The Epicure's Lament (14 page)

Which would lead the casual bystander to wonder why we never got divorced. Divorce is legal, easier than ever, expedient, and self-protective, a bulwark against potential calamities like the one I'm now facing. It was sheer laziness, of course. I always meant to get around to it. Sonia, of course, never would, being a Catholic and an evil conniver. Staying married meant she could always hedge her bets. She always meant to come back, I see that now. Now that she's ten years older, no doubt wrinkled and frumpy in the saddle, with a daughter who's old enough to crave things, to demand accountability and knowledge of her forebears… sure, it would be very nice for Sonia to come back here, to lounge about the house, Lady of the Manse, and turn Bellatrix over to me for the duration of her dependency on us, her mother having more than fulfilled her own parenting obligations, assuming they should be shared between mother and father, if I were in fact her father. In any case, legitimate or not, I prefer a parenting version of “I buy, you fly.” This has worked beautifully for Sonia and me thus far, better than most parenting arrangements I've ever encountered, including Dennis and Marie's, which has always struck me as smarmily utopian and therefore suspect, not to mention deluded and doomed. Dennis set out to be a co-parent; Marie has her own career. If that's not a recipe for disaster I don't know what is. Of course they had sexual difficulties: they didn't know who was supposed to be the woman. I've forked over enough money so that Sonia could raise, clothe, feed, school, and house “our” child without having to fritter away the kid's high-maintenance years in an office, factory, or restaurant. She had
the rare opportunity to carry this out according to her own rules, her own proclivities, schedule, disposition, and moods. I gave Sonia the best marriage anyone has ever had, and now she wants to ruin it.

This is how I see it.

Bun told me he would take my number and ask his wife to call me back, although—he added this peripherally, as far as I could tell—this might not be until tomorrow, because they're going to dinner at Marie's tonight, and Stephanie is still at work. He then reminded me, as we were hanging up, that he too is a lawyer. I countered with the on-the-spot stroke-of-ge-nius reply that I thought a female lawyer might be a better advocate in such a case. “Of course,” he said sagely, and we parted amicably enough.

Two hours later, she has not returned my call. I am aware of an uneasiness I haven't felt in years. Because I haven't pursued a woman with any intent since Jennifer the college administrator ended our liaison last year and married her erstwhile boyfriend. Lately, I've preferred cornering a postadolescent cashier with limited education, cockeyed opinions, and a chatty personality. It hasn't been entirely satisfactory, to say the least. But is this any better? Awaiting a married woman's phone call like a lovestruck doofus? I need more cigarettes; I've somehow consumed the entire carton I bought several days ago, up in smoke, poof poof poof. But I don't want to leave the house, and so I sit here in the kitchen with one lamp burning—a symbol of my ever-hopeful heart, I suppose. The shade is a little ratty, which is appropriate, and the bulb flickers periodically. Dennis has taken his daughters to the movies. It's a rainy, windy, very dark night. This… sitting around waiting for someone to call, this unaccountable desire to hear a specific voice again, to see one particular face, is an unpleasantly disconcerting itch I haven't felt in so long I've conveniently forgotten how
distracting it is, how futilely time-frittering and anxious. I remember now why I've confined my romantic pursuits to unattainable shopgirls. I prefer the pain in my foot that's been keeping me awake at night, or in fact any sensation, no matter how uncomfortable or excruciating, that doesn't require the actions of someone else to alleviate it, and that isn't caused by another person's actions. Or lack of them.

Meanwhile, I sit at the kitchen table scrawling nonsense. I've turned into that teenage girl waiting for some socially challenged ape to telephone with some tedious offer of a bad movie and lukewarm hamburger so he can fondle her budding breasts. She waits for her ultimate reward with nothing but the self-manufactured chatter of Dear Diary to console her.

This is unacceptable. Writing about it only makes me feel like even more of a sap. If I don't artificially generate some sort of forward propulsion right this minute, I might as well shoot myself in the head. I think I'll go on over to Marie's house, friendly Uncle Hugo greeting with genial affability anyone who might answer the door. I hope this will remind them that a masculine presence in a house can be enriching and reassuring, despite what they may think or feel most of the time. Show a little fake but convincing brotherly concern.

It hasn't escaped my notice that Stephanie has been invited there for dinner tonight.

