Famous Last Meals
Page 21
The woman saw Troyer first, the change in her eyes, the flicker of distraction signalling to Glick that this carefully blocked scene was about to be disrupted. The German, I have read, is notorious for his sudden storms on the set. The slightest interruption can trigger these outbursts. Actors, honoured to be working for such a legend, a genius, know that by doing so they put themselves within striking distance of his rage. These tantrums are reportedly dramatic, cinematic, even beautifully wrought, as if he had spent time planning their execution, matching them specifically to the moment and the perceived infraction, the crime against art, as he has been known to characterize these usually understandable and often unavoidable work stoppages. A sneeze, a forgotten line, a wardrobe malfunction, the weather, a shift in the light, the intrusion of the larger, unregulated world.
As Troyer tells it, anyone witnessing the moment would have thought that this unassuming pair was suddenly beset by a wild, hungry beast. The way they turned and their defensive postures made for a reaction incommensurate with the writer’s arrival. It was otherwise a pleasant day, the air fresh and warm, the sunshine bright. The distant hills seemed to gesture to them as the ancients believed the gods reached down to intercede in mortal affairs. The vineyards exhaled an intoxicating garrigue. A scene less suited to fright and contention could not be imagined.
What did he want? Why was he bothering them? This was voiced not by the man, who had made his name slinging such challenges, but by the woman, who had, it seemed, left her submissive, pliant persona behind. How dare he sneak up on them in this way? It was at once the perfect inversion of what Troyer expected and the perfect effect he was after. Instead of the filmmaker deliberately undermining the bubble of tranquility in which the retreat lay suspended and protected from the fractious world, here was Glick defended as the purported victim of the same sort of mischief.
Troyer introduced himself, offering sincere apologies and explaining that he had only wanted to meet them, to simply say hello and give thanks for the films, copies of which he assured them were among his most cherished possessions. It was enough to defuse the woman’s anger. Glick looked on, Buddha-like, saying nothing. He and Troyer shared a glance that Troyer took to mean that he should not be upset by her flash of pique. He had wandered into firing range and had been the recipient of misdirected ire.
“Yes, well, I am sorry also,” said Sylvaine Delacroix warily. She thanked Troyer for his interest and said that she hoped to see him again but without their making a plan to meet. It was what you said to be polite when what you really wanted was to see the person’s back becoming smaller. Glick gruffly offered similar conciliatory words, not quite apology since he had not been the one to wheel so viciously on Troyer but in the vein of no-hard-feelings, with a hearty handshake to seal the moment. The writer left the scene hastily. It was not quite “Exit pursued by bear,” but Troyer admitted to a similar feeling, the metaphysical equivalent of hot breath on the back of his neck. Glick had been unperturbed. Rather, he let Troyer see how amused he was, a brief glimpse of the cards in his hand. It was Delacroix, strong, sharply defined, difficult, who figured in the writer’s imagination now. As he walked away he was preoccupied with one question: when would he see her again and alone?
It is entirely plausible that Sylvaine Delacroix had conspired to be at the artists’ retreat when her ex-husband was also going to be there. The reason? Confrontation, curiosity, revenge, longing, masochism or any combination of these. In today’s most successful erotica, women let themselves be used as playthings by powerful men. What Glick created in his films was the opposite of this. It is in fact the antithesis of pornography. He is on record as saying that his goal always, his vision for the work of art, was the visual, kinetic record of a soul in torment, the victim of an indifferent world. She, Troyer believed, was tormented not by the cruel demands of an exacting artist but a monstrous neglect.
Perhaps I make too much of Troyer’s intrusion and the couple’s reaction to him. These are people aware of the tacit rules of social intercourse, after all. Against expectation, for example, one refrains from humiliating a stranger, someone perhaps never to be encountered again. The paved surface gives more to the runner than does the sandy beach. Because they better reflect our image and our intention, the firmer path, the better known quantity, the friend and the sibling take the greater pounding. Thus are we harder on those we know and love than we are on those with whom we form weaker emotional attachments, often because we can’t separate love from desire, appetite, expectation, narcissism. Any image displayed in love’s mirror, however familiar, is still a distortion of the actual. Troyer’s intention in interrupting the former lovers dissolved rapidly in the acid bath of social convention. That said, I do think it led to something wholly unintended, a work of art that might not have come about otherwise.
In Troyer’s fictional depiction of the encounter, as described in his novel, The Woman in the Vineyard, the Glick character, now a playwright, takes the novelist in hand as he might take an ingénue unsure of her emphasis, her lines or her character’s motivation, his blacksmith-large arm and paw pulling her to him, comforting her paternally. The interloping scribe finds himself hustled off stage-left, as it were, not quite the bum’s rush but close. The writer knows he is being hurried away. It is all right, it fits his desire: the playwright is the one he wants to speak with alone. He apologizes to the woman, in the novel a stage actress, assuring her that the last thing he wanted to do was to cause distress. She mumbles something dismissive, fixes the playwright momentarily with a searing look, and walks quickly off.
