The Epicure's Lament (36 page)

Because the pack I bought earlier today was already gone and I was hankering for a chat with Carla, I stopped in again at Stewart's, leaving Vero to guard the groceries in the truck. Carla wasn't there, so I had to buy them off her villainous blockhead of an Uncle Evan. I wanted to box his ears, as they used to say in olden times, but didn't care to get involved in the family melee, not in that way. I am now consumed with a physical hunger for Carla's long gawky limbs, those delectable teats, her enormous head on its funny, erotic stalk of neck….

When we got home I realized that I had left something in my old room, something important.

I left Vero unpacking grocery bags and went back to my old room and knocked on the door.

“Come in, door's unlocked,” Fag Uncle Tommy called in a garbled voice.

“Uncle Tommy,” I said with businesslike casualness, “I forgot to take a few things when I moved out of your room. Is it all right if I get them now?”

“Come in, dear boy,” he said. He was sitting up in bed with a book propped open on his bony knees. He looked delighted at the interruption, a little human contact for a lonely old soul. I perched on the edge of my former favorite chair while he fluttered to make himself presentable. “How are things downstairs?” he asked.

“Chaotic and distressing,” I said dourly. “You're not missing a thing. Where are all your male nurses? Why don't you have any?”

“Male nurses? I can still make my way to the lavatory and keep myself tidy, and I can still feed myself. I'm not ninety-three yet.”

“But I thought your disease…” I began, then all at once I realized I had never actually been told that he was dying of AIDS, I'd simply assumed it because in my ignorance I thought that's what all homos died of. “Never mind,” I added. “I lived in this room for many years. It's the nicest one in the house, and you're lucky to have it.”

“Of course,” he said absently. “What do you mean, my disease?”

“Well,” I said, “on the phone I thought you said you were sick.”

“Sick?” he chirped with a puckish twitch of his lips. “You mean AIDS? No, I'm just old and homesick, and the city isn't so easy when you're over a certain age.” He pressed both hands to his sunken cheeks and chuckled. “You assumed, because I'm
gay, of course. You are such a homophobe, Hugo. Aren't you cute. You almost belong to a different era; you remind me of those pugnaciously hetero blue-blooded boys running around Greenwich Village when they still called it that. Actually, now that I think of it, you remind me of my uncle Sebastian.”

“Sebastian,” I said churlishly. “Didn't he live in a tree house in California and chant all day?”

“Oh, but that was later, in the sixties, all that ecological mysticism. No, he was a real boys’ boy when he was younger, like you. And like your father, also.”

“You said you always wondered why he married my mother,” I said. “Why?”

“I can't pretend to know why men choose any women, obviously,” he answered shrewdly. “And your mother never liked me either.”

“Just tell me, Uncle Tom. I didn't like her either.”

“Well, first of all, there's a natural antipathy that exists, almost universally, between a coupled person and his or her partner or spouse's siblings, and vice versa. What do you think of your brother's wife?”

“I like her fine now that he left her,” I said. “And he seems to like my wife more than is strictly brotherly.”

“Well, you boys never did conform,” he said. “But as for your father and me… I was the older, gay misfit, and Bim was the younger, golden boy who married the French beauty who turned into a beast. She was sweet enough at first, just a little flighty and demanding, until he got blown to pieces and she went off the deep end. I always suspected you boys suffered at her hands, but what could I do? She rarely let me anywhere near you lest I corrupt you, or something to that effect. I went off the deep end a little too when Bim died. I adored my brother madly. He was the shining star, really the sun, of my existence. From the moment he was born I knew myself to be
eclipsed, but, unlike many boys like me, I didn't mind. I never had any hunger for the limelight, any wish to be other than what I was and am. He grew up to be everything a man should be, which neatly offset my own character, which has always tended to the secretive, shallow, and debauched. He was brave and strong and bright and proud and true. I should have died, not him, and I do mean that. I would have traded my life for his. It would have been the one noble gesture of an otherwise fatuous life. My goodness, you smoke a lot.”

“Like a cigarette?”

“Oh, I haven't smoked in years,” he said, wagging his head. “But why not. You make it look so pleasurable.”

