Famous Last Meals

by Famous Last Meals (Candidates; Famouse Last Meals; The Woman in the Vineyard) (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Did you know that Mary Desti was the mother of Preston Sturges, the 1940s comic filmmaker? The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve. He helped keep America’s mind off the war. One of the first to make the transition from writer to director, and for a while, until booze and his restaurant, The Players, diverted his attention away from the screen, the highest paid person in Hollywood. Did you also know that the word ‘restaurant’ originally meant a purgative?”

  We looked at Chandra with a mix of incredulity and hilarity on our faces, for we knew that she was never wrong and that her sense of comic timing was never left to chance. “Restoratif. All the rage during the reign of le Roi Soleil and successors, right up to the nineteenth century. People sometimes had three and four enemas a day.” As she had meant to do, she had punctured our paralytic unease: the last meal of an adult, especially that of a dying or condemned person, is difficult enough to contemplate, and we were finally steeled to the unsettling though strangely erotic reality of these poignant scenes; the last meal of two innocents who would die so soon after a joyful though brief sojourn in the company of their parents, was so utterly not right, so unalterably bleak, as to negate any sense of the social gusto sought by our quartet. This was too far in the wrong direction away from thirty. This did not remind us of our mortality. It didn’t make us thankful for each day we had lived blissfully beyond the age of five. It made us lose our appetite for the entire conceit.

  “Then,” said Max, ever the restorer of order, “let us re-enact le dernier répas de la Belle Duncan, as we first planned.”

  “She and Mary had a light meal together at a restaurant near their hotel in Nice,” said Chandra. “Just the two of them. Then they returned to the hotel to wait for Benoît Falchetto, the race driver, to deliver Isadora’s new vehicle, probably an Amilcar. People think it was a Bugatti, but that might have been just the nickname she’d given it in the showroom.”

  “This is silly,” said Beth. “She’s too old, her children were too young, there were only two at her last meal. We’re none of us, except for Colin, all that wild for French cuisine. Let’s start over and pick someone whose last meal we can enjoy.”

  I almost said something then about our taking undue enjoyment from the suffering and ultimate demise of others. What were we really gaining by this? Rarely were these meals—those of the doomed—anything to stir the imagination or the palate, and often we embellished generously upon the entrees Chandra found for us to cook. We had to. Usually the subject was so ill that he or she could no longer eat. Often the food was irredeemably bland. Nevertheless, I voted for a re-enactment of the Duncan case, mainly because I saw how dearly Beth had her mind set on it.

  I was trying hard then to be accommodating. We were seeing a marriage counsellor, a woman highly regarded and sought after for her sensitivity, compassion, tact, intelligence and common sense. She saw, for example, that I was a typical fixer, someone who strove immediately for a solution to a problem. Beth, on the other hand, needed to talk at length about how any given difficulty made her feel, and her need to do so was not necessarily, as I had erroneously perceived it to be so, an attempt to rub my guilty snout in the particular dirt of the moment.

  “Beth is not blaming you for the way she feels. She is not punishing you when she asks you to please sit beside her and listen, just listen. This is merely, but let me add, crucially, her way of talking through to health.”

  One day we watched a TV profile of Jane—she had become Jacoba Wyndham by then—who declared that Isadora was not only her muse but that she was the present-day embodiment of the iconic modern dancer. “Do you mean you believe you’re the reincarnation of Isadora Duncan?” said the interviewer, his low, hypnotic voice betraying his skepticism. “Yes,” she replied, “I do.”

  My memories of Jane came flooding back, after years of successfully keeping them buried. Yes, Isadora reincarnate, sans doute. Duncan was the perfect subject for our Last Meal series of intimate dinners, for was she not physically and emotionally forever an Under-Thirty? Who was I to stomp on Beth’s choice? She wanted Isadora? Hell, I decided, for the sake of our happiness, she would bloody well get Isadora. The one nagging question was how to get Isadora without Jacoba tagging along, too.

