Famous Last Meals

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

  Many times I’ve played an imaginary dialogue over in

  my mind:

  “What were you doing that morning you drove out to

  the quarry?”

  “What do you think I was doing, Colin?”

  “I haven’t a clue, Jane. Tell me.”

  “Then that makes you clueless, doesn’t it?”

  She must have forgotten about the gate or thought she could circumvent it. I think she was trying to kill herself. I’ve often wondered how I would go about broaching the subject if I ever met her again. I think about her pre-emptive denial in the hospital room in Burlington, Vermont. Maybe she said it because her father was there. Had she been honest with me about anything? She spoke the truth about dance. That was one thing she couldn’t make up.

  It had something to do with her family. She saw Tighe and Francesca together and thought, “I’ll never have that.” Maybe that was it. Or, “If this is what awaits me, this vapid barnyard-animal devotion, then no thank you.” Or, “This is for everything, Mum and Dad. This is for me never being good enough in your eyes. This is for making it clear that what I said and did were the least important matters in your world.” Or, “This is a meaningless act. The instant I finally decide to do it, to actually carry it out, I will regret it. It will cease to have meaning. It will be the single most decisive, important, irreversible, meaningless act of my life. Nothing else will be as real.”

  Beth stood gesturing for me to join her. She was the most real, appropriate, joyfully uncomplicated figure imaginable in that bright, simple, pleasure-giving landscape. I took off my clothes. She smiled when she saw my erection, but paid no further attention to it, or didn’t do so noticeably. She applied sunscreen to my back and got me to rub some on hers. Chandra and Max were asleep in her room, she said. The Nazreens had been up all night dancing and had knocked on the door early in the morning before she had gotten out of bed. They said they needed, just once, before they returned home, before this week in paradise ended, to sleep in each other’s arms. “How could I refuse such a request?” she said. “I hope that when I get married I stay as in-love as they are.”

  A backgammon board was lying on the blanket beside her. She’d taught me how to play and I assumed we were going to have our accustomed three games, but when I opened it and began to distribute the stones she stopped me.

  “The sun’s getting strong,” she said. It was no stronger than it had been on any of the previous days. I suggested we move back behind the line of palms and into their shade. She lowered her eyes and lifted them, slowly, deliberately. We dressed. She took my hand and we walked back to the main beach, up to the refreshment kiosk, through the main hall, and out to the accommodations, which were set back amid the undergrowth. The air smelled of mold and disinfectant and the perfume of tropical flowers. She had draped around her a length of floral print fabric, as if she had recently emerged from the shower. I couldn’t see her face under her hat. Now that she was covered again I felt uneasy. We were moving in an irreversible direction. We paused under the shade of the main building’s high roof.

  “Are you sure about this?” I said.

  “Are you?”

  My knees began to quake as I opened the door to the room that Max and I were ostensibly sharing. There were no keys, no locks on the doors. We’d left our valuables for safekeeping at the main desk, exchanging money for beads worn around our necks. We’d embraced a pared-down existence from which the city, our workaday concerns, all our political battles were barred. Why then was I so nervous with this woman, alone with her in a room mid-morning in a climate that made clothing superfluous?

  The hat fell, we kissed, her sarong dropped away, the entire day dropped away without our being aware of it until, late in the afternoon, Max came in to change his clothes, and we drew the bed sheet up. He apologized for interrupting us. He looked surprised but not unhappy. We told him, no, we were the ones who should be apologizing, and began to bustle about, gathering items of clothing, keeping our eyes averted.

  When we looked up again he was gone. While we’d been fussing like two people caught unprepared for an important test, Max had managed to gather all his clothes, his toiletries, the damp towel from off the shower rod, and jam them all into his suitcase. He’d completed one-half of the exchange without our having been aware of it. I sensed something of heft shift in me then as if, lifting a piece of furniture, I felt a hidden counterweight roll from one side to the other.

  Beth and I rode the bus into Basse-Terre. We were in that delicate state of togetherness in which lovers say little for long stretches and then begin speaking simultaneously, only to break off into laughter. I sat beside her, terrified that if I were to lose contact, my skin with hers, she might disappear. I was sure that either I was going to be sucked out one of the windows or she was going to rush to the front, demand that the driver stop to let her out, and slip into the dense undergrowth that threatened to swallow everything, the road, the bus and all tentative signs of humanity.

  The children we encountered looked happy. They went about shirtless, often naked. Their little bellies stuck out like smooth taut gourds. What child who plays outside all day is not a filthy urchin? It didn’t dawn on me then that they were probably eating dirt and with it ingesting germs and parasites, their gastrointestinal tracts seething with worms. Onward we rode in the shiny bus with its air-conditioning and its big Mercedes symbol like a peace sign on the grille. We waved at the children and little pink palms waved back, toothy smiles brilliant against dark skin. Weren’t we the attentive anthropologists taking in a smattering of steel-shed culture on our way to the shopping district.

