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.