Famous Last Meals (21 page)

“I'm on my way out myself. I'll tell Jane you stopped by.” Was it a man? Yes, she said, he was someone who used to dance with the company.

“She wasn't wearing a long red scarf around her neck,
was she?”

“No, she wasn't,” she said in a pitying tone, whether for my weak attempt at humour or my obvious lovesickness I couldn't be sure.

One weekend Chandra and I drove to Lac Memphrémagog, where she and Max had built their house, and where she stabled her horse at a nearby farm. Max was travelling and Beth had gone down to New York City to see a Broadway show with a girlfriend. It was early in the affair—Chandra and I had spent four or five lunch hours together—and when she called she sounded almost shy. She had arranged for a neighbour, a retired woman with no grandchildren of her own, to babysit. The boards, as they say, had been swept clean. She made it seem as if she had just that moment decided to call and spirit me away, “if all's clear at your end, Colin.” She knew full well that such was the case. This was not a woman who left anything to chance. It was she who had put the idea in Beth's impressionable mind to take in the theatricals. “I've heard that
Rent
is fabulous. I wish I could go myself. I'd go with you, but my marks have to be in first thing next week and then there's my paper for the Learneds. Why don't you call up Cecilia and make a junket of it? The packages are a dream, I've heard. Nothing left to chance.”

When I thought about Chandra's planning and manipulation, I was impressed by her skill, but it was disconcerting that I could be just as convincing a liar as she was.

She did her best that weekend to teach me how to ride. Neither my mount, a near-blind swaybacked grey mare, nor I showed any enthusiasm for our limited partnership. Our time in the beginner's ring was short, unsuccessful and not to be repeated. Just as I believed downhill skiing and skydiving were for people with death wishes, so too was horseback riding for those naïve enough to think that the quadruped understands what we require of it or cares enough about us to carry out our requests safely.

It was a pleasant getaway, my equestrian shortcomings notwithstanding. We stayed two nights in a motel the limitations of which we hardly noticed, so heightened was our sense of illicit thrill. For pure concentrated ability to focus, Chandra was nonpareil, in bed and out, that is when she was employing her considerable powers of concentration. When she was not, little could lift her from the wheel-rut of annoyance. In an instant her companion could become intensely boring, her surroundings, regardless of what or where they were, vexing. She had envisioned the two of us trail riding up to a remote cabin, the key for which she had procured from the stable owner, but when she realized that I would rather drink bleach than spend time astraddle the broad back of a coarsely carpeted beast of burden, she let that famous focus of hers be atomized. When I tried to interest her in a rented video to watch in bed, she looked at me as if I'd suggested we move to Nashville and become a country-and-western duet.

“Put your clothes on,” she said.

“What?”

“Come on, move. Now! I'll explain on the way.”

She'd remembered seeing a notice on the announcements sign of a church we'd passed earlier. The sign had said something about a recital and she was almost certain she had read the word, “dance.”

“Oh, great. We have a fifty-fifty chance of walking in on a bunch of six-year-olds' ballet recital or their grandparents' social night.”

“At least we'll be doing something,” she said.

“Are you saying that the hopeless romance and acerbic social satire of
The Graduate
is nothing?”

“You're such a little Dustin.”

I held my tongue. It was enough to see her snapped back into alert mode, all moving parts meshing again.

It was a big old United church with a newer hall built onto it, the white vinyl siding of the hall in contrast to the pink granite of the sanctuary. The performance had begun. Gingerly we opened one of the double doors leading into a gymnasium-style hall. The place was almost full. I wanted to back out, but she led the way up to the front row, where two seats in the middle of the right side were empty. I felt all eyes in the room trained on us. Chandra had the look of a child at her first circus performance. She took off her jacket quickly. I struggled awkwardly with mine, not wanting to draw more attention than I already had, and in doing so was even more distracting to the people seated behind us than I should have been. The result was that Chandra, recognizing the performer before I did—there had been no name posted on the sign, simply, “Dance Recital”—took hold of my hand and
squeezed hard.

