The Epicure's Lament (6 page)

I tend to avoid the rest of the house and its teeming
over-crowdedness. The accumulated strata of time and people and objects in parlor, sitting room, ballroom, and upstairs bedrooms make me slightly queasy, all the ornate marble fireplaces, beds with carved headboards, grand and lesser pianos with yellowed keys, probably out of tune, clarinets, flutes, autoharps lying still as dead animals… the blank-eyed marble busts… the pair of hand-painted screens, one with knock-kneed cranes in a stand of bamboo and the other depicting a black wolf passionately eviscerating a prim white stag. In these rooms I feel the intolerable pressure of too many things, all the historical significance of a family whose names are, in the end, more important and memorable than any of the individual souls who bore them— Livingston, Stuyvesant, Standish, Parrish, Whittier—it's like kicking around an archaeological site, walking through those rooms. I need a pickax and notebook and specimen bag, and an intern to carry my lunch.

I live in the octagonal tower on the river side of the house, a 1907 addition, the part of Waverley least burdened by ghosts and objects. On my tower's first floor is the octagonal library, whose upper walls and ceiling glow with intricate trompe-l'oeil faux-bois plaster, underneath which are walnut shelves that rise from floor to crown molding and hold crammed-together rows of priceless leather-bound books—such amazing books— ancient issues of
Cornhill
and
Blackwell's
, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
from the 1790s, with its fantastic illustrations, its contributions by Diderot and Rousseau. A treasure trove of eighteenth-century reference books, Dr. Johnson's
Dictionary
, all eleven volumes of Diderot's
Encyclopedia.
The room contains most of the great and minor classics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, tissue-thin ink-lined pages preserved in old leather.

I sleep in the former billiards room, one flight up from the library. Above my room, on the third floor, is an empty aerie
that used to be a schoolroom, long ago. Now it contains only the spiral staircase to the circular widow's walk on the tower roof. When I was younger and in love, I brought my bride, Sonia, up there in warm weather with drinks and rattan chairs to watch the sunset turn the river all manner of lurid romantic colors. We slept together in my room. When Bellatrix was born (how long ago? almost eleven years?), we kept her in the old bassinet near our bed. When she cried, Sonia would leap naked and quivering with animal mother-love from our bed and snatch her up and suckle her, squawking what must have been Polish lullabies.

And now I sleep alone, in this same tower room… and eventually, maybe soon, I'll die here. My death isn't anything I fear or abhor. It's mine alone, and I'd like to be left in peace to get on with it.

This doesn't seem to be going to happen. Speaking of thriving unmolested.

In the five or six years since I retreated “for good” from the social hubbub and commerce of life, my so-called company has consisted until now primarily of canvas ghosts, the disembodied faces of ancestors in rooms I rarely enter. Every room of Waverley except my bedroom and the kitchen is roughly as crowded as a train station with mostly second-rate oil portraits of my line, a dark-haired race with veiled eyes, some dull and arrogant, a few others with a hint of wayward madness, rebellion, ironic mockery, which I seem to have inherited along with all the other remnants of my manifestly unwanted heritage. More of these portraits crowd the “new wing,” built onto the main part of the house at the turn of the last century to accommodate my great-grandparents’ crop of eight children. Upstairs are those children's old nurseries, bedrooms, and playrooms; the ballroom downstairs is where they “came out,” got married, etc.

My grandmother Julia Standish's portraits hang in the parlor, on the second-floor landing, and upstairs in her old bedroom, all of them depicting at varying ages the same stubborn chin, mischievous eyes with a hint of meanness, and the mouth well shaped but not at all sensual. She was the firstborn and favorite, and as such inherited Waverley outright the day her parents’ sailboat capsized in a sudden storm off the coast of Nantucket. Her seven younger siblings must have been distressed and outraged, but a will is a will. Grandma lived here for the rest of her life with my grandfather Henry Stuyvesant Whittier and their two sons and all the servants.

The Standish-Whittier line is dying out…. I have a number of scattered cousins around the area, but I don't know them well. There was some bad feeling in the family when my grandmother inherited Waverley. Her weak-minded spinster sisters, Emily and Anne, forgave her, and were eventually allowed to come back to live here until they died, but the rest of them stayed away from the place for the rest of their lives, as do their descendants. Not that I blame them. Or have any desire to know them.

