The Epicure's Lament (2 page)

My rare visitors over the years have been women lured here every now and again for sexual purposes. Jennifer, the last, was the forty-two-year-old auburn-haired plumpish admissions administrator at the nearby liberal-arts college. For a number of months, she and I enjoyed a casual ongoing affair, which proceeded nicely enough and might have gone nowhere forever as far as I was concerned, but came to an abrupt halt about a year ago, when she reunited with and then precipitously married an old boyfriend I'd never heard of.

Since then I've been reluctantly celibate, but am always on the lookout.

Meanwhile, through the years I have not encouraged and in fact have scarcely tolerated Dennis's occasional casual drop-ins, with or without his offspring but never with his wife Marie, who has never liked me. He came ostensibly to touch base with the semi-estranged brother but really to make sure I wasn't burning all the fainting couches to keep warm, or giving away any heirloom silverware, or otherwise squandering his inheritance and history. He has always been suspicious of my care-taking abilities, and with very good reason.

It's breakfast time. Under normal circumstances—which is to say, if I were alone here—I would stroll by the options in my mental automat: omelet with leftover chunks of lamb, a daub of sour cream, some chopped parsley; or a fried jumble of eggs, onions, potatoes, and sausage, puddles of ketchup; or maybe a sandwich of smoked herring fillets on toasted rye with horseradish and mustard; or a big chunk of extra-sharp cheddar, an apple cut into eighths, and a wad of sourdough bread ripped from a whole bakery loaf.

But Dennis is down there in the kitchen, all chipper and clean-shaven and wanting to talk to me. There's nothing I dread and resent more first thing in the morning than the double-headed monstrous hydra of obligatory pleasantries. It makes me want to bash his head in with a tire iron. As long as he's here, my life is ruined. Not to put too fine a point on it.

October 11—Good morning! I'm still alive, I see.

If I can hold on through the night, the morning is always better.

Here I am again, Dennis downstairs as usual in the kitchen with his wet-haired, soap-smelling self wedged in a chair, itching for a little male bonding with the kid brother—-Jesus, it's unbearable, but this is his house too.

Montaigne carved on the roof beams of his own hermit tower the following admirable thoughts:

The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge.
I establish nothing. I do not understand. I halt. I examine.
Breath fills a goatskin as opinion fills a hollow head.
Not more this than that—why this and not that? Have you
seen a man that believes himself wise? Hope that he is a fool.
Man, a vase of clay.
I am human, let nothing human be foreign to me.
What inanity is everything!

What inanity indeed. If I don't have a cup of coffee soon, my head will implode.

I'm smoking, as always, a long slow suicide that in recent years has got a fuck of a lot faster. Smoke, smoke. In draw, out blow, rush of nicotine. The first one of the day is the only one that matters to me, all the other ones are just habit. I wake up jonesing, shaken from the long night of pain. And the match, the dry sulfur hiss of promise, of comfort. And the first deep lungful of gray foul-fresh smoke. And then the finest moment of each day, the zing. I can never get it back all day long, no matter how much or little I smoke, no matter how carefully I space out the cigarettes, and I think I've tried everything, every trick of timing and dosage. Short of upgrading to heroin or crack, there's nothing left to do, it's just what it is now. And heroin or crack would eventually turn into the same drill.

Pain kept me awake all night; I'm saggy-faced and wrung out. Nerves, the electrical wiring of the body. Wish I could short-circuit myself. I seem to have suddenly entered a temporal waiting room I won't get out of until I'm alone again. Last night I read some of Montaigne's
Essais
, in French. My French isn't nearly good enough for this, so it helped me fall back to sleep, finally.

Maybe I'll take a bath soon. Now that I'm no longer alone here, I'm aware that I offend the nose with my unwashed person. Dennis's nose with my unwashed person.

What do I care what he thinks? What do I care if I offend him? Since he came home I've done everything to drive him away again.

Yesterday evening, as usual out on the veranda, I held my whiskey bottle as if its neck were Dennis's, twisting it with one hand while holding the body of the bottle with the other. I took a pull at its mouth as if I were sucking out its final breath. I hadn't offered him any and he hadn't asked.