  Beth wanted children. I was pretty sure I didn’t. We talked about it, becoming beached on shoals of impasse, not necessarily stalemates, but points beyond which I refused to venture any farther into that theoretical territory without a strong drink, a long sleep, a forty-minute trudge in the snow, or all three in succession. The Jane I knew adored children. Who knows if Jacoba did? Her dance, Demolition Nursery would suggest otherwise. Isadora died to a large extent the day her children drowned, and, in retrospect, I found much of what Jane used to say, about being jealous of Isadora’s wound and wishing she had a similar grief to swaddle and feed and mainline into her performances, an elephantine load

  of crap.

  A knee injury sidelined Jane the summer we met, and she was forced to drop out of the company. The equivalent would be a writer no longer able to fashion sentences or a scholar no longer able to remember what she had read two minutes ago. Jane spiralled quickly downward after leaving Red Bugatti. She got prescriptions for antidepressants but never followed their regimens for more than a week at a time, complaining that the drugs left her unable to feel anything except the sharp pain in her knee. She had a series of operations on the joint, each of which “fixed the one problem but fucked up the perfectly good part beside it,” to quote the patient.

  I wondered if this was the incipient Jacoba Wyndham finding her voice from somewhere deep inside the miasma of her pain. The nadir of her dive came when she got herself admitted, against her will and because of an incident in an elementary school where she was the visiting artist that day, to custodial psychiatric care. Allegedly she stripped and danced naked atop the desks of a classroom full of Grade 5 children before cowering, muttering gibberish, beneath the teacher’s desk. I went to visit her in the locked ward and found her perched on the inside sill of her cell’s high window, a remarkable feat attesting to her still extraordinary balance, given that the sill was barely five centimeters wide. I asked her repeatedly to come down and talk to me. I left forty minutes later without having been able to engage her in eye contact and without hearing her say a word beyond a low cooing sound that was somewhere between a purr and a gargle. If her knee was bothering her as she crouched so precariously on that ledge and looked out, fingers jammed into the metal mesh obscuring the colourless sky, she did not give any indication of pain.

  I didn’t understand why she couldn’t pull herself out of this hole. I’d seen her confront, with the same fearlessness, policemen, bank managers, beggars and aloof passers-by, seducing them all with charm and guileless optimism. Where was my bright warrior now? How dare she give up and hide?

  You’ve probably figured out by now that I wouldn’t have felt so indignant and abandoned and hopeless over Jane’s breakdown if I hadn’t been in love with her. We fell in together the day we met, allied from the moment we thumped up the stairs to the three tiny rooms comprising Wolf Moon Press.

  “Don’t look too needy,” she said. “Sniff around a bit. Let them see your condescension. Make them realize how blessed they are going to be to hire you.”

  The publisher, Myron Saukville, a distracted man in shirtsleeves, worn brown corduroy trousers and carpet slippers, frowned when I handed him his own business card.

  “The man who referred me to you, his name, it’s there,” I said, turning the card over in Saukville’s hand. He read the handwriting and furrowed his brow even more.

  “Ah, his marker. The Black Spot.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t suppose you have any publishing experience.”

  “I’m a pretty good proofreader.” I was not.

  Saukville said that his second editorial director in a month had quit on him, leaving him al
one to fill a contract for three thousand copies of a mail-order catalogue for a company that sold replicas of American Civil War miscellany: uniforms, tents, camp desks, canteens, tools, rifles, pistols, knives, swords and the like. The catalogue, yet to be designed, was due to the printer in less than three weeks.

  He looked through the pages of my CV for a second and a half, mumbled something about my probably being able to figure it out. “It’s not difficult work. I can’t pay...”

  “That’s all right,” I began to say.

  “He’s not working for free. That’s a line we don’t cross.”

  At “we” Saukville raised his eyebrows and peered at Jane over the top of his glasses. “You’ve come with your agent, I see. Much. I can’t pay much. Minimum wage to start. Maybe after this catalogue job we’ll see where we’re at.”