“It's not, trust me,” I said, finding myself warming to this odd duck of an uncle of mine despite my admitted homophobia and strong native distaste for my own relatives. “Anyway,” I said, handing over a cigarette and lighting it for him, then settling back into my chair a little more comfortably, “my mother.”

“Mig,” he said, and chuckled as he exhaled a stream of smoke. “Mig the Twig. Poor little thing, all alone in this big house with Vivian, who was a good person but quite out of her tree as well, and two little boys. You know, don't you, that Vivian was in love with your mother. Mig was very needy physically, very clingy and demonstrative. Apparently, on several occasions she asked Vivian to sleep in her bed, and although nothing overtly sexual transpired, Vivian blew this up into a love affair in her own mind. Of course, she knew it was all in her own mind, but that only made it more intense; you know how that works, I'm sure.”

“How do you know all this if you weren't allowed anywhere near us?”

“After your mother died, Vivian and I met at the funeral. She sat next to me, and we began talking, as two old homos will, and when I asked her her plans for the future she told me
she had not a clue what to do next. So, in an uncharacteristically generous mood, maybe because I pitied her for having had to live with Mig all those years, I offered to help her. And then, without too much trouble, I found her a job taking care of a bedridden friend of a friend, and a rent-controlled sublet in the Village, right near my place—the lease belonged to a friend of another friend who'd relocated permanently to Morocco, and she lived there forever. That was back when you could still hope to find a place to live down there. She never forgot my kindness to her. She and I had lunch together once a month for years until she died, and she always picked up the check. She was a great old gal, that Vivian, when you got used to her.”

“I hope she didn't cook for your bedridden friend of a friend,” I said. “And you don't have to tell me that my mother was physically needy. She practically molested me for years.”

“Molested?”

“Well, she didn't pull my little wiener or anything, but she might as well have,” I said tersely.

“I am not,” he said compassionately, “altogether surprised. I always suspected she was particularly demanding of you, much more so than your brother. You were a sweet, charming little boy. I'm sure she took advantage. What a terribly fraught situation. I'm amazed you chose to come back and live here after such a childhood.”

“With her gone,” I said, “it's a nice enough place.”

He chuckled knowingly. “And you've had the run of it for years. That must have been lovely. If you're not scared of ghosts. But you're not, are you?”

“No such thing,” I said.

“Oh, please, they're everywhere here, the place is crawling with them. Well, luckily, they're all relatives, so I don't mind. Except for that creepy dead governess who was stabbed by the Swedish butler in my grandfather's day. Eliza someone. She's the
only one I'm afraid of. But she stays over in the new wing, where you're sleeping. Along with poor Aunt Charlotte—poor Charlotte, who got knocked up by the dairyman, at least according to my mother. She was only fifteen; she couldn't face it. She hanged herself, you know.”

“I'll collect my things now,” I said, “if it's all right.”

“Oh,” he said, waving his hands magisterially, “by all means, go right ahead.”

I stuck my head into the closet, waggled my hand around the shelf to the back, touched the wall, but couldn't find the packet I was looking for.

“Where did it go?” I said.

“You're looking for your bag of pills?”

“You have it?”

“I found it when I was unpacking,” he said, reaching over to his nightstand, trying to disguise his disappointment. He handed over the bag. “This is an odd thing to accidentally leave behind.”

“Well, it's my reserve supply,” I said, as innocently as I could. “I thought it was in my Dopp's kit with the others, but then I remembered I had squirreled it away for when I needed it. I hope you didn't take any.”

“I might have helped myself to one or two to ascertain their identity, but the rest of them are all here. My goodness, you have quite a supply. Hillbilly heroin, if I'm not mistaken, and I rarely am. Very potent, very nice indeed. Of course, you have to sniff it, once it's powdered.”

“It's a legitimate painkiller prescribed by Dr. Schuyler,” I said.

“For what?” he asked, concerned.

“For pain,” I said tersely. “I have a foot condition. I'm not a drug user.”

“Well, you are, but in fact you're using them in the way
they're intended to be used rather than abusing them wantonly like me—let's get our terms straight here. I'm sorry about your foot. But are you sure you can't spare a couple for a lonely old man in a tower?”

