“We're not blue bloods like you and Dennis,” Marie added without scorn or resentment. “But Vero is a snob.”
“May I smoke in your house?” I asked.
“I don't usually allow it,” she replied.
“If I don't smoke I'll likely become agitated and froth at the mouth,” I rejoined pleasantly. “I have to smoke. It's my human condition.”
“Evie will smell it when she gets home. She won't like it. She'll think it was me, and disapprove.”
“Well, you can just tell that puritan child of yours it was that nasty Uncle Hugo. Let me take the rap. It will be my pleasure.”
She smiled, sighed, and proffered a dish I took to be a substitute ashtray, which I made use of right away; I felt better without having been aware of feeling worse beforehand.
Vero, it seems, didn't qualify for enough financial aid to go to a “good school” like Swarthmore or Yale because her father looked much richer on paper than he really was. So Vero, arguably the best and the brightest of the Dupins, certainly the most intellectually promising, went to Hunter College, where she got straight A's, while Didier took over their father's ailing business and turned it around, and Marie got her degree in social work. Neither of them did a thing with the educations Vero would have given a limb for. Vero still resents this years later, but Marie maintains that her disgruntlement isn't so much about a good education as it is a class issue. Marie herself, or so she claimed to me, has never had any interest in or patience for class issues; it just isn't in her makeup to care about such things,
and she isn't someone who feels it incumbent upon herself to try to transcend her makeup. She is who she is.
I caught a certain undertone of boozy defiance in all this.
“Your attitude must not sit very well with Dennis,” I offered with sly sympathy.
“No,” she said, “it doesn't. His lineage, as he calls it, matters more to him than anything. It galls him that I'm not impressed by it.”
“Well, I don't care any more than you do about my lineage. As far as I'm concerned, they were all a bunch of freaks. Hothouse orchids. Everyone has ancestors; what's so special about mine except that they had a lot of money and married other people with a lot of money?”
“Maybe Dennis should have married Vero instead,” said Marie. “She would have appreciated all that proud-to-be-a-Whittier crap.”
“I understand,” I said companionably settling a little more comfortably into the banquette and lighting myself another cigarette off the dying embers of the first one, “that you have more than once enjoyed referring to me as Quasimodo or a troll under a bridge. Of the two, I frankly prefer the troll, which appeals to my reverse vanity and is funny besides. Quasimodo is completely inappropriate.”
Marie was spared having to reply to this by the doorbell, which yielded the fragrant, golden, wryly self-possessed object of my desire and her husband, a bemused and rumpled fellow in a maroon button-down and olive-green trousers. Bun Fox was in possession of a black, shiny, velvety mole on his right cheekbone the size and shape of a small cockroach.
“Hugo Whittier,” he said, “the name sounds familiar.”
“I called and left a message for your wife earlier today,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I wanted to consult with her about a legal matter.”
“I forgot to pass along the message,” said Bun. “I've been ad-dlepated lately, to put it mildly. Stephanie, this guy here called. Call him back. His number is somewhere at home.”
“Hello, Hugo,” said Stephanie coolly. I shook her hand with no flirtatious pressure or undue significance.
“Hello, Stephanie,” I said.
“Wine, everyone?” Marie asked, holding up the bottle.
“Yes indeed,” said Bun.
“Here's an interesting trivia question,” I said. “Does anyone know how many pounds of meat a day the Roman Emperor Maximus consumed to keep up his strength?”
“Oh, Marie,” Stephanie said, “it smells delicious in here, speaking of meat.”
“Forty pounds,” I said, but Stephanie was looking into the oven. “A day. He must have done nothing but eat all day long. And vomit, being Roman.”
“Really,” said Bun, who was sticking close by my elbow, looking intently at me. Male solidarity, perhaps. Whatever the reason, it was giving me the willies.
“Greek actors made a point of consuming gross amounts of meat as a sort of entertainment,” I added chattily as Marie handed Bun a glass of wine. “One Greek actress could eat ten pounds of meat at a sitting, washed down with six jugs of wine.”
“I feel like I could do that right now,” said Bun.
“The great banquets of antiquity,” I went on loudly, aiming my voice at the seemingly oblivious Stephanie, feeling like a lovestruck buffoon, a fourth-grade grossout showoff, “featured stews made of erotic offal, such as sows’ vulvas and nipples, or the testicles of calves. In the French region of Languedoc, where such dishes are still eaten, they call them
frivolités
, frivolities.”
“Thanks for that information, Hugo,” said Marie. “Unfortunately, all I've got tonight is a humble roast. Sorry to be so unimaginative.”
“I'm not entirely disappointed,” said Stephanie dryly.
“Shall we go into the dining room? I'll go wake Vero. She's taking a nap. She says she's been sleeping a lot this fall. I don't blame her. It must be unspeakably sad and hard, living down in the city right now.”