When Grandma died, the place went to my father and Fag Uncle Tommy, now an ancient homo who lives in a West Village townhouse in the city and hasn't been back here since my mother's funeral sixteen years ago. Dennis and I inherited our father's half of Waverley along with his family money, which is for all practical purposes enough to support us and whatever dependents we amass, but not enough to do anything wild or extravagant, such as restoring and repairing this house or indulging whatever midlife crises we may fall prey to with Jaguars and starlets. We could of course have chosen to pursue legitimate careers, but that sort of thing doesn't suit me a bit, and Dennis would maintain that he has pursued a legitimate career despite the fact that he doesn't make much money at it.

Therefore, Waverley is falling down and Dennis and I are limited to well-built old American cars and ordinary women with pedestrian tastes, which seem to suit both of us equally well, one of the few things we have in common.

October 16—Was Sonia really everything I remember her as being? Nostalgia plays shadow-puppet tricks on the mind. She looked wan and tired in the winter. Her eyes had a beadiness in candlelight late at night over backgammon and grappa. Her voice squawked like a magpie's. She was a bit of a magpie, Sonia. Always looking for glittering objects and secreting them away. Sometimes I miss her in my bones. Knowing her is not the same as loving her. But people have layers like onions and planets, and Sonia's obdurate, complex, alien shell cracked to reveal something else entirely, like a crustacean smashed against a rock to free an ermine, something ineffably soft, rare, shy, and tender with a quivering little face. I knew that. I can't forget it. But I'm loath to believe it, nostalgia being the trickster god it is, the Loki of the emotions.

I must have been born under the sign of that trickster god, and have been ruled all my life by nothing more than his whims and illusions, his mischief. Maybe it's not only me. My generation is a sudden tail-end-of-the-Boom dip on the population-explosion graph, the unprepossessing trough characterized only by a shared generalized nostalgia for some America that almost but never quite existed—I envision us as a tiny tribe of isolates scattered around the coasts, clinging to the edges like aliens yearning for some golden, decadent, hot-browed era of martinis and Louis Prima and Harlem midnight suppers, apothecaries selling morphine-laced beverages, wooden dice rolling on deep-green baize, that zingy old New York pulse and fizzle, sad gas stations out west we drive up to in our roadsters and Thunderbird convertibles, to refill our tanks for fifteen cents a gallon and move on from, leave behind in red dust, Shell sign
flapping in hot wind, on our way to Palm Springs to shack up in some turquoise geometric motel with intergalactic decor and a butterfly-shaped pool, drinking gin and fresh orange juice and smoking Luckys and solving murders and eating ham sandwiches at 3 a.m…. We live in our own romance stories, detective novels, noir films, all that jazz.

It was another bad night. It's either generalize about my generation, or dwell self-pityingly on the electric demons in my leg. The instant I give in to self-pity, I'll shoot myself.

This is my garum mood. My rib cage is filled with a strong, caustic brew, and my bones are turning to jelly, my guts likewise liquefying, digesting themselves, giving rise to these thick, pungent, unspeakably reeking private thoughts.

Garum was the Roman delicacy that cost the earth and played a role in historical conquests and gourmandise alike, recipe as follows (I think, anyway, but am too lazy to get up and check my reference books): Take fish guts, add salt and water, let stand and rot in the sun. It will literally digest itself; rather, the intestinal bacteria will digest the intestines themselves. Strain the resulting effluvium, add fragrant dried herbs, let rot some more, put a cork in it, and use a few drops of this fish-gut liqueur (called alec, the animal equivalent of marc) to flavor everything from cereal to stew. The Romans used garum in almost all their recipes. No wonder they vomited so much. It's an ancient recipe; Greek colonists used it when Rome was still a caravansery and it played a role in the conquest of Gaul, because of all the garum-prospering trading posts up and down the coasts of France and Spain. Add water to it and you have hydrogarum. Add oil: oleogarum. Vinegar: oxygarum. Sanguine garum: made with tuna guts and blood.

