The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. Sean Dixon
do you describe the cave you lived in before you walked out of it? What did Hell look like before the angels were hurled into it? Was there anyone who felt bigger than life in sixteenth-century London before Shakespeare stepped onto the stage? Did the Meccans have any idea of the power their language contained before Muhammad walked down the hill?
The truth is, the two of us have had enough schooling that we no longer believe in these before-and-after visions of history. History is the history of marketing and publicity; which is the smaller way of saying it’s written by the victors.
And it was certainly not all glory and roses after Runner’s entrance, either.
We said earlier that Du and Anna and Runner were climbing the stairs to a bygone era. But not yet, because the Lacuna Cabal had not yet completed their latest book. Out with the old and in with the new then. Or, more to the point, out with the new and in with the old.
The book we were completing was Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. It was the only book we had tackled all winter, and it had borne the burden of having to distract us from daily life after the death of Ruby Coghill. Grief and loss were emotions that none of us had really experienced before, and we didn’t know what to make of them.
On the day in question, that is, 18 March 2003, just after 7 p.m., we initiated our farewell to this book with a standard ritual we called the Final Indulgence. Aline, with help from a reluctant Emmy, began to read a passage that was agreed to be beloved to everyone. It was about two women who were lovers who pledged to never leave one another, and it contained descriptions of the sea and of November. Everybody cried for some reason at the mention of that word ‘November’, especially Romy, who cried out loud. We cried too, though we don’t know why; we’re crying now, even though we can’t think of anything bad that has happened in November, other than it was only two months later than September. The truth is, we would have wept at the name of any month at all, the names of months being heavily weighted with the passage of time away from September and towards a sad and heavy future.
Emmy was weeping on the shoulder of Romy, quietly despairing that she didn’t have someone like that, someone to love who could love her like that. Nobody was noticing this except for Romy herself, naturally, and her heart was both melting and bursting. Emmy worried quietly to Romy that she was becoming repellent and unclean, that she gave off a scent that said to men, ‘Don’t come near me.’ She felt it went right down to her genes. She also proclaimed herself one of the last of the old-time nihilists, who would think nothing of throwing herself onto a scrum of sailors à la Last Exit to Brooklyn. Though she was also, she said, so fucking tired of her life experiences being governed by stories in books.
Romy wanted nothing more than to counter Emmy’s nihilism by paying homage to her stripes, which were, to Romy, the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and which seemed to pulse with her heartbeat in a way that could be discerned only by a person sitting as close as Romy was now. But she knew that Emmy did not want to speak of such things, so instead she breathlessly protested that no single man, not even a bevy of wild-eyed sailors, could possibly affect Emmy’s perfect genes and declared, perhaps a little too emphatically, that Emmy was as beautiful as she had ever been.
This was overheard.
There had been, thus far in the room, some unspoken tension, because the women of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club were not comfortable with giving themselves over entirely without criticism to a work of fiction, no matter how important or established it was. We tried to maintain a critical distance, so that only the most sublime portions of a given work would stick. But there had been something about this book that had gotten to us, and so we found ourselves, on this evening, ushering the author of Fall on Your Knees into the pantheon of the greats without so much as a whisper of protest regarding length or anachronism or political relevance or anything. And so there was a creeping feeling of embarrassment that perhaps the Lacuna Cabal was losing its edge. Still, though criticism was desired as an outlet, it had to be well-spoken and deserved, and woe betide the woman who let fly for the sake of venting alone. Nobody had dared on this particular evening, and so when Romy was overheard to be speaking quietly to Emmy about beauty and blue jeans, the collective Lacuna Id, in the person of founder and president Missy Bean, spotted an outlet. She turned to Romy and dressed her down for turning her attention towards issues of fashion and beauty at a time when attention had to be paid to more serious matters of literary analysis, to wit: ‘We are tonight attempting to recall the deepest and greatest values of this book, but Romy, it seems, would prefer to speak about … ’, et cetera.
To Romy, who was the perfect Lacuna Cabal member, this was a blow.
‘No, Missy, we’re not.’
‘Oh, Romy, you’re not? You’re speaking of more serious things?’
‘Yes we are.’
‘Could you share them with the group?’
‘Uh.’
‘Books suck, Missy, essentially, is what I was saying. Okay? Happy?’
This from Emmy, who opted in her newfound self-destructive manner to deflect attention from Romy – possibly the only kind thing she will ever do for anyone in this story. She went on. ‘Because for me they don’t do what they’re supposed to do when they need to do them most.’
Missy, shocked, spluttered something about how books, in fact, ‘have no needs, Emmy’.
‘All I know is,’ Emmy continued, ‘and this is what I was telling the poor embarrassed Romy, all I know is, I lie in my bed at night, by myself, trying to read some cosy little book, but I can’t read them any more, because they’re too small, and they don’t matter, and I have to put them down and just get on with it.’
Missy, trying to affect a sympathetic tone, began to assure Emmy that we all knew about her ‘circumstances’, an ir resistibly vague term that prompted Priya to lean over and ask Romy, whisperingly, what those ‘circumstances’ might be.
‘Priya here doesn’t,’ corrected Emmy. ‘But you were saying?’
‘Emmy, if you’re not available for the necessary suspension of disbelief through these tragic circumstances of –’
‘Missy, I’m not saying my circumstances are tragic. God forbid thinking they’re tragic. I know they’re common, they’re so common that, who knows, they might even happen to you one day.’
To Emmy, Missy presented the image of manless perfection.
‘Can we get down to the next book?’
‘Sure, shit, whatever, shit, sure.’
But it was not as easy as all that. Missy had let loose the Id, and it wasn’t going to be so easy to allow it to slip back into the dark crevice from whence it had come.
Priya spoke up now – lovely, sunny Priya – suggesting helpfully that Missy ‘say what the book is going to be so we can get it over with’. To Missy’s explosion of protest, Priya countered that, ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle will vote for whatever you want them to, Missy … ’
Missy, mining a deep-core reserve of calm, asked, ‘What is this, a mutiny?’
‘I’m just telling it like it is,’ said Priya.
‘But it’s not even true,’ countered Missy. ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle can vote however they wish, and besides, it’s not my fault that our resident maverick, Runner Coghill, is missing today.’
Romy said, ‘Runner Coghill is always missing on decision days. It’s because she can’t stand the Final Indulgence. She thinks it’s stupid.’
Missy fixed Romy with a very frank look. ‘Well, I don’t have any sympathy for her then.’
‘Missy, she just lost her sister.’
‘What does that have to do with anything? Anyway, that was six months ago!’
‘It’s