Famous Last Meals
Page 22
He admitted to it. For as long as he could remember he was someone attracted to the misdeeds of others, particularly those in power who abused their position, be it legal, financial or moral. For example, Glick liked being the storm cloud that blocks the sun at the garden party. Well, Troyer vowed, such a disturbance would not go unanswered, not as long as he could play the role of balancing avenger.
“Interruption in the form of correction. How protestant of us,” she said. “How boring.”
That couldn’t be all of it. She didn’t care one way or the other whether or not her former Svengali liked to be the mischief maker disturbing his fellow artists’ shit.
“You are a more interesting man than you make yourself out to be, Mr. Troyer, but ultimately avengers are sad lonely characters. Wouldn’t you agree? They think they are righting wrongs when really nobody thanks them for what they do, and often they become scapegoats after the act. The punisher can’t bring back the murder victim, nor can he restore fully the original item stolen, since it will from that point on always bear the memory of the crime. And revenge for what? An overly active ego? My God, without ego great art would never be made.”
Her harsh assessment of him hurt. With a few choice words she had reduced him to a petty agent of dubious justice, while at the same time suggesting that if he wasn’t a more interesting, complicated man than he seemed at first glance to be, she was going to be sorely disappointed.
In the twenty minutes they walked together through the vineyard, Troyer forgot about everything, his writing project, his reason for interrupting Heinz Werner Glick, his critical success and modest sales, and gave all his attention to this woman, with whom, he came to realize, he shared a remarkable number of traits. They were both people not fully actualized unless in service to a power greater than themselves. In Ms. Delacroix’s case, she was a being of rare talent unable to exert her skill unless interpreting the vision of another. Troyer—and I recognized this in him early, from that first writing workshop in which he was my tentative student—could not write unless he was thinking about the way his stories were going to be received. The work reveals this with embarrassing clarity. His is a conditional voice, one that continually clarifies, justifies, makes sure at every turn that not only do we understand his point, we are allied to him in that understanding. It could be his most annoying trait, that assumption, more accurately a presumptuous claim, that we are as glad to see him on our doorstep and hear him ringing our private doorbell as we are happy to read every contrived, derivative thing he has issued into print.
I should point out that I felt this way about Troyer and his writing until I read The Woman in the Vineyard, his most recent novel, which, incidentally, he dedicated to me. Even without his touching acknowledgment of the part I played in the book’s creation, I would have come to a radical re-evaluation of the man’s worth. I mean, of course, his place in literature; his worthiness in personal terms demands more space than I can devote to the question here. And yet, can the man and his work really be separated? Moreover, how can relative worth be assigned to a human being? We are born into a world, in this country at least, that assumes we are all equal regardless of circumstance. No life is of greater value than another. Only what we do and make sit comparable to other actions and products, and even that valuation arrives fraught with difficulty.
I am trying to determine what about The Woman in the Vineyard makes it so markedly better than anything Troyer has published to this point. I think it has to do with making himself, or whoever stands in as Troyer, an elemental figure stripped of all but one function, and because of this someone emotionally vulnerable. His main character is a playwright in love with a woman who has spurned his advances and who also happens to be an actress, not a star although someone who could become one. Unwittingly, the playwright creates a drama tailor-made for the woman, a part that draws on her peculiar strengths, the way she moves and uses her voice. Knowing what Troyer has told me about Sylvaine Delacroix, I immediately recognized her in the character of the actress.
Contrary to expectation, the jilted playwright has not created this vehicle in order to promote the actress in question. Instead, he has done so to ruin her career, writing a part so demanding that she can only fail in the attempt. She is on stage for every scene but two of a three-hour play, with almost as much to say as Hamlet. On top of that she must perform a number of exhausting feats of physical endurance. If he cannot love and be loved in return, he will ensure that the object of his affection never enjoys the attention of anyone she might wish to embrace, so defeated in spirit will she be.
You can guess what happens. The unintended result of this nefarious scheme is that the Sylvaine Delacroix-inspired character rises to and exceeds the expectations of the role. She gives the performance of a lifetime. Instead of being undone by it, she comes to define herself by the role. The play becomes a long running, record breaking, critically acclaimed hit that travels the world for years afterwards, with her reprising her character many times during her career. Conversely the playwright is punished by not being able to write anything comparable or even worthy of being staged.
On the basis of such a synopsis the reader would be excused for dismissing the story as being a rather thick morality play. What makes it intriguing and Troyer’s novel so remarkable is the way he uses the actress to reflect so much about motivation in the modern age. She chooses to accept the poisoned part because, unknown to the playwright, she too wants to experience career death. She believes that her true calling is to be a modern dancer and that before she can effect that change she must commit ritual suicide. Hardly remembering the playwright or his protestations of love, she sees only that her agent has delivered the very thing she has been craving, a part that would leave her so humiliated it would be as if she had died so that she could be resurrected a different person. A born-again dancer. Her suspect reasoning was that the only way to become a great dancer was to fail catastrophically as an actor.
