The Epicure's Lament (9 page)

“No.”

“Eggs?”

“No.”

“Another species besides chicken?”

“Yes. Seven more.”

“Meat in another form besides organs and muscles and fat?”

“Yes.”

“Mammalian meat of a specific species?”

“Yes.”

“Was it technically meat, meaning the flesh of that particular mammal?”

“Yes, counselor.”

“Was it… some part of the animal the Vatican didn't think to specify as meat?”

“Technically… yes.”

“Technically yes. So maybe it was the eyeballs—I'm not asking, just thinking out loud. Maybe it was the ground-up bones. Maybe they ate marrow? Is that it? Bone marrow?”

“No,” I said gleefully; I love to win. “Two more.”

There was a long silence. “I have to get home!” she cried suddenly, leaping out of bed. We showered together in the moldy, rickety little stall with its intermittent, spurting water pressure. She clutched the plastic curtain as the concave bones of my groin collided in deliberate syncopation with her soapy ass cheeks; she yelled out as I reached around and deftly manhandled her meaty goods.

“The genitals?” she asked, reaching for one of the hard, eroded towels that smelled of bleach.

“No. Last question.”

“Okay,” she said, drying off, “did they eat the unborn fetuses of rabbits, and keep a large number of rabbits for that very purpose in order to have a constant and unending supply, because of the fast turnover of their breeding cycles? Did they regularly make fricassees of dozens of these aborted whole hairless ravioli-sized bunnies with unopened slit eyes and still-liquid innards?”

I deflated—which is to say, every part of me did. “You knew all along?”

She held my gaze with her own in a way that made me lightheaded.

“Rumpelstiltskin is your name,” she said mysteriously. “And now you owe me dinner, but not tonight.”

Outside, in the parking lot, with the dark empty road
gleaming nearby, I took Stephanie into my arms and danced lightly with her and crooned into her wet hair, “Goodbye, my friend, it's hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky. Now that the spring is in the air, pretty girls are everywhere—when you see them I'll be there.”

“Oh God,” she said, laughing, pushing me away. “ ‘Seasons in the Sun.’ I haven't heard that song since junior high.” I chucked her under the chin. “It's Hugo's Theme.” And then, while she leaned against her car with her arms folded, looking rosy and scrubbed clean and ten years younger than she'd looked when she first walked into the roadhouse, I recited in my facilely authentic French accent, the direct result of my year or two as adolescent kept boy and later flaneur-about-town in Paris:

“C'est d'humaine beaute” I'issue! Les bras courts et les mains contraites, Des tpaules toutes bossues; Mamelles, quoi? toutes retraites; Tales les handles que les tettes; Du sadinet, fi! Quand des cuisses, Cuisses ne sont plus, mais cuissettes GriveUes comme saucisses.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Stephanie asked lackadaisically, unlocking her door with a press of a button on her key chain and a high beep in response from the car.

“It's medieval French,” I said. “No wonder you didn't understand it.”

“I don't speak a word of French,” she shot back.

“Well, it's the final stanza of a Villon poem narrated by a whore too old and withered to profit any longer by her trade. She's describing her own decay, but naturally, this being my
man François, it's a meditation on the inescapable transience of all human beauty.”

“Your man François,” she said mockingly, and got into her car and drove off with a little spurt of gravel.

Smiling, beaming, floating like a fool on ice, I drove home. Dennis was sitting on the porch of Waverley drinking a glass of wine, reading a book. I sat with him for a little while, brimming over with the memory of my delectable betrayal. The book he was reading, I couldn't help noticing, was
Anna Karenina.
Coincidence? Not at all: I stole Louisa's copy and then helpfully planted it on the kitchen table at the place Dennis has made his own with his typical domesticated-animal habitude. And, like an overly zealous lab rat, my brother walked with both eyes open right into the trap, because that's where he likes to be. I think it will be instructive, and certainly germane to his own current predicament, for him to read, or reread, the story of Anna and Vronsky and the train. For all I know, this was originally his copy.

