Famous Last Meals

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

  Beth and I were sitting in our favourite Turkish restaurant, sharing a plate of its Special Meze, when she asked me if I’d ever loved anyone more than I loved her. She had a knack for exploding little ordnances like this under my nose while I sat salivating in wait for my Beyti Kebab and Hunker Begendi. Although I had told her about Jane, I didn’t feel comfortable revealing intimate details about that summer, and so would steer the discourse away from the personal, away from Jane and toward Jacoba. Beth was more knowledgeable about dance than I was, having studied ballet and jazz and a year of modern dance while she was growing up. She more than I could appreciate the physical demands of the art form. She was forever “taking her hat off” to people like Jacoba, a comic image because Beth in a hat resembled a piece of antique decoration, an accessory to furniture. She didn’t have the head, hair or body shape for it. Nevertheless, her hat went off. “I could never do it,” she said, and I concurred. Who could do what Jacoba Wyndham does? Who could endure the intense public scrutiny, the misunderstanding, the pain?

  Somehow, despite my attempts at diversion, Beth knew that I had suffered a broken heart before meeting her. Sensing the engagement of her intuition, and having nothing to lose by telling the truth, still I panicked when she asked the question. No, I assured her, I’d never loved anyone more than her at that moment, and as I said it I felt guilty, like a child caught with something stolen in his possession, and indignant. How dare she make me answer such a question. I conveyed both of these sentiments in my response. Don’t be angry with me, her eyes seemed to say, I’m only asking. Why so defensive? You’re holding it right there in your hands, Colin. Shall we try this again?

  “Really? I was sure you were going to say that dancer.”

  That dancer. Why do men continue to lie to their wives and lovers even after the truth has been exposed? It must be that women want something, if only a thin ply of words, between them and the battering male fist of reality. Do women want to be lied to? Not in the way men understand it. Beth may not have wanted to be lied to, she may not have wanted to know that I was lying to her, but she needed just as much not to hear the truth from me, especially at that point in our marriage.

  A woman who has her mind set upon having a child but cannot is the saddest, the most pathetic, the purest in harrowing wretchedness, the most righteous, the noblest, and the most beautiful, tragic figure we in this jaded world can conceive. Beth wanted a baby, I didn’t, she became upset by this to the extent that in her eyes our union was bankrupt, we received counselling, followed the expert advice, made gains along a proscribed path of recovery, she asked me a question that took the measure of my love for her, and while waiting to be served a meal of lamb and eggplant on a bed of warm rice on a cold winter day, while gentle instrumental music played in a sonorous melding of East and West, I reached across the table, my hand spanning the Hellespont to take hers in a false gesture of reassurance.

  It wasn’t a lie as hideous as the one Max told Chandra about the nature of his travels. It was hardly in the same ballpark as my not telling Beth about my affair with Chandra, whom I continued to love for her companionship, intelligence, resourcefulness and tact. Why then did it, little and white and innocuous, continue to eat at me?

  The last of the Famous Last Meals was our re-enactment of the final repast of the children of Isadora Duncan, and despite the ages of the characters and a frisson of unease, the foreboding we as the characters should not have been feeling but did, we carried it off rather well. With Chandra’s help, Beth improvised a dance solo to cap the meal and send the children on their way. A further loose interpretation of events came when Beth, transformed now in character from her usually melancholic, slightly nervous self to the overtly erotic, graceful, intoxicating bohemian, took Max’s hand under the table and drew it up under her long skirt. It was wholly believable that Isadora should do such a thing. Had she not given birth to two children by two different fathers, marrying neither? Had she not danced along the edge of a live volcano’s rim with the mercurial Russian poet? To live is to burn hot! To be is to embrace every urge. I looked over at Max, who as Paris Singer had an appropriately haughty, proprietary grin on his face.

  I didn’t learn about this historically unsupported bit of hanky-panky until later in the evening, when Beth came out of her bathroom, her hair towel-turbaned, face slathered with night cream, and told me what she’d done. She said it in such a matter-of-fact way that at first it didn’t register. She could have been stating that she had signed a petition that day calling for the abolition of plastic grocery bags. She tended to state almost everything the same way, without much inflection, somewhat arrogantly, with an edge of defensiveness, arming herself, daring the listener to challenge.

  “Oh, by the way, Max felt me up under the table during dinner. I wasn’t wearing anything under my dress. He sniffed his finger afterward.”

  I sat on my side of the bed. “Why are you punishing me, Beth? What have I done to you?”

  “Nothing. Not one thing. Nada.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was a success, don’t you think, the dinner? I’m still abuzz. I’m still her. I think I could fly if I tried. I think I will. Have you ever felt that light, Colin, that buoyant? Those poor, poor, poor babies. How could we pick that one of all possible days? Whatever were we thinking? I could skip across the surface of a deep river right now, I truly could.”

