Famous Last Meals (20 page)

We found a flat together off Saint-Denis south of Rachel. It had high ceilings, ornate moulding around the doors, and large, dusty, impractical windows we had to cover with plastic shrink-wrap in winter. Our dining-room table was a massive masculine piece in dark dry wood that Beth had inherited. It fit the room in size and style, crying out for an elegant centerpiece, linen tablecloths and napkins, silverware, and the eight other seated guests who would have completed the tableau. We were even then haunted by absent bodies. At least we didn't make that sad picture at mealtime of the wife and husband dining at opposite ends of a long table, too far removed from each other for easy conversation. We would hug one corner of the curved piece of thick, manorial furniture, and if we began the meal in separate seats, usually by dessert and coffee time she would have made her way onto my lap. Or I onto hers, playfully, gingerly. You couldn't say we were pining for company then; we were too myopic in love for that. How extraordinary is the ability of new love to block out all but the most insistent of external demands.

I was standing in line for coffee one day when I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned around to look at the man who had apparently recognized me. Shorter than I and wearing an expensive dark wool overcoat, red scarf framing a suit and tie, sharply pressed trousers, Blundstones on his feet—I should have recognized Max immediately. It had been two years since Guadeloupe. We'd exchanged a Christmas card and some lengthy email messages, digital photos attached, in which we'd tried to keep alive the unreal splendour of our time in paradise. He was sporting a Van Dyke beard, stylish then. He looked delighted to see me. When I finally recognized him we hugged. He said he was in the city on business.

“Thinking of relocating here, in fact,” he said. The cost of living was reasonable. Many of his clients were in Montréal. And now that he had bumped into me, well, “That's a sign from above, wouldn't you say?”

Max could make anyone he was talking with feel like the most important person in the world. He could be pointing out how immensely wrong-headed you were for thinking something, but he always did so in a way that embraced you affirmatively, locked a beam onto your attention, a bear hug of engagement. No one strayed from his attention.

Max and Chandra moved to Montréal eighteen months after our chance meeting in the café. His business was thriving. She joined me as an adjunct in the McGill English department. They bought a house in the country. He began to travel often.

One day he said, “You have to go there,” meaning South Africa, “now that the whites have to take their place in the democracy instead of acting like arrogant tyrants.” He could say such a thing with a straight face, betraying no hint of the connection between himself, whose people would have been labelled coloured and would have enjoyed a relatively better life than did the blacks, and the Afrikaners, who were watching their way of life burn, seemingly overnight. Max's people were Asian South Africans who had emigrated to North America in the 1960s, not because they deplored the way blacks were being treated but because the opportunities to make money, they thought, were greater in Canada and the U.S.

What puzzled me was that Max never seemed all that excited about the items he insured and about which he was a supposed expert: Kaffir robes, Zulu headdresses and spears, Damara drums, Bechuana thumb harps. Not once did we have a prolonged discussion, passionate or otherwise, about these items, what materials they were made of, how they were constructed, what they represented or were used for, how they were valued, not in resale but in cultural terms. Who made them? Was there a cottage industry? Did he have a little factory in Soweto? “You have to go there” meant—and I understood this too late to change the way things turned out—“you have to let yourself be jolted out of your North American complacency and relocated, transformed for a short time, long enough to experience a way of life that teeters on the lip of a yawning void.” The food, the music—he was bringing back recordings of Ladysmith Black Mombasa and other black musicians years before Paul Simon discovered them—the way they smelled, which he admitted he found intensely erotic. The sound of gunfire in the night? The stench of burning rubber tires? Corpses came attached to those sensations, I wanted to remind him.

“I cheat death every time I have a virgin,” Max said after one of our last Last Meals. “Think of it. We're supposed to be thumbing our noses at the Angel of Death every time we observe the final meal of someone famous who died young. But how does it make you feel, Colin? Are you rejuvenated?” I admitted that, no, all I felt was bloated and drunk. Chandra had been Joan of Arc that evening. We had attempted a medieval series of courses, and in honour of the future saint's means of expiration had added the fires of cayenne and jalapeno peppers to an otherwise bland fare. “My stomach is scorched,” I moaned.

