The Epicure's Lament (38 page)

“Speaking of overcooked,” said Sonia. “You'd better stir the pot; I think I smell burning.”

“Alexander the Great fed his troops onions to make them strong, on the theory that strong food made strong soldiers.”

“Strong food,” said Sonia, “makes strong breath.”

“Onions were considered peasant food until the Middle Ages, disdained by the rich, possibly because the peasants ate them raw with bread and beer as a staple diet, so the rich considered them rough and insulting to the nose and suitable only for those who didn't care what they smelled like, but in the Middle Ages onions became worth their weight in gold. Charlemagne ordered them to be planted in the royal garden, and they were accepted as payment for land. And of course they had many other uses. The superstitious used strings of garlic and onions to ward off vampires.”

“My mother hung garlic to ward off vampires,” Sonia said, sniffing with the special brand of disdain she reserved for her backward family. “And her mother, and so on all the way back to the medieval ancestors who knew nothing. They still know nothing.”

“And did you know that, in a certain small town in Texas whose name escapes me, it remains to this day against the law for young women to eat raw onions after six o'clock in the evening? Cooked onions, no problem, but one nibble at a raw Vidalia will send any
chiquita
to the slammer for the night.”

“Isn't that interesting,” she said absently, still caught up in all-encompassing scorn for her native land.

“In ancient India they used onions as a diuretic, and to benefit the heart and other organs, even as the Brahmins turned up their noses at them. And people now believe certain compounds in this cheap common little root fight cancer. Meanwhile, there's a religious group in Paris with a few thousand followers who call themselves the Worshippers of the Onion. Mystical, curative, legislative, aesthetic, culinary… it's a powerful little orb. A sulfur-breathing dragon packed into a pearl that becomes sweeter and softer the longer you cook it, the longer you expose it to the heat of the fire.”

“Very poetic, Hugo.”

“Thank you. I think so too.”

I poured a half-cup of dry red wine over the caramelized onions and brought the whole thing up to a boil, then down to a whispering simmer; when the fumes had burned off, I dumped in a thawed quart of beef stock from the stock I made and froze a few months ago. I added several shots of Worcestershire sauce, salted the broth to taste, and let it simmer undisturbed while I toasted slices of firm, crusty French bakery bread, so different from the cheap supermarket sponge tubes that are half air. I ladled the finished soup into sturdy bowls, laid two slices of toast on top of each, smothered them with thick slices of pungently nutty Gruyère, and ran the bowls under the broiler for about five minutes, until the cheese was bubbling and brown, and the toast had soaked up a little of the savory, oniony, buttery broth.

We sat across from each other at the kitchen table and opened our napkins. I lifted my wineglass and looked at Sonia through the candlelight and gazed long and hard at her, sitting there in her robe with her hair loose and her face naked and rosy, and said, “To a long and successful marriage.”

“We never saw each other through most of it,” she protested.

“That's why it's been so successful,” I said. “And long.”

She laughed as we clinked glasses. It was possibly only the fifth time I've ever heard Sonia laugh.

As we ate—or, rather, as Sonia gobbled her soup like a starving dog the moment it was cool enough, and I took judicious, appreciative bites of cheese and toasted broth-soaked bread interspersed with spoonfuls of slippery, savory onions—I found myself saying with untoward calm, “Sonia, now that it's over, we've been through it, and here we are, tell me: who is Bellatrix's father? Doesn't she have a right to know?”

She stopped eating and looked squarely at me. “Let it go,” she said. “Just let it go. You are my husband and she is the child I gave birth to during our marriage, and so you are her father, Hugo, and you should forget this whole question of who, who, who. Does it matter, really? Does it? That was very cruel of you to say all that in front of her. She might be scarred by it forever.”

“Bellatrix,” I said, “does not scar easily. And blood is thick. Someday, when she's older, I hope you'll tell her who he is. She has a right to know. If I were her I would want to know.”

“If I were her I would want my parents to get along, and for my father to acknowledge me as his child.”

“The truth,” I said. “That's what matters.”

“The welfare of a little girl is what matters,” she countered.

