The Epicure's Lament (22 page)

“You don't have to be snide, first of all,” she said, “and second [she pronounced it “suckint,” to my inward delight], you're wrong about why I wanted to come down here. It's hard to see the stars from Marie's yard, 'cause the neighbors have a bright garage light. I always want to come down here, but I'm scared of rapists and perverts.”

“I'm resisting the temptation to make the obvious joke that, instead of leaving it up to fate to make you run into a strange rapist and pervert, you've brought your own along with you.”

“Huh,” she snorted. “You're such a wack job.”

“Although you have a powerful crush on me,” I pointed out.

“I do not.”

We bantered playfully in this vein for what to me was an unnecessary length of time before she felt at ease enough with me to confess the things I'd been brought here to learn.

Sylvester, it turns out, was the middle-aged Negro janitor at Kings College with whom Louisa began an affair last spring in a spirit of derring-do, the fear that if she didn't do something bold and rebellious and ill-advisedly reckless then, she would never have the nerve. She allowed him to seduce her and relieve her of her virginity, late one night at the school library, improbably behind a carrel where anyone could have seen them. Which reminds me of my assignations with Annika in Central Park: the risk of getting caught confers a dollop of erotic suspense that heightens everything. Sylvester is fifty, married, a self-taught political activist, and the father of three daughters, all of whom are older than Louisa. He entertains delusions that if he hadn't been kept down all his life by the white establishment he would be a professor instead of a lowly toilet-scrubber. He is boiling with rage at the university. He hates all the professors; he despises the students. He himself is a high-school dropout.

“Like me,” I said.

“Get out of here!” she said back.

“No,” I said. “I got kicked out of many schools, then narrowly escaped being banished to fester and rot in military school by sneaking off into the night and never looking back. But that's another story, and not germane to this one.”

“Well, for a high-school dropout,” said Louisa, “Sylvester seemed pretty smart to me. He's a Marxist, he reads a lot. He
told me that he knows more about sociology and political science than any professor, because he lives in the real world and they live in the ivory tower or whatever. Like, he knows from experience what they only read about.”

“Really,” I said, feigning impressed curiosity. “And does he think the new sixties are about to happen, and he's going to be the new Malcolm X, only Malcolm X didn't go far enough, so the power structures didn't change? So he plans to bring it about with his followers, his movement, which until recently consisted only of you?”

“Something like that,” she admitted. I heard wariness in her voice.

“Did it not occur to him that the student body is racially mixed, as I'm sure the faculty is too? No, wait, let me guess. According to him they're all slaves of propaganda, they're kowtowing to the power elite. Like Uncle Toms, they buy into a racist system for their own protection. But for any real change to come about, that old system has to be completely dismantled.”

“How do you know all this?” she asked, still wary.

“I can well imagine,” I said pleasantly, “the rambling, paranoid, nostril-flaring, adamant hectoring he inflicted on you, his young white freshman mistress.”

“Is that what you think I was?”

“For the purposes of this story,” I said.

“So anyway,” she said, “then, at the beginning of this semester, he told me he was plotting to blow up the library.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To make a statement and put them all on alert. He called it ‘the book prison.’ He asked me to help him. He said if I loved him I would be faithful to his cause.”

“Makes perfect sense,” I said. “Don't you think?”

“He's so full of himself,” she burst out. “I can't believe I was
so fucking stupid. After the World Trade Center thing I realized that was what he was talking about, sort of. I mean, it's, like, almost the same thing only smaller. I'd been buying all this bogus crap he was feeding me. I sent a letter to the administration but I didn't sign my name. I think he probably lost his job or worse. I'm sure he knows it was me. He's probably really pissed. So I came up here.”

“Louisa,” I said, “you did the right thing.”

“I learned one thing from Sylvester: I don't need any shit from anyone. That's something, at least.”

“Why don't you come over here to my table if you won't let me come to yours?”

“I tell you this story and you hit on me?” she asked, her voice cracking with scorn and disappointment.

Since this was precisely what had happened, I found I had no comeback, snappy or otherwise. “Well,” I said, “yes, in fact.”