  I slipped in between the bedcover and the top sheet, which was still tucked in. I was turned away from her, my bedside light turned off. Usually I flipped the radio on to the quiet smoky voice of the jazz host, but this time I left it turned off. I wanted to give the impression that I’d fallen asleep. I thought about Max’s hand moving up Beth’s leg. That puerile, reprehensible, completely natural and understandable gesture of putting the tip of his finger to a nostril and inhaling. Elemental communication. Such small but effective revenge, intended or not, given his own transgressions, those open secrets, and yet why did knowing about it make me want to commit murder? I feigned sleep. She could tell by my breathing.

  “A mother in love with her children is the happiest, freest, most fulfilled being on earth. That, minus the heaviness of heart that attends any parting, must be what she was feeling as she prepared to return to her studio that day. ‘Drive safely, my darlings. I will see you this evening. Be good for Nurse. Sit still for the driver. Do what he says.’ No, despite these obvious feelings, this is not the reason I am as light as ether,” she said. “I will tell you. I am impossibly, madly, impetuously happy because I know there lived a woman who truly understood what great unending anguish I carry with me every day. Someone lived who suffered more than I do. I am a mere child in my petty pain compared to her. She was the Grand Duchess of Harrowing Loss. How can I possibly complain, how yearn, how mourn? She takes all my grief from me. She makes me insignificant and insubstantial.”

  Substantial enough to let another man grope you, I thought. I bristled, seethed, ignored the molten kernel of her meaning. How could I have been so dense, so self-involved, to have let the moment go by as I did? And yet I did.

  After Jane was dismissed from psychiatric care, I heard she went to live in Prague. I kept in touch with Tighe, who went on to marry Francesca. Meanwhile I stayed on at Wolf Moon Press through the fall and winter and kept the little apartment after the actor let it go. Tighe said that Jane had had a number of different treatments for depression, including electro-shock. Prague, we agreed, knowing almost nothing about the city, was a good place for her to have gone. We’d heard that the arts scene there was open and vibrant and experimental the way Paris was in the first two decades of the twentieth century. She’d spent a few weeks in Amsterdam before moving on to Prague, and Tighe hinted that the easy access to marijuana had also been a factor in Jane’s move to Europe. None of the painkillers she’d been prescribed for her knee worked as well alone as it did in conjunction with good old pot. It made me think about the
day we met, when she said she put no poison in her temple-pure body, her “instrument.” We change, we grow scar tissue, we figure out how to get to the next square on the board.

  I’d put some money aside. A car-buying guide the press published sold exceedingly well and Mr. Saukville paid me a generous bonus, one he couldn’t afford but one I wasn’t about to refuse. I had also reconnected with a friend from university, Max Nazreen, who revealed that he was recently married. He had taken over the family business after his father’s death. Max had been to a Club Med on the island of Guadeloupe, and he convinced me to fly down the same week he and his wife were going to be there.

  I’d been thinking about flying to Prague to see Jane. Since seeing her that time in the psychiatric ward, I was wary, afraid of what she had become or what in her had been revealed. It was cowardly of me, I was the first to admit. I should have gone to see her more often. I should have been the friend in deed that everyone tries to emulate. I was young, self-centered, tired, sick of the city and its volatile weather. I needed to get away from everything.

  We arrived on separate flights. I spotted Max ahead of me in line while we waited to pass through Customs at the Basse-Terre airport. The woman beside him stood a head taller than he was. They were arguing, a low, controlled, barely audible tiff, the tension felt more than heard in the wet-wool mug enveloping us. Apparently, there being no more double-occupancy rooms vacant at the resort, Max and his wife had been told that they were being put in separate rooms, he with another man and she with a woman. “Unless some other arrangement can be found,” said the official in bored French.

  Max lit into the man in a torrent, of which I understood the gist: Max had assumed that since he had paid SO MUCH MONEY

  he and his wife would be spending their PRECIOUS time TOGETHER. It was unconscionable, insupportable. If the man in the crisply pressed white uniform did not THIS VERY INSTANT provide them with a room of their own…. He let the threat hang unspecified. The official looked mildly alerted to Max’s urgency while continuing to hang onto both his ennui and his appreciation of the awkwardness feeding the situation its humour.

  “Écoutez, monsieur, I cannot change the accommodation at this time. I do this for le Club as a courtesy to them and to you so that when you arrive off l’autobus, voila, it is all arranged and you do not waste a single moment of your precious time, as you so correctly point out. I am a very busy man, as you can see from the number of weary travellers standing behind you in wait to have their passports stamped.” He looked directly at me as he said this, as if he expected me to speak in support of his position. “When you arrive at le Club I tell you this is what you must do. You must ask to have the changes made at that end, n’est-ce pas? It is understood?”

  Chandra didn’t think the accommodation mix-up was that big a problem. “We’ll sort it out, Max, come on,” she said, but he dug in stubbornly.

  “No, I’m sorry, this is not on. This will not fly. Let me speak to your superior.”

  The supervisor worked in the city and could not be reached. “You are causing these good people behind you unnecessary delay, monsieur. Venez. Sois raisonable”

  With Chandra’s insistence, Max relented, but not before letting everyone within earshot know that he had travelled the globe and had never, even in the most straitened outposts of Africa or Southeast Asia, been treated so shabbily.