  She was quiet as she looked out the window.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, meaning, Oh, everything. Everything I have no control over. Every potential mine that threatens to explode under me if I make the wrong step. Every turn that ever took me into unfamiliar territory. I didn’t know then, for example, that she hated to travel, that for her the pleasure was to be in one spot and to stay there, as still as possible, soaking in the pleasures. Her favourite expression was, “Beam me up, please.” She hadn’t even wanted to go to Basse-Terre, she told me after we’d flown home, I back to Toronto and she to Montréal.

  She was working as a university fundraiser, had been so for a year since graduating from Concordia with a degree in biology, and had no trouble shifting her allegiance, immersing herself in McGill’s history, its current achievements, and its barnacle-like hold on the dynamic city spread out below the mountain. Her strong message to me was, “You come here. You get on that train, buster, I love you. Move here, be with me, please, on my terms,” which I’d assumed were the terms of a fierce independence, but which in fact were the defensive entrenchments and makeshift fortifications of a woman who feared change as much as she feared growing old.

  Young Anglos bilingual enough to live and work in Montréal were moving back to the city, reversing somewhat the exodus of 1978 when René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois took power in the province. I enjoyed being in the city whenever I went there to visit Beth, every other weekend and every possible holiday. She was on her own, her parents dead, no siblings, a rich aunt in Scotland and some cousins there she’d lost touch with. She had also some Pennsylvania Dutch relations she’d never met.

  We found a flat together off Saint-Denis south of Rachel. It had high ceilings, ornate moulding around the doors, and large, dusty, impractical windows we had to cover with plastic shrink-wrap in winter. Our dining-room table was a massive masculine piece in dark dry wood that Beth had inherited. It fit the room in size and style, crying out for an elegant centerpiece, linen tablecloths and napkins, silverware, and the eight other seated guests who would have completed the tableau. We were even then haunted by absent bodies. At least we didn’t make that sad picture at mealtime of the wife and husband dining at opposite ends of a long tabl
e, too far removed from each other for easy conversation. We would hug one corner of the curved piece of thick, manorial furniture, and if we began the meal in separate seats, usually by dessert and coffee time she would have made her way onto my lap. Or I onto hers, playfully, gingerly. You couldn’t say we were pining for company then; we were too myopic in love for that. How extraordinary is the ability of new love to block out all but the most insistent of external demands.

  I was standing in line for coffee one day when I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned around to look at the man who had apparently recognized me. Shorter than I and wearing an expensive dark wool overcoat, red scarf framing a suit and tie, sharply pressed trousers, Blundstones on his feet—I should have recognized Max immediately. It had been two years since Guadeloupe. We’d exchanged a Christmas card and some lengthy email messages, digital photos attached, in which we’d tried to keep alive the unreal splendour of our time in paradise. He was sporting a Van Dyke beard, stylish then. He looked delighted to see me. When I finally recognized him we hugged. He said he was in the city on business.

  “Thinking of relocating here, in fact,” he said. The cost of living was reasonable. Many of his clients were in Montréal. And now that he had bumped into me, well, “That’s a sign from above, wouldn’t you say?”

  Max could make anyone he was talking with feel like the most important person in the world. He could be pointing out how immensely wrong-headed you were for thinking something, but he always did so in a way that embraced you affirmatively, locked a beam onto your attention, a bear hug of engagement. No one strayed from his attention.

  Max and Chandra moved to Montréal eighteen months after our chance meeting in the café. His business was thriving. She joined me as an adjunct in the McGill English department. They bought a house in the country. He began to travel often.

  One day he said, “You have to go there,” meaning South Africa, “now that the whites have to take their place in the democracy instead of acting like arrogant tyrants.” He could say such a thing with a straight face, betraying no hint of the connection between himself, whose people would have been labelled coloured and would have enjoyed a relatively better life than did the blacks, and the Afrikaners, who were watching their way of life burn, seemingly overnight. Max’s people were Asian South Africans who had emigrated to North America in the 1960s, not because they deplored the way blacks were being treated but because the opportunities to make money, they thought, were greater in Canada and the U.S.

  What puzzled me was that Max never seemed all that excited about the items he insured and about which he was a supposed expert: Kaffir robes, Zulu headdresses and spears, Damara drums, Bechuana thumb harps. Not once did we have a prolonged discussion, passionate or otherwise, about these items, what materials they were made of, how they were constructed, what they represented or were used for, how they were valued, not in resale but in cultural terms. Who made them? Was there a cottage industry? Did he have a little factory in Soweto? “You have to go there” meant—and I understood this too late to change the way things turned out—“you have to let yourself be jolted out of your North American complacency and relocated, transformed for a short time, long enough to experience a way of life that teeters on the lip of a yawning void.” The food, the music—he was bringing back recordings of Ladysmith Black Mombasa and other black musicians years before Paul Simon discovered them—the way they smelled, which he admitted he found intensely erotic. The sound of gunfire in the night? The stench of burning rubber tires? Corpses came attached to those sensations, I wanted to remind him.

