The Carnival Trilogy (20 page)

Lazarus sought to lessen the shock of the disclosure of the other woman by rambling on a bit about sobriety, the difficult achievement of sobriety in a world that was drunk. He tried to hold her steady but nothing could dispel the naked faint profligate distress in Aimée’s staring eyes.
The dance had begun. She sat in the car beside James and the frame of mutual deception they had played on each other for years unfolded in a flash as the car toppled.

She danced to the rhythm of the accident, she was drawn into a striptease of soul on the bonnet of the car upon Nightbridge stage. Lazarus also danced. He saw himself mirrored in her open faint eyes, trembling lips, astonished brow,
as
she
lay
crumpled
beneath
the
embankment
against
the
road.
What a dance! Aimée sprang up.

Lazarus saw her eyes again, dark as hair yet segmented with the minuscule bars of a ladder, crossed by stars. She swayed before him on the brink of the wheel of the car on Nightbridge stage. The car was dressed with red ribbons. Advertising gimmick in a garage! (Aimée received an additional fee for this.) Car for sale on Nightbridge! Her lips were parted in a faint gleam to kiss a blade of grass and an autumn leaf descending upon the stage and falling beside the parapet or embankment or road. Her brows invited him, repulsed him. Climax. Anti-climax.

And then in a flash she was clothed again on the stage beside the living understudy of the grave. The wreck of the car had vanished into a mist. (I recalled the faint mist standing over my mother’s eyes at Masters’ window above the East Street garden on the day of my father’s funeral.) But in the interval – between the mist of the dance and the dancer’s quiescence on the stage – several orgasmic or
climactic
ghosts moved with Lazarus. They reflected a series of involuntary climaxes or relief, stilled rain upon fallen bodies. She was free of James, wasn’t she, he was free of her, wasn’t he? Let them go their separate ways, she said to Carnival Lazarus, into Purgatory or into hell or anywhere else on Resurrection Road. The shops were still there, food was still
there, records, newspapers. Why should she be guilty of anything? Why should he be upset over her? But she knew in her heart of hearts she was guilty. She also knew she wanted him to be upset over her. Damn the other woman! “I want him to brood upon me,
me
,
Aimée. Upset over me …” The climax of relief therefore – the climax of separation, that they were free to go their separate ways – was a deception. She knew it was. Lazarus knew it was. He held her close and offered himself to her in place of her Nightbridge lover. He (Lazarus) was the living understudy of the grave. He
understudied
the deceptions that men played upon women, women upon men, in every resurrection of hate or jealousy, vanity or love.

He understudied the frames of mutual deception that broke in a flash within the mirror of the dance of life. He
understudied
illusory male bodies in women’s arms in parallel with illusory female bodies in men’s arms through Nightbridge lovers or Nightbridge rehearsals of dual, multiple climax.

“I love James,” she said to Lazarus.

“Is it vanity then,” asked Lazarus, pondering his own lines in the Nightbridge play, “is it vanity, or love, that is hurt, that fractures, when you learn that the one you thought you possessed to brood upon you is possessed by another and broods upon another? Is vanity the root of outraged love?”

“
Vanity
!” she almost shouted. “Oh my god! I tell you I love him. Don’t you understand?” And Lazarus saw he had hurt her deeply. He had wounded her so deeply I felt her anguish as if it were mine and Amaryllis’s. We were both angry. The dream is no respecter of persons. Lazarus had been, to say the least, tactless. He had taken her into his arms to soothe her distress, then he had turned upon her and accused her of vanity, of feeding upon a splintered faint mirror of multiple bodies to achieve an orgasm. Even Lazarus should mind his own business. Not probe, not question, the vanity of men and women who make love!

Lazarus’ disturbing mirrors, fractions of which lingered in my senses, and Amaryllis’s senses, shifted the gears of personality – at the instant of Aimée’s Nightbridge dance
with him – from first to third or fourth dream-person upon the bonnet of the red-ribboned car as if to bring an echo of formidable ecstatic trinity, ecstatic quaternity, into play within multifarious suffering vehicles and bodies in the air, on the sea, upon the Earth. And thus in the dance, despite its deceptions, its schizophrenias, there lurked a nucleus of considerable originality, shared hells, shared heavens, shared self-confessions, shared divinities as well as daemons, shared resurrections as well as orgies, shared vanity so close to authentic affection that the distinction sometimes faded but remained nevertheless to help us define fractions of genuine love, fractions of genuine care, and the mystery of truth.

