The Epicure's Lament (21 page)

“Anyone in the mood for a little Shrimp Newburg?” I asked jovially. “It's one of those mid-twentieth-century butter-heavy dishes whose names list the main ingredient first and the name second. Clams Casino, Oysters Rockefeller—along those lines. It's easy to make, and looks unprepossessing in the extreme, but it's very good.”

“Hugo,” said Marie with a smile so faint it might have been a mirage. “This is a surprise.”

“My own lodgings are overrun with tedious interlopers. I also brought some wine I thought you'd enjoy and a few other tidbits.”

Rather than waste time awaiting an answer, permission,
invitation, or assent, I left them sitting there (I thought I heard them chuckling in my wake, but this may have been my imagination) and bustled through the house to the kitchen, where I stowed the food, opened a bottle of chilled Pinot Grigio I particularly like, and brought the bottle and three glasses out to the lawn. I sat on the grass beside their chairs, and we drank it while the sky darkened still further.

The mood was so convivial I felt I'd wandered into a European movie, one set in the bucolic but civilized countryside of southern France or Sweden, in which people choose to sit in the grass and drink wine. Louisa is doing very well up here, away from the industrial factories, waste-transfer stations, and toxic-waste storage facilities of her native Greenpoint. Her eyes have lost their shadowy, repressed shyness. And Marie seems to be thriving without her husband, I have to admit. Although naturally this isn't at all what I want to see happen, I can't blame her for being happier in his absence. I would feel exactly the same way, and I envy her. She didn't tell me and I didn't ask, but I had the strong intuitive sense that she, like me, has recently experienced an erotic renaissance of sorts. She looked satiated and calm, all the static electricity discharged. Was it urban-dweller Jim or Mediterranean novelist Arnold? Maybe both.

“Do you find it in any way strange,” I asked Marie, ostensibly out of some wild blue yonder, “to be friends with Bun Fox after he was your client?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But I'm usually fairly good at compartmentalizing the things he told me back when he was my client, before we were friends.”

I leaned back on my elbows. If there'd been a stalk of wheat nearby to chew, I would've plucked and chewed it: Hugo at ease, making pleasant chitchat. “Did you cure him of whatever he came to see you for?”

“Cure him?” She laughed. “Well, yes, I think so. We agreed
to terminate the therapy after a couple of years, when we felt we'd done all we could together.”

“So with Bun,” I pursued, a little brusquely but not, I hoped, unduly so, “for example, was there one specific issue he came to you about, or a complex stew of neuroses, or a specific problem caused by many forces, both ex- and internal?”

“Good question,” she said.

I preened inwardly at my glib and chummy way with psychobabble.

“All I'll say,” she went on in her cagey therapist's manner, “is that we accomplished the work we set out for ourselves.”

I wanted to ask whether her confidence in her work with him would extend to allowing Bun to take her younger daughter on an overnight camping trip, but of course I couldn't without revealing how much I knew, and how I knew it, and although I might have done this once, lately, now that I had so much at stake (in particular, the prospect of getting to fuck Stephanie again, which wouldn't happen if she somehow found out that I'd blabbed to Marie about what she'd told me in confidence about her husband), I had been learning a little bit of social self-control.

“I wonder,” I said instead, “what the effect will be on your daughters if you and Dennis don't reconcile.”

Marie looked shocked. “Hugo!” she said. “Don't try to guilt-trip me into taking your brother back. Is that why you're here? Did he send you?”

“I was just wondering,” I said, “what your professional opinion of this matter is. After the tragic incidents of September the Eleventh—”

“I can't believe you're referring to this unspeakable human tragedy in a sneering voice.”

“I wasn't using a sneering voice.”

“You were, Hugo. Wasn't he, Louisa?”

“Maybe not sneering,” said Louisa, “but he sounded sort of like he was making fun.”

“I'm not making fun,” I said. “I'm trying to perform a mitz-vah here.”

“What are you,” Louisa huffed, “like, Jewish now?”

“Trying to get on your good side by speaking your tongue,” I said.

“Well, you're trying to talk me out of a job, that's all I know,” she rejoined.