“And your cock is limp,” said Max, laughing with an edge of cruelty. “You are no more the master of time than is a summer peach lying in a warm damp bed of grass. Face it, this is an elaborate excuse for us to meet to tell each other how great we look, how wonderful we are, how young and unwrinkled and stylish and urbane and…”

“I get it, Max.”

“In Lesotho the girls call me Simba. I kid you not. Someday you're going to see for yourself, and you'll know, really know what it is to be a man at the peak of his virility. I mean, come on, face it. You can't have equality in bed, not if both partners are going to get where they want to go.”

“Doesn't the word, ‘partner,' suggest something equitable?”

“Fine. Not partners. Poor choice of word. A man takes a woman. He takes her. There is no other way to describe it. She must submit to his will, his urgent desire. Otherwise she is diminished.”

“Not the best arrangement for longevity in the relationship, you have to admit.”

“And I do, I do. Don't you see that I am speaking about two wholly different animals here, two separate entities? There is the marriage, for the creation of children and the consolidation of home, wealth, social standing, citizenship, community. And then there is that which a man must do in the world in order to be truly a man. He must go forth. He must conquer. He must spread his seed. Do not laugh!”

“You're so full of shit you're starting to grow saplings out your ears.”

He continued to be outrageous, to drink while we did the dishes (I washed and dried, he sat and drank), to condemn me for being “whipped” and “milquetoast” and “Teddy Telemachus.” Chandra and Beth, as was their custom, had remained seated at the dining room table and were sipping liqueur and speaking intimately in voices punctured by sudden screams of laughter. Jokes about Joan, Beth said later. Could the Maid of Orléans have been around all those soldiers and remained a virgin? Yes, they decided, if the soldiers had been French. Or English. Or in armour…. Or men!

“What,” I asked her, “do you possibly gain from deriding men?”

“Hope,” she replied.

“Hope? Hope for what?”

“Hope for a better world, you dumb cluck. Lighten up!”

Beth could say that kind of thing most days of the week without hurting my feelings, because her smile always led a playful advance party. If, on the other hand, Chandra ever said such a thing, and she did from time to time, not often though often enough to have made it memorable, it stung. With Chandra everything was serious. She was not necessarily always a serious person; she could be as silly and outrageous as Beth could, especially when they were a team, one feeding off the other's infectious hilarity. But for me, Chandra was someone to think about, deal with, be with, be apart from, in a serious way. It was the way I thought about Jane Burden. With Jane I always felt I hadn't been given the latest update to the script. Seriousness with her was usually a product of my intense concentration, my effort to catch up to and stay abreast of her, to understand the terms and the context, grasp the rules, if there were any to be learned. Jane was making it up as she went along, the form, the means of expression, the terms by which others would take part, the duration of events. The rules of engagement.

It wasn't the duration but the consequence of our time together that had felt unsatisfactory. It came to an end abruptly soon after her accident. She was released from the hospital in Burlington after a night of observation. Her father came to see that she be released properly and not sooner than she should. She broke down after a visit from the police, admitted that the car she'd been driving had not in fact sunk to the bottom of the water-filled quarry, but that the man who had driven her to the hospital had taken it. She gave a description of him to the officer, and the man was picked up a few days later claiming that Jane had given him the vehicle. She said she didn't remember saying such a thing. She'd been in intense pain. The man had given her liquor to drink. Who knows what she said to him in her delirium? She knew that telling the truth at that point was probably going to either nullify or severely reduce the coverage provided by the owner's insurance. The car was never recovered. The most plausible theory, corroborated by the man, a petty criminal, was that the car was in pieces and that those pieces were by then replacing lesser or worn or damaged parts in a dozen other vehicles. It was as just a situation as one like this could be, given that the robbery had promoted conservation and environmental protection: old cars were being kept on the road and out of landfills longer. The friend who had lent Jane her car got over her dismay when her insurance company paid enough for a large down payment on a newer model. Except for the injury—Jane made jokes about finding that chop shop and getting a new knee—everything seemed to have turned out for the best.

