The Epicure's Lament (37 page)

“Gee, thanks,” Vero called up from the floor.

“—should not show his or her hand. I need to feel a sense of collaboration—as an artist, maybe—nonartists may not feel this way when they read or watch or see a work of art. But for me, knowing that Tolstoy sees Anna's death from the very first sentence causes me to lose interest.”

“What if,” I said, “I told you he'd changed the whole work over the course of many years? Revised it from top to bottom? He intended Anna to be a blowsy coarse, voluptuous adulteress, but in spite of his best intentions she came to life under his hands. She was transformed from that rude fishwife of her creator's intent into the sophisticated, beautiful woman we all know and love, in our way, although she also has certain shallow qualities, that carapace of obliviousness that makes her more complex than if she were a heroine pure and simple.”

“Well, judging from what I've read,” said Dennis, “Tolstoy seems to be didactically killing off his heroine because he doesn't approve of adultery. Punishing her. Meanwhile, who can blame her for choosing Vronsky? Not me. Do you? Why should she die because she makes that choice?”

“Don't take it so personally,” I said.

Dennis drank the glass of water in several manly gulps while Vero ignored both of us.

“Vero,” I said, turning to her, “what the hell are you doing?”

She ignored me.

“She's scrubbing our kitchen floor,” said Dennis.

“But it's clean,” I said. “She's scrubbing the floor as if no one had washed it in seventy-five years. I myself mopped it two days ago. Vero, this isn't necessary. In fact, it's intrusive. And what is that thing on your head?”

“I don't mind doing this,” she said obtusely. “It'll be much easier to cook this meal if the kitchen is spotless.”

“It's spotless already.” I gave her an exasperated look. As I said, things had not gone smoothly earlier, in the markets. I consider myself the boss of this meal, but apparently Vero thinks otherwise. She seems to assume that she knows better than I which vegetables are freshest. Then there was the gravy squabble. I told her, in the appropriate aisle, having added several packets of turkey-gravy mix to the cart, that I make it from this mix, to which I add defatted drippings. Packets of mix make better gravy than from scratch with flour and fat. Vero refused to allow this as a possibility. What followed was a strained argument too tedious to reproduce here in this journal.

“It can't hurt to wash the floor again, can it?” she said now.

“If you want to waste your time,” I said.

Dennis refilled his glass and slunk off in the direction of the back porch. I gave Vero one more grim look and followed Dennis; our conversation, now that I thought about it, was not over yet.

He stood on the crowded little kitchen porch and pretended to study the defunct kitchen garden, which in the decades since Vivian's departure has settled into a sort of democratic free-for-all; it looks completely wild, but in fact over the years I've sneakily cultivated certain of the weeds and routed out others. Occasionally I pull many gloved handfuls of nettles and make an excellent soup out of them; the dandelion and mustard greens are all right in salads, and the wild onions will do in a pinch instead of store-bought, although they're very sharp-tasting, so they have to be cooked longer. Nasturtiums, violets, and roses grow along the borders; a smattering of their petals is just right in these wild salads. Every year I stick a few carrot, parsnip, and turnip seeds into the soil so there are homegrown roots to add
to soups in early winter. The idea, I suppose, is that there's always something to eat around the place. Never mind that these are exactly the same vegetables I was force-fed as a boy by we-all-know-who. When I cook them, they behave entirely differently and it's entirely possible that I cook them because of this, as yet another form of exorcism.

Nettle soup… so simple, so bizarrely delicious. A big basket of the tender heads of nettles (not too many flowers) gathered from a clean garden with well-gloved hands, washed clean of grit and bug piss, set aside in a colander. Sauté minced onion and diced peeled potatoes in olive oil. Add the nettles, stir, and cook for a few minutes. Add enough chicken broth to cover plus two inches, boil lightly till the potatoes are soft, purée, then add salt and pepper, nutmeg, cream. I always have a slight, amazed contraction of the palate at the first spoonful of nettle soup, as my eyes roll back in a culinary swoon…. Nettle soup tastes like a concentration of powerful green. Nettles, which raw are terrible to touch, are rendered superbly edible by boiling, so tender they melt on the tongue with a rich, faintly fishy multidimensional flavor. Maybe it's the Waverley soil; maybe they aren't as good elsewhere. I'll never know.

