The Epicure's Lament (17 page)

“Don't interfere in my marriage, Hugo. It's in enough trouble already.”

“Well, if I hadn't interfered tonight, then I wouldn't be able to warn you now that your wife is looking into seeing other men. Not only that, during the course of the dinner party she asked your quote-unquote friends Bun and Stephanie to help her find one.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Again, that startled look, as he realized that some of the other characters in his play had scenes sometimes without him.

I cocked an eye at the ceiling, squinting as if I were trying to decide exactly how much information he could handle, as if I were tiptoeing around him because there was no sense in upsetting him more than necessary. I waited just long enough to give him the impression that there were a few things I had decided not to tell him out of concern for his frail emotional condition.

“Well,” I said, drawing the word out skeptically, “Marie sort of announced, I suppose the word is, that she's ready to date again. Your wife, the mother of your children. Stephanie immediately trotted out a couple of likely candidates. Jim and Arnold.”

“I don't know,” Dennis spat savagely, “any Jim or Arnold.”

“And, interestingly,” I said, “the only people in the room tonight who seemed to have any interest whatsoever in defending you—or, rather, your marriage—were Vero and me. Blood, it appears, is thicker than water.”

“Vero can't stand me.”

“That may be.”

“And what do you care about my marriage?”

“I care about reuniting you with your wife and small daughters, who are barely out of diapers, and who need to grow up under a father's loving guidance. Isabelle in particular is going to need a lot of protection. Evie I wouldn't worry so much about. She can already take care of herself.”

“That's true,” he said. “I worry about Isabelle.”

“Dad would have wanted you to stay with the woman you married. The way he himself did. That's what Whittier men do, they stay with their wives.”

Dennis snorted. “I don't see Sonia anywhere around the house these days.” Another of his wildly courageous forays out onto the bright, thin, and treacherous ice of badinage.

I gave an abrupt bark to acknowledge this game attempt at humor, then pulled my trump card from my boot. “Well, you will very soon,” I said. “My wife and I are reuniting. I'm putting, as they say, my money where my mouth is. We were not raised to be divorced, Dennis, nor were we raised to allow our children to grow up without a father underfoot. I am not divorced. Neither are you—yet.”

“Well, I'm going to be,” he said. “Just so you've got it all straight.” He took an emphatic swallow of wine.

I took a moment to knock back some whiskey and pour
myself some more, then asked slyly, “How's that book you're reading? Ringing any bells?”

He looked at the cover of the novel as if it would tell him the answer. “All the marital goings-on?” he asked. “What? I don't see what you're getting at.”

“You mess with legal marriage at your peril.”

“Right,” he said, although he obviously didn't see at all. “That was a long time ago, in Russia, Hugo. And, frankly, I don't believe Sonia is coming back.”

“Well, she is,” etc., etc., until I had to go up to my room and produce the letter from my wife and pretend that I had written back encouraging her to return instead of doing everything in my power to keep her far away from me forever as well as our fearsome spawn, etc. By the time my dullard of a brother finally understood that I hadn't forged the letter from Sonia and I wasn't bluffing about all this for my own unworthy purposes, quite a lot of my bottle of whiskey had somehow disappeared, and it was after one in the morning, and my leg was aching to beat whatever band was playing anywhere, mariachi, marching, garage, swing, or brass. Dennis had likewise made impressive inroads on his own bottle of wine.

“So it appears I'll finally meet my niece,” he said with half-sloppy sentiment.

“Well,” I said, “it does appear that way, yes. But I would bet any amount of money you care to name that she doesn't look anything like me.”

“Why is that?”

I raised my eyebrows and waggled them, which made my scalp move over my skull, a slightly creepy and slightly pleasurable sensation I was in no hurry to repeat.

“Maybe you should ask Sonia that question,” I said, “because I sure as hell don't know.”

It was time for bed, so we turned out the lights and took
ourselves upstairs. I walked with all the normalcy I could muster until Dennis peeled off on the landing for his own (temporary, temporary) room and I could gimp my way to the tower room I've made my lifelong home.

November 4—Tra-la! The lovely Carla is back at her post, brightening my twice-a-day cigarette runs, gracing me with the deliriously warm and fantastically fuzzy delusion that I am not entirely alone in the world, there are others like me, others who have no real business holding down jobs, speaking frankly to strangers, being entrusted with small change or the keys to the till, etc.

