Famous Last Meals (28 page)

In Troyer's novel the Glick character, the playwright, is defeated by his own plot to ruin the woman with whom he is still in love. Heinz Werner Glick, conversely, gave no indication that his relationship with Sylvaine Delacroix contributed to anything but a prolonged period of successful filmmaking and theatre. And in the time since their divorce, he wrote and staged an opera based on the life of Silvio Berlusconi, the disgraced Italian prime minister and billionaire media mogul. His films, in German and English, have earned significant praise and won international prizes. Stills from his body of work formed the basis for a visual-arts exhibition that drew large crowds in Europe and North America. He is often photographed with his new love, a statuesque fashion model who, not surprisingly, had the lead in one of his recent films. The couple is sometimes seen with his eleven-year-old daughter, Io. The paparazzi seem unable to capture them in anything but happy poses. On the surface, then, he appears to be the opposite of the blocked artist. And although Delacroix did not become defined by a single gruelling role, she did become a significant modern dancer and, later, when her body finally did stop responding as it should to commands, a choreographer of note. It almost doesn't matter that Troyer interrupted them in the midst of an argument the specifics of which are probably never to be revealed.

In the months following Troyer's departure, I continued to work in solitude, publishing little and seldom, content with sifting, with making circular passes through well-rifled drawers. But that moment, Troyer's ambush, continued to nag. What do former lovers fight about in the hot, close moments after one has surprised the other? They don't argue about large matters. My intuition tells me that whatever pain resides in them is buried deep and it takes considerable coaxing to draw it out of hiding. For that, one talks with a therapist. No, I think it has to have been about something relatively small, inconsequential. Glick, anxious to gauge the progress of a new hybrid grape, was annoyed at having been delayed in doing so. Anyone, a stranger or a former lover, would have set him on edge. I imagine him saying, “I'm busy, I'm in a hurry, I haven't time right now. What is it, is Io all right? You look fit. What are you doing here, are you working? Dance, what do you mean,
dance
? You're an actor. I made you into one. This is ridiculous. Puppet? I never treated you as such. I can't stop you throwing away your talent. She is well, then? Gretchen can't wait to see her again.”

This is all preliminary banter until the reason for the confrontation is stated: Delacroix has been invited to join a dance company that travels widely most of the year. Glick has not been returning her calls. His assistant, rather, has not been passing her messages on to the filmmaker. The crux of the matter—contrary to what I suggested earlier, this is hardly a small thing—is that she needs him to take Io to live with him for an extended period, a year and possibly longer. Mother and daughter, to this point best friends and inseparable, have been fighting of late. It is inevitable, the result of hormonal changes, burgeoning selfhood, the pushing against boundaries, the testing of personality, new muscles. The girl is growing up quickly. Yes, she answers him, it would indeed seem to be a time when the girl needs her mother. The truth is that Sylvaine needs to do this, she must, now, or shrivel and blow away on the next strong wind. Can he not understand that?

He did, evidently, since soon afterwards Io was living and travelling with her father and his girlfriend. I can't begin to approximate the mind of an eleven-year-old girl except to acknowledge or merely wish for her to be aware and happy in her altered circumstances, to see how lucky she is to be the daughter of such a brilliant man and of a talented woman perceptive enough to know that for her continued good health Io had to break out of her mother's orbit for a year. I am fascinated to have seen this very thing worked out in Glick's most recent work.

By now you must think I write only by way of a filter formed by the creative work of others. Troyer's novel, Glick's films, Delacroix's performance as described in X's review. It is, I admit, the way I engage with the world nowadays. It does restrict the quality of my output to a rather narrow scope of observation and commentary. Have I become nothing more since Troyer's stay in my house than a critic? I do wish I could write a simple and profound piece of fiction that does not buckle under the weight of self-consciousness. Leave off interpretation, I hear myself saying even as I continue in this quest for meaning.

This all came to a head not long ago when I was approached to write a theatrical adaptation of
The Woman in the Vineyard
. According to his publisher, Troyer tried unsuccessfully to adapt his novel to the stage. This struck me as strange, given that his book is about a playwright, an actress and the play he fashions for her to perform. To be fair to Troyer, we can be too close emotionally to our work, the product of our often blinkered imaginations, to manipulate it beyond our initial vision for it.

My first reaction was to refuse to do it. Admittedly I am someone who usually says no and, after considering the request, changes his mind. Here, for what it's worth, was my thinking at the time of being asked. First, why should I help a man for whom I felt something stronger than annoyance but milder than animosity? A man who with his most recent book had achieved something I had not, that is, commercial and critical success. A protegé whose acknowledgment of my contribution to his professional development was nothing but a stinging nettle. A colleague, someone I considered a colleague, who thought of me only as that creep who paws through his guests' belongings while they are away. A man who called himself a literary artist yet lacked the imagination necessary to transcend such petty notions as personal privacy. Who could not bring himself to embody my point of view long enough to understand my reasons for wanting to know more about the subjects of his writing project.

Once I was able to let go of these negative valuations of Troyer the man, I found it easier to approach his novel as someone with an objective purpose, i.e., adaptation, in mind. It was going to do me and my career no favours to continue to hold a grudge. And if Troyer hated me for what he considered an unforgivable violation, well that was his unfortunate egg to coddle. I had a book to read and turn into a play.