“Listen, I'll be blunt: Marie, what were you thinking, throwing my brother out when you did? I understand the urge to get rid of him; I feel it every day, more strongly than I can begin to say. What I'm asking is, did the terrorist attacks cause you to question everything and determine that your life with Dennis was a waste of time?”

“A waste of time,” said Marie slowly, in a kind of negative wonderment. “This is completely none of your business. I can't believe you're suggesting I didn't think of my children in asking Dennis to leave. You, of all people, Hugo, you who want nothing to do with your own wife and daughter.”

“That's different,” I said. “Sonia left me. I have supported her and Bellatrix all these years. I have never not done my duty as a husband and a father.”

“You know nothing whatsoever about marriage,” said Marie with a small laugh, as if my opinion mattered so little to her it wasn't worth her while to be offended by anything I said.

“That's true,” I admitted.

“I worry about Isabelle and Evie every time Dennis takes them. I hope he's watching after them as well as he should be. That's what upsets me most in this sorry situation. Having Louisa to help me, and being the undisputed head of the household, coming home from work to find dinner on the table and my children excited to see me, their homework done, is a far
greater source of freedom and pleasure to me than I ever dared dream of when Dennis lived here. I can depend on Louisa to do what I need her to do without any fuss, whereas having him around was like having a third, half-grown child who demanded sex as well as every other form of attention. It was the least convenient arrangement imaginable. You can tell him I said so.”

“I hope I won't have to,” I said meekly, smiling in spite of myself. “I'll make dinner now.”

I got up, brushed off my trousers, and went inside. In the kitchen I found what I needed and got down to work. While the green beans steamed, the Boston lettuce drained, and the rice boiled, I made a roux with butter and a handful of flour, a dash of salt, and a cup and a half of milk. When it thickened, I stirred in sherry, paprika, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce, then opened two cans of shrimp and drained them and added them to the mixture. This was Shrimp Newburg, and I defy anyone to make it correctly and not want to devour every single gooey orange bite.

I served this simple but very satisfying meal in the dining room with the second bottle of Pinot Grigio I'd brought.

“It's important to use canned shrimp,” I said. “Just as when making spinach dip the only acceptable variety of spinach is frozen. It just tastes better. I've tried making this with fresh shrimp and it just isn't the same. It wasn't out of cheapness or laziness, I assure you, just reverse-snobbery gourmet know-how.”

“Thank you, Hugo,” said Marie. “It's good, but I have to admit, you never struck me as the culinary type.”

I was tempted to reply flirtatiously that there happen to be a few other things about me she might be surprised to learn, but as I said, I'm learning about self-control, forestalling a momentarily, pleasurably incendiary remark to achieve a higher end. More to the point, I'm not in the business of making overtures
to my brother's wife; it would suggest an underlying incestuous urge the very notion of which I am utterly repulsed by. Marie is very appealing; what keeps my interests firmly elsewhere is that my overt pursuit of her would imply, however faintly, that I was incapable of lighting my own fires and so must warm myself at my older brother's, which we all know isn't the case.

So I said instead, “I'm glad you like it,” and left it at that.

However, clearly my off-limits rule where Marie is concerned applies not at all to her au-pair girl.

After we enjoyed blushingly ripe Bosc pears with robust Stilton and the surprisingly potent and palatable Calvados I'd found at the town's dusty little liquor store, Marie cleared the table and began to wash the dishes, leaving Louisa and me alone in the candlelight, able to talk under cover of the noise of the washing up. Louisa, whose night off it was, surprised but didn't disappoint me when she agreed to my suggestion that we take a stroll down to the nearby lake.

Stephanie is naturally completely in control of any situation we could possibly find ourselves in together. Louisa, although she controls by virtue of her sex certain aspects of the outcome, has been entirely in my thrall from the moment I first met her. Or so I flattered myself then with thinking. The memory of my pressing her undies to my face playfully yet with intent was foremost, uppermost, in my brain as we went out into the gusty evening and strolled along the road down to the lake, which is more a brackish pond than anything so stately and expansive as a lake proper, but no matter.

“It's nice out,” she said when we had gone about halfway.

We were walking not close together but not far apart; not like lovers but not like strangers either.

