Famous Last Meals (15 page)

Critics have called her an original and a fraud, sometimes in the same review. They have never known what to make of her. She refuses to go away, even after such a brutal failure as
Demolition Nursery
. How to describe the effect of that dance? Imagine yourself on a train, not a North American commuter train, an Amtrak or a Via Rail, those cattle cars reminiscent of a Greyhound bus, but the compartment of a European train, the kind with seating for four and access to a common corridor. The train has pulled away from the station and you let out the breath you've been holding, because it appears you have the compartment to yourself. You prop your feet on the seat opposite. Just when you think it's safe to close your eyes, let go of the difficult world, pick your nose or slip a hand down your pants, in comes a woman who has the close-cropped head and bearing of a Marine Corps drill instructor and the clothes of a bag lady, but who moves with the tread and balance of a cat. Instead of taking the seat across from or beside you, she straddles your lap and begins to kiss you with garlic-laced breath. She plucks your eyebrows one by one, criticizes your kissing for being too stiff. She replaces your secretive hand with hers. Her fingernails are ragged and dirty.

In the car on the way home from the hospital, Jane said she wished she'd been hurt in the accident before the performance I watched in the old drill hall. Then she'd really have known what it was she was supposed to have been feeling, as a crab or human pretzel or whatever she was supposed to be, rolled about the floor. I doubted a torn-up knee would have improved her role in that bizarre show. She certainly wouldn't have been able to fold herself into a lewd beach ball. But she was serious. She was the kind of person who would have taken a ball-peen hammer to the joint. To prepare. To get it right.

I had my first inkling of this when I drove with her to her father's house in Vermont. It was the weekend after the performance. As she told me more about Sergei Esenin, I tried to gauge just how far she would go for the sake of art and, nearer my own concerns, what she might expect of me, as a friend, lover and confidant.

The house was composed of two connected log cabins that had been transported across the border from Quebec and reconstructed on the property, making a roomy but still intimate L-shaped space. One of the cabins was two-storied, and the three bedrooms were situated on its upper floor. The large fireplace, kitchen and living room area were in the smaller cabin, which, because its open space concentrated warmth, sustenance and the comfort of two long, deep, blanket-draped sofas, was the place where people tended to congregate. On the ground floor of the larger cabin Jane's father had a study with a sofa bed. Down the hall were a mudroom with laundry machines, a second toilet and a storage room.

Jane's brother Tighe was there that weekend with his girlfriend, Francesca. Tighe was about three years older than his sister, and he and Francesca acted like a married couple. I liked Francesca immediately. Short (she preferred, “compact”) with a pretty face, kinky black hair, full hips, round breasts and the faintest hint of a moustache, she had refined the art of nagging into a form of entertainment. She never stopped smiling while she nipped at Tighe's heels. He was built like a pro wrestler, though lacking the proto-human rolls of flesh at the back of the neck, the bullet-shaped shaved head or the long, ape-man tresses. He was so big I wondered if he took steroids. Tighe had a placid nature, however, suggesting that he had achieved his extraordinary muscle mass as a result of exercise, diet and inherited genes. Nothing Francesca said to him ever made him drop his big open grin. 

They worked at the same club in Montréal, she as a waitress and he as a bouncer. They spoke English with a hint of a French accent. We saw them for supper two of the days, for brunch on the day before we were supposed to drive back to Toronto, and the rest of the time Tighe and Francesca spent riding their four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles along an old railroad bed. 

We did all go swimming together on Saturday afternoon at a nearby quarry. Jane wore a bikini that kept threatening to fall off. “I used to be fat,” she explained, adjusting a shoulder strap. “Fatter.” She was as thin as a noodle. She had to hold everything together with her hands whenever she jumped off the edge into the water, a thirty-foot plunge from the top, where we'd spread our towels. Tighe grinned approval for
her bravery.