“Autumnal gloaming,” I intoned from the broad railing
where I was perched, looking down the lawn to the weeping willows at the edge of the dark river. “She creeps in on her velvet paws to curl around the windowpanes and swells my gourd with ripeness to the core.”

“What's that?” asked Dennis from the other side of the veranda, where he was carving a pumpkin in the pool of overhead light.

“A pastiche,” said I. “The conceit is that my girlfriend is the autumn evening, which I'm sure went right over your head like most of my inspired bloviating.”

He didn't answer. He leaned back on his haunches and scraped some pumpkin pulp and seeds from the newspaper on the porch floor beside him. He lifted them absently to his nose and sniffed.

I know what they smell of, they smell of sex.

“Dennis,” I said suddenly, and was gratified when he jumped a little. He had drifted far off into some reverie of his own, apparently. “Now that you've cast off your marital shackles…”

“What?” he asked, hacking industriously away at the pumpkin again. As a professional sculptor, my brother has achieved a certain amount of success, a Chelsea gallery, a couple of shows a year, work sold to serious collectors, articles about him in art magazines, the usual art-world hoo-hah. He's been called “versatile” and “inventive” by critics who presumably know what they're talking about, but not since we were lads have I seen him apply his so-called talents to the vegetable kingdom: he traffics mainly in heavy metals, as far as I know. So maybe he's come home to regress.

“You've got your mind on a woman, I can tell,” I said, hazarding a guess. The night before, he'd gone on and on, after drinking quite a lot of wine. At first he was vague—he referred mysteriously to Another Woman—but it took very little prompting on my part to get the specifics out of him. He was obviously dying to talk about it.

“ça te regarde pas,”
he said with automatic absentness, sounding exactly like the ghost of our dead French mother, bless her needy, narcissistic bottomless pit of a soul; it was her stock response to anything we said that had nothing directly to do with her own thoughts, feelings, well-being, and opinions.

So I was right.

“I think I know who,” I said sneakily “Your friend Bun Fox's wife. In your cups last night, you mentioned that the lovely Stephanie Fox frequents Rex's Roadhouse alone after work sometimes. You intimated that she's unhappy with said friend Bun. You licked your chops, and I saw a plan afoot in your hothouse of a brainpan to rescue her and give her what you clearly believe she wants and needs.”

“Back off,” said Dennis in that tone of voice I know not to brook, if only for the sake of weaseling a discussion of the topic out of him later, after he's had a few. “I mean it, Hugo.”

The subject of sex, once it rears its head, is not so easy to beat down again, like Lear's Fool's eels: Down, nuncle!

“Where the back door are my cigarettes?” I said, fumbling around in my pants pocket as if I fully expected to find them there.

“I don't know,” Dennis said, gouging a tiny, shallow curlicue into the pumpkin's flesh. “Maybe you smoked them.”

“Maybe I did.” I got up and went inside for my wallet and keys.

“Watch out for Officer Friendly,” Dennis called through the open window. “Actually, maybe I should drive you there.”

“Oh, I'm all right,” I said through gritted teeth, gimping across the weedy lawn to my truck. I sputtered off at a fuck-you stately pace up the long driveway to Route 23, and then to Stewart's, of course to buy cigarettes, but incidentally to chat up the cashier, a gormless, lumpen girl who has captured my heart with her idiot-savant–like chatter. We are both high-school dropouts, and, as such, are soulmates. I linger twice a
day, sometimes for as long as half an hour, tapping an unlit cigarette on the counter, talking nonstop to her, while customers flow around me. The romance has, to my half-relieved dismay, failed over the months to progress beyond these almost daily manic, nonsensical, and yet strangely passionate colloquies. I'm not sure whether Carla has yet reached the age of legal consent, but even if she has there's sure to be an outcry of some kind if I seduce her. Why, I don't know, but there ought to be.

