The Epicure's Lament (10 page)

Every book and ashtray in this room has its place. I know where everything goes: The bed must be aligned just so with
the crack overhead, the windows. The edges of the books are lined up to be the right distance from the edge of the shelves. Likewise, every dish and piece of silverware in the kitchen downstairs used to have its place until Dennis came home. Sometimes of late I find myself sitting at the table hissing silently, “The fork goes there. Not there. The glass goes there. Not there.” The beauty of human domestic existence is the control we exert over our surroundings. Nature is only attractive to me insofar as I can mow, cook, kill, or change its components to my liking. The tree outside my window is a microcosm of inhuman order. It's the house next door, filled with birds who know what to do there. If I sat in that tree I might gnash my teeth every time a bird flew onto the wrong nearby branch and disturbed my innate sense of what went where. But I could do nothing about it: they're the experts out there, I'm the expert in here. Do some birds resist chaos more stringently than others? Is there an obsessive-compulsive bird in that tree who knows how I feel in here?

Dennis has no idea where the clean dishes go, and for that I consider fratricide.

When did I develop this obsession with order? I can't remember. Maybe I always had it, but it didn't fully manifest itself until I settled into Waverley as a grown man to live amongst these old books and silent instruments, these paintings of ghosts.

Sonia left in part because she couldn't grasp the absolute necessity of placing each knife in the drawer with the blade facing the right way. She did fine with the glasses; she was always an artistic sort, and as such showed an elementary aesthetic appreciation for patterns. The old etched water glasses had to be aligned just so, right, until I broke them all, but that was after she left.

I have a slight fever. Caused by the fact that, just this morning, my own brother, flirting with death, jammed a handful of
clean knives any old way into the drawer. I can't think straight, can hardly write. My eyes are burning as if they'd been scalded with acid. Sonia dried the glasses carefully, by hand, the right way, with the soft towels I asked her to use. Dennis takes the new glasses—the ones that replaced those old glasses after Sonia left and my compass went awry for a little while—he takes the new glasses from the drain and shoves them, whistling as if I weren't about to leap at his throat with my teeth bared, shoves them into the cupboard right side up. They go upside down. I wait until he leaves the kitchen to turn them. Meanwhile, as he “helpfully” putters, I sit at the table grinning derangedly—dangerously, if he only knew—not saying a word, tapping my painfully aching foot, inviting the pain as a distraction, almost exploding with the need to turn the glasses, turn the knives. There's a terrible jangling whoosh of disturbed blood and misaligned cells in my ears until he goes away and I fix everything.

There he is: I see him,
mon frère l'oiseau compulsif.
He's a scraggly half-cracked, but obviously intelligent specimen like me. He watches the other birds, bouncing on his branch, eyes flicking desperately to and fro. He wants to kill them all. You land there, not here. Move. Not here. There. He's my soulmate in the bird kingdom.

His name is obviously Erasmus, after my old friend the medieval satirist and theologian who wrote the
Manual (or Dagger) of the Christian Gentleman
, published in 1503. The book's theme is sincerity. The chief evil of the day, according to Erasmus, was formalism, a respect for traditions, a regard for what other people thought essential, and never a thought of what the true teaching of Christ may have been. The remedy was for every man to ask himself at each point, What is the essential thing?, and to do this thing without fear. Forms were in themselves evil only when they hid or quenched the spirit. In this careful, rigorous, and thoroughly Dutch (which is to say, utterly assured of
his own probity and correctness) examination of the special dangers of formalism, Erasmus paid due respects to monasti-cism, saint-worship, war, the spirit of class, the foibles of “society.” I can get behind all that, at least in a secular sense, at least in a concrete, secular sense, the only sense I have. In all but the saint-worship, I applaud him, and I have a feeling his avian counterpart would too.

I know, despite those bouts of melancholy and nostalgia fueled by memories of her, that Sonia was diabolical and poisonous, a
jolie laide sans merci
, a black hole in the cosmos—and she didn't understand about the knives. My absolute, all-encompassing, nonnegotiable need to have the knives go the right way was what finally drove her from me forever. But she understood about the glasses, and for a little while, for the sake of the great love I bore her and the unfamiliar, uncharacteristic, and therefore interesting (to us both) tenderness I inspired in her cold black heart, she tried to understand about the knives. She was a black and shining pearl among women. Not once, ever, did I want to rip her jugular open with my incisors, at least not murderously. “It is for our daughter that I go,” she spat from the taxi just before it spirited her to the train station and away. “She cannot grow up to learn such things.”

