The Epicure's Lament (19 page)

A couple of hours later, we were in her car on our way to Atlantic City for some reason having entirely to do with the volatile but not unhappy combination of her desire to go and my desire for her. I left my truck in the parking lot attached to her office building; she promised it wouldn't be ticketed or towed. She asked me to drive. The windshield was besieged with a constant spatter of rain. We listened to the skritch-skritch of the wipers and smoked cigarettes. Air blew in the cracked-open windows smelling of diesel and wet asphalt. I drove just fine on animal reflex and muscle memory. Stephanie was restless from all the vodka. She quivered with a coiled, rebellious, unhinged defiance, an attitude that never failed to provoke untrammeled lust in me when I encountered it in girls in high school, and little had changed in the meantime; in fact, I had become a puppet for her to do with as she liked. Her packed suitcase turned out to be stowed in the trunk; she was supposed to be going there for a conference, she said, which she had no intention of attending now, even though she'd paid and was registered. It had started that afternoon, and Bun thought she'd already left, but she'd missed a day of it to make our date. She had planned to drive there tonight, alone, after our date. Dragging me along as her escort, I was meant to infer from this, was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But I inferred no such thing: I had the strong feeling that she had planned all along to bring me with her.

We got into Atlantic City in the middle of the night, technically early Tuesday morning. We checked into our aerie and flopped fully clothed onto the hard synthetic bedspread with its no-doubt unspeakable bacteria count; we fell into twin comas. When we woke up it was noon, and I had all sorts of things
raging on my body, a headache, thirst, an erection. I opened my eyes to find Stephanie's eyes staring directly into mine. I looked back at her for a minute or two while our brains ticked in unison, then, wordlessly, vehemently, with deadpan calm, we fucked ourselves into puddles of melted butter. Then we showered and brushed our teeth with the toiletries provided by the thoughtful hotel staff, made our somewhat unsteady way down to the hotel restaurant for coffee and scrambled eggs and Bloody Marys, then walked along and squinted at the glittering ocean, strolling slowly as geriatrics on the sunny, chilly, gusty boardwalk, that windy wasteland of a strip that separates the wide, flat beach and ocean from Casino Land, rows of false fronts, an artificial movie set. We left the corporate casinos and conference centers, turned inland to walk through the run-down old resort town, or what's left of it, seedy bar-and-grills, pawnshops trolling for gold, falling-down row houses, bleak and shabby behind all the ersatz glitz.

Time started to pass, and we went right along with it. We drank free casino vodka at the roulette tables, where Stephanie won a considerable amount of money. We slept, intermittently, or at least she did. I watched her sleep, or stared at the ceiling, or read the room-service menu, and then, when she woke up, we relieved our sexual predilections and urges on each other without much premeditation, thought, or shame, like a couple of orangutans. There was a certain amount of affection between us; how could there not be? In public we stayed a chaste six inches apart, as if we were mere acquaintances—at the roulette tables, walking along the boardwalk, in restaurants. We didn't talk much. I have rarely if ever felt more closely allied with another person.

The casinos are a series of hells that ring with a high, eternal sound of slot machines being fed quarters one after another, handles being jacked, wheels whirring inside. Under the higher
ringing of wheels turning is the occasional exciting clamor of quarters spewing out. The high ringing sound becomes inaudible after an hour or two in a casino. When you leave, you hear a sudden silence as deafening as a wind tunnel. There's nothing natural there. I should have loved it all.

Stephanie played roulette, and I stood behind her with a series of vodkas on ice in plastic cups brought around free by a nice ample-breasted lady in a tailless bunny suit. The croupiers wore black pants, white shirts, and patterned vests that contrasted interestingly with the casino's already contrasting decor. Their expressions were identical, although they themselves varied widely—size-husky bull dyke, size-zero ex-geisha, soft ruddy chubstein with mustache, reed-thin black gentleman with close-cropped 'fro—a distant smirk that occasionally ignited into a half-smile when someone won and tipped them a chip. This look was directed at Stephanie more often than anyone else, all night long.

