The Epicure's Lament (8 page)

“Poor thing,” she said, her voice cracking with held-in laughter. “I'm laughing,” she hastened to explain, possibly sensing my mood, “because he seemed like a fish out of water in that Stonekill house. Do you know what I mean? Wearing one of Marie's aprons in that kitchen, making chicken nuggets for the kiddies, watering the herbs on the windowsill, giving Marie a rundown of his day. Maybe because he strikes me as a born bachelor. Does it run in your family?”

“I have a wife, and her daughter bears my name,” I said.

“At Waverley?”

“They chose to go elsewhere, oh, about ten years ago. But I am married, as is Dennis. Born bachelors don't tend to get themselves into such situations.”

“They do if they're caught in them.”

“Meanwhile, I came here to escape Dennis, and now you're insisting on talking about him.”

“Well, frankly, I'm here to escape my husband. I'm a born bachelor too, you know. I can't believe I got caught, myself. To make everything worse, or at least more complicated, Bun wants to have a baby. Sorry, I know this is personal information. Whatever. I'm in a confidential mood. You can tell me to change the subject.”

“And you don't?”

She glanced at me with appreciation for something: my willingness to pursue the topic, or my perspicacity at guessing her feelings? Maybe both. “I do not.”

“What woman doesn't want a baby?” I asked with a roguish twinkle.

“This one,” she said. “I don't want a baby, not now, not ever. I might have consented to breed one or two of them when I was twenty-five or thirty, but now we're just too old.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty,” she replied promptly.

I reassessed her openly. She didn't look it, but, then, who did these days, besides me?

“You look younger,” I said. “What if it's still physically possible for you to have a baby?”

“We're still too old!” she said. “What is this new fad, elderly new parents? I was raised by young parents with a lot of energy to discipline us and take us places. I couldn't offer the same, I'm far too set in my ways and distracted and impatient. Of course,
Bun says we could offer wisdom and security instead of youthful energy.”

“My wife gave birth to her daughter when she was twenty-seven and I was twenty-nine,” I said proudly.

“Well, that's all very well,” said Stephanie. “But, frankly, I don't think anyone over thirty, or thirty-two at the very latest, should have children. It doesn't seem right, either biologically or psychologically. Babies are boring, and you have to be young to put up with them. I'm just not in that mind-set any more. I like what I like, and I don't want to give any of it up for anyone.”

She shook a cigarette from my pack, which was on the bar at her elbow, then offered the pack to me. I raised my eyebrows in ironic thanks, which she caught, and took one, then lit hers first.

“I'm not arguing,” I said. “I agree with you.”

“Look around the world. Are there too few people here, or too many? Are the billions of us worth replicating? Biology and hormones blind us to the fact that we've become indentured slaves to little egocentric tyrants.”

“And why the fuss about DNA and genes and bloodlines?” I said innocently, conveniently not mentioning my own semi-quasi-obsession where my wife Sonia's daughter is concerned.

“Exactly,” she said, visibly warming to me. As she resettled on her barstool, her shoulder brushed mine. The contact somehow released a cloud of lemony perfume from her hair. Then she steadied herself with a hand on my shoulder, as if she'd been about to tip over, and leaned into me; looking down, I caught a glimpse of the shapely tops of her breasts held in a bra under the slippery white blouse. This gave me an almost instant erection. “Children have no function any more,” she went on as if she were unaware of her effect on me, which I would have bet any money she wasn't, “no social advantage. Almost no one questions the inevitability of parenthood; almost no one rebels
against its tyranny. Well, here I am, Exhibit A: living proof that a life is not incomplete without children. I never have to forgo a dinner party, a movie, a walk, or any other civilized pleasure because of someone's naptime or feeding time or playdate or carpool or birthday party. The idea that a child-free life is empty is a myth perpetrated by proselytizing parents who can't remember what their lives were like before they had kids, or can't imagine what they'd do if they didn't have them. I think Bun is a deluded romantic.”

I wanted to fuck her in the most biological, hormone-driven way. “Do you feel this way about marriage too?” I asked as if I were merely curious and had no agenda.

