The Epicure's Lament (13 page)

“I can easily imagine,” I said, and slid my haunches under hers and pinioned her hips and went right up her ass without lubricant of any kind and began fucking her, slowly but hard and with intent to punish. There was silence for a while, and we both yelled from between our clenched teeth at the same instant. Then it was time to sit back and ponder this new development. I was besotted with this woman. I didn't care who she was or what she'd done; I didn't want her to leave again, I wanted her to stay here with me. All right, I knew all about her act, the young lost penniless waif of a foreigner in need of a warm bed and some sympathetic company. I had done it myself, many times, but it had never been done to me.

“Well, it's sort of brilliant,” I said, almost laughing at my own cleverness, turning her own tables on her so slickly.
“A Thousand and One Nights.
Ironic and original.”

“Yes,” she said smugly, with her usual total lack of humor. “I am risking my life, I am putting myself at the mercy of strangers. I knew that you, out of everyone in that car, would understand. I felt that you and I were the same: we are both radicals, we write our own laws. I know this to be true after a week with you.”

“You conned me, you bitch,” I said, tugging at a piece of her short hair, hard enough to force her head down near my naked crotch, where a certain other show was taking place, one energetic puppet alone onstage, getting ready for its close-up. Ah, those were the days, of the eternally rising sap of youth. She did what she was meant to do down there, despite where my fellow had so recently been. Sonia was never squeamish about hygiene or bodily fluids or anything, really.

She sat up. “Give me some more champagne,” she said. “I'm thirsty.”

I handed her the champagne and she smiled. Seeing her smile was a rare and wondrous thing: she did it so seldom, and her smile was oddly and touchingly goofy. It also displayed her small brownish Eastern European teeth, which may be why she avoided it for the most part.

In due time, I married her; and in due time, she left me.

It pains me to admit this: I don't know, even now, whether her purported performance-art piece was yet another con, or whether she had actually embarked on such a project and been waylaid by me. I never knew anything about her for sure, how many other men she fucked while we were married, what her childhood had been like, who her family was. I was never sure what she wanted from me, if anything, besides my citizenship-conferring last name, my support, my adoration, my late-night cooking, my love of wine, my unending lust for her. It was a double-edged sword—I loved her because she had the power to fuck me up as much as my mother had, but she was as unlike my mother as any woman I'd ever dreamed of.

What a sap.

We went to Europe for our honeymoon after a quickie ceremony at City Hall that was attended by my friend Fred and his girlfriend, Liza, our witnesses and only guests. Sonia took me to Warsaw and showed me the dark, airless streets of her childhood, the house where her parents had lived before they'd died.

I took her to France and played the big man, the cosmopolitan epicure, the sugar daddy, the lovestruck young husband. I spent vast amounts of money on her. We ate every delicacy we could get our hungry little mitts on. In the Alps… Never mind, it was all a dream, and, like all dreams, it ended.

I struggled to keep writing after she moved in with me. I didn't see the point of my dogged, self-serving, old-fashioned endeavors in the face of her fresh understanding of art. She had breathed life into the rotten lungs, had reanimated the defunct veins and infused them with her mischief. She had electrified the old corpse. My books now seemed like pointless weights getting heavier with each page I scrawled. I read parts aloud to her, to prove to her that I was her equal, her fellow; but her dry, dismissive, even derisive comments (“The sorrows of young Hugo!” was one in particular that went right to the sticking-place; not to mention, “Hugo, you are such a child with your need for metaphor, metaphor, metaphor, everything compared to something else instead of just saying what it is…. What are you afraid of, saying what a thing is? In Poland we say straight what things are, we have not the luxury of your American excess.”). She was right about my writing's being callow and overwritten; that was the thing that killed me. If I'd been able to muster any defense, I might have survived it, but I knew as soon as the words left her mouth that there was nothing I could say. And I had no such criticism of her to offer in return. I was too young to imagine that she might be manipulating me, keeping me in my place as a means of keeping me. I trusted her….

