Famous Last Meals
Page 24
“She would have been in her final year of high school then. Her plan had been to study music at university and go on to become a famous opera star. She’d done the research, setting her sights finally on a small, prestigious liberal arts college in New England. Her marks all through high school were stellar, high 90s across the board, and she played on her school’s field hockey team. On paper she was the perfect candidate for a scholarship. She’d even won an award in a national essay-writing contest, her entry something about the mathematics of Bach. I mean, talk about the cruelty of the cosmos. Human cruelty—I was going to say that it pales in comparison, but you get what I mean, don’t you? Think about it. All her life, ever since she was a little girl with dreams bigger that a wish for the latest fad doll, she wanted to sing on stage. And this is what plops on her head from above.
“When she admitted to herself that a career as a vocal performer was closed to her, she lost interest in everything. Her marks in senior year plummeted. She quit playing hockey, stopped doing anything physically active. She had always been a large girl, not corpulent but solid, another factor contributing to her self-image and her goal of being the next Maureen Forrester. Now she hid in her room, eating and becoming fat. She used to hang out with a gang of friends, boys and girls in equal number, as I recall. They stopped coming to the house to see her. It was like watching a great sorrowful balloon expand, not to take flight but to sink into the earth and disappear.
“How much was it about letting go of life’s handholds and sliding to her regrettable, pathetic end and how much the result of unavoidable circumstance? We could have saved her. All it would have taken was the blunt truth told early. Telling a child she can do anything, accomplish whatever she sets her sights on, is the most irresponsible thing a parent can do. It makes me burn and weep, it really does, to think about my beautiful sister, her spirit broken.”
“What does she do now?” I asked rather stupidly, not having heard any of Troyer’s narrative clues.
“She doesn’t do anything, she’s dead.” He looked at me as though I’d desecrated her grave. “She got diabetes, which led to heart disease. By the time her cardiomyopathy was diagnosed she was beyond saving.”
I was sorry and I told him so. But this did not sit right somehow. If he had asked me to read a story with this in it I would have red-flagged the offending passage. More information, please, I’d have written in the margin. A person does not live very long with diabetes without having seen a doctor, who presumably would have taken a good listen to Troyer’s sister’s heart and lungs, given her obesity and sudden sedentary state. How long a period were we talking about, from first instance of despondency to death? I couldn’t ask a grieving brother such accusatory questions. I guess I might have, but then I’d have been calling into doubt the veracity of his story. And that was a line I was not going to cross, not in his presence,
that is.
Having made his point about Sylvaine Delacroix, and having left behind a thick smear of unimpeachable sentiment, Troyer went off to visit his friend at her cottage. It left me alone to mull over the man’s entire story to date, an account I had no reason until that moment to question. I was bothered first by the fact that he was willing to use his private family history to illustrate what amounted to a minor point, the relative unpreparedness of the actress for her new career. One question ignited the next. For example, would Ms. Delacroix not have to demonstrate her professional fitness, her suitability for the developmental work she would be undertaking at the artists’ retreat? Competition for space in such programs runs high. She would have had to send an audition tape along with the endorsement of reputable experts in the discipline. This wasn’t Saturday morning, take your kid to the Y and sign her up for introductory ballet. Didn’t he say that she had recently joined a touring dance company? I was becoming suspicious not only of this part of Troyer’s byzantine story but the entire conceit.
I should have been able to separate what I thought of Troyer, my expanding doubt concerning his trustworthiness, and what I had to work with in adapting his novel. A fiction writer, they say, is someone who tells the truth only on the page. Why, then, should I have harboured such compunctions to the point of being obsessed and unable to work? The man was at best a distant acquaintance. It wasn’t as if he was a friend who had betrayed a confidence, shattered a bond. Emotion need not have played any part in this. I had his book, which I’d dissected in my attempt to put the details, the events of his narrative, into a simple linear structure. There they were, and are still, spread before me across the large table in my office. For the longest time I moved the photocopied pages, some whole, some reduced to a few words, as I might arrange jigsaw-puzzle pieces while looking for connections. Whatever I tried to construct either reproduced the approximate novel or leaned towards an oral account. Of the two records, what Troyer told me over the course of his stay makes for the more memorable story. I think this is the sticking point of my problem: putting aside the question of trust and truthfulness and judging by purely literary standards, I believe that what he told me over the course of his stay is the better book, if I can use that term to compare the two.