It was very cold out there. I hunched in my shirtsleeves and said to Dennis, “By the way, I rented out the gatehouse. I may have neglected to mention to you that I was doing so. It's much too nice a place to stand vacant. I was planning to move down there myself, but this seems to be a more elegant solution since you say you're moving to the city eventually. And he said he'd make it habitable again.”

“Who said he'd make it habitable again?” Dennis asked testily.

“Oh,” I said, “our new tenant. He signed a lease today. Pete Stravinsky.”

“Pete Stravinsky? Who the hell is Pete Stravinsky? Since
when are we renting out the gatehouse to strangers? It's not as if we need the money. Why did you do this without talking to me or Uncle Tommy first about it?”

“Look,” I said, “down there. Is someone breaking into the tool shed?”

“That's Bellatrix,” he said. “As you well know. I sent her down to get some hooks so I can hang the wreaths and pine boughs.”

“Well, it might have been an intruder. And the more eyes we have around the property, the better. Since when do you give orders to my kid?”

“Since when is Bellatrix your kid? I thought you disavowed all blood ties.”

“She's not related to me,” I said, “but she's my ward, and I'm her guardian, not you.”

A strong wind came up from the river and ruffled the sparse, paltry rows of weeds in the garden, and continued up to the porch to lift Dennis's and my hair from our brows. We Whittier men do not go bald. Lack of testosterone, I would say, except that we both seem to have an unhealthy surfeit of it.

“The last time there was a Christmas tree at Waverley,” I said, “was 1977.”

“Wrong,” said Dennis. “It was 1978. You were gone, but we had one anyway. The world didn't grind to a halt around here just because you ran away from home, you know.”

“Just you and Mother, alone at Christmas together? How cozy.”

“And Vivian, and a couple of friends of mine from school. Where the hell were you, anyway?”

“New York,” I said airily. “Then I went elsewhere. I worked my way around the world in the gigolo and drug-running trades, you could say.”

“Right,” said Dennis, obviously not believing me. “Someday,
Hugo, maybe you'll learn how to answer a question directly, like a grown-up.”

“Gosh,” I said, “do you really think so?”

“No,” he said shortly.

Bellatrix came running up the lawn in her blue puffy down coat, her legs knock-kneed and ungainly, her expression earnestly intent on not dropping whatever was in her hand. She trampled through the sodden garden and tracked wet earth up the steps to the porch. “Look,” she said to me once she was within easy earshot, “I found this in the shed.”

She opened her hand and showed me, ignoring Dennis.

“Well, look at that,” I said.

Dennis and Bellatrix and I peered together at the stoppered test tube in which, one winter day when I was about Bellatrix's age, I'd preserved the dead litter of mice I'd come across. They were still there in a cozy row, their tiny pinkish-gray snouts and paws pressed against the glass, their fur as crisp and fuzzy as if they'd just been licked clean by their mother.

“Oh, for God's sake, I thought I made you get rid of that,” said Dennis, and went back into the house with his empty water glass.

“He didn't think much of that back then either,” I said. “That's why I had to hide it.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“Dead baby mice in a stoppered test tube.”

“Chuh,” she said in a singsong, evidently some contemporary expression of childish scorn. “I mean, why did you make this and hide it in the shed?”

“How did you know it was me? I mean, rather than Dennis, or someone else who grew up here?”

She gave me the glance equivalent of “chuh.”

“Well,” I said, “I had test tubes in my chemistry set, which every kid had back then. We all got them for Christmas. They
came with chemicals, real ones, glass test tubes and beakers, and Bunsen burners. Back then, you know, no one wore bike helmets either, or knee pads. Nowadays there's nothing like that, it's all safe and fire-retardant and shatterproof, I imagine because of lawsuits and child-safety laws and everything else. We could make horrible smells with those chemicals, mix them and cook them and cause explosions and messes. That's all a chemistry set was really good for; I don't think anyone actually learned anything about chemistry. Anyway, I found these mice one day, dead, in the ballroom fireplace, and thought I'd see how long they'd last if I kept them like that.”

“How long have they lasted?”

“About thirty years,” I said. “It's amazing how fresh they look. You found them on the shelf where all the nails and screws are, right?”

“Yup.”

“So no one found them all those years.”