“You're back!” I cried.

She handed me my shiny pack of cigarettes with an urchinlike grinning-ear-to-ear expression that is not the most flattering to her face, since it has the unfortunate effect of accentuating the puffiness of her cheeks and squeezing shut her eyes, which are her best and indeed only really good feature, being clear, blue, sparkling, and filled with a certain impish light. But I didn't mind; that smile told me all I needed to know about the requitedness of my feelings for her. I envisioned her at once on the old Whittier iceboat with me in the wintertime, riding along the ice beside me, clutching a package of Lorna Doones to her large-breasted parka'ed chest, the icy wind in her hair.

“Hi, Hugo,” she said in her husky voice tinged with the local accent, the real voice of my youth, no matter what I may have told Louisa about her own husky voice. “How ya been?”

“I been just swell,” I replied, settling in to my old perch, out of the way of the flow of customers, leaning on the counter at the end, where no one would jostle me.

Oh, how we chatted. There seemed to be a great deal for us to say to each other. First there was the matter of the utter lack
of developments in the government's so-called efforts to capture this autumn's national villains, the anthrax mailer and the former would-be playboy and rich oil brat Osama. In Carla's opinion, the government is falling down on the job and she doesn't care who hears her say it, she's as patriotic as the next person but this administration is just totally unworthy of leading the greatest nation on earth. While she talked, I noticed, as I always do, the heaving swell of her enchantingly oversized bosom beneath her olive-green smock, her name tag riding the crest of her left breast like a surfer hanging a glorious ten upon a majestic wave. Those are womanly breasts on a slight and girlish frame, the milk-rich bags of a madonna intended for serious childbearing, meant to have a toddler still nursing at one while the new baby clutches experimentally at the other and all around her the supplanted postinfants clamor for their old feeding stations… and yet her limbs are lanky, and her full, round, oversized head teeters on the frail stalk of her neck. These juxtapositions of paucity and surfeit I find exceedingly, aesthetically erotic.

I think I must have slipped into a bit of a reverie, fixated upon the Kubla Khan I saw before me, in need of no opiates as long as Carla was in front of my dreaming eyes, as real as anything else I know of, when suddenly I came to with the instant, dismaying awareness that her male relative, my old friend, had entered the store and was fixing me in his sights.

“Well,” I said, “hello. I'm beside myself with joy to see that you've allowed your lovely niece another whack at the cash register.”

Carla looked at me, startled, then a grin spread sneakily across her face, a grin I was flummoxed by. This wasn't, probably, the most tactful remark I could have made. There were a few other customers in the store, within earshot and seemingly with nothing better to do than eavesdrop. This remark had the
triple effect of alerting the customers to that funny business between Carla and the cash register, and her uncle to another brand entirely of funny business in my professed joy at her return, and Carla to the fact that I knew about her criminal behavior. It was time to go, I could see that as well as anyone else in that family-run Stewart's franchise.

I went out to my truck clacking my heels together mentally with elation. Carla is back!

As I drove out of town I saw him again, that man, that face…. I drove right by him, our eyes met, I drove on, he drove on. He didn't turn his car about and come after me with a sawed-off anything, he drove on peaceably, like the good citizen he has no doubt become in the interim since he was a sinister low-level mobster and I was a two-timing kept boy. Shlomo, his name came back to me. Shlomo Levy, Shlomo Levy of Brighton Beach, hired by his cousin Tovah to dispatch me to Hades. I eluded Shlomo Levy then by slipping out of town. I've eluded him all these years but, I have an uneasy feeling, no more.

He's not looking for me. He's not here to find me. He can't be.

It was all so long ago, but the icy sensation of recognition made me realize that, to my corporeal self, it was yesterday.
Les neiges d'antan
have caught up with me.

The irony is that ostensibly I don't care now if I get iced. Actually, the real irony is that I don't care, but the other-Hugo someone who lives alongside me in this wreckage does, some vestige of that younger self. My mother might call this someone my astral body. Or my etheric body. My mother would say…

Tovah would say I was about to get what I deserved.

I myself would say that Shlomo is not following me and I don't give a damn any more what he does.

Tovah could be dead by now. For all I know or care.

