Dinner Along the Amazon (32 page)

“Who?”

“All of them,” Conrad said with a kind of vehemence Michael had never heard from his friend before. “All of the God damn Powells. God damn sons-of-bitches.” Conrad sat disconsolate, still barely visible.

What, Michael wondered, could have happened to Conrad—usually so resilient and now, apparently, defeated by the mention of a mere name. They had spent all their school days laughing. Not that a person could go on laughing forever. Michael was perfectly aware of this and of the darker things that had affected Conrad’s life. But this was something new; unknown. As if the laughter had escaped and Conrad could not locate it.

“I suppose,” Conrad said, “this means Fabiana will actually bring him with her. Jackman. I suppose this means I’ll have to face him…stand there and actually shake his God damn hand.”

“I suppose so. Does it matter?”

“Yes. It matters.”

“Why?”

“Won’t go into it. Later, maybe. After they’ve gone. Not now. The son-of-a-bitch…”

“You’ve said that. Several times.”

“I know I have. Leave me alone.”

“You know I can’t leave you alone, Con…” (Michael was using a swishy, sibilant voice—the one he always used to tease Conrad.) “I adore you.”

“Don’t,” said Conrad. “This isn’t funny.”

“I’m sorry.” Michael lighted another cigarette and handed it through the mist to Conrad. Ever since Conrad’s father had died, three years ago, there were things you couldn’t talk about. Not always having to do with Fastbinder senior (whose name had been Karl). Sometimes with mysteries Michael wasn’t privy to. The causes of Conrad’s silence: the long sojourn abroad in Italy and Spain; his sudden reappearance; Rodney Farquhar; Fabiana Holbach Powell…God knew, any or all of these things could and should be the centres of conversation. But, more often than not, they were the cause of snapping jaws and bitten tongues.

“Change the subject,” said Conrad. “Help me understand what’s wrong between you and Olivia. Give me something to laugh about.”

“You think we’re going to laugh about that?” said Michael.

“Maybe,” said Conrad. “Is there another woman?”

“No,” said Michael. “I wish there was.”

“What do you mean? Is there someone you love?”

“Yes.”

“Someone you can’t have?”

“Yes. I suppose you could put it that way.”

“Who?”

“Olivia.”

“Oh.” Conrad drank from his glass and took a drag from his cigarette. “Have you ever seriously thought of falling in love with me?” he said.

“I wouldn’t know how to behave in bed,” said Michael, trying to be funny: failing. “What do you do with Rodney?”

“I admire him, dear,” said Conrad. “He adores it. I tell him he has the most beautiful pudendum known to man or boy. A palpable lie of course. But Rodney believes it. Sometimes I pull it for him.”

“Don’t be so God damn crude. That’s disgusting.”

“Well—you asked.”

“It’s so childish.”

“Precisely. And Rodney is a child.”

“And you? What do you get out of all this?”

“Notoriety. Open doors. Rodney’s connections are quite spectacular, you know.”

“But you don’t need open doors, Con. Every door is open to you.”

Conrad was silent. Then he said: “was.”

“You mean to tell me you’ve taken up with that young man just to get through a few doors? It’s grotesque.”

“How the hell else am I supposed to get through? Who else would take me? I’m a forty year old faggot without a cent to my name.”

“That’s only temporary, Con.”

“You’re damn right it is. Any minute now, I’m going to be a forty-one year old faggot without a cent to my name. And stop laughing! Rodney’s getting restless. The young always do. They wake up one morning and they see you. That’s why I always insist on separate rooms. Never let your lover see you, Michael. It’s death.” Conrad held out his goblet. “If anyone turns up here tonight, it’s only going to be because Rodney Farquhar asked them. I may be the attraction—but it’s Rodney’s circus.”

Michael said, “That’s ridiculous” and poured more scotch.

“It’s not ridiculous. Alas,” said Conrad, lying back in the bath. “I overheard him on the phone. ‘
Do come and see old Conrad again. He’s so amusing. Tells such wonderfully funny stories. Even gets drunk and falls down…but never loses consciousness. I tell you, it’s a scream. He once had a whole conversation with the Princess of Rheims lying flat on his back in the middle of the floor. The whole room flocked to him. People were actually introduced while he lay there. The footmen brought him drinks and got on their knees to serve him
.’ I heard him, Michael. He could sell tickets. But I can’t. I’m the one they all come to see, lying down on the rug. You do have a rug, I hope.”

