The Epicure's Lament (11 page)

I weighed the envelope on my outstretched palm for a moment, my scalp prickling unpleasantly, my already tingling nerves tingling even more, internally debating: if I ripped it up and threw it away unopened, I could walk out of here and, should anyone ever question me about it, simply claim it had never arrived. Nothing good could come of opening this envelope and reading the letter, whose very existence spelled trouble, or at least unpleasantness….

Curiosity won out, as it always does. Slightly nauseated, I went back outside to the street and sat on the bench right outside
the PO door. Old Glory writhed sinuously overhead. What a silly flag that is, especially these days, with all the enforced gung-ho rah-rah America the Beautiful wet-eyed jingo-patriotism, like a cross between a cartoon jailbird's uniform and a superhero's cape.

That dead crow inspires me to consider the historical propriety of eating the equivalent of roadkill. In the Middle Ages, the French aristocracy regularly consumed elderly birds in an advanced state of decay, which, in a fowl variant of garum, they inundated with and steeped in for lengthy periods of time spices and verjuice, an acidic liquor made of the juice of crab apples or green, unripe sour grapes. They didn't care for young creatures back then. Elderly game was left hanging until it had reached the state of putrefaction considered most tasty, which was known as “high.” Grimod de la Reynière wrote that a pheasant killed on Ash Wednesday should not be eaten until Easter. Brillat-Savarin—Mary Frances's venerable mentor— thought the pheasant was most delicious in early decomposition. “At this time,” he wrote, “its aroma is developing in association with its oil which requires slight fermentation to be given off.” Small birds, such as woodcocks, were brought back from the hunt and hung up by the feet until their insides deliquesced and dripped out through the beak, and the feathers fell off. Only then were they prepared for the table.

But enough about that. I opened the letter. My long-estranged wife had covered the top third of one sheet of typing paper with her neat, black, deceptively innocent-looking handwriting.

“Dear Hugo,” she began.

Dear Hugo!

I paused a moment to savor the rich layers of irony in this salutation, after ten years…. Dear Hugo, Dear Hugo. I breathed it in with my eyes as if it were an interesting smell I couldn't
place, or get enough of, something unhealthy and complex and pungent, all at once. A low-tide mudflat smell. A diseased sexual organ. A drive-through whiff of the Fresh Kills Landfill. An old man's fungus-ridden foot newly freed from its tight leather shoe on a sweltering afternoon.

“Dear Hugo,” she wrote. “I am well. Bellatrix has asked me to write to you. We are in NYC [NYC! How I savor this charming Americanism of an immigrant mother whose American-born child has taught her—not well, of course, because no immigrant mother ever fully learns her child's native tongue, but adequately enough to sling around a little slang] now, and will come up to see you next month. Maybe to live, if we stay. You are still my husband, and it has been a long time. I won't pretend. But our girl is getting older and should know her past. Time for her to know her father and her someday house. We will come on the train, and you can come and get us in your car. Please write to us at this address. Bellatrix sends you her fond regards. She is much older now, you won't know her at first, she is grown up and plays the violin. We will need to go to NYC on Saturdays on the train for her lessons. Your wife, Sonia.”

That, in its entirety, is the first contact.

My vision began closing in from the top and sides like the walls and ceiling in that Sherlock Holmes story until I sat in a zooming tunnel, at the end of which were my faraway, vulnerable-looking feet in their old cracked-leather shoes. Women, women everywhere but not a drop to drink.

October 24—Dennis and I had another bedside chat this morning. My bedside, his chat. He came bustling in brandishing the newspaper as if it were a dirty diaper, a bad dog, a bundle of litter he'd found on a pristine highway. I gathered that he'd been reading it downstairs in the kitchen over his coffee,
and, incensed by the news from the front and in the grip of an overdose of caffeine, was desperate for someone to vent to. Lucky me. I sat up in bed as he bristled in my doorway. I was shaking a little from the aftereffects of the pain in my foot all night, hoping he wouldn't choose my river-view chair, but knowing before he sat in it that he would, naturally, with his unerring instinct for pissing me off. He couldn't help himself, the same way I can't help needing those flower-patterned drinking glasses to go upside down and aligned in the cupboard. We all have our compulsions, our foibles. Pain has made me uncharacteristically compassionate, or else weak in the head.

