The Epicure's Lament (24 page)

December 2—It has been many days since my last confession. Ha ha. That's because I managed to get the hell away from Waverley for Thanksgiving. I took my own advice to go somewhere secluded. I didn't go far, just holed up in the motel where Stephanie and I once spent such entertaining hours. But I'm not so pathetically far-gone in my crush that I stayed in the same room; no, I took a different one, although the room we spent our delirious time in was available, which I knew because I was the only guest in the place that first night of my stay. Others came and went the second and third nights, but on that first night I was alone in the place except for the obese proprietor, whose sex I was tantalizingly unable to ascertain: deep voice, mustache, big meaty hands, but breasts! And it wore a shapeless sacklike garment I thought might have been intended by its designer to be worn by some species of female. Its age was a less compelling but equally opaque mystery: no wrinkles on its hammy cheeks or near its beady eyes, but a few of the coarse hairs on its upper lip were a wiry gray.

I took all my meals in my room, thanks to deliveries, and spent a lot of time watching TV, in an inexplicable attempt to gain a passing familiarity with its more popular personalities and characters. TV is exactly as I expected it to be. In addition to eating construction-paper–like pizza and watching manifestly unfunny sitcoms, I drank whiskey, whacked off, watched more TV, slept, writhed in pain, took many showers, etc. It was a pleasant interlude, overall. I was alone, and that was the idea. Appropriately, during the darkest hours of the night, when the pain wouldn't let me sleep, I worked on my own translation of Montaigne's essay “On Solitude.” Montaigne was someone I would have happily drunk and eaten with anywhere, in any rough-hewn country inn or swank city establishment. He liked to eat and drink as much as I do. His views concerning solitude are comfortably close to my own (except for his unfathomable
admiration of religious nuts). He was levelheaded and not stupid. He appreciated and even celebrated both the solitary life and the willed death, and respected those who embraced either, or both.

During those sleepless hours after my powers of concentration failed me and I was on the edge of pain-blunted sleep, I leafed through
The Dictionary of Difficult Words
, which I'd found at an otherwise sad and tawdry Catholic-church rummage sale across the street from my motel. I learned that the rather clumsily constructed word “homoousia” means “sameness of substance,” the unpronounceable word “athymy” means “melancholy,” and “pergameneous,” a word that's just asking to be kicked in the ass, means “resembling parchment.” Many of the other words, to my intense disappointment, I found as familiar as clothes I'd seen on someone else. However, along with the interesting challenge of translating Montaigne without a Larousse, it got me through a night during which the athymy of my soul and the pergameneous sheet of my bed were ho-moousiatic in that both were crackling, tissuelike, yet durable.

Solitude needs no journalistic expunging. But now, now that I'm back at Waverley, the need to write has resurged for the usual reason, that being the need to pop the swollen memory of conversations like fat boils and wipe their effluvia on this paper; I've felt the renewed pull of this notebook after my encounter with Bellatrix an hour ago on the stairs.

Bellatrix, during her stay here under the ancestral roof, has not appreciably come to resemble me or any other Whittier any more than she did when she first arrived. No Whittier ever had such a dumpy build, such a rabbity nose. No Whittier ever had that fragile blond transparency either; Bellatrix is fairer and more stolid than anyone else I've ostensibly shared a bloodline with. We've always been a dark, wiry line, possessing a kind of psychological opaqueness, an unwillingness to be cracked open
too easily. Bellatrix has the foreign (to me) tendency toward splotches on her cheeks, a quaver of her voice, contracting of the pupils, frank intake of breath. She's a brute, feeling, flat-footedly simple animal of a nature repellent to someone who has always prized and honored any evidence of murky motives in himself and anyone else.

“Well,” I said upon catching sight of the little potato one landing below me, stumping upward as I gimped my way down. “If it isn't the Amazon Star.” This, unfortunately, is the sort of pleasantry I blurt when I'm taken unawares and haven't spoken to anyone in a while. I regretted it instantly: it marked me as something of a git.

“Hello, Dad,” she rejoined in her colorlessly adenoidal voice, her pudgy knees flashing bare with each step.

