by Famous Last Meals (Candidates; Famouse Last Meals; The Woman in the Vineyard) (v5. 0) (epub)
Perplexed that someone could be so playfully evasive about such a serious issue, Adam was happy nevertheless. For the first time he was enjoying his labour. He was making it up as he went. When he wasn’t sure about the answer to a question, he returned to the literature disseminated by LB’s national party: withdrawal from NATO, universal daycare, revocation of NAFTA, resurrected passenger-rail travel, higher taxes on fossil fuels, incentives to convince people to use their cars less often. Reactions ranged from incomprehension to giddy disbelief, with equal parts hearty support and unapologetic apathy filling a plump middle ground.
“So let me get this straight. If I switch to an electric car, I’ll still be able to drive it to work? Okay, that’s fine. There’s just one little thing, eh? Where do I get ahold of the $80,000 to buy one of them enviro-saving babies? You’re blowing smoke out your bunghole, buddy. You’re eating cloud pie.”
It didn’t faze him when people reacted this way. Maybe it should have. He smiled, made a note, thanked the constituent for his or her time, and moved on to the next address.
At one house Adam rang at the front door. No one answered, but he could see through the glass that the family was gathered at the breakfast table in the kitchen, at the rear of the house. He walked around to a side door that led directly off the kitchen, and knocked.
A woman answered.
“Hello,” he said, “I notice you’re eating breakfast.”
She said, “No thanks” and began to shut the door.
Quickly before it closed, he said, “Are you sure the food you’re eating is safe?”
The door halted, opened slightly. “What did you say?”
“Trans fats?” She invited him to step inside.
She had read the newspaper report, too. She was worried. Everything she bought, it seemed, had the artificial fats in them: breakfast food, cookies, potato chips.
“If my candidate is elected, he will work tirelessly to ensure that trans fats are eliminated from processed food everywhere in this country.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s something to think about.”
“Did you know,” said Adam, now holding the attention of the entire family, father in shirt and tie, coffee cup poised, cooling, in mid-air, three little girls looking at him as if he were all the members of their favourite boy-band, “that for every calorie of food we eat, we burn ten calories of petroleum?” How far was going too far?
“I have to go to work,” said one of the girls, who looked to be about ten. “I mean school.”
A younger sister laughed. “You said work! Where’s your briefcase? You said work! Ha, ha, ha!”
The third daughter joined in and the parents told them to be quiet, to finish their cereal and get ready for school, which was not regular school, the youngest clarified, but day camp. They called it school because they spent most of the day inside their regular school building, learning how to design robots using a computer and then assembling the automatons and testing them. “I’m going to be a robot when I grow up,” she said without irony. She was seven and made her ‘bots out of programmable Lego components.
The family was stalled in that inertial stage immediately preceding egress. Adam felt like an intruder. “I’ll be on my way.”
The father got up and left, his daughters trailing behind him to the bathroom, leaving the mother intently reading the ingredients listed on the side of the breakfast cereal box. An aged hound limped arthritically into the room and stood beside the woman, leaning against her for support.
“Good bye and thank you for your time. I’ll let myself out.”
She gave no response. When his hand was on the handle of the screened door, she said, “Do you have a card?”
All he had was LB’s election pamphlet, which she held with the hand not holding the cereal box. She flipped the pamphlet absent-mindedly against her thigh.
“I was thinking,” she continued, “maybe I would...volunteer?”
The campaign phone-number, he pointed out, Mrs. Fallingbrooke’s, was printed on the pamphlet. “You can reach me there. I mean, us. Reach us there.”
“Who’s us?”
“The Party.”
“To whom I am speaking?”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Lily Tomlin. An old routine,” she said.
“Ah.” He knew he would never see her again. Why, then, did he not want to leave? She fanned her face with the pamphlet. Where was the rest of the family? She looked down then up, directly into his eyes. It was the heat. It was being so many days in unfamiliar territory. It was the seduction of the election race. She was an attractive woman, older, not that much older than he was. Her husband was just down the hall. Her legs were bare, her feet in open-toed shoes. Strapless. She would do anything, answer phones.
Lick envelopes.
“I can reach you at this number?” she asked.
“You should come to my country,” said LB as they stood on the grand wide porch of a large house in the city’s south end. When LB rang the doorbell it made a musical chiming that resounded throughout the house. “You will see the plague orphans and then you will know. Your head and your heart will fill the same place, perhaps for the first time in your life.”
Adam tried to picture his head and his heart cohabiting somewhere in the middle of his body. Man with head poking out from chest, pulsating with the rhythm of drumbeat heart. Maybe a mind so intimately positioned, sea-surge of pumping blood flooding, would better function, better feel, better know the fundamental truths.
In LB’s country as many as six hundred people were dying every day of malaria and AIDS. He rang the bell again. “Think upon that, Adam of the silver spoon.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“A matter of relativity, my son, a relative matter. My father was a goatherd. To him you are one of the white gods, as alien as if you had fallen to earth in a burning chariot. This,” he said, gesturing to indicate the wide portico, its neo-classical arches, mullioned windows, slate roof, pink-marble facing, “is a palace.”
