Famous Last Meals (27 page)

“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.

My confession to him, that I had read the notes and early chapters of the novel without his permission, swiftly put an end to his time of free room-and-board with me and, not a surprise, an end to our acquaintance. He would publish an angry, bordering-on-vicious attack against me in a national newspaper, the subject being my influence on a generation of younger writers, a “pall” that he argued did more to harm the state of our national letters than to promote it. When he called my “so-called school” of novel writing “antiquated, self-indulgent, quasi-intellectual pap that stews in its own complacent juices and turns out stories so plot-thin and boring that from even the most reactionary pulpit they are condemned for their soporific dearth of action,” I did not give him the satisfaction of a reply. I understood this to be the residue of an abiding anger still simmering after what he considered my violation of his sacrosanct privacy. This is understandable, I suppose, coming from someone who continues to believe that a private life is desirable and necessary. We live at a time when to keep something to oneself is the same thing as throwing it out with the trash. In fact, I don't even believe his sniper's ambush of me in print had much at all to do with me reading the equivalent of his teenage diary. I think it had everything to do with his fear that I was going to steal his already pilfered goods. What can I say about that except that he is entitled to his opinion, this is still a place where freedom of speech is upheld, and little minds produce small thoughts.

It is far more rewarding to return to the stories that caused all the fuss in the first place. In the historical record, the eyewitness testimony of Glick's boyhood nurse did nothing to incriminate the heiress, whose lawyer made quick dismissive mincemeat of the young woman, of both her account of events on the water that night and her reputation. As the trial drew to a close the jury could not even be sure the yacht in question had left its mooring that evening. Nothing corroborated her testimony except for that of her fiancé, Gunther, who arguably would have said anything to support her, and so nothing prevented what she said she saw from being discredited wholesale.

Not content with exoneration, the wealthy woman set out to destroy the nurse, now ex-nurse given that she was fired as soon as the not-guilty verdict was rendered; the rich close ranks in such instances. Even Gunther abandoned her, breaking the engagement within the month following the end of the trial. The rumour continued to circulate that the nurse had been romantically involved with the heiress's young husband before he disappeared. Glick grabs hold of this gossip in his film. In a breathtakingly short time the young woman finds herself alone and destitute, unable to secure even the most menial work. Whether or not she left Zurich is a matter of conjecture. In some accounts she became a beggar stationed every day outside the gates of the heiress's mansion. In others she becomes a prostitute and in a few years the proprietor of a notorious brothel, and she takes her revenge upon the heiress by effecting the death, by venereal disease, of her only son. In yet another version the ex-nurse travels to a distant canton, where she becomes a successful merchant who eventually buys the heiress's industrial and banking empire out from
under her.

Here is the point at which Troyer and I diverge with respect to this fictional amalgam of possible truths: where he was content to repackage what was already there, I craved significance, deeper meaning. There had to be more, for example, to Troyer's interview with Delacroix. She was dismissed from rehearsal that day she and her partner tried unsuccessfully to execute their difficult move, the blind back-roll. Inured to being treated harshly by her director, she shook her head apologetically as if to say that it was all her fault. Her partner assured her that he was as much to blame as she was for their failure, if not the greater cause of their timing problem. He was a ruggedly handsome man with a long, sculpted face, large hands and prominent veins in his arms and legs. He was strong enough to lift her all manner of ways, and his rhythm and ability to anticipate and react were impeccable. In short he was not the problem. Even onlooker Troyer, whose knowledge of the art form was at best elementary, could see that the male partner was where he should have been at every beat, doing what the choreographer required of him. It was Delacroix who was off that day. Troyer believed that she was distracted by Glick's presence, by something the German said to her before Troyer so inexpertly sneaked up on them.

They walked, Delacroix and Troyer, through the rows of grapes. If she told him what she and Glick said to each other earlier, Troyer did not tell me. What he did relate were the sensations he remembered from the twenty minutes they spent together, the way the light played on the distant hills, the smells—juniper, pine, rosemary, thyme—seeming to originate in the ripening fruit, the colour and visual texture of the gnarled vines.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I feel as old and twisted as these branches.” This is a quotation from Troyer's novel. Whether or not she said this to him is immaterial, I believe, at this point. If she did not say it she most certainly should have. It pins her precisely in that moment, holds her up to the light. Still a youthful woman of early middle age, she felt ancient. Not defeated, not weak the way the elderly become, but tough and deeply rooted. One can be weary and still vigorous, one's body more able to endure than it had been in younger days but lacking the explosive ecstasies of brimming youth. As an artist she had made herself an increasingly reliable vessel. Her vintages could be anticipated with excitement. They could be counted on. Was this artistic death, predictability without brilliance? In a sense she had come to see herself not as an artist but an artist's prop, a highly developed, finely calibrated instrument. Thus, to fail, to be unable to do what the artist wanted of her, as in the dance studio that day, would have left her puzzled and frustrated.