The Epicure's Lament (3 page)

I remember those seven or so years “on the run” chiefly as
being driven by rage and lust, equally. The law meant nothing to me. Sex meant quite a lot, and still does. Money meant little but was a necessity. I never had a steady girlfriend; I always kept several girls going at once. I liked them all just fine, but I was too pissed off to love anyone. This naturally made me unaccountably irresistible to many women. I suppose I broke some hearts. I imagine I may have behaved like something of an asshole, but I moved around too frequently ever to fall into any black holes of consequence. I lived here and there. I kept my money in cash, and made sure never to have too much of it but always to have enough. I made friends easily, automatically, wherever I went, New York, France, Spain, California, Canada, Long Island, Boston. I kept my emotional distance while being as charming as I could. It was remarkable how popular this made me with other men as well as with women. People on the whole tend to be deeply intrigued by and gravitate toward anyone who is not insecure, vulnerable, or needy, who seems to be comfortable in his own lonesome skin and in possession of the secret of easy autonomy. I slithered around, as hungry and unobstructed as a snake in a nest of baby birds. People helped me, looked the other way when I transgressed, offered a place to stay or a loan, a ride somewhere, a meal.

Just after my twenty-fourth birthday, my mother died of breast cancer. I read about it in the
New York Times
obituary section, several paragraphs she'd earned by virtue of her marriage, having done nothing before or since to merit any notice. I saw the obituary because someone pointed it out to me; I wasn't in the habit of reading any newspapers then and am still not. I was “house-sitting” in a Long Island beach house when I heard—which is to say, I was squatting for several weeks with nominal permission from the owners, an older couple I'd met at a party, who had said I could crash there for a night or two but had only the vaguest knowledge of how long I'd been there,
since they were there only rarely…. I showed up late with my rucksack for the funeral at the old family chapel and graveyard near Waverley, technically on our land. I was clean-shaven and wearing a suit of sorts, but I'm sure I looked scabrously pale and wild-eyed. I was tripping my brains out. Dennis has never been able (possibly because he has never really tried) to wrest from me the truth about where I was all those years. I've told him shadowy and deliberately vague stories about working my way around the world on freighters and as a courier on planes, feeding off the fat of the drug trade, being kept by rich older women, and so forth, but I've only alluded to all this in the course of discussing other things. He hasn't ever pressed me for dates or names or details.

There's a certain unspoken tradition in our family: every generation has its reclusive eccentric. I'm sure Dennis has consigned me in his own mind to their ranks as a rudimentary means of understanding me. Because, whatever my wanderings may or may not have actually entailed, they came to a complete end after my mother died, once the Waverley coast was clear. I've been here ever since, reading my way through the ancestral library, wearing the same clothes day after day until they fall apart.

Of course, given my animosity toward tradition of any sort, I have to flout it any way I can. How do I flout this one? By dying young, of course. All my hermit-monk forebears were gaunt nonagenarians when they kicked off Me, I'll be less than half their average age.

Over the years, I find I've despised Dennis less and less vehemently, but without any increase of respect. I've never tried to hide my opinion that he's unoriginal and plodding. I let on to him, not that he asked me, that I found his years as a struggling bohemian artist in New York a tired cliché, and his purchase of that nice old solid-investment house in Stonekill the
stodgily “smart” thing to do with his inheritance, and his marriage to Marie Dupin, a girl of recent French descent, an obvious imitation of Dad. When Evie was born, I wrote my newly hatched niece a letter in this same squat, crabbed handwriting, explaining that blood relations mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, and therefore she could expect to find me an unsatisfactory uncle throughout her life, but maybe one day she would understand my point of view. This, it developed after five pages or so, was my highest wish for her, although I didn't take the trouble to elaborate on what my philosophy involved. It would, I pompously maintained, speak for itself if she studied my actions and way of life, which I hoped for her own sake she would undertake to do throughout the years.

This was of course partially my own needling way of getting Dennis for having been born first, making me be the scout and the decoder, and finally having to be in the untenable position of being my would-be keeper at nineteen. But primarily it was how I felt, therefore genuine.

