The Epicure's Lament (20 page)

Her mouth, her eyes, her hands. She holds nothing back, not at gambling, not at fucking. Throughout the most lost-in-space moments with her, when our eyes are wild, our breath is raspy, our lips are chafed raw on each other, when we're wholly given over to our plundering instincts and all our animal cells are plumped with satiation likewise, such preternatural, hotheaded, adamantine intelligence gleams from every radiant, heedless glance of hers, every follicle of her hair crackles as my hand runs through it, each cell of her responds fully, electrically, to every cell of me; I suspect, with no false humility and every ounce of admiration I possess and am capable of marshaling, that this is none of my own doing, and all of hers. There must be such a thing as sexual genius, as musical genius is said to exist, or scientific, or literary, etc. Stephanie is a fucking genius. I have
never known one before, but that doesn't matter; I know it when I see it.

It goes without saying, despite the fact that I evidently am compelled to say it anyway, that I would never have chosen voluntarily to become sexually enslaved to someone so inscrutably superior to me. It makes me feel as if I have no skin. I would prefer to be in Carla's thrall, or Louisa's. With either of them I would at least feel that I had the upper hand.

My mind—fickle, untrained beast that it is—keeps straying as I write about the glorious Stephanie (no doubt out of old habit and inclination) to sneaky, essentially unwanted thoughts of the vile bitch Sonia. The body betrays the heart and mind at every turn.

November 21—Now that I've met Bellatrix, now that she lurks downstairs this morning along with my brother and my wife—as if they were all gathering for my funeral, I think in my more mordant moments—I can only be thankful that she's certainly not of my genes.

Do I feel dislike for my purported daughter? Not dislike, no, but grave indifference, and even distaste.

The only compliments I'm able to muster in her direction are the following: her violin playing is surprisingly good, and she knows better than to try to make me love her. She has a particular and admirable talent for rendering Bach in a crisply fluid, soulful style that I find impressive, especially in someone under the age of eleven. Which is to say, she plays well, better than I had any right to expect, and she doesn't seek me out with irritating questions—which is to say, she avoids me.

Sonia is also staying out of my way. Both my wife and her
daughter are, to my dubious relief, seeking out instead the company of my brother, who seems to have made a manful and heroic first impression on both by rescuing them from the train station when I was away.

Which leads me to suspect that there is a tinge of resentment in their cold-shouldering me. How dare they? They weren't invited to come live here, they invited themselves, and then didn't bother to give me any warning. The uppity cheek of it all. As if I should have read Sonia's mind as to their arrival time and then made myself agreeably available to fetch them from the station.

I've begun spending the whole day here in my room, reading, and then at around six, I get into my truck and make a stop at Stewart's to replenish my supply of cigarettes and incidentally talk to Carla. Then I go and have a solitary dinner at the Turtle Inn. I always hover at the entrance to the Black Orchid Lounge; I can't pretend I'm not hoping to run into Stephanie there. I can't call her. I can't do anything. It's all up to her: she's got me. My pride won't let me chase her, won't let me be a supplicant of any kind, or a noodge. She has to come to me, or we'll never come together. This rule, self-imposed, feels harsh and cruel. Still, I can't break it.

Afterward, when I've enjoyed an after-dinner smoke and
digestif in
the Black Orchid, I drive home and park as always on the lawn in front of the house. On my way through the foyer and up the first flight of stairs, I can smell the remnants of their supper, and hear them all laughing together in the kitchen, the clack of dominoes or the first part of the Bach Double Violin Concerto, nicely played, or the radio tuned to a classical-music station, or the crack of a brand-new deck of cards being shuffled. They've become quite the cozy little threesome, my brother, wife, and “daughter.” I don't know how late they stay up, because once I close my door behind me I can't hear a thing
except for the wind soughing through Erasmus's tree and my own breathing, the turning of a page of a book, the rustling of sheets and blankets.

My leg is worse. The pain is less bearable than ever. This is the most tedious subject in the world. But when I'm in the grip of this night pain, there's no other subject I can think about. No matter how I try to focus on an essay or a poem, to dwell on certain recent and pleasurable erotic memories, I can't—my brain is in the thrall of pain more than anything else. But in the morning, when the pain ebbs, I can hardly remember it. It seems to recede without leaving a mark.