Stephanie gambles with casual but focused brio. She puts down chips here, there, stacks of dollar chips, sometimes as many as ten on one number. She hit twice in a row on the same number; then came a long dry spell, which she waited out; then she hit again. As a boy gigolo I used to gamble with my keepers’ monies, but I never played roulette, it was always baccarat, blackjack, or craps. Roulette is a woman's game. It involves “intuition” (plain luck, really) and stamina. I stood drinking behind her because I had no desire to go off on my own. My gambling days are over, long gone. This was her idea, and her game, and her trip. I was along to keep her company. Watching her was all the pleasure I cared to pursue, to put it mildly. I watched her with admiration, and her fellow gamblers with the usual loathing and disdain I feel whenever I'm surrounded by strangers, misshapen, fat, stupid, boring hordes with their outfits and hairdos and quirks and hangups, all certain they're
original, essential to everything, the center of the universe, all equally grasping, gluttonous, wasteful, misguided, pointless, and disgusting. Stephanie, alone of us all in the casino, struck me as a necessary thing.

Being drunk didn't seem to affect her betting any more than it had affected my driving. The muscles have a memory of their own. My foot was hurting badly, but I didn't whine or make a fuss, I stood there stalwartly, pierced through by the sharp trident of pain, desire, and misanthropy, while she hit three times in a row, let her chips stay on the number, and pocketed half her winnings. There was something about watching Stephanie gamble that galvanized some long-dormant part of me. She seemed completely alive to the game—the numbers, chips, and wheels; the other people at the table. Her back was alive to me. No part of her was abstracted. She's the same way in sex too. It's that whole faggy hippified Zen-of-whatever theory I've never subscribed to any part of, but it does explain Stephanie. She wore a pair of black jeans and a little black tank-top affair, maybe the same one she wore to Marie's dinner party. The most flattering clothes ever worn, by any woman, ever. I sound besotted, I know, and I don't care.

Yesterday morning we awoke early, ready to leave our temporary haven and return to our real lives and separate existences, her marriage and job and house, my whatever you want to call it. Situation. Not that there's no room for her in it. On the contrary. Anyway, the day was windy, cold, and so sunny that the light hit my eyeballs in shards that made them stream with water. We ate breakfast before driving home this morning at the grimy old Poseidon Grill, across from the grimy old newsstand where we bought our papers. Stephanie bought them: I prefer to have breakfast unmolested by the news of unstoppable catastrophe. “Nothing I can do about it all,” I said to her when she threatened to read parts of it aloud to me over
our breakfast. “And no amount of palliative, in the form of treacly human-interest stories or impassioned editorials plying solutions to this mess, can sugarcoat that. I'd rather eat my breakfast without having to hear about any of it. Anyway, the other night you told Bun not to talk about these things.”

“I just didn't want to hear him talk about them,” she said back.

Stephanie ordered us beer with tomato juice, assuring me that this vile combination would cure the most pernicious hangover. It did nothing for mine. Then she read aloud to me from the newspaper. I tried to tune her out, and tried to choke down my red-eye, or whatever the horrible concoction was called.

I came home last night to find my estranged wife and purported daughter ensconced in the suite of rooms my parents once occupied.

To my complete astonishment, moments after I'd returned I encountered Sonia in the second-story bathroom. I walked in without knocking to take a badly needed pent-up piss, and there she was all splayed on the throne, reading a book and soaking her feet in my dish tub, her hair in a sesame-seed-colored bun.

She was still beautiful in her pale, malnourished way. The shock of the unexpected sight of her sent a wave of some ancient emotion splashing against my sternum. As it receded I half-consciously identified it as the sort of pleasure derived from roller coasters, horror movies, and near brushes with death or great danger. Pleasure! I was glad to see her again, in other words, or part of me was, in spite of or even because of the horror, danger, etc.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed, light-headed and trembling.

“Hello, Hugo,” she riposted in her throaty growl, looking up
from her book to flick a glance my way. “I'm back, as you can see. As I said in my letter.”

“I told you not to come,” I said.

“Our daughter is asleep,” she informed me stoically, “and I'm not going to wake her, so you can wait and meet her tomorrow.”

“I don't want you here,” I said urgently. “Sonia, please go away, go back to New York tomorrow.”

“Your brother was so hospitable,” she said. “He came to get us at the train. He thought I'd be staying in your room, but I told him that this is a reunion after a long separation, and I don't want to rush anything. He gave Bellatrix and me your parents’ rooms. Where have you been, Hugo? I was very hurt that you missed my homecoming.”

“Out of town,” I said. “I went out of town, nothing to do with you. I wasn't avoiding you. I wish I'd met your train, so I could have put you on the next one going in the opposite direction. Dennis is a meddlesome prat.”

“A meddlesome prat,” she repeated with a flash of her old world-weary scorn for my linguistic anachronisms.