I decided to put the adaptation on hold until I knew more, not about Troyer’s novel—it I had pulled apart, digested and regurgitated—but the people on whom he’d based his characters. I secured a small travel grant and convinced the publisher who had commissioned the work to throw in an equal amount. It was an audacious bit of salesmanship, if I may say so. There might have been some embellishment, some fictionalizing of my intentions and vision for the project. In any case it was going to be enough to get me across the pond to the very artists’ retreat where Troyer’s story began. My thinking was that if I could stay there a few days, as a writer needing only peace and solitude, sleeping in one of the rudimentary cells, taking meals in silence, walking where Troyer, Glick and Delacroix did, seeing and touching the vines of plump grapes, gazing out on the purple undulating hills, I might chance upon an approach to the project I’d hitherto been missing. And if being there should tell me more about the trio and their brief encounter, so much the better. At the very least I knew that Glick had reason to visit there periodically, and should our paths not intersect I hoped for a way to contact him once in residence. Finding the filmmaker, my reasoning told me, I should then be led to his former muse. Being still-active artists, they would doubtless be involved in work or be looking for their next project. Their fields depended on collaborative work. I would find people to talk to, to ask about the subjects of my search. I had no desire to see Troyer again. I did want to expose him, however, to my detective efforts and to the world. At the time of planning my trip it did not strike me as counterproductive to lay bare the hidden truths about an author whose published work I was adapting to the stage. I didn’t think that effecting the first would scuttle the second, proof that naivety is not restricted to the young.
I thought about the third point of my triangle, the form upon which I was trying to structure my play. I would say it is the apex, the staged courtroom, where we the audience can see beyond the frame of the theatrical set to include all action taking place backstage and in the wings. Here, centrally, is dramatized the prolonged testimony of the nurse, whom we have already seen taking care of the playwright as a young boy. Behind the scenes the playwright tries to subvert the performance. He orders sounds and music to be played at the wrong times. He amends the script from one night to the next. He has her wear ridiculous outfits, hides her regular costume. Maddeningly for him, her performance only improves.
Inside these adjoining sides I hang Troyer himself or the character I name Troyer, a writer in retreat at a French artists’ colony. This, as you might guess, is my addition, one not found in Troyer’s novel, the title of which he presents, somewhat lamely I thought, by way of a dream her lover tells the nurse while they are out spooning in the moonlight on Lake Zurich. When I read that the first time, I laughed angrily. The woman in the vineyard
, I felt, was central to the entire conceit. To hide Sylvaine Delacroix in that way was dishonest. It approached the criminal in its fraudulence. A dream? Come on, I said to no one. What reader even halfway perceptive was not going to pick up on the artificiality of such a
clunky device?
And yet I couldn’t ignore it. Troyer had made the conscious decision to translate his encounter with the enigmatic Ms. Delacroix into a simplified artistic language removed from the personal. Had I not heard what I consider to be the real story, the dream version might not have upset me so. I had no choice but to include it in my adaptation, although to do so ran contrary to my instinct. So much depended on the integrity of Gunther’s dream. If it held up, if it supported the structure and was integral to the whole, I would include it.
Some of Troyer’s version, published in the pages of his novel, follows:
How ardent, his piercing look. He made her feel self-conscious when all she wanted was to drift peacefully on the placid water. His intentions were unmistakable: only her acceptance of his proposal would do. Otherwise, he claimed, aloud and in a stream of letters, he was lost. She liked him. She liked several other young men who had also made their attraction to her clear if not in so feverish a way as had Gunther. But this Miss Kern, Monika, dipping her hand into the first, warmest layer of the glacier-fed lake, wanted a different sort of passion, one without so many words. She would know it—she would know him, rather, when he stormed into her life. Until then, after six and a half days a week tied to that nursery in a stifling household where nobody said what they were really thinking and everything had to be just so and her charges considered her nothing more than a large child herself, an evening out in a quietly drifting boat was all she needed.