While he was staying with me Troyer worked on a suite of stories begun while he had been resident at the former monastery. They were set elsewhere, in Buenos Aires, the most recent city he had visited before going to Provence. I have confessed in these pages my lack of enthusiasm for much of this man’s writing. I suppose the reason for this boils down to one thing: he employs the exotic as backdrop to the same story told repeatedly. A man travels the world in search of identity and acceptance. He seeks it in Taipei in the same way and with essentially the same result as in Chicago, Bruges, Nairobi or Istanbul. Cultural reactions to his hero, always the same figure, vary according to attitudes peculiar to the location. For the most part, however, because he tends to blend innocuously into whatever landscape surrounds him, acceptance is a relative constant. An entourage of young, rich, hedonistic drifters assembles to embrace him. Troyer, like most of us, leaves such immersion as Lawrence Durrell’s in Alexandria, Paul Bowles’ in Tangier and Henry Miller’s in Paris for more daring writers.
My theory, for which I have no support beyond intuition, is that Troyer is a spy. He knows how to travel and where to stay without drawing attention. He is an accurate recorder of the sort of detail I tend to skip over in my writing: the shape of a face, the quality of the material in an outfit, the exact name of a hue. It is as if he were trained to see things at their most concrete. His identifiers peer below the surface, peek under the disguise. Good novelists do that well, though a mediocre storyteller will burden a novel with minutiae at the expense of narrative momentum. To further promote my unproven hunch, my house guest has been everywhere there has occurred a significant global event, the ousting of Morsi in Egypt, for example, and the recent bombings in Madrid and Mumbai. He was there only days before each. What it adds up to I can’t say for certain. His presence neither prevented nor contributed to the events in question, as far as I can see, and I have tallied at least ten such instances. It used to be called skullduggery. Now it seems to be the way everyone operates. My first wife used to accuse me of being a crackpot conspiracy theorist, the sort who sees a clandestine government plot underlying every act of terror. I won’t deny it, although in the ensuing time since 9/11/2001 I no longer make room-clearing statements. I still believe most of us have no clue about what our governments are doing in secret.
We were dining at a fashionable and expensive restaurant, Troye
r’s treat to thank me for my hospitality, when he told me more about Heinz Werner Glick. Content that he had achieved what he had set out to do, which was to “pull a fast one” before the same could be done to him, the writer began talking about the one film of Glick’s he knew well, the one considered his best and which again featured Sylvaine Delacroix. The actress and the filmmaker were newly married then, as he recalled, and were very much, very publicly in love. They became adept at harnessing the power of publicity, any such attention attracted to their benefit, in the American style that is so pervasive now. This included the staging of loud embarrassing rows in restaurants and the publication of salacious rumours about the state of their union and the probability of infidelity. In one such press release, authored anonymously, it was suggested that she had become so enraged over one of her husband’s many dalliances that she hired someone to have him killed. It was a falsehood, they assured the reading public in a magazine profile published in Milan, but not until the rumour had accomplished what they had wished it to, which was a heightened interest in their recently released film.
The plot was based on a true story, a famous murder in Zurich. An heiress was charged with killing her husband, a much younger man who it was believed had married her for her fortune. The murder was deemed an act of passion, the police assembling evidence to suggest that the woman had discovered her husband’s true motive and was afraid that he was planning to kill her. Complicating the case was the fact that his body was never found and the method of murder mere conjecture. Young lovers out for a midnight bit of boating on the lake testified that they saw the heiress’s yacht at rest nearby and heard the splash of something large heaved over the side. It was the young woman in the small boat who insisted she saw a body-sized bundle hit the water. Her paramour, oars in hand, was looking at her and away from the yacht.
The accused was able to provide an alibi for her whereabouts at the time of the supposed disposal of a body. Her maid had brought her some herbal tea in her bedroom at around 11:30 that night. The mistress of the house, her lawyer argued, could not have travelled across the city and then aboard her boat to the spot on the lake where the witnesses claimed they saw and heard something suspicious in time to have been directly involved. Given that she was of petite stature and unable alone to lift a man’s corpse to drop it overboard, her accusers pursued a more likely explanation, that she had hired a killer and given him or her the means to use the yacht.
It would not have been an intelligent thing to do, the defence countered. Her boat was easily identified by its name, Das Rastlose Mädchen. Furthermore, the captain of the yacht had also been home at the time of its alleged use and knew nothing about the vessel having left its berth that night. The yacht was returned to its regular mooring unharmed and apparently untouched: no fingerprints other than those of the captain, the heiress, her husband, the deckhand, the galley cook and a few guests, all of whom could account for their whereabouts that night, turned up when the police dusted all surfaces.
Troyer has been able to live comfortably teaching part-time, writing his fictionalized travelogues, which he launches regularly and at a handsome profit to his publisher, travelling and enjoying the life of a peripatetic intellectual. He admitted to me that he considered his greatest failing his inability to avoid sticking his nose into the affairs of others, especially if the intrusion promised fodder for a good story. His initial urge, to interrupt the grandstanding of the German filmmaker, soon became intense curiosity about the man’s relationship with the actress-turned-dancer. Unlike his fictional main character, he was intimidated by Glick, and so chose instead to engage the woman and to learn from her the particulars of her recent encounter with her ex-husband and the reason why they appeared to be so upset with each other.
