Famous Last Meals (22 page)

Thanks also for suggesting those titles to read. As for my performance schedule, ever since the security incident a few years ago in Nauheim, I no longer publish such bulletins.

Thanks again for your interest. Be well and be good to yourself.

She signed it, “Jacoba.” Not the full name and not Jane Burden. The Jane I had known no longer existed. Maybe she never did exist. We looked for other emails, other forms of correspondence between them, but found none.

“We did some growing up together.” Can any two people truthfully say such a thing? Jane and I were together a short while before growing into different people. If you stay together long enough, you see who the other person is becoming. It's not so much a transformation as a gradual unearthing. Or maybe it's a gradual earthing-over, not necessarily a lesser process when you think about it.

One day I bumped into Tighe Burden on Greene Street. He was helping to transform an Italian restaurant, one I'd thought about going into for lunch that day, into a Prohibition-era speakeasy. The production company's white trailers lined both sides of the street. Thick black power cords snaked along the edge of the sidewalk, crossing the pavement under sturdy little plastic ramps. Down an alley, powerful arc lamps lit a dingy side entrance. Tighe was coming out the front door as I stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up and wondering where I would eat now. This sort of setback never used to bother me. Until recently the sight of a movie set could make me smile like a kid and think about the make-believe being spun there and the famous American actors who might be wandering between takes into bistros on Crescent Street.

“Yo, Colin, who died, my man?”

By way of answer I almost told him about Chandra. Instead I said I was looking for a place to eat. He happened to be heading for the catering trailer and said I was welcome to tag along. The company always spread more food than the crew could eat, and since no “names” were there that day nobody would mind if I “bellied up to the trough.” He found me a visitor's tag and slung it around my neck.

He filled a plate and we claimed two empty folding chairs set up outside one of the dressing room trailers. No one gave me a second look. It was a slow day on the set. The lighting techs were having a difficult time pleasing the cinematographer, who was convinced that the room, in order to be authentic, had to have the feel of a smoky cave. Tighe's job was to construct a series of sliding wall panels that could be quickly changed to disguise the nature of the illegal club. He was most proud of the bar, which could be lowered until its surface was flush with and indistinguishable from the floorboards.

Exhausting the subject of work, we talked for a while about Francesca, who was expecting their third child, and Beth, who had begun, in the last few months, after practically moving in with Max and the kids to help cook, clean, buy groceries, and drive people to their various lessons and sports games and therapy sessions, to talk with a guarded enthusiasm about adoption. Tighe said, “That's good, man, that's a real positive move. Cause, like, kids take you out of yourself. When people ask me what I do now, I tell them, one, I'm a dad, two, I build sets, and three, I manage the club. In that order.”

“That order.”

“Damn straight. Most important job in the world is to make healthy people. The rest of it is dressing.”

“People are pretty resilient. Kids are.” I was thinking of Lori and Vaughan Nazreen, who were adapting slowly to life without their mother, shuffling back to normalcy.

“Oh, it doesn't take much. That I know.”

“Much to...?”

“To strip the threads, man, screw a kid's head around so bad she can't function right.”

“She? Are you thinking about Jane?”

“No.” He folded his empty paper plate in one big paw and leaned forward preparing to stand. “No, just, you know, general case scenario.”

“Right. You have to get...”

“Back to the sweatshop. You know it. I'm gonna be here till two in the morning if I don't rev up. Nice to see you, Colin.”

I thanked him for lunch and told him to give my best to Francesca. He'd almost told me something. Part of me said, Drop it, it's none of your business, but another part, the one that was thinking about Chandra and her correspondence with Jacoba, wondering what she thought the dancer could tell her, wanted to pry.

“Hey, Tighe?” He stopped walking and turned around. “If you ever need to talk...”

“Thanks. I will. Appreciate it.”

“You've got my number.”

“That I do.”

“So what did happen? To Jane, I mean.” A look passed over his face, only for an instant, and I wondered if this was the look he got when he was preparing to deal with a customer who had had too much to drink. “I thought maybe you were starting to tell me something about her.”

“You have yourself a good day,” he said, turning, walking back up the stairs into the restaurant.

