by Famous Last Meals (Candidates; Famouse Last Meals; The Woman in the Vineyard) (v5. 0) (epub)
“I know exactly where they’re going.”
“No, you don’t. You haven’t a clue where those are going. Somebody could’ve been hurt. Wake up, Max. Just wake up.”
Tim and Gary righted the appliance and pushed it into a corner of the basement. Beth came downstairs and helped Max pick up the scattering of seeds that had burst from their packets.
“They’re to go all around the property. Around the boulders. Soften the rocks a bit. For memory and luck. I’ve known for a long time now where I want them to go. I just haven’t found the time to plant them.”
After that we wandered around the house in the falling darkness, picking up toys and crayons and bits of paper, looking for more to do. The truck could hold no more. Chandra’s rocking chair would not fit, and so she gave it to Tim and Angela. Max told us to feel free to take anything that had been destined for the trash, but there was now a quickly descending sense that we had only a little time left in which to depart, that to stay was to risk being locked inside something dark and airless. We said our goodbyes quickly as if we were going to see the Nazreens the next day, and then walked up the driveway past the moving van to the road above, where the cars were parked. I got in, moved the driver’s seat back, and reached across to unlock Beth’s side. She opened the door but did not get in.
“Wait for me, please. I won’t be long.” I assumed she wanted to say goodbye to Chandra again. I rolled my window down and listened to the sound of her receding footsteps. From the dark came amplified sounds: water lapping at a dock, a dog barking from across the lake, tree branches rubbing overhead. The screen door opened and slapped shut. I waited for the same sound that would signal her return.
Finally I got out of the car and walked down the driveway, feeling my way more than seeing from one of Max’s boulders to the next. Around the final turn the truck loomed, grinning with dim eyes. No lights were on in the house, but from a point beside and just below it, on the slope to the lake, came an irregular flash of light, and I walked around the house toward it.
Max’s landscaping plans had included an extension of the line of boulders along both sides of a wide path that led from the front corner of the house diagonally down through a series of terraced sections to the beach. Max and Beth were moving up from one rock to the next. Beth held the shallow cardboard box and a flashlight that she kept trained on the ground where Max sliced open a mouth of soil with a shovel. Beth handed him one of the empty Sludge containers, which he dropped into the hole and tamped down with the toe of his shoe. After she sprinkled in some seeds, he removed the blade of the shovel and stomped twice to close the gash.
They were doing it all wrong. The seeds were much too deep. Max’s technique was better suited to the planting of seedling conifers than to perennials. It would take a miracle for any of those flowers to show themselves in the spring. This furtive attempt to carry out his plan by darkness was comical but salvageable. I opened my mouth to tell them I was there and to set them right. All I could get out was, “Beth. I was worried.”
“About me?”
“Yes, I...”
“You shouldn’t be. Do you want to help?”
“Help? No, that’s okay. I’ll just watch.”
When the last of the packets was emptied, the three of us hugged. I apologized for yelling at Max, who said that he would miss us and that he wished we could move to Denver with him. We said we wished we could, too. We told him we would visit as soon as we could.
The Woman
in the Vineyard
When Troyer called to say that he was going to be in the city a few weeks and needed a bed—nothing more, he promised, I would hardly be aware of his presence—I offered him my modest guest room. He had taken one of my writing workshops and was someone I had recommended for residencies and grants. I suppose I considered him something of
a protegé.
At the time of his arrival I lived alone. I spent my days in my attic office, my evenings reading and listening to music. In that indefinite period between the breakup of my most recent relationship and any desire to begin a new one, I was uncharacteristically serene. Problems that used to upset me I dealt with in a workmanlike manner, as if it were not my but my neighbour’s front lawn that had to be trenched in order to free the sewer pipe of tree roots, not my but a gremlin’s fault that a clogged gutter had led to an ice dam and leaking roof. Solitude, although not a state I wish for myself for the remainder of my days, does bring with it clarity of mind generally unattainable by those entwined in intimate relationships. A day or an entire season can take on a felicitous shape, sprung from within rather than through negotiation. On the other hand, during that time of celibate bachelorhood I was more likely than before to invite company, more likely to chance rejection if only to stave off boredom.
Troyer arrived when he said he would, emerging from a taxi after what seemed, as I watched from the living room window, an unusually long time. He explained that he had had to use his bank card to pay for the ride from the airport and had forgotten his identification number. His credit card balance was over its limit and so he wrote the cabby a cheque. I remarked that in this city the taxi drivers usually took only cash. “You must have a trustworthy face,” I said.
“Oh, but I do,” he replied. “Everyone tells me that. I can’t count the number of times I’ve dined out on the mere assumption that I am an honest man.”
He travelled light, carrying only a leather weekender grip and a good umbrella. The carry-on was in the style of bag doctors used to tote when they made house calls. This one had an inner sleeve for his laptop. He was otherwise unencumbered. He said he didn’t maintain an apartment anymore. When he taught his one semester out of three per year, he rented a college dorm room. The other eight months of the year he lived abroad. Paper correspondence, of which he received very little by then, went to his office at the arts college where he had tenure or to his literary agent. It seemed an ideal, attractive life, the freedom of it immensely appealing. He went from friend to friend all around the world, trying never to overstay his welcome. I meant to ask him how he decided when to move on. He had to be sensitive to his hosts, their personality, their ability to accommodate the writer, and their circumstances at that point in their lives. As it turned out, he left before I could learn his trick of never staying in one place so long that he began to smell like yesterday’s fish.