Until I woke up one day to find myself divested of the illusion that she was in my thrall, an illusion I finally realized she had been in complete control of the entire time.

I became dementedly and justifiably suspicious of her long absences, her secretive airs, her unflappable attitude of superiority to me. She went out and slept with other men. I couldn't
bear it. She was my wife, and I wanted her all to myself. Then she became pregnant, and I knew the baby wasn't mine; I don't know how I knew. Maybe I smelled on her the scent of another man's DNA, I don't know. After the baby was born, blond and round and looking nothing like me at all, I drove Sonia away, I guess is one way of looking at it, with my irrational jealousy and hotheaded accusations.

The fight about the knives was just an excuse.

Over the years I've come to see Sonia for what she was with a much more clear and cold understanding. I see what she did to me and how. And I want nothing more to do with her, beyond seeing that she's taken care of, she and that kid, whoever's spawn Bellatrix may be. Sonia doesn't deserve even this, but it's not in me to do otherwise. I do it for myself, as the saying goes. I will always have the moral upper hand with her, as long as she's dependent on me and beholden to me. Her own dreams for her work, assuming she wasn't lying when she told me she had had training to be an actress and was hoping to find success, ended exactly when mine did: she no more became an actress than I became a writer. The tumult of our marriage was no doubt drama enough for her while it lasted, and after she left me, my support of her from afar killed the fire in her belly, the burning need to claw her way up, killed the thing in her that I had loved, or so I comforted myself with thinking. She would never have to work as a waitress between auditions; she would never have to beg for a part, clutching her expensive headshots. She would never have to live in a cold-water walk-up with a bathtub in the kitchen, or strip, or go on welfare, or marry a man she didn't like, any of the single-mother would-be-actress escape valves. That was all right, I didn't mind rescuing her, because it also meant that she would never again be hungry enough to throw herself body and soul into her work; that was the punishment I set out for her.

Of course, she could have been lying about wanting to act— this could have been part of her con—in which case she succeeded as the only kind of artist she ever wanted to be, and got set up for life.

I was twenty-seven when I met her, twenty-eight when I married her, twenty-nine when Bellatrix was born, and thirty when she left me. When I met her I was filled with youthful life and inspiration, and when she left I was finished, washed up. She corroded me, is one way of looking at it. I allowed her to corrode me, is another way. A third: she was only the catalyst for what would have happened anyway, Sonia or no Sonia. Finally, after enduring her criticism of my writing, in the grip of an abject but defiant urge to show both of us that she was wrong, I went into town one day and had several expensive, dense Xeroxes made of each book-length manuscript I had written: poems about the metaphysics of sex, and philosophical essays about the ethics of living above or outside or “in spite of” the law…. Recalling these subjects, I cringe at my own audacity and sheer hubris: what, at twenty-eight, did I think I knew about anything? I had flouted the law, had slept with a lot of women, but those experiences were crude oil in my brainpan still, the refinery of time hadn't even begun its processes yet. How could I have expected any editor to pony up an advance for this raw and undigested stuff? Nonetheless, I doggedly sent them out to agent after agent, editor after editor. For two years I kept at it, trundling back and forth between home and the post office, and for two years my manuscripts streamed back to me in stamped, self-addressed envelopes accompanied by rejection letters, many of them encouraging and respectful, or at least polite. At first egged on by some of the phrases they contained, I tried magazines, both glossy and literary. However, these efforts were likewise fruitless. A vanity press was out of the question: I would not pay to have my work published,
because it would prove nothing to Sonia, or, for that matter, to me. It was bad enough to have to see those familiar envelopes waiting in my box, addressed to myself in my own handwriting. It felt like the most depressing sort of masturbation, the sort done only to relieve base need.

God, the past.

