The Epicure's Lament (25 page)

Maybe the ass is ourselves; maybe he means to imply that we
bumble blindly through life like animals, with no thought of death. Or maybe I was right the first time: the ass is death. That must be it.

“Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave.”

I find this sentiment strikingly interesting. I don't believe any of that afterlife garbage invented and sustained by those too chickenshit just to live with the fact of their own deaths without going out of their trees. As for me, I see no compelling reason not to believe my own death will be a perfect nullity, nonbeing, a full stop.

“There is no evil for him who has rightly understood that the privation of life is no evil”—yes, and what's so admirable about trying to prolong your life? I never saw the point of it.

It appears I'm also rethinking my position concerning painkillers…. I know what's coming as soon as I put down my pen and get into bed and turn off the light and lie in the darkness with nothing to distract me from the Anschluss, as the krauts like to say: I don't look forward to the night ahead, or any night, for that matter, for the rest of my life. Morphine is starting to look pretty good to me as a secondary addiction, or tertiary if you count whiskey, which I don't, because it's a crutch but I can limp along without it if I have to, whereas cigarettes are like another limb.

December 5—I heard a knock on my door at seven o'clock this morning. I was already up and dressed and sitting in my chair, watching Erasmus and his cohorts enjoy the life of birds in a tree. The sky was pinkening in the east, and the birds were waking to their fresh new day. The few leaves left on the tree shuddered in the dawn wind. Inside, all was snug and warm. I rejoiced in the comforts of humanity, rejoiced not to have been born a dumb animal incapable of sitting in a chair enjoying a
cigarette, the anticipation of breakfast, which I had almost decided would be, today, a bowl of creamy oatmeal with brown sugar and a cut-up pear, the luxury, upscale version of my vile childhood muesli.

“Come in,” I barked, fancying myself a four-star general in a bivouac, a snowy-headed, intimidating old gimp who'd been decorated and wounded more times than anyone else in the army, and whose underlings’ passionate devotion was satisfyingly tinged with abject fear.

Bellatrix stuck her big, pasty head around the door; then a cup of coffee followed, proffered by her pudgy little hand. “Mama told me to bring you this,” she said, her eyes wide.

“Did she,” I snarled. “Well, it's not because she's nice, you know, it's because she wants me to do something I don't want to do. A lot of things. So you go downstairs,” I said, taking the cup, which she handed me without betraying the least bit of passionate devotion, but with some other feeling tinged satisfyingly with abject fear, “and tell her I can't be bought. You might want to add that you won't be used as a pawn, but that's entirely your affair.”

“You don't like her,” she said. Her forehead was wrinkled. She seemed about to sneeze. “You don't want us to be here.”

“That's right,” I said, not unkindly.

“Why not?”

“Because I prefer to live alone. I wish Dennis would get the hell out of here too, and he's my very own brother.”

She looked around my room, then back at me. “Can I sit down?”

“No, you can't sit down.” I drank some coffee. It wasn't strong enough. Sonia, even back when we were proper sweethearts, has always refused to understand how to make a pot of coffee, no matter how many times or how clearly and patiently I've tried to explain it to her. She's a blindered, blockheaded mule. An ass who won't be held by the tail.

I thrust my coffee cup at Bellatrix. To her credit, she managed to take it without falling backward.

“Listen,” I said. “Take this back downstairs, and tell your mother that if she's going to try to bribe me with coffee she could at the very least try to make it the way I like it.”

“How do you like it?” she asked coolly.

“Very strong,” I said. “Not like mud, but like mud with water added. She knows, she just won't do it.”

“Why not?”

“And tell her, while you're at it, to send a messenger who doesn't ask questions. Go.”

Off she went. I limped over to my bed and lay down and propped my back up with a big heap of pillows. I waggled my foot, which was aching, for a few minutes, then gave it a vengeful thump with my fist. This made my leg feel worse, but it made me feel better. I was about to go down to the kitchen to get myself some breakfast when there was another knock on my door.

“Enter,” I barked, the crusty old general in his bivouac.

“I'm not going to ask any questions this time,” said Bellatrix with firm resolve as she bustled over to me, bearing a cup again. “I was just trying to be polite before. I don't really care. I thought I should act like I cared, but I don't.”