“Maybe someone did, but they were so grossed out they didn't want to touch it. There's all kinds of weird stuff in that shed. I hate going in there.”

“Did you get Dennis his hooks?”

She gave me another look. “I forgot. Can I keep this? Or just bring it to school to show my friends? I promise I'll take care of it.”

“Don't let anyone steal it,” I said.

“I swear I won't.”

“Guard it carefully.”

“I will.”

“You can have it.”

“Do I have to go back down there and get those hooks for Uncle Dennis? There's all these spiders.”

“You're scared of spiders but not this test tube full of dead baby mice?”

In the end we went down to the shed together, I found the
hooks, and then she scampered off with her prize to deliver the little box to my brother. And I went alone up to my room to write, which I am now almost finished doing. I've been contemplating all along as I've written, like a nagging itch, a phantom pain, the fact that Vero, that awful woman, is mucking about in the kitchen downstairs. Well, I gave up the test tube, the talisman from childhood; but I have to acknowledge now that I've decided to relinquish everything: my kitchen and its arcane, inscrutable, essential order, its cupboards stocked with late-night supper ingredients, its garden, tended for so long, and these notebooks (I'll burn them, I think, or bury them under the floorboards in my room), and my own body, which will likewise be either burned or buried, I don't much care which.

December 26—This will be my last entry, and then my life is done. Or, rather, undone, by me.
Et Dieu sauve le remenant!
Christmas dinner is over; it's two in the morning of the day after, Boxing Day, the last day of my life, or, rather, the last night. I won't live to see the dawn. (There's an odd pleasure in writing that—I realize I've always wanted to say it.) I've lined up all my ducks in a row, the dinner has gone off, and the dishes are, for the last time, all washed, dried, and put away where the will of God dictates (to me, and apparently only me) that they belong.

On Christmas Eve, after all the traditional present-opening-by-the-tree-in-the-firelight shenanigans were completed (during which I stayed writing in my room; I neither give nor receive gifts and made this clear to one and all) and the rest of the household had gone to bed, I went to Sonia's room, knowing this would be my last crack at a pastime that has afforded me some of the greatest pleasure I've known in my life.

If I stay alive longer and keep smoking, I will very likely lose my ability…. Unthinkable.

I took all the pleasure from her I could and allowed her to
have some too, and afterward she lay in my arms, breathing into my neck without talking on and on, something she has never done.

Then she fidgeted, sat up, and began to yammer at me. It was time to shut her up with food. I escorted her downstairs, lit candles in the silent kitchen, and opened a bottle of a robust, spicy Spanish wine I'd been saving for a special occasion. To make onion soup properly takes time, so I took time. I found in the root bin four good—not moldy or sprouted; the skins have to be papery, dry, and blemish-free—medium yellow onions, cut them in halves, and sliced them thin, then sautéed them in butter and olive oil for nearly an hour, with a little sugar and salt sprinkled on them, until they caramelized and turned slightly brown. “Consider the onion,” I said as the onions sizzled in the pot. “A perfect white globe of many tightly packed layers wrapped in parchment paper and secured at either end. It's a perfect world unto itself, pearly white and beautiful to hold and look at, cool to the touch, firm, and unscented until you cut into it—then it releases its sulfur, and makes grown men cry.”

“I do not cry when I cut onions,” said Sonia.

“Well, you, of course not,” I said. “It's a paradoxical root, the onion. Did you know that, thousands of years ago, the Egyptians buried their pharaohs in their tombs with small onions in their eye sockets? They were a sacred symbol of eternity.”

Sonia leaned her head on her hand and watched me, evidently having become used to these little food lectures of mine, so she no longer tries to redirect and reclaim my attention with her narcissistic wiles and tactics.

“They were also the subject of sacred art: Egyptian painters painted onions on the insides of pyramids. There was a small sect of Egyptian priests who were forbidden to eat onions, no one is exactly sure why.”

“Priests,” said Sonia, “do all sorts of things and no one understands why.”

“In Pompeu, onion sellers had to form their own guild, because the other fruit-and-vegetable sellers rejected them. But in Pompeuan brothels, the onion was highly valued, down in the places where the underworld could meet the elite, as the song goes, where the snobs and the onion eaters intermingled. Archaeologists found a basket of overcooked onions in the ruins of one of the most popular whorehouses in Pompeu.”