The Epicure's Lament (7 page)

In that even, earnest, self-justifying voice I know as well as the smell of my own shit, he announced that he had come back to Waverley because Marie had asked him to leave.

She had forced him to admit that he had fallen out of love with her, and then she kicked him out.

He didn't fight, which is typical of Dennis.

I'm sure she must have anticipated that, since she knows him better than anyone else, even I.

She must also have known perfectly well that even though the romantic part of their marriage was over, he would have
stayed anyway, for the kids’ sake, for the sake of his vows, propriety, family honor, all the things he believes in most fervently, if she hadn't called his bluff.

“We never have sex any more,” she'd apparently said the night before he left, in bed, just as they were falling asleep. The Bildungsroman narrator who channels himself through Dennis's vocal cords informed me that this statement came at my brother out of the depths of the darkness, trembling with outrage.

They'd both lost interest in sex in recent years, he replied, or so it seemed to him. But it was so like her to blame him for the whole problem.

“Well,” she said harshly, “do you still want to?”

“Sometimes,” he said. It was true, Dennis told me now, as always wide-eyed at his own forthright goodness, priggishly astonished at other people's raging passions, their needs. And sometimes he did still want her. But she'd made herself so remote and inaccessible, the effort it seemed it would take to arouse her seemed as if it wouldn't ultimately be worth the payoff, so he'd just given up altogether. He had been under the impression that it was she who was no longer interested, and so he had stopped trying, rather than suffer the indignity of rejection night after night.

I gazed up at my bedroom ceiling and followed with my eyes the long crack in the plaster that leads to nowhere.

They'd never had a great sex life, as far as Dennis was concerned, even during their courtship. Making love (of course he calls it that) with Marie had always been oddly unsatisfactory to him, even though he was attracted to her and loved her body and thought she was beautiful, because Dennis wanted to do everything, all the time, no holds barred, and she didn't. He'd respected Marie's cooler temperament and romantic notions of lovemaking, and maybe because of this, he'd always been hot for other women throughout their whole marriage, sometimes to
the point of obsession, extreme temptation, but he'd never acted on his feelings. Though he could hardly admit this, he secretly felt that Marie should be grateful to him for overcoming his often intense yearning for other women. All right, for Stephanie Fox, she was the one he really wanted; he admitted it.

I perked up a little at the mention of Stephanie Fox. “Will you call her now and confess your ardor?” I asked with real interest.

“Other men would have cheated,” said Dennis, oblivious, or pretending to be, and in any case not to be deterred from the narration of the story he'd set out to tell. “I didn't. Of course I know this is slightly disingenuous. Why should my wife be grateful to me for being faithful? Why didn't I just have an affair?”

“What I wonder,” I said, “is this: why, given your history, did she bring up the topic of your sex life in that accusatory tone? She could have tried to seduce you if she'd really wanted the marriage to continue.”

“Why do you think?” Dennis asked—rhetorically, no doubt.

“Obviously,” I shot back, “she was trying to bring it all to a head so she could get it over and done with. She was looking for an out. She was sick of you.”

“I think you're right,” he said.

I sat up and lit a cigarette, then turned on my bedside radio and fiddled with the dial until I found Benny Goodman and his swingin’ licorice stick.

“And then she told me to leave the next day,” said Dennis. (I could easily imagine her half-hostile, wet-nosed voice.) “She said, ‘I want you to move out tomorrow. It's over. I want a divorce.’ ”

At this point I had to point out, hypocritically, having driven my own once-beloved wife away, and having had plenty of time since then to mull it all over, that maybe he should have
taken her into his arms, tried to win her back, smothered her with warmth; maybe he could have rekindled something.

“No,” said Dennis. “I felt defeated by the hard, cold edge in her voice, even through her tears. It didn't invite reconciliation. She sounded almost relieved that I was finally going. I left the next night, after the girls were in bed, having spent the day loading my things into the U-Haul, and the evening reading stories to Evie and Isabelle. Marie said goodbye to me, then turned out the front-door light and closed the door before I'd even started the engine. So I drove away from the house we raised children in and lived in together, and now here I am. I always wondered how a marriage dissolved, what the straw was that would break the camel's back.”

