The Epicure's Lament (5 page)

“You ate my food,” she shot back. “You smoked in the house. It's not allowed.”

“Louisa, you're a fever dream come true!” I cried, my hand on my chest. “Look at you standing there, brandishing your weapon, all a-bristle with indignation, your hair aflame, you hotheaded Cerberus of my dreams! What book is it? I have to know.”

“Anna Karenina,”
she said, smiling in spite of herself.

“Anna Karenina,”
I repeated in hushed, delighted tones. I held my hand out…. “May I take the book?”

She hesitated. “What for?” she asked.

“Because,” I said with a kind of half-laughing, wheedling provocation, “I want to read part of it aloud to you. I think you'll find it interesting. Romantic, anyway. It's the passage about poor Kitty watching Anna and Vronsky dancing together at the first ball. I've always had a soft spot for that scene—something about Anna's powerful sexual triumph as seen through the eyes of a vulnerable young girl. I want to soften you up a little.”

I took the book from her and fuddled around with it until I found the page. “Listen to this,” I breathed. “ ‘Some supernatural force drew Kitty's eyes to Anna's face. She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her full arms with the bracelets on them, enchanting her firm neck with its string of pearls, enchanting her curly hair in disarray, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her small feet and hands, enchanting the beautiful face in its animation; but there was something terrible and cruel in its enchantment.’ ”

Louisa, lulled into an enchantment of her own like a cat whose belly is scratched just right, was stilled in the doorway; her claws were retracted, eyes slitted shut, breathing slowed.

I flipped a page. “Here: ‘She saw in her,’ she being Kitty, her being Anna, ‘a streak of the elation of success, which she knew so well herself. She could see that Anna was drunk with the wine of the rapture she inspired. She knew that feeling, knew the signs of it, and she saw them in Anna—saw the tremulous, flashing light in her eyes, the smile of happiness and excitement that involuntarily curved her lips, and the precise gracefulness, assurance, and lightness of her movements.’ Here's Kitty's internal monologue, a little farther down: ‘No, it's not the admiration of the crowd she's drunk with, but the rapture of one man.’

When I paused to take a drag of my cigarette, the spell I'd cast on Louisa was suddenly lifted.

“Does Marie know you have a key?” she asked.

I gave one last suck to my cigarette, looked around for a place to crush it out, and dropped it into the near-empty water bottle on her desk, where it drowned with a hiss.

“That's my water!”

“So sorry,” I said.

I as provocateur seemed to be in control, but that was only an illusion. It was really all up to her: she could either respond or walk away; my pitches would land on bare ground unless she caught them. Some change in her demeanor, a drawing-up of herself, told me she had just realized this.

“Okay, get out of my room,” she said calmly, backing out of her room so I could pass through the door.

I leaned against her bureau and crossed my arms, waggling my good foot, humming to myself. “And if I don't?” I asked after a moment.

She rolled her eyes, evidently having realized how harmless I am. “I'm outta here,” she said, and went off in the direction of the living room.

I nosed around in her bureau drawers for a moment, overtaken by the psychological equivalent of that powerful twitching in the nose before a sneeze.

A little while later, I slunk through the house holding a clean pair of her underpants pressed to my nose. I found her in the living room on the couch, pretending to read
Anna Karenina.

“Oh, please,” she burst out when she caught sight of me. “Oh my God. That's just, like, so weird. What are you
doing?”

I grinned devilishly behind my makeshift burqa. “I think I'll keep them,” I said.

“Go put them back.”

I came to sit next to her, closer than I'd sat that morning, and leaned back against the cushions to gaze at her soulfully with the panties still pressed to the lower part of my face, inhaling
with deep, ostentatious, connoisseurlike concentration. The air between us, the small space that separated us, felt charged with hostility, hilarity, and electricity.

“Louisa,” I said, lowering the underwear, my tone all earnest and humble. “Please come out with me, just for a drink, or dessert. I'll have you home in an hour, I promise.”

“A
drink?
I'm not of age, in case you've forgotten.” She held out her hand. “Give those back.”

I passed them to her silently, still watching her, leaning in as close to her as I could get without touching her, lips pursed with the force of my persuasion. The corner of her mouth twitched; she was trying not to smile.