What neither she nor the playwright could see was that she was in that punishing, mortifying role the embodiment of everything the audience craved, a character in worse straits than they, a woman so bent on self-annihilation that her pain becomes the most highly prized entertainment imaginable, a person who in losing personhood becomes shorthand for end-times consciousness. In the few dark days remaining, it says, let us laugh scathingly at the victim, thereby alleviating for a brief time our corrosive fear. Let us usher in the last chapter of the world by taking delight in the suffering of others.
Anything the world knows about Heinz Werner Glick has come by way of conjecture drawn from his work. In his film based on the Swiss murder, for example, Sylvaine Delacroix plays the part of the young lover in the rowboat. In the real-life story the young woman was a maid serving in the household of a very rich man, a banker thought to have made his fortune storing large quantities of purloined Nazi gold. Notably his biographer asserts that Glick was the child of a lady’s maid serving in a large German house before and during the war, and the suggestion is that he was the offspring of a dalliance between the maid and her employer. She was allowed to continue living in the house, working as before and letting her son be raised as a member of the man’s family, a brood of seven other children. What was the addition of one more to a progressive home buffered by wealth and relatively untouched by war?
This did not mean that within die Familie Glick little Heinz was treated as an equal. He was still a bastard, a product of the lower class. He was made to do the bidding of the other children, who could be diabolically creative in the ways they found to torment him. The head of the household, the banker, was a haughty, emotionally distant man whose attention seemed always directed elsewhere and most often towards his work. His wife considered the maid’s continued presence and her very existence an affront barely countenanced. Her dirty little boy would be made to know his place.
Heinz feared the woman as a child fears witches, ha
gs and the sorceresses of fairy tales. The other Glick children were cared for by a nanny, their exposure to their mother limited to mornings and evenings, when she would shower them with effusive attention. Little Heinz had only his own mother, who never had time to herself let alone time to spend with him. She worked from the moment her eyes opened in the morning until the instant she fell exhausted, often still wearing her uniform, into bed late at night.
In the film, Sylvaine’s character, the maid in the rowboat, becomes a key witness in the prosecution’s case against the heiress. Glick’s vision, no doubt fuelled by his own childhood memories and his mother’s difficult position, becomes the nightmare experienced by the maid. Only she has seen the bundle the size of an adult body hit the water, although her boyfriend says he heard the splash. She is the one who remembers the name emblazoned on the yacht’s stern and under cross-examination maintains her assertion that she had no prior knowledge that the vessel belonged to the heiress. She has not been fed that information, she contends, nor coached in her responses by the prosecuting attorney in the case. She becomes the state’s best chance to win a conviction.
Glick places Delacroix in the witness box for almost the entire film and for most of her time on screen. She stands throughout. The lighting, her restrictive clothing, tightly draped, binding, the box-shaped stall that contains her, and the oppressive questions are all meant to hold her in place. Unremittingly the defence counsel makes her restate the details of what she saw. Her good character is called into question. What resentments did she have against her employer and the moneyed class in general? Was it not true that she had a baby out of wedlock, that the baby’s father was her present employer, and that the boy had been taken from her? How intimately did she know the young man who was rowing the boat that night? Was it not the case that she had been planning to break off her engagement to him, because she was romantically involved with the heiress’s husband?
“That was the plan, can you deny it? You weren’t floating so close to the yacht that night by accident,” the defence challenges. “You were there because you thought your lover was up there on that deck, that he was very much alive, and that he was disposing of the body of the heiress. You couldn’t stay away as you should have.”
“No!” she cries. “That is absurd.” She is in love with Gunther, the rower. She knows nothing about the heiress or her husband.
The lawyer will not let up. “Are you telling me that you have heard nothing about their troubled marriage? Servants talk to one another, households communicate, this is a tight community. Gossip takes wing. After all, what else do you have for entertainment if not salacious speculation concerning the illicit affairs of those from whom you take a salary and to whom you owe your well-being?”
The interrogation, from both sides, continues unabated for hours. It takes the form and quality of torture. Sylvaine’s character slumps and writhes. Incomprehension, humiliation and exhaustion contort her features. Surprise gives way to outrage, which ebbs to disbelief, fear and finally defeat. The inconceivable asserted often enough becomes the probable. Students of the film find that the remarkable thing about it is not so much the ordeal of the role, the countless hours of physically and emotionally draining scene-takes on that claustrophobia-inducing set, but the sense, achieved with spare, minimal dialogue, that such trials as this one happen every day and that they are mundanely commonplace. A young woman, her will draining away along with her repeated claims of innocence, is browbeaten into capitulation. To watch it is to experience the slow death of a magnificent animal in the bullring. Delacroix from the beginning of her acting career had a dancer’s supple strength and balance, that majestic posture, the neck of a swan. To see her being used in this way, brought to her knees stab-by-stab, is hypnotic. Were we in the audience able to intercede on the victim’s behalf we might not have done it, so stylish a rape does the film depict.
