Famous Last Meals (14 page)

“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 them, 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. 

Once, when the approaching re-enactment was going to have a Hollywood theme, with Max attempting his best Rebel Without a Clue as the actor James Dean, she asked me if I thought other women found Max attractive. He was more Sal Mineo than Jimmy Dean in appearance and manner, but he was a superb mimic, and without his glasses he could, conceivably, in the right light, be said to have been handsome. I told her so.

“Handsome and attractive are not always the same thing,” she said as she brushed her hair in the mirror. We were sated. I was still in bed, unmotivated to return home to my considerable dung heap of marking: post-colonial critiques of
Heart of Darkness
. Inexplicably, or perhaps not, the thought of having to grade those essays reminded me of the first time I saw Jane Burden dance.

The venue was a crumbling community hall, a First-World-War-era building meant to have been temporary but so sturdy it remained standing after newer structures around it were razed. It's there today and has had many incarnations: army drill and recruitment hall, homeless shelter, health clinic, government office, storage facility, youth drop-in centre, daycare, new-age temple, even a repertory movie house for a spell. The paint on the high arching ceiling was unfurling, plaster dropping in chunks, the radiators clanked loudly in winter when the boiler was working, and in residence were generations of rodents so used to people that they were said to occupy empty chairs during performances. Poets came here to stand on the low risers at one end of the long space and read from their precious pages. The acoustics were good. Theatrical productions, if they were not ambitious, could be carried out there. The space seemed best suited to rallies and massed suppers. A benevolent society still serves a meal to the indigent there on Sunday afternoons.

The first time I watched Red Bugatti perform, it was a hot day, one buried like shrapnel in the sweaty flesh of similarly unrelieved days and nights that stretched ahead and behind for weeks. The temperature rarely dropped below thirty degrees Celsius the entire summer, and the humidity stayed jammed near one hundred percent or as close as it could get without it causing rain, indoors and out. The rare rainy day brought little relief, contributing to a spike in the humidity without a corresponding dip in the mercury. A fan in the high ceiling sucked the thick air up and away from the audience. The wooden folding chairs we, an audience of nine, sat upon looked to be the same vintage as the building, but they were sound though thinly padded. The hall's dim lighting was augmented by stands of theatrical lighting set up above and to either side of the stage and along the wide central aisle, where much of the performance took place.

I took a seat on the left side of the center aisle as one faced the “stage,” and about halfway back. Red Bugatti was performing a piece that can only be described as industrial techno-grunge, a posture already a decade out of style in the music-video world but which, because it dressed the gyrations of the street in the weeds of art (Johannes Pittfield Paul, the company's choreographer had taken master classes with Peggy Baker, Danny Coleman and Sylvaine Delacroix), was supported by funds from all three levels of government.

Jane was unrecognizable and in her role unintelligible. I knew by then just how flexible she was. Without warning she could kick a leg up over her head and lean its full length vertically against a wall, stretching there as if doing the splits on the floor. The few times she came into my bed that summer she used her considerable suppleness to felicitous effect. Having this intimate knowledge of her body's ability to bend well beyond what most of us think of as its natural limits, I was nevertheless unprepared for the crabbed, torture-chamber-inspired, arthritic pose she was forced to hold, moving only when moved—rolled is the more precise term—by another performer. I didn't know who or what she was supposed to be portraying. Neither was the story of the dance ever more than fleetingly evident. Story is too bourgeois a term to be applied to the aesthetic that night. Even to admit responsibility to the audience, to fulfill the tacit communicative contract, reaching past the fourth wall to bridge the span between conception and execution, to translate, to be understood—this bunch wasn't stooping to any of that. 

At one point Jane, clad only in a kind of loose cloth diaper, her breasts and shoulders smeared with veins of blue paint, was rolled by a male dancer down the center aisle. She came to a stop against an empty chair two rows ahead of mine and moved her head just enough to clamp her mouth onto its leg. A computer governed by a random program was generating the “music,” and whenever it squealed with deliberate feedback Jane let out a corresponding loud moan, all the while keeping tight hold on the chair. If the seat still exists, her teeth marks are there. Her legs, flung back behind her head and crossed in a half-lotus posture, her shoulders positioned in front of the backs of her thighs, created the sense of two separate sets of body parts put together terribly wrong, by an inebriate or a Dr. Frankenstein with a demented sense of humour. I tried to watch the performance and ignore Jane. I was unsuccessful in both. 

