The Epicure's Lament (31 page)

“The Archangel Michael,” I repeated, pronouncing it the normal way. “He killed a dragon too, didn't he? Gee, so many dragon slayers. Sts. George and Michael, of course, and then you have Sigmund, Beowulf, Sigurd, Arthur, Tristan—it's a wonder there were enough dragons to go around. Apollo, Cadmus, Perseus. It's all coming back now. Interesting, isn't it, how dragon slayers and dragons seem to coexist in a perfect one-to-one ratio. The minute a dragon appears, it seems, on any landscape throughout human history, there's a hero to kill it—and you don't hear of any dragons who got away, or
would be dragon slayers who can't seem to find a dragon. Why do you suppose this is? The dragon might be an interesting symbol, really, if you were given to interesting symbols.”

“The sword and the scale,” said Otto, “are also interesting symbols. I could tell you about them, but it all depends on how deeply into this you want to go.”

“Let's start with not very,” I said breezily. “I've got a lot on my plate today. The sword, we know where we're going with that, we're going to stick it into the dragon's heart and kill it dead. The scale… was to weigh the heart?”

“Was to weigh men's souls,” said Otto darkly. “According to one interpretation. But the legend of St. George is, on another level, concerned with human incarnation, the cycles of the immortal soul on earth. The lower self, the dragon, is destroyed by the higher self, St. George. Ahrimanic forces must be balanced with Luciferic on the scale that Steiner called the Christ Impulse. The scale is a sort of inner sun that guides us on our true path of freedom between the Luciferic illusions in our thinking and living and Ahrimanic enticement into a shaping of things that satisfies our ego, but isn't rightly meant to be ours in our present epoch. Michael's sword is the outer, literal sun; the rays of the sun contain iron, like his sword, that permeates our blood and wages war there on anxiety, fear, and hate. The iron, raying in, drives these unwanted beasts, the dragons of our time, from the blood. We pick our way through the maze of Luciferic-Ahrimanic snares by keeping the Michael-Christ impulse before us always like a compass, looking outwardly at Michael, inwardly at Christ. Only then can we both attain our spiritual evolution and become fully human, and free.”

Suddenly, in the midst of this jibber-jabber, most of which I have forgotten and failed to record here at any length, a shooting pain attacked my foot, so fierce it made my knee buckle. I broke out into a clammy sweat and clamped my jaw shut against the scream I felt ripping up through my throat.

“Ah,” I said when it had abated enough for me to speak normally. “Well, did you know that medieval Japanese warlords ate the tongues of komodo dragons? They most highly prized swallowing whole a tongue from a live komodo. They believed it conferred power and glory to the man who ate it. Dragon's tongue. Can you imagine the taste? The texture? I imagine a cross between liver and leather. I wonder whether it was already cooked from the fiery breath. I wonder whether there was a whole silent, suffering tribe of tongueless komodos roaming the land.”

“I doubt that,” said Otto, clearly skeptical, as well he should have been, since I'd made it all up on the spur of the moment to counteract his talk of souls.

“Can I offer you,” I said as we headed back toward the school, “another cigarette?”

“I'm only allowed three per day,” he said with a rueful, slightly impish shake of the head that caused me to imagine a wife tut-tutting in the background. “I'd better not. Don't want to use up my rations before lunch!”

I drove out of the school parking lot feeling as if I needed a long hot shower and a profound, skin-tingling exfoliation with a spanking-new loofah. The image of sunlight raying iron particles through my blood, infinitesimal swords wiping out invisible dragons of fear, anxiety, and whatever that third thing had been, irked me greatly, as did the idea of the compass-scale holding in balance, not good and evil, but those two…. Damn it all to hell. My mother's ghost hovered just above me. I felt her breath on the back of my neck, smelled her lavender perfume in my mind's nose. Why did all the teachers in Bellatrix's school smell of lavender? Yet another mystery I'll never unravel. Luckily, the pain in my foot had abated enough to make driving possible, so I aimed the truck toward town to find out whether any mail had piled up in my box since the last time I'd
checked. Also, I was hankering for a greasy diner breakfast with plenty of ketchup to drive away this succubus threatening to devour me in my own truck's cab. My mother couldn't abide the smell of bacon fat.