I figured that was the door closing tight on the subject of Jane Burden until, two days later, the phone woke us. It was Tighe. He'd been drinking, not enough that he was slurring his words but enough to make his speech slow and deliberate. Yes, he said, I'd been right. He had indeed been referring to Jane. Something had happened to her, something no one outside of his immediate family knew about, not even Francesca. He'd sworn an oath to Jane and his father that he would never speak of it, but he couldn't keep it inside any longer. It was an acid that had eaten through its container.

From bed Beth gave me a questioning look. “Just a sec, Tighe.” I covered the mouthpiece. “It's Jane's brother,” I whispered. “He and Frankie had a fight. He's had a few. I'll try to talk him home.” She burrowed under the covers and I took the phone into the dining room.

In the darkness, quickly becoming chilled, I regretted having pushed with my questions into Tighe's weakened container. This has nothing to do with me, I thought. It was a romantic notion to think that I still had a connection to Jane, that I mattered in the least to her, that what I'd experienced that summer was anything more than a fiction.

“Listen, Tighe, we don't have to do this now.”

“I think we do, Colin.”

“Why?”

“Why. Why. Good question. Because if I don't...” He went quiet.

“What? If you don't, what? You still there? Tell me what you called to say.”

“She...she was always incredible about coping. You know?”

“Jane, you mean.”

“Even when she was little, she had this way. It was like, I don't know exactly, like she could turn into whatever she needed to be. Good girl, party girl, ice queen, loudmouth. Whatever. I could never do that. I had my one thing, big Tighe, big dependable moose. Nobody...nobody thought I could feel bad inside, because I was always big, lovable and tough.”

“So, this thing, it didn't just happen to Jane. It happened to you, too.”

“I guess you could say that. Our mother, her and Dad were fighting a lot. Dad was seeing this other woman, she's out of the picture now, and he couldn't decide if he was going to leave us to live with her or break it off or what. Our mother kept at him, demanding an answer and he couldn't tell her. He needed more time, he said. ‘Stop bothering me, woman. I will deal with this in my own way. If you had any respect for me you would back off.' But it was making her crazy. He was away so much for business, more now than ever, and all she could think was that he was with her. This went on for a long time. Months. Long time for a kid. I was maybe twelve, thirteen. I remember wishing that she would go away and he would come back, she was so strung out miserable, bringing the misery down on everybody. Just go, I wanted to tell her. Give him what he deserves. Walk out. That'll teach the bastard.

“He phoned one day and asked to speak to me, wanted to meet me downtown to talk, said he had something important to say, so I jumped on the Métro. He was at this swank bar, more like a men's club, with leather armchairs and old portraits on the wall. He was dressed in a new suit. Even then, at my age—I mean, what kid pays attention to what his parents are wearing? — I was impressed. He looked like a real smooth operator. I guess that's what love does for you.

“We sat at this almost private table in part of the room that had its own glass doors, and he closed them. ‘Tighe,' he said, ‘I've come to a decision and I wanted to tell you first.' ‘You should tell Mom first, don't you think?' ‘No, it's important I tell you first, son, because you're almost a man now and you have to be strong for your mother.' ‘You're going away.' ‘That's right,' he said, ‘I'm going to live with the woman I told you about. I love her and it's best that your mother and I...what I'm trying to say is that you're going to stay with your mother and Jane will come live with me.'”

“Was that all right?” I asked.

“Hell no, it wasn't all right! What kind of question is that, Was that all right?”

“I meant did you handle it all right. Did you cope?”

