Famous Last Meals (26 page)

When they practised from a stationary beginning they were able to complete the step to the choreographer's specifications. Leading to the intersecting roll, each dancer performed several intricate moves that were themselves demanding and not easy to remember. The young man achieved his lead-up steps fluidly with a natural cadence that gave him the right timing. The former actor, on the other hand, was struggling. Troyer could see her thinking about what she was doing. It showed in her face. Because she could not see her partner those few seconds before they came together in the roll, she began to balk, pulling up short or glancing over her shoulder for reassurance.

“No!” shouted the choreographer, a woman with a short fuse. “It has to be blind. Trust your instinct,” she commanded. “If you fall, you fall. You do know how to fall, don't you? Does she speak English?
Comprenez-vous, mademoiselle
? Yes? Take a short break, please, and compose yourself. Perhaps we should try this with another girl.” She turned to her assistant, a slip of a boy with a clipboard, and said something in a low voice.

Every rehearsal reaches a point beyond which further work is counterproductive. The dancers broke for the day. Sylvaine was towelling off and donning her warm-up gear, wrapping a light scarf around her neck to keep from tightening up, when Troyer approached her. Did she have a few moments to chat? He wanted to make amends for so rudely interrupting her and Glick the other day. And, he confessed, he was intrigued. Could she assuage his curiosity and tell him what it had been like to act in the films? He told her that he had been an ardent fan for years. “Please,” he said, “if you don't mind, would you explain this dramatic change in your professional life?”

She regarded him coolly. “Who are you, again?”

He told her, sensing she did not care to know.

“I don't trust writers,” she said. “They take so much more than they are prepared to give.”

“I like to think that what I write becomes a gift to whoever reads it.”

“Then you have a naïve concept of gift giving, Mr. Troyer. Every novel is baked from the ground bones of real victims.”

Despite the lacerating sting of her criticism he remained diplomatic. He reminded her that he was there, as was she, to work creatively, and not as a journalist or a prying paparazzo. He was no vampire feeding on celebrity, contrary to what she might have decided about him.

Eventually she warmed to him. They walked between the outbuildings. The stones of the barns and vineries were sun-bleached, the whitewash on the dining hall and dormitories newly applied. They came to the vineyard where Troyer had witnessed the couple conversing so intently. She liked to walk the rows, she said, up one and down the other. It helped her visualize the elements of the dance she was learning.

“When I walk nowhere in particular, buffered from the larger world as in a maze, my mind takes flight. True, it lets me review the work, the demands made on my body, but more than that I make contact, energy connections. I feel a power enter me, up from the ground and in through the soles of my feet. I become like a lightning rod. Have you ever experienced such a thing, Mr. Troyer? Your body becomes nothing more than a conduit.”

Yes, he said. It happened sometimes when he became lost in his writing, when he would become suspended in an eternal now, an unmoving, unchanging moment of creativity during which nothing existed beyond the screen, the words having appeared magically, put there by an unseen hand.

As they entered the section devoted to Glick's hybrid grapes, she admitted to what he had suspected, that she had contrived to be there when the German would most likely be checking the progress of his crop.

“It isn't what you think,” she said, bending to a crouch to inspect a plump bunch growing near the ground. “I don't want anything from him, nothing material, that is. I surprised him in the same way you surprised the two of us, Mr. Troyer. Something in the cant of your head and the trajectory of your approach, not direct like an arrow but oblique, curving—it told me you were up to something. You wanted to be
le sabot jeté dans la machine
. It's not right?”

He admitted to it. For as long as he could remember he was someone attracted to the misdeeds of others, particularly those in power who abused their position, be it legal, financial or moral. For example, Glick liked being the storm cloud that blocks the sun at the garden party. Well, Troyer vowed, such a disturbance would not go unanswered, not as long as he could play the role of balancing avenger.

“Interruption in the form of correction. How protestant of us,” she said. “How boring.”

