The Epicure's Lament (18 page)

Annika had come to the city from Sweden to study English literature at Columbia. Her mother, somehow, had contrived with Tovah that Annika should live with her because of the ancient connection between them: Tovah had studied as an exchange student in Sweden one year as a teenager and had stayed with Annika's mother's family, and now it was time to return the favor.

After Annika arrived, there was nothing else but for me to seduce her. How otherwise should this plot have developed? Fierce, sexy Annika comes from Sweden and the kept boy is unable to resist the temptation to have her: this was the only possible thing that could have happened.

Instead of understanding my needs—I, whom Tovah
professed to adore—instead of sympathizing with the young lust of her wards, instead of appreciating all the favors I performed for her, she tried to have me killed.

I've borne Tovah a grudge all these years for trying to punish me for doing what I had to do according to the laws of the universe. The one thing that has saved me from viciousness where she's concerned is that parallel fact that she arranged it so I would overhear her, giving me just enough time to get out of town under my own steam.

There is much more to the story, of course. Primarily the question of what Shlomo is doing here: here of all places, here in the Hudson River town of my youth.

That day, I walked with my tray right into Tovah's drawing room as if I hadn't heard anything and stared hard at Shlomo. “Hugo, Shlomo just dropped by for tea, could you get us another cup?”

I eyed with some trepidation his overbite, schnozz, arc of paunchy cheeks, snarly rat-faced pallor, eyebrows as see-through as plastic brush bristles. He sported a soul patch and long sideburns that didn't become him. He fancied himself something of a hipster, this Cousin Shlomo. I'd never liked him. He was menacing in an overtly slimy, rather than an elegantly subtle, way. He would have been the obvious choice to be fingered in any lineup anyone put him in. He didn't like me; he considered me a pansy-boy freeloader and would have loved to sock me in the face. The only thing that stopped him was his cousin's cloying affection for me.

“How's it going, Shlomo?” I said nervously.

“Forget the tea,” said Shlomo, flicking his glance my way and then retracting it. “I gotta go. Like I said, Tovah, it's done.” And off he trundled.

I was headed out of town on a westbound bus two hours later; I never saw Tovah or Annika again. Maybe Shlomo trailed
me to Port Authority, saw that I was headed out of town, and considered it a job well done.

November 12—Tonight is my dinner with Stephanie. The pain in my leg is less bearable than usual. Of course I'm compensating for this by smoking more cigarettes than ever, since that's the only thing that calms me down.

Just stopped writing for a while and smoked another one, looked out the window at Erasmus and his feathered cohorts hopping around the branches chattering. They were having a very lively discussion out there just now about something—the shocking goings-on of the birds in the next tree, the location of a few new bird feeders within a ten-mile radius, the likelihood of a storm, whatever it was they were agitated and het up about, interrupting each other, sometimes talking all at once. Now most of them have flown off, apparently in agreement about where they were going and why, but Erasmus is still on his branch. He's either an alpha male who makes everyone else forage for food and bring it back to him, or, more likely, a female, staying behind to mind the hearth. What do I know? I can't tell whether birds are male or female, these average-Joe species without distinctive sexual plumage. This particular species all look alike; the males didn't get any bright coats of many colors like the peacocks’ shimmering drapery, the blue jays’ iridescence.

The sky is a heavy white. It's three o'clock in the afternoon; the river looks flat and turgid, the trees are tattered, dulled. It's warm today, and still; the day feels as if it's got its breath held. The storm is sitting overhead, pent up and sullen. As for me, I am exploding out of my skull, or wish I could. Erasmus is watching me with sharp black eyes, fat-chested curiosity. I'm watching him right back, although I have no idea what we expect to learn from each other. If I met him in a bar I wouldn't talk to him.

What intelligence resides in the interplay between two beings? None, as far as I can see. When people are in a room together they feel compelled to talk. Marie's dinner party, for example: people sat around a table eating together, eating well-prepared food they didn't pay nearly enough attention to because they felt compelled to talk. I speak, therefore I am not. Talking precludes thought or consideration; most interpersonal yakking is prompted by the concomitant desires to appear to be something and to get something, commerce and advertising masked as “social communion.”

