The Epicure's Lament (40 page)

I poured some vodka into a glass and handed it to her. “Tell
him I'm in here if he wants to get away from all the merriment and festivity, which I'm sure he does. Although maybe he'd rather talk to Louisa. The Jews probably prefer to stick together on this awful Christian holiday.”

“Are you okay?” Vero asked suddenly, with that same warmth and ease. “You look a little pale.”

“I'm fine,” I said. And I was fine. The drama I'd set in motion was all set to unfold without me now. All I had to do was serve the damn food, and then I would be free to get out. All manner of shit will hit the fan after I'm gone. I'll never know what happens with Shlomo and Bun Fox, with Louisa and her future, with Dennis and Stephanie, with Marie. This is what death is. You don't get to know what happens next. It's like the ending of a novel or a play; you never get to know what happens to any of the characters after the final page or the fall of the curtain, unless the author writes a sequel, which rarely happens. With suicide, you get to choose your own ending. Natural death is messy and ignoble. It has no form, no meaning, no aesthetic satisfaction. “The remedy of the vulgar is not to think of it, but from what brutish stupidity can proceed so gross a blindness?” To anyone who drifts passively along thinking God is the author of his life and death I say, Go ahead, delude yourself, but if I were you I'd bridle the ass by the tail.

I busied myself for a while, and then Shlomo came shuffling back to get a refill.

“Merry Christmas, Pete,” I said sarcastically.

“Fuck off,” he said. “These people are my worst nightmare. Where's the booze?”

“I hear you met Louisa,” I said.

“Fat redheaded Jewish girl who looks like half my cousins,” he said dourly.

“She doesn't look like Tovah.”

“No, she's gorgeous compared to Tovah.” He drank the
vodka he'd poured, then poured himself some more. Shlomo had gussied himself up in honor of the goyim's Messiah's birth. He had squeezed into a shiny brown suit, and his hair was parted on the side and slicked down. “So can I speak freely?”

“No one's here but me,” I said. “You see who I'm talking about, right?”

“He's hanging by a thread as we speak,” said Shlomo. “I'm telling you, you'd better be sure you really want to make this deal.”

“Why?”

“Don't like the look in his eye when the littlest kid goes by. Don't like that, or the tone in his voice when he talks to her.”

“Isabelle,” I said. “My younger niece.”

“Whatever. He's asking for it.”

“That's why we struck our deal,” I said uneasily. I am uneasy about it still, as I write this. But I know it's the right thing to do, and I won't be around to worry about it.

“You don't look so hot,” Shlomo said then. “You're pasty. And you look like if you weren't leaning against that counter you would keel over.”

“Since when are you concerned about my health?”

“Since never. I'm concerned about my dinner. You sure it's gonna be edible? I sucked in my gut to get into this goddamn monkey suit and drove all this way in a car with a busted heater, and I don't want to eat burned crap.”

“You will not,” I said grandly, “be served anything resembling burned crap.”

“Well, that's a big relief,” he said. “I assume I'm officially on the job now, so I'm going to spend this evening making nice with all the yawns and meanwhile watching like a fuckin’ hawk about to take out the rat. As for my alcoholic intake while engaged in my contracted assignment, if you know me at all you know that's not an impediment, it's an occupational requirement.”

“Drink all you want,” I said.

“I don't need any fuckin’ permission,” said Shlomo, and off he went to keep an eye on Bun.

I assume Stephanie won't need to trouble herself about the divorce, but I will never know for sure.

Then I began to chop some things, and sauté some others. While handfuls of minced garlic and shallots sautéed in butter, I chopped a rib or two of celery and added those and then some sliced mushrooms and minced fresh rosemary…. The smell was pleasant and homey, and I felt completely at ease. My mind is always empty when I cook. The world shrinks down to just my hands, whatever I've got before me, and the pots and pans and spoons and fire and water and whatever other tools I need to bring about the alchemical process that turns base ingredients into a proper dish. Any interaction between me and food invariably gives me as much ease—which is to say, happiness— as I've ever felt. I realized, making this final meal, that all my life I have preferred cooking and eating to almost everything else. Well, smoking. But I don't love smoking, I'm obsessed with it. There's a difference, but I don't know what it is. And maybe I'd rather fuck than cook—the two are inextricably linked. I don't know which I prefer. I prefer to fuck, then cook and eat, then fuck again, then cook and eat again, drinking all the while. Smoking all the while.