There's a modern dish, a descendant of garum, called pissala-dière, a Provençal delicacy made of whole cheap strong-tasting oily fish like anchovies and mackerel, whatever is too tiny or bony or garbagey to eat on its own. Smash them all together in
a big earthenware jar with coarse salt and herbs, in layers, finishing with a layer of herbs. Let it sit under a heavy flat stone in a cool place until all the salt dissolves. This takes a while, so be patient. Days, even weeks. Then strain it, purée it, and store it under a fresh layer of coarse salt. You can add onions and olives if you like it that way. Spread it on flatbread for Ligurian peasant pizza.

I tried to make it once. Sometimes I like to eat something for the idea, the romance of it. But this putrescence…

Was unforgivably distracted then by Dennis, who came a-knocking on my sanctuary door.

My leg pain would be alleviated if I quit smoking, but I'm uninterested in considering this because it's not a choice for me. To live without smoking is no life.

In another notebook, I recently tried to write down how I made some of the dishes I've cooked over the years. Recipes, all right, that's what they are. But the effort it took to reconstruct those meals I made and enjoyed a long time ago put me in a foul mood, this nostalgic Loki garum mood. Why do people write recipes?

A recipe is a cruel joke.

I'm conceiving a brutal, half-hateful crush on the late, great, much-lamented food-memoir author M.F.K. Fisher, that uppity little slyboots of a voluptuary autodidact, that fresh-faced Irish smartypants. I ask myself—as I set down measurements of this and that, tell my unknown galley slave to wait until the butter is foaming before adding minced shallots, conjure the giving, fleshy plumpness of dried cherries in stout sauce for holiday ham—where Mary Frances got the idea that her foodie musings would interest anyone. She wrote book after book about her
own thoughts, experiences, and ideas concerning food. I lack that idea fundamentally. I can't expect anyone to look to me for any kitchenary authority. But… again, the futile urge to impart my deepest secrets before I go.

Montaigne, even in his original hard-to-follow old French, pleases me as much as Fisher these days. They were doing the same thing, really, hedging their bets against death, shoring the fragments of their ruins with words. That crazy old François Villon as well, who wrote,
“Qui meurt, a ses lois de tout dire.”
The dying man has the right to say anything. And I suppose in my own way that's what I'm doing.

How to make holiday sauce for ham (not recommended for hermits, for obvious reasons): Whisk a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch into a cup of chicken stock or broth. Melt a wad of butter in a skillet till it foams, then sauté three minced shallots in it for a few minutes. Add a pinch of allspice; stir for half a minute. Add four cups of dark stout, a cup of tart dried cherries. Simmer this for ten minutes, until it thickens a little. Rewhisk the chicken broth and cornstarch to mix it again, and then stir it gradually into the stout mixture. Cook this until it thickens, remove from heat, add one and a half tablespoons balsamic vinegar, then salt and pepper to taste. Serve this smoky, fruity, blackish, bitter-at-the-end sauce with hot sliced hickory-smoked ham, in a pitcher on the side with a ladle.

I've left out an ingredient, the one that's supposed to go in with the stout and cherries. So whoever follows this recipe is guaranteed to fail, insofar as his or her sauce is guaranteed not to be the same as mine, the gold standard only because it's my recipe. I can't remember now what it was, but if I made it now in the kitchen, it would come to my hand at the right instant. It's not a malicious omission…. Maybe it's a drop of garum.

There is no better combination than that of velvety butter and fumey alcohol, and, later, fatty tender meat.

There is nothing less interesting to me than the idea of a
holiday meal with eight or ten or twenty people related to one another by blood or marriage; the thought of such a meal and its proscriptions and protocols causes me to fall instantly asleep. I'm boring myself so much I can hardly hold the pen.

After he barged into my chambers, Dennis parked his flat, entitled rear end on the seat of my favorite chair, the armchair facing the windows that look out over the river, and proceeded to explain the end of his marriage to me while I sat on my bed in my pajamas, squinting at him with all the hatred I bear him, which is a heavy force, although he's as ignorant of that as he is of everything else about me, including the fact that in a short while I'll be dead. Dennis can be counted on to be a narcissist in every particular until his own end, whenever that may be slated to take place. My one regret in being terminal is that I will never know this, or other things.

He told me much, much more than I wanted to know, and now I feel unhealthily burdened and implicated. Nothing is more revolting to me than other people's unasked-for, sweaty, hot-breathed confidences, especially my brother's.