Famous Last Meals (24 page)

“What did you say to Max?”

When I told her, she said that the best thing I could do for the moment was to mind the children, the Nazreens' as well as two who belonged to Tim and Angela.

Chandra's brother, Gary, who had flown from Colorado to drive the truck once it was loaded, was trying to keep the children occupied in the living room. A large blue cartoon genie was singing and changing shape every few seconds to an inattentive audience. Tim and Angela's youngest, Manny, decided then that he wanted to see his mother, and began to cry inconsolably when Gary wrapped his arms around him to keep him out of the kitchen. Manny's wails triggered a similar response in Lori and Vaughan Nazreen, who darted past me in an end-run around the couch. This pulled the women, Angela wrapping china plates in newsprint, and Beth sifting bills, wills, and homemade Mother's Day cards, away from their work, the exasperation wry on their faces.

Hearing the heavy rear door of the U-Haul roll up, Gary left to help Tim load boxes. I ducked down the stairs to the basement. Midway down sat a shallow box containing a dozen each of seed packets and empty plastic medicine bottles. I picked it up and brought it into the basement, where Max was hunched over a red toolbox open on the floor.

“What do you want done with these, Max? I thought someone might trip on them.”

“I know exactly where those are going,” he said, taking the box and placing it beside the tools.

“Tell me where to begin, then.”

Everything stacked against one wall was to be loaded onto the truck, while all else was garbage. Armed with this distinction, I began carrying the larger items, a floor lamp, a set of four kitchen chairs, a child's bicycle, upstairs. The children were colouring on large sheets of newsprint spread on the kitchen floor while Angela and Beth put cookware into boxes and dry goods into plastic grocery bags.

“There's an empty chest of drawers ready to go in Chandra's room,” said Beth.

Chandra was asleep on her back on the wide bed, the stacks of envelopes and manila files arranged on either side of her. She was able to concentrate only for short stretches now before having to rest. The papers around her were barely disturbed by the rise and fall of her breathing. I sat gingerly at the foot of the bed. Her deep olive skin that had once glowed, regally, beneath black eyes and a noble nose, so arrogant, always so right, was now like parchment. Her mane of thick black hair, tossed at me more than once in teasing condescension in symposia and departmental meetings and dimly lit restaurants, was now a cropped white cloud. The pupils of her eyes seemed visible through onionskin lids.

Beth said, “Colin, Tim says he has room for that dresser now. Do you want help with it?”

I stood abruptly and the room grew dim. She got me to bend down on one knee and lower my head.

“You've been going at it too hard, mister. Why don't you loosen that?” She unbuttoned my collar. “I bet it's pressing on your carotid sinus.”

After a few minutes I regained my head and set out to prove my fitness, despite Beth's warning, by moving the dresser out to the truck all by myself.

The rest of the day passed as if I were watching a grainy film of it, including my own efforts, projected onto the bare walls of the house. The family renting the house arrived in the midst of the upheaval to swim in the lake, and changed into their suits in the bathroom. When they announced that they had forgotten their towels, Max dug through already packed boxes to find some for them. During this time a woman arrived to look at the kitchen table and chairs Max was selling.

“I really like the set,” she said, “but I have no way to get it home. Can you deliver it?”

“No, I'm sorry, I can't,” said Max.

“Most places deliver.”

“I am not most places.”

“Well, I just thought when I saw that big truck parked outside...”

“Madam, you go outside and look in the back of that truck. Look at how much bloody room there is in there. If I had room enough for a table and four chairs, I would be sending them on to Mile High City, now wouldn't I?”

She left without purchasing anything. Chandra called Max into the bedroom to chastise him for his rudeness and he absorbed her censure patiently. Nothing she said, whether it was that he had tied an antique serving board closed so that it was in danger of being scratched by the cord, or that he was being a tyrant for not having arranged lunch yet, or that the flight to Denver he had booked for her was all wrong because it left in the morning and she would never be able to nap on the wretched airplane in the morning, diminished his attention to her. Nor did he reduce himself in obsequiousness. Never did he reply that bond-weakening utterance, “Yes, dear.”