“Why,” my distraught only sibling burst out, apropos of nothing, “must the media present men as stupid dolts? The humor, or sales pitch, of half the advertisements on TV now is: Men are like children, and women rule the world, so buy these sneakers, go to this superstore. We're like the village idiots all of a sudden. I don't see why we as an entire sex should be made into laughingstocks or scapegoats. We buy things too. Maybe they're trying to appeal to what they imagine is our guilt and self-loathing.”

I lit another cigarette. “I don't have a TV. I have no idea what you're talking about. I couldn't care less about whatever humanity is up to these days.”

“But that's just the least of it,” he went on. “Those fucking little punks, those suicide terrorists. They're like cockroaches. I don't want to understand them, I just want them dead. I can't imagine what those knee-jerk lefty-liberal mealy-mouthed hypocrites are thinking, those idiots who claim to feel somehow implicated in these wholly unprovoked attacks just because they're privileged, educated, and white and therefore feel guilty for having what most of the rest of the world wants. Well, I may have my own issues with guilt, but I suffer from no such qualms about those terrorists: if those baby boomers really feel
so guilty about having it all, they can give away their SUVs and satellite dishes to inner-city AIDS patients and move to third-world huts and die of dysentery or ebola or a machete in the head. If I were younger I would enlist and go over to Afghanistan. Our father died at war; we should all die at war. Meanwhile, what am I doing instead of risking my life like a real man? I'm wrecking it. I split up my family. I'm not getting any work done since I came back here. I'm shooting myself in the foot out of helpless frustration. Or so I tell myself, to convince myself that what I'm doing has some basis in logic and current events, when actually I'm beginning to believe that I'm just as crazy as you and it just took longer for my own self-destructive pathologies to emerge.”

It amazes me how much time Dennis wants to spend with me, how he seeks me out whenever he can, as if he had a stored-up fount of things to tell me. It was this way when we were boys, only back then I was eager to please him and smaller than he and therefore under his rule.

“But,” I said, making my face go all blank and inoffensive, “we aren't alike, you and I. I'm delighted with all of my so-called pathologies. You strike me, admittedly the layman but someone who has known you long and well, as clinically depressed. Maybe you need professional help. Maybe you need Zoloft or Prozac or Wellbutrin, but I wouldn't know a thing about that.”

“Men in our family don't go to therapists.”

“They marry them, apparently.”

“And look where that got me,” he shot back. “For all her clinical training, she doesn't have a clue about her own problems. That's her blind spot.”

“Well, maybe you should move out of this old pile. Maybe you need a change of scene, Dennis.”

“This old pile is my ancestral home,” said Dennis. “I have as
much reason to be here as anywhere. And you, Hugo, wing nut though you may be, are all the family I have.”

“But why don't you move back down to the city if you're not getting any work done? Get yourself a cheap loft in TriBeCa—they're going for nothing these days, I hear, not to be morbid. What I'm trying to say is, why not make a fresh start down there? Don't all artists want to live in New York?”

He didn't say anything right away; I assumed he was mulling it all over.

“You know, Hugo, I've been wondering something,” he said. “Why don't you live in New York?”

He asked this with what for Dennis was real curiosity. Usually I rely on his narcissism to keep the focus off myself, but my false sympathy, it seemed, had backfired. “I hope you're not really going,” he added thoughtfully, “to spend the rest of your life moldering in this room.”

“I'm a career hermit,” I said equably. “Moldering is a valid life-style choice, as they say. The problem is that your being here is mucking up the whole deal, to put it mildly.”

“How so?”

“Let's talk about those dishes,” I snapped.

Our conversation went on from there. Violence was considered a few times by at least one of the parties involved, but I extracted a promise from Dennis to pay attention to the direction of the knife blades in the drawer. I am not holding my breath about this in any way.

