The Epicure's Lament (33 page)

“Well, don't get yourself asked any more.”

“Hugo,” said Bellatrix, annoyed, “quit being so weird. That's Uncle Dennis's friend.”

“Bun's not his friend,” I hissed at her out of the corner of my mouth, and rolled up my window and drove off with Bellatrix safe and sound next to me, although apparently not grateful for my interference.

“Hugo, why did you talk to him like that?” she asked, looking behind us at Bun's car, which was idling impotently in the parking lot. Maybe he was trolling for another passenger, maybe he was just a little shocked by what I'd said and was getting his bearings, maybe both.

I was filled with hatred. My whole torso was ballooning with it.

“It's a grown-up reason,” I said.

“Since when do you care about not telling me things just because of that?”

“Just do me a favor and don't ever get into his car or in any situation where you're alone with him. Do you promise me?”

“How can I promise when I don't know why I'm promising?”

Although this was the kind of logic I would have used myself
as a kid, I was now the adult, so I didn't have to take it. “Do as I say,” I said. “I pay all your bills, including your violin lessons and school tuition. You're a kid, you take orders.” I thought this was a good answer, but then a long, probing, clear-eyed stare from Bellatrix prompted me to blurt out impatiently, “He's a child molester. Okay? You're a child. There, now you know. You happy I told you?”

That shut her up.

In the course of the long ensuing silence, during which I have no idea what she felt because she didn't say, we passed the small ugly church on the main drag in Briardale. Dressed-up locals were spilling out onto the street, clogging up the traffic flow.

“Look,” I said innocently, “a wedding.” I was feeling a little mean and low for having told her flat-out that way, and I was trying to cajole her out of her funk. Girls liked weddings, as far as I knew, even prepubescent ones. It had something to do with imagining the far-off, dreamy day when they themselves would be got up like virgin snow-queen cupcakes and handed over to some undeserving lout. “Unusual, isn't it, to see a wedding on a Friday afternoon.”

“Oh yeah,” said Bellatrix.

I parked the truck across the street from the church and said, “Listen, Bellatrix, I'm sorry I said that about Bun Fox.”

“Well, is it true?”

“Do you even know what a child molester is?”

“Yes. Is he really?”

“Well,” I said uneasily, “from what I understand, he's trying hard not to be, but there's no sense in testing him, is there.”

“You mean being alone with him in the car?”

“Right,” I said carefully. How the bejeezus was I supposed to handle this conversation? I didn't want to have to say all this to a kid on her way home from school, but at the same time
couldn't not say it. “He might not, but he'd probably want to, so is it really worth taking the chance? Good lord, it's Carla. Carla's getting married. Look. She never told me.”

“Who's Carla?” asked Bellatrix.

Carla was coming down the steps of the church in a white dress, on the arm of some thick-necked local lad in a tux, squinting becomingly in a hail of rice and confetti as several flashbulbs popped. Her hair was up, her face was alight. She looked as beautiful as any freshly married bride ever has looked, I would have wagered, in human history. I envied the groom in a completely impersonal but direct way. I didn't really want to be him. I didn't want to marry Carla. But… her face was illuminated with a kind of electric, radiant joy that's rarely evident on a dismal small-town street in the late afternoon on a winter weekday. And this young square-headed lad, a plumber in training by the looks of him, was its source, its keeper, its… guardian.

“She never told me,” I repeated stupidly, to what avail I had no idea. Why should Carla have thought to mention that she was getting married? I was her customer, the crackpot who harangued her instead of going about his business, because he had no business to go about.

But what girl doesn't tell the whole world she's getting married? Her hairdresser, neighbor, bus driver, airplane seatmate, karate instructor, Bible-study teacher, mechanic, coffee purveyor, shoe salesman…

And so I now know that, despite the fact of our ongoing frequent conversations with only a counter separating us, cigarettes the ostensible link between us, I am no part of that “whole world” of Carla's.

I set out to detach myself from all of human interaction, to live apart and to be alone. It appears I've succeeded at my life's work; I have accomplished this, if nothing else. It has by no means been as easy as it first seemed it would be, or as simple.