When I saw him again, Max was holding a glass filled with a thick, brown liquid that resembled chocolate milk. The drink, Chandra's Sludge as Max called it, was a bitter concoction that came in the form of a brown powder in a small plastic bottle, the same type of container I'd found with the seed packets in the box on the stairs. The cure was a combination of four wild roots and barks, all common and native to North America, dried and pulverized. To mix the solution, the powder first had to be boiled in water for a number of hours, strained through a clean cloth, boiled again, and then cooled. Its name derived from that of a Canadian nun who had adapted a native Indian recipe to cure a number of her colleagues of breast cancer early in the century. Each twenty-eight-gram bottle cost fifty dollars and lasted about a week. Until recently the Sludge had been a point of contention between Beth and the Nazreens.

“If you keep ignoring my advice, I can't be your doctor anymore,” Beth would say. Chandra kept drinking the Sludge and Beth kept driving out to the lake every evening to see her.

Because the renting family was bringing in its own refrigerator, Max and Chandra's had to be moved into the basement as the final act of the day. This news came not from Max but Gary, who seemed to be just waking up while the rest of us leaned, sweat-stained and drooping, against various counters and doorjambs in the kitchen. Angela was down at the lake with the children. Beth closed the vertical blinds against the early evening sun, and then stood with her arms crossed watching Gary work with a large screwdriver.

“There's a good part of your weight right there,” he said, leaning the door against the sink. All the food had been removed and either thrown away or placed in plastic bags with the two families' names on them. Beth's and mine, the smaller, contained the food the children would never have eaten: jars of chutney, curry mixes, cans of mushrooms, sardines, pungent cracker spreads. The other, Tim and Angela's, contained breakfast cereal, cookies, bread, four boxes of lasagne noodles, jelly mixes, juice boxes, raisins, and chicken
noodle soup.

Gary marshalled us around the empty shell and we shuffled with it to the top of the basement stairs. Gary and Tim took the heavier bottom end and proceeded down backwards. At the bottom of the stairs the doorway was not wide enough for two to pass through at once. Tim took the weight as Gary crawled under the refrigerator and through the door. During this transfer the pair grunted and swore and laughed through gritted teeth as if this were the activity they had hoped to be doing all day. Tim then had to wait until Max reached him on that side before he could take his share of the load again.

“You'll have to let me take it the rest of the way, Max.”

“No,” said Max, “you are my guests. This is my burden. I have to...”

Gary swore at him to give up his place.

“I'm trapped here until you move,” said Tim. “Gary can't hold that whole back end much longer.”

Max let Tim take the weight and he stepped back up the stairs. On the other side, expecting another step but finding none, I stumbled and sidestepped quickly to regain my balance. As I did so, I stepped onto the edge of the box of seeds and empty medicine bottles. The contents flipped out, the seeds rattling snake-like, the plastic bottles bouncing with hollow pongs around my shoes. My arms gave out and the side of the appliance I was holding toppled slowly. As Tim tried to correct the imbalance, Gary sang out new profanity, and the whole thing crashed to the floor.

“How did those get back there? I moved them out of the way,” I complained.

“I know exactly where they're going.”

“No, you don't. You haven't a clue where those are going. Somebody could've been hurt. Wake up, Max. Just wake up.”

Tim and Gary righted the appliance and pushed it into a corner of the basement. Beth came downstairs and helped Max pick up the scattering of seeds that had burst from their packets.

“They're to go all around the property. Around the boulders. Soften the rocks a bit. For memory and luck. I've known for a long time now where I want them to go. I just haven't found the time to plant them.”

After that we wandered around the house in the falling darkness, picking up toys and crayons and bits of paper, looking for more to do. The truck could hold no more. Chandra's rocking chair would not fit, and so she gave it to Tim and Angela. Max told us to feel free to take anything that had been destined for the trash, but there was now a quickly descending sense that we had only a little time left in which to depart, that to stay was to risk being locked inside something dark and airless. We said our goodbyes quickly as if we were going to see the Nazreens the next day, and then walked up the driveway past the moving van to the road above, where the cars were parked. I got in, moved the driver's seat back, and reached across to unlock Beth's side. She opened the door but did not get in.

“Wait for me, please. I won't be long.” I assumed she wanted to say goodbye to Chandra again. I rolled my window down and listened to the sound of her receding footsteps. From the dark came amplified sounds: water lapping at a dock, a dog barking from across the lake, tree branches rubbing overhead. The screen door opened and slapped shut. I waited for the same sound that would signal her return.

Finally I got out of the car and walked down the driveway, feeling my way more than seeing from one of Max's boulders to the next. Around the final turn the truck loomed, grinning with dim eyes. No lights were on in the house, but from a point beside and just below it, on the slope to the lake, came an irregular flash of light, and I walked around the house toward it.

