The Epicure's Lament (26 page)
The subway train doesn't match up exactly to the platform, mind the gap. It runs out of the station…. This calls to mind one of the “profounder” insights I recall from Early Hugo: successful metaphors cause us to look up abruptly from the page to catch them as they fly, and bad ones cause us to shift uneasily in our chairs as if in the grip of a bad smell, rubbing the page in hopes of erasing it. A bad metaphor makes the world seem dim and creaky; a good one shines a light into the gap for a brief instant.
This proves if nothing else that he was right about bad metaphors.
Early Hugo. Here he is, all shiny-cheeked and bustling, resplendent in his vigorous earnestness, the type of young man I now want to run over with my truck whenever I have the misfortune to come across one. I always recognize the loathsome species by his unabashedly creative facial hair, his attention-attracting haircut (my hair is now maintained by the town barber to resemble my father's hair in the 1960s as much as possible, and my cheeks are shaved blisteringly clean every morning, right up to my hairline), and, worst of all, his idiosyncratically up-to-the-minute clothing (I wear my father's old trousers, cotton twill in summer, wool or corduroy in winter, all of which are in good shape still and fit me fine, and button-down shirts that are slightly too large, but what do I care?)—never do I not want to smash this boy to a pulp, no matter where he is or what I'm doing when he catches my eye. That I respond to him so violently hints to me, despite my strong preference not to know this, that Early Hugo has possibly never been asleep in the sense of a dreaming, restorative slumber—he's been in a coma, most
likely because I've bashed him in the head repeatedly through the years. I'd do it again right now if I hadn't lost the wherewithal.
I went into town yesterday to get my mail and gently harass my beloved Carla, not to mention replenish my stock of whiskey and late-night-supper ingredients. I found Carla sullen and withdrawn, not her usual chatty self, so, with businesslike consideration, I made my usual purchase and continued on my unmerry way to the post office. In my box was a brief note from Stephanie, written hastily in black ballpoint pen on an index card, enclosed in a plain envelope with no return address. It said in its entirety, “Dear Hugo, Sorry I missed you the other night; something came up and it was too late to let you know. I just realized I could have called the bar, but for some reason it didn't occur to me then. I apologize. Stephanie.”
She apologized. Fat lot of good that does me. I don't believe she wants to see me again, and I don't believe she, a lawyer, didn't think of calling Rex's at the time to let me know she wasn't coming. She did it on purpose, and then sent me an apology that means nothing at all. It's the opposite of a recipe, but similar in the way of opposites, of the same nature: A recipe pretends to provide exact instructions for re-creating a dish whose essential nature is, like that of all alchemical processes (including sex, prayer, smoking, dreams), unique, inimitable, completely different every time. An apology pretends to cancel out whatever action, or in this case nonaction, caused injury or offense, but it doesn't carry the same significance or weight as the action or nonaction itself, not even close. An index card in an envelope doesn't mend the gap between sitting alone at a bar feeling itchily dissatisfied and the anticipated pleasure of getting to fuck Stephanie again, any more than a recipe for Seafood Newburg in any way allows one to re-create the experience of sitting at Marie's dining-room table on that Euro-cinematic evening.
December 7—I was given a prescription yesterday for pain relievers and sleeping pills when I went to see ancient Dr. Schuyler, who looked me over and pronounced me worse. The amputation of a toe or two is an imminent possibility. More distressing, some degree of erectile dysfunction or even full-out impotence is not out of the question. “It's all part of the same thing,” he said sternly, unhappily. It pains him, as a doctor, to watch me, a (to him) youngish man he delivered as a newborn and vaccinated as a tot and helped as much as my crazy mother would allow through all the childhood ailments, now willfully condemn himself to certain death, and all he can do is stand by and watch and predict all the unhappy results of my untoward, incurable passion for cigarettes.
He gave me the predictable injunctions against smoking—it's what he was trained to do, preserve life at all costs—and, when I asked him for it, he wrote me a prescription. I went along to the pharmacy and got my knockout pills and pseudo-morphine. I already feel much better—merely having them is a nice insurance. Not taking pain relievers has until now been my bulwark of cognitive-dissonance bravado against what I intellectually but maybe not entirely viscerally accepted as my imminent death. Now that I've got them, the floodgates have opened.
