Famous Last Meals (19 page)

Chandra didn't think the accommodation mix-up was that big a problem. “We'll sort it out, Max, come on,” she said, but he dug in stubbornly.

“No, I'm sorry, this is not on. This will not fly. Let me speak to your superior.”

The supervisor worked in the city and could not be reached. “You are causing these good people behind you unnecessary delay,
monsieur. Venez. Sois raisonable”

With Chandra's insistence, Max relented, but not before letting everyone within earshot know that he had travelled the globe and had never, even in the most straitened outposts of Africa or Southeast Asia, been treated so shabbily.

“Monsieur, je vous implore. Calmez-vous.”

“Listen to yourself, Max. Come on. Tut-tut.”

I stepped forward and said hello.

“There you are. Have you been here all this time? Can you believe this shemozzle?” Max introduced me to Chandra. We shook hands. She smiled and said hello but distractedly with one eye on her volatile husband.

I suggested that Max and I share a room, at least for now, and let Chandra, who was now looking at me with guarded hope, room with a woman travelling alone. As soon as we got to the beach resort, I promised, I would add my voice to theirs in pursuit of a more desirable arrangement.

We claimed our bags and climbed aboard the bus that shuttled twice daily between the resort compound and the airport. I sat in an empty seat behind them and they half turned to converse with me. It would be all right, I promised, not yet grasping that if another heterosexual couple did not willingly vacate their room and split to form two same-sex pairings, he with me and she with this as-yet unidentified woman, my promise was an empty one. That would leave me rooming with this stranger, who, unless she was a free spirit like Jane Burden, would probably balk at the notion. But then wouldn't she be there on her own and did that fact not carry a certain connotative weight? This was, after all, a resort devoted to hedonism. Were we not adult? Each room came with two double beds. Why could a man and a woman not share a room solely for the purpose of having a place to sleep? Because, Chandra informed me, a man is a man and a woman is vulnerable. Equality in such a situation has yet to be established, unless she is armed with pepper spray or a nice little gun.

We were treated to a more pleasant version of the reception we'd had at the airport, but the essential message remained the same: the resort as a rule did not put a man and a woman together in the same room if they were not married to each other. An unoccupied room was not available. Max and I would therefore have to do the gentlemanly thing and room together, as would Chandra and her mysterious roommate, who was due to arrive in a few hours. The management was truly sorry. If we four were to come to an unofficial agreement in the meantime, that was entirely up to us. For the record, however, this would have to be the way it stood.

Predictably Bethany Van Doren, the woman travelling alone, was not open to bunking with me, as pleasant a man as I appeared to be. Increasingly, however, we passed the daylight hours together, our companionship more the result of design and guilt than mutual regard. Baldly put, she and I got out of the way so that the newlyweds could have a room they could use for sex. No one said as much; we were too polite and reserved and Canadian for that. It simply worked out that after lunch Max and Chandra would disappear and Beth and I would know that the couple had gone to one of the two rooms. We never knew which one the Nazreens were using, which made us all the more reluctant to venture in that vicinity.

The surprising change was that after three days they stopped disappearing in the afternoons, preferring to stay out on the beach with Beth and me or to join us on the tennis court or take the daily bus excursion to the other side of the island. On one such outing we were led by an ebullient Frenchman who insisted we take off all our clothes and play a group game that entailed passing a rubber ball to a person of the opposite sex without using one's hands. He had a way of making us feel aged and un-hip if we didn't take part. Wine flowed in abundance. Beth and I drifted away from the group. From a palm-shaded bluff we watched Chandra and Max frolic like puppies in the surf.

On the fourth morning Beth wasn't at our usual spot on the beach. I wandered toward the point, a brief sand spit where the beach turned a corner and beyond which was a hidden strand where guests could sunbathe nude. We'd been told about this beach. I was curious but didn't know the protocol. Was it acceptable to walk among the unclad if you were dressed? How close was too close? At what point would I be expected to doff my shirt and swim trunks?

While I deliberated I spotted a couple face-to-face in the water, only their heads and shoulders visible. They were kissing, and the gentle swell was making them rise and fall in the same rhythm as the waves. Immediately I thought of Jane. I wished I'd followed her to Europe. I missed her body, missed the way she pushed me around with her challenges to all things complacent, missed her assaults against received wisdom. The ground was never solid beneath my feet when I was with her; instead it was like walking uphill in sand over dune after endless dune, lost but happily so, seeking a solace I couldn't put adequately into words.

The woman in the water threw back her head, opened her mouth wide, brought her hands up to her partner's head, grabbed fistfuls of hair, and cried out in a high pitch. The man answered with a triumphant groan. I was about to turn away when Beth stood up from where she had been lying on her front—she too must have been watching the couple in the water—and she waved, motioning me to come closer. She wore only a wide-brimmed straw hat. She had full hips, a firm stomach, well-toned arms, short, strong, shapely legs, and the most desirable breasts I'd ever seen outside of the pages of
Playboy
. Seeing her there I was struck dumb, immobile. To come closer and undress would be to reveal my arousal. Watching the couple in the water had made me feel intrusive, a voyeur; seeing Beth naked made me feel almost insane with mirthful desire. I wanted to run up to her, gather her in my arms, press my skin against hers, get in under that ridiculous hat with her and be safe. Safe, depleted and replenished at the same time. She was so different from Jane. Jane of the rubber limbs. Jane of no breasts, and nipples too sensitive to touch. Jane who made me turn away sometimes, her gaze could be so penetrating. Jane who nudged me ever closer to the immolating flame.

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.