“You're spending quite a bit of time down there.” My voice floated to him on fumes of exhaust. Dennis looked around and saw my truck, idling near the tree he was sitting under, and the night-splitting headlights. The taillights cast a red, wavering light on the indentations of the tires in the weeds behind the truck. “It might be time to set up camp. Bivouac.”

“How was your date?” Dennis asked jocularly.

“She thinks Osama bin Laden is among us, here in this country; in fact, she's fairly sure of it. She says he could have sneaked in. All he had to do was shave off his beard and wear normal clothes and get a fake ID. How hard would that be for him? I told her she's wasting her talents at Stewart's. The CIA needs operatives.” I turned off the engine and opened the door, put my good foot up on the dashboard, and sniffed loudly. “The air smells strangely like snow,” I said. “I think I'll take the old
ice-boat out on the river this winter. Maybe I'll invite Carla. She can bring a thermos of Swiss Miss and a package of Lorna Doones.”

“This sounds serious,” Dennis said.

“You think I'm toying with her.”

“Actually,” said Dennis, “what I think is that I came down here for some peace and quiet and you've invaded my sanctuary.”

“Tit for tat, brother mine,” I rejoined meaningfully.

“Brother mine?” Dennis stretched his legs out and yawned, completely failing to catch my drift.

“It's all very nice to anticipate being together, you and I, day in, day out. But I wonder: do you plan at some point to rejoin your life as you knew it?”

“If you take it from Marie,” said Dennis, “I'm not going back. She isn't wasting any time. Today she told me she's just hired an au-pair girl, sight unseen, someone her sister recommended—one of her former students, I think. And this girl came up immediately on the train.”

“What sort of a girl?” I asked with a sidelong flick of my eyes.

“I don't know. A former student of Vero's. Whatever that means. Knowing Vero, it can't be good.”

“A girl,” I repeated, tasting the word on my lips. I like girls. I prefer women, but girls as long as they're plausibly over the age of eighteen are interesting too.

“Hugo,” said Dennis. “Don't mess with the au pair who's looking after my children.”

I said breezily, “Says who?”

There was another brief silence, this one tainted with my brother's disapproval. But what could he say? He has no jurisdiction over me, which he has always known, but it must have struck him in that moment that he has no more say over his wife's employee's private life than he has over mine. His distress over this knowledge was plainly visible.

“Do we have Caller ID block?” he asked abruptly. “On the phone, I mean the thing that prevents someone from dialing star-six-nine, or knowing who's calling?”

“You know how insufferably paranoid I am,” I said. “I had them install every thwarting service that currently exists. Why do you ask?”

“I think I'll make some dinner,” said Dennis, scrambling upright and brushing off his pants.

I fired up the truck engine. “Can I offer you a ride home?”

“Thanks,” he said with the optimistic, daring tone that means he's about to make his idea of a joke. “I'll walk.”

“You do that!” I rejoined hilariously.

In the cavernous, lamplit kitchen, I sat smoking at the table and fiddling with the radio, trying to find some big-band swing music, which is the cornerstone of my new War Effort aesthetic. Dennis opened a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass without offering me one, I suppose because I was already drinking whiskey. Bastard. He never shared as a kid either. He rummaged through the shopping bags he'd recently brought back from the grocery store and piled garlic, onions, canned tomatoes, frozen spinach, and an Italian sausage on the counter, got out a chopping block and butcher's knife, heated olive oil in a cast-iron skillet, filled a big pot with water for spaghetti, and turned the flame up high underneath it. He began chopping onions and garlic. He has made it known that he “likes to cook”: he says, prosaically, that it soothes the troubled spirit, concentrates the ruffled mind. And Dennis's mind is nothing if not ruffled these days, his spirit so troubled it would look like a storm-tossed ocean if it looked like anything. At least, that's how I can see him explaining it to himself: I am convinced that Dennis narrates his own life to himself as if he were the hero of a Bildungsroman.

Well, as it happens, I like to cook too, but I'm a lot better at it than Dennis is. And I don't make a big deal about it, I don't
pretend it's therapeutic, and I don't have an unforgivably heavy hand with the spices.

“All you get these days on the airwaves is anthrax,” I said, snapping the radio off. “It sounds like a surgeon's instrument. Or a kind of super-durable plastic. Part of an ant. Carla thinks a pissed-off former lab employee is sending these envelopes. What are you making? Hash?”

