The Epicure's Lament (32 page)

Outside, windy, brisk weather had begun to prevail over the morning's calm. We ducked into a shadowy entryway and lit up, furtive-looking as we cupped our hands around the ends of our cigarettes to block the wind.

“I don't really smoke,” she said.

This was a bald-faced lie. I know her kind: Vero belongs to that species of smoker who can't admit it but is a smoker all the same. The kind who never buys them, only cadges them, as if it didn't count to smoke someone else's.

“So,” I said as we strolled along the sad, depressed old Main Street, past lawyers’ offices and antique-store windows full of old lamps and antimacassars with yellowed price tags dangling from them, “Dennis is having an affair. I can't even imagine how he thinks he has any right to say a word to me about my own marriage and behavior. It boggles the mind.”

“God, Marie irritates me so much sometimes,” Vero burst out. “She's so self-righteous. Everything she does, she just does. She doesn't question herself. She judges me, but it never occurs to her to wonder whether or not I'm judging her, and why.”

“Substitute Dennis for Marie and I know exactly what you mean.”

“Since birth, she's been this way. Looking down at me and pointing a finger.”

“They're born that way, the older ones. With a chip in their brains that blocks out self-questioning and new information. They're the guardians of the parents’ trust. But they seem to think it gives them license to act in any way they want.”

“We're expected to fall in, the minute we're born. No wonder we rebel.”

“Is that what we do?” I turned to look her in the eye.

She laughed, a genuine laugh of amusement. “Hugo. Look at us. How old are you? I'm thirty-five.”

“Forty,” I muttered.

“Ha ha,” she laughed.

“I don't see what's so funny,” I said.

“Well, we are, really. The joke's on us. What have we done since we were born? Watched them, reacted to them. Listen,” she added seriously, shifting gears as though her emotional workings had been recently oiled, “I do care about Evie and Isabelle, you're wrong. They're good bright sensitive little girls, and this is beyond upsetting for them. Isabelle has started to wet the bed again, and she's doing inappropriate sexual things in public.”

“Like what?”

“Meanwhile, Evie is taking out a lot of aggression on Isabelle, punching her and tearing up her drawings and calling her names. Marie is a therapist, for God's sake, but she doesn't seem to make the connection. She thinks it's because of what those terrorists did. I think it's that, of course it's that, kids all over the country are reacting to that, but it is severely compounded for Evie and Isabelle by the fact that no sooner did madmen attack our country than their father moved out and their mother started acting like a slut.”

“Their father makes crank calls to their mother to scare her.”

“He does what?”

“He calls his old number and breathes into the phone when Marie answers and doesn't say anything, and then he hangs up. Or he gets the machine and doesn't leave a message.”

“I always knew Dennis was a creep.”

“He wasn't always a creep,” I said. “Something happened to him.”

“He's acting like a twelve-year-old!” said Vero. “Crank calls to his wife?”

“I've caught him doing it. And he denies it. He may not even know that's what he's doing. But it implies to me that he wants to go back but doesn't know how to ask. I'm sure Marie is fed up with him, though. Last time I was there, she said she was much happier without him, and she really seemed it.”

“Well, whatever you may think about my motives here, I don't buy it for a second. It's only sex, and it won't last, because sex never does. I know Marie: she'll wish he'd come back soon enough. I know, easy for the childless to judge, but they should do whatever soul-searching and soul-baring is required to present a genuinely united front and discipline these girls strongly and appropriately, so they feel safe and loved and protected.”

I had nothing to say to this. I was thinking that Vero was impossibly earnest and tiresome and I was glad she wasn't my sister. I felt glimmerings of empathy for Marie but kept them, wisely, to myself.

“I know I'm an ‘eccentric childless academic spinster with cats,’ ” Vero went on in her earnestly tiresome way, “and I say this in quotation marks to put words into my sister's mouth, because that's exactly what she thinks I am, although she would never say it aloud of course, but even I can see what the problem is. I have tried telling Marie, but she looks at me as if I'm speaking Martian. She's not used to taking child-rearing advice from me, to put it mildly. I'm glad I sent Louisa up here to take care of them, but she's just a girl herself; she can't give them
their father, and he's the one they want, incomprehensible as that may seem to us. Listen, I need another cigarette.”