“You don't care about your father?”

She looked bleakly at me.

I tasted this new cup. “Finally!” I said. “Finally, that mother of yours has given in and made it right. I never thought I would live to see—”

“I made it,” said Bellatrix.

What a strange child she is.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, you made it just right.”

“Goodbye,” she said, and made her way over to the door.

She would have gone through it if I hadn't said suddenly, “You don't want to be here either, do you?”

She turned and said flatly, not meeting my eyes, a flush rising in her pergameneous skin, “I wanted to stay in New York. I like it there. I don't see why we had to come up here. It's boring, and anyway I don't believe you're my father. If you were, you would act differently.”

I looked at her as a light dawned suddenly in me. “Frankly,” I said, laughing, “I don't believe I'm your father either.”

“You don't?”

“What I think is that your mother prowled around behind my unsuspecting back with some rawboned blond proletarian fellow, and pretended I was the one all along because it was in her best interests to do so. I assume this other fellow was a butcher or a mailman or someone equally unable to provide the things she wants and seems to require. What I also think is that she was raised a Catholic and therefore had a head full of voodoo propaganda, despite all her efforts to rid herself of it like a sow trying to chase off a horsefly; she felt too guilty to stay here, so she made me drive her away. Why she brought you back here to live I have no idea.”

What she made of any of this was hard to tell; I wasn't in the habit of addressing children, and had decided that the best approach was to talk to them as if they were adults in waiting, capable of shelving anything they didn't understand until later, when it would come in handy.

“She talked about you all the time,” said Bellatrix.

I blinked. “She did?”

“All the time. Your father, blah blah, your father. Anyway, all the things she told me about you made me expect someone… really great.”

The general gave his crusty bark of a laugh. “What did she tell you about me?”

Bellatrix took a deep breath and said in a singsong, reciting from memory, slightly mocking, “She said you were smart, you were handsome, you made her laugh like no one else ever did,
you lived in a mansion, you took her to Europe. You sang songs to her under the balcony of your hotel in Venice, you took her to a place in the Alps where there was the best view and then you had a picnic. You brought her strawberries you'd picked in the dawn in the south of France and woke her up by putting them in her mouth.”

“And they were wet with dew,” I added in the same mocking singsong. I cocked an eye at her. “And you believed all that?”

“I used to, till I met you.”

“Those,” I said, “were your bedtime fairy tales.”

She cocked an eye back at me. “So you never did those things?”

“Let's just say,” I said cautiously, “that a different man did them.”

Our eyes were still cocked at each other.

“She told me you did all those things,” she said staunchly.

“And do you believe her?”

“No! I used to, though.”

“Bellatrix,” I said, “if you must know, she was the only woman I ever sang to. But I had no idea, blind and foolish and trusting as I was, what she was up to.”

“What was she up to?”

“She was fooling around behind my back.”

Bellatrix is not even eleven yet; I wasn't sure she'd grasp the implications. But she is a New York child who's watched enough TV to augment the knowledge gleaned from street and subway and fellow New York children.

“So you're not my father,” she said after a moment.

I felt like yelling, “Bingo.” “No, I'm not,” I said. “So let's just stop this lovey-dovey father-daughter charade. Why don't you go find your real father? He might be the man who runs the local convenience store.”

“What lovey-dovey charade?”

“I was being ironic,” I said. “If you were my real daughter you would understand.”

“Well,” she said, “your real daughter might not know how to make coffee right, so there.”

“Did you know what your mother wants me to do, why she tried to bribe me?”

“Love her again?”

“Well, there is that,” I said. “Yes, that's certainly on her agenda. She also wants me to quit smoking and make Christmas dinner for everyone in the nearby universe, although she knows full well that it's highly unpleasant for me to see anyone at all, much less everyone all at once in my own house.”

“I love Christmas. It's my favorite day of the year. And smoking sucks. It kills you.”

“What's wrong with deciding you'd rather die than quit smoking?”

She shook her head at me as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing. “That's just stupid,” she said. “So should I bring more coffee?”

“Yes, please,” I said, and she was gone.