Later I would recall brief snatches of imagery from the rest of the dance: a woman simulating giving birth as she crouched on a chair being held aloft by two men; a couple, male and female, slapping each other rhythmically on the face, endlessly, each whack coming hard with the same palm against the same reddening cheek; a group of three forming a closed hoop that rolled around the perimeter of the hall continually until the performance ended. As with Jane's character, each dancer produced startling sounds that came like the emanations of a madhouse and had no discernible connection to either the movements of the artists or the theme suggested by the title of the piece.

Afterwards she asked what I had thought of the per­formance.

“I was enthralled.”

“You were?”

“Definitely.”

“I detect a tone.”

“No, no tone. I believe I am tone-free.”

“It left you feeling uncomfortable, I can tell.”

“Yes, but you opened my eyes.”

“Really?”

“Really, yes.”

“To what?”

“Well, to a new way of perceiving, for one thing.”

“New way of perceiving what? I'm curious.” This could not end well.

“Pain,” I said after too long a pause. “A new way of perceiving human pain and suffering in all its various guises.” She was expressionless. Say something, I thought. Nod your head. “Yes,” I blundered on, “how often do we pass by our fellow humans oblivious to their pain? The frozen mask, the hunch of the shoulders, the cramp of an uneven stride, the stiffness of an arm that won't swing. These are all the indications we have. But your dance. Your dance made me...”

“…feel others' pain.” Even after saying this she was revealing nothing.

Certain now that I had expressed a colossal misread of the dance's meaning and had been blind to the themes of connection and healing implied by the title, I began to think I should admit that I had neither enjoyed the dance nor understood it.

“Jane,” I began, abducted by the urge to confess, “what I mean to say is...”

“You're incredible, Colin, you really are.”

“You're right.” She had seen through me. What did I know about the artistic value of her performance and that of her equally highly trained peers? Who was I but a narrow-minded, thinly educated, introverted lout who knew more about psychiatry than I did about interpretive movement? She could see this. She had flushed me out.

“I have to tell you, I was prepared for you not to like it—it is a difficult piece, making so many extraordinary demands on dancer and spectator both—and I guess I was braced for the possibility that you might not get it completely, but—”

“Jane, I know, and I'm so sorry.”

“You're sorry? About what? I was going to say—”

“Oh. Then I shouldn't have interrupted. Go on.”

“But why are you sorry?”

“I'm not.”

“You just said you were.”

I had run out of ground cover. “I was starting to say that I'm sorry I didn't—”

“But don't you see? You did!”

“I did?”

“Yes. You expressed it beautifully. I wish I had recorded Johanne's words during rehearsal so that I could play them to you now. What you said, you know, about pain being at the core of all miscommunication, it's, I kid you not, almost his exact words. It was like you were listening in on us. You weren't, were you?”

Too stunned and relieved to reply, I jigged my eyebrows a couple of times and grinned with incredulous lips, keeping my teeth hidden. A toothy smile would have given me away. I must have gotten it, then. I couldn't have made it up. All that was secondary. She had been impressed by my assessment. For the first time with her I felt other than a make-work project, a man-in-embryo for a girl to incubate, hatch, nurture and educate. For the first time when I looked at her I didn't feel defensive, my wary eye no longer on the lookout for the expected projectile thrown at me from the wings.

Jacoba Wyndham is better known in Europe than at home. In Germany she is renowned for her punishing performances that can go on for two hours without pause. Audiences there appreciate her uncompromising commitment to her art. Dance purists here in North America dismiss what she does as agonized masochism, even those who remember (or would learn about if they took the time to read beyond her website) the car accident that destroyed her knee. Even the least knowledgeable among us, armed with this telling information, would understand the extent to which she had to change her style to accommodate the injury. She takes her brace off only on stage. The pain is omnipresent.