I leaned against the doorway to the bathroom and ran my hand over my eyes. It had been a long drive home with Stephanie, who'd slept most of the way in the passenger seat, then I'd had to collect my truck and drive alone back to my own side of the river. I was sorry to be separated from Stephanie, deflated by the end of our adventure together. After the initial animal shock of pleasure at seeing Sonia, I felt only dread and the memory of great pain.

“I wish you hadn't come back,” I said.

“Your daughter wants to meet you,” she rejoined impassively. “It is for her I came.”

“She is not,” I said, “my daughter. I have to go to bed now. I'm exhausted.”

“You look exhausted,” she said flatly, without sympathy or concern.

I stalked up to my room, bladder bursting, in a complete lather. I pissed a lively, lengthy stream into the antique water pitcher on the shelf in my closet, then poured it out the window and felt slightly better, or at least well enough to get myself to bed and lie there, seething and howling inwardly with pain, until the first gray glimmer of dawn matched my gray and wrung-out self, and then I fell into a sandy-eyed sleep for a few hours and awoke in a sweat.

“They called two days ago,” Dennis told me this morning, as if he thought I must be nothing but glad to find them here. “I told them you were expecting them. Where the hell were you? They arrived two nights ago, and I picked them up at the train. I gave them Mother and Dad's rooms. Finally, after all these years, I get to meet my one and only niece. She's not what I expected, frankly. But Sonia seems exactly the same as ever. She hasn't aged, or changed, has she?”

“Sonia,” I replied, “has evidently made a pact with Satan concerning some rudimentary soul she may have once possessed and given up in exchange for eternal youth long before I ever met her. Or maybe she's just been preserved in her own brine, like a sardine.”

At that moment, a medium-sized girl ran into the kitchen. “Uncle Dennis!” she said with some excitement. Then she saw me, and stared at me for an instant. “Are you my father?” she asked, I thought with some skepticism, but I might have been imagining this.

I stared back at her. If I had ever harbored any doubts about
Sonia's child's patriarchal lineage, the sight of Bellatrix dispelled them forever.

“This is your dad!” said Dennis with foolish emotion. “Hugo.”

“Hi,” she said shyly. With a dull, blankly dutiful expression she advanced toward me, flung an arm around my neck, and kissed my cheek with lips that were warm and moist.

“Hello, Bellatrix,” I said, and drowned my unspeakable consternation in a gulp of coffee. My cheek had a damp spot on it, one I wanted to wipe away, though I maturely forestalled myself from doing so. I realized that I had been holding out all those years for some sort of proof that she really was mine after all, despite my darkest suspicions.

Well, I don't have to think too hard about it, given her general character and appearance. She must be, as I have somehow known all these years, the spawn of some village gas-station attendant, or Carla's uncle at Stewart's. She's a soft potato of a child, with no spark or density of character. Her hair is as blond as her mother's, but lank and thin where Sonia's is thick and silky. Her face is a blue-eyed vacuity, a pink-cheeked wasteland. She looks Polish, the worst of the Polish character, the superstitious, mind-numbingly provincial ignorance that enabled an entire nation, as one, to turn a blind eye to the mass murder of any and all of their friends and neighbors who were too dark, too intelligent, too bookish, too deviant, too different from them, and then go to confession and tuck into a hearty meal of overcooked meat and boiled lardy eight-pound dumplings afterward in a stupor of self-forgiving Catholic ignorance.

Sitting here writing all this down, I can't rid myself of this monstrous teenage idiot's erection. Now, instead of being the lovelorn girl, I've been transformed by Stephanie's body into her ape of a boyfriend. I seem to be unable to stay my hand from writing the clichés I know I'm about to write, very much in the style of that teenage lovelorn diarist. Stephanie… her hair is a gold, fragrant nimbus, her body a preternaturally sensitive organism, her belly the perfect canvas for my deposits of splooge (she uses an oral contraceptive, but refuses to accept any stuff inside her, according to some crackpot theory that it contributes to cervical cancer; I refuse to wear a condom; we are both clean, nice people, and so I deposit it where she tells me, with joy). My appetite for her, rather than being sated during our debauchathon, is now essentially out of control. Holding the pen to write in this new notebook, running my hands on the new white sheet of paper, reminds me of touching her. Even the act of writing, pressing and moving pen on paper— or, for that matter, driving my truck: the gearshift, my foot on the pedal. Everything I touch that is not myself reminds me of touching her.