December 22—Dennis hauled in a chopped-down pine tree and set it up in the living room, in the corner between the double doors into the dining room and the fireplace. With the three girls and a stepladder to aid him, he hung a multitude of glittering things on its boughs, enough to drive a flock of magpies mad. 'Tis the season.

Fag Uncle Tommy has come home to the roost. He arrived today in all his faded glory, like a bedraggled peacock who has lost neither his voice nor his self-satisfaction, just a few feathers, in Dennis's old sedan, fresh from the train and the city, riding with his head out the passenger-side window like a prissy floppy-eared purebred dog, an Afghan or a tall poodle. His longish white hair was blowing back in the breeze; his eyes were beatifically closed. Dennis and I carried his luggage (two old-fashioned steamer trunks, filled, no doubt, with crimson cravats, vintage maracas, and marabou mules) up to my old room while he swished behind us, thanking us, praising our strong backs, reveling in the old smells of home. “You have no idea,” he said halfway up the stairs, “how wonderful it feels to be back again.”

He does not look especially ill or weak to me, just old and lonesome and long past his nancy-boy prime.

“Lovely, my boys,” he said to Dennis and me when we'd set his trunks down in his old room. He gazed rapturously around at my chair, my bed, my windows, my tree, then appraised us both with frank appreciation that raised my hackles. “And aren't you both handsome? You turned out rather well. As children you were a little peaky, both of you.”

“That's because Mig starved us when we were sick, which was all the time,” I said. “Dennis here would have died if Vivian hadn't taken pity on him and given him bootleg sandwiches.”

“Hugo,” said Dennis, “we don't need to bring up all this old history, come on.”

“He was afraid she'd see the evidence in the toilet and know
he'd been fed, and kill him. And when we weren't sick, things were not a whole lot better. We got food, but it was hardly edible.”

“It wasn't that bad,” said Dennis, master of denial.

“My brother's wife, Mig, was quite the little lunatic,” said Fag Uncle Tommy with a gleam in his eye. “I always thought so. I never understood why he didn't strangle her in her sleep. She was pretty. But what a boyhood you two survived with her. Positively Dickensian…” He inhaled the room's peculiar, clean fragrance, an atticlike smell of dry plaster, old wood, and fresh air seeping in from outside. “I wonder how much time I have left.” He cast another fond look at Dennis and me, standing there like a couple of numskulls with nothing to do or say, and added, “You are both remarkably handsome men, just like your father. I won't add myself, out of modesty.”

“Welcome home,” I muttered, and went away to my new, too-big, barely heated barracks in a garum funk. The ghost of my mother seems to be ever-present lately, hovering somewhere over my shoulder, just out of sight, but I know she's there. I understand that most men love their mothers with primal, unthinking loyalty and would defend them to the death. What I recall of mine makes me want to stab her ghost with an icepick: her hot breath on my cheek, the glazed migraine stare she fixated me with, her moans as I (so bored, so fucking, fucking bored) rubbed her neck until she fell asleep, sated and spent, the unspeakably horrific stains in her underwear I was required to remove instead of running around outside getting into neighborhood brawls like the other lads my age, the thin, watery Buchenwald soup, unsalted damp bread that stuck to the roof of my mouth…. She was creepy, my mother. Will I never be free of her?

Well, yes. Unless she's waiting for me in the underworld— Mig with a migraine in desperate, permanent need of me.

December 24—Still here. Not for long. I'm feeling bizarrely buoyant at the thought of leaving all this behind. In fact, I haven't felt this cheery in months.

Today I went in search of my erstwhile hit man for the first and last time in our lives. I drove to a former fine family home on a seedily empty street in Bayersville, down by the river, near a defunct train station. His landlady answered the door. She looks like a former stripper who invested her minor-league savings in an SRO and is living out her days renting single rooms to the kind of men who used to shove dollar bills into her sweaty cleavage. She opened the door in a tight sweatshirt and black stretch pants that showed her sagging abundance, her blond hair tied back in a leopard-print scarf, cheekbones high, eyes catlike, skin pouched, makeup festive.

“Hello,” she both purred and growled, like a cat-dog hybrid.

“Mrs. Brewster?” I hazarded from the name by the doorbell.

“That's me,” she said, arching her baggy throat and slitting her eyes. I half expected her to run her foot up the back of my calf. “It's ‘Miss,’ though. But you can call me Rochelle.”