I made far too much food for this dinner. And there were far too many components and courses. Cooking for these people on this day was an act of aggression, I suppose. After sending out a plate of several good cheeses, shrimp cocktail, and French bread to the ballroom via Vero, I made a very simple but palatable fresh puréed pea soup, in each bowl of which I floated a dollop of crème fraîche and a sprinkling of fresh thyme. After the soup bowls had been cleared away came the onslaught: ham with dried cherry-and-stout holiday sauce; the little hens filled with Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's Oyster
Stuffing (plenty of oysters mixed with bread crumbs lightly fried in butter, oyster juice, salt, pepper, celery, salt, and paprika); potatoes mashed with sour cream and garlic; gravy made of half game-hen pan drippings, half instant Durkee packets; butternut squash puréed and mixed with the sautéed minced shallots, celery, mushrooms, rosemary, and pancetta (a dish that never fails to bring me as close to vegetable nirvana as I have ever been); baked yams bursting from their jackets and leaking caramelized sugar; stalwart, neat rows of green beans drenched with lemon juice and butter. After all the diners seemed to have stuffed themselves enough with all this bounty, I bustled out carrying an elegant, faintly snooty winter salad of butter lettuce and endive with sections of oranges, roasted walnut halves, and a simple vinaigrette; and then, when all were groaning and holding their bellies and leaning back looking stunned, I brought forth the pies—filled with the mincemeat I had put up a month ago, baked in the surprisingly expert pie shells I'd inexplicably trusted Vero to make—and the spicy, delectable figgy pudding with hard sauce. A full selection of wines, Calvados, and brandy. Coffee with whipped cream.

I served the desserts to much protest and went back to the kitchen to begin washing the dishes. Vero and Marie tried to help me, but I shooed them away and they went.

All through the afternoon and evening, I had kept away from everyone, staying in the kitchen spinning my web, sending tendrils of tension and drama out into the assembled company like some culinary backstage Loki, the marplot cook. The sound of their voices had wafted to me faintly in the kitchen; in them I imagined I heard anger, disappointment, betrayal, suspicion, passion, lust, all the great products of the human heart, soul, and mind. It seemed fitting that I stay apart all day and night from these gusts of feeling, even as I did my utmost
to influence them from my outpost—I had no further business with any of them. I felt I had already said goodbye to them all, except Dennis, but I have no way of saying goodbye to my older brother. There is no resolution or appropriate parting gesture. I can only take my leave knowing he'll never know why I took my leave.

When the dishes were clean, dried, and put away, I poured myself another whiskey and went to sit at the table with everyone for a little while before coming up here… a farewell to all these people who've been my companions these past months, and as such have come to matter to me in varying degrees. I can't pretend otherwise.

The table was festooned with pine boughs and red candles and bowls of nuts in their shells and tangerines. Dennis had spiked the chandelier with candles and lit them and built a fire in the enormous stone fireplace; the room was ablaze with firelight, and everyone's eyes shone, reflecting the points of flame. Firelight is flattering to the human face and form: the assembled company gave the impression of being uncommonly attractive, even with Shlomo skulking at the far end of the table and Bun's mole all lit up.

I sat at the table and looked around at them all with a sense of distant curiosity. Sonia presided as hostess, preening and darkly glowing, at the foot of the table, wearing a low-cut yellow dress that flaunted her sculpted clavicle and tiny neck, her blond hair combed straight and shining; Dennis sat at the head, looking like a blockhead in his good suit, too handsome for his own good; at his right was Evie, looking like a smaller female version of her father in an embroidered brown velvet dress, her hair in prim braids. On Sonia's right sat Fag Uncle Tommy in one of his silk cravats, his hair plastered to his skull, clearly besotted with her, the way an old homo is wont to be strickenly enamored of a much younger woman who is obviously out of
her mind and nothing but trouble, the kind of woman from whom any sane, eligible straight man would run away with his hands over his ears. I noted approvingly that Bellatrix was seated safely between Louisa and Shlomo, although no one had been able to prevent Bun from wedging himself in next to Isabelle. On Isabelle's other side was Marie, molten with hot righteous anger, in a black velvet dress and the ruby necklace that belonged to Dennis's and my grandmother. I wonder—after Dennis divorces her, will she have to give back our family jewels? That will be a dilemma for him: family tradition and history versus gentlemanly good grace. But none of it mattered. Sitting between Vero and Marie, I felt vaguely detached from them and from everyone else, as if I were already gone. People spoke to me and I to them, Vero sent remarks my way, and Marie smiled at me, but I was encased in a shell, the knowledge that in a few hours I would cease to be.