*

The blow to a universe of vanity that coats ambiguous lovers was a stratagem upon which Masters drew in the mask of Lazarus to gain some knowledge of the whereabouts of the mysterious overseer who had caused his first death in New Forest when he had been mistaken for him by Jane Fisher the First. Aimée and other women in Resurrection Road – who courted a fiction of double lives – might well lead him, he calculated, to seize the devil whose wound he carried and whose guilt he bore. It was a guideline, a dream-chain, to which I clung with immense fascination.

In understudying a sophisticated Nightbridge dancer – whose object in part was to provide a medium of exotic romance, exotic colour upon the ordinary, prosaic bodies of the common-or-garden husbands of bored women – Masters pursued a motif, however slender, that mirrored the
privileged
overseer who had slept with, and cruelly deceived, Jane Fisher the First. Had not he (Masters himself) profited from such privileges exercised and enjoyed by plantation kings and overseers? In sleeping with the women of the estate, the overseer gave an extra glitter, an extra glory, to the banality of intercourse between buried workers, clerks, even politicians, and their wives. Who, after all, could equal the glamour of a prince?

Who better therefore than he, masked as Lazarus, to
understudy
Aimée’s Nightbridge lover? Where better than Carnival Nightbridge to glean information about a character one seeks to confront beyond life and death with the injustices with which one has been saddled in life and which were the occasion of one’s first death, a character whose blood runs in one’s privileged Lazarus-veins of memory?

Masters, dressed to play his part, proceeded to Nightbridge Club to dance with Aimée. He rang the bell but had some difficulty at first in gaining admittance. Aimée came to the door and told the doorman that the resurrected king was foul and
persona
non
grata.

“I hope your damn heart bust open again, Lazarus,” she said. “That will teach
you
the difference between vanity and love.”

He was on the point of leaving when a figure in a great winter overcoat – rich as a fur coat – spoke to the doorman. (Fur coat, I dreamt – where had I seen it or something like it before? Had it not lain on the floor of Masters’ bedroom that day in 1982 when he died at the hand of an unknown assailant in the wake of Jane Fisher the Second?) Lazarus did not see his face in the night but in point of obscure fact I knew that this was the closest Masters was to come to the sovereign daemon of an overseer who long ago had borrowed his face in New Forest. The doorman was instantly agreeable. “Mr Lazarus,” he said, “it’s okay. The play’s started. It started the moment you rang the bell.”

“But Aimée refused …”

“Someone higher than Aimée or anybody else in this club say it’s okay, sir. So it’s okay.”

“Do you mean …”

“The same.”

Masters instantly looked around for his mysterious
benefactor
but he had vanished in a Soho side street. “I missed him,” he cried. “Oh god, so close yet so far.”

The doorman held Masters and pulled him in. Lazarus was reluctant yet glad to enter the club. It was a chill evening
outside. Through a crack in the door he could see – fifty yards or so away – the gleam of a street-light upon the bare arm of a tree. Beneath it the cloth of night had been cut into a square. And beyond the square a church tower loomed black and still. Masters shed his coat and passed it to a young woman with a red ribbon in her hair. He settled at a table inside and ordered a whisky. In a flash – as if a subtle torch had flared or signal been given – the curtains over the stage were up and Masters beheld a winding stairway that rose into heaven. It was a replica, he thought, of the ladder or gate through which Aunt Alice Bartleby had looked down on earth. Aimée now appeared with her dancing partner. They were still, as if frozen, while someone made an announcement to the effect that the real dancer, Aimée’s true partner, was ill and an understudy would perform the part.