After I filled the scrip, I went off to the woods and sat on a fallen log in the cold gray wind and smoked an entire pack of cigarettes, one cigarette after another, perversely, feeling as I did another Young Hugo turning gently in his casements, said casements being my present-day self, his prison and his guard both. When the pack was empty and the last butt stubbed out, I vomited in a patch of bare underbrush, then drove back to Waverley and joined Sonia, Bellatrix, and Dennis in a game of Monopoly, a disgusting game of avarice and blunt-headed acquisition. It was strangely painful to me because of the memories it evoked for me of Atlantic City, which may well be the happy finale to my life, barring any other, unforeseen happy occasions that may
surprise me on my now inevitable passage to my end. Thanks to a series of unlucky rolls of the dice, my metal hat cooled its heels in the two-inch-square jail far more than was its natural due; I shared my whiskey with two of my opponents, and somehow, despite my incarcerations, handily beat all three of them. Outside, a storm came and went, and the electric lights flickered on and off a few times. Dennis hauled out and lit the old hurricane lamps, and built a fire in the fireplace. After my stunning victory, he said with half-drunk surprise and brotherly condescension, “You could have been a mogul, Hugo,” at which time I thought I should scuttle up to bed. I stumped upstairs and for the first time in months slept long and deeply, knowing those pills were there if I needed them.
I woke this morning to a heavy, gray, disastrously moody day. That note from Stephanie is rising in my gorge. I'd ripped it to shreds and burned it during my woodsy smokeout, but not before I'd memorized every word for all eternity. How irritating memory is. I can no longer play a stupid game of Monopoly without cringing at the words “Ventnor Avenue.” This sharp, piercing nostalgia for a recent time is nothing like that other nostalgia, that longing for nonexistent, imaginary eras. One is cruelly heartbreaking, the other pleasantly so. How can they be described by the same word?
Everything is a matter of degrees, I guess.
Today Waverley feels like a big ship beached here on this sloping lawn, ablaze with lights and filled with sea-drunk madmen. Bellatrix is sawing away at her violin, first a bit of Dvorák, an odd piece she's been learning lately, full of spiky incidentals, shiveringly passionate asides, and now she's playing Bach, which is allowing me the only shred of focus I've had all day. I like her playing; I am thrilled to find something to like today, and by the fact that her well-played Bach is a pellucid bath of light that's enabling me to see clearly enough to write
here. For the first time it occurs to me to wonder why she's not in school. Shouldn't Sonia have enrolled her in the local barracks by now?
As Bellatrix plays, Sonia is, I fear, down in the kitchen baking some doughy things that will no doubt taste like baking powder, like all her attempts of that nature. And the kitchen itself will be in a shambles of dislocation when I next go down to forage for sustenance, as usual at a time that enables me to avoid eating en famille.
And as for Dennis, judging by the rhythmic banging sounds coming from the depths below my aerie, he's still deeply involved in the renovation of the second-floor bathroom. Apparently, the walls by the old claw-footed tub have rotted through the years—bathers have come and gone, but the steam has lingered on. The other day, in a fit of all-too-characteristic derring-do, he took a crowbar and God knows what other destructive implements and worked out some of his angst and artistic inner turmoil by bashing out huge swaths of plaster. He disappeared in his Dart off in the direction of the hardware store in the strip mall on the way to town, then returned with all manner of things tied to his roof and poking out of his passenger window. He parked on the lawn, even closer to the house than my truck, something he usually considers a sacrilege (he has repeatedly begged me to park in the driveway; I have repeatedly assured him that I will do so when I find the kitchen arranged the way it ought to be arranged and as the gods intended it to be arranged, and if and when this happens in my lifetime I will hold up my own end of the bargain); then he came huffing and puffing up the stairs, bearing an unwieldy slab of green Sheetrock. I watched, smoking, from the rear landing as he fought it into the hallway and along to the bathroom. I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray I held and did not offer to help him, and of course he refused to ask me, for reasons I
give not one flying fuck about. Let him do it all by himself if it's so important to him. I have better things to do than patch up this leaky, scabrous old vessel. But Dennis, ever the optimistic aristocrat, soldiers on alone, muscling the house into the future with him single-handedly. Well, I wish him luck with all of it, smooth sailing, the rest. Why wouldn't I? I don't care what happens after I'm gone.