Max's landscaping plans had included an extension of the line of boulders along both sides of a wide path that led from the front corner of the house diagonally down through a series of terraced sections to the beach. Max and Beth were moving up from one rock to the next. Beth held the shallow cardboard box and a flashlight that she kept trained on the ground where Max sliced open a mouth of soil with a shovel. Beth handed him one of the empty Sludge containers, which he dropped into the hole and tamped down with the toe of his shoe. After she sprinkled in some seeds, he removed the blade of the shovel and stomped twice to close the gash.

They were doing it all wrong. The seeds were much too deep. Max's technique was better suited to the planting of seedling conifers than to perennials. It would take a miracle for any of those flowers to show themselves in the spring. This furtive attempt to carry out his plan by darkness was comical but salvageable. I opened my mouth to tell them I was there and to set them right. All I could get out was, “Beth. I was worried.”

“About me?”

“Yes, I...”

“You shouldn't be. Do you want to help?”

“Help? No, that's okay. I'll just watch.”

When the last of the packets was emptied, the three of us hugged. I apologized for yelling at Max, who said that he would miss us and that he wished we could move to Denver with him. We said we wished we could, too. We told him we would visit as soon as we could.

When Troyer called
to say that he was going to be in the city a few weeks and needed a bed—nothing more, he promised, I would hardly be aware of his presence—I offered him my modest guest room. He had taken one of my writing workshops and was someone I had recommended for residencies and grants. I suppose I considered him something of
a protegé.

At the time of his arrival I lived alone. I spent my days in my attic office, my evenings reading and listening to music. In that indefinite period between the breakup of my most recent relationship and any desire to begin a new one, I was uncharacteristically serene. Problems that used to upset me I dealt with in a workmanlike manner, as if it were not my but my neighbour's front lawn that had to be trenched in order to free the sewer pipe of tree roots, not my but a gremlin's fault that a clogged gutter had led to an ice dam and leaking roof. Solitude, although not a state I wish for myself for the remainder of my days, does bring with it clarity of mind generally unattainable by those entwined in intimate relationships. A day or an entire season can take on a felicitous shape, sprung from within rather than through negotiation. On the other hand, during that time of celibate bachelorhood I was more likely than before to invite company, more likely to chance rejection if only to stave off boredom.

Troyer arrived when he said he would, emerging from a taxi after what seemed, as I watched from the living room window, an unusually long time. He explained that he had had to use his bank card to pay for the ride from the airport and had forgotten his identification number. His credit card balance was over its limit and so he wrote the cabby a cheque. I remarked that in this city the taxi drivers usually took only cash. “You must have a trustworthy face,” I said.

“Oh, but I do,” he replied. “Everyone tells me that. I can't count the number of times I've dined out on the mere assumption that I am an honest man.”

He travelled light, carrying only a leather weekender grip and a good umbrella. The carry-on was in the style of bag doctors used to tote when they made house calls. This one had an inner sleeve for his laptop. He was otherwise unencumbered. He said he didn't maintain an apartment anymore. When he taught his one semester out of three per year, he rented a college dorm room. The other eight months of the year he lived abroad. Paper correspondence, of which he received very little by then, went to his office at the arts college where he had tenure or to his literary agent. It seemed an ideal, attractive life, the freedom of it immensely appealing. He went from friend to friend all around the world, trying never to overstay his welcome. I meant to ask him how he decided when to move on. He had to be sensitive to his hosts, their personality, their ability to accommodate the writer, and their circumstances at that point in their lives. As it turned out, he left before I could learn his trick of never staying in one place so long that he began to smell like yesterday's fish.

I should add that I have not loved everything this author has written. We met before Troyer became published. At that time I enjoyed being a facilitator as much as I did a teacher and took it upon myself to introduce him to editors at publishing houses where I was known. Unfortunately none of these contacts accepted his work, and he published his first collection of stories independently, online, in what seemed a regrettable instance of desperate vanity. In most cases, after the self-published author has paid out more money than the book will ever recoup in sales, and after he has distributed a copy to every member of his family, the urge to write subsides, the fire dying to a weak ember, and the
auteur soi-disant
gets on with leading a more realistic life.