The dancers in residence at the retreat, a group of five plus two choreographers, were all from different places and companies. The nature of their work made it difficult to create in isolation, and so together and with the addition of some young dancers from the region they developed new work and honed their skills. Much of the work involved physical conditioning and body awareness. Practitioners from the world of yoga, T’ai chi, sports medicine, drama and the musical arts all led workshops aimed at helping the dancers become stronger, more flexible, more expressive and more receptive to the demands of new work.
They had the use of a large indoor space, a former granary converted to a dance studio, its stone floor covered by a more forgiving surface. Light entered through high small windows near the ceiling, and two of the walls that shared a corner were entirely mirrored. A reliable pianist accompanied the sessions. Troyer noted this woman’s ability to sight-read and to intuit from minimal suggestion the choreographer’s wishes for variations in the music. Other residents like Troyer, working outside the discipline, were encouraged to watch these practice sessions as long as they made themselves inconspicuous and their numbers remained small. The morning he slipped in and claimed a chair, he was the only spectator in the room.
Sylvaine was working with a male dancer on a tricky manoeuvre that had her rolling in a controlled motion across his back. During the instant they came together in the move, he stood with his backed humped and his arms hanging down almost touching the floor. His instruction was to stop for a single beat and no longer. Approaching him from the side, obliquely and almost blind, since one instant he had to be elsewhere and the next in place, she had to time her part of the intersection flawlessly. Her roll took the form of a back-to-back move, spine-aligned-with-spine, a quick on and off. Her legs had to be straight and held parted in a rigid V-shape throughout, feet held at right angles to the line of her legs. Conversely her arms had to be so relaxed they flopped, apparently boneless.
When they practised from a stationary beginning they were able to complete the step to the choreographer’s specifications. Leading to the intersecting roll, each dancer performed several intricate moves that were themselves demanding and not easy to remember. The young man achieved his lead-up steps fluidly with a natural cadence that gave him the right timing. The former actor, on the other hand, was struggling. Troyer could see her thinking about what she was doing. It showed in her face. Because she could not see her partner those few seconds before they came together in the roll, she began to balk, pulling up short or glancing over her shoulder for reassurance.
“No!” shouted the choreographer, a woman with a short fuse. “It has to be blind. Trust your instinct,” she commanded. “If you fall, you fall. You do know how to fall, don’t you? Does she speak English? Comprenez-vous, mademoiselle? Yes? Take a short break, please, and compose yourself. Perhaps we should try this with another girl.” She turned to her assistant, a slip of a boy with a clipboard, and said something in a low voice.
Every rehearsal reaches a point beyond which further work is counterproductive. The dancers broke for the day. Sylvaine was towelling off and donning her warm-up gear, wrapping a light scarf around her neck to keep from tightening up, when Troyer approached her. Did she have a few moments to chat? He wanted to make amends for so rudely interrupting her and Glick the other day. And, he confessed, he was intrigued. Could she assuage his curiosity and tell him what it had been like to act in the films? He told her that he had been an ardent fan for years. “Please,” he said, “if you don’t mind, would you explain this dramatic change in your professional life?”
She regarded him coolly. “Who are you, again?”
He told her, sensing she did not care to know.
“I don’t trust writers,” she said. “They take so much more than they are prepared to give.”
“I like to think that what I write becomes a gift to whoever reads it.”
“Then you have a naïve concept of gift giving, Mr. Troyer. Every novel is baked from the ground bones of real victims.”
Despite the lacerating sting of her criticism he remained diplomatic. He reminded her that he was there, as was she, to work creatively
, and not as a journalist or a prying paparazzo. He was no vampire feeding on celebrity, contrary to what she might have decided about him.
Eventually she warmed to him. They walked between the outbuildings. The stones of the barns and vineries were sun-bleached, the whitewash on the dining hall and dormitories newly applied. They came to the vineyard where Troyer had witnessed the couple conversing so intently. She liked to walk the rows, she said, up one and down the other. It helped her visualize the elements of the dance she was learning.
“When I walk nowhere in particular, buffered from the larger world as in a maze, my mind takes flight. True, it lets me review the work, the demands made on my body, but more than that I make contact, energy connections. I feel a power enter me, up from the ground and in through the soles of my feet. I become like a lightning rod. Have you ever experienced such a thing, Mr. Troyer? Your body becomes nothing more than a conduit.”
Yes, he said. It happened sometimes when he became lost in his writing, when he would become suspended in an eternal now, an unmoving, unchanging moment of creativity during which nothing existed beyond the screen, the words having appeared magically, put there by an unseen hand.
As they entered the section devoted to Glick’s hybrid grapes, she admitted to what he had suspected, that she had contrived to be there when the German would most likely be checking the progress of his crop.
“It isn’t what you think,” she said, bending to a crouch to inspect a plump bunch growing near the ground. “I don’t want anything from him, nothing material, that is. I surprised him in the same way you surprised the two of us, Mr. Troyer. Something in the cant of your head and the trajectory of your approach, not direct like an arrow but oblique, curving—it told me you were up to something. You wanted to be le sabot jeté dans la machine. It’s not right?”