“You could have asked me,” I said. “I could have given you a hint.”

“And now I know. It's not so much a straw as a rising tide that finally overflows and drowns whatever goodwill and tenderness remain. Together we let the floodwaters rise between us, and together we sent me out to sea in a pea-green boat alone.”

“Not literally to sea,” I said glumly. “And not entirely alone.”

“Well,” said Dennis, “thanks for listening. I thought you should know the story.”

He got up and went back downstairs.

October 17—A cup of hard-packed dark brown sugar. Just for the record.

October 18—The horse-chestnut tree that grows directly outside my window has a mottled pattern on its bark that looks like a smooth cellulose version of the fur of some great savanna cat. Most of the leaves are gone, but the few that remain are curled inward like reddish-dun claws, parchment-thin.
Covering the tree like ornaments on a
Tannenbaum
are pairs of furry brown balls the size of walnuts. The birds who alight and roost in its branches are round, compact, having the meaty heft of small pheasants or doves and speckled black-and-white breasts and all-black overcoats; they are sociable and sharp-beaked, and seem to enjoy bouncing gently on the elastic smaller boughs. As the light changes throughout the day, the shades of bark and birds shift and change; the sun coats the leaves and testicle-balls with light that makes them seem to glow from the inside out.

It's beautiful, I say completely without irony.

Meanwhile, I have discovered another one of Dennis's secrets, this one completely by accident. It explains his question about the Caller ID block, which has been nagging at me.

He was dialing the phone in the front hall earlier, as I was coming downstairs. I paused to eavesdrop on his conversation. It was so quiet I could hear the purr of the line ringing faintly, and then a woman's voice, answering.

It was the oddest thing: Dennis didn't say a word. He waited, his back to me. I heard her sharp question, her rising indignation, and then the click as she broke the connection.

Who was she? I had to know, of course. I suspected strongly that he was telephoning Stephanie Fox to ask her to meet him at Rex's Roadhouse and then losing his nerve at the fatal last instant; this would have been all too typical of him. So, after he'd gone back outside, Encyclopedia Brown, boy detective, made his stealthy, sleuthy way down the stairs, took possession of the telephone, and cleverly hit the redial button.

“Hello?”

It was Marie's voice, unmistakably.

I didn't say a word.

“I'm calling the police,” she said as I was hanging up.

So. Dennis has made a silent call to his own wife for reasons I can't even begin to guess at. At least one: who knows how
many other times he's done it? And now I've done it too, after breaking into her house and making off with the au pair. What will we do next?

My old easy, habitual life of deception and crime seems to be smoldering to life again. Before I know it, I'll be running drugs or crashing uninvited in other people's houses once more.

No, I won't. Instead, I have a strong and not at all innocent desire to contact Louisa, to try to trick her into seeing me again. I could have asked whether she was home just then, instead of hanging up on Marie, and pleaded total ignorance of that other call and caller. But she would have suspected me, of course, and of course my entire life has been arranged to avoid getting in the middle of anything. Aha, she would have thought, Hugo—I knew it all along! I'm the natural enemy of my sister-in-law.

October 19—Last night, on my way across the river, the headlights cut through the darkness as if I could follow them and they'd take me wherever I wanted to go.

Rex's Roadhouse is an old shack on a small stream, set back from the road, lurking in the woods. Weekend people don't come here much, just locals—adulterers, drunks, college kids, and regulars. The back wall is almost all glass, so you sit at the dark bar and look out at the lit-from-below woods and stream. It's all very romantic, ramshackle, rough-hewn. The room is about the size of a basement rec room and holds an unassuming bar, some cracked red leatherette booths with scuffed tables, a dartboard, a cigarette-burned pool table, and a jukebox stocked with old country-and-Western legends’ B-sides. The whole place smells of wet rags that have wiped used ashtrays and beer spills and then been left to molder in a wet heap in a bus tub.