Finally, I had to admit to myself that Sonia was right and my work was crap. I tried to buck myself up, stay with it, keep writing, strike out in new directions. I started a few novels, several plays, new poems and essays…. I even tried a family history in my darkest night of the soul. I was desperately unable to make anything take off I couldn't work up much interest in anything I wrote about; I suspected I had nothing of interest to say. So many before me had written so well. How could I ever have thought I could join their ranks? Instead of writing, I sat and berated myself for thinking I could write. I felt sick to my stomach at the sight of a blank sheet of paper. Phrases from rejection letters echoed in my head along with Sonia's derision. I knew everyone had to face rejection, and I knew that talent was cheap, and discipline and courage separated the men from the boys. But somehow I failed to overcome the loss of my faith in work and love. By my mid-thirties, wrung out and dried up, I stopped writing altogether, and stopped seeking out my fellows. Solitude was comforting. Other people made me weary. Conversations felt pointless and draining. A psychologist might have called what I was going through a breakdown of some kind; I called it a whole new way of life.

As my garum gloom deepened and intensified, my friends stopped trying to pull me back into their warm, happy circle. On our last outing together to a bar to get drunk amid noisy chaos, I told Fred I had decided to live as a hermit for a while because the end of my marriage had been too much for me to take. I didn't mention the rejection of my work—I was too
proud. I needed to hole up alone for a while, I said, and nurse my wounds.

Fred said, shaking his head, “Well, some people find Jesus and convert to Christianity, you found Sonia and converted to Sonia, and she fucked you in the head. So now you're going to be a monk? That's fucked up, but I guess it's your decision.” We toasted the dissolution of our friendship, and never saw each other again. From then on, no one needed or asked anything of me in my psychic demilitarized zone of near nonbeing. I found that this suited me; I became the inward leeward becalmed remote island I am today—or, rather, would still be if I could.

But I am forced now to admit, if only to myself, that I became a solitary do-nothing by attrition—not by philosophical choice, as Montaigne did, but because I had reached the end of my tenure in work and life and had become old at the arguably young age of thirty-five. It was around the same time that Dr. Schuyler told me in no uncertain terms that if I kept smoking I would eventually die of Buerger's disease, maybe within a few years. I decided that this wouldn't be the end of the world, only of me.

So here I am. For now, anyway.

Speaking of the past, there was that face earlier, going by the diner window. That face, flashing into view as I sat over the remains of my lunch, riding atop its body… that ratlike, intelligently citified face, a face from the distant past. His name escapes me but not for long. His pointy nose, bulging eyes, sin-isterly transparent eyebrows, I know and fear that face. I know exactly who he is. He didn't see me. But if he can walk by me once, he can do it again, and next time I might not have the
safety of glass between us. The world is a treeless backyard with a high fence around it, everyone milling around in stark sunlight, trapped. Dennis is at home. Sonia is coming back. That face.

I owe Stephanie a dinner. I want to plunder her rich, suave corpus, and I think I might be able to, if I break bread with her and go through the motions of listening to her not wholly uninteresting conclusions about marriage and procreation for an hour or two, if history is any indication.

So there's nothing for it but to telephone her and offer to pay my debt. No harm in trying, as they say.

I loathe myself, but am all I have.

October 30—Garum mood again.

November 1—Reeking stews of rotten fish entrails washing around skull and rib cage.

November 2—Drank all the whiskey I could hold last night, and it washed my head and chest clean of
poisson
poison. Feel like a new man, like Adam just made. It's healthy to have a good/bad hangover every now and then, the physiological equivalent of clear-burning forests or dousing a toilet with lye and ammonia, the aftermath of a noxious but beneficial procedure that leaves everything sparkling and black and dead, ready to rejuvenate. Like chemotherapy but a lot more fun.

Stephanie wasn't home tonight when I telephoned. Her husband, Bun, was. He was rather chatty; we had a long and amusing, for him anyway, discussion of my identity, relationship to Dennis, reason for calling, and interest in his wife. I thrust and parried like a real man, heave-ho. He was suspicious, as well he should have been. I meanwhile lied baldly and boldly, so as to give him the impression that I am in need of legal advice,
which, now that I think of it, I might be: can Sonia come back to live here if she's still legally my wife? I have a grave fear that there's some obscure law on the books that entitles her to half of everything I own, which includes my half of this house. And my truck.