“That year I grew like ten inches taller and bulked right out. People who used to pat me on the head, now I was patting them on the head. And strong. I thought I could do anything. I mean, cope? Cope is nothing. I thought I could solve everything. Thing is, our mother, when she heard about our father's brilliant solution, the magic saw-the-family-in-half trick, she went berserk. No way was she letting him take Jane, even around the corner. He got a legal separation and then a divorce. He had a good lawyer who convinced the judge that our father's plan was the best one, since our mother refused to cooperate. Refused to play his sick game, was how she put it. ‘Go, just go,' she told him. ‘You've got your whore, I give you your freedom. What do you want with my little girl?' ‘Jane needs a stable mother,' he said. He convinced the court that her drinking made her unfit. I never quite got the logic. Apparently it was fine for me to live with her, somehow I was immune, but Jane was impressionable, had more to gain or lose.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“Good for you, because I never could and neither could Jane. All we could see was two adults squabbling over what was best for them. A boy for her and a girl for him. Even-Steven. As I said, it was a mess. It took a court order and the police to pry Jane out of our mother's grip. It was ugly. Screaming, Jane crying, Mom being restrained by this cop who used way too much force. Dad was outside waiting in the car on the street. He didn't even come inside. I'll never forgive him for that, for not being there and getting his hands dirty, hearing the noise. He was the one who started it all.”

Beth got up and went into the kitchen. She reappeared with a glass of water. “Colin, it's so late.” I made a helpless gesture and nodded my head. Soon, soon. This was important.

“So she wasn't content to live apart from Jane.”

“You got it, Pontiac. Dad's lawyer had conveniently filed a restraining order preventing Mom from coming within so many blocks of him or Jane, and this was too much for her. Some women would've given up, let it defeat them, or accept it and get on with their lives.”

“I don't know too many who would, Tighe.”

“Ya, well, Mom was not one, she was the extreme opposite. All it did was make her more determined than ever to get Jane back. So she did some sleuthing, hired a detective and found out where they were living, which was in Outremont, and one night didn't she up and sneak in the house and kidnap Jane. The police came in the morning with a social worker and took the kid away to a foster home, and she stayed there for like a week until Dad could convince the family-court judge that he had been the injured party—him!—and Jane should come home. Which she did, but not until after a week of thinking she was never going to see any of us again. You can imagine what that does to a kid.”

I let out a murmur of understanding.

“This happened a couple more times. Mom hanging around Jane's school at dismissal time, taking her for a milkshake, another time to a movie, Dad getting wind of it, calling the friggin' gendarmes and this time getting her cited for violating the writ. Couple hundred dollars in fines did nothing. She comes back more determined than ever. But also I see something new in her eyes, an emptier desperation. She stopped caring about herself, stopped eating, didn't change her clothes or wash her hair. That was when I learned how to cook. Everything. Got myself up and out to school on time. Made sure there was supper for the two of us, even though half of it usually went into the garbage. I thought, If this is what being married is like, no thank you.

“That went on, I don't know, not too long, until we learned that Dad and Jane were moving away, we didn't know where, exactly. The woman he had taken up with didn't seem to be in the picture anymore. She had probably had it with all the legal wrangling and the abductions, Mom waking everybody up in the middle of the night, smashing bottles against the side of the house him and Jane were renting at the time. Now, thinking that she wasn't going to be able to see Jane anymore, she went dead almost. What's the word? Cat-something.”

“Catatonic.”

“Right. I thought she'd gone completely nuts for a while there. Then all of a sudden she's normal. It's like whatever connection was loose got tightened. She fixed herself right up, took care of the way she looked, got her hair done, got a prescription for sleeping pills, started working at the Musée. Everything seemed good again. I missed Jane and my father, sure, what kid wouldn't, but I also believed that this wasn't going to last forever. One day we'd be back together, the four of us, the way it used to be.

“I was in Boy Scouts that year, I remember. All my friends in school were, too. Geez it was fun. When I was doing Scouts I forgot about everything going on at home. We were planning a big overnight camping trip, everybody getting hyper thinking about it, trying to calm each other down with list-making and assigning duties, but I was still buzzing when I got out of the meeting, it was at my old school. Mom was waiting for me in the car. Usually I didn't talk much. This time, though, you couldn't shut me up. I had to tell her everything we had planned, every cookout, every canoe trip, every game of Capture the Flag. It was good, I guess, because I didn't notice just how distracted she was as she drove and didn't notice that we went right by the turn-off to our street. Soon we were in a part of the city I didn't recognize and I asked her where we were going. To get Jane, she said, and I think I started to cry. She reached across and gave me a slap back-handed across the face to make me shut up. Which I did. I just sat there biting my lip.