I sat at the far end of the bar and ordered a shot of whiskey
and a draft. While the droopy yokel behind the bar applied himself fervently to bottle and tap, I examined my hands, which I'd cleaned carefully that morning, along with every other inch of my visible self, in addition to trimming my nose hairs, cutting my toenails, and shaving twice. No more filth on my person, was the general idea I was suddenly espousing; Hugo goes a-hunting-oh in poontang season. But there was already a layer of dirt under my fingernails. And even as I write this, although I've cleaned my nails again in the interim, the grime has come seeping back, the exfoliated by-product of my unfulfilled yearnings.

That's a bunch of hogwash.

My yearnings have been fulfilled, every one of them: sex, revenge, trouble.

A woman came in when I was halfway through my second round. That made three of us here at Rex's: me, the yokel, and her. She stood in the doorway for a moment while her eyes got used to the murk, her face bright and anticipatory. She was older: no postpubescent girl, this was the real thing, established, professional, almost certainly married to a male counterpart, a matching duo of doctors or therapists or professors. She had a white-gold, wavy, but carefully managed mane, wore a low-cut white blouse and a form-fitting skirt that came to just above her shapely knees, and was an utterly acceptable variant of my librarian-taking-off-her-glasses fantasy except that she wore no glasses, and her hair, rather than being in some degree of bun, floated freely around her head and neck. She shimmered with the muscular vibrancy of someone focused, driven, healthy but very bored, that cerebral, pent-up lustiness that's always made my blood rise like a war cry from over the distant hills.

When she met my eyes, she headed straight toward me.

It occasionally happens that I meet people who become instant intimates. This happens more or less according to the
period of my life I am in. This woman and I seemed to know something about each other right away, and dispensed accordingly with the usual sideways tactics.

Head-on, she slid onto the stool next to mine.

“Hi there,” she said easily. I resisted a strong temptation to kiss her on the mouth. We had plenty of time, and our pick of five or six old motels within a mile of the place. “Been here long?”

“Feels like years,” I said. “Where've you been?”

“Oh,” she said with a half-smile, “you don't want to know.”

“What are you drinking?”

“Hooch,” she said to both me and the bartender. “Bombay-gin martini, very dry, shaken, and straight up with olives.”

We sat elbow to elbow, looking out at the woods. She smelled lemony. I finished my whiskey and set the shot glass back down on the bar so it made a satisfying rap against the cheap wood.

“Who are you, anyway?” she asked.

“I'm Hugo.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, puzzled. “You don't look like a Hugo.”

“Oh, but I am,” I said grandly.

“No, you look like a David,” she said.

“Well, I'm not a David.”

“Wait a minute. Hugo who?”

“Whittier,” I told her, my pride suddenly all gone.

“Hugo Whittier,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Not Dennis's brother?”

“Well, I'm a lot more than that,” I said.

“I'm Stephanie Fox,” she said. “Dennis and Marie are good friends of my husband's and mine.”

“Dennis is not such a good friend to your husband, actually, Stephanie.”

Her martini came. She lifted the big inverted pyramid in
both hands and took an oddly humble sip, as if she were a mendicant who'd been handed a charity soup bowl.

“Ah,” she exhaled, licking her lips, then returned her attention to me. “Hugo, please tell me what you're talking about.”

“I'd better not,” I said, having used the interval of her tasting her drink to collect my wits, or as many of them as could be summoned, which had turned out to be just enough to realize that this line of inquiry was not in my own best interests.

She wasn't laughing, but her merriment was clearly visible, an effervescence around her head like tiny cartoon champagne bubbles rising from an uncorked bottle. “Fair enough,” she said. “Although I hope you meant what I think you meant.”

The bartender's pointy ears twitched with the effort to look as if he weren't listening.

“I'll have another whiskey,” I said, and he leapt to the bottle and slung a good dose into my glass, hoping he wouldn't interrupt this conversation, which was the most entertaining thing to come down the pike in a while.

“So Dennis has moved back to his old house,” she said.

“Pathetic, isn't it?” I said swiftly. “Running home to the roost.”

“Well, he had to go somewhere,” she said. “How is he these days?”

“Miserable,” I said, baring my teeth at her in a smiling mammalian display of harmlessness, but inwardly violent.