No one was answering. “We should go, don’t you think?”
“Yes, it will be my first official junket at the taxpayers’ expense. You’ll accompany me as my events coordinator.”
“I meant we should move to the next address.” Was he incapable of being understood?
LB rang again, a prolonged chime followed by a series of quick angry pulses. “A house like this is never empty,” he said. “How could it be? An entire village from my country could live here.” He shook his head and grinned, a mixture of incredulity and childlike faith.
After the echo of the last ring had ended, they heard the precise click of hard heels and saw a figure approach. It was distorted through the facets of the narrow mullioned windows on either side of the massive wooden door, which reminded Adam of the door of an English manor or an Austrian chalet, where Blofeld brings the captive 007 and teases him with beautiful untouchables, an improbable harem, before locking him in an ingeniously life-threatening space, one involving rising waters, sharks, shrinking walls, thick constrictors, venomous spiders, electricity of lethal voltage, suffocating foam.
A primly dressed woman of middle age opened the door. She wore an apron but not one Adam associated with a servant’s habit. This one was too feminine and personal for such livery, he thought, remembering Alexei’s term for passenger-rail cars. It was flounced and spotted with the remnants of past culinary experiences. Something about the woman’s face as she looked up at them indicated that these had been triumphs rather than defeats.
“Yes?”
“Madam, how extraordinary to meet you!” said LB, who introduced himself and Adam, his colleague, “a man of vast political acumen,” and stated the purpose of the call.
“Oh, I’m not political.”
“Do you buy food?” said Adam.
“What kind of a question is that, do I buy food?”
LB jumped in. “Do you drive a car, buy gasoline, give blood, rent videos, vote in elections, take hot baths, produce garbage, convince your husband—”
“I’m not married.”
“Effusive apologies, madam.”
“He died four years ago.”
“Extreme condolences.”
“What exactly...?”
“My point, dear lady, is that you are no hermit subsisting in the desert. Your presence in society is in itself a political act.”
“I can give you ten dollars. That’s all I have. Then will you go away?”
“Dear madam, exquisite lady—”
“Stop calling me that. Make him stop calling me that. I’m just the same as—we weren’t always—my husband was smart with money and he was lucky. You won’t make me feel guilty about that.”
Adam held up one of LB’s pamphlets. “We’re only asking for your vote.”
“Oh, yes, you’re that—I mean, you’re not the one from away, the prime minister’s man.”
“No, LB—Mr. Bliss here—would like to represent you in Parliament.”
“Like?” the candidate interjected. “That’s a small weak word. Fellow citizen, I would most vociferously represent your interests in the great legislature, your interests alone.”
“How can that be, my interests alone?”
“I will think only of you, for your confidence is every vote of confidence, your remarkable face every face I see.”
“Is he for real?”
“Sometimes too real,” said Adam.
She smiled. “I almost didn’t answer the door. I was about to make bread.”
“We could come back another time,” said Adam.
“I should really close the door. You’re just after my money.”
Adam touched LB lightly on the elbow to signal that they should move off, but the candidate was moving forward as the woman stepped back to close the door.
“Yes! Your money. Exactly what we are after. Let us prevaricate not a moment longer. Madam, rich lady, bread maker, you live comfortably.”
She nodded. “But hardly extravagantly.”
“And yet...”
“Yes?” she said, taking the hook, letting it set.
“And yet...I can see that you feel no small burden of guilt about your estate.”
“I do not. How presumptuous.”
“Oh, but yes you do,” insisted LB.
“You’re...you’re just...wrong! My husband worked himself to death to get where—to get here, and how dare you...?”
“How dare I what, madam?”
“Please go away or I will call the police.”
“And they will surely rush to your rescue. After all, look at this scene: a black man on your doorstep, a large, threatening, murderous, political black man. Frightening! Horrific!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were thinking it.”
“Please go, please, please just go away.”
“That it were as easy as that. I can leave your sight, Lady Privilege, but you know I will never leave your thoughts after you close that door. Which, I notice, is still open.”
Adam had stepped onto a lower stair and now rose level with his candidate again. He felt he should pull LB away before she began to cry or scream or call for help, but he was also fascinated in that way in which one cannot pull one’s gaze away from a scene of carnage or humiliation. She had not shut the door. She looked frightened. To replace the physical barrier between herself and the two men, Adam imagined, would be an even more frightening prospect, for then she would be alone again, and the thing unseen is always to be feared more than the fearful thing in view.
“Your money can do much good,” said LB. “You see that, don’t you, you see its potential. You have been feeling guilty about it for quite some time.”
“No.”
“You have.”
“No.”
“Admit it.”
“No.”
“What is your name?”
“Laura.”
