Famous Last Words by Timothy Findley

her appearance had improved. Which is to say, her wardrobe. Dmitri’s family had money. Much of it. Now I presumed it was clothing this woman.
    Maybe six and maybe seven times the three of us were
    together. Once, we drove above the city so far back into the hills we had to spend the night in a stone hotel. We had strayed into that pastoral China seen on plates where the willows bend and the bridges disappear into the mist.
    Sometimes we laughed. It would not have been possible
    to live in Dmitri’s presence never laughing, never smiling.
    He played Charlie Chaplin for Wallis, Mary Pickford for me.
    He would play whole scenes with flowers and teacups.
    Sometimes, he brought a Victrola with him and we danced
    73
    She looked away.
    I should not have said grotesque.
    There was a long, long silence—somehow held in her
    hands—and when she opened them, it was to confess her
    marriage to Spencer, of which I had been unaware.
    Then, looking off into the crowd around us. she also confessed her virginity. I sat immobilized, alarmed. Women—
    certainly none that I had known—did not “confess” their virginity. They proclaimed it.
    “It isn’t fair,” she said, “Mister Mauberley. All my life there have been such fine beginnings. And such rotten endings.
    Everyone 1 love is swept away downstream. What is
    a person meant to do?”
    She withdrew her hands into the territory of the teacups, touching them very lightly on the way as if to mark their whereabouts.
    She did not speak again until she had regained complete control of her poise—and then she said: “it seems to me, Mister Mauberley, this world is nothing more than someone’s revenge. We are led into the light and shown such
    marvels as one cannot tell…” I watched her staring off towards some view to which I was not privy. “And then…they turn out all the lights and hit you with a baseball bat.”
    Now she withdrew her hand into her lap. and fumbled
    for her handkerchief. “Well,” she said, blowing her nose and beginning to repair the damage of her tears, “we have to fight back. Don’t you agree? We have an obligation to fight back.” Smiling. “Even if it means we have to pick up baseball bats of our own… .”
    Her fingers, I noticed, however much they shook, were
    brisk as they made their repairs. It is only now—after twenty years—that I see her face as-lacquered; only now that I realize she has never lived without the application of a mask. There is a mole you would never see, for instance, down by the corner of her mouth, which I saw that day for the first and last time. As she worked—she was an expert: her mouth, her eyes, her hair were masterpieces of illusion—she went on speaking through her teeth; her voice as sibilant as something from behind a screen. “That boy we loved is dead,”
    she said. “You wanted him; I wanted him; Now—” she drew a thin red line along her upper lip “—what we have is each other.”
    She snapped her compact shut, giving off a punctuation
    mark of pale pink dust, and said; “I like you, Mister Mauberley.
    I will be frank. You are not Dmitri. You are not my
    beau ideal. But then—in your eyes—I am not Dmitri, either.”
    I smiled.
    “Very well. We can be friends.”
    I nodded.
    She dropped the compact back into her purse. Done.
    “Then,” she said, “there are practicalities. Mister Mauberley.
    If I am to have my life, I must find some means of
    sustaining it. The same, I assume, applies to you.”
    I agreed. All I had was my tutor’s fees, and few enough of those.
    “One thing I had from Dmitri was an entree to that other world where money floats more freely than it does down
    here. I do not mean that was the basis of our…relationship.
    Only one of its side-effects. But one I shall sorely miss… .”
    She toyed with her gloves. “And the same might be said for you. Am I right?”
    It was true—though not so great a concern for me, being a man, as it was for her, a woman and