It's almost time….

“I'd like to propose a toast,” said my brother suddenly, standing up and hoisting his wineglass aloft, “to Hugo, for your hospitality, your generosity, and your culinary talents. I know this house is technically as much mine as it is yours, but it's been yours for many years, and only recently mine again. I thank you for welcoming me back to the family homestead. It's been by far the hardest season of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had my brother to help me through.”

He stopped for a moment and considered what to say next, his glass still in the air. He swayed slightly, and his expression was ponderously grave. He was drunk, I realized then. Well, I'd be drunk too in his shoes, with my suicidal brother and his evil wife and her illegitimate daughter, my furious soon-to-be-ex-wife and her furious sister and our tender, vulnerable daughters, and my new mistress, also my wife's best friend, and her husband,
also my best friend, not to mention a hit man, an au-pair girl, and my old homo uncle, all at the same table. Dennis is so entrenched in his complicated and messy life, I could easily imagine how much he needed to be drunk tonight.

“They say,” he went on after his moment of thoughtful swaying silence, “home is the place where they can't turn you away, and family is whoever has to take you in. This, then, is my true home, and, Hugo, you're my family. I know our course isn't smooth and never has been, but in my experience, nothing that matters is easy. The relationships that have been the rockiest for me are the ones I treasure most deeply. Here's to you, little brother.”

He held his glass up and looked earnestly at me for a moment of general stunned silence. Then Fag Uncle Tommy coughed and said, “Hear, hear,” and glasses began clinking up and down the table. What did he mean by all that? I wondered to myself as I smirked and nodded and behaved as appropriately to the occasion as I knew how—which is to say, with as much sincerity as I could muster. Marie was staring at Dennis with a stricken look, I noticed, and Stephanie was looking at the table. Shlomo looked disgusted; Bellatrix was surreptitiously picking her nose.

As if to break the suddenly solemn mood, Bellatrix was prevailed upon, first by Sonia and then by the rest of us, to fetch her violin. With matter-of-fact acquiescence, as if she understood why we would all want to hear her play and accepted that this was her part in the proceedings, she got it out, tuned up, and then, with scarcely a segue between tuning and playing, swept into an unaccompanied Bach cello suite transposed for violin. She played it more fluidly with more subtlety and range and understanding, than I have ever heard her play anything before. Is it possible that she's a prodigy, a genius? Her violin almost spoke the music, in a clear, supple, restrained, and preternaturally
confident voice. After the last note, she lifted the bow from the strings, acknowledged the enthusiastic applause without shyness or apparent vanity, laid her instrument back in its case, and turned back into a fairly ordinary and not especially pretty child.

When the time came for the children to go to bed, Bellatrix followed her “cousins” around the table, kissing everyone good night. As she planted her lips as far from Bun's mole as she could manage, Shlomo glowered and Louisa looked pained. I have done what I can to protect her. I have to believe that she's in good hands. When she came to me, I roused myself and looked her squarely in the eye. She looked back at me with a puzzled expression, most likely because I looked so awful and she couldn't imagine why.

“Sleep well,” I said jocularly as she kissed my cheek. “Don't bite the bedbugs.”

“Ew,” she said, and off she went to kiss Vero, who was next to me.

Our final exchange. I can't help wondering a little what she'll think and feel when she learns I'm dead. I wonder even more whether Sonia will ever tell her who her real father is. I hope, once I'm out of the way, Sonia will feel called upon to drag the offending cheese onstage. I wonder whether he is Carla's uncle. I once hoped so, in my Loki way. Now, for Bellatrix's sake, as sincerely as I can feel anything, I hope her father is someone whom she can love and who will love her.