Then she let me have it. What made me think I could treat her like she was some easy prey? What, did she wear a sign that said, “I'm desperate”? Well, she wasn't desperate. She could read me as clearly as if it was written on my face: I thought she was too young and naïve to get that she was being played. I was just like Sylvester, we both hit on teenage girls because we thought they couldn't tell what total sleazebags we were, but I was wrong about that too.

“Really?” I asked, perching on the edge of my chaste picnic table. “It's also possible that you're making assumptions about me, rather than the other way around.”

At this patently ridiculous suggestion, she snorted.

“And, then again, maybe not,” I conceded. “In any case, I feel I owe you an apology. I apologize. What you did, turning Sylvester in, was very brave and admirable. It made me want to kiss and probably fondle you, but this is due to my own cynical impurity. I promise not to attempt to sully you again.”

She was silent.

“Listen,” I said. “I can't help issuing a warning to you about heroes. Hero-worship of any kind is bound to cause you disappointment and disillusionment. Heroes at the personal level are almost universally egomaniacal tyrants who cheat on their wives and treat their loyal followers abysmally. Maybe some people are meant to be and are most fully themselves as public heroes who lead and comfort and inspire the masses in times of crisis although they're really horrible up close, sometimes even cynical bastards who fool a lot of the populace into thinking they're compassionate, caring guys, say, for instance, the current mayor of your hometown—oh, and by all reports Martin Luther King, Jr., was no sweetheart to the people closest to him either. Maybe Jesus was a jerk to the apostles. Maybe it's impossible to be both a nice guy and a leader.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“I'm babbling,” I said. “Would you like to go back?”

I sensed her hesitation. “Maybe so,” she said, but she sounded reluctant to me.

“Louisa,” I said sternly, “you can't have it both ways, accompany a lonesome old bachelor down here to stargaze with you, a lovely young girl, on an unseasonably warm evening in a secluded romantic spot, then both establish a precedent for such assignations and win my sympathies with the moving tale of your busted-up love affair, the emotional, racial, and political overtones of which only serve to heighten my desire for you—and then light into me for presuming. And then, when I offer to take you home—”

“Why are you so impossible?” she snapped. “You're rewriting history. You're mixing up everything.”

“All I'm asking, Louisa,” I said, “is whether you'd like to go home now. It's entirely up to you; as for myself, I would be thrilled to enjoy your company for a while longer.”

“Let's go, then,” she said, and stomped up the path to the woods.

On the way back to Marie's house, I allowed Louisa to walk several feet ahead of me. She seemed to derive a certain amount of comfort from this, judging by her utter lack of interest in waiting for me to catch up with her. As we mounted the steep driveway, she said stiffly to me over her shoulder, “So now you know you can't just take advantage of me.”

“I certainly do,” I said. Something welled in me. I don't know even now what prompted the following outburst, but I do know that I am still too dismayed by my sudden paternal rant to transcribe it word for word. I believe I said, in a full-throated voice I have never or rarely used before in my entire life, that she should never worry about my intentions toward her again, that I respected and liked her very much, and that I found her to be entertaining, intelligent, and wise beyond her years. She had been through something very difficult, had handled it admirably and all alone, and she could trust me not to betray her confidence.

The very thought of what I told her next causes me to grimace and slap the side of my head.

I said I could see the woman she was going to turn into— Louisa at, say, thirty-five or forty, permanently free of the constraints she's had imposed on her all her life to date by virtue of birth order, physique, and class. No more younger-sister drudgery, no more synagogue with her basset-hound father, no more enslavement to her mother's drooping shoulders, no more cringing obeisance to her tyrant of a sister: she will be highly educated, well married, sexy and knowing and funny, well liked amongst her colleagues and friends, and fulfilled in her work.

I assured her that she doesn't project any degree of neediness, and that I had flirted with her solely out of admiration.

I said a few more things. I don't remember what.

Her eyes were boggling slightly by the time I finished, or possibly well before—I hadn't noticed because I was too busy singing my little aria.

“Um,” she said. She couldn't quite meet my eyes. “Okay, whatever, good night, thanks for the dinner.”

And she went in, leaving me standing by my truck. I got in and drove home to Waverley with a kind of twisty, curdled feeling I recognized from long ago but haven't felt in many years.