Jacoba Wyndham had once without warning cancelled a performance in London, before the Queen, in favour of a hastily organized one in a refugee camp in Kosovo. It only increased her cachet. I'd heard a rumour that she was living in a large yurt outside of Sydney, Australia and that she had given up dancing indefinitely. Yet here she was, in North Hatley, Quebec.

My first thought was that Chandra had arranged this. She assured me after the performance that she hadn't.

“I kind of wish Beth had been along with us to see her, she would have loved it.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Only Chandra could so completely close the various compartments of her life that way, each one watertight with no passageways connecting one to the next: Max: Cabin 1
A
; children: 1
B
and
C
; Colin: 2
A
; —no, 2
D
, we don't want to stack the men, do we!—career: 3
B
, etc. And so to her it was conceivable that the wife of the man with whom she was having an affair should accompany them to watch a performance that she, the wife, more than most of those in the audience, could enjoy and appreciate. “Too much of life is lost on those unable to appreciate it,” Chandra would say. Of course Beth, a dancer at heart but issued the least dancer-like body, should be there to see this great artist. What does fidelity have to do with it? And while we're at it, I could hear her say, let's talk about this loaded word, shall we? Infidelity. What if you don't accept the premise of marital monogamy? It's like, what if you're not religious? What then does one do with the word “sin”? Does it become irrelevant and meaningless?

Well, Beth wasn't there, I was, and when I saw Jane I didn't recognize her immediately. I knew Jacoba Wyndham to see. She had had enough exposure in arts-channel documentaries and in newspapers, with profiles of her life and criticism of her aesthetic, that my sincere reaction was, “Cool.” We were getting to see this icon, here of all places. Then, a beat and a half later, recognition and remembrance, and I became flustered, my neck and face beginning to flame, my heart to bang against its bars, ears filling with a roar.

Her costume was a white straitjacket over black floor-length evening gown. She moved in such a way that her impediment was not noticeable unless you were looking for it, because her gait was straight-legged and erratic like the movements of a primitive automaton. Her feet were bare. The trademark stiff leg shot out parallel to the floor, in front, out to the side, as if independent of the body it was attached to, and the toes, those grotesque little hammers I used to massage to remove stiffness, cramp and soreness, were splayed like the claws of a cat held against its will. Like that first one, in the old drill hall, this performance was at times too much to bear and I closed my eyes or looked down at my feet, thinking, Coward, sit up and give her your attention, she deserves that at least. Let the past be past. Her stage persona, so different from the private Jane and yet trailing threads of antecedence from her brief time with Red Bugatti, was still not distant enough for me to be neutral, at ease and unclamped from my still intense regard for her.

After the show, her handlers moved her quickly through a back exit, and people in the audience remained seated or milled in the aisles, bumping the metal folding chairs off their alignment, murmuring to themselves and each other, mumbling their incomprehension. This was not the way they were used to feeling in this space, violated like this, ears still ringing from the industrial cacophony played too loud, their minds still processing the meaning and impact of the dance, although few of these white- and grey-haired folk would have used the word “dance” to describe the way she had moved her body in their sight. Many were there for the experience of being close to such notoriety—word must have spread through the community—and had they been younger they might have tried to claim an autograph or a quick word at the lip of the stage, something, some stardust to rub off on an aspiring artist.

She looked older than she was. Greater concerns than mine had toughened her face, her limbs. She was on a different trajectory, aging in cat years, absorbing the world's toxic residue, its excrescence, using up her body in the service of artistic defiance. If anything could be said to be a sin it was this consumption, this burning away of her youth, her innocence, impetuousness, ingenuous fresh hope, the girl who had tilted her mirror to direct lemony sunshine into my eyes, burning my retinas, blinding me, giving me new vision.