“Whose daughter?” I asked futilely She never admitted a thing. Until the end she kept up the pretense that the child was mine, likewise my wife.

We had just had a fight about the knives that wasn't really, of course, about the knives at all. It escalated until finally, in a speechless knot of fury, she cut me, not with one of the butter knives under dispute, but with the butcher's knife used to hack
apart chicken carcasses. She sliced it across my forearm, then brandished the infant Bellatrix like a shield in her own defense as I advanced toward her blankly, a zombie in a horror flick, dripping blood as I went, my unharmed arm raised to—what? I would never hit a woman, never hurt one either, nor would I harm a baby—and meanwhile Sonia backed away from me, matching my speed and gait step for step, as if we were two-stepping, wide-eyed, gasping, into the hall away from me, and gabbled into the phone for a taxi, her monkey face white and red in equal parts. She must have been afraid of her own rage, not mine. I would never have hurt her and she knew that, if nothing else.

Birds mate, don't they? Erasmus has a wife, I'm sure; he's handsome enough, for a bird. Does Mrs. E. hide her head under her wing in despair as her implacable, hell-bent mate pulls apart the nest to rebuild it the right way, rearranges the eggs she sits on so they're right? Doesn't she know it's not his choice? Erasmus, old pal.

October 22—Speak of the she-devil.

I never should have mentioned her at all.

Yesterday I went into town to collect my mail at the post office. On my way there I stopped at Stewart's to replenish my dwindling supply of suicide tubes and to reassure the no-doubt heartsick Carla that I hadn't forsaken her. She wasn't there, though. Some big fat ox of a local cretin was behind the counter, trying to figure out how much change to give the
Hausfrau
in front of me for five dollars for a three-fifty pint of extra–milk-fat ice cream. He handed her two dollars and fifty cents after some deliberation, whereupon she Abe Lincoln–ly handed back the extra dollar, throwing him into a complete dither. His white-coated tongue was wedged between his front teeth. He breathed like a pregnant mastodon in the throes of labor.

“Keep it,” she said frantically, and peeled off in her tank-sized hermetic Suburban, going home to her solitary narcotizing pleasures, pleasures I share and understand more fully than anything else.

I asked for a carton of cigarettes. “Where's Carla?” I asked, all innocence.

“Fired,” the gentle giant replied without any visible emotion.

“Why?” I asked, piqued, nettled. “Wherefore?”

“Because,” he answered. Now came a pause while he looked at the money I'd given him and calculated his most effective means of ascertaining the correct change without having to ask me straight out. I waited, then let him give me twenty cents too much without handing it back. I didn't want to upset or embarrass or humiliate him or, most important, distract him from the matter under discussion, which was only under discussion because I'd put it squarely there.

“Because,” I prompted.

“Oh,” he said, remembering. “She stole, I guess.”

“She stole,” I breathed. My little revolutionary. My miscreant, my rebel girl, my daredevil. “How do I get in touch with her?”

He looked at me, puzzling it out. Why would anyone want to get in touch with that stringy-haired, pug-nosed, knuckle-headed girl? I stared him down. “Carla?” he asked after a while, to make sure we were on the same page.

“Her telephone number,” I said suavely, encouragingly, avuncularly, as if I had found the stack of library books or first-prize science-fair ribbon she'd accidentally left in church. “You don't happen to have it, do you? On an employee sheet somewhere?”

“She's my niece,” he said, his eyes bulging with inbred and possibly incestuous and entirely understandable suspicion. “Her father is my brother.”