Troyer, however, did not fit that model of defeat. A newly established literary agent happened to read his ebook and within minutes of finishing the collection had signed him as his representative. In almost that brief a period they had a contract with a reputable literary publisher to release the stories in print and to publish his novel-in-progress when it was completed. This pathway to publication has become the norm rather than the exception. The entire industry, its very aesthetic, has been turned on its head. How readers choose to consume their quirky fiction, stories in which cardboard cut-out characters say silly or outrageous things and act with risible predictability, is their prerogative. Troyer, to his credit, was not being untrue to his nature when he wrote his frothy accounts of young, cosmopolitan, urban professionals hooking up, breaking up, crying on each other's shoulder, laughing about childish matters, and exhibiting an astounding lack of civic engagement and personal responsibility.

We would see each other first thing in the morning and not again until late afternoon. He liked to spend his mornings out and about, visiting galleries and museums and writing a few hours in a library or coffee shop before meeting a friend or colleague for lunch. He seemed to have no end of contacts in the city, despite never having lived here. I, on the other hand, have been here all my life and can count the number of people I see regularly on the fingers of one hand. I say this merely to illustrate the difference between Troyer and me. Too much socializing puts me off my work. Even having him under my roof caused me to change my habits and consequently my output, which has never been voluminous. To look at the situation objectively, the unhappy truth was that his presence, however limited, affected me to the point of distraction. I asked myself, was this jealousy? Was I committing that most pathetic offence against art, the personal comparison? I suppose I was. The man was younger than I, had been writing for fewer years, and yet had achieved more. More books published, more critical attention, more appearances at literary festivals and on television and radio, more money earned. In the meantime, those whose opinions I trusted told me that I had a reputation for integrity, literary quality and anti-commercialism. The writer's writer, a particularly dubious distinction. See what that buys you at the grocery store.

Because the results of my culinary efforts are unpredictable, Troyer and I would often eat out at the end of the day, alternating between three Asian restaurants I like and can afford. My house guest was to his credit agreeable in this and in most matters generally. The secret to his ability to live and travel cheaply, I could see, was this highly consistent bonhomie. He went along with you, he sat still in the middle of the boat, he listened while others spoke, his glass always charged ready for the next toast. It was his quiet genius, really. Had he not been a novelist he would have made a successful diplomat or spy.

We were eating Korean sashimi and drinking hot sake when he recounted a story from his latest trip abroad. He had stayed at a French retreat, an artists' colony that had once been a monastery, near the village of Vacqueyras. The administrators of the institution maintained the simplicity of the former religious order, asking visitors to keep to themselves except during meals, refrain from making loud sounds, and respect the natural beauty of the grounds, which ran to many acres and incorporated a large vineyard. A celebrity vintner, his expensive, limited-quantity wines highly sought, grafted new varieties of grape onto established vines of Grenache and Syrah, harvested the fruit and paid the colony a handsome fee, the income helping offset the cost of accommodating
the artists.

The winemaker was none other than Heinz Werner Glick, the filmmaker. Glick hired locals to see to the day-to-day work of pruning the vines, checking for blight, forcing the fruit to work for its water. Sometimes the auteur showed up on the property, as much to be seen as to see to his crop. He was known to enjoy the impact his presence made on the painters, composers, choreographers, dramaturges, actors and writers who might be trying to work. It was even thought he did so to throw people off their creativity. Troyer did not want to believe that this giant of post-reunification German cinema could be so deliberately disruptive. On the other hand, he said, not to test the hypothesis would have been a lost opportunity for someone who depended on the subversive tendencies of the psyche for the material of his stories. And so, learning at breakfast one morning that Glick was there that day, Troyer set out to put himself where the man would have no choice but to speak with him.

If you happen to be familiar with Glick's oeuvre, you know that such little schemes of convenience rarely turn out as planned. A woman obsessed with her child's music teacher destroys her marriage, reputation and career, as well as the nerves in her hands, while learning to play the piano. The very investigative body he established to root out graft and influence-peddling arrests a politician who had presented himself to the electorate as a reformer pitted against corruption. A legendary professional cyclist pushes his grandson to pursue the same rigorous pastime, with deadly result. Synopses reduce a work of art to a mere wisp of itself and many feel Glick has been unfairly branded a pessimist, and yet the curdling of hope does seem to be one of his dominant themes. Some who believe in karma might suggest that the negativity expressed in his work has prevented him from achieving the masterpieces of some of his contemporaries and has kept him out of the inner circle of prizewinners. My house guest might not have been thinking about such matters while he ambled towards the vineyard. Still, I wonder if he could feel his intention turning against him with every nonchalant step he took in that direction.