I remained seated while Chandra stood. Having processed the experience, cataloguing it for optimal retrieval, something she could work into a lecture, she was ready to move on to the next fun thing. I was angry at having been ambushed in this way by my past and at not being able to be an objective observer, inasmuch as anyone watching one of Jacoba's dances can be said to be objective, for she implicates you, tricking you the way the slickest confidence artist makes unsuspecting saps his accomplices. Together you steal the floor and the walls, then wait, breath held, eyes skyward, for the ceiling to fall.

“That beats watching Little Big Man trying to act, wouldn't you say, Colin?”

“Why did you do this?”

“I swear I had no idea,” she said, and I believed her. It didn't do much to calm me down. “You used to date her or something, didn't you?”

“Or something.”

“Too bad she rushed off so quickly.”

I grunted an affirmative sound.

“Come,” she said, tugging at my arm to make me stand, “don't be grumpy. Come back with me, come back to our iniqu­itous den, and I'll frame you with my black-stockinged leg.”

She got me to smile, to forget again for a little while, to play and be simple and indolent and indulgent. We did start watching
The Graduate
that night in the motel room but fell asleep before the climax at the church.

After our re-enactment of
le dernier dejeuner
of Isadora Duncan's children, as if we'd heard the same whispered caveat, we failed to make plans for the next month's theme. Some months passed. One day Beth bumped into Max at lunchtime outside Ben's delicatessen. It was an odd exchange, according to Beth. Distracted, Max revealed that Chandra had not gone anywhere in weeks, that she was spending all day at home “catching up on her reading.” Novels, of all things. Chandra, a Milton specialist, used to boast that she never read fiction, that it was a decadent self-indulgent genre. Now she was reading and re-reading two novels, John Irving's
The 158-Pound Marriage
and Ford Madox Ford's
The Good Soldier
. She was going around the house all day in bathrobe and slippers, muttering, “four-sided prison” and “infernal minuet.”

Fall and winter that year she rarely left the house. She neglected her teaching, precipitating the hiring of a replacement for her, and began writing emails to
CBC
radio and to politicians. She kept saying that something catastrophic was coming. She didn't know what it would be or where it would hit. Nobody listened. “I've been out there. I know,” she said. She held a short-lived vigil outside the American consulate, standing for a night and a day on the sidewalk across the street and holding a sign that read, “Atone.” People asked her what in particular she was protesting, but she wouldn't answer.

She kept all her emails. Max found thousands of them in her office at the university, printed out and stored in file folders arranged by date. Most were addressed to public figures and to the
CEO
s of various companies. In a vague, rambling way they expressed her suspicions that a global conflagration was coming. She must have gotten Jacoba's email address off her website, because included in the files was a letter to her and this short reply:

Dear Professor Nazreen:

Thank you very much for your query. I'm not exactly sure what it is you're warning me of, but I appreciate the thought all the same. I don't know if I agree with you about the “demise of art at the hands of the cult of the personal.” If you're saying we have to rescue art from the average person, then I couldn't disagree more. If anything, more people should be encouraged to express themselves through dance or visual art or music or drama. I mean, think about it. What if we did? What if we reorganized the world so that we were all performers as well as audience members? What if, instead of living to the tired-out drumbeat we label, “Normalcy,” we lived each moment as if in a performance? Watch your children play sometime. They sound delightful, by the way.

You're absolutely right about the dangers of militarism and imperialist expansion. We have to draw the line at warfare and violence, unless the art demands it or is corrupt without it. My credo has always been, “Do no harm.”

Yes, I do remember Colin, very well. Please give him my warmest regards. We did some growing up together.

Thank you for asking about the knee. What can I say? It's there. I work around it. Or, rather, I work with it. The injury has defined my style to a great extent. I would be a different performer without it. As for the circumstances surrounding the injury, I don't know why Colin told you that, but he must be thinking about someone else. I hurt it in a downhill skiing accident. That's a very strange story he told you.