We ducked into another entryway and lit up again. Then we walked (she paced; I hobbled) up and down Main Street, smoking and talking, all hostilities suspended in the interest of our common goal, as if we were setting an example to our sister and brother of how this could be done.

“Why are you walking like that?” she asked me.

“Because I have Buerger's disease,” I answered.

“I see,” she said, not seeing a thing; people like Vero only need answers. They can't admit they don't understand when they don't, so they take all answers at face value and go charging ahead.

Without too much trouble, we came up with an agreement that this Christmas dinner would be brought about. Vero presented the idea to me, arguing that it might be most effective for general morale if the food were edible. Dennis and Marie would benefit from an evening in the same room together with their children in a congenial, warm, familiar setting, a setting that smacked of home, tradition, family history. She said this in a persuasive, velvety way that almost made me believe Waver-ley could be such a place if I squinched my eyes shut hard enough. So I agreed to cook the damn dinner, in part because I'd already decided to do it. It's my fitting final gesture, Hugo's last supper. Of course they don't need me to cook it; any one of them can do it. What they want is for everyone to gather, even the horrible Hugo, and they think they can get me to show up by playing on my vanity and pretending no one but me can stick a turkey or a ham in an oven and pull it out when it's done. This overwhelming urge to gather the whole club together in a huddle without any members missing to eat a large meal en masse is one of the many social instincts I've never understood.

“I'll help you cook,” Vero added, almost as an afterthought.

“You can set the table. I don't need any help. Besides, do you even know how to peel a potato?”

“I know how to cook,” she said. “Fuck you for assuming I can't just because I'm not married.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That's not why.”

“I'm a fantastic cook.”

“I'm sure you are.”

“I am!”

“I have no doubt,” I said.

Soon afterward, negotiations broke down and we went our separate ways. I went home and finished packing my “personal effects.” For obvious reasons, I moved them all into the room in the “new wing” where Great-Aunt Charlotte hanged herself in 1928. Packing and moving took most of the early afternoon, but I finished sweeping out my old room and making the bed with fresh linen for Fag Uncle Tommy well before three o'clock. I was getting into my truck when a voice from the porch, Sonia's of course, said, “You don't have to pick her up, if that's where you're going, Hugo.”

I looked up to see my wife standing on the porch, leaning against the railing, wrapped in a blanket, looking red-nosed and forlorn.

“Sonia!” I cried. “I see you've survived the bubonic plague. I don't mind, I'm on my way there now.”

“No,” she said. “Don't bother. Stephanie Fox said Bun would get her; she said he was planning to be over that way anyway.”

“What do you mean, Bun Fox is picking her up? She doesn't even know him.”

“She knows him.”

“Well, I took her this morning, and she asked me to fetch her home again, and that's what I'm doing. If she's properly brought up, she'll know better than to get into a stranger's car.”

“She knows him,” Sonia repeated obtusely. “She's met him a couple of times.”

Off I trundled as fast as my little wheels would go along the roads we'd traveled this morning; I was glad I'd paid enough attention to remember where the place was. I got there in twenty minutes flat, spurted into the parking lot, and careened to a stop. Children were trickling from the school building, and a couple of them were hanging around the school steps. However, there was no general melee and hullabaloo, as there had been this morning, which made me suspect I'd missed her. I scanned the crowd for a pale, pasty little dumpling and saw several, but none of them was mine.

I breathed some air and reminded myself that Bun has never actually molested anyone, according to Stephanie. Also, Bellatrix is not the kind of little girl who might easily be scared into keeping her mouth shut. She can't hide much, for one thing, and though she may seem like a cream puff, she's no cream puff If he tried something on her, she would scream and bite.

In a moment, I decided, I would drive back along the road to Waverley as fast as I could, in hopes of overtaking them. Unless he'd already driven her into some wooded wilderness…

My heart beating unnaturally fast, I approached the kids on the steps. “Has Bellatrix Whittier gone yet?” I asked.