Erasmus seems much more at ease in his own feathers, at home in his tree, now that his pesky compadres have gone off and left him alone.

These are brave words written by a man who has a date with a married woman in a few hours. I have stage fright. I suppose it's only natural to feel a certain degree of nervousness about this impending evening from start to finish. Regret for having initiated this entire dalliance. A slight fear of Stephanie, who I have an uneasy suspicion is not my inferior in any way, and who moreover has my number, assuming I have a number. Trepidation…

The first time we met, I didn't know her and expected nothing. Now I know her and want her again. Vulnerability has set in, self-doubt, all the things I remember from my youth and mistakenly thought I had jettisoned in middle age.

Would I rather not see her at all?

Well, no. I would rather see her than not.

Lately I'm finding myself increasingly embedded in other peoples’ lives, which nauseates me and fills me with fear.

SECOND NOTEBOOK

November 16—I met Stephanie at the bar of the Turtle Inn, the Black Orchid Lounge, as agreed. We never made it to our table, because neither of us was hungry, and evidently we both had our own reasons for wanting to get as drunk as possible. We stayed in the bar and drank three martinis each, during the second of which Stephanie had an odd confessional meltdown.

That was four nights ago, by my count.

And now I'm back from Atlantic City, where Stephanie insisted we go, straight from the Black Orchid Lounge. We drove in her car and stayed for three days at Resorts, in a room high above the Atlantic Ocean, which glinted in the hard morning sunlight with a sinister invitation, mocking us where we stood, trapped like flies behind suicide-proof glass. At night, all we saw
in the window were our own pale naked reflections, engaged in a number of interesting contortions.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

“I made Bun go to Marie all those years ago because he never wanted to have sex with me,” she told me at the Black Orchid Lounge, during our third round of martinis.

I gave her a look intended to discourage any further revelations about her marriage.

But she went on. “He still doesn't, and the only difference in the situation is that I've given up and accepted this stalemate. He's dangling the prospect of conceiving a baby like some carrot in front of my nose with a paternal twinkle in his eye, Hugo, and you cannot imagine how dismaying it is to be confronted with that at bedtime.”

“I do not care,” I said.

“Want to know what his problem is?”

“I do not care,” I repeated.

“I'll tell you: he's a pedophile.”

I stared at her for a moment, debating internally with myself: whether to pursue this objectively interesting topic, or to continue trying to keep at bay any further revelations which might prevent me from getting Stephanie into bed again, on the theory that women who talked to other men about their marriages weren't likely to sleep with them afterward.

Curiosity won out. “What do you mean he's a pedophile?”

“He's got the hots for children,” she said impatiently. “Isn't that pretty much the standard definition, Hugo?”

“How do you know? Why are you still married to him?”

“Well, I found out—a while ago, when I was so angry at him and he never wanted to touch me.”

“That's funny,” I said. “Peculiar, I mean. Dennis told me Marie kicked him out because he never wanted to fuck her. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around in
marriages—I thought wives were supposed to withhold sex and husbands were supposed to complain.”

“Who told you that?” she asked, surprised. “Not about marriage, about Dennis and Marie?”

“Dennis did,” I repeated.

“Well, if you ask Marie, you get a completely different story,” she said.

“What story?” I asked, hoping it didn't involve anything about Dennis's attraction to Stephanie herself, and hoping to steer her away from the subject of her own marriage now that I'd imprudently allowed it to rear its head.