According to the editor I spoke with, Troyer himself had recommended me for the project. I won't pretend I wasn't flattered, despite the frostiness of our parting. So much of what we think of as divinely inspired masterwork, the painting that commands a million dollars at auction, the film that tops every critic's list, the book that refuses to fall out of print, was made because somebody asked for it to be made. No ego is so insularly resilient that it does not need stroking. Not even Heinz Werner Glick dismisses genuine praise. It was gratifying to be asked.

Troyer uses a tripartite structure of scenes between which he moves in telling his story. Of course, they are larger than mere scenes, they are episodes, but for me to envision the novel as a play I needed those three points on the triangle to be constant and static. The first is set in a nursery and involves the close, loving relationship of an eight-year-old boy, the future playwright, and his nurse, a 19-year-old girl he thinks of as both mother and lover. The second is situated in a rowboat on Lake Zurich. In the boat are the nurse and her boyfriend. As he rows, languidly dipping the oars, he tells her about the dream he had the night before. 

He is bent low while picking ripe grapes for the wine harvest when he feels the light touch of a hand on the back of his neck. He stands and turns to see a grown woman who has the bald head and undeveloped face of a baby. Nevertheless she speaks in an adult voice, addressing him as though she has known him all her life. This does not strike him as strange. She tells him that she must show him where she has buried his music. Again he considers this in no way out of the ordinary. Gunther is a composer, Troyer tells us. I have no way of knowing, without researching the question, whether or not the real Gunther was a composer of music. From the subjective position of a reader presented with an unfamiliar story, it strikes me that his vocation and the mention of music in the dream are too convenient not to have been fabricated. Then again, what should composers dream about if not the product of their work?

When Troyer was still speaking to me, before he left in an indignant huff over my innocent act of curiosity regarding his writing, I asked him about the dance move Sylvaine was trying to perfect with her partner. Had they been able to accomplish it? He said that he didn't know. He left the place the next day. My first thought was that he wasn't much of an investigator. What journalist worth his byline up and goes home so soon into a story? In his defence I admit that Troyer was not there to delve into the lives of this intriguing former couple, he was there to write fiction. Given the matter and form of what he produced while in residence there, however, I do still think he fled the scene too soon. The imagination needs distance and time enough to allow the real to be transformed, that much I will concede. But what did he miss by leaving so soon? What might his novel have become?

We agreed that the woman he had met and I had watched in Glick's films was not someone who would have let such an insurmountable thing as a tricky physical manoeuvre defeat her. She was a model of perseverance, I said, letting the remark be taken for a subtle gibe should he be so perceptive as to recognize it as such. I don't believe he did, for he continued to speak earnestly about that frustrating rehearsal and their subsequent stroll. Throwing herself into the move only to fail repeatedly was difficult to watch.

“I looked away,” he said. “It was too painful. Her partner was doing everything he could to help her without destroying the integrity of the choreographer's vision. It was her fault they weren't nailing it, no doubt about that. Poor thing. You could see all the years of formal training in him even though he was quite a bit younger than she was. She was operating on instinct, raw talent and the force of her will. It would be like entering a milk-delivery van in a high-speed car race. You might have your accelerator pedal pressed to the floor, but that isn't going to cut it.”

I reminded him of his hasty exit. What about his obligation to the story? I didn't even mention his curiosity, which he must have had to suppress.

“Well, yes, you are one hundred percent correct,” he replied congenially. “A writer does not flinch, let alone avert his eyes. You said something to that effect in your creative writing course, if I'm not mistaken. So here's my thinking, and all I can hope is that you can see it my way once I've told you: the person I saw while I sat on the sidelines in that mirrored studio was my sister. 

“She was eight years older than me and all she wanted to do was sing. Did she have a voice? She did; so does a frog or a blue jay. Our father loved her so dotingly that he refused to let anyone tell her the truth. He would rather lose his hearing than say anything to hurt her, and so he continued to pay for expensive singing lessons with a renowned opera singer. My sister must have been competent enough by then that this woman took her on as a student. I can't imagine anyone being so cold-hearted as to take my father's money knowing that the student was sure to fail. All I remember is the sound of what to my ears was a strained, reedy, unpleasant noise that would go on for a prolonged period behind closed doors.

“Was it cruelty on our part not to tell her? Was it only that I was too young to appreciate the kind of music she wanted to sing? Had she improved, these questions and their answers would have been moot. She didn't improve, and I wasn't the only one to innocently say so. Even our father conceded the futility of the endeavour. And so one day he took his daughter aside to break the news to her that money had become tight and he could no longer afford to pay for her lessons. ‘It's because I'm no good, isn't it, Daddy,' she said.

“‘No, no, you are marvellous,' he said. He was such a bad liar. She knew right off that the whole song and dance about the money was just his way of letting her down easy. To her credit she didn't make a big deal of it. She was her papa's daughter in that regard, able to smile stoically in the face of adversity and say it didn't hurt a bit when really it did hurt a whole hell of a lot.

“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.”