Among the many things cluttering the top of the vast old desk in the library is a photograph in a silver frame of my grandfather Henry Whittier, taken on the front veranda with his English setter, Shad. Shad was deeply beloved by Grandpa, as hunting dogs traditionally were by those olden-days WASP men who hunted pheasant, grouse, and woodcock in full hunting regalia and fancied themselves country squires in the English manner, like Squire Allworthy in
Tom Jones.
A story I was told as a boy is the following: One day Grandpa was chopping wood for the fireplace, and Shad put his paw up on the block. Grandpa, not seeing it there, accidentally took it off, and
then, as a result, had to have Shad put down. According to family lore, Grandpa thereafter referred to that day as the worst day of his life, this man who'd been through a terrible war, lost two sons barely out of their infancy, and watched his own father choke to death on a chicken bone at the dining-room table in this very house.

This story is, to me, deeply significant of the morbid patrician insanity of my ancestors. Dogs are, although insufferably needy and demanding, considered by some pleasant to have around; they're loyal and friendly and eager to please, and some of them even seem to have little personalities. But Grandpa's feelings for Shad were just unnatural.

Grandpa's first son, my uncle, was named Thomas, after Grandpa's father; his second and third were George and James. They both died of polio as toddlers. My father, his fourth and last son, was born when Tommy was twelve years old, named Henry after Grandpa and immediately given the inexplicable nickname of Bim, presumably to distinguish him from his father. Tommy was born a fag and remained a fag and is a fag to this day; Bim was born a robust red-blooded boy and grew into a Real American Man whose mettle was formed, tried, and proved at Andover, Harvard, Harvard Law, and a prestigious Manhattan law firm.

The girl Bim eventually married, my wretched mother, was the youngest of eight children and the only girl, and thus presumably intended to be a languorous lily-skinned ornament from birth. Her name, as long as Dennis and I knew her, was Mig Whittier, but despite the tennis-skirted, gin-scented alias she was as French as a baguette. She was born in 1937 outside of Paris, in the gatehouse of her land-poor family's Nazi-occupied château, and christened Marguerite Victoire Marie-France de Belloc, an oppressive mouthful that was truncated and Americanized to Mig at the time of her marriage to our father.

Her family had some nobility, a few titles scattered here and there, some money, some land. But, unlike Bim, Mig wasn't concerned with her lineage, and so we almost never heard about it. She rejected completely her family and her past.
“Collaborateurs,”
she would mutter when we asked about them, and leave it at that. Fair enough, I thought, not caring much about relatives. Dennis, on the other hand, naturally made an exploratory swashbuckling trip to France once, in his mid-twenties, in search of the de Bellocs. Whatever he found there caused him not to urge me to go after them in my turn; about them he said, “It was good to meet them, but I don't think I'll make the effort to see any of them again.” By this, I assumed they were, despite their pretensions to class, neither interesting, colorful, well educated, nor worldly, all the qualities Dennis so dearly prizes in the mostly dead people on our father's side of things.

I suppose to her credit, Marguerite left her dull, provincially snooty family behind and sailed for America as soon as she was old enough. She taught French for a time at an upper-crust New York girls’ school. She met my father, somehow. She married him; of course, she had to, or I wouldn't be here. But despite their matching-bookend names, Mig and Bim Whittier strike me now, in hindsight, as being as ill-matched as a pair could possibly have been without any miscegenation, sexual-identity confusion, or language barrier. As I vaguely but very fondly remember my father, Bim was tall and intelligent and kind and hearty and brimming with health and vigor; as I remember all too well about my mother, Mig was indolent, spoiled, sickly, manipulative, and completely out of her mind. After the wedding, she settled into Waverley and consigned herself to the housekeeper, a big mannish freak named Vivian Jones who ran the place single-handedly while my mother languished in her bedroom upstairs.

True to form, Bim impregnated Mig with his supercharged
sperm shortly after the wedding, and in due time out popped Dennis. I can imagine, as this fine firstborn son graduated from mini-tadpole to piscine lump to tailed mutant to arguably viable fetus, Mig unpacking twee old prenatal fripperies, tiny spoons, nightgowns, and rattles dragged from storage by Grandma (who lived here with the young couple in what was after all her own house, widowed and bossy as ever, until she died, when I was a few months old) and laid it all carefully in “the nursery,” the huge cold room on the second floor which Dennis and I had to share until he turned twelve and was sent to his own room to jerk off alone so he wouldn't corrupt little Hughie, who had been chafing his little stick raw under his blanket for years already. I had to stay warm somehow, after all.

