let the halogen spot miss its target now and then, to allow it to shoot out from behind her and smite the audience. It is so Jacoba, this bit of assault theatre. She is always blinding her audience, temporarily, in one way or another, until they have learned to see in a new way. The setting of the piece is unspecified, although it could be a city street. A sidewalk, hot air blowing up from a grate, stirring the folds of her clothes. Had her hair been longer—she cut it short, a severe crew, soon after her accident—it too would have danced in the subterranean wind. And during the entire performance she moves her feet not one step forward or back or to either side. She could be bolted to the floor. In case you are picturing the old Vaudeville gag, that Hope-and-Crosby bit of lame illusion, put it from you, please. What Jacoba did sent such sophomoric stunt-making back to its dim place of origin, namely to the land of the tired, the realm of imitation and artistic bankruptcy. For this is her complex conceit, so simple in execution, so difficult to carry out: she is standing as if bolted in place, a volcanic wind escaping from the rift beneath her, a light that is no sun or moon or any known lamp shining like a
laser upon her back. She is as alone as one would be in a desert of infinite sand and yet around her, passing close by her, threatening to climb over her, through her, is the continual progress of bodies, all painted white, harshly so, stone-age, sinewy, angular, made to look emaciated. Their muscles are strings that threaten to snap. Their eyes peer out from deep black sockets. They dance like the flames of a heatless white fire, licking close, never touching, but exerting such a force upon her that she is buffeted in their wake.

  I winced at times, so violently did she move. I expected her to be broken, purple welts raised on her skin. I expected her to be heaped on the stage when it was over, mere residue, aftermath, bone pile, something to be swept up and carted away. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: how yesterday, how done, the notion that each of us is alone, that we inhabit concrete canyons that trap artificial light and sap energy, that too many of us live and work this way like ants climbing over each other, colliding, breathing each other’s foul exhalations, deafened by sirens and screams and unholy prayers, even our dreams invaded so. Who can refute the axiom, now a cliché: we live lonely, soulless, disconnected, over-stimulated, undernourished lives. Woe and woe again unto us.

  So do something about it already! Move to the countryside, get a hobby, commit good deeds. Get an air exchanger, earplugs, a vibrator. Take up yoga in a purified, buffered, softened room. Move deeper into the bliss. The ways are many, the techniques proven, for counteracting the destructive effects of modern life. But were it as simple as that. The point, gentle seeker, is that these words go only part way toward conveying the singular experience of that dance, and no synopsis or analysis, no intellectual pigeon-holing is ever going to come close.

  Like her character in that performance to come, Jane could find no comfort or refuge in any one person. Being alone with someone robbed her of her ease. Whenever we made love, she had to have the window to the fire escape open so that she could hear the night sounds and, although she never admitted it, to have a ready exit. I wonder if I was the last person she was truly alone with. We were so young. We felt we were old souls, two immortals on our own in a great graphic novel, a kind of cut-out cartoon empire populated by poor, deluded, dull but endearing types who at least were trying to do something worthwhile. Above all else we paid tribute to endurance wherever we saw it: collateral damage from the high-tech sector, stunned babies in stiff new suits wandering from job interview to temp work to employment office; the independent butcher cleaning animal-rights obscenities off his display window; the obese young woman ferrying a rope-clutching line of sun-struck toddlers, all wailing, across a downtown intersection snarled by construction. We thought we were the first to discover the old adages: the journey trumps the destination; better to dive into a fast-food restaurant’s dumpster than toil behind its corrupt counter; a single moment lived in the pursuit of art is better than a plodding lifetime spent in exhausted defeat. What I didn’t know was that Jane was living her ideals whereas I was only pretending to. We both thought I was as passionately committed to our vision as she was, when really I was merely enamoured, not with art or justice or knowledge or enlightenment but with a person, a complicated soul. Her.