  “Monsieur, je vous implore. Calmez-vous.”

  “Listen to yourself, Max. Come on. Tut-tut.”

  I stepped forward and said hello.

  “There you are. Have you been here all this time? Can you believe this shemozzle?” Max introduced me to Chandra. We shook hands. She smiled and said hello but distractedly with one eye on her volatile husband.

  I suggested that Max and I share a room, at least for now, and let Chandra, who was now looking at me with guarded hope, room with a woman travelling alone. As soon as we got to the beach resort, I promised, I would add my voice to theirs in pursuit of a more desirable arrangement.

  We claimed our bags and climbed aboard the bus that shuttled twice daily between the resort compound and the airport. I sat in an empty seat behind them and they half turned to converse with me. It would be all right, I promised, not yet grasping that if another heterosexual couple did not willingly vacate their room and split to form two same-sex pairings, he with me and she with this as-yet unidentified woman, my promise was an empty one. That would leave me rooming with this stranger, who, unless she was a free spirit like Jane Burden, would probably balk at the notion. But then wouldn’t she be there on her own and did that fact not carry a certain connotative weight? This was, after all, a resort devoted to hedonism. Were we not adult? Each room came with two double beds. Why could a man and a woman not share a room solely for the purpose of having a place to sleep? Because, Chandra informed me, a man is a man and a woman is vulnerable. Equality in such a situation has yet to be established, unless she is armed with pepper spray or a nice little gun.

  We were treated to a more pleasant version of the reception we’d had at the airport, but the essential message remained the same: the resort as a rule did not put a man and a woman together in the same room if they were not married to each other. An unoccupied room was not available. Max and I would therefore have to do the gentlemanly thing and room together, as would Chandra and her mysterious roommate, who was due to arrive in a few hours. The management was truly sorry. If we four were to come to an unofficial agreement in the meantime, that was entirely up to us. For the record, however, this would have to be the way it stood.

  Predictably Bethany Van Doren, the woman travelling alone, was not open to bunking with me, as pleasant a man as I appeared to be. Increasingly, however, we passed the daylight hours together, our companionship more the result of design and guilt than mutual regard. Baldly put, she and I got out of the way so that the newlyweds could have a room they could use for sex. No one said as much; we were too polite and reserved and Canadian for that. It simply worked out that after lunch Max and Chandra would disappear and Beth and I would know that the couple had gone to one of the two rooms. We never knew which one the Nazreens were using, which made us all the more reluctant to venture in that vicinity.

  The surprising change was that after three days they stopped disappearing in the afternoons, preferring to stay out on the beach with Beth and me or to join us on the tennis court or take the daily bus excursion to the other side of the island. On one such outing we were led by an ebullient Frenchman who insisted we take off all our clothes and play a group game that entailed passing a rubber ball to a person of the opposite sex without using one’s hands. He had a way of making us feel aged and un-hip if we didn’t take part. Wine flowed in abundance. Beth and I drifted away from the group. From a palm-shaded bluff we watched Chandra and Max frolic like puppies in the surf.

  On the fourth morning Beth wasn’t at our usual spot on the beach. I wandered toward the point, a brief sand spit where the beach turned a corner and beyond which was a hidden strand where guests could sunbathe nude. We’d been told about this beach. I was curious but didn’t know the protocol. Was it acceptable to walk among the unclad if you were dressed? How close was too close? At what point would I be expected to doff my shirt and swim trunks?

  While I deliberated I spotted a couple face-to-face in the water, only their heads and shoulders visible. They were kissing, and the gentle swell was making them rise and fall in the same rhythm as the waves. Immediately I thought of Jane. I wished I’d followed her to Europe. I missed her body, missed the way she pushed me around with her challenges to all things complacent, missed her assaults against received wisdom. The ground was never solid beneath my feet when I was with her; instead it was like walking uphill in sand over dune after endless dune, lost but happily so, seeking a solace I couldn’t put adequately into words.

  The woman in the water threw back her head, opened her mouth wide, brought her ha
nds up to her partner’s head, grabbed fistfuls of hair, and cried out in a high pitch. The man answered with a triumphant groan. I was about to turn away when Beth stood up from where she had been lying on her front—she too must have been watching the couple in the water—and she waved, motioning me to come closer. She wore only a wide-brimmed straw hat. She had full hips, a firm stomach, well-toned arms, short, strong, shapely legs, and the most desirable breasts I’d ever seen outside of the pages of Playboy. Seeing her there I was struck dumb, immobile. To come closer and undress would be to reveal my arousal. Watching the couple in the water had made me feel intrusive, a voyeur; seeing Beth naked made me feel almost insane with mirthful desire. I wanted to run up to her, gather her in my arms, press my skin against hers, get in under that ridiculous hat with her and be safe. Safe, depleted and replenished at the same time. She was so different from Jane. Jane of the rubber limbs. Jane of no breasts, and nipples too sensitive to touch. Jane who made me turn away sometimes, her gaze could be so penetrating. Jane who nudged me ever closer to the immolating flame.