The Epicure's Lament (12 page)

When we first met—my wife, Sonia, and I—I was a Writer with a capital double-you. Those were different days, and I was a different man. I had friends back then; I hadn't yet felt the desire to eschew human contact; in fact, in those young, far-off days, I think I actually enjoyed it. I drank and ate with my fellows, behaved well at parties, was altogether pleasant to have around, or so I seem to recall, if occasionally bellicose, self-indulgent, grandiose in my professed aims.

Throughout the end of my twenties, I lived at Waverley, but only as a stopgap. I planned to move on after I had finished what I intended to be the twin cornerstones on which I would build my literary career: two books, one of poetry, one of philosophical pensées, or maybe I called them essays, it depended on
the time of day, the flavor of my mood. I had discovered reading years before, when I was sponging off various rich women, most of whom possessed the requisite rich person's good library, shelves of great and good books haphazardly collected, ostentatiously displayed, and for the most part largely ignored. I cultivated my reading habit as any secret vice, heady as opiates, clandestine as pornography. Although I can't prove this, I believe I had read more than the average English major by the time I was twenty. My reading was undertaken seriously, with an eye toward writing someday, when I felt I was ready. I was in no hurry. During those years as a kept boy in those several houses in New York and Europe, my so-called mistresses (well, what else were they? girlfriends? I think not) were society women whose romantic lives were split in two: their public escorts, the “bachelors” who chaperoned them to all the benefits, teas, auctions, and balls, and their pet boys, whom they ravished later, afterward, when the squire had handed them over to their doorman and gone off into the night in search of his own kind. Because of this, I had plenty of solitude, and little to do besides eat, walk around whatever city or seaside resort town I found myself in, and read.

Maybe because of my odd life-style, I gravitated at first to the most dreamy, dilatory, and passionate writers: my earliest influences were the English Romantic poets, the Russian novelists, the American Romantic mystics, and the German philosophers. I didn't remember much of what I'd read, an unfortunate but unavoidable by-product of all the actual drugs I indulged in, mainly champagne, cocaine, Benzedrine, and cognac, for some reason the universal drugs of choice of almost all my ladyloves. Still, the cadences, mannerisms, and modes of thinking of the likes of Coleridge, Dostoevski, Whitman, Emerson, and Kant were branded in my subconscious, and chunks of their intent somehow adhered to my cortical lobes as well. From there I
branched out to the early moderns—Wharton and Forster,
The Waves
, Beckett,
Ulysses
, Ford Madox Ford,
Oblomov
, Kafka, Flannery O'Connor, Hemingway—then I was done for. This was my jumping-off point: once I'd sucked in the Romantics and digested the early moderns, I systematically gorged myself on everything I could find, early or late, lush or stark, nihilistic or overwrought, I didn't much care. Throughout my twenties I read and read, insatiable as a termite. When I came back to Waverley to live, I bored a steady hole through its library until I felt that I had traveled enough with my forebears, learned enough of their craft, to launch my own little bobbing flotilla in their wake.

I began to write; I disliked it very much and still do. However, it never seemed to be a matter of preference but absolute necessity. Naïvely, I made a solemn pact never to write a word I didn't mean, never to write an unnecessary word. I set out to revolutionize and awaken from its shallow slumber the moribund desert of contemporary literature. What young writer doesn't? I was on fire; I stayed up all night in the library with cigarettes burning through the predawn hours. I wrote thoughts and poems, dreams, reflections, all of it achingly candid, bright-eyed, blustering, hubristic. Utter shit. But I kept at it. I worked until my head ached, until I fell asleep in the lamplight with my head on the table. I thought I heard voices sometimes late at night, saw faces, heard scurryings in the walls. I forgot to piss. I awoke in the mornings sometimes stiff as a corpse from sleeping upright in my chair with the sun burning on my sweaty head.