Dennis has recently made a few more of his creepy silent calls to his wife; I'm sure as a result she's been operating on the low-level panicky alert of a woman alone in an old drafty house trying to convince herself that the doors and windows are locked and the locks will hold, the sole protector of her own children and a teenage girl. I'm sure as she lies in bed at night every creak and rattle and moan makes her stare with sizzling veins into the darkness. I'm sure she gets up to gaze in at her vulnerable, sleeping, helpless girls, double-checks each door and
window, then stands in the mudroom, staring out at nothing but darkness and her own car in the silent driveway, shivering in her nightgown, exhausted but unable to go back up to bed. I imagine it would take very little at this point to make her scream with movie-heroine coloratura. I further imagine that if there were some way for her to contrive Dennis's return tomorrow without her losing any face, she would leap at it like a thrown rope and hold on to it, a woman in white water approaching the falls.

And I suspect Dennis has plans of his own, and is probably far more conniving and self-interested than I've ever given him credit for being. This is disconcerting. I detest being surprised by people, especially those to whom a certain degree of my identity depends upon feeling superior.

Something strange is happening. I started writing this notebook to escape Dennis and to reclaim my solitude. More and more, as I contemplate my death, it strikes me as vital in some way to hedge my bets. These fragments here… I leave them in lieu of a life's work, a series of achievements. “This is my letter to the World,” as Emily Dickinson wrote. A sorry offering, but I'm a sorry specimen, and I don't say this out of self-pity or false modesty, I say it out of years of self-scrutiny

November 3—Evie and Isabelle were spending last night at Waverley so I ambled the truck over to my sister-in-law's house yesterday just after dark, hoping to finagle a means of ambushing Stephanie Fox when she arrived for dinner. On my way I stopped at an elderly, beaten-down strip mall consisting of a cluster of sad little businesses that looked as if they had weathered several recessions already and were unlikely to survive this new one, with one exception, a dazzlingly bright little haven whose neon sign, “Liquors,” was as bright as the North Star must have looked to escaping slaves on the Underground
Railroad. I tucked one bottle into the glove box and left the other beside me on the seat in its paper bag (bait) and then continued on my scheming, ardent, falsely altruistic way.

I left the little town's business district behind and turned onto a small lane; treetop branches met overhead to form a nearly bare arch filled with falling raindrops illuminated by my headlights. I found this claustrophobia-inducing, as always. Lights flickered through fences and hedges: other people's cozy houses—or “homes,” as they're called now—filled with sedentary overfed citizens seething in lonely but overpopulated hells, vapor-locked into a computer or television screen. Less than a mile along this road, I turned up Marie's steep, unlikely driveway and parked innocently in front of their house. Its outline against the night sky showed peaks and gables, a chimney. Windows within were lit.

To my delight, Louisa came to the door when I knocked. She smiled when she saw me, then remembered all at once that our friendship might compromise her standing with her employer. I saw it in her face.

“Hello, Hugo,” she said, trying to sound cool. But she's too young still, her heart too warm and healthy, for her to be any good at dissembling political maneuvers.

“Hello, Louisa,” I said. “I was in the neighborhood. I thought I'd see how you were. And I brought Marie a bottle of wine. A humble offering, to be sure.”

“Wait here,” she said breathlessly.

I waited there. A moment later I was face-to-face with my sister-in-law.

“Hugo,” said Marie, managing to loom in the doorway, although she is quite small in stature. “What can I do for you?”

She looked ravishing. Her black hair was springy and agleam, her slanted Gallic eyes narrowed with suspicion. She wore a red dress.

“Hello, Marie,” I stammered slightly, as if she had caught me off guard with her fierce beauty, as she had obviously intended to do. “I was passing by and thought I'd see if you needed anything. Check up on you. I thought Dennis would appreciate it.” To flatter her further, I reached for the doorframe as if I needed to steady myself with a hand against it to regain my composure. Accidentally, or not, I touched her shoulder, which was likewise resting there. She leapt back as if it had burned her. Her skin was very warm through the thin satiny cloth. “And I brought you a bottle of wine I'm fond of. I thought you might appreciate a good St.-Émilion. The blood of your countrymen, so to speak.”

“What a disgusting image, but thank you,” she said firmly, taking the proffered bottle. “I don't mean to be rude, but I'm expecting a few people in a little while, so we're just getting ready. Thanks for the thought, Hugo.”

She began to shut the door.