December 6—I woke up this morning with a sense of having misplaced something irreplaceable. Without too much unnecessary cogitation, but with a certain amount of dismay, it dawned on me that this supposedly precious item was my younger self. Further inquiry pinpointed which younger self it was: it was that decade-plus younger self revealed to me by Bellatrix. She gave me a flash of memory of his now entirely foreign inner workings in her recounting of Sonia's romantic embroidery—I saw him again, that starry-eyed cuckold, trapped inside my decrepit older self, waking up with me this morning after a long sleep. He's groggy and blinking, but he wants to get out, and when he wakes up fully I'll be in trouble.

I would like to kill him, but can't think how to do it without offing myself, which I'm not entirely ready to do yet—the thought of getting to fuck Stephanie again is still too compelling for me to quit the stage, and there are a few new dishes I'd like to make before I go. These tenuous, temporary, but unbreakable threads bind me to my life like a wriggling, trussed-up fly not dead yet, trapped in a crooked web made by a spider on acid.

This young chump of a Hugo—the serenading, strawberry-picking, hormonally charged moron who thought he had won the greatest prize the planet had to offer—ten years after the dissolution of that never-to-be-broken bond…

The cliché of a tree adding rings is tiresome to me, not un-useful, but overused, and therefore like the elastic of my boxer shorts that has no stretch left in it. I am still that young Hugo, the way a withered apple is its fresher self as well as its rotted self, both at once. Midlife is like standing on a high peak looking down at the plains, temporal and spatial simultaneity; it's a congruence of life and death, ashes that you came from and the ones you're heading toward becoming. Fresh-faced Newlywed Hugo wakes and sings within my sagging, soon-to-be decomposing chest; innocent, wakeful Hugo embraces his bride, while bitter old Hugo wakes, smokes, contemplates his end, and that same wife, now loathed and despised, sleeps elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Childe Hugo sits downstairs, kicking silently at the rung of his chair as he chokes miserably on his putrid muesli, his equally miserable brother across the table doing likewise, their ever-watchful mother eagle-eyed, admonishing them if they flag even for an instant in the dispatching of their hated and punishing breakfast. And Dead Hugo, delivered at last, lies behind me on the bed, still and white. And Rotted Hugo grins cheekless underground, somewhere nearby.

Forty, the time of reckoning with unwanted memories, when
old and buried sap rises hot and sturdy again, and of death waiting ahead of me, fully in sight now, while behind me I can clearly see everything that's brought me here, and none of it is good, none of it brings me joy, it all hastens me along toward Old Scratch, who waits with wheelbarrow and pitchfork and stony face. His expression says it's rude to keep him waiting, impolite to take more time when I've already had so much and there are others coming up behind me who need the air and water more than I do. Well, they're welcome to it all, soon enough. What a relief, no longer to care, no longer to be burdened by the future, as I was when I was younger.

Recalling the urgency I felt about my Work as a young sprat makes me laugh inwardly, a long, low, mocking guffaw that would curdle the blood of anyone who heard it. My Work! I still have it all somewhere, all the reprehensibly impish doggerel, the self-serious philosophical grandiosities. The arrogance of youth—those poems I wrote stank like soiled diapers in the sun, the essays were so snot-nosed they might as well have been written with colored chalk on a sidewalk in a hopscotch pattern. Back then I had intimations of grandeur every bit as fulsomely swashbuckling as Dennis's apparently still are. I cringe to think of the way I used to whisper aloud my own name, Hugo Whittier, the smarmy thrill I would feel at my breathless intimations, soon-to-be renowned…. As I recall, I intended that it would be shortened, in seminars and conferences, to a crisp “Whittier,” as telescoped and important as “Montaigne,” or (the happy young Hugo inside me whispers urgently) “Shakespeare.”

Being forced to recall it this way, on this particular morning, seems unnecessarily cruel. I need no prompting or reminders to fuel my self-loathing: ongoing present circumstances serve to keep it blazing and alight.

This is always the case with writing, and there are plenty of
handy ways to refer, either obliquely or head-on, to the gap running between what I might be writing in a perfect world and the constant falling-short of the words I manage to get onto the page.