“She's still in the classroom,” said one of them, a dark little girl I recognized from our introductions this morning. My eyes closed momentarily with relief. “Bella, your dad's here,” another kid screeched as she raced into the school. Everyone else regarded me with idle curiosity. I smirked at them all. Score one for the Special Forces. Humbert was going to be very put out. I'd outfoxed him. I'd scooped his crumpet.

Just then, out came “Bella,” carrying her violin case and wearing her goofy backpack. “Hi,” she said to me. “Have a good vacation,” she said to her classmates, beaming a little, trying
to seem casual, but obviously beside herself with relief that her cynical scalliwag of a nonfather had come not only on time but early, so she wouldn't have to wait unclaimed on the steps like a loser. I shepherded her to my truck, one hand firmly on her back, in case Bun drove up and tried to take her by force.

“Let's just sit here a minute,” I said. “Bun Fox thinks he's picking you up, so when he gets here we'll just tell him I came instead. But I don't want him to think you were kidnapped and raise a false alarm.”

“Okay,” she said blandly, then clambered up into my truck cab and put on her seat belt. Little front-row sitter. I never wore a seat belt as a kid, and I fought my mother every time she tried to force me to wear one. It made me feel like I was in a straitjacket, which I probably needed, come to think of it.

“Why is his name Bun?”

I got into the driver's seat, turned on the engine, put the heat on, and found a radio station that was playing some Dixieland jazz. “I think it's short for some other silly name,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Bunting? Bartholomew? Bunderella?”

“Bungee cord,” she said, laughing, her nose wrinkled.

“Bungee cord,” I said approvingly.

“So aren't you going to ask me how school was today?”

“How was school today?” I asked with a sideways look of apprehension; I've never, to my knowledge, asked anyone that before.

“Okay,” she said. “I made two baskets in gym and played my cadenza really well in orchestra and I aced my test.”

“I'm sure you ace all your tests,” I said.

“Yup,” she said. “Sort of.”

A few minutes later, the eager-beaver Bun Fox drove into the parking lot in search of fresh prey in his sporty red child-molester's car. I thought I saw that soft, black, shiny
child-molester's mole on his cheekbone gleaming through his windshield.

“Bungee cord,” said Bellatrix softly.

I haven't bothered to hate anyone for a while. Dennis is my older brother, so the hatred I bear him is tinged with familiarity and some sort of nebulous but unbreakable blood bond. My feelings for Bun Fox are, for reasons I can't entirely articulate or name, pure. I hate him. Maybe because I fucked his wife and thought I loved her and she dumped me to fuck my brother instead, all seemingly unbeknownst to Bun, who is meanwhile still married to her. Maybe because I suspect he wants to molest Bellatrix, or any other little girl, and would if given the chance. And although she's not my daughter, I consider myself her—what's the word they used to use in the olden days?—protector? caretaker? My memory is failing me now too, along with everything else. But if not Bellatrix, he'll eventually molest someone else. If he ever has a daughter, chances are that he'll be unable not to molest her. Maybe he'll molest a series of little girls through the years, until he dies, or someone kills him. He's a potential creep of the highest order, a villain waiting to happen.

And I'm Bellatrix's… Interesting, that this should be the word my brain would snag on. Let's play a little game of jog-the-memory It has something to do with custody but isn't “custodian,” something to do with caretaking but isn't “caretaker,” it's that legal thing when someone bears financial and often moral responsibility for a child…. I am her… guardian, that's it. I am her guardian.

So there I was, guarding her.

Bun maneuvered his car around and pulled up alongside my truck when he saw I wasn't going to get out to talk to him. We both rolled down our windows; then he said in a friendly and falsely innocent tone, “Hello, Hugo, apparently there's been a
mix-up. I thought I was supposed to get your daughter from school today.”

“There's no need, but thanks all the same,” I said.

We locked eyes. In mine he may well have seen hatred, since I made no attempt to hide it. In his I saw frustration. I wasn't imagining it; I saw the shadow of it go over his face as if a cloud had momentarily hidden a moon somewhere.

“In the future,” I said, “if I were you, I wouldn't offer to pick up any more little girls from school. Ever. Am I making sense to you?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, seemingly bewildered. “I didn't offer, I was asked.”