Famous Last Meals (18 page)

I winced at times, so violently did she move. I expected her to be broken, purple welts raised on her skin. I expected her to be heaped on the stage when it was over, mere residue, aftermath, bone pile, something to be swept up and carted away. Oh, I know what you're thinking: how yesterday, how done, the notion that each of us is alone, that we inhabit concrete canyons that trap artificial light and sap energy, that too many of us live and work this way like ants climbing over each other, colliding, breathing each other's foul exhalations, deafened by sirens and screams and unholy prayers, even our dreams invaded so. Who can refute the axiom, now a cliché: we live lonely, soulless, disconnected, over-stimulated, undernourished lives. Woe and woe again unto us.

So do something about it already! Move to the countryside, get a hobby, commit good deeds. Get an air exchanger, earplugs, a vibrator. Take up yoga in a purified, buffered, softened room. Move deeper into the bliss. The ways are many, the techniques proven, for counteracting the destructive effects of modern life. But were it as simple as that. The point, gentle seeker, is that these words go only part way toward conveying the singular experience of that dance, and no synopsis or analysis, no intellectual pigeon-holing is ever going to come close.

Like her character in that performance to come, Jane could find no comfort or refuge in any one person. Being alone with someone robbed her of her ease. Whenever we made love, she had to have the window to the fire escape open so that she could hear the night sounds and, although she never admitted it, to have a ready exit. I wonder if I was the last person she was truly alone with. We were so young. We felt we were old souls, two immortals on our own in a great graphic novel, a kind of cut-out cartoon empire populated by poor, deluded, dull but endearing types who at least were trying to do something worthwhile. Above all else we paid tribute to endurance wherever we saw it: collateral damage from the high-tech sector, stunned babies in stiff new suits wandering from job interview to temp work to employment office; the independent butcher cleaning animal-rights obscenities off his display window; the obese young woman ferrying a rope-clutching line of sun-struck toddlers, all wailing, across a downtown intersection snarled by construction. We thought we were the first to discover the old adages: the journey trumps the destination; better to dive into a fast-food restaurant's dumpster than toil behind its corrupt counter; a single moment lived in the pursuit of art is better than a plodding lifetime spent in exhausted defeat. What I didn't know was that Jane was living her ideals whereas I was only pretending to. We both thought I was as passionately committed to our vision as she was, when really I was merely enamoured, not with art or justice or knowledge or enlightenment but with a person, a complicated soul. Her.

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?”