  “I cheat death every time I have a virgin,” Max said after one of our last Last Meals. “Think of it. We’re supposed to be thumbing our noses at the Angel of Death every time we observe the final meal of someone famous who died young. But how does it make you feel, Colin? Are you rejuvenated?” I admitted that, no, all I felt was bloated and drunk. Chandra had been Joan of Arc that evening. We had attempted a medieval series of courses, and in honour of the future saint’s means of expiration had added the fires of cayenne and jalapeno peppers to an otherwise bland fare. “My stomach is scorched,” I moaned.

  “And your cock is limp,” said Max, laughing with an edge of cruelty. “You are no more the master of time than is a summer peach lying in a warm damp bed of grass. Face it, this is an elaborate excuse for us to meet to tell each other how great we look, how wonderful we are, how young and unwrinkled and stylish and urbane and…”

  “I get it, Max.”

  “In Lesotho the girls call me Simba. I kid you not. Someday you’re going to see for yourself, and you’ll know, really know what it is to be a man at the peak of his virility. I mean, come on, face it. You can’t have equality in bed, not if both partners are going to get where they want to go.”

  “Doesn’t the word, ‘partner,’ suggest something equitable?”

  “Fine. Not partners. Poor choice of word. A man takes a woman. He takes her. There is no other way to describe it. She must submit to his will, his urgent desire. Otherwise she is diminished.”

  “Not the best arrangement for longevity in the relationship, you have to admit.”

  “And I do, I do. Don’t you see that I am speaking about two wholly different animals here, two separate entities? There is the marriage, for the creation of children and the consolidation of home, wealth, social standing, citizenship, community. And then there is that which a man must do in the world in order to be truly a man. He must go forth. He must conquer. He must spread his seed. Do not laugh!”

  “You’re so full of shit you’re starting to grow saplings out your ears.”

  He continued to be outrageous, to drink while we did the dishes (I washed and dried, he sat and drank), to condemn me for being “whipped” and “milquetoast” and “Teddy Telemachus.” Chandra and Beth, as was their custom, had remained seated at the dining room table and were sipping liqueur and speaking intimately in voices punctured by sudden screams of laughter. Jokes about Joan, Beth said later. Could the Maid of Orléans have been around all those soldiers and remained a virgin? Yes, they decided, if the soldiers had been French. Or English. Or in armour…. Or men!

  “What,” I asked her, “do you possibly gain from deriding men?”

  “Hope,” she replied.

  “Hope? Hope for what?”

  “Hope for a better world, you dumb cluck. Lighten up!”

  Beth could say that kind of thing most days of the week without hurting my feelings, because her smile always led a playful advance party. If, on the other hand, Chandra ever said such a thing, and she did from time to time, not often though often enough to have made it memorable, it stung. With Chandra everything was serious. She was not necessarily always a serious person; she could be as silly and outrageous as Beth could, especially when they were a team, one feeding off the other’s infectious hilarity. But for me, Chandra was someone to think about, deal with, be with, be apart from, in a serious way. It was the way I thought about Jane Burden. With Jane I always felt I hadn’t been given the latest update to the script. Seriousness with her was usually a product of my intense concentration, my effort to catch up to and stay abreast of her, to understand the terms and the context, grasp the rules, if there were any to be learned. Jane was making it up as she went along, the form, the means of expression, the terms by which others would take part, the duration of events. The rules of engagement.

  It wasn’t the duration but the consequence of our time together that had felt unsatisfactory. It came to an end abruptly soon after her accident. She was released from the hospital in Burlington after a night of observation. Her father came to see that she be released properly and not sooner than she should. She broke down after a visit from the police, admitted that the car she’d been driving had not in fact sunk to the bottom of the water-filled quarry, but that the man who had driven her to the hospital had taken it. She gave a description of him to the offic
er, and the man was picked up a few days later claiming that Jane had given him the vehicle. She said she didn’t remember saying such a thing. She’d been in intense pain. The man had given her liquor to drink. Who knows what she said to him in her delirium? She knew that telling the truth at that point was probably going to either nullify or severely reduce the coverage provided by the owner’s insurance. The car was never recovered. The most plausible theory, corroborated by the man, a petty criminal, was that the car was in pieces and that those pieces were by then replacing lesser or worn or damaged parts in a dozen other vehicles. It was as just a situation as one like this could be, given that the robbery had promoted conservation and environmental protection: old cars were being kept on the road and out of landfills longer. The friend who had lent Jane her car got over her dismay when her insurance company paid enough for a large down payment on a newer model. Except for the injury—Jane made jokes about finding that chop shop and getting a new knee—everything seemed to have turned out for the best.

  Tighe and Francesca drove us back to Toronto, Jane and I uncommunicative in the back seat despite our proximity. She had to sit with her back to the door and the injured leg stretched out straight across both seats and under my raised knees. It should have been an intimate posture. I wanted to touch her, but was worried about inflicting further pain, and she made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with me. Less than halfway home, Francesca and I switched seats.

  I checked on Jane in the morning and again after work the next few days. She was getting around surprisingly well using a single crutch and seemed to be in good spirits. The dance company was rehearsing new material, which they videotaped for her to study, and she was confident that she’d be able to catch up. It was going to be a six-week convalescence, I reminded her.