I won't think about Stephanie any more. I will abuse Sonia all I please in the usual ways, and maybe wholly new ones I may devise in the near future, and I'll likewise allow her to believe that I'm fully capable of offing myself at any moment, which I am. Why does she pretend to care? She will inherit whatever is mine, all the money held in trust in my name—the exact amount of which remains a mystery to me, except that there always seems to be enough there for as many cigarettes and bottles of whiskey as I could want. I have a vague idea how much I'm worth, of course, but the actual dollar amount fluctuates with the stock market, rises and falls with the national mood. Whatever it is now (eight hundred thousand? nine hundred? surely it can't be a whole million dollars, or I'd feel much richer than I do), they'll inherit it all, Sonia and that bastard chick of Carla's uncle. I don't care what happens to it, it came to me from someone else who got it from someone else and so on back into the dawn of financial time. Anyway, they've already been issued so much of it, through the years; they may as well get the rest. In a sense, I consider it my charitable contribution to the advancement of music, in that it will allow Bellatrix to go to Juilliard, which she claims is “her dream.”
This stands as the last will and testament of Hugo Whittier, on this 7th day of December, 2001, being at the moment in soundish mind and hopelessly fucked-up body. They'll inherit all I've got no matter what, but whoever reads this will know I wasn't duped, I willed it this way.
December 9—I recalled with a lovestruck pang, as I was cleaning out the refrigerator yesterday morning, something that Stephanie told me as we lay postcoitally alight and bathed in sweat in that Atlantic City bed: she said that, on hot summer evenings when she gets home from the office and Bun is still gone, she likes to sit on their screened-in porch and have, for her supper, one cored and sliced red bell pepper still cold from the refrigerator dipped bite by bite into a jar of very hot salsa, washed down with a large, icy dry martini, and then, for dessert, a lightly boiled and salted ear of corn.
I knew then that I could and might possibly already be in love with her….
Apropos of something I can't put my finger on, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher uses the word “plenty” much the way Hemingway uses the word “good,” to conjure up a sense of generous warmth in lean, uncertain times. Sometimes I whisper to myself now, the way I used to whisper my own soon-to-be-famous name as a simpering idiot of a young man, “Serve with plenty of hot buttered toast.” This is one of my favorite directives of all time. It never fails to give me a glimpse of Mary Frances herself in her belted dress, her dark hair falling glam-orously, the way it did, over her cheek, her round, sexy Irish face a little puckered, a little abstracted, since she was far too sensual and intelligent to be sunny. Her “plenty” is a mannered, self-conscious thing, of course, but its repetition, sometimes even stilted overuse, offers a vicarious sense of good American overabundance, stout comfort to those in alien lands and heartsick fugue states alike. “Serve with plenty of hot buttered toast” gives the disaffected and ill-at-ease—me, for example—a momentary welling of joy.
After I cleaned the refrigerator and had that sudden hankering for a red pepper dipped in hot salsa, despite the fact that winter is nigh, I got in my truck and drove to the supermarket,
and was standing in line with my little arm basket of goodies when what to my wondering eye should appear but Shlomo the hit man, carrying his own basket of goodies, which I couldn't help noticing consisted entirely of packaged, nitrate-heavy artificially flavored dreck.
He saw me; I saw him. Too late for either of us to backtrack: recognition was full-blown in my expression and had just begun to dawn in his squinty eyes.
“Shlomo,” I said, placing my purchases on the conveyor belt with feigned relaxation. “Amazing coincidence to see you again after all these years.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Wait till I buy all this crap, I want to talk to you out in the parking lot.”
“Yeah,” I rejoined, “I bet you do.”
We carried our single bachelor plastic sacks through the pneumatic door, out into the cold wind. I hunched into my coat; he did likewise.
“Why exactly am I not dead?” I asked.
“Shut up,” he said without heat. “I don't give a fuck; I got out of the business and relocated. If anyone knows I'm here I'll be the one who's dead. They didn't move me very fucking far away from all the trouble.”