“Are you nervous?” I asked her.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught the sidelong gleam of a quick glance in my direction. “A little.”

“Why?”

“Well, it's like, how well do I really know you?”

“You don't,” I said, “not technically, but in one way you do.”

“Which way is that?”

“We're a lot alike.”

I let this sink in and stumped along by her side in comfortable silence. I allowed us to drift slightly closer together. Louisa has a pleasant smell. She smells yeasty; I know this carries intimations of vaginal infections and whatnot, but I don't mean that. Stephanie has a faint astringent scent, clean and crisp. Louisa smells like bread, Stephanie like lemons. Louisa is comforting and familiar; Stephanie is neither of those things. Also, Louisa is slightly less than half Stephanie's age, not to mention my own.

“I meant to say,” I said, “that in some ways we're alike, but I'm sure we're also very different. I didn't mean to offend you. Naturally I meant it as a compliment, having a high opinion, not of myself, but of you anyway. Have you read any Rabelais?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I read some last year in Vero's class. Professor Dupin. What's it called,
Gargantua et Pantagruel.”
Her French accent sounded like something stuck in her throat. She laughed self-consciously.

“Well, then, you know what the term ‘Rabelaisian’ means.”

“Oh my God,” she cried. “It means fat, right?”

“No,” I said, laughing, “it means full of brio. And that's a good thing.”

“Yeah, right,” she said shortly.

We came to the glimmering path that led through a small copse to the pond. Without hesitation, she plunged from the road onto the path and disappeared into the dark stand of bare trees.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. “So what is it really like to have your wife back?”

“Irritating beyond my powers of description. We finished
with each other long ago. My daughter is a great disappointment to me. Not to mention quite likely not really my daughter at all.”

She ignored this last bit of information for reasons I couldn't guess at. “What do you mean, she's a disappointment?”

“I mean, she's not my daughter. This was a mistake on Sonia's part, coming back. She should have known better, but it's all too typical of her that she didn't.”

“Does she hope you'll fall in love with her again?”

“What kind of question is that? Have you heard a word I've told you about her?”

“Well, what do I know, I've never been married and I don't have a kid, obviously. But I think you should give them a chance.”

“Do you think Marie should take Dennis back?”

Louisa turned suddenly to face me. “What?”

“I didn't think so.”

“No,” she said, turning to resume her progress down to the “lake.” We came out of the woods onto a small, sandy beach that glowed white. I could smell the water and hear it lapping against a dock.

“Here,” said Louisa, “you lie on this table and I'll lie on the one next to it.”

“I'd rather lie on your table, next to you,” I said in a wheedling but charming tone.

“I'm sure you would,” she said, and plumped herself onto her own private tabletop, leaving no room for anyone else. “So,” she said, “I recently checked a book of the constellations out of the library. I've been studying the stars. This is the first time in my life I've lived somewhere where I can see them.”

“What have you learned?” I asked politely.

“For one thing,” she said, “Bellatrix is a star in Orion, also known as the Amazon Star.”

“My estranged wife,” I lied, “used to be something of a stargazer herself.”

“She chose the name?”

“Not exactly,” I confessed.

“Orion,” Louisa went on in an eager, scholarly tone I didn't much care for but was faintly amused by because I could easily see her as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed student, although she clearly is more naturally suited to a light, humorous knowing-ness, an aspect of her personality that will have an increasing dominance in her as she gets older and her family ceases to dictate her self-image, “was a hunter Artemis fell in love with, then her twin brother got jealous and stuck him up in the sky. The most famous stars in Orion are Betelgeuse and Rigel.”

“Tell me about Sylvester,” I said, perching obediently on the edge of the table she'd assigned me.

“What?”

“Sylvester,” I repeated. “The reason you had to leave town.”

“How do you know about him?”

“You mentioned him when we went out for ice cream. Very mysteriously, then you said you'd tell me about him someday. That's why you agreed to come down here with me, of course, not for chitchat about the infinite wonders of the universe. You need to tell someone, and I'm the obvious choice. It's very lonely for you to keep it all inside, and if you were completely honest you'd acknowledge that there's a swaggering element to the story that you're anxious to enjoy. So let's have it. How did you two get involved, what happened, and why did you run away?”