One night I went to a party with my friend Fred and his girlfriend, Liza, a wicked brunette who always flirted hotly with me right under Fred's nose. This never seemed to bother him, which vaguely offended me: was I nothing, a fly, a harmless nonthreat in his eyes? I was always tempted to try to fuck her,
but never did. That night we drank a lot, more even than usual, and decided to drive to a bar about half an hour north. We all, about six of us, piled into Fred's car and set off It was one of those summer nights with a fine humid mist suspended uniformly in the air that makes everything seem mysterious and exciting and full of adventure, or did in those days anyway. Liza sat on my lap on the front seat; Fred drove. Everyone else was crammed into the back. We sang along with a song on the radio. Liza's shapely ass was pressed warmly into my crotch; her arm was slung around my shoulder. She leaned against the passenger-side door, her bare feet extended into Fred's lap, her head back against the window, half lolling against mine. I decided, determinedly, that tonight was the night. If Fred wasn't minding the store, it was going to get held up.

“What's that?” said Liza. “Look, there's someone in the road.”

A girl was walking along facing the oncoming traffic with her arm thrust out, her thumb up. She looked young and slight, with pixie hair, white-faced in the headlights.

“Look at that,” I said. “It's Peter Pan.”

“She's in trouble,” Liza said immediately. “Fred, stop the car, pick her up!”

“No room,” said Fred through his cigarette.

“Fred, come on, don't be an asshole, stop the fucking car,” Liza said evenly. “I'll sit in back.”

She tossed herself casually over the back seat into the laps and elbows of everyone sitting back there. There was some jovial, drunken shouting and laughter as Fred slowed and then stopped and then reversed the car. I opened my door and the girl was on my lap like a shot. She was smaller and lighter than Liza. Her ass landed on what was left of my Liza-inflated pecker. “Thank you,” she said in a hard, husky, accented voice that belonged to someone older, more world-weary, than this little elf. She
smelled of the night air and cigarettes and something else, her own scent, a clean animal smell like the fur of a marmoset, not that I'd ever smelled one, but I was drunk and young and very horny and given to poetic associations. “You saved my life,” she sighed dramatically.

“What do you mean, we saved your life?” Liza asked, leaning over the seat between Fred and me. “I'm Liza, by the way.”

“I am Sonia,” said the girl, turning to give Liza a wan smile, a fleeting acknowledgment.

“What happened?” asked Liza insistently.

“Oh,” said Sonia, and sighed again. “I was out on this crazy date with someone, a man I know, and he tried to hurt me or something, I wasn't sure what he was going to do, but he threatened me. So I jumped out of the car while he was driving and rolled away and hid under some bushes, then I walked for a while, and you stopped and picked me up.”

“What do you mean, he threatened you?”

“Sexually,” she said, drawing the word out, scornfully. “Sexually, and possibly violently as well. He had a gun, he took it out and told me to…” Almost involuntarily, I held her close, as if she were a hurt child and I her affectionate uncle. Well, I'd been bewitched and bothered by Fred's cock-tease of a girlfriend and hadn't had much action in the past month or so. Sonia sighed and nestled into me, but even then I sensed there was nothing weak or defenseless about this little chick. Her sigh, her nestle, barely betrayed a withheld impatience, a kind of quivering expectation, a defiant insouciance, as if she had been through too much, had seen too much, to feel anything any more. She was merely the vessel for tragedy, not its victim in any way.

“You don't have to tell us if it's too painful to talk about,” said Janey, the wife half of the couple whose party it had been, earlier that night. “But I think we should take you to the hospital
so you can be looked at. Or, if you're not hurt, then the police, so you can have him caught.”

“Press charges!” Sonia said. I'd always liked Janey but now, in the cold blue light cast by Sonia's reaction to her, I felt irritated to have to be in the same car with her or to be associated with her in any way.

“Why not?” said Fred. “He deserves it.”

“He is my boss,” Sonia added patiently, “where I work. I want never to think of this again and never to say a word to anyone I know about this. I have to go to my job tomorrow. I work as a chambermaid at his motel and need this job because I am not a citizen. I am not hurt. In Poland we don't go to the police with such things.”