He and Jane had a quiet rapport. They were well past the awkward years of mutual sibling exasperation. Something in the understated, quasi-secretive nature of their exchanges—they often looked away when speaking to each other, as if keeping one ear open for distant signals—spoke of a history of solidarity and mutual dependence.

Their mother lived in rural Connecticut with her second husband, a man she had met in rehab. Their father was away on business somewhere unidentified and would not be joining them that weekend. He worked in Montréal as a planner or architect—he could well have been an engineer; it didn't register with me at the time. Jane said that her father came in and out of their lives, as if he were a distant uncle. The summerhouse had interested him up to the point at which the construction had been completed. Now he was looking for lakefront property in Quebec's Eastern Townships and had his mind set on a house built of straw bales and wattle. Tighe, when he referred to his father, spoke with a dismissive tone: the “old man,” the “scatterbrain.” “He” had forgotten to stock the beer fridge. “He” had neglected to put gasoline in the
ATV
s. Again. Jane intervened, reminding her brother that neither had Tighe done any of these chores, and reminding him further of the various maintenance tasks that had to be completed around the property. I had the feeling she wasn't so much defending her father as closing family ranks, keeping private matters private. I was more than a friend, she made that clear from the way she hugged and kissed me in front of the other two, but I wasn't all the way “there” yet. Certain doors
remained closed. 

I got on easily with Tighe. We found subjects of common interest to talk about, and I never felt from him the disapproving scrutiny of the protective older brother. One of his interests, I was surprised to learn, was stagecraft, Tighe moonlighting as a set builder. Theatrical illusion fascinated him. He loved making something flat appear three-dimensional and fully functioning in a movie. He talked about the art of distressing new objects with paint, dirt and grease to make them appear old. The designer only got in the way. Yes, the vision was necessary, the initiating idea, but a director needed creative, resourceful people who could work with their hands, work with what was in front of them to make something out of nothing. An entire house erected in a morning and torn down before sunset, that was the kind of thing Tighe was talking about, a whole dining room you can pack up and put in a suitcase.

“You should hear them when him and his friends get together,” said Francesca, who had wormed her way onto his lap. It was well after supper and we were sitting outside in Adirondack chairs on a sheltered, flagstone patio off the kitchen. “Talk about your hyper-bowl.” She and Tighe wrestled playfully for a few seconds, subsided into cuddling, and appeared to fall asleep.

I wondered about the antecedents of this interest in theatrics, in brother and sister. As far as I know, neither of their parents had acted, sung or danced except during family gatherings. Perhaps the talent and compulsion had skipped a generation. Or maybe it had more to do with something that had happened to them when they were growing up. An outside influence? A child never stops trying to get his parents' attention. I asked Jane. Was their approval an easy thing to get?

“No, it wasn't. I heard about it when I didn't achieve to their expectations.”

“And when you did?”

“Did what?”

“Achieve.”

“Not a word.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not. When I got anything less than a perfect mark, my father zeroed in on the one- or two- or five-percent deficit. He would make me sit with him and go over the mistake and re-do the problem until I got it right. To him this was the only real opportunity for learning.”

“And for you?”

“In a word: torture. All I could think about and feel was his disapproval, his disappointment.”

“Does it still seem that way? Are you able to see through his eyes now?”

“On a cold, intellectual level, maybe. It still hurts.”

“He loved you. He wanted the best for you.”

“What is this? You some kind of operative? Has he got you working for him now, Colin?”

“I can't believe that his only wish was to punish you. What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

Did she take the same approach? Did she dwell, as their father did, upon the absence rather than the substance?

“Why are you so interested in this?”

Stars filled the black dome. When I tilted my head back it felt as if I could open my mouth and swallow a pail full of them. Light-headed, I said, “It helps me to get to know you.”

