The Epicure's Lament (42 page)

Lately, in these past weeks, poems have been coursing out of me. What this means, I don't care. Whether or not they're any good, I care even less.

Like my notebooks, it's a necessary bloodletting, no more or less.

February 27—Of all the possible disagreeable topics we could have covered, I was encouraged today by Dr. Jameson to discuss my mother. Actually, she once again brought up the fact that I often try to distract her with antics and wisecracks instead of “doing our work,” and announced that we were going to explore the reasons for that directly instead of skirting around it, as we'd been doing till then. This led right to my mother, but through no fault of mine; I'm fairly certain Dr. Jameson forced it there. I resisted any discussion of how any attempt of mine to deflect the therapeutic endeavor could possibly relate to Mig, but the good doctor, assuming she is good, would have none of it.

“It might be fruitful for us to explore this, Hugo,” she said with the diverting gentleness of a farmer coaxing a cow up the ramp to the guillotine. “Every time we start to get close to your feelings about your mother, you shut down. I'd like to try to get past your defenses and see what's there. Why don't you start by telling me a few things you remember about her.”

She leaned forward and peered at me through her bifocals, her full, shapely mouth interrogatory and half amused, her salon-cut shoulder-length gray hair falling just so around her heart-shaped face. She is a very appealing woman, Emma Jameson. If I weren't so wary of her motives, I would make a play for her. But any attempt to flirt with her would only result
in a lengthy, utterly uninteresting examination of my feelings toward women in general and my mother in particular, resistance to therapy, and my dissociation from my own feelings. How do I know this? Because I've already tried.

“What is the point,” I blustered, “of regurgitating the past? Are you aware of human-interest statistics that suggest that Holocaust survivors who forget the traumas they've suffered are on the whole better adjusted than those who remember? This calls into question the entire premise of so-called talk therapy. Why bring it all up again? I would vastly prefer to forget my entire childhood.”

She regarded me with skeptical equilibrium. “Well, for you, this seems to be something of a life-or-death question. You didn't move on and get over it, Hugo. You killed yourself.”

“I tried to kill myself,” I corrected her. “I would have been perfectly content to have stayed dead.”

“Well, you're not dead,” she countered reasonably. She double-wrapped one long, thin, black-tight-clad leg around the other in that way only the slenderest women can sit. “Why don't you close your eyes and tell me about your mother,” she prompted with steely gentleness.

I sighed and fussed at nothing for a while like an old codger. Damned if I was going to close my eyes. Damned if I was going to blather on and on about Mig's horrible personality.

“There's quite a bit of time left in the session,” Jameson pointed out helpfully.

I sucked my gums and jigged my knee up and down and cast trapped glances out the window and at the door. She watched me, bright-eyed, waiting, nobody's fool.

Finally, in a voice that conveyed the strong opinion that this was all very boring for me and she wasn't getting anywhere and we were both wasting our time here, I recited my all-too-familiar laundry list: the barely edible food, the massages I had
to give, the migraines and breakdowns and screaming fits, the underwear stains, the crackpot spiritual theories, the time Dennis was so sick and almost died, Vivian's rough ministrations and attempts to care for us boys, how my mother went completely cuckoo after my father died…

… and what do you know, at the mention of my father's death I was suddenly racked with sobs, me, a grown man. I was blindsided by grief. I can't explain how or why this happened. It must be the lack of booze in this bughouse, it would make anyone cry.

“Boohoo,” I blubbered. “Boohoo hoo hoo.”

“You were very little when he died,” she prompted. “You loved him very much.”

I tried to ask her why the bejeezus she felt compelled to point this out; it seemed to me she was trying to make me feel even worse. But I couldn't get the words out.

“I think you're still mourning him, even after all these years,” she went on in that diabolically compassionate voice. “You've never let yourself fully grieve for your father. You never really got to know him. You were deprived of the parent you trusted, and left alone with the one who abused you. That must have been so devastating for such a little boy.”

I said as forcefully as I could, “But now I'm a grown man, and my parents are finished and over and gone forever; I would happily have joined them in oblivion. The least I can do is let them lie in peace. That's the kindest thing anyone could do for anyone else.”