October 25—I wrote back to Sonia, finally, to tell her that under no circumstances must she descend upon me and my life. Bad enough having Dennis here. “Dear Sonia,” I wrote. “You signed the recent letter you wrote me ‘your wife,’ and legally you are. I have provided for you and will continue to do so but feel urgently that this must be the extent of our contact. The
money will continue, and if you need more all you need to do is contact James Cahill. More than that I cannot offer. When you left me, we understood that it was forever. Your peremptory tone is unsettling to me, as there is no basis for it. Since Bellatrix has lived and from the sound of it even thrived for the past ten years without knowing me, I fail to comprehend even slightly how being uprooted from her present no-doubt full and happy life to become forcibly acquainted with a stranger, a man whose biological connection to her is shaky at best (you know what I mean by this) and whom she has every chance of disliking very much, can be considered a good thing for any of the parties involved in any way. In all sincerity, Hugo.”

I mailed it yesterday, checked my mailbox and was delighted to find it empty except for a credit-card offer I disposed of at once, and then, reluctant to leave that sad little washed-up burg right away, I lunched at a diner. Here I was served rubbery bacon with a leaf of tough lettuce and a mealy tomato slice on stale rye with yellowish mayonnaise liberally applied to both slices, and a corrosively bubbly, refreshing glass of the world's most pervasive soft drink.

Then. Sitting in that grimy booth, breathing the tepid air, and wishing I could slap the fortyish, hard-faced waitress on her quivering mound of behind and rest my face between her smarting buttocks just for one brief delirious moment as the perfect coda to my seedy lunch, I saw a familiar face go by the window outside. It was a flash of recognition and then he was gone.

The knowledge of who it was came in a gradual development, first idle noticing, then puzzled consternation, then puzzled awareness, and finally panic.

I need to know what he's doing up here, whether it's a coincidence, and whether he's looking for me….

How could I have thought I could escape? I wondered then,
and always wonder, about the fact that, no matter how hard one may try to live without the intolerable burden of society, the unwelcome recognition of a face, perfect solitude is always shown to be temporary, a phantasm, a dream. I envy the lonely. Loneliness, which is to say neediness, drives others away and keeps them at bay; the great irony is that the more those of us who desire only autonomy try to escape, the more we are pursued, whereas those who most long for companionship are most denied it, as if that pull of longing creates a force field around them that repels those they most want to attract. By those same laws of psychological physics, the attempt to escape creates an undertow in the social surf that pulls people along with you as you flee. True escape seems impossible for people who crave it like a drug. It seems that there can be no pure life, no essential aloneness.

It's slightly comforting to suspect that even monks of the most mute and reclusive orders, men who yearn so absolutely for perfect spiritual calm that they sacrifice sex for it, have to live cheek by jowl together in third-world–like close quarters. I would posit without doubt that the average monk becomes embroiled in petty power disputes over toothbrush slots, cringes at the eating noises of his brethren, chafes at interaction-fueled irritations, ferments with a barely restrained claustrophobia only hours of meditative prayer every day can begin to control.

A hermit in his cave must likewise, I'm sure, be driven to murderous frenzies by the banal and heedless shouts of hikers, smoke and guitar sounds from their campfires, the whine of big rigs all night long from a nearby freeway somewhere.

If I were deaf and blind, I sometimes think, I might be happy, but of course then there would be some maniacally well-intentioned Annie Sullivan pestering me day and night to rejoin the world of language and communication, not resting
until she succeeded in reattaching my hated umbilicus. Only in the caves, the cells, of night pain or this writing is there the letup for me now of this awful and debilitating human commerce. Death will of course bring it about in a final way, another reason I don't fear or fight this early stop for me. The carriage, though, had better hold just me alone, or I'll feel unforgivably gypped, and ask for my money back.

Sex, though. Sex, even though it necessarily involves another person, is a cave of its own. I never tire of it and would like to have it constantly. I've always been this way. As a wee lad I awaited its advent with breathless excitement, and since my hormonal spurt began, I have wanted nothing much more than to fuck and fuck and fuck, and never once have I felt hemmed in or impinged upon by any of my successes in doing so. A woman being penetrated doesn't say much, and if she does it's generally exciting and conducive. Afterward is another story. Stephanie Fox and I seem fundamentally alike in some way that's new to me with a woman. Sonia streamed with words, bled words, talked and talked and talked until I had to fuck her again to shut her up.