November 23—Dennis asked me yesterday morning, as we sat on the porch with our cups of coffee—I having gone out there to be alone and he having followed to interrogate me— where I was during my three-day absence.

“Atlantic City,” I said innocently.

“Alone?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, and thought that was the end of it.

However, he had evidently just learned from Bun Fox that Stephanie attended a three-day legal conference in Atlantic City during the exact same time as my own absence.

“Did you go there with Stephanie?” he asked me after a loaded silence.

“Stephanie.”

“Stephanie Fox.”

“Oh,” I said. “That Stephanie. Of course not.”

But the jig is up; I played dumb, he tried to catch me out in my lie, I denied everything, but he knows, I know he knows, and he knows I know he knows, and so forth into the endlessly reflecting hall of mirrors.

“Who did you go with, then?” he asked.

“None of your business,” I answered pleasantly.

“It's my business if you went to Atlantic City for three days with my best friend's wife.”

“Well, I didn't,” I said.

“Well, you better not have.”

“Why do you care so much anyway?”

We locked eyes. He knows I know he's hot for Stephanie. He knows I know he wants to kill me for getting to fuck her for three days straight. I know he knows I'll never admit to any such thing.

“Well,” was all he said, or could say, “you're lying, and you know it.”

A little while later, he came up to my room and entered without knocking. As a matter of fact, I had been indulging in a daydream about Stephanie and Atlantic City, and my erection had reached the point at which I wanted very much to take it out of my pants and relieve it of itself. Luckily, I held a book open on my lap, and nothing was under way. Still, I started as guiltily as a prepubescent kid caught with a bootlegged copy of
Portnoy's Complaint
or his sister's soiled underdrawers.

“You were definitely in Atlantic City with Stephanie Fox,” my brother said with a pained expression, accusing me of a capital crime he would give anything to have me be innocent of.

“Dennis,” I said wearily, “please get out of my room.”

“Admit it,” he said.

“If you choose not to believe me, that's your own affair, and I can't help you any further.”

“Why are you ignoring your wife and daughter?”

“Because I don't want them here,” I answered.

“That's not what you told me a few weeks ago.”

“Well, it was in my momentary best interests to pretend this little family reunion was my own idea,” I said. “It was Sonia's idea; I tried to keep her away, but she insisted on coming anyway. That little corncob down there is no child of mine. I'm
waiting until they go away. If you want to entertain them, that's all very well, but don't expect me to thank you for it, because the sooner they leave the better.”

He sighed and sagged a little against my doorframe.

“I'm way ahead of you,” I said, “brother mine. Don't even try to keep up with my machinations. It's all way over your head.”

“ ‘Brother mine,’ ” he repeated ruefully. “Where do you get these expressions?”

I picked up my book and began to read with beatific concentration.

“All I want,” he resumed, desperately picking at the nit in his brain, “is to know whether you and Stephanie slept together.”

“My sex life,” I responded without looking up from my book, “is of interest to me and possibly, although I don't assume it, to whatever woman or women I'm fortunate enough to have it with, and no one else. But how about this: the moment I have any interest in having another person know anything about it, I promise I will unburden myself of this fascinating information to you before anyone else. Hot fresh poop, newly minted, all yours, exclusive story, you and only you. Have we got a deal?”

He went away then without another word. He didn't slam the door, although I could tell he was itching to. Dennis isn't a violent man and never will be. He imagines himself capable of grand gestures but is manifestly not.

I got up, closed and locked my door, and got back to my busy morning.