She handed me a Kleenex. “Why is that?” she said. She looked kindly and nonjudgmental, but I saw right through it.

“I'd much rather talk about when I'm going to be sprung out of this hellhole. That, to me, is far more germane.”

“They're not leaving you in peace,” she said, ignoring this last comment. “That's the crux of the matter, isn't it?”

“The crux of the matter is that no one leaves me in peace,”

I said. “Hey! Dr. Jameson, I have a swell idea! Let's talk about
your
parents for a while. Was your mother warmly self-effacing and mercifully kind? Did your father help you with your algebra and pat you on your head with a kindly twinkle? Did your brothers and sisters flock admiringly round you as you descended toward your date, radiant in your prom dress? I would guess no, no, and no. I can't imagine that anyone else had it any better than I did. Human nature being what it is. Parents being what they are. And my unseemly display of emotion back there is not going to be repeated. I won't be reduced to a large baby by the power of the past. The past only has power if you plug it in, like anything else.”

“That's exactly the point. You've tried so hard to avoid being plugged in because of the power the past has.”

“I fail to see how this conversation helps either one of us,” I said, “unless you've got some issues you'd like to explore here.”

Then, of course, it was necessary for us to talk a while longer about why I felt the need to deflect and resist this subject of my mother's “physical and emotional appropriation” of me, my father's “tragic early” death. I did my utmost to continue to deflect this inquiry into my deflections, if only because it's my nature to do so, and Dr. Jameson persisted in trying to “plug me in” (a phrase I now wish I had never introduced into the proceedings; I know it will become her mantra), if only because it's her job to do so, and then our time was up.

As I was about to swing my one-foot-and-a-crutch way out of there, she said out of nowhere, “Hugo, I'm very proud of you. You worked hard today. I didn't think we'd get this far so early in our work together.”

“This is early?” I said. “How much longer is this going to go on?”

“Well, that's up to you,” she said. “If you keep this up you'll be out of here before too long.”

“Keep what up? Blubbering and carrying on?”

“It's a start,” she said.

Dennis came in the afternoon. He brought gifts: a box of blood oranges, since fresh fruit is one of the few pleasures permitted me at the moment. He also brought, with typical didacticism, a few current popular-news and highbrow-culture magazines; he evidently hopes I'll acquaint myself with whatever has happened in the world since I “died.” I will do no such thing, because I do not care.

And he also brought, to my surprise, Sonia and Bellatrix.

He sent them to explore the grounds first so he and I could have a little chat.

“So,” he said, settling himself cozily into the couch next to me where I was reading the big fat glitzy for-women-only bestseller I found on the hospital shelves and have become oddly, nauseatingly engrossed in, “I hope you don't mind I brought them without checking with you first. Sonia called and said she wanted to come with me, and I thought maybe you'd object, and so I just brought them. She said she has something important to tell you.”

“What you mean to say is, in your customary fashion, you took it upon yourself to do what you thought would be best for me rather than what you absolutely knew I wanted.”

“That's right, Hugo. What you want is usually bad for you. The day I stop trying to save you from yourself is the day I stop being your brother.”

“I'm not holding my breath,” I said grimly. “I see the kid brought her violin.”

“I brought you a letter too,” he said. “I was tempted to open it and read it, but I didn't.”

“Gee whillikers,” I said, “you are a busybody. A letter from whom, pray tell?”

“The guy who came to Christmas dinner, Pete something.”

“Stravinsky,” I said, suddenly alight with curiosity. “After the composer, no doubt. Why did he move out? Where is he?”

“Search me,” said Dennis. “He never moved in.”

“Hand it over.”

“Listen,” he said, giving me Shlomo's letter (a nice thick envelope—it gave me a chill even as it filled me with interest; this is the effect old Shlomo seems to have), “I sent Sonia and Bellatrix off for a little while, because I want to talk to you first about what you plan to do when you leave here. They say you're getting better. In fact, they're all impressed with your progress. Apparently you're extremely cooperative and working very hard in all your therapies.”