Well, that's one thing you can say for those Ay-rab terrorists—at least, it's the one thing I myself will say here—they've distracted a sovereign nation's collective mind from the goings-on of other people's genitalia. But not our own—these have become even more urgent and paramount in our consciousness since last month's attacks. I should say my own. To this end, I'm tempted to make some degree of move on freckled, bony, big-breasted, postpubescent Carla the same way Dennis is plotting his own, equally inappropriate campaign to seduce his best friend's wife. These are desperate times.

When I got back from Stewart's, my headlights picked out the silhouette of Dennis, crouching down at the far edge of the lawn on the bare earth in the near darkness under a weeping willow, staring moodily across the Hudson, no doubt at staccato bursts of streaming white light along some faraway road. He used to spend a lot of time there as a kid, primarily alone, although sometimes he allowed me into his strategic paramilitary games and spying missions. When he did, though, he'd make me be his decoder or scout, in some unequivocally subordinate position. Back then I was obedient, tractable, and eager to please.

I turned five in 1966, a month before our father was killed in Vietnam, a war he'd enlisted for, even though he was a summa-cum-laude graduate of Harvard Law School and the father of two young sons. He enlisted as a matter of course; he'd
joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Harvard and graduated with a commission of second lieutenant, and so had already embarked on a military course of action. As an officer, he must have felt reasonably confident of returning home in one piece. Also, he must have wanted very badly to get far away from my mother, but this is only speculation. In any case, if he'd eschewed the college military rigmarole he would have been exempt from serving in Vietnam by virtue of being a father.

As it turned out, second lieutenants were required to serve on the front lines with their men. Being an officer was no guarantee of safety, no siree.

It was very hard for the family, to put it mildly, when Dad was blown to bits by a stray grenade. Maybe because I had nowhere else to put it, I somehow transferred all my shining adoration of Dad to the manifestly undeserving Dennis, who became my unchallenged leader for the remainder of my childhood. It wasn't until adolescence that I saw the light and started balking at Dennis, defying our mother, maybe because I was blindsided by a sudden surge of hormones and maybe because I woke up and saw them for who they were. At the time I was as perplexed by this as anyone else, although it was a relief to be wild and destructive, to turn it all outward.

The incident that ended forever my family life—and my youth too, for that matter—occurred during the autumn I turned seventeen and was a senior at Choate, when Dennis committed the fatal error of agreeing with our mother that I should finish high school in a military academy down south. I can fully understand that at that time this might have seemed the only solution to the parent-teacher conferences concerning my breaches of conduct, all the suspensions and inevitable expulsions, first from Winthrop Prep, a fine old school near Waverley where Dennis and I were day boys together, then Andover, my father's alma mater, and finally Choate, my
grand-father's—none of their administrations or faculties much cared for my vandalism, my cheating on tests, my drinking during school hours. Finally, in my senior year, I got busted selling pot at the same time it emerged that I'd impregnated a Rosemary Hall freshman, a pathologically pissed-off candy heiress named Belinda Crake, the one other student there who actually gave me a run for my money in the juvenile-delinquent department, but no matter. Belinda received a voluntary legal abortion, and I got kicked out for good. Dennis drove our mother to Wallingford to collect me. I allowed myself to be collected, then festered in the back seat most of the way home, until she broke the news that I would have to undergo psychological testing and then go to military school. When Dennis seconded the motion and refused my appeals for brotherly solidarity, I called him a traitor, a spineless coward, a pussy, a mama's boy, all of which he arguably was. Then I lapsed into a ticking silence, slit-eyed, my knee jerking madly up and down. Several miles later, I announced I had to take a piss. I disappeared at the gas station. I went into the men's room, in other words, and didn't come back.

Dennis told me, long afterwards, that they'd put out a missing-persons report, had three different private detectives look for me at various times. They never found me. I lived for a while with a rich fat Jewish woman on the Upper East Side. Then I went to Europe and continued my life as a kept boy for a while, until I got bored with being a lapdog and turned to petty crime, mostly small drug deals, but a little bit of theft and whatnot. I eventually mooched my way back to the States, where I did a bit of this and that, including making several very lucrative drives from Canada to the U.S., big bags of marijuana taped to the underside of my wheel well. I was clean-shaven and polite, and never got any trouble from anyone.