Michael could see Conrad, now. The steam was beginning to dissipate. His skin was alarmingly pale; his arms and shoulders lacked entirely the tension of muscles; his neck was like a girl’s, stretching to hold the tremulous chin in place and the large, round head with its dank, stringy hair seemed unable to contain his skull which pushed against the skin like a swollen melon about to burst. His hands were almost ridiculously fine; waxen, beautifully shaped and manicured…

“Please stop staring,” said Conrad. “Tell me about Olivia.”

Michael did not say all of this that follows. He only said the parts he could articulate. The rest—the precision and the syntax—were in his mind, but silent under a cloud of scotch and daydreams. Downstairs, he could hear Olivia setting the table in the dining room—telling Rodney she didn’t have anything that matched by way of crystal and china—all because Mrs Kemp had her own definition of the word ‘set’: “
break eight and leave four
…” Rodney could also be heard on the telephone, ordering food from Fenton’s. Grendel was found in the hall closet and came up the stairs to lie outside the bathroom door.

Michael said: “When you said you always insisted on separate rooms, I understood. Our bed—Olivia’s and mine—is divided down the middle by the Grand Canyon. We might as well live in separate hotels.”

Conrad glanced at Michael, huge and majestic, just a shape in the steam: backlit—hovering on the toilet seat—holding both the bottle and his goblet—his head turned sideways, looking for the words. Michael was six foot four and he had a club foot that no one ever talked about. It affected his walk, of course, but not outrageously and on the occasions when it pained him, he would remove the boot and rest the foot on a table or a chair. He was resting it now on the edge of the tub.

She’s gone away somewhere, Con: gone without going, of course
.

Conrad waved his hand in the soapy water, watching it vanish.

Now what am I? A sort of bachelor, living in her house; always on the periphery of Olivia’s life. “Goodbye, Michael.” “Goodbye, Olivia.” “I’m going to the other end of the sofa, now.” Gone. Like that
.

I saw a movie once. One of those “Nature of Things” on the CBC. It was a film about some tribe in Borneo. One of those primitive tribes—still living almost a prehistoric existence. Ceremonial killings. Sexual segregation. Ritual circumcision. Unbelievable savagery. The way they treated one another—slaughtered their animals—slaughtered their enemies. Three things stood out: three I will never forget. One was the pig thing.

The women with children lived in special houses—groups of women and children—until the children grew to be a certain age. And they had these pigs, you see, as pets. The women and the babies and pigs all lived together and, the way it was shown, they seemed to be quite happy. Then the men would decide it was time to have a nice feast of pork and they would come and drag away the pigs and they would kill them. The women’s pets, you see. The children’s pets. But it was only the men who got to eat them. Pork was supposed to induce some special kind of magic. So off they went—the men—to their bachelors’ quarters where they’d roast these pigs and sit around having magic dreams.

Another thing was the women killing their babies. But only their boy babies. Only their boys. But it wasn’t always…I mean, they didn’t necessarily kill every boy.

What you have to know is, the women did all the work. The only thing they didn’t do was hunt. But everything else was left up to them and they had to do it all with their babies on their backs and their children dragging along behind them. You could see it must drive them mad; all these children and all this work and, all of a sudden, there would be this moment when one of them would take off down to the river. Where she would drown her baby son. Not quite dispassionately—certainly with anger—but suddenly: coldly—methodically—without remorse. It was awful. You knew it was revenge for how the men had made them live and for what the men had done to their pigs.

And then there was this other thing—the third thing I remember.

This is about the bachelors. Even the husbands were ‘bachelors.’ And they moved in and out of the women’s lives—mating with them—not ‘making love’ but truly mating, animal style. And stealing their pigs and watching the women—always from a distance. There were these huts—retreats—high up in the mountains where the bachelors went. Also, there were these compounds where the growing boys were kept. Not just kept with the men—but, really, kept apart from the women. And this was some kind of privilege. Different, you see, from the dowdy huts and the little, crowded farmyards where the women lived with all the pigs and babies. The men and the boys had contests. They played games and laughed. They created a culture of male totems…

“Why?” said Conrad.

