The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [95]
– Do they want to be doctors or hairdressers? Jean asked, laughing.
– One of each, naturally, said Lucjan from the doorway, taking obvious pleasure in Jean's initiation.
Jean soon learned that at Ewa's parties there was always a project on. Huge rolls of brown paper were unfurled and everyone painted a mural; a sheet was tacked to the wall and a film projected while the Dogs played, sewing together a melody out of silence and the whirring of the projector. Actors gathered in the middle of the living room and, with nothing more than a spoon or a dishtowel, transformed reality – having a Sunday row on a pond or floating in a lifeboat on the North Sea; suddenly they were lovers on a picnic blanket, or thieves, or children on a swing. Jean knew these actors had worked together for a long time, a bodily history among them. She had seen Avery perform loaves and fishes with objects, with stones on the beach, with rulers and wooden blocks, creating bridges, castles, entire cities. But his magic was solitary and intellectual compared with the instantly complex communication between these bodies, the moment continually changing, deepening into humour or sorrow. And sometimes this pathos was intense, and a hole opened, and everyone watching from the edges of the room found their own sorrow pouring into it. Crack! the earth of the scene split open and down everyone tumbled together into the wreckage of memory. And then the actors melted back into the party, and the food and the bottles were passed around again.
Jean's hair was pinned up in a knot, gently unravelling. She had Lucjan's sweater over her shoulders.
– You radiate happiness, said Ranger.
Ranger sat down next to her.
– Does Lucjan talk to you? he asked.
Jean looked at him, startled.
– Yes, Lucjan talks to me.
Ranger stretched out his legs.
– I'm drunk, he said.
He leaned his head on Jean's shoulder.
– What if, Ranger said, the most important, the most meaningful, the most intimate moment of your life was also the most important, the most intimate moment for hundreds of thousands of others? Any man who's lived through a battle, the bombing of a city, a siege, has shared the same private moment with thousands of others. People pretend that's a brotherhood. But what belongs to you? Nothing. Not even the most important moment of your life is your own. Okay, so we understand this. But what about what happens between a man and a woman in the dark, in privacy, in bed? I say there's nothing intimate about that either. You hold her hand in the street, everyone knows what you do at night. You have a child, everyone knows what you did together.
Jean was silent. She felt the damp weight of Ranger's head against her, a terrible sadness. Then she said, in a gentle voice, Do you mean to say that all women and men are alike, that one woman is exactly like another? Or do you mean to tell me that Lucjan has had many women? If so, don't worry, he's told me himself.
– And what do details matter? continued Ranger. Her father, his father, her mother, his mother, the deprived childhood, the happy childhood … Even the particulars of our bodies – at the moment of passion, at that precise moment, she is any body, any body will do.
– Have you never been in love?
– Of course I have. I'm seventy-four years old. But the experience of love – what you feel – it's always the same, no matter who the object of that love is.
Lucjan came with Jean's drink.
– Jean, is he scaring you? Ranger, I wish you wouldn't – that's my job.
Ranger bowed his head and held out his hand for Jean's glass.
– No, said Lucjan quietly. Language is only approximate; it's violence that's precise.
– No, said Ranger, raising his voice. Violence is a howl – the ultimate howl – inarticulate.
– No, said Lucjan. Violence is precise, always exactly to the point.
– It's just a philosophical