I was an old hand, an expert, at handling older women, giving them what they wanted, being whoever they craved me to be; I was raised to do just that by the proto-archetype. Tovah needed me, I needed her. Or, rather, I needed the books I read, the clothes I wore, the meals I ate, the bed I slept in. She was forty-two years old and could not get enough of me. She said that she had a hungry, aching feeling all the time, an engorged feeling in her vaginal canal that made her insatiable, that only fucking could assuage, and only momentarily. I myself, being eighteen, with an identical engorgement problem, had an identical hunger and need, at least at first, at least until I met Annika and we began meeting on the sly and I began bestowing all that appetite on a girl my own age, and then, mysteriously, inexplicably, I began to run out of juice sometimes, and guess who figured it out? Tovah was no idiot, her animal native intelligence clued her in to the fact that her plaything, the boy she'd taken in, was now taking her in.

One day in her Fifth Avenue penthouse with Central Park laid out below in shades of glistening green, Shlomo and Tovah plotted my demise, and I only found out about it in time to escape—which I was fairly happy about, because in those days I felt my stupid life was worth preserving. I happened to overhear them. Actually, I was about to go into the salon to bring Tovah her afternoon tea, a ritual she had induced me to observe for the simple reason that she liked being pampered, she liked having me pamper her, and she liked to have afternoon tea brought to her and then to fuck all afternoon long. She must have intended me to overhear her and Shlomo. I have parsed it all out in the ensuing years, having had a great deal of time to consider each plot point from every angle and get it just right in my own head. Tovah must have known I had an assignation later with Annika in that very park below the window at which
she sat. I had begun to contrive reasons for leaving Tovah's bed early. I liked very much to fuck Annika in the Rambles with all the homos and drug addicts watching. I liked to lean her up against the wall that bordered Central Park West and go at her from the rear with pedestrians passing by high above, oblivious. A twitchy Negro fellow in a baseball hat often lurked along the path within eyeshot of us, thinking himself unobserved. We called him the Charleyhorse, because Annika sometimes suffered from them in her feet or calves when he was nearby. Not always, but often enough to create a kind of association in her mind.

“There is the Charleyhorse,” she would grunt through her teeth, her hands splayed on the brick wall, the light from the leafy trees playing over her freckled, slitty-eyed face. In ecstasy she resembled some sort of slinky little beast.

Anyway, somehow Tovah figured out what we were up to. And apparently she wasn't happy about it.

“I want him taken care of,” she was saying in her gravelly voice to someone I couldn't see. “He's playing me. I won't have it. You know what to do.”

“Leave it to me,” said her cousin Shlomo, whose scary, high, nasal voice I recognized immediately. “Not to worry, it's done.”

That was the day I left New York forever.

Tovah had inherited millions from her Brighton Beach carpet-king father. She had pretensions to class, but was un-apologetically florid, which is to say obese. She loved food, she loved sex, but she denied that these were anything but the highest intellectual and aesthetic and spiritual passions; she pretended to study the
Kama Sutra
, to pore over Brillat-Savarin, to be an epicure rather than a glutton pure and simple. But no epicure allows her body to balloon, no gourmet shovels food into her mouth many times daily and each time, whether she is hungry or not, grunts in salivating ecstasy over a pastrami
sandwich on rye with a dill-pickle spear and potato salad on the side, and, as young as I was, I saw right through her affectations and self-delusions and gave her what she wanted, which was straightforward pastrami sandwich, good and hard, not those spiritual fancy-ass Eastern techniques and poses she affected to know all about and to be “very curious to try.” She lay in her billowing, beautiful bedsheets made of the softest cloth—not satin, because satin was tacky, but some sort of dense, very soft cotton, I think it was—she lay there like a mountain I had to climb again and again, a mountain I struggled with, carrying many pounds of food and water through storms and ice and strong winds, up into the heady realms of oxygen deprivation, far, far up into the clouds, real life a tiny dot below, seemingly so far away it didn't exist any more, whatever it was. She was like a geographical formation, Tovah, whereas Annika was a young leopardess, smaller than me, and younger, firm and hot and elastic to the touch; Tovah's flesh was clammy, quivering, pale. Her mouth was a sucking sea creature. Her limbs were vises that clamped my head to her flat beige nipples, between her spongy thighs.