I am acutely aware that this account places layer upon layer between the reader and whatever truth is to be had. This is Troyer’s story as told by me. He relates what Ms. Delacroix told him and what he has gleaned from the films. On top of this we have my relationship to Troyer, once that of mentor and student, now a reversal of roles, he having become the more successful because the more adventurous. The final layer is Troyer’s novel. I know too much about its antecedence to judge it impartially. I should be able to; believe me when I say I can’t. The story is ruined for me. Think about it. It is morning, I am awake, just, the coffee is freshly dripping into the pot, my world for a blessed but too-brief time is without perturbation, and then he is there, at my side, speaking in medias res about this infernal encounter of his.
It fed his imagination, engendered his book and informed every waking moment of his stay with me. Did we speak of anything else, of ideas or global events or the writing life? I assure you we did not. What we explored, what he continually pushed into the foreground for investigation, was this co-dependent relationship of Glick and Delacroix. My role was to remain mute except for the occasional clarifying question. Troyer was not satisfied to let the unknown remain so; he despised enigma. The films, although entry points, were insufficient. He recounted what he had learned from each of them, a dozen at least, as if trying to unravel a tangle of lies. It became oppressive, it bored me to distraction. Unable to redirect the conversation once we got snagged on the subject, I contrived to avoid the man whenever possible. I forged outrageous excuses for my absence. A writer who closes his ears to narrative deceives his instinct. It became an escalating source of discomfort, exacerbated by the fact that we arrived at and passed, by two days, then three and four, the day he was supposed to depart, without his acknowledging the delay. The story of the woman in the vineyard took over his entire consciousness, it seemed, leaving no room for such mundane matters as work schedules, travel itineraries, or the courtesy of leaving his host in peace, returning me to the solitude I so craved.
I have come to the conclusion, after separating my personal complaints from the larger story, that the completed matrix points to a single idea, that of liberation. Sylvaine Delacroix could not begin to free herself from the ties that bound her—her past with and work for a man who cast her in highly restricted roles, her vocation, her gender’s traditional acceptance of subservience to men—until she effected a radical change. In exchanging the acting life for that of a dancer, she appears to have doffed one set of chains only to don another. This was puzzling. How could she be said to be freer in one than in the other?
Troyer was no help answering this question. He concerned himself only with the details of the story. The way his mind works, ideas get in the way. Nothing should impede the narrative. It must be simply that this happened followed by that, without explanation. Each reader creates an individual, subjective context. Troyer likened himself to a detective solving a mystery, whereas I wanted him to give me a framework of ideas upon which to examine the implications of the fiction. Throughout his visit we remained thus, separate
in disagreement.
Those who have been enslaved and freed come to a junction at which they must confront their abusers, in person or symbolically. Somehow they must make peace with the past. The consequence of not achieving forgiveness and of not letting the memory of the crime fade and disappear, is illness and early death. Of this I am convinced. As Troyer kept mucking through the fragments of what he thought he knew about Sylvaine Delacroix and Heinz Werner Glick, and as he made the waters not clearer but increasingly choked with the sediment of his research, he was blind to the obvious reading of the story. The actress-turned-dancer was confronting her tormentor in an act of self-preservation. Whether or not he admitted guilt in the matter was less important than was her brave demonstration of survival. Why is this so clear to me, when the one who was there, who interviewed the woman and psychoanalyzed the man, who heard or dreamt their separate confessions, failed to see it?
Troyer took a three-day side-trip during his stay with
me. A friend picked him up in her car and drove him to her cottage on a secluded lake an hour’s drive north of here. On passing the open door of his room the first morning of his absence I looked in and saw that he had left his laptop and bound journal sitting on top of the desk beside his bed. Before he left for the cottage he said that he had begun writing his novel, going so far as to say that he found my house highly conducive to his creativity and that he would be sure to recognize me in the acknowledgments in the published product. Something about the way he said this stung more painfully than it should. He knew that it had been twelve years since I’d published a book. I could not help thinking that he was giving me a backhanded gesture of thanks, that it was less an acknowledgment of my help than it was the running up the flagpole of a banner announcing his comparative success. Someone less confident in his station might have been devastated by it.
I am not proud of what I did next, although I don’t consider it worthy of guilt or punishment. It was my house, after all. When he returned I told him what I’d done. He deserved to know, both that I had violated his privacy and, to my thinking the more salient point, that I knew now that he was a fraud. He had essentially stolen the plot of his novel from Glick and Delacroix. Without the real case of the heiress and her yacht, without Glick’s connection to that story by way of his childhood nurse, without Glick’s subsequent film, that is, his artistic approach, embrace, alchemical manipulation of the material, what would Troyer have had? Nothing. Add what he had appropriated of what Delacroix had told him about herself and Glick, and you have what amounts to theft.
I was the least surprised of anyone to hear Troyer characterize The Woman in the Vineyard as homage. Imitation as sincere flattery, etc. It made me close to nauseated to contemplate.