Tighe and Francesca drove us back to Toronto, Jane and I uncommunicative in the back seat despite our proximity. She had to sit with her back to the door and the injured leg stretched out straight across both seats and under my raised knees. It should have been an intimate posture. I wanted to touch her, but was worried about inflicting further pain, and she made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with me. Less than halfway home, Francesca and I switched seats.

I checked on Jane in the morning and again after work the next few days. She was getting around surprisingly well using a single crutch and seemed to be in good spirits. The dance company was rehearsing new material, which they videotaped for her to study, and she was confident that she'd be able to catch up. It was going to be a six-week convalescence, I reminded her.

“No, I don't believe that,” she said. “They don't know what they're talking about,” wincing, “those so-called doctors.”

“Give it time. What else can you do?”

“I can stop listening to the likes of you, Colin.
H.I.M.T
.”

“Himt?”

“Halted in mid-transformation.”

“You're going to tell me more, aren't you, whether I want to hear it or not.”

“Most perspicacious boy. Hobble with me to the front of the class. You were on your way. And I'll tell you where, to save you having to ask the obvious: you were well on your way to becoming the person you were meant to be.”

“Really. What stopped me?”

“I told you, no stupid obvious questions. You have to promise me.”

“I do. I'm shut, I'm Silent Sam. Why don't you take a load off. Elevate it or something.” She was trying to cut slices off a loaf of bread while balancing on her good leg. The knife was too short and hadn't the necessary serrated edge.

“If you don't stop nagging, you'll remain in the dark. Not a good place to be. Toast or plain?”

“Toast. I was halted in development because…?”

“You were halted in
metamorphosis
because.”

“Fine.”

“Because … you made the fatal error…”

“Yes?”

“Oh, Colin, why are you making me say it? Can't you read my mind?”

“I don't want to change. I don't see why I should.”

“All bourgeois, suburban, blind, grown-up-stupid mole-rats must change. It's a rule.”

“I'm going to make you say it.”

“If you do I'll cry. I'll twist my knee and fall in a heap on this grungy linoleum floor. You'll have to pick me up and you'll throw your back out in the process.”

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You're in love with me and I won't have it. I can't have it.”

“Why not?”

“The stupidest, stupidest questions!”

“You can't love me back.”

“Something like that.”

The toast was burning. It was a terrible moment. Neither of us wanted to move. The smoke alarm went off and still we didn't move. When I did it was to open the door and run into the hallway, down the stairs and outside. I didn't know where I was going. I had never felt more wretched or crueler. She probably couldn't reach the alarm to disable it, not without standing on a chair and risking further damage to her knee. Her roommates were at rehearsal. I imagined her hopping back into the kitchen, unplugging the toaster, turning it upside down in frustration, shaking it to dislodge the charred remnant. Throwing it against the wall. Opening a window to let the smoke out. But these would have been my reactions, not hers. This was nothing but my imagined, petulant, anguished, self-pitying tantrum. Knowing Jane, I could be sure she had that alarm turned off and that toaster righted in less time than it took me to run like a wounded antelope out into
the street.

Those who can't accept rejection attract a kind of pathos almost too unsettling to describe. They begin, after the initial shock has worn off, by acting as if the moment of rejection never happened. I went back to Jane's apartment the next evening, after a sleepless night and a day at work during which I did more to scuttle the project Mr. Saukville and I were working on than I did to complete it. Jane was out, said one of her roommates, a new face—they were always changing. Out? Yes, she said, a friend had come by to pick her up. Where had they gone? She said she didn't know, picking up her keys and shoulder bag. She hadn't asked.