Dad. The word detonated with a spiky ferocity in my sternum; the shards lodged there and stuck as I made my way down and she trundled up. Then we were face-to-face. There was nothing for it but to say something else; I couldn't just keep going as if she were a stranger. Well, she was, but I'd already given her an advantage with my ill-advised greeting; no sense letting her have the moral upper hand as well.

“You're not a bad violinist,” I told her skeptically, the implication in my tone being, I realized just after I'd said it, that she was a tragic failure at everything else. Well, that was all right. No harm in being honest.

“Thanks,” she said implacably.

I met the frank empty blue of her gaze.

“Do you ever play anything by Vivaldi?” I asked in all innocence.

“I hate Vivaldi,” she said. “He reminds me of shopping malls. I like Bach better if I have to play something baroque.”

“They don't play Bach in shopping malls?” I asked, impressed in spite of myself by her discernment.

“They do,” she said, “but it's not the same thing. He sounds totally out of place there, because his music has nothing to do with malls, and Vivaldi sounds like elevator music.”

“How many shopping malls have you been to?”

“Mama takes me sometimes. She likes the one in Paramus, New Jersey, and also the one in Nyack. She thinks they're fun.”

“And you?”

“They're okay,” she said insincerely, the loyal immigrant's child. “Mama likes food courts and shoe stores and those places where they sell a lot of accessories like belts and earrings.”

“Food courts,” I said. “That makes perfect sense.”

“Excuse me,” she said then. “I have to go to the bathroom really badly.” And continued up the stairs.

I went down to the kitchen and helped myself to an apple, and now I'm back up in my room staring at a page of French, the denuded apple core at my elbow. Let's see what we've got here….

“And it is not the prescription for one solitary sickness; death is the prescription for all our troubles. Death is a promised haven, never to be feared, often to be sought. It amounts to the same result if a man puts an end to himself or passively accepts it; whether he hastens to his final day or simply waits for it; wherever death comes from, it is always his death; no matter where the thread breaks, the whole thread is broken; no life remains on the spindle.

“The most beautiful death is the one that is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others; our death depends on our own.”

I wish old Michel could meet me tonight at the Turtle Inn and the two of us could converse over plates of vulvic oysters with brown bread, bowls of vagina-aromatic bouillabaisse, rare steaks au poivre as tenderly pink as the inner walls of labia, and a bottle or two of menstrual-blood-red wine.

I could write forever about food and women, the connection between them, eating and fucking, etc., etc., but I find myself distracted by the memory of my recent little chat with that child who bears my name: she is not the sort of starchy, dense, earthbound person I first assumed she was. This gives me something to chew on, but nothing much to write.

December 4—I have spent an hour or so this morning with my pen held impotently over the paper, brooding in some distress over Stephanie's failure to make our assignation. I am not accustomed to being stood up, to put it mildly

When I telephoned her office yesterday, she answered, to my relief. I didn't want to have to speak to any officious secretary-type employee or leave a message with my name on it, and have her call me back, and have Dennis answer… only my craving for her, which now rivals my hunger for cigarettes, allowed me to breach my aversion to interrupting someone else's solitude or peace of mind. We chatted somewhat superficially for a few minutes before she agreed to meet me for a drink that night when she finished work. We arranged to meet at Rex's, the same disreputable roadside tavern where we first drank together. She sounded friendly, but distant and distracted, as if she could hardly remember who I was, as if I were some cousin she'd forgotten about.

When it was finally time to get into my truck and go, after counting the minutes all afternoon while I pretended I was otherwise occupied, I drove fast through a lowering dusk that threatened rain, arrived right on time, then proceeded to sit at the bar. Over the course of an hour and a half, I drank several whiskeys; then I returned home, slowly, moodily, through a rainstorm. I came into the house, and there was my wife lurking like an alley cat in the humid hallway, looking trashy and hungry and mean.

“Hello,” she said as if she were yowling on a fence with her back humped and her front legs stretched provocatively out in front of her. “Hugo,” she added after a brief pause, as if to show that, despite my avoidance of her and recent absence, she still remembered my name.