I should add that I have not loved everything this author has written. We met before Troyer became published. At that time I enjoyed being a facilitator as much as I did a teacher and took it upon myself to introduce him to editors at publishing houses where I was known. Unfortunately none of these contacts accepted his work, and he published his first collection of stories independently, online, in what seemed a regrettable instance of desperate vanity. In most cases, after the self-published author has paid out more money than the book will ever recoup in sales, and after he has distributed a copy to every member of his family, the urge to write subsides, the fire dying to a weak ember, and the auteur soi-disant gets on with leading a more realistic life.
Troyer, however, did not fit that model of defeat. A newly established literary agent happened to read his ebook and within minutes of finishing the collection had signed him as his representative. In almost that brief a period they had a contract with a reputable literary publisher to release the stories in print and to publish his novel-in-progress when it was completed. This pathway to publication has become the norm rather than the exception. The entire industry, its very aesthetic, has been turned on its head. How readers choose to consume their quirky fiction, stories in which cardboard cut-out characters say silly or outrageous things and act with risible predictability, is their prerogative. Troyer, to his credit, was not being untrue to his nature when he wrote his frothy accounts of young, cosmopolitan, urban professionals hooking up, breaking up, crying on each other’s shoulder, laughing about childish matters, and exhibiting an astounding
lack of civic engagement and personal responsibility.
We would see each other first thing in the morning and not again until late afternoon. He liked to spend his mornings out and about, visiting galleries and museums and writing a few hours in a library or coffee shop before meeting a friend or colleague for lunch. He seemed to have no end of contacts in the city, despite never having lived here. I, on the other hand, have been here all my life and can count the number of people I see regularly on the fingers of one hand. I say this merely to illustrate the difference between Troyer and me. Too much socializing puts me off my work. Even having him under my roof caused me to change my habits and consequently my output, which has never been voluminous. To look at the situation objectively, the unhappy truth was that his presence, however limited, affected me to the point of distraction. I asked myself, was this jealousy? Was I committing that most pathetic offence against art, the personal comparison? I suppose I was. The man was younger than I, had been writing for fewer years, and yet had achieved more. More books published, more critical attention, more appearances at literary festivals and on television and radio, more money earned. In the meantime, those whose opinions I trusted told me that I had a reputation for integrity, literary quality and anti-commercialism. The writer’s writer, a particularly dubious distinction. See what that buys you at the grocery store.
Because the results of my culinary efforts are unpredictable, Troyer and I would often eat out at the end of the day, alternating between three Asian restaurants I like and can afford. My house guest was to his credit agreeable in this and in most matters generally. The secret to his ability to live and travel cheaply, I could see, was this highly consistent bonhomie. He went along with you, he sat still in the middle of the boat, he listened while others spoke, his glass always charged ready for the next toast. It was his quiet genius, really. Had he not been a novelist he would have made a successful diplomat or spy.
We were eating Korean sashimi and drinking hot sake when he recounted a story from his latest trip abroad. He had stayed at a French retreat, an artists’ colony that had once been a monastery, near the village of Vacqueyras. The administrators of the institution maintained the simplicity of the former religious order, asking visitors to keep to themselves except during meals, refrain from making loud sounds, and respect the natural beauty of the grounds, which ran to many acres and incorporated a large vineyard. A celebrity vintner, his expensive, limited-quantity wines highly sought, grafted new varieties of grape onto established vines of Grenache and Syrah, harvested the fruit and paid the colony a handsome fee, the income helping offset the cost of accommodating
the artists.
The winemaker was none other than Heinz Werner Glick, the filmmaker. Glick hired locals to see to the day-to-day work of pruning the vines, checking for blight, forcing the fruit to work for its water. Sometimes the auteur showed up on the property, as much to be seen as to see to his crop. He was known to enjoy the impact his presence made on the painters, composers, choreographers, dramaturges, actors and writers who might be trying to work. It was even thought he did so to throw people off their creativity. Troyer did not want to believe that this giant of post-reunification German cinema could be so deliberately disruptive. On the other hand, he said, not to test the hypothesis would have been a lost opportunity for someone who depended on the subversive tendencies of the psyche for the material of his stories. And so, learning at breakfast one morning that Glick was there that day, Troyer set out to put himself where the man would have no choice but to speak with him.