Well, at least Bellatrix seems happy in that place. They aren't hypnotizing her, to all outward appearances, or turning her into a zombie; and she seems to have a lot of friends. So that's all right, insofar as anything ever is. If I were her father, I suppose I would be delighted with her progress, her situation.

(Here I can't avoid confessing my horrid, treacly, hypocritical pleasure at being introduced to those schoolgirls by Bellatrix as “my dad,” so prosaic and humble a word, so false and sentimental too. What was this pleasure? What was my brief but significant flash of envy when I imagined Otto's wife, so plump and fond? What was that? And why is my mother still hovering over me and causing me such horror now, so many years after her death, even still now, when I'm middle-aged and theoretically in full possession of my identity and powers?)

These thoughts will stay right there, safely contained, quarantined in those parentheses, while I return to a forcible account of my day to blot out the imminent arrival of Fag Uncle Tommy, which is gnawing at me like a rat.

Mail, there was none. Breakfast, there was in spades. I ate for several healthy men. My genetic predisposition toward a wiry physique allowed me to consume without a qualm a short stack of buttermilk pancakes with syrup and butter, a plate of eggs and bacon with potatoes, then a piece of blueberry pie, all gummy filling and Crisco crust. Five cups of coffee to wash it all down. My favorite waitress, with her quivering buttocks, was in fine fettle, refilling coffee cups with her soft dimpled hand, bestowing saucy glances everyone's way. It appears she's found herself a feller, by her attitude, by the swing of her hips. Her face looked abraded by kisses, the rough getting-to-know-you
kind, not the perfunctory married kind. It only made me want her more, of course, to see the traces of some other man's having already been there.

(I wanted her, but to what end? What did I want, for that matter, with Stephanie? What game have I been playing with that child Louisa, and that other child Carla? I certainly don't want to be coupled. I certainly don't want some woman underfoot day and night; when is Sonia going to clear out? My own proclivities aside, I'm a bad prospect, given my life expectancy. To fuck, perchance to live—is that it? Where am I going with all this, and why am I asking these questions now, when I've doubted nothing in so many years?)

… those parentheses again, barricades… against what? Dams to hold what water back? Who am I trying to fool, or impress? No one ever. That is the point.

Apropos of nothing except that it occurs to me to write this, Hamlet always struck me as a neurasthenic little nancy-boy stamping his foot with self-pitying outrage, a desire for vengeance that feels formal, manufactured, empty of blood-lust or love for his murdered father. I read his soliloquies with impatient boredom. No matter how beautiful the language is, there's no force behind it. He doesn't have the weight of experience to support such a terrible dilemma. I want to cuff him on the ear: Just kill yourself if you want to, and get on with it. Who cares? Just another rich kid with a distant father and a controlling mother.

It's really almost about that time.

As I sat in my diner booth alone before the wreckage of my breakfast, I beheld, as I seem to lately at this particular diner, someone I recognized going by outside the window, someone I didn't want to see. Today it was Marie's sister with her haughty airs and pretentious clothing. Today she wore a tailored black leather coat with a spray of lace spilling out around the collar and a shapeless crushed-velvet sort of hat. Her hair
looked more ridiculous even than it did the night I crashed Marie's little dinner party. Her bangs slanted down over her eyes, and a small swath stuck out unbecomingly between the stupid hat and silly lace collar. I was irritated immediately just by the sight of her, and then became more so when, as I was about to look away and pretend I hadn't seen her, she caught my eye.

I nodded coolly, then looked away from her to gesture to the waitress, assuming Vero would keep going to wherever her destination might have been.

The waitress was, of course, not looking in my direction, and it took some doing before she finally acknowledged me. As she did so, the diner door opened and in barged Vero. She made a beeline for my booth. She wasn't smiling, and she didn't look glad to see me. She flung herself into the banquette across from me just as the waitress placed my check down on the table in front of me. The check fluttered a little in the air Vero displaced, but it didn't blow away.

“Hugo,” she said straight away, “there's something I need to discuss with you.”

“With me?” I said. “Aren't you supposed to be down at Kings College administering final exams right now?”