She took a deep breath; the infusion of oxygen to her brain must have caused her to change her mind about telling me whatever she had been about to reveal about Marie. “Anyway,” she said. “About Bun. This is serious, and I'm really sort of at my wits’ end about it now. I found what I guess would be called soft-core child pornography under his side of the bed in a manila folder about two years ago; I guess I was supposed to think the folder held a law brief or something, and leave it alone, but I came across it when I was looking for something else to do with a case we were handling together. Ironic. I was horrified, beside myself, I'm sure you can imagine. Kiddie porn. I mean, not anything really bad, it was sort of tasteful and seemingly innocent, if you can imagine tastefully innocent kiddie porn, but I know porn when I see it, like the guy said. I tried to tell myself it had to do with a case; I thought maybe it was for his research; I tried to think it was anything but what it was. But when I confronted him about it, he blurted out that he was attracted to children. It was almost a relief for him to say it, I could tell. He said he had no desire to have sex with a child, it wasn't that, but he was attracted to them sexually. He said it was different. And he was struggling; he wanted to change, he couldn't stand feeling this way, it seemed hard-wired and he
couldn't stop it. He said he had been about to get help.” I was going to ask a question, but she forestalled me. “Why did he tell me? He tells me everything. He is incapable of keeping anything a secret. He likes to shock people, anyway.” She forestalled my next question just as deftly; I could see her in court. “Sex has nothing whatsoever to do with it; not any more. I'm still married to him because I like him, we understand each other, and we're in the same business.” She laughed shortly. “Actually, I used to like him. Lately he's been driving me insane. Maybe that's what I'm doing here with you.”

“Does he like boys or girls?” I asked, despite my innate aversion to talking about Bun. I had been wondering.

“Little girls,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Has anyone ever brought charges against him?”

“No, because he's never really molested anyone. Never even come close.”

“Well, then, I have to ask: what's the problem?”

She gave me a dark and scornful look. “It could erupt at any time,” she said. “He swears it won't. That only makes me more suspicious. Repression is a dangerous thing where sexuality is concerned.”

“Resulting in adultery?” I said. “Well, I suppose that's another story.”

She didn't seem to hear me. “He never even told me he had this quote-unquote problem until I began confronting him about our pathetic and frustrating, for me at least, lack of a sex life, and then one night it came out. Although he spent two years in therapy with Marie, I'm not convinced she entirely cured him of it. How can you be cured of what you are? But according to the didacticism of current parlance, no one is just plain crazy. No, it's a disease. Well, some diseases are incurable. It's all so fucking tedious, frankly,” she added distractedly, lighting another one of my cigarettes. “And it compounds my desire not to have children.”

“So,” I said, “just so I have this straight: Bun has pedophilelike urges but has been through therapy to control and cure them, and has never once acted on them.”

“Right,” she said. “That's exactly it.”

“Well, I have strong urges to disembowel my brother and fondle the cashier at Stewart's and ram my truck so hard into the rear ends of slow drivers they get whiplash, and those urges don't seem to be curable either. Far be it from me to try to defend your husband, but honestly, in a spirit of intellectual inquiry, let's look at the facts: he married an adult woman; he hasn't molested anyone; and, Stephanie, you surely must agree that the potential to commit heinous acts exists in all of us. That's where ethics and morals come in, if they come in, which they often don't.”

“Forget it,” she said, smiling in spite of herself and waving her hand in front of her face as if the smoke were suddenly bothering her. “I should have known you'd be on his side.”

“I'm not on his side.”

“Let's change the subject,” she said. “Let's talk about nothing at all.”

“With pleasure,” I said.

The tension between us dissolved immediately: it had no history or heat behind it. It's a strange phenomenon, talking and drinking. You talk and talk and talk, and drink and drink and drink, and it all vanishes into air, into hot air, and memory retains only a flavor of the undercurrent that usually runs unnoticed beneath all social commerce, and is most present during these often confessional, feverish, impassioned, heartfelt, rambling, almost unconscious conversations. I was quite aware of Stephanie's arm on the table, its blond hairs brushing those of my left arm, skin not touching, feeling as if a nest of ants were gently wandering over my forearm. It was not at all unpleasant, but this no doubt had everything to do with the fact that I knew it was caused by the proximity of Stephanie's arm hairs
rather than a tribe of pismires. And I recall the changing shape of her mouth as she talked, listened, smoked, laughed, grimaced, drank, stared off into space.