Tighe and Francesca roused, excused themselves and went up to bed, she leading the way. He held her hand and looked like a slouching bear. Once inside she giggled and then screamed his name in mock outrage. Hearing them on the stairs made me feel jaunty and playful, too. I considered this weekend a turning point in my life. Yes, I was living and working in Canada's largest, richest city. Yes, I was having what I considered a serious relationship with a beautiful uncompromising artist, someone principled, with a locked private side but an intense interest in me. And yet, until this trip away together, I hadn't felt completely on my own. I hadn't really thought I might never go home to live with my parents again. The new me, set-free, flying-up-to-the-stars, giddy with potential, was talking now. I could do anything, say anything, and so I asked again: How did her mother react when Jane failed to live up to her expectations?

When she looked away into the distance the way she had with Tighe, I thought we were going to share a similar inner-circle connection. She leaned forward and up until she was perched on the edge of her chair, let her feet fall heavily to the ground and stood. Still she avoided looking at me. I was afraid she was going to go into the house without saying anything. What should I do then? Should I follow her inside, through the first cabin, up the narrow staircase and into bed with her as I had done the first two nights? Should I wait for a sign? Or should I feel my way to the third bedroom and sleep there? I had no previous experience of this kind on which to base a decision. 

That I had pushed too far with my questioning was achingly evident; she didn't need to say anything about that. How do two suddenly separated people find their way back to each other, how do they traverse the yawning space? The continents move steadily, incrementally apart, we don't even notice the drift, and it's easier to let them take us with them than to throw a line backwards to the place we were a minute ago, to the one moving the other way on solid ground.

“Please let's not talk about this anymore,” she said. “Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.”

“You mean talk about her.”

“Don't be a prick.”

“Excuse me?”

“You're an ever-correcting prig. Were you aware of that, Colin? You push and push and push.”

“I only—”

“Shut up. Don't say anything else. This is who you are. You are never going to be anything else, I realize that now.”

She went inside, letting the kitchen door slap closed behind her. I sat for another hour, maybe longer. The dew fell cold on my bare legs. The eastern horizon began to lighten. Nothing I could think of could put this back together. Older, with a few more scars on my psyche, I might have tiptoed up to her bedroom, gently stroked her hair, whispered my apologies softly in her ear. I often think about what might have happened, where I would be today, if I had done just that. But I was newly hatched. The shards of shell weren't going back together, the fluff was drying and the fledgling ego was growing at alarming speed. I couldn't get beyond the idea that I was right and she was over-reacting, and Jane, I wanted to say, what about leaning into the teeth of the gale? What about hitching up your skirt in front of a stranger and taking a piss all over his blue suede shoes? 

I was tired. She would forget about this by morning. Such was my hope as I made my way, not upstairs but through to Mr. Burden's office and its foldout couch.

I woke late, close to noon. Tighe and Francesca had gone off on their
ATV
s. At least I assumed they had, because the vehicles were gone. I showered, made a cup of instant coffee and sat at the kitchen table. The day's heat was already penetrating the thick walls of the house. I heard a car approaching from a distance down the gravel road leading to the property. It pulled into the driveway and stopped close to the house. The back door swung open and slapped shut. A man with a grey crew cut and Jane's angular cheekbones and sunken eyes stared at me.

“Who in God's name are you? Where's Tighe?”

I told him my name and that I was a friend of Jane's. When Mr. Burden asked if I knew what had happened to her (not where she was, intriguingly), I replied that I didn't. “Isn't she asleep upstairs?”

“Come with me,” he said. I followed him out to the car.

He drove for a long time before he spoke. “You really didn't hear the phone?”

“I'm sorry. I must have been sleeping pretty deeply.”

He spoke his thoughts, wondering where his “lunk of a son” had been. “Out tearing around on that infernal noisemaker, no doubt, up at first light, scaring the wildlife into the next county. No wonder the duck hunting's the pits. What did you say your name was?” I told him. “Ah, her latest victim. She's told us all about you.”

Who was “us” and what had Jane said? That she had said anything about me was encouraging. She must be fond of me, then, I thought. She thinks about me. She tells her family.