“Understudy!” Masters cried with impatience, with
confusion
, but his voice was lost in the music. He felt cheated. Who was this new understudy who took not only the place of the “real or true dancer” but his (Masters’) place as well? He was exactly the same build, the same height, as Masters. Masters half-rose from the table to leave the club, then sat down again. The path to the door was blocked. His heart was beating fast with sudden anger. My heart was beating fast. I had anticipated another dance between Masters and Aimée in succession to the one he had performed with her on the red-ribboned car. But the cue that the mysterious overseer had delivered at the Nightbridge door had changed the rhythm of Carnival theatre into a form I had not anticipated.

The dance or play now revolved around a core of creative anger in lieu of vanity, genuine creative anger that sometimes runs close to fierce love or fierce hate to offset the illusion of vanity.

It was the dance of purgation through creative anger in which Aimée was now involved and though Masters was not with her on the actual stairway into the stars on Nightbridge stage I suddenly saw how profoundly he was involved in the play, in the dance of anger.

All at once the dance enlisted great heaps of soil piled high at the foot of the stairway. These vibrated. A series of dancing mudheads, freshly risen puppets-Lazarus, appeared. They sprang from the stage on to the floor where Masters sat. They occupied tables there. They formed a great circle around him. And as I stared at them closely I remembered Masters’
distinction
between bloody puppets and the art of freedom.

Yes, they were bloody puppets. It was a subtle comedy. They were dead, however active, triggered by strings,
manipulated
. Masters was
alive.
Alive? Risen? Yes, I dreamt that he was alive, that he was risen from the humus of a
civilization
. His anger was real. That was my only proof that he had risen. He had come to the club to seize … Seize whom? The mysterious overseer. Yes, but there was more to it than that. He had come to seize a slender motif, an inner vein, an inner artery in that overseer, an inner current within the wound he carried, a wound that really belonged to the other. His anger was therapy, the therapy of justice he needed to create within his own being through the other.

He might never see his enemy –
the
enemy – face to face, deceptive face within deceptive face, but the originality of therapeutic anger, therapeutic blood rather than bloody puppets was a form of seizure to withstand every ape of the resurrection.

Even as I perceived this, I also perceived that Aimée’s anger, her resentment at the injustice of being labelled vain and hollow, was equally potent. Lazarus – the risen, alive Lazarus rather than puppets-Lazarus – had aroused her. Not that she was beyond the hysteria of manipulated being but her anger was so real that an original transfusion of justice possessed her. I saw those faint wonderful eyes of hers. The languor of her limbs, her faint arms, reached out not only to the immediate dancer on the stairway but towards the puppets-Lazarus on the floor or pit of the theatre. That reach endorsed her outer gaze on the edge of manipulated being. But her inner faint body glanced at Masters as well with the rage of longing, with the certainty of the genius of love, the genius of vocation within her blood, true blood not bloody
puppet. She was a dancer of freedom’s cousinship to epitaphs of fate.

I held Amaryllis close. I knew. And yet … I could not be sure. Aimée was no puppet but I wondered whether the flick of a die on the stairway might tighten the strings around her and about us and change the batteries of anger in the theatre of the world into a strike at humanity that would ape our rage, our longing, our tenderness, and lose the therapeutic originality of inner justice, inner transfusion, inner blood born of transformative organs of power and lust.

A flood of music swept the theatre and lifted Aimée into the sky upon the stairway of Nightbridge, into the arms of the dancer who resembled the overseer of god.

“There is anger and anger,” Masters cried to the dancer with his own body on the stairway of god. “I know the limits of anger. I have ruled and served, have commanded labour and been a labourer myself, have stood high and stood low.”

“Never high enough, never low enough,” said the terrible dancer. “And that is why we deceive ourselves. We project ourselves into the stars but fall far short of the
mind
,
the original mind of angry creation, angry for justice. We project ourselves into the grave but fall far short of the original sobriety, the original seed of the spirit of life. Never high enough to mind, never low enough to original humility, original spirit.”

I saw that the mask of Lazarus had slipped a little from Masters’ face and that it floated between Amaryllis and me. “Is this your gift?” I cried to him, “the gift of true fiction, the gift of the understudy, the living understudy of heights we have not yet achieved and depths we have not yet plumbed? Is this your gift, Masters?”