That couldn't be all of it. She didn't care one way or the other whether or not her former Svengali liked to be the mischief maker disturbing his fellow artists' shit.

“You are a more interesting man than you make yourself out to be, Mr. Troyer, but ultimately avengers are sad lonely characters. Wouldn't you agree? They think they are righting wrongs when really nobody thanks them for what they do, and often they become scapegoats after the act. The punisher can't bring back the murder victim, nor can he restore fully the original item stolen, since it will from that point on always bear the memory of the crime. And revenge for what? An overly active ego? My God, without ego great art would never be made.”

Her harsh assessment of him hurt. With a few choice words she had reduced him to a petty agent of dubious justice, while at the same time suggesting that if he wasn't a more interesting, complicated man than he seemed at first glance to be, she was going to be sorely disappointed.

In the twenty minutes they walked together through the vineyard, Troyer forgot about everything, his writing project, his reason for interrupting Heinz Werner Glick, his critical success and modest sales, and gave all his attention to this woman, with whom, he came to realize, he shared a remarkable number of traits. They were both people not fully actualized unless in service to a power greater than themselves. In Ms. Delacroix's case, she was a being of rare talent unable to exert her skill unless interpreting the vision of another. Troyer—and I recognized this in him early, from that first writing workshop in which he was my tentative student—could not write unless he was thinking about the way his stories were going to be received. The work reveals this with embarrassing clarity. His is a conditional voice, one that continually clarifies, justifies, makes sure at every turn that not only do we understand his point, we are allied to him in that understanding. It could be his most annoying trait, that assumption, more accurately a presumptuous claim, that we are as glad to see him on our doorstep and hear him ringing our private doorbell as we are happy to read every contrived, derivative thing he has issued into print.

I should point out that I felt this way about Troyer and his writing until I read
The Woman in the Vineyard
, his most recent novel, which, incidentally, he dedicated to me. Even without his touching acknowledgment of the part I played in the book's creation, I would have come to a radical re-evaluation of the man's worth. I mean, of course, his place in literature; his worthiness in personal terms demands more space than I can devote to the question here. And yet, can the man and his work really be separated? Moreover, how can relative worth be assigned to a human being? We are born into a world, in this country at least, that assumes we are all equal regardless of circumstance. No life is of greater value than another. Only what we do and make sit comparable to other actions and products, and even that valuation arrives fraught with difficulty.

I am trying to determine what about
The Woman in the Vineyard
makes it so markedly better than anything Troyer has published to this point. I think it has to do with making himself, or whoever stands in as Troyer, an elemental figure stripped of all but one function, and because of this someone emotionally vulnerable. His main character is a playwright in love with a woman who has spurned his advances and who also happens to be an actress, not a star although someone who could become one. Unwittingly, the playwright creates a drama tailor-made for the woman, a part that draws on her peculiar strengths, the way she moves and uses her voice. Knowing what Troyer has told me about Sylvaine Delacroix, I immediately recognized her in the character of the actress.

Contrary to expectation, the jilted playwright has not created this vehicle in order to promote the actress in question. Instead, he has done so to ruin her career, writing a part so demanding that she can only fail in the attempt. She is on stage for every scene but two of a three-hour play, with almost as much to say as Hamlet. On top of that she must perform a number of exhausting feats of physical endurance. If he cannot love and be loved in return, he will ensure that the object of his affection never enjoys the attention of anyone she might wish to embrace, so defeated in spirit will she be.

You can guess what happens. The unintended result of this nefarious scheme is that the Sylvaine Delacroix-inspired character rises to and exceeds the expectations of the role. She gives the performance of a lifetime. Instead of being undone by it, she comes to define herself by the role. The play becomes a long running, record breaking, critically acclaimed hit that travels the world for years afterwards, with her reprising her character many times during her career. Conversely the playwright is punished by not being able to write anything comparable or even worthy of being staged.