“And the two are not at all mutually exclusive,” I said. “Just remember, someday, that I wanted her to know, all right?”

“How can I ever forget if you're always reminding me?”

“I'll stop now,” I said. “I promise, this is the last you'll hear of it, if you promise to tell her someday.”

“Hugo,” she said wearily.

I knew from long experience that this was the best I was going to get out of her in terms of a promise, and any more cajoling on my part would only backfire, so I subsided.

After we had drunk the wine and eaten the soup, we went
up the stairs together. She paused before we parted ways and looked at me. “Come and sleep with me,” she said. “Just to sleep.”

“I can't,” I said.

“Why not.”

“Because I'm crazy as a coot,” I said.

She didn't laugh at this, but she smiled slightly, and so I parted from my wife with some warmth, and more understanding than I ever expected from her.

This night is very quiet. The house has a sort of warm and postfestivity smell of roast meat and flowers and perfume and extinguished candles. Loud in my head are lines from a poem by a teenage girl who had no idea what she was talking about but got it right anyway: “I feel no haste and no reluctance to depart; I taste merely with thoughtful mien, an unknown draught, that in a little while I shall have quaffed.” I see I've dropped, for the first time in so many years, my stance of self-protective mockery. What would be the use of it now? There's no one any more to keep at bay and no thoughts I don't want to confront, no feelings too large for my formerly small but suddenly enlarged canvas. The inside of my head is very quiet. Montaigne is with me, as I knew he would be, at the very end.

These words of his resound as if he'd said them aloud to me, maybe because I translated them myself in my clumsy way, maybe because I believe them and have taken them to heart:

“The most beautiful death is the one that is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others; our death depends on our own.”

I strove, above all else, to make my life independent of the will of others. Looking back, I see that in a sense it consisted of little else…. Well, it could be posited that my years of solitude were lived in reaction to the will of others, which is to be together. The will of others is the flour that binds the gravy.

Hugo waxes philosophical one last, excruciating time.

I have never, in my entire life, experienced Martin Buber's much-vaunted I-Thou relationship with any form of God. There's no Maker I'm going to meet. My inhabitance of this body and this mind was an ever fluid and shifting trance, but I was always aware of some core, inviolable thing in the pit of my stomach, the thing that I most trust and rely on but which I can't keep, and which isn't mine or me, again a contradiction, a wordless but constant knowing…. There's a theory that there's a brain in our intestines. My godlike intestinal brain has informed me all my life of the things I had to do. I never questioned it, and it served me well. I took responsibility for myself at every turn, never laid claim to more than my lawful and natural due, took pains not to inflict my self-loathing on others except as strictly necessary, or for their own good. This finer point was likewise determined by my intestinal brain; I've never knowingly caused harm to another person. Telling Bellatrix I'm not her father doesn't count because I'm not her father, and if I were, I wouldn't feel so free to take myself out like this. The sooner we all were clear about the truth in this matter, the better.

I am glad I lived alone. Human bonds and bondages tear at the fragile fabric of each self: betrayal, misunderstanding, heartbreak, loss, anger, grief. We can't be both true to ourselves and in some sort of relationship to each other, and in almost every instance, minute and overarching, one or the other has to give. I chose what I chose; other people choose otherwise.

Vero turned out to be, to my surprise, an effective sous-chef Cooking an enormous holiday meal is not difficult or complicated,
but it does require a certain lightness of touch and finesse with timing and proportions. Vero has neither, but she can follow orders when she suspends her know-it-all arrogance and simply does what she's told. Of course, I had to beat her about the head with a pair of wooden spoons—no, actually a few sharp words did the trick. Some women are full of hot air but the minute a red-blooded man barks an order they turn as meekly submissive as any geisha, as if that was what they secretly, really, truly wanted, and all the rest was just bluster…. Vero is one of those. She arrived promptly at two on Christmas Day. “Cut these,” I said to her, and she cut them. “Smaller,” I said, and she cut them smaller. Meanwhile, I moved efficiently from counter to sink to refrigerator to cupboard to pantry to oven…. I made a ham with holiday sauce and Cornish game hens. Throughout the afternoon of cooking, we spoke little and kept our own counsel. Just before everyone arrived, when the ham was baking, the potatoes were ready to boil and mash, and the rest of the side dishes had been taken as far into their preparation as possible, we had a little chat.