“Increasingly,” she said. “But only because it has a way of softening otherwise interesting men. Bun used to be exciting. Now he's a big zero. Men are programmed to either please women or defy them; there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. If they defy their wives, we get angry. If they're too eager to please, we get bored. Men as a species need to evolve to the next level.”

“My wife left me because I both defied and bored her,” I said. “Maybe it's women's fault partially, for demanding this emasculating fealty from us. Maybe women could use a little evolving themselves.”

“Touché,” she said wearily. “But, really, what's the point? According to the rules, we all lose. We can't have anyone else, we have to train ourselves to act in ways that run completely counter to our natures, and financially, at least for me, there are no real advantages. Bun and I are both lawyers; we both make plenty of money. I get on his nerves as much as he gets on mine. I'm just not cut out for this.”

“I see our time is up,” I said. I didn't care for the topic of her husband; I would have been happy to discuss just about anything else under the sun with her.

“Oh, sorry,” she blurted, and laughed again, but angrily this
time. “Frankly, this isn't my first stop on my way home from work tonight. I put in some time earlier at a tavern near my office, but there was no one there to talk to.”

“Ah,” I said. I was doing my best impersonation of Hugo the Barfly, sweet-natured, passive drunk. Meanwhile, I itched to wrestle with her and slap her and bite her with heated blood-lust until she yelled and foamed at the mouth, then I wanted to slam every hard external appendage I owned into every wet warm receptor on her and repeatedly bash it all into her until we both went into frenzied spasms and collapsed.

I told her affably, “Stephanie, I'm dying. Dennis doesn't know. You're the only person I've told besides my doctor, who in fact told me.”

She gave me a sidelong look. “You're dying of what, exactly?”

“Buerger's disease.”

“Which is what?”

“Caused by smoking,” I said. “Two packs a day, that's what did it. If I quit, I could beat it.”

She looked intrigued. “Really? What are your symptoms? You look fine to me, quite frankly.”

“Thank you,” I said. “As it happens I have Buerger's disease, also known as thromboangutis obliterans, which results when fatty deposits caused by bad health habits narrow the major arteries carrying blood to the legs and feet. The smaller, collateral vessels can't handle the load, and so any exertion, walking for a short distance or up several flights of stairs, causes muscle cramping and aches in the feet and calves. This is often the first symptom, which I first noticed last spring, and which has since worsened to the next level—namely, numbness, tingling, and, recently, often severe pain. Tra-la! And next will come vascular inflammation, ischemia, and claudication, and eventually ulcer-ation, infection, gangrene, amputation, death. I can expect the
pain to get much worse, spread to my other foot and both legs. I can expect my toes to blacken and have to be amputated, or an entire leg. I can expect hideous lesions on my limbs and face, chronic and intolerable pain, extreme sensitivity to heat and cold.”

“My God,” she said. “So quit smoking!”

“I won't quit smoking,” I said, and lit another cigarette to prove it.

“You would rather die than quit?”

“Me and millions of other smokers,” I said. “I'm just going to go faster and more honestly than some, that's all.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Are you serious?”

“About this,” I said, “I couldn't be more serious. What's wrong with dying? Nothing, except most people are afraid of it. Well, I'm not afraid of it, and I see no reason to live if I can't smoke. Smoking,” I added with a hint of laughter, “is the love of my life.”

She encircled my wrist with her warm fingers and held my hand on the bar so I couldn't take another drag. “I'm in love with your brother,” she said almost pleadingly, as if trading her darkest secret for my own. My cigarette fumed, stilled by her hand.

“Why?”

“Because he's exciting.”

“Dennis? He was never exciting. He was born a stick and then he got married.”

“He's an artist,” she said with a sigh. “I wish I had become an artist. I didn't have the courage; I took the road most traveled. Law school? Any half-intelligent monkey can be a lawyer.”

“Don't,” I said with a grimace, “romanticize artists. Any brain-damaged monkey can be an artist. There's nothing romantic about Dennis. He bangs big pieces of steel into
unrec-ognizable but ostensibly interesting and oversized shapes and sells them at an upscale SoHo boutique. Actually, I believe it's in Chelsea now. The point is, the nobility of the artistic life is vastly overrated. Dennis has a trust fund. He didn't have to go to law school, although he could have gone to Harvard with no effort whatsoever because our father did. Being an artist is no more or less noble than being a lawyer. Please don't kid yourself. It's possibly the most selfish, childish, unjustifiable pursuit on the planet.”