Then I told her that what she needed was a drink, and she half smiled and agreed, and so we brought her along to the bar with us. She and I sat in a booth; somehow everyone understood that she was my charge. I had forgotten the treacherous, seductive Liza. Sonia was a street urchin straight out of a nineteenth-century novel, with her sharp, pale little face and short yellow hair. She and I were the same kind of thing, and I wanted her to know this. I wanted to impress on her the fact that I was nothing like these soft Americans. Over glasses of vodka, leaning into each other across the shitty old cigarette-burned table, I told her, as I had never told anyone, about all my years on the lam, starting with leaving my mother's car at the gas station, hitchhiking to New York, living in hotel lobbies pretending to be waiting for someone and dozing on couches and using the facilities (it helped to have that innate blue-blooded air of slouching entitlement, not to mention the prep-school haircut and outfit, which, even unwashed and rumpled, made me look altogether too purebred for a hotel doorman to question), until Tovah found me on her way to hear some homo jazz pianist at the Carlyle and rescued me
and took me home. I told Sonia about escaping New York, crossing the Atlantic as crew on a freighter… and on and on, through Paris, the Riviera, the crazy countess in Aix-en-Provence who made her own goat cheese and liked to be taken from behind like a dog under the open-air baskets where the cheese aged, suspended from branches of the trees in her garden—her withered buttocks and her unfathomable tendresse, her generosity with me—and then the cold winter in Prague in the squat with the neo-Nazi and his feral pack of dogs, then picking olives in Greece before I ran into my old Parisian mistress's best friend, Marie-Chantal, at a discothèque and was taken by her to Paris again, then living in the States again, smuggling drugs between Boston and Canada, freeloading in houses in Los Angeles and on Long Island, hitchhiking aimlessly from coast to coast…. Sonia listened blank-faced, coldly rapt, as if she were taking in, along with my words, my gestures, point of view, manner of speaking and inflections, with a plan to impersonate me later, for her own profit.

“Are you an actress?” I asked her abruptly, on a hunch.

“Of course,” she said. “I trained for it in Warsaw. I came to America to act. But so far”—she made a dismissive fricative noise—“only community theater, last summer, around here. Nothing! And I am twenty-five! Old.”

“You're a baby,” I crooned. I was twenty-seven.

“You're drunk,” she shot back. She almost never smiled. Neither did I, for that matter. By the end of the night, she and I were in agreement that she would not go to work tomorrow, her boss be damned. She could find another job. She had to quit this one, and I would lend her—no, give her—money to tide her over.

Back at Waverley, we tumbled around my bed together. She was fierce and opaque, and not breakable. We got no sleep that night, no sleep for several nights to come. Sonia wanted to be
abused. She wanted me to insult her, to treat her like a whore, to slap her ass and rough her up, force her to do whatever I wanted. It was the only way to reach her or arouse her or provoke a response in her. This was fine with me; I had had my share of being bossed around by many women, going all the way back to my mother. The tables were turned and there was, it seemed, no end to the indignities and humiliations I could subject another, willing person to. My appetite for this sort of thing felt bottomless. It seemed to be mutual. I forgot my work, forgot about food, forgot everything except this girl; she and I haunted Waverley together like gleaming white-fleshed young ghosts, naked in every room, night and day, sunlight or candlelight. I was sure my ancestors were watching in dismay and abhorrence, which jacked up the pleasure. In her blank-shocked blue eyes I saw the disappointed, rotten, louche folk-soul of Europe itself. She was very bad news, which was all to the good; I had never been in love before, but it was high time. I was a romantic slob with her, a pushover. Sonia was my first and only free-fall swoon.

She confessed a week afterward, as we sat eating cold takeout sesame noodles on my bed, facing each other naked, listening to Fauré's
Requiem
of all the preposterous things: it was all an act, that hitchhiking story, a bit of performance art. She was, in fact, a performance artist, and had never been a chambermaid in a motel, or assaulted by her boss. Her cheeks flushed a little as she told me, and her eyes looked sharp and wary and filled with anticipation: here was fresh drama of her own making.

“No motel,” I said. “No attempted attack. I don't see why you'd bother with that whole story, you scrawny teat-loose bitch. Why not just thumb a ride?”

She inhaled sharply through her nose and drew herself up. There had been a flick of pleasure in her eyes at the insult.

“It is my work,” she said. “I consider what I am doing a form of storytelling and theater. I call this entire piece, this journey, my
Thousand and One Nights.
That is how long I will try to survive on the stories I tell, the roles I play. I am traveling around the U.S.A., seeing how far I can go with my art alone. My rule, though, is that after a week I must tell those I have interacted with, my fellow players, who do not yet realize they are in a piece of theater, a show. Hugo, you are my fellow actor. There are no rules, we can make this theater whatever we want. This has been my most successful piece so far. It alone of all my projects is engaged theater, as opposed to a piece in which I feel I've committed a wrong. People have been very angry at me, you know.”