The filmmaker was standing on an access road that ran alongside the vineyard. The road was paved in brilliant white quartz gravel, which the monks had arranged to be brought from many kilometers away. It was a highly prized surface because it produced little dust, thus reducing the amount of water needed to clean the harvested grapes before they were crushed. Troyer was dazzled by the scene: the shining path, almost blinding in the bright summer sunshine; the deep green and purple masses clustered low and hugging the undulating contours of the landscape; Glick, who had Turkish and Hungarian in his family background, standing, dressed all in workman drab, his instantly identifiable uniform that could also cause him to be mistaken for Fidel Castro, his black beard aimed at the sky, gesticulating angrily; his interlocutor, a trim, athletic-looking woman in her late forties who was dressed in running shoes and lightweight track suit, a headband holding her hair off her face, shifting her weight from foot to foot while listening. Or pretending to listen. Troyer thought he saw her attention stray. The slightest shift of the head, a loss of shoulder alignment.

I picture Troyer attempting to approach the couple soundlessly, his intention hampered by the brittle crunch of gravel underfoot. My onetime house guest is a small man. I would say he is the right weight for his height. He is pleasingly proportioned, if I can make that observation without it being construed as anything more than an aesthetic judgment. A film camera would capture this man's tidy, compact body and economical movements and call it the encapsulation of grace. I noticed, the few times we walked together, that no matter the length of his stride, his feet struck the ground directly in line with his center of gravity. He would lean forward, spine straight and aligned with his neck and legs. It was the subtlest suggestion that he was falling, each step a preventative act. The effect, then, of his curving approach across the lawn and along the snow-white path, must have been for anyone watching from a distance reminiscent of the approach of a hunting cat moving upon stationary game. 

The woman dressed in running gear, Sylvaine Delacroix, was at one time an actor. She and Glick had been married many years earlier during a difficult time of poverty, child-rearing, competing professional desires and demands, and the erosive toll these circumstances took on the union. She appeared in many of his films. I won't say that she starred in them. Her scenes tend to place her in static poses with minimal dialogue and are distinguished by a strong tension between her body's evident desire to move and the physical restrictions placed upon her character. In one such memorable film she is naked standing navel-deep in fast-flowing icy water. As still as she is, after a quarter and then half a minute watching her we would swear she is being carried along by the current. The effect is achieved not by the movement of the camera, the change of angle or strength of lens magnification but by the alteration of light playing over and across her. Light and shadow animate her, the product of cloud flow we feel more than see. Every pore of her exposed skin puckers into gooseflesh. Her arms are held out to the side so that her fingers only just touch the surface of the stream. Our perspective is so tight on her that her surroundings are indistinct. We think of her as being in a mountainous region, although we can't be sure.

In another film she sits while riding in a series of public-transit vehicles. In each bus and train car she is held immobile within the tight pack of passengers sharing the space. The abutting shoulder of the man seated beside her, the bony hip of the woman standing in the aisle and steadying herself while holding the overhead strap, the large baby-carriage and its wailing occupant cutting the character played by Sylvaine Delacroix off from escape. Knowing now that dance was her passion and knowing that as an actress she was more than Glick's pawn, was in fact his enigmatic muse, I think of these early works as cruel exercises bordering on torture. The filming of a single scene can demand the intense attention of an entire day. Shooting, re-filming, changing perspective or endeavouring to reproduce the precise details of the previous take, Glick sacrificed everything on the altar of his art. Was his treatment of his actors, Ms. Delacroix in particular, a justifiable crime perpetrated in the name of a greater good? He was her husband. Did he cease to be married to her while he peered through the lens of his camera at a person in distress? And what use is such a question to someone in a darkened theatre watching the performance?

It turned out that Glick had not been aware that his ex-wife and former muse was staying at the monastery. Their meeting beside the vineyard was as far as he knew the result of chance. Troyer had no way of knowing this, not until much later. He drew near, coddling his assumption that Glick had waylaid her and that Glick was intent on undermining whatever practice, planning, training, meditation, creation of new work or combination of any of these she happened to be engaged in. Tit for tat, I believe, was Troyer's simplistic term for what he as third wheel was intending by way of intervention. He should have kept his distance. This is my assessment, not his. The writer remains on the sidelines for good reason: we lack the ability to take part in life and not mess it up more than it already is. Although we might have the inexplicable power to peer into the future, we tend not to recognize all that a moment holds, its entire significance, until we have had time to turn it over many different ways in our minds. Transformative memory for us takes the place of hindsight; it isn't so much that we look back to see an event for what it was as it is that we rewrite history to make it what in our estimation it should have been.