“Why are they telling you that?” I asked. “I try to thwart them at every turn.”

“I wasn't sure they had the right Hugo Whittier, quite frankly. I had to ask if there was more than one. They said no, so all I can think is that you must be fooling them.”

“Sure,” I said. “So when are they going to spring me?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But they advise me that you should have a plan for when you leave, and they encouraged me to discuss this with you. Do you want to go back to Waverley? I'm not sure it's such a good idea, but Uncle Tom would be thrilled. I'm not going to be there forever, because my wife still loves me, she just has to come to her senses and realize it and forgive me… and when I leave, he'll be all alone. He misses Sonia, by the way. I think he's got a crush.”

“God save us,” I said. “Sonia actually flipped an old homo with her black-voodoo trickery. Frankly, I don't know what I'm going to do when I get out of here. I have an idea that I'll take up smoking and living alone in happy idleness right where I left off, and this time no one can stop me.”

“I don't believe you,” he said neutrally.

“Why not?”

“I don't think you'll take up where you left off,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Dennis,” I said impatiently, “I know you have an unshakable
opinion concerning what I should do—you've never been reticent about spewing your advice any chance you get. Come on. Spit it out, you'll feel ever so much better.”

“What about going back to the city?” he said promptly, enthusiastically, without taking a breath. “What about getting a place down there? I think that's what you ought to do, go live in New York and meet people, make a life for yourself. You said you used to be a writer. Maybe get back on that bicycle.”

“Empire City,” I said in a 1940s movie-actress accent. “The glittering metropole. The honk and bustle of it all. Taxicabs and lumbering buses, hot-dog vendors, messengers mowing me down with their bikes, young women in their summer dresses, young men with their haircuts. Well.”

“You asked,” he said, nettled, “just so you could mock me.”

“I never miss a chance,” I said. “Is the river still frozen?”

“It hardly froze at all this year,” he said concernedly, probably because he was remembering I'd been unconscious, then foggy-brained, then sequestered behind thick walls for most of the winter. “Brother mine.”

“I have an iceboat date with a certain cashier,” I said. “And I won my bet with Stephanie; I could collect on that if I really wanted to press my luck, which I'm fairly sure I don't.”

“What bet with Stephanie?” he asked with a spark of his old post–Atlantic-City jealousy.

“She bet I wouldn't have the nerve to go through with my death. I won the bet, it seems to me. And against my will, it also seems I'm here to collect on it after all. That's the one upside to being dragged back—I was right and she was wrong. She'll think she has to pay up, because, whatever else she may be, she's no welsher, she's too conceitedly stuck-up to go back on her word. A sail on the iceboat with Carla, a phone call to Counselor Fox with the idle threat of a dinner with me, her
treat, so I can listen to her squirm: these are my plans for the future. Shall we join the ladies?”

We went out to find Sonia and Bellatrix and came across them on the glassed-in sun porch talking to one of the crazies from my group therapy.

The four of us strolled off toward a secluded wicker table.

“That lady is weird,” Bellatrix whispered up at me as she slipped her hand into mine. I looked down at her. What made her think she was free to express opinions about my fellow inmates? And what gave her the idea that she was welcome to hold my hand with this childish proprietary ease?

“What are you laughing at?” she asked.

“Do you think she's weirder than I am?”

She made a face that expressed a mixture of humor, impatience, and instinctive understanding of what my question meant. She will be an interesting adolescent, I imagine, much too quick for her own good, and consequently a bit of a pain in the ass.

“Now,” said Sonia, “it is my turn to talk alone with Hugo. Run along, go and get some tea and cake and bring it back, and we'll have a little party.”

“Well, Sonia,” I said. “You're looking plump and secretive. I've never seen you this way before. Did my thwarted demise cause you to go on an eating binge?”

She rolled her eyes. “I'm pregnant,” she said smugly, triumphantly, “and this time it is yours.”

I was rocked back on my heel by this, I confess. I had nothing to say. Literally. My mouth opened and closed. I sucked in some air, but still no words came.

“Oh,” I said finally, enraged, blood hot and red behind my eyes. “No wonder you're fatter.”