When I got home, I parked on the lawn and skulked up the stairs to my aerie, where I sit now, steeping, as I said, in my own garum.

November 27—Was interrupted then by Sonia, of all people, who rapped on my door. She wore a black and slinky dress, and her straw-colored hair was sleek from a recent washing and much brushing.

I asked what I could do for her in as frosty and uninviting a tone as possible; I knew exactly what I could do for her, and how.

“I have chosen to forgive you,” she said, “for your long silence and then your unfriendly letter. I am ready to resume our relations.”

“You've chosen to forgive me,” I said. “That's rich irony. I thought that might be the case, given your garb and demeanor.”

“My garb and demeanor,” she repeated in the familiar withering tone that for Sonia is direct flirtation. “Garb and demeanor, Hugo, really.”

I wasn't tempted so much as overcome with garum; I was in no position to withstand her. Sex is one of the only recourses in this mood, the only solution or distraction, and here it was, being served in a shiny black dress I shucked off my wife posthaste. Underneath she was white and smooth as an oyster
out of its shell, quivering with briny juices and piquantly yielding to the teeth.

Speaking of oysters, M.F.K. Fisher's
Consider the Oyster
has enthralled me. I read and reread whole passages lately. One of these concerns the American regional varieties of oysters and Mary Frances's opinions of them. The chapter entitled “A Lusty Bit of Nourishment” is concrete lyricism, a
cri d'estomac.
I don't trust my adoration of Mary Frances, of course; she's too smug, too sure of herself, to fully merit such slavish admiration. For example, let's take the following: “I have thought seriously about this, while incendiary bombs fell and people I knew were maimed and hungry….” After this introduction she then has the breathtaking audacity to maintain, in her consistently light and reasonable tone, that a reinstatement of brown bread in restaurants served alongside raw oysters would make nostalgia seem like a lusty bit of nourishment, rather than a perversion…. Meanwhile, her beloved husband was dying of Buerger's disease, and wouldn't, the same way I won't, quit smoking. No matter what her own personal tragedy may have been in those days, only a preternaturally, even unreasonably confident woman would calmly discuss the essentialness of brown bread with oysters in the same breath as starvation, maiming, and bombs. She must have been angered beyond reason by his stubbornness, but in the diaries she wrote while he was dying, she is nothing but supportive, loving, admiring, claiming that Timmy can't be expected to live without cigarettes because that wouldn't be a whole man's life, it would be some kind of sissified loserdom, a concession to mama's-boy Goody Two-Shoes crybaby scaredy-cat pansyhood.

Well, of course I agree.

As for her final thought about nostalgia's being a form of perversion usually, I don't know exactly what she means and am far too slothful to parse it out, and I have my own strong ideas
about nostalgia, but nonetheless this passage makes me yearn passionately for a buttered slab of pumpernickel sprinkled with fresh lemon juice, a plate of ice-cold smallish oysters in their briny liquor-filled shells, and, served alongside, Mary Frances's commendable battery—horseradish, Tabasco, cocktail sauce, vinegar with chopped onion, French dressing.

I was rough with Sonia, to be sure, and had little to say to her before, during, or after. I loved her once, and that was enough for me in my engorged, self-loathing, semi-tipsy restless state. Her body is smaller and weaker than Stephanie's. She makes a hell of a lot more noise, and scratches me, and stares at me with demented, fixed eyes while riding me up and down, and generally behaves like a starving civet cat. She mewls, turns over to raise her little rump in the air for me to do with as I please, and elongates her spine and licks her chops when I ram my sausage into her puckered little bunghole. It's a strangely pathetic, adolescent performance that's not altogether unappetizing.

I tossed her around, and as I did so, I informed her that she was a filthy whore, a vile bitch, a yellow nag, a stinking harridan, a fishwife. This is a brand of ill treatment she still enjoys. I found the things I was saying to her so hilarious it was all I could do not to laugh aloud. But I knew she was in dead earnest about the pleasure she gets from this degradation, and if I had laughed, she would have yowled and scratched my cheek, then disengaged herself from my piston before it had shot its engine grease. And so I kept a poker face and rode my little hobbyhorse into the night.