Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel

Author:Fiona Maazel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Twenty-five

Every gathering has a core guest who thinks she can’t possibly outstay her welcome. Tonight we have three: Wanda, Eric, Marcus. The talk is about Tabu, which is still in the DVD player. Now that flat-screen TVs double as wall art, a silent movie can turn into ambience real fast. I am decided to watch it again once everyone leaves. I feel like I have new information to unload on my experience of it. Because the thing about love in Bora-Bora—the movie, that is—it mobilizes all this Golden Bough stuff to inveigh against the System, which affects the natives and white folk alike. We’ve got these lovers, primitives, who are denied each other by force of law. She’s gotta preserve her virginity for the gods, he’s gotta buzz off. The couple flee to an island governed by the White Man, who exploits their naïveté. The boy falls into debt. The girl drinks champagne. Inter-island politics regard the pair as chattel. The boy discovers graft. The girl gets mettle. And the movie, it says the hydra of convention will nail you one way or the other. Lop off the first head with a bribe and a second pops up, saying blah blah ritual, blah blah virgin. I imagine the hydra allegorizes a whole bunch of things besides convention. Like: Betray your vows only to confront the specter of your four little girls back home in Norway. Take up in your beloved’s hat company only to discover she’s married someone else. Snatch your beloved from his fiancée only to watch him marry your best friend.

I sidle up to Eric and Marcus, who are staring at the screen. “This part kills me,” Eric says, just as the boy takes a last look at the ship escaping with his adored.

“Wait, but he drowns?” Marcus says. “Why can’t he just swim back? Oh, never mind. It’s a metaphor. I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” I say. “It is a metaphor, but maybe not the way you think. Not: I can’t live without the love of my life, but: I should die now so that I can reexperience this death by heartbreak and learn from it. That’s what Agneth would say, anyway.”

Eric looks at me funny. Like my good sense is on the lam and what is this twaddle?

I raise my glass and toast Aggie. I am not certain when I switched to gin, but I think it was a good move.

“To Agneth,” Marcus says, though he hardly sounds committed. I’m not even sure why he is still here. Perhaps because we shared our adolescence and there’s a camaraderie there you can’t erase. Alternately, given the way he’s ogling Eric, I’d say camaraderie be damned.

Mother and Wanda are gathered around the coffee table. We convene. Mother asks Jumbo Prawn to join us because she’s been on her feet for hours. Wanda has her shoes off. Eric starts telling Marcus about an abandoned missile site he saw for sale on eBay for three mill. It’s got an 1,800-gallon septic tank and a two-story silo underground.

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