“Allez houp,”
said Vero, drying her hands on a clean dish towel after washing all the cooking dishes. She looked a little battle-scarred, and ready for a drink. I opened us a bottle of wine and poured some out. Not too much for her: Vero strikes me as the type who has half a glass of something and becomes morbid, weepy, garrulous, confessional, giggly, or all of them at once. She is both pent up and determinedly unconventional— a combination that begs to be made woozy and pliable, and I was in no mood to bring about any such thing.

“Christmas was never much fun when I was little,” she announced after two sips: so she was of the garrulous and confessional variety. “We had to sing for all the relatives.”

“Was Christmas really fun for anyone? Was childhood?”

She laughed, her eyes sparkling. So! A girlish crush on Hugo.

“Do you know with whom Dennis is having his extramarital affair?” I asked.

She looked startled at the change of topic but went right with it and my impeccable grammar. “No,” she said avidly. “Do you?”

“Stephanie Fox,” I snarled. “Your sister's purported best friend.”

“Oh,” Vero said, obviously shocked. “That's heinous. Are you sure? How do you know?”

“She confessed to me once that she was in love with my brother, who had already made it clear to me that he was hot on her trail. Then, recently, he started strutting around like Chanticleer on steroids.”

“Chanticleer on steroids,” she repeated slowly, parsing it out. “What an unpleasant image. But do you know for sure? Has he told you? Has she?”

“No one,” I said, “has told me. I have a way of knowing things without being told. But you might want to mention it to your sister, or maybe not. I'll leave that entirely to your discretion; it all depends on how much trouble you feel like causing. In any case, Dennis has made it clear that he has no interest in reconciling with Marie.”

“And she has made it clear to me that she will never let him move back in with her. So apparently this is all for nothing.”

I raised my glass to hers. “Well, we might as well enjoy ourselves, then,” I said.

The thing I am about to do, leaving my corpse for others to dispose of, struck me then and strikes me now as not the most festive, Christmassy thing to do. I've thought of drowning myself in my truck in the river, driving straight in and removing myself that way, making it look as though I had driven off in the night and vanished again… but this seems unnecessarily cruel in another way. People like to know what happened.

People don't like an unexplained rift in the social fabric. A dead body is at least a finite answer. And in my will I've specified that I want no fuss: I want my remains put into a plain pine box and stuck into the ground with the rest of the dead relatives, Mother included, and what was left of Dad. It is an odd way to go out, I admit; but I can't think of a better way, which is to say a way that is both more expedient for me and less unpleasant for those left behind. My only consolation is that people apparently can get over just about anything, thanks to the smoothing-over effects of forgetfulness and time.

I added, “Maybe it's better if they get divorced. Apparently children do survive such ruptures.”

“According to whom?” she asked, and held out her glass for more wine.

“Good question,” I said, and we laughed. It gave me an odd pleasure to laugh with someone who irked me. We worked our way through the whole bottle, and finished it just before Dennis's car, filled with the three girls, Fag Uncle Tommy, and Sonia, pulled in and discharged its cargo. They all came streaming into the kitchen, shedding coats and mufflers, talking and laughing, taking handfuls of pistachios, tangerines, crackers, olives, and figs from the bowls I'd set out.

“I'm starving,” said one of the kids, probably Isabelle.

“Marie isn't here yet?” asked Dennis.

“Not yet,” I said. “How was the expedition?”

They had been to the Christmas festival on the village green in Briardale, where a tree is put up and decorated every year. Every Christmas afternoon, while the church choir sing carols in their thin, shivering voices, a local Santa in the usual moth-eaten, pillow-stuffed costume hands out cheap trinkets wrapped in cheaper paper, and several mothers dispense cupcakes iced with mint-flavored red-and-white frosting or pour hot cocoa from huge thermoses into Styrofoam cups. Vivian took Dennis and me when we were small boys; our mother had always
needed a nap by Christmas afternoon, and this had been a perfect way to rid herself of everyone.