“He had learnt I was carrying on with another man under Nightbridge,” she said. “That’s the name of my club. I saw he was upset the morning he left. But I thought nothing of it. He was always so quiet, you know, and I felt the cloud would blow over.”
“Is Nightbridge a cloud that blows over?” asked Lazarus.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t be mean to me. We need to deceive each other a little, some of the time if not all of the time, don’t we? I’ve come to you because he thinks the world of you and he’s changed and I’m worried he may do something bad to himself.”
She was weeping, half-genuine guilt, half-stifled, ominous pleasure. He passed a handkerchief to her. She dabbed her eyes. Her features were a mixture, a paradox. Fragile, eggshell solid, exotic ghost, natural but artificial body, the strip-tease of the soul that made her a great success when she danced in the Club Nightbridge.
“What do you think I should do, Lazarus?”
Lazarus looked intently at her. “The accident,” he said softly, “happened in the late afternoon when James was driving back home. Not in the morning when he left you. Is it not possible that something else, someone else, not you, Aimée, was on his mind?”
“He was brooding all day,” she protested, “all day. It was me. He’s a careful driver. He drives so smoothly I could stand on the bonnet of his car and be safe. I could dance …”
“I know you can,” said Lazarus.
“It’s ridiculous but he says if he hadn’t dreamt of you at the last moment he would have died. What about me? Suppose I had been sitting next to him, and I had dozed off too, would I have lived?”
“You would have danced with me,” said Lazarus, “on Nightbridge stage. I am the grave’s living understudy. I could take the place of your lover. James wouldn’t mind.”
Aimée had not heard Lazarus’ response which was spoken under his breath. She cried, “And that’s why I have come to see you, Lazarus, in case James spake of me to you. I need help.”
Lazarus looked at her even more intently. He saw beyond lucid dream that she was worried about James. And yet there was something else she desired, something that infiltrated her guilt. Was it that James’ sudden accidental death would have freed her, would have been a legacy to her to construct his epitaph in dance and to bring her Nightbridge lover home? Would it have given her, James’ death, the impulse to dance with greater mourning/ecstatic abandon than ever before?
To care for a loved one, yet desire his death, is nothing new. Her guilty desire to see James dead was true but — if anything — it strengthened the bond between them. She needed him. She needed him to fill a dual hole in her affections. She needed him sometimes fictionally dead, concretely alive, sometimes concretely dead, fictionally alive. The knowledge of his presence at home or at work — performing the daily, the nightly chores — gave spice to her Nightbridge affair. The deception she practised prepared her for the greatest figure, the greatest dance, she would ever perform with the grave’s living understudy.
“Look, Aimée,” Lazarus said at last, “I assure you there’s no need to feel guilty about James. He’s a quiet customer, as you know, and I know from something he confided to me in the factory …” he hesitated then plunged on, “that he was having an affair with another woman.”
“Another woman?” Her eyes were incredulous. Lazarus had stunned her. It was the first cue she received in respect of the coming dance.
“Yes, yes, you see it was not just you he was upset over. There was another woman! She threatened to leave him. She wanted a car and though his pay was good he couldn’t manage that. He hadn’t yet paid for his own car. He showered her with gifts but she said no. Time to draw the curtains on their little act. On the day of the accident she left him for good. He was upset, yes, and if he’s downhearted now it’s because he’s sober. One can be quiet as hell and still drunk inside. Some quiet people commit some terrible crimes! James is sober now. Not just quiet. He’s fasting. His stomach aches. He survived but he knows what death is. No more cannibal promiscuity if death sobers one, mind you, it isn’t always the case, death is also a heady champagne, ask any fast driver. James is truly sober now. No more cannibal promiscuity, each intent on eating the other’s wages of body and soul.”
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.