“What did you eat before I moved in?” Dennis asked with his usual willful ignorance and disregard of whatever it is that I am.

“Dog food from the can,” I snarled. “Rabbit-fetus fricassee. But at least I didn't have to answer any condescending questions. Ah, those were happy days.”

Dennis scraped chopped onions and garlic into the skillet. “In answer to your question before,” he said with maddening self-seriousness, “I'm not going back to my family. I will probably not move back to New York. I might stay here at Waverley a while. I don't know yet.”

“Well, I make it a point never to interfere,” I said. “But about that woman you married…”

“I already know what you think of her, so save your breath.”

“Marie,” I said with scorn, in hopes of provoking Dennis into defending his wife, and consequently missing her, and then, in a magical chain reaction, going back to her and leaving me alone. “In the thesaurus, next to ‘virago,’ ‘shrew,’ ‘harridan,’ ‘fishwife,’ ‘alewife.’ ” I spat a fleck of tobacco off my tongue onto the floor. “The tyranny of domesticity, the cozy little horror-show of homey house arrest. And those little girls—”

“My little girls,” said Dennis, who had heard all of this before and was both unimpressed and bored by it. “Don't forget.”

“—embryonic proto-wives, lying in wait until they're big and breasty enough to lock some unsuspecting dupe of their
own into the contractual shackles of mealtimes, don't do this, please close your mouth when you chew, and for God's sake take a shower. Wives in waiting, little emasculators-to-be.” I smiled sinisterly at him; I've never shied away from trying to hit Dennis below the belt. He adores his daughters, and until now I believed he adored his wife as well. I still suspect he might harbor some vestige of this feeling for Marie, separation or no separation. “Misogyny, you think? Look to that human embodiment of ether, chloroform personified, my smother.” I dropped my cigarette butt to the floor and crushed it with my heel. “Look to the source, Dr. Freud.”

“Yeah, well,” said Dennis sourly, shaking his head, “you should hear what Marie says about you.”

“What does she say about me?”

“She calls you the troll under the bridge,” Dennis said. “That, or Quasimodo.”

“Whatever for?” I asked in wounded innocence.

October 13—Dennis announced yesterday evening that he was on his way to pick up the girls. He and Marie apparently arranged before he left that the kids would come to Waverley every Friday for the weekend and be home every Sunday in time for supper; it seemed that it was assumed by both of them that Dennis would do all the transporting and driving. This strikes me as another way in which he gets the raw end of the stick, and of course I told him so, but of course he ignored me.

With my vision of this new au-pair girl firmly in mind, I insisted on going with him at the last minute. Smelling aggressively of shampoo and aftershave, my wet hair plastered in comb-tooth furrows against my skull, I rode shotgun to Stone-kill in Dennis's old rattletrap, thoughtfully blowing my cigarette smoke out his window. Dennis mused to his captive audience
on the way that maybe he'd drag them to the fair over in Columbia County, but he hated fairs and suspected they did too; they would of course eat their cotton candy and suffer through the indignity of all the dinky little rides without complaint, but there would be something tawdry and manufactured about the whole enterprise. He sounded nervous to see his own children, apprehensive, as if he wouldn't be able to entertain them all of a sudden, these small creatures he'd helped raise from birth who presumably still adored him unthinkingly.

As we pulled up the driveway, I said in an unusually pleasant tone as Dennis set the emergency brake, “May I come in with you?”

“Don't you want to avoid the tyranny of the emasculating harridan?” he asked with a jocular tilt of the head that suggested he considered this the height of witty repartee.

“Ha ha!” I said obligingly. He had clearly forgotten my interest in the new au-pair girl; I had only mentioned it once, of course, and that a few days before, but this was the sort of potential plot point I never would have forgotten even under pain of torture or extreme duress. In all fairness, he has a lot on his mind these days, and he's never paid any attention to my plans and ideas before, so there was no reason to expect him to start now.

I got out of the car and walked with my exaggeratedly stiff-legged gait up the flagstone path. “I've forgotten how picturesque your house is,” I called over my shoulder to Dennis. “It's like an ivy-covered gingerbread cottage, size extra large.”