“May I tell you about the dream I had last night?” he asked after a particularly intense love-stare elicited no response from her.
“By all means,” she replied. “I will interpret its meaning for you.”
He was walking through a vineyard, he said, the plants of which stood so tall that he could not see over them on either side. The rows were not laid straight but in a maze formation, so that before long he could no longer tell where he was in relation to the entrance. “I knew I had entered through an arbour thick with pink and white roses. Where that gate stood now was anybody’s guess.”
Around a corner he felt someone touch him on the back. Turning, he encountered a woman who was nude except for a necklace of rose thorns. She had the lean, toned body of a dancer and she smiled at him beatifically. When he asked, “Are you an angel?” she did not respond. As he approached her she receded, although she did not appear to move her feet. In the reality of the dream this was not puzzling to him. She turned around and began to run away. Without having been told, he knew that she wanted him to follow her, and so he did. He had not run this way, with unconscious abandon, for many years, not since childhood. It was like flying, his feet barely touching the ground, and he breathed easily, not in the least winded. No matter how fast he ran, the distance between him and the woman remained constant. What was more, she was telling him things he could hear clearly as if they sat tête-à-tête on a love seat in a hushed room.
She promised that if he caught her before they left the labyrinth of plump, bountiful grapes that were ripe for harvest she would be his. But if he failed he would be put to death. It was only fair, she assured him. Again, this stipulation struck him as being perfectly reasonable. He did not ask how he might be killed, he didn’t have to, for he knew that if he did not catch the dancer soon he would be crushed along with the grapes in a gigantic wine press. Increased effort brought him closer to her. The tight turns of the maze came sooner and sooner as he careened around corners, his clothes catching and tearing on jagged protrusions of the twisted vines. It was as if the tendrils were animate and trying to grab hold of him. They wanted him to fail, they craved his death. If he died then they would not.
Meanwhile, still sprinting, he could no longer see the woman. As he ran he tried leaping high to peer over the top of the maze. With each jumping stride he remained airborne longer. She had vanished. He could still hear what she was telling him, however. It was her story, one of great devotion and suffering. She was in thrall to a powerful, cruel master who made her do unspeakable things for his perverse pleasure. Her only relief came once a day for one hour, during which time she was allowed to stroll alone through his maze. She was not permitted to talk to anyone she might encounter there. She was committing a punishable sin by talking to Gunther, who called out to her, “Stop running. Why are you fleeing? Let me bring you away from this prison.”
She replied, “But don’t you see? It isn’t a prison, it’s my life, it’s what I was destined for, how I’m meant to live.”
I read a newspaper article recently about a group of physicists and mathematicians who are seriously exploring the possibility that all human consciousness is the product of a computer simulation and that the proof of this might lie in such anomalous phenomena as our dream life.
While I waited to board my flight to Paris I watched a woman in a burka hustled away by no fewer than six security personnel. It happened swiftly with little sound, and none of the other people seated in the gate’s waiting area seemed the least bit perturbed by the arrest. I tried to read my book but couldn’t concentrate. It made me think about security and justice and the freedoms we have given up like so many unquestioning sheep.
I wish I could tell you I got on that plane, flew to France, found answers to my questions, filled all the gaps Troyer left behind, came home and finished turning his enigmatic novel into a play. To tell you the truth I abandoned the project. I could say I lost my nerve or I lost the thread or I stopped believing it was even worth doing. Each statement is right in its own way but not completely right. The closest thing to an explanation I can give you is that like a car I ran out of fuel and discovered that all the gas stations were closed. I have been a fabulist for so long, living inside stories, I am no longer confident I can find the exit. And so, forgive me if I stop here and think awhile, to figure out my next move and the subsequent ones and, ultimately, how I’m meant to live.