“Oh, Marie,” I said, “do you mind if I come in for a moment and use your bathroom?”

She sighed; clearly she wished she could tell me to go away, but she couldn't because I'm family, in a way, and we have to allow family into our houses—otherwise who will take them in? “Okay,” she said, “just for a minute, Hugo, but please don't bug Louisa.”

I raised my eyebrows at her to show my complete lack of ambition in that area, then smiled a little, no offense taken. I slunk through the house, sniffing the homey air with shivery half-dreadful pleasure. Some sort of roast was in the oven. Additionally, I thought I detected a whiff of baking gingerbread.

I emerged from the bathroom into the kitchen and, seeing that Marie was busy doing something in the dining room, I inspected all the various pots and baking dishes Marie had going
on the stove and in the oven. I lifted lids, inhaled, and peeked into the oven. I found gingerbread, a pan of potatoes, and a large roast in the oven, and a bundle of asparagus waiting in a steamer on the stovetop. In the pantry, a bowl of crisp-looking lettuce and a plate of cheese. On the counter were a bowl of apples and pears and a large loaf of bread on a cutting board.

“All right,” said Marie, bustling back into the kitchen, “I'll see you out now, Hugo. My guests will be here soon.”

“Who is coming over?” I inquired, picking up an open bottle of wine and looking curiously at the label.

“Hugo,” said Marie, “why are you really here? What are you doing?” She was trying very hard to be tough but her face had an expression I was unfamiliar with, a sort of loopy softness. It dawned on me then with a little zing that she was tipsy; the bottle was half empty. So I might have a chance here.

“I came to see how you were,” I said. “I've been thinking how hard it must be sometimes for you with Dennis gone. Despite the fact that we've never been close, to put it mildly, I am still your brother-in-law. I thought you could use a brother right now. I apologize for intruding.”

“It's all right,” she said, clearly debating internally whether she should let herself be taken in by this patent pile of hogwash. As a therapist, she should have seen right through it. Well, she was drunk; I'd give her the benefit of the doubt. “But it wasn't necessary. I'm fine.”

“I just wanted to put my mind at ease. I feel partly responsible; I'm not my brother's keeper, but he hasn't been acting very well by you lately.”

“He certainly has not.”

“Marie,” I said with what for me was genuine sincerity, “Dennis misses you. He'll come back if you'll have him.”

She shot me a proud and angry look I knew was intended for Dennis, but was conferred upon me as his stand-in.

Even my heart has its soft spots. I smiled at her. My best, sanest, most trustworthy smile. “And I thought we could enjoy a glass of the wine I brought,” I added, dangling between two fingers the corkscrew I'd palmed a moment before.

“Oh, all right,” she said, and smiled back at me. “Damn it, Hugo. Have a seat.”

“I'll leave the minute you push me out the door,” I said, then settled into the breakfast nook for a cozy chat with Marie while we waited for our friends to arrive.

Thus did I insinuate myself into the dinner party, and, for the first time ever, my brother's wife's confidence.

I learned that her younger sister, Veronique, was upstairs napping that very minute, having taken the train up from the city for the night, and so Marie had invited Bun and Stephanie Fox to come for dinner. Louisa was going to take the car into town to spend her night off pursuing whatever entertainment she could find in that depressing backwater.

Marie's sister, Marie informed me, was until recently Louisa's French professor; it was Vero who recommended Louisa for this job when she dropped out suddenly at the beginning of this, her sophomore year. Vero would prefer to be teaching medieval French literature at an Ivy League school, but is stuck in a third-rate outer-borough zoo trying to drum the fundamentals of
la grammaire française
into mediocre brains. Marie frankly thinks Kings College is not appreciably worse than any college with a so-called great reputation. A lot of perfectly capable and even great teachers end up at places like Hunter College and City College, and they're lucky to have teaching jobs at all; Ivy League graduates tend to land the plum teaching spots because people take care of their own, it stands to reason. Vero went through the New York City public-school system, then got her B.A. from Hunter College and her postgraduate degrees from SUNY Stony Brook, so what does she expect? And those are
good schools, Marie thinks; this Ivy League superiority thing is a big fat myth. But Vero has never got over the fact that their older brother, Didier, the firstborn, graduated from Columbia, and Marie, next in line, went to Wesleyan. By the time it was her turn, the country was in a recession, and their father's import-export business had declined with the economy.