“Come with me,” I repeated. “For an hour. For dessert.”

“One hour,” she said. “Only because I need a hot-fudge sundae and Marie took the station wagon so I have no way to get there; otherwise I would tell you to go fuck yourself.”

“But you won't,” I said with joy, leaping to my feet and offering her a hand to help her up.

I took her to the appropriately named Friendly's, where we ordered an enormous oblong metal dish of ice cream heaped with nuts, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce for her, one vanilla scoop for me. The massive influx of sugar into her bloodstream seemed to relax her and loosen her tongue much the way alcohol affects others. She told me, unprompted except for unfeigned interest on my side of the booth, about the life in Greenpoint she'd so recently left behind. In short: her parents, Solly and Ruth Zimmerman, are a pair of basset hounds she mildly despises. She is under the spell of her older sister, Rachel, who is twenty-three but still lives at home, spending most of her time up in her room blasting techno music while she smokes joints or does her nails or tries on outfits to wear out with her friends. Rachel, being beautiful and spoiled, never helps their mother with the housework and contributes none of
the money she makes selling clothes at a boutique in the East Village. Louisa has been helpless all her life against Rachel's charming cruelties and sense of entitlement; Rachel has always been able to provoke in Louisa a queasy desperation to prove her devotion. Although Louisa has always expected Rachel to do something big, to be a movie star or the president of her own company, it appears that her ambitions fall far short of her charisma.

Louisa has read enough novels, she says, to know her own place in the scheme of things: she's the plain younger daughter who goes to synagogue with her father on Friday evenings even though she's not religious and hates sitting upstairs in the balcony with all the other women because the whole arrangement is backward. She does the dishes, folds laundry, rubs Mommy's shoulders. Mommy teaches junior high. Daddy owns a small trucking company.

Apparently, Louisa has promised Marie that she'll stay until summer if things work out for everyone, but she'd envisioned her tenure here as a sort of dreamlike, transfiguring blur, seeing herself floating along through a time-warp tunnel, losing weight, making the children love her, severing the umbilicus that binds her so tortuously to Greenpoint. It's just beginning to hit her that her purpose here is to be completely involved in this family's daily life; this escape hatch is actually a job. She is panicking, a little.

“So what do
you
do all day?” she asked suddenly.

“I read, and I write a little,” I said. “And until recently, I enjoyed unbroken solitude.”

She had nothing to say to this, and I could understand why.

“To answer your question more directly,” I said, “I have no truck with any so-called go-getter instinct. I came back to my childhood home to live because, to make a short story much shorter, there were people in New York a long time ago who
wanted to do me harm, and I had no interest in being harmed. I thought it wise to get out of town. I stayed out of town, and found that there was nowhere else I wanted to go. When the time was right, I came back here, and am content to stay here for the rest of my life.”

“I had to get out of town too,” she said in a hushed voice. “That's why I took this job. People, someone, might have wanted to do me harm.”

She didn't say why and neither did I, but there flashed between us a brief shared swagger, as if we were saying to each other, I did something bad and I can't tell you what it was but if I so much as show my face in Port Authority, if they so much as smell me on the breeze…

Her hair is copper red near her scalp and gold-shot toward the wavy ends. She has a
Fiddler on the Roof
quality that moves me, a humorously mournful Ashkenazi solidity. She eats like she means it.

“Anyway,” she said, looking around to make sure no one was listening, lowering her voice, “I can't tell you any more than this, but I had to drop out of school and come up here. Someday I'll tell you why. It has to do with Sylvester.” She looked over her shoulder and dropped her voice as she said his name.

I brought her home shortly after this, unscathed.

Sylvester. I look forward to learning about Sylvester.

Why is the pain worse at night? Sounds are louder too at night, magnified by the lack of ambient noise. I have nothing else to think about, that's the problem. I can't write any more, I have to put down my pen and howl like the beast I am. I could easily get a prescription for painkillers and sleeping pills from
Dr. Schuyler. I'm not sure why I don't. Maybe because that will mean I'm that much closer to the end. Maybe because it would feel like an internal admission that this disease is going to be allowed to go all the way to the end. But, still, I've decided to let it run its course. When I'm in the grip of this pain, I understand that death will be a release.