“That's all over,” she said. “I'm up here for the holiday. And what did I just learn last night over dinner with Marie? My sister is seeing two men at once. The same two men Stephanie Fox essentially offered her at that dinner last month. Jim and Arnold. Anyway, Marie seems to think this is all just fine.”

I raised my eyebrows, trying not to laugh. “And meanwhile you're not seeing any men at all, because she's hogging them.”

“Please,” she said wearily. “I'm in no mood. Not only is she throwing a perfectly good marriage down the toilet, she's setting an execrable example to my nieces and jeopardizing her chances at getting custody, if it comes to that.”

“Our nieces.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I didn't know anyone besides me ever used the word ‘execrable’ in the course of casual conversation.”

“This is not casual conversation.”

“Anyway,” I said, “you're the one who's jeopardizing Marie's chances of getting custody, it seems to me, by telling her husband's brother about her affairs.”

“But you want to help them preserve their marriage too,” she said adamantly. “I could tell, at that dinner. You have to do something.”

“What exactly do you imagine I can do? What sort of influence do you think I wield? And since when do Marie and Dennis have a perfectly good marriage?”

She nodded. “He's an insufferable fool, anyone with half a brain can see that, but he's the girls’ father, and they deserve an unbroken home. When people get married they ought to stay married. It's an opportunity to work on themselves, but instead people just quit and go make the same mistakes again with other people. Life is not fun. God, Americans are such children.”

I was struck again by how strangely and disconcertingly Vero resembles Marie. Her face is what Marie's might look like if a sculptor tugged all its features this way and that to render them less conventionally beautiful and more exaggerated. She's like the cartoon version of her sister. Where Marie is compact, rounded, femininely proportioned, Vero is long and a little gawky, her hands slightly too big, her shoulders broader than the rest of her narrow frame. I couldn't help thinking, with my always-on-the-lookout horndog appraisal, that if Vero let her hair grow out and wore something flattering she might be passably sexy, to someone else, of course, but at least I wouldn't wonder what her husband saw in her, if she ever got one.

“And you of course are not American,” I said with some amusement.

“Not by temperament. And from the look on your face, you're probably thinking there's a reason why I'm not married, and you're right, but it's not what you're thinking.”

“I wasn't thinking anything, necessarily.”

“There's no man I've ever met that I could put up with for a minute, let alone all those years. Men are worse than women, and women are bad enough. Men are good for one thing only. I'm not a lesbian either. I just can't bear to have someone around me all the time.”

“Neither can I,” I said. “I see your point.”

The look she gave me implied that I was a dung beetle not worth half a dram of the invective she might have crushed me with had she been so inclined. “This is horrible, what's going on with my sister, and now Dennis is apparently carrying on with someone, Marie says he told her, but he won't say with whom, only that he's in love with her and wants a divorce.”

The earth opened up for a moment and sucked me down into some pit of hell, but then, after a split second, it spat me out again, and I was able to say calmly, “Their sex lives are none of our business, Veronique.” I pronounced her name with as broad, nasal, flat, and American an accent as I could muster. “We're not their keepers. What do you care, anyway, about Marie's marriage? I don't believe you do.”

“I'm not concerned about them,” she said. “Those children are all that matter here.”

Stephanie and Dennis! The whole idea hit me with the force of a nuclear aftershock. Not that I hadn't suspected.

“I don't buy that either,” I said. “I think you're angry at your sister for… sisterly reasons. Far be it from me to discourage a reconciliation between her and Dennis, which I very much want for my own good, not theirs or their children's. At least I'm honest about that.”

I handed the waitress some money, and she took it over to
the cash register, an old-fashioned silver, curlicued thing with keys as big and round as gumdrops that whirred and jingled as she put it through its paces. The cash drawer shot open with a brisk ding. My adversary and I were momentarily distracted by the fascination of it, but once the waitress had headed back with my change, Vero said crabbily, “I need a cigarette. I should have known it was useless to try to talk to you.”

I wanted to ask her why she could ever have thought it would have been otherwise, but something forestalled me from pointing out the obvious—or, rather, deflecting someone with the usual self-loathing obfuscation. Instead I said, “I have plenty of cigarettes. Let's go outside.”