“Fear,” said Michael.

That was the basis of it. Fear. Partly disgust and a sort of mystical distrust of the women because of menstruation. But also a childlike fear of the power of women to give birth. And this fear was real and so tacit that, even though the men had segregated the women—even though they had succeeded in debasing them and disinheriting them, the women taunted the men. And they got away with it. They stood on the hillsides in groups and they laughed at the men in the compounds and they dared the boys to come out and have sexual intercourse. Dared them with all kinds of lewd, graphic gestures and always laughing. And, of course, the boys wouldn’t go. They were afraid. They backed off. They hid. Or else, they came outside the compound in an army and they’d kill the pigs. Sometimes, too, they made war on their neighbours. Anything, rather than go to the women.

“Are you sure it was really the women they were afraid of?”

Michael did not answer this.

Conrad pulled the plug and the water began to surge toward the drain. He lay back watching it ebbing, revealing his pallid, hairless body.

“Anyhow, that’s how I see myself now,” Michael said. “A kind of ritual bachelor, living in retreat. Taunted from the hillsides. Being watched and listened to. But silently…”

“What about her pigs?”

Michael thought of the yelling matches and the slamming doors and the undone, promised things. He also thought of the silence with which Olivia seemed to be rebuking him. “I guess I’ve killed a few,” he said. “But I haven’t had the benefit of any God damn magic dreams.”

The last of the water drew away with a great, loud sucking noise and was gone. Conrad lay there in the empty tub, with his goblet in his hand and his toes sticking up.

After a moment, he spoke and he said, “This is how they found my father. Just exactly three years ago. The twenty-ninth of April. With his wrists slashed.”

“Today’s the twenty-eighth,” said Michael.

Outside the bathroom door, Grendel threw up the remnants of Mrs Kemp’s toona sandwich. It was now 6:45. The guests would arrive at eight and still no one knew—but Rodney—who they would be.

“Conrad wants an egg.”

“But we’re going to eat in an hour-and-a-half.”

“I don’t think he wants it to eat,” said Michael.

“He’s going to throw it at someone, is that it?” Olivia was undoing the boxes from Fenton’s and setting the contents in bowls and souffle dishes. Rodney was arranging her flowers in crystal vases on the cutting board.

“All I know is, he wants an egg.”

“He wants it to lift his face with,” said Rodney. “If you have a pastry brush, you’d better send that up, too. And a nice little dish to separate the egg in.”

“Has he been doing this long?” Michael asked.

“About a year,” said Rodney. “And only at parties. It makes him look Chinese.”

“All we need,” said Michael. “The Empress of China.”

They arrived in the first warm rain.

There was a girl whose name was Louellen Potts who had once been one of Michael’s students. She was now out taking care of other people’s children in a daycare centre, wasting her talents as a first rate critic. She had come, this evening, ostensibly as Rodney’s “date”—but she seemed to have an ulterior motive: at least, in Michael’s view. She was one of those dreadful women who hound you with their beauty while they beat you with their mind. Michael cringed from the thought of what lay ahead: Louellen attempting to best him at every turn in the conversation, opening one and then two more buttons of her blouse and thrusting her breasts into the lamplight. If only she were less attractive, he could be sure of winning.

Olivia rather liked Louellen Potts. She was one of perhaps six students both she and Michael had encountered in the classroom and the lecture hall over the years. What Olivia instilled from
Heart of Darkness
, Michael destroyed with
Frankenstein
. Kurtz and the Monster, walking hand in hand: that was the future, according to Michael.

When Fabiana Holbach Powell arrived, she was not with her husband, but her husband’s brother Tom and Tom’s wife Betty. Fabiana’s husband, Jackman, was enigmatically “abroad.” The word “abroad” was delivered by Tom, while Fabiana looked the other way.

They had drunk for half-an-hour, waiting for Conrad to come downstairs. Michael put on some passable tapes (acceptable to everyone, that is, except Louellen) and the atmosphere was actually bearable. Under the influence of Cleo Laine, things loosened up a bit. The sailing voice cut through the dreadful, early chit-chat and very soon people were asking freely for “another scotch” or another glass of white wine. If only Louellen would stop exposing herself, life might be endurable.