“I'm looking for a tenant of yours, Rochelle, if he still lives here,” I said. “He goes by the name of Pete Stravinsky.”

“Second floor, third room on the right. Go on up.”

She shoved the door aside with her sneakered foot and allowed me to venture into the gloom of the front hallway, where I saw a plugged-in upright vacuum cleaner.

I went up the stairs as the vacuum cleaner roared to life. The stairwell smelled of mildew. I knocked on Shlomo's door, and he answered it immediately, as if he'd seen me drive up and heard the exchange downstairs. He wore an undershirt and pa-jama bottoms and had a white towel around his neck. He smelled of a vaguely froggy-went-a-courtin’ kind of aftershave. His basketball of a stomach sat beneath his narrow chest and on his narrow frame as if it had been taken from the body of a
larger man and surgically stitched onto him. He was smoking a cigar; his eyes were hooded under their transparent eyebrows.

“What the fuck do you want?” he said, gesturing me in. “I was about to take a dump.”

“Don't let me stop you,” I said hastily, backing out of the room.

“Just joking,” he said, unsmiling. “Get the fuck inside so I can shut the door. I don't want that cat in heat coming in here and seeing me half naked. No telling what ideas she'd get.”

“I think she's cute,” I said jovially.

“All right.” He scowled. “What's your purpose here?”

“Is this place bugged?”

He snorted and waved his hand limply, which I took to mean that I should sit down in the armchair he had gestured toward and speak without fear of unwanted listeners.

“I have a business proposition for you,” I said, getting comfortable, or trying to. I waggled my foot, which was causing me some discomfort, to put it mildly, and concentrated on not screaming with pain. I fished my pill bottle from my coat pocket, found a pill, and was about to swallow it dry when Shlomo handed me a fifth of something without a word. I unscrewed the cap without looking to see what it was and washed the painkiller down with a big swallow that warmed my chest and made me cough a little. “Thanks,” I said.

“By business I take it you're referring to my preretirement occupation,” he said tonelessly

“I want to discuss a couple of hypotheticals,” I said. I coughed again, this time to cover a flutter of uneasiness at what I was about to do.

“Hypotheticals,” said Shlomo. “I don't like hypotheticals. Never did. They don't smell right.”

When he sat down in the chair across from me, a small puff of dust rose up around his head.

“You should let her in here to clean at least,” I said.

“Hypotheticals,” he repeated with distaste. “Of what nature?”

“First, a hypothetical sum of money.”

He inclined his head with a gleam of monetary interest.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said. It was the amount I'd withdrawn in cash from my bank that very morning. During the transaction, to deflect any possible suspicion, I'd made pleasant chitchat with the bank officer, Merry Pratt, whom I'd known as a kid in grade school. We'd never had much to do with each other back then, so we had no reason not to be friendly and polite to each other. She counted out the enormous sum I'd requested without a flicker of suspicion, probably because I had mentioned offhandedly in the process that I planned to use it to buy a secondhand pickup truck with a plow in order to shovel the snow from Waverley's driveway. This fact clearly bored her so much she could hardly wait to be done with me. “A truck with a plow,” she repeated dully, her eyes glazing over. “My husband always talks about getting one of those.” The bank closed for the holiday at noon; she was clearly longing to get the hell out of there.

“That's a nice round hypothetical sum,” said Shlomo with dubious approbation.

“Coincidentally or not, the amount Tovah offered you twenty-two years ago.”

“And who do I gotta whack for all this bounty,” he shot back on a careless exhale.

I told him briefly what I know about Bun Fox, how he hasn't harmed anyone yet, for all I know, but might.

“And how do you know he might if he hasn't yet?”

I explained about Stephanie, what she'd told me about her husband, and the look on Bun's face in the school parking lot. As I did this, I questioned to myself… not the rightness, morality, or probity, but the appropriateness of what I was
doing. I disapprove of murder, first of all. Second, I don't care about anyone besides myself; I am an island, etc. Going against my deeply held convictions in order to prevent a possible wrong against people who are not myself is not at all in my line of behavior. However, death sharpens things. I didn't realize this until now. The knowledge that I am about to die makes everything look foreshortened, both less and more urgent, less and more ludicrous.