On the basis of such a synopsis the reader would be excused for dismissing the story as being a rather thick morality play. What makes it intriguing and Troyer's novel so remarkable is the way he uses the actress to reflect so much about motivation in the modern age. She chooses to accept the poisoned part because, unknown to the playwright, she too wants to experience career death. She believes that her true calling is to be a modern dancer and that before she can effect that change she must commit ritual suicide. Hardly remembering the playwright or his protestations of love, she sees only that her agent has delivered the very thing she has been craving, a part that would leave her so humiliated it would be as if she had died so that she could be resurrected a different person. A born-again dancer. Her suspect reasoning was that the only way to become a great dancer was to fail catastrophically as an actor.

What neither she nor the playwright could see was that she was in that punishing, mortifying role the embodiment of everything the audience craved, a character in worse straits than they, a woman so bent on self-annihilation that her pain becomes the most highly prized entertainment imaginable, a person who in losing personhood becomes shorthand for end-times consciousness. In the few dark days remaining, it says, let us laugh scathingly at the victim, thereby alleviating for a brief time our corrosive fear. Let us usher in the last chapter of the world by taking delight in the suffering of others.

Anything the world knows about Heinz Werner Glick has come by way of conjecture drawn from his work. In his film based on the Swiss murder, for example, Sylvaine Delacroix plays the part of the young lover in the rowboat. In the real-life story the young woman was a maid serving in the household of a very rich man, a banker thought to have made his fortune storing large quantities of purloined Nazi gold. Notably his biographer asserts that Glick was the child of a lady's maid serving in a large German house before and during the war, and the suggestion is that he was the offspring of a dalliance between the maid and her employer. She was allowed to continue living in the house, working as before and letting her son be raised as a member of the man's family, a brood of seven other children. What was the addition of one more to a progressive home buffered by wealth and relatively untouched by war?

This did not mean that within
die Familie Glick
little Heinz was treated as an equal. He was still a bastard, a product of the lower class. He was made to do the bidding of the other children, who could be diabolically creative in the ways they found to torment him. The head of the household, the banker, was a haughty, emotionally distant man whose attention seemed always directed elsewhere and most often towards his work. His wife considered the maid's continued presence and her very existence an affront barely countenanced. Her dirty little boy would be made to know his place.

Heinz feared the woman as a child fears witches, hags and the sorceresses of fairy tales. The other Glick children were cared for by a nanny, their exposure to their mother limited to mornings and evenings, when she would shower them with effusive attention. Little Heinz had only his own mother, who never had time to herself let alone time to spend with him. She worked from the moment her eyes opened in the morning until the instant she fell exhausted, often still wearing her uniform, into bed late at night.

In the film, Sylvaine's character, the maid in the rowboat, becomes a key witness in the prosecution's case against the heiress. Glick's vision, no doubt fuelled by his own childhood memories and his mother's difficult position, becomes the nightmare experienced by the maid. Only she has seen the bundle the size of an adult body hit the water, although her boyfriend says he heard the splash. She is the one who remembers the name emblazoned on the yacht's stern and under cross-examination maintains her assertion that she had no prior knowledge that the vessel belonged to the heiress. She has not been fed that information, she contends, nor coached in her responses by the prosecuting attorney in the case. She becomes the state's best chance to win a conviction.

Glick places Delacroix in the witness box for almost the entire film and for most of her time on screen. She stands throughout. The lighting, her restrictive clothing, tightly draped, binding, the box-shaped stall that contains her, and the oppressive questions are all meant to hold her in place. Unremittingly the defence counsel makes her restate the details of what she saw. Her good character is called into question. What resentments did she have against her employer and the moneyed class in general? Was it not true that she had a baby out of wedlock, that the baby's father was her present employer, and that the boy had been taken from her? How intimately did she know the young man who was rowing the boat that night? Was it not the case that she had been planning to break off her engagement to him, because she was romantically involved with the heiress's husband?