The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. Sean Dixon
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Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, for the simple reason that she was not a young woman at all. Not that she was old, or that we would not have been able to make some kind of exemption for elderly applicants, but we’re not entirely sure that we should have made an exemption for Aline Irwin, no matter what Missy might have wished.
Still, Aline was there at Missy’s invitation and Missy’s insist ence, and there were certain matters in which no one would ever dare to cross Missy.
Priya, who was new to the group, recalled once having seen Aline, sometime in the previous year, surrounded by friends (presumably including Missy, who did everything she could to protect Aline from the world) in a breakfast café on Parc Avenue. It was something Priya recalled easily for the simple reason that she had never before seen a person who looked so miserable as Aline did that morning, especially in contrast with her crowding compatriots. It was clear that her friends appreciated Aline, indulged her, allowed her to stay the way she was: sitting with her head down and peering through her makeup at the black dress, the stockings, the shoes. They accepted her without complaint and were heroically unaffected by his moods. The way you might sit with a sick friend when it’s many of you who have come to visit and not just one.
But even in this recollection we’ve managed already to make the error of referring to Aline in the masculine. We can’t even prop up the desired illusion of femininity in our own account.
Because it was clear to all of us, including Aline herself, if that permanently alienated expression was any indication, that Aline was a boy. A boy in a dress, as distinguished from a spectacular androgyne, like Prince, or like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. Probably not even a fully grown boy, since he was working so hard to mentally suppress his hormones.
Yes, she was a he, dressed as a she, and no matter how much makeup and sympathy were ladled onto her, this remained a permanent, irreversible fact. She was never going to make the cover of Cosmo. Where the makeup was concerned, you could always more than make out a five-o’clock shadow – a misnomer in this case, since he shaved sometimes three times a day, so it might as well have been a 10 a.m. shadow. His skin reacted badly to the foundation and sprouted abscesses with deep reservoirs. No matter how loosely fitting her drop-waist dresses, you could always perceive the blockiness of her body, the flatness of her chest, the leggings emphasising the power of her thighs, the knobbiness of her knees.
It was appalling.
Missy (we suspect) invited Aline into the Cabal so that she might have the opportunity to meet and get to know ‘other women’ and have them rub some of their womanness off on her. Among other things, she wanted her to experience ‘the reinvention of the self through literature’ and ‘a bit of a haven from boys’.
Since there were no boys allowed in the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club. Not then. Not ever. No exceptions …
Neil Coghill was an exception. Because he was ten and alone in the world except for Runner. And he was not really a member but, rather, merely present to the membership. Otherwise, no exceptions.
The one who was fierce in her loyalty to Aline, who sat next to her, protected her, displayed in the manner of all guardians that most profound test of loyalty – the commitment to a lie – was none other than
Missy Bean,
founder and president of the Lacuna Cabal, of whom we have already spoken. How could we not have already spoken of her? She touched and enriched each of our lives in myriad ways. She gave us books and she gave us one another, and she was lonely and she was from Westmount. She was our captain and our king. If we were the seven sages who laid the foundation, Missy alone was the engineer of human souls!
Which is not to say she could not be barbaric (or, if you prefer, particularly considering the aforementioned allusion to a quote from Stalin: which is to say she could be barbaric). She had the instinct for power and the will to find it. She left no question in anyone’s mind that politics is something pursued for the love of power and the craving of attention. Government is essentially barbaric – ‘barbaric in its origins and forever susceptible to barbaric actions and aims.’11 It can’t civilise itself. But it can certainly civilise the rest of us, depending on what book it elects to have us read and plunder.
And we would have followed Missy to the ends of the earth. As it turns out, Missy did indeed go there, to the ends of the earth, before this story came to its conclusion, and we – the two of us – did not follow her there. So this book is our attempt to fulfil the tenets of our oath some years after the fact.
Missy was a little older than the rest of us – a fact that she managed to conceal fairly easily, mostly by refraining from any discussion of her past. Truth be told, she’d had some experiences of her own, had travelled a bit and was, we’ve come to learn, listening very closely to the ticking of her biological clock. She kept this fact well-concealed, however, allowing us to think of her as a latter-day Sappho, indifferent to the world of men, when in truth she was more like Cleopatra. Which is not to say she was anything like the woman discussed in the previous chapter. It’s true they shared a speculative interest in sleeping with strangers, but the chapter-one girl (Anna) wasn’t thinking clearly about it, whereas Missy was focused entirely on the goal of ten little fingers, ten little toes and a crib, and the reader should not forget this fact. Also, the former girl was interested in being paid, whereas Missy had a rich father who kept her in furs and memberships, and provided the credit card that purchased the heater, in the glow of whose blue flame she now sat next to.
11 Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1993.
Me.
The other I of the two of we: Danielle, at the other extreme end, the other one of the two of us about whom the less said the better, though I suppose we should say something:
We were brought into the club by Missy, essentially as loyalists – sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to her Claudius, with the twins, Runner and Ruby, cast as Hamlet. We were there from the beginning. Missy knew that it would take an effort to control the will of the twins, though she felt that the Cabal was better off with them than without them, since perhaps without them meant against them, and that would have been no good at all.
Though we pretended fealty and friendship to everyone, essentially we represented two extra votes in Missy’s favour. That was the private condition from the beginning, to be overturned only if we felt that, for some reason, Missy was committing a destructive act, against herself or against the integrity of the club. The only reason this caveat was ever discussed at all was that we, including Missy, shared a very high sense of drama, occasionally indulging in fantasies about going mad and that sort of thing.
But why should Missy not have three guaranteed votes? She’d built the Cabal with her own bare hands. Whatever it was that a maverick such as Runner Coghill brought to the table, she was no leader, and she could not have begun to build such an institution on her own. Mercury burns its path, cuts a swath: it’s a destroyer, not a builder. Missy built the Cabal alone.
So, yes, we were her lackeys, meant to counterbalance the influence of the twins, Runner and Ruby, and their essentially wacky ideas. Which means, we suppose, that the two of us were the anti-twins.
And that completes the call of the role for the Lacuna Cabal, 18 March 2003, 7.06 p.m. Here we are, in all our individualised glory, with our conflicts and our quirks.
Though in many other ways – many essential ways – we were, together, a single thing. Like a unit of the army in battle, like the chorus in an old Greek tragedy, like the Scooby-Doo gang. We were then, and always will be, the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club.