Shortly after Dennis was born, Mig “took to spiritualism.” Her retroussé nose disappeared into the treatises of Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky and the like. The hive of her brain amalgamated all this folderol into a proscriptive child-rearing program that caused her to starve us when we were sick, keep our bedrooms near freezing temperatures in the winter, and enforce a prisonlike diet, the regimen of camps and gulags. We got no dairy, meat, fish, or fowl. We had oatmeal porridge for breakfast with cut-up prunes in winter, and in summer a gummy mess of raw oats and near-rotten fruit soaked overnight in water. We had sandpapery brown bread for lunch along with whatever Vivian hauled in from her truck garden, boiled, then mashed with “health-giving” safflower oil. Supper was a plain soup of garden vegetables, dried beans, rice or barley, and oil. At bedtime came a tisane, boiled water poured over the witches’ wort du jour; it might be mint, which was acceptable and even good, but could also be chamomile or melissa. The word “tisane” gives me the dry heaves. The thought of boiled zucchini or mashed turnips causes my stomach to cramp, as does the memory of that brown bread, which Vivian baked herself
(I once caught her drooling into the dough as she kneaded, in a trance of some kind) and stored in a damp breadbox.

Our father wasn't home to provide any alleviation or protection from this regime. He was at work, and then he was at war. He commuted on the train; he died before I was in first grade.

Mig seemed to be made of brittle twigs and eyes, in the mold of so many Frenchwomen.

She liked me to wash her underwear by hand. I stood over the bathroom sink on a stool and scrubbed with a bar of Ivory soap at streaks of menstrual effluvia and whatnot. Her under-things were not the lacy and delicate “unmentionables” you'd expect. They were revolting cotton things as thick as washcloths. I had to get all the stains out. I couldn't use a scrub brush: it wasn't good for the cloth.

When she had migraines I was summoned to rub her neck and shoulders for what seemed like hours. “Yessss,” she would hiss as if my massages were causing her to have some sort of extended pulmonary orgasm. She lay on her couch in her bedroom, a room that smelled of an elderly female invalid, sweaty flannel, camphor, and violets. Her neck and shoulders felt like vellum-covered straw. She was dry and frangible. I was her boy, Dennis was Bim's. When she turned to kiss me afterward and send me to bed, she might as well have devoured me alive and whole with her dry, pursed, weirdly sexy little mouth. She was a young, beautiful woman throughout my childhood, but I remember her as elderly. She was always sick, always dying, always reclusive, half bedridden. She believed in ghosts and elves and fairies. She droned on and on about the astral body, the choleric temperament, the forces of Ahriman and Lucifer in her hollow, French-accented voice. (She spoke French to us rarely, but somehow we learned it well enough.)

I am convinced that my father went to Vietnam to get away
from my mother, and that his death there was a welcome relief for him.

After he died it was just the four of us here at Waverley Dennis, my mother, Vivian, and me.

October 21—Buerger's disease is almost certainly terminal in patients who keep smoking, but before it gets me, suicide will likely be necessary as the only way to escape what will one day be unbearable pain. I'm already planning for this. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher lost the love of her life, Dillwyn Parrish, nicknamed Timmy to Buerger's. He shot himself when the pain got too bad to bear any more. He, like me, refused to quit smoking. The Parrishes and Whittiers are distant branches of the same family tree, going back two hundred years or more. This gives me a certain sense of kinship with Mary Frances independent of our shared foodie passions: this rare disease, most likely an autoimmune reaction to tobacco products, is limited almost exclusively to male smokers between the ages of twenty and forty and tends to run in families. I like to think I caught it from Timmy Parrish. He was a decent painter, but, most important among all his achievements, he was so loved by his brilliant, beautiful, robust, and original widow that she claimed that she had died along with him, although her husk lived on for decades, cooking and eating, bearing two daughters, marrying, divorcing, buying houses, traveling and telling the tale, etc.

My own feral, toxic, odd-duck widow very likely won't even know I'm gone, the way the trust is set up, and the way we haven't exchanged a word in a decade. If she did hear I'd died, she'd shrug with Slavic resignation. Not that this is a competitive issue between me and Eighth Cousin Timmy by any means.