I gave her a look and informed her that she could come to my room that night. “Maybe not,” she said; “you smell of whiskey.” But of course she came, and I abused her in every way I could think of. After it was over, we went down to the kitchen, hungry. She sat at the table in her robe while I made our supper. I melted a “lump of butter,” as Mary Frances calls it (the phrase conjures for me that nostalgia-world of lipsticked women with cigarette holders, men in hats and trench coats drinking rye on the rocks), until it foamed in a hot cast-iron griddle, turned the heat very low, then slipped four beaten eggs into the hot fat. Meanwhile, I boiled a handful of frozen corn for a couple of minutes, drained it, and sprinkled it onto the omelet along with some smoked kippers I happened to have on hand, roughly chopped, and a heaping spoonful of small, salty capers.

I served the omelet with a bottle of chilled white wine and a plate of buttered toast. It was delicious. At least, I thought so. I didn't care what Sonia thought.

“You're still smoking too much,” she said. “Please stop, Hugo. You'll die if you don't.”

“That's my decision, I do believe.”

We were silent for a moment, and I was about to go up to bed alone when she inhaled in a way I recognized: she was poised like a deadly little snake about to strike.

“I am having a Christmas dinner,” she announced. “Here at Waverley Dennis will invite his friends the Foxes, and I am trying to convince him to invite Marie also, and that girl who takes care of the children, and Marie's sister, who will be visiting.”

The Foxes.

“Christmas,” I said. “Here? Are you out of your mind?”

“Please,” she said with a cold smile. “Hugo, don't be difficult about this. I don't know how to cook, and Dennis says he does, but you and I both know you're the only one who can do it.”

“Actually, what I know,” I said, “is that you could have it catered if you wanted, or hire a cook. But you would rather have me serve forth platters of festival meats while you lounge at the table and order me around. In your fantasy of this Christmas, you probably even have me in an apron.”

She snorted. I suddenly recalled those times, long ago, when I managed to coax a laugh out of her, a dark and bitter laugh, of course, reluctant, hard-won, but somehow worth the effort it took to wrest it from her.

“Will you do it or won't you?” she asked, tapping her nails against the tabletop.

“Unfortunately, I have plans to be far away on Christmas,” I said, munching unconcernedly on my last buttery corner of toast. “So the answer is no. No, I won't do it. No, I won't be here.”

She reared back and spat, “You are not going away again. You can't. This is an important family holiday, and your daughter would like to spend it with both her parents for the first time in her life.”

“If this tantrum were about your birthday, I could understand your concern,” I said, “since it's largely self-interest that's making you perform this little charade, but Christmas isn't up your alley, Sonia, it never was. It celebrates the birth of Christ, who spawned an evil religion that made you afraid to masturbate. Catholicism is the nuclear meltdown of Judaism, remember?”

“I have since changed my opinion,” she said. “I've come to understand the deeper meaning of Christmas. It's a nice holiday,
and it's more about family and food than any glorification of Catholic hypocrisies, and, most of all, Christmas is very important to Bellatrix. She's a little girl. Children love Christmas.”

I stared at her. My ruination by financial security of the old passionate, opinionated, artistic Sonia, I saw, had been a great success.

“Some might,” I said crisply back at her. “I never did. Good night,” and stalked up to my room.

Since these notebooks could be viewed as one long, extended suicide note, it seems fitting that I record my latest decision concerning my untimely, inevitable end. I would prefer to eliminate myself with a minimum of fuss and bother: no illegal prescriptions, no bloodshed, a minimal possibility of failure. I'm casting about for a method: cheap, legal, and of a cleanly toxic nature that won't cause me to bespatter my innards and humors about the room, which would be horrible for whatever relative or hired hand has to mop me up. Poison of some kind, but what?

Montaigne… “The end of our race is death; it is the necessary object of our aim; if it scares us how can we go forward without a fit of ague? The remedy of the vulgar is not to think of it, but from what brutish stupidity can proceed so gross a blindness? We must bridle the ass by the tail.”

I like this image: the ass in full bray held by its shit-and-fly-specked tail, bowlegs splayed, back swayed. I can see it. But I don't understand the metaphor, exactly: Is the ass death? Are we the ones holding it by the tail? Why the tail? Why an ass and not a lion or a shark?