“Admit it, Laura.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She began to tremble, her whole body, as if an earthquake were concentrated beneath her alone. It lasted a few seconds and then she was able to speak. “All right. Yes. Okay. Yes. I said it. I have all this money and if I gave it all away it would benefit some who needed it, but then I’d have nothing, and if I gave away part of it, there would still be...you know.”
“‘And the poor we will always have with us’?”
“Well,” she said, “yes. It’s true, isn’t it?”
“No matter what we do, no matter how much we try to change things...”
“You’re making me confused. I don’t know what I should think.”
“What if I were to tell you—”
“No, please don’t say anything else. Please go.”
Adam intervened, thanking her apologetically and indicating the contact number on the handout. “If you need a lift to the polls or anything. You know. Questions. Just call.”
“You can make a difference, Lady Laura!”
“LB, come on, that’s it, we’re gone. Sorry to have bothered you, ma’am.”
The pair walked away. They were due to meet the party’s provincial co-ordinator, who was canvassing with the national leader on LB’s behalf in a nearby neighbourhood. Then they had a radio phone-in show at noon, a newspaper interview at one, a visit to a senior’s facility in the north end at two-thirty, tea at the Dalhousie University faculty club at four. A TV spot on the news at half-past seven. It tired Adam out just thinking about it.
“You shouldn’t have brow-beat her like that. It’s no different from harassment.”
“Young Adam, young Adam, young Adam, one day you will be with a woman and you will understand what I am saying to you.”
“I’ve been with a woman.”
“Have you really? Then you know that “close” is a defeat, a failure. That woman wanted me to push her, she needed me to be pushing her, she was not going to get there on her own.”
“Get where? We were invading her privacy, making her uncomfortable.”
“Precisely. We were bringing her to that state of abandonment that is also a place of enlightenment. She needed our help. She kept her door open, you noticed. I charge you with a task: you will call and invite her for luncheon. I will meet her at one o’clock. Choose an expensive restaurant, conspicuous.”
“You think she’s going to have lunch with you.”
“I know so.”
“How?”
“How do I know anything? How did I know you would return to work with us? How do I know I will make my entrance to Ottawa from a helicopter landing in front of the Peace Tower?”
“I thought you were set on a parasail?”
“Unpredictable. Winds change.”
Adam called Hannah Pachter, who, back in Ottawa, was distant in tone but cooperative, and by cross-referencing street address, car license number and the woman’s first name, she found Laura Bowen’s unlisted phone number. It was soon enough after the visit that Laura remembered him when he phoned her, and he was amazed when she agreed to have lunch with LB. They chose an expensive new restaurant that had just opened on Spring Garden Road.
The next evening, Adam was still shaking his head when he got back to Mrs. Fallingbrooke’s. He couldn’t say which had surprised him more, LB’s behaviour during the all-candidate’s meeting or Laura Bowen’s acceptance of a lunch date with the man.
Each candidate—Don, LB, a university student from Saint Mary’s running as an independent, and a member of the Green Party—spoke for ten minutes and then took questions from the audience. LB chose instead of a speech to sing a s
ong in his native tongue, one that had many in the audience on their feet, swaying, laughing, clapping in time to its infectious rhythm, until the moderator of the debate pounded her gavel and called the proceedings back to order. When it came time to field questions, LB scurried off the stage and was the first in line at one of the microphones set up in the aisles.
“Mr. Bliss, you are not allowed to ask questions, you are here to answer them,” said the humourless chair, a retired high school principal whose tone indicated that she had been transported in these surroundings, this old high-school auditorium, back to 1969 and the controversy over hair length and dress code. Adam imagined her saying, “The blue-jean dungaree is, was and ever shall be a garment reserved for incarcerated felons.”
LB argued that he had a right to ask himself a question.
“Ask yourself a question?”
“Thank you, Madam Chairperson, Your Excellency. Very well, Mr. Lexington Bramwell Bliss, is it true that you have come to this country for the sole purpose of subverting democracy, hypnotizing our young people with your overtly sexual music, your marijuana cigarettes and your lustful body movements, stealing from the haves and giving to the have-nots, turning all weapons into shopping carts, reinstating the welfare state, making the Senate an elected body the sole purpose of which will be to intercept the intrusions of telemarketers, renaming Ottawa “Trou d’Eau,” banning the term “blacklist” and replacing it with “white-wicket,” and learning how to skate on thin ice?”
They watched as he ran up the aisle, leapt onto the stage, resumed his seat, pulled the table mike closer to him, and answered, “No, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, maybe, definitely and probably.”
All was shouting and hooting and gavel-pounding and hilarious pandemonium for a good four minutes until the event appeared to exhaust its fuel and people began filing out, still chuckling, some wiping their eyes with the backs of their hands. Adam had been sitting beside Mrs. Fallingbrooke, who sat with the quiet, proper elegance of someone listening to a sermon, who appeared to be taking it all in, analyzing it, storing it for future use, but who could just as easily have been daydreaming about a shipboard intrigue in the China Sea. Not even LB’s antics altered her demeanour.