I laughed grimly and shook my head. “Unfortunately, Uncle Tom, I need them all,” I said. “But alcohol is cheap, available, legal, and stimulating as well as relaxing.”

“It's nowhere near as exciting as that stuff in the bag,” he pouted. “Not by a very long shot.”

“Well, maybe you can get your own prescription,” I said, but not without affection, and a little while later I went away to manage my pain.

It's become so bad I'm using more and more pills now in daytime, which raises my resistance to them and makes me slightly fuzzy-headed despite their time-release properties, a double whammy of ill effects, and I need all my faculties because there's much to oversee in the kitchen. I'm sure Vero is putting things where they don't belong and causing no end of chaos I'll have to undo before I can think straight enough to cook. Have tried on numerous occasions to get rid of her and send her to her sister's, but she sticks to me like a burr. If I had any ego left I'd suspect her of harboring a crush on me, but the fact that writing these words makes me laugh indicates this is every bit as ludicrous as it appears. No, there's something else going on. The family has appointed her to make sure I really go through with the damn dinner? Maybe.

Time to go and restore whatever she's disarranged.

On my way downstairs I ran into none other than my horse's ass of a brother, who was up on a ladder in the stairwell replacing a light bulb.

“Hugo,” he said importunately as I attempted to sidle by, “could you hand me that bulb there?”

I knew full well what bulb he meant, since there was only one that I could see, but didn't want to make it too easy for him. “What bulb?”

He pointed, I affected to look, picked it up, and handed it to him, he got back to work, I attempted once again to sidle by.

“How's dinner coming along?” he asked.

I looked up at him. “We haven't started cooking yet,” I said patiently.

“Well, I know that,” he responded with good cheer. “I just mean, how is it working out with Vero?”

“Who assigned her to me, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

More back and forth until he realized I wasn't backing down.

“Marie thought you could use a hand,” he said.

So Dennis and Marie were getting along well enough to conspire. This was interesting news.

“Are we being set up?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Neither of us would wish either of you on each other.”

“You know she talked me into cooking this dinner,” I said, “when I ‘happened’ to run into her the other day. Was that a setup too?”

“There is no setup,” he grunted, and tossed down the burnt-out bulb. I caught it in spite of my determination not to. “Well, except apparently in the other direction. Marie said you and Vero are trying to save our marriage. She said Vero told her you agreed to cook and host this dinner for the good of our daughters. You should save your energy in that case. We've pretty much decided it's over.”

I sputtered ineffectually for a moment, genuinely embarrassed. In that moment I felt exactly like Dennis, transparently caught in the act. “Listen,” I said, “she's the one who came at
me like a chattering squirrel when I was just sitting there minding my own business and trying to finish my lunch. All I agreed to do was cook a meal. She's all fired up about the good of Evie and Isabelle. You know how she gets.”

“All I know is, for a while I thought there was a chance for reconciliation, but we've both moved on, and we're with other people now, and this is the way it ought to be. So now you know, and you can continue to mind your own business from now on.”

He climbed slowly down from the ladder with his left hand on his lower back, grimacing.

“Looks like your acrobatic sex life is taking its toll,” I said, in spite of my determination not to bring up anything to do with Stephanie.

He didn't respond to this. Instead, he folded up the ladder and tucked it under his arm and began to carry it downstairs.

“How did you like the ending of the book?” I asked his receding back.

He barked over his shoulder, “Which book?”

“Anna Karenina,”
I said.

“I couldn't finish it.”

“Why not?”

I followed him the rest of the way down to the first floor, waited while he stowed the ladder in the closet under the stairs and mopped his brow, and then followed him into the kitchen, where Vero was scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees, her hair up in a babushka-style head scarf that did nothing to flatter her angular face.

“Why couldn't you finish it?” I asked again.

“Well,” said Dennis, at the sink with a glass, filling it from the tap, “although it's an undeniably great and immortal novel, one of the greatest ever, I can't stomach it when I sense that an artist knows how a work will end from the outset, whether it
be a novel, a movie, a piece of music, or a painting. I require a sense of mystery, discovery, and surprise; by which I mean to say, the artist himself—or herself, of course—”