  “I’ll take it. I won’t let you down. I’m an exceptionally quick study. You’ll see.” With Jane there I felt fearless.

  I began working twenty-five hours a week for Wolf Moon Press. Myron Saukville proved to be sharper, kinder and more interesting than I’d assumed the man was. A book of poetry the press had published had won a major prize in Italy. Saukville was a champion of new Canadian poetry. The commercial contracts—catalogues, brochures, flyers, family histories, vanity projects—almost paid for the chapbooks and hundred-page short-story collections he published. Rather than peer over my shoulder all the time, he let me make mistakes on the job and correct them. To a point. If it was going to cost money he couldn’t recoup, Saukville intervened, cutting me off from disaster, showing best how something should be done, whether it was a matter of laying out text and graphics together on a page, working with colour reproductions, handling phone calls from creditors or deciding which bills to pay and which to transfer to the bottom of the pile.

  Poor doomed Deirdre’s father was Gordon Craig, the brilliant, uncompromising theatrical designer. Patrick’s father was Paris Singer, heir to the sewing machine fortune. Nine years after her children drowned, Isadora met Sergei Esenin, the poet laureate of the Russian Revolution. He was twenty-seven, she, forty-four. He was an alcoholic egotist prone to depression and delusions. Against her beliefs—she considered matrimony a woman’s prison—they got married to avoid being hassled when they travelled to America, where anti-communist paranoia was fervid. They were still detained, interrogated and threatened with expulsion when they disembarked at Ellis Island. By October 1923, after travelling together in Europe and America—Esenin particularly despised New York—their relationship was finished. They never divorced. In December 1925, after signing himself into an alcohol-abuse clinic, he left suddenly and checked into Leningrad’s Hotel d’Angleterre. In the same room where he and Isadora had stayed, he burned all his manuscripts, opened a gash in his wrist, dipped the nib of his pen into the blood and wrote a farewell poem that ended, “In this life, dying is nothing new, / But living, of course, isn’t novel either.” Then he hanged himself from the water pipes.

  “I am so unhappy,” Isadora wrote to a friend. “I often think of following his example, but in a different way. I would prefer the sea.”

  When Jane told me this story we were on the Toronto ferry, returning to Harbourfront from Centre Island. It was the Sunday of the Canada Day long-weekend and the boat was crowded with people who looked as if they had enjoyed too much of a good thing. Faces around us on the upper deck, where we sat looking back at the islands, were sunburnt, drowsy, boozy, happy. A man was teaching a young boy a complex clapping game. Two teenaged girls dressed identically in shorts and halter-tops tossed breadcrumbs to a squadron of hovering gulls. The vessel, sitting heavy and square, ploughed ahead through the chop, surprising us with the occasional plunge into a deep trough.

  “Why are you with me?” I asked her. “I’m nothing like the people you admire or work with.”

  “I told you the first day. You’re the ideal candidate for reconstitution.”

  “What if I don’t want to change?”

  “Of course you do. You have a poet’s soul. You were born to live a large life.”

  “I don’t feel it. You want me to be Isadora’s crazy Russian.”

  “Not crazy. Too sane. He saw too clearly. He saw what a futile chicken-run this life is.”

  “It’s not. You don’t know what you’re saying.” But I was unsure, also. The sunny, brave, out-there Jane I’d known for the past few weeks wouldn’t make such an existentially bleak statement, would she? We’d spent every free moment together. She’d found me a bachelor apartment in the same building where she shared rent with two other dancers. Vacated for the summer by an actor performing at the Shaw Festival Theatre, the tiny sublet had a kitchenette, a Murphy bed, two old leather armchairs from the lobby of a defunct hotel, a toilet and a shower stall. Every week I changed the roach traps. I bought a small electric fan to use during the hot nights, and when that wasn’t enough I squeezed out the window and onto the fire escape. Jane’s apartment sat two floors above mine and on the other side of the hallway. One night, while I sat on the fire escape and drank beer from the bottle, she joined me from above.

  “I was going to surprise you,” she said.