Dennis is right: Waverley is becoming as shabby and down-at-heels as I am, to my mind a natural and even proper devolution. The house was built in the early 1800s (on land given to the Irish and Italian Catholic servants of the old river families) by the descendants of one Chancellor Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence…. Funny that he should be best known for scrawling his name, an act which took several seconds. Or so I was told as a child by my few surviving relatives, Fag Uncle Tommy and my now long-dead great-aunts Emily and Anne, the purveyors of all the family history and lore I'm in possession of. The original Livingston, possibly the chancellor's father, was given a land grant by one of the English kings; George I strikes me as a plausible suspect. This grant covered about fifty square miles and amounted to a medieval fiefdom, since the Livingston family was able to live off the rents paid by all their tenant farmers, the people living within the land grant. Early in the nineteenth century, the tenants rebelled by refusing to pay the rent, a famous uprising known as the Rent Wars. Learning about this as a child, and about the rest of my family history, I felt no small amount of disgust, guilt, and outrage— no pride, and no sense of loyalty or responsibility: why did these people feel so entitled to so much?

As for the name of the house, after the novel
Waverley
, Sir
Walter Scott was a Romantic, like his contemporaries Shelley and Byron. To some degree, his liberal ideals were a by-product of the French Revolution, which was why he was so admired by continental artists and middle-class rebels like Verdi, Schumann, Lizst, and Berlioz, who wanted their countries to become nations on the model of the new American Republic or the French Republic. The eponymous young hero of Scott's first novel, which was published around the time the house was built, is a passionate dilettante according to the Romantic model, a feckless scion who finds himself among the Jacobites on the Scottish Highlands during the rebellion of 1745. In the course of the book he experiences war, gets a load of the quirky Scottish Highland folk, and learns the invaluable lesson that life is not like Romantic literature. The book was a raging success, so much so that the newly rich, would-be patrician, staunchly American Standish-Parrish-Whittier clan was so enamored of it that they named their new estate after him.

The estate had its own train station until the 1950s. The railway company allowed this, even though there was already a law of eminent domain, because they'd built the train tracks along the river estates of the Livingston descendants, in return for which they granted each family the right to flag down a train for its own convenience. I can imagine some male forebear in a waistcoat and breeches flagging down a train, his lower lip thrust forward in a peremptory manner, his eyes glittering with imperious certainty that the train would stop. This image of his arm with its manicured hand commandeering all those tons of hot, pulsing steel-in-motion makes me want to throttle him and throw him under the wheels….

It is because of this and other stories that I, as a laissez-faire, elitist man of no people, am of the (minority) opinion that the ludicrously named Waverley and the equally ludicrous life-style it was meant to support have reached a necessary end. This end
should be honored, as all natural ends should be; I am against artificial life support. Accordingly, Waverley and I have mold-ered together in diplomatic mutual forbearance: I won't say anything about your wrinkles and wheezing if you don't mention mine. Plaster sags on the wall of the back staircase leading up to my tower bedroom. One night, if I brush against it, it will come cascading down on my head, and I don't care. The fussy imported French wallpaper, stretched on muslin, is peeling here, faded there, and the front-veranda fresco on the house's stucco face has faded; the faint fluffy blobs once were sheep, I think, but where oh where has their sylvan shepherdess gone? The field, which used to be a pruned green lawn, on which fine young aristocrats no doubt played croquet and drank lemon squash in the summertime in flannel trousers or seersucker suits or flapper dresses, is now returning to wilderness. Saplings are springing up in its expanse, and I let them thrive unmolested.

I've worn an invisible path through the years from the kitchen to the side veranda, up the back staircase to the tower, my bedroom and the library below, and in winter to the “home parlor,” next to the dining room, the least cluttered and easiest to heat of all the downstairs rooms, the friendliest besides the kitchen. It contains, among other things, an original old chest-high Edison gramophone on whose turntable is a recording by Henri Gendron and his orchestra of a song called “Gigolette;” it's been there for as long as I can remember, and occasionally I play it. Who left it there? Maybe a dreamy young great-aunt. The gramophone works perfectly, even now, when the “modern” eight-track and cassette players of my youth long ago went belly-up. At the crank of the handle and touch of the needle the song warbles to life, slowing old-fashionedly as it progresses but almost free of crackles.