I'm reading a book called
Consider the Oyster
, which my foodie soulmate Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher wrote while her husband, my late ancestor Timmy Parrish, was suffering from his protracted bout of Buerger's disease. I suppose I'm reading it for clues, for bits of breadcrumbs dropped along the trail
ahead of me. She found it important enough to note, during a time when Timmy was screaming with pain all night long, and when both husband and wife greeted each bright new California day wracked with sadness and exhaustion, that Louis XI obliged his courtiers to eat a huge heap of oysters every day because they contained a lot of phosphorus, which was supposed to make one more mentally acute. Oysters were considered brain food, in other words; this goes far back, apparently all the way to Cicero, who ate oysters to make himself more eloquent. This led me to consult Maguelonne Toussaint-Smart's
History of Food
, translated from the original French by the no-doubt lovely and brilliant and gustatorily sophisticated Anthea Bell. I learned there, on page 389, that Henri IV ate so many oysters he got indigestion, which is somewhat less fascinating than Mary Frances's anecdote about Louis. But then, reading not very much further, I was rewarded by this pearl: someone named Marshal Junot, whom I've never heard of but who is invoked here as if he were a universally famous personage, was the champion oyster-eater of the early nineteenth century. He ate, according to this source, three hundred of them every morning (interestingly, the chapter I'd just finished reading in Mary Frances's book is called “Take 300 Oysters…”—further proof that the universe, the one I live in at least, is ruled by Loki the trickster god). Marshal Junot died of insanity. Were the two facts connected? The (voluptuous, scholarly, and highly sexed, I hope) Maguelonne speculates that they may have been, but no one seems to know for sure.

November 24—I'm in that ole-devil-garum mood again. I'm steeping in my own bile, festering violently in the harsh sunlight of crowded quarters, and if I don't actually reek in a literal sense, I am inwardly foul with bad humor.

Dennis has begun a day-care center. As I drank my coffee
this morning, his daughters and Sonia's spawn were embroiled in the old ballroom, shrieking noisily and finding it necessary to jump up and down as much as possible. Sonia was meanwhile sitting in the oddly warm sun on the lawn beneath my window, precisely in the spot where my urine landed the night I returned from Atlantic City, or so I hoped, singing along to a battery-powered tape player on which she was playing one of the trashy 1970s pop songs of her Soviet Warsaw youth.

I was trapped in my own house, and meanwhile the dishes were upside down in the cabinets, the refrigerator was a shambles, and someone had drunk a good deal of my whiskey. I hoped this was Bellatrix but strongly suspected it was Sonia, who feels herself entitled to half my worldly goods.

Sitting in my chair in a funk of irritation, it occurred to me that I have the means to go somewhere else; I could take myself to a remote island somewhere, a cabin, a hotel, a stateroom, a chalet. I have neither seen nor heard from Stephanie since she dropped me off at my truck. What is keeping me here, then? I'm not sure.

And so, in search of reprieve from the twin hells of the downstairs nursery school and my estranged wife's impromptu concert, I hied myself to Stewart's for a lengthy chat with my favorite cashier, and then I had lunch at the old diner (lurking, I confess, from doorway to doorway like a film-noir shamus, in case my old hit-man nemesis should choose that moment to pass by in his car), then spent the afternoon at the town theater watching a pair of movies starring the legendarily winsome, smart-mouthed Barbara Stanwyck. I was in luck: they were showing
Baby Face
and
Ball of Fire.
I reveled in her wised-up, loose-limbed, smart-mouthed splendor for a few hours, watched her sleep her way to the top and do whatever the hell else she wanted, and left the theater in an itchy mood to stir up a little trouble.

So, to punish my brother for I know not what, and feeling unaccountably uninspired by the thought of the usually appealing menu at the Turtle Inn, I bought a sack of groceries and drove to my sister-in-law's house, which I knew to be child-free tonight, and possibly friendlier now than it had ever been before.

Marie and Louisa were at home, I saw immediately when I drove up the driveway and came into view of the house. It was an unseasonably warm evening; they were in chairs on the lawn, a picturesque tableau in the gloaming. The treetops overhead were black, and nighttime had fallen on the ground, but the sky was still light, the birds still sang. When I got out of my truck, the air smelled of woodsmoke. Anticipation came over me at the sight of my sister-in-law and her au-pair girl there on the lawn, a particular kind of social anticipation I didn't know I could still feel. I dismounted from my cab and hiked over to where they sat, hauling the bag of foodstuffs.

“Hello,” I called.

Once again, the young and fresh-faced Louisa tried and failed to hide her frank, instinctive friendliness toward me. The primary difference this time around was that Marie, rather than looking horrified, had a neutral, if wary, expression.