I knew better than to press him. I'd be back; time enough to
soften him up. I went on my merry way, which was a lot merrier now that I had some cigarettes to accompany me. Cigarettes are among those objects that have their absolute place in the world. I noticed a while ago that I smoke according to the internal directives of that very same internal demon who dictates my dish habits, my bedroom-accoutrement arrangements. Always hold the matchbook so the edge aligns with my thumbnail just so. Always strike the match toward the epicenter of the rising sun. Just kidding. The waiting cigarette must be wedged in at a particular spot along my lips, one cigarette's width away from the leftmost edge of my mouth, and inserted so the end grazes my dogtooth just so. I have to strike the match on a trajectory that runs exactly parallel to the ground. Always hold the lit match so the angle the match and flame create is a perfect square; otherwise I am required by these laws to start over. One suck only as I hold the flame to the tip, and if the cigarette isn't lit I have to douse the flame and start over. Hold the cigarette exactly between the second knuckles of first and second fingers. There's an indentation there now after all these years, a little slot where the cigarette automatically nestles. Tap the ash when it's that particular length I know but can't describe, squash the cigarette out when it's burned down exactly that far. Who set these parameters? I don't know and don't ask, I simply follow them. Is this proof of the existence of God? The intricacies of smoking confer upon my inutile life a gravity and passion it would otherwise lack.

Leviticus established the obsessive-compulsive dictates of the Judaic social fabric. He was the poster boy for obsessive-compulsives, our greatest success, our Olympic hero, our guide and paragon: he got millions of people through thousands of years to follow his hand-washing, counting, clothes-fondling, number-counting, ritualistic compulsions. Of course, Leviticus happened to be an infinitely more socially oriented creature
than I and the rest of my kind. He cared deeply about humanity and society and the well-being of an entire people, which I absolutely do not, and so his precepts held sway and established a foothold in the greatest religion in human history, whereas I couldn't even get my own wife to put the knives right in the drawer—Sonia the rabid anti-Semite—it all somehow stands to reason.

As I said, speak of the she-devil… I drove into town and parked. I gimped to the post office, past a row of stores set into the ground floors of shabby wood-frame houses, identified as such by old-fashioned hanging shingles or handmade signs: Grace's Beauty Shop; Groverton Hardware; Stern Paint; Pet-care Animal Hospital. Very depressing. In the road was a smattering of fallen chestnuts, green and bristling in their sci-fi space-pod casings; a big roadkilled crow, insides lurid and raw and edible-looking, in spite of everything. There's a roadkill cookbook somewhere: I will investigate. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw a pair of tied-together sneakers hanging from a power line, then looking up I saw a pair of large dingy-white birds perched there, watching me, heads cocked with the amused, sidelong disapproval of certain women I've known. I passed a red frame house with a row of carved pumpkins going up the porch steps, all of them having the features and expressions of those oversized, grinning, helmet-wearing children on the special short bus. Ah, the river town of my youth: as a gangly masturbating pubescent I rode into that very town on my Schwinn ten-speed, the road whirring by under my wheels like the ratcheting blank light-flecked film right before the start of a movie. I dismounted on Main Street at noon like the Lonesome Kid, swaggered along this same stretch of sidewalk, stared violently at all the girls and women, imagining them naked under me, pounding my chest with their fists, raking through my soon-to-be-copious chest hair with manicured dagger nails,
crying out for more, more, more of the Lonesome Kid. In actuality I was getting no such lucky breaks, sexwise, and so instead I had a tendency to vandalize and steal. I seethed with energies I couldn't channel, as if I were a pastry bag of furtive, violent humors. I was on testosterone, more than THC or coke or Quaaludes or anything artificial or self-administered, testosterone, my first burst of it. It blindsided me with the heady sense that I could KILL, I could twist necks, punch lights out, gouge eyes, sock it to 'em and fuck 'em up bad.

How things have changed since then. I made my harmless old tomcat way into the clean, dim, creaky, linoleum-floored building, greeted Betsy Blackwell the postmistress in her wooden cage behind the screen, unlocked my box, and pulled forth the letters that had been accumulating there for a week or more. Bills, more bills. Why must there always be so many bills? A letter for Dennis from his daughter Evie. A letter to me from someone with handwriting exactly like Sonia's.

Who, of course, was Sonia, according to the name above the return address, a West 58th Street address in the city; immediately I envisioned a Hell's Kitchen walk-up, gentrified and respectable and appropriately expensive now, a former tenement dive with bad acoustics, a view of nothing, and cramped rooms that smelled of hundred-year-old cabbage steam.