If you happen to be familiar with Glick’s oeuvre, you know that such little schemes of convenience rarely turn out as planned. A woman obsessed with her child’s music teacher destroys her marriage, reputation and career, as well as the nerves in her hands, while learning to play the piano. The very investigative body he established to root out graft and influence-peddling arrests a politician who had presented himself to the electorate as a reformer pitted against corruption. A legendary professional cyclist pushes his grandson to pursue the same rigorous pastime, with deadly result. Synopses reduce a work of art to a mere wisp of itself and many feel Glick has been unfairly branded a pessimist, and yet the curdling of hope does seem to be one of his dominant themes. Some who believe in karma might suggest that the negativity expressed in his work has prevented him from achieving the masterpieces of some of his contemporaries and has kept him out of the inner circle of prizewinners. My house guest might not have been thinking about such matters while he ambled towards the vineyard. Still, I wonder if he could feel his intention turning against him with every nonchalant step he took in that direction.
The filmmaker was standing on an access road that ran alongside the vineyard. The road was paved in brilliant white quartz gravel, which the monks had arranged to be brought from many kilometers away. It was a highly prized surface because it produced little dust, thus reducing the amount of water needed to clean the harvested grapes before they were crushed. Troyer was dazzled by the scene: the shining path, almost blinding in the bright summer sunshine; the deep green and purple masses clustered low and hugging the undulating contours of the landscape; Glick, who had Turkish and Hungarian in his family background, standing, dressed all in workman drab, his instantly identifiable uniform that could also cause him to be mistaken for Fidel Castro, his black beard aimed at the sky, gesticulating angrily; his interlocutor, a trim, athletic-looking woman in her late forties who was dressed in running shoes and lightweight track suit, a headband holding her hair off her face, shifting her weight from foot to foot while listening. Or pretending to listen. Troyer thought he saw her attention stray. The slightest shift of the head, a loss of shoulder alignment.
I picture Troyer attempting to approach the couple soundlessly, his intention hampered by the brittle crunch of gravel underfoot. My onetime house guest is a small man. I would say he is the right weight for his height. He is pleasingly proportioned, if I can make that observation without it being construed as anything more than an aesthetic judgment. A film camera would capture this man’s tidy, compact body and economical movements and call it the encapsulation of grace. I noticed, the few times we walked together, that no matter the length of his stride, his feet struck the ground directly in line with his center of gravity. He would lean forward, spine straight and aligned with his neck and legs. It was the subtlest suggestion that he was falling, each step a preventative act. The effect, then, of his curving approach across the lawn and along the snow-white path, must have been for anyone watching from a distance reminiscent of the approach of a hunting cat moving upon stationary game.
The woman dressed in running gear, Sylvaine Delacroix, was at one time an actor. She and Glick had been married many years earlier during a difficult time of poverty, child-rearing, competing professional desires and demands, and the erosive toll these circumstances took on the union. She appeared in many of his films. I won’t say that she starred in them. Her scenes tend to place her in static poses with minimal dialogue and are distinguished by a strong tension between her body’s evident desire to move and the physical restrictions placed upon her character. In one such memorable film she is naked standing navel-deep in fast-flowing icy water. As still as she is, after a quarter and then half a minute watching her we would swear she is being carried along by the current. The effect is achieved not by the movement of the camera, the change of angle or strength of lens magnification but by the alteration of light playing over and across her. Light and shadow animate her, the product of cloud flow we feel more than see. Every pore of her exposed skin puckers into gooseflesh. Her arms are held out to the side so that her fingers only just touch the surface of the stream. Our perspective is so tight on her that her surroundings are indistinct. We think of her as being in a mountainous region, although we can’t be sure.
In another film she sits while riding in a series of public-transit vehicles. In each bus and train car she is held immobile within t
he tight pack of passengers sharing the space. The abutting shoulder of the man seated beside her, the bony hip of the woman standing in the aisle and steadying herself while holding the overhead strap, the large baby-carriage and its wailing occupant cutting the character played by Sylvaine Delacroix off from escape. Knowing now that dance was her passion and knowing that as an actress she was more than Glick’s pawn, was in fact his enigmatic muse, I think of these early works as cruel exercises bordering on torture. The filming of a single scene can demand the intense attention of an entire day. Shooting, re-filming, changing perspective or endeavouring to reproduce the precise details of the previous take, Glick sacrificed everything on the altar of his art. Was his treatment of his actors, Ms. Delacroix in particular, a justifiable crime perpetrated in the name of a greater good? He was her husband. Did he cease to be married to her while he peered through the lens of his camera at a person in distress? And what use is such a question to someone in a darkened theatre watching the performance?
It turned out that Glick had not been aware that his ex-wife and former muse was staying at the monastery. Their meeting beside the vineyard was as far as he knew the result of chance. Troyer had no way of knowing this, not until much later. He drew near, coddling his assumption that Glick had waylaid her and that Glick was intent on undermining whatever practice, planning, training, meditation, creation of new work or combination of any of these she happened to be engaged in. Tit for tat, I believe, was Troyer’s simplistic term for what he as third wheel was intending by way of intervention. He should have kept his distance. This is my assessment, not his. The writer remains on the sidelines for good reason: we lack the ability to take part in life and not mess it up more than it already is. Although we might have the inexplicable power to peer into the future, we tend not to recognize all that a moment holds, its entire significance, until we have had time to turn it over many different ways in our minds. Transformative memory for us takes the place of hindsight; it isn’t so much that we look back to see an event for what it was as it is that we rewrite history to make it what in our estimation it should have been.