  “You must have come over the roof.”

  “Do you know you have a disagreeable penchant for stating the obvious?”

  “No, but hum a few bars and I’ll wing it. And it’s penchant.”

  She grabbed my nose and squeezed. “Try it now, priggy-boy. Pon-shaw, pon-shaw!”

  I wriggled free and she helped herself to a long swig of my beer. She was wearing almost nothing, a camisole and the briefest imitation of the boxer shorts I had on. I told her that if she hadn’t shown up in the next ten minutes I was going to make my way up to her window.

  “Oh, were you now, my bare-chested gallant? My Cyra-nose.”

  We sat on the steps of the fire escape all night. Though I went inside and got us another two bottles of beer, she insisted on drinking from the one I was holding. She would wait for me to begin taking a drink before grabbing my wrist, halting the bottle a breath away from my open mouth. “I adore that look on your face, Colin, so noble, so intelligent.”

  “I thought you didn’t put poison in your instrument.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “Beer is an essential food group.”

  “Food group, is it? Fascinating.”

  “That’s correct. It contains all the necessary nutritive yeasty fluids.”

  “All. Yeasty. Fluids. Check. Continue.”

  “Yes, all emulsions of that kind, naturally occurring and artificial. Man-made or should I say woman-made? Well, hello there. Is this Aquarius ascendant?”

  I excused myself and passed as quickly as I could without injury through the window. Nothing in the bathroom, not cold water, not the smell of the toilet or the chlorine cleanser, not even the most disagreeable thought, could alleviate my sudden tumescence. When I came out of the bathroom, she was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “How do you know you won’t wake up inside the wall every morning?”

  “I don’t. That’s the thrill of a fold-down.”

  “With two people there would be less chance of that. I would think. Did I say that correctly? Less?”

  “A-plus. Yes, more weight is always desirable.”

  “Am I a desirable weight, Colin?” She said it in such a tentative quiet mouse voice that I almost looked around to see if someone else was speaking.

  I had never wanted anyone or anything more. I told her so.

  “I thought as much.”

  “Jane.”

  “Shhh. Don’t. Just get over here.” I wanted her to add something like, “before I lose my nerve” or, “please” or, “if that’s what you want, too,” something to make her that smallest bit less confident and me an equal measure more so.

  Chandra and Max Nazreen had two children. Beth and I didn’t babysit th
em, not because it would have been a chore—they were delightful children and Beth loved to get her hands on the baby whenever she saw him—but because we were afraid that providing such a service, stepping up in a pinch, might compromise the friendship. We would, of course, have refused compensation, leaving the door open to the suggestion that we were being taken advantage of, although none of us in the foursome was a strict accountant in that way. We were always bestowing gifts on each other, of food, new dishes we had discovered, great finds of wine, fresh flowers, travel trinkets, toys for the children, toys for the adults. It was a good balance of intimacy and respect for privacy. We were not like those four-cornered friendships that topple because one-half of the square becomes a parenting unit.

  One reason for this gyroscopic sense of balance was that Chandra, the emotional center of our tidy square, expertly compartmentalized. When she was with Beth and me, with or without Max, her concerns were always adult. She refused to be one of those mothers whose brains become single-issue receivers and transmitters of all things infantile. To draw again upon the image of the nursery, Chandra was in adulthood still very much like a child, jealously guarding her free time when she wasn’t lecturing or supervising graduate students. Max, an insurance underwriter of African art and artefacts, specialized in being out of town. Chandra taught four days out of five, barricading the fifth, whatever weekday was free that term, as her personal day. For a time she devoted it to horseback riding until a fall ruptured a disc in her lower spine.

  Usually we would meet on Friday at lunchtime. The trysts were exciting at first, always delightful, respectful, adult, carefully wrapped in a mantle of performance, never dissolving into acrimonious pleading or character assassination. We didn’t throw things. We didn’t talk about Beth or Max. We made no reference to her children or anything remotely personal, unless it had to do with our research or the courses we taught or Famous Last Meals.