“We need art,” said Stephanie. “It's the lungs of society the way religion is the immune system. Books and paintings and sculptures allow us hoi polloi to breathe.”

“Artists have sold you so-called hoi polloi a bill of goods for centuries. They're just trying to justify the fact that all they have to do all day is drink too much and make mud pies and feel everything much too intensely because life just hurts too much. They're socially inept malcontents who can't hack working for anyone else. Take Dennis, for example.”

“You only say that because you're his brother,” she said.

“I say that because I'm myself,” I said. “I don't base my opinions around what Dennis does or doesn't do.”

She looked at her martini for a while. I waited for her to spit it out so we could move along to the next level of our budding friendship.

“I just wish I knew whether he feels the same way,” she said finally, not quite meeting my eyes. “I think he does—in fact, I'm sure he does—but then I doubt myself. Do you know?”

“He doesn't,” I lied smoothly and automatically, without batting an eye.

She flinched.

“Maybe it's better that you should know for sure than keep wondering and risk your marriage for him. Dennis is a stickler for propriety and commitment, no matter how much you wish
he were a bachelor. He can't love you, it's not in his makeup. He loves his wife.”

“Hugo,” she said, “you're wrecking my day here.”

“Sorry,” I said with a purely manufactured but I hoped convincing sympathetic grimace, “but I happen to know that Dennis would eventually irritate and bore you as much as Bun does now, the minute that first flush of love wore off It's the natural and inevitable progress of the disease of marriage: from cramps and fatigue to tingling and numbness to intolerable pain to amputation of major limbs. That's just the way it always goes, and nothing will ever change that. That's why God invented adultery and stuck it in the Bible as a big no-no, so we could sneak off and indulge ourselves in it with all the guilt in the world. The forbidden has always been the greatest aphrodisiac, and evermore shall be, amen.”

I sat back and waited for Stephanie's pragmatic, lawyerlike internal calculus to unfold: she couldn't have Dennis, but here was his randy, available younger brother, all liquored up, with his bare wrist caught in her fist.

Shortly after this exchange, we checked into Betty Lou's Motor Court, a place of seedy perfection. We made the bed-springs squeak, banged our heads against the wall, made guttural noises, did everything according to the adultery script. She was technically cheating on Bun the same way I was cheating on Sonia, who despite everything is still my wife, and whom I've cheated on many times before, but, really, Dennis might as well have been watching from inside the particle-board half-closet or the cut-out eyes of the portrait of some long-ago hunter in a rococo frame on the wall above the bed, or huddled beneath the reeking flock flower-print bedspread we'd flung to the floor before boarding the bed itself. Stephanie's body consists of well-tended, exfoliated, barely aging flesh over gym-hard muscles. Her almost constant, extremely arousing moans and sighs were
at once blindly selfish and heart-rendingly grateful. No one, it seemed, had touched this body in quite a while. Come to think of it, the same went for my own catastrophic and disreputable but still hydraulically sound person.

After I pounded all her orifices with all my limbs, we did indeed go into spasms and collapse. Then we stayed in that bed for a little while, lying on our backs, apart, not touching. For whole minutes, no one said anything. This in itself, this post-coital reticence on her part, was in its way as surprising and pleasurable to me as anything that had preceded it.

“Did you know,” I said when the silence had become almost too pleasurable to bear, shattering it the way a little boy breaks apart a butterfly, tearing its flimsy shining wings off with a fiendish sadness, “speaking of adultery, how monks in the Middle Ages who were forbidden to eat meat got around the Vatican's proscription with an ingeniously sneaky and gluttonous loophole?”

“What a convoluted question,” she answered. “You want me to guess what loophole they came up with, is that it?”

“Like a game,” I said. “You can ask me ten yes or no questions, and if you figure it out, I owe you dinner. If not, you owe me. The intent being to coerce you into eating a meal with me at some point in the near future, of course.”

“Does it have to do with disguising meat to look like something else?”