The Foxes and I took up posts around the long dining-room table while Marie vanished upstairs. We set our wineglasses down with sudden happy clatter, guests together in someone else's house, irresponsible and carefree as children. In the center of the table was a cluster of small plates and bowls of food. Olives, nuts, smoked oysters, crackers and cheese, that sort of thing. I took the chair nearest to this offering and helped myself liberally; I was feeling light-headed, possibly because Stephanie was sitting directly across from me, watching me feed myself, looking amused and completely mysterious. Bun leaned back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling, and sighed.
“This fall,” he said, “I haven't slept well, not one single night. This is the tip of the iceberg. This is only the beginning. It's all going to go to hell now.”
“Can we please talk about anything else just for one night?” Stephanie asked in an even voice with a glint of anger running through it.
“There is nothing more urgent at the moment to discuss,” said Bun.
“I say, the less we talk about it, the less power those animals have,” Stephanie said back.
“No,” said Bun. “We have to remain on our guard, and remember all of it.”
“Remembering,” she said, “won't help. Nothing we can do will help, because we did nothing to bring it on ourselves.”
“Sure we did; it's the chickens coming home to roost,” said Bun. “Right, Hugo?”
I had a few things to say about this, but decided not to say
them. There was something about their exchange that seemed marital, personal, fenced off.
“Bun,” said Stephanie, each word as hard and deadly as a gunshot, “don't start this here. Not now. You can't just say these things.”
“Life is tragic,” said Bun. “We never learn from our mistakes.”
I said mildly, without import, “Maybe it's tragicomic. Look at us, inflated with our own busy godlike importance, but at the same time we're fools who fuck and fart and scratch, get weak and decrepit when we're old, and die sooner or later. What a joke on us, to leave the two to duke it out in us, god and dog.”
“God and dog,” Bun repeated bemusedly shaking his head.
Vero preceded her sister down the stairs. She was a taller, plainer, but somehow more immediately striking version of her elder sister. She had the same slanted eyes, the same lustrous pallor and long slender nose, but on her it all looked less organized and more dramatic. “Hello,” she said to all of us in general. She had a low melodious voice with a faintly plummy accent. There was something of the old-fashioned stage actress about her. Her hair was cut into a saucy bob around her long face. She wore a low-cut watered-silk purple dress from which her bare neck and bony shoulders rose with Edwardian stark-ness. I sensed immediately a high-strung, quivering self-regard that precluded the inclusion of anyone else. She was her own hermetic system.
“Bun, Stephanie, this is my sister, Veronique,” said Marie.
“Finally we meet,” said Stephanie, reaching sideways to shake her hand. “I was beginning to think you were Marie's imaginary sister.”
“I'm Dennis's brother, Hugo,” I said to Vero, who had already given me a swift appraising look and sized me up while I did the same to her.
“I see,” she said.
Colliding waves of mutual animosity met in the air between our gazes. I disliked her because she appeared to have a far higher self-regard than was strictly warranted; why she disliked me was anyone's guess.
“When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend named Frederick Marshall,” said Bun. “He was six foot seven, from Des Moines, an opera singer, and a horse thief. He was absolutely real to me. I was the only child of somewhat elderly parents. Stephanie and I are embroiled in a discussion about whether or not to have children right now. I would like to have at least two, so the first one has someone to talk to besides the likes of Frederick Marshall.”
“This is all too typical of Bun,” said Stephanie, “to blurt out personal or marital news as if it were no more off limits than what he read in the paper today.”
“Marie used to be my therapist,” said Bun. “I guess I'm in the habit of speaking frankly around her. I always assume she's interested.”
“That's how we met,” said Marie, on her way into the kitchen.
“I was suffering from a certain rather delicate physical difficulty,” said Bun. “Marie helped me to get to the roots of the problem, which I was astonished to learn was actually my own fear of inadequacy.”
“Bun!” said Stephanie.
“It's nothing to be ashamed of,” Bun countered. He looked over at me. “Right, Hugo?”
“I wouldn't know,” I said, on the surface apologetically. I lit a cigarette and looked at Stephanie, who looked steadily back at me for the first time since she had arrived. My hands shook a little as I held the flame to the tip and breathed in.
“I can't take him anywhere,” she said, referring to Bun, I
assumed. “He drops these little bombs into conversations and then sits back to enjoy the explosion.”
Marie returned with more wine, which she splashed liberally into everyone's near-empty glasses. She set my ashtray before me without a word of complaint. I was apparently increasingly welcome to make myself quite at home here in my brother's house.
“If he gets to smoke,” said Vero, eyeing me with disgruntle-ment, “then I do too.”
“Oh, all right,” said Marie. “I'll get you an ashtray.”
“I want one too,” said Stephanie.
“See what you've done,” said Marie to me.
“Yes, of course I do,” I said. “I've done everyone a favor. You might as well smoke too, Marie.”
Vero held a lit match to the end of Stephanie's cigarette, then her own, then Marie's, then mine, then shook the flame out, and finally said, exhaling smoke, “Now, this is more like it.”
“Since Dennis and I split up,” Marie said once dinner was served and we were all busy with our meat and potatoes, “when I'm not livid at him, I'm starting to feel a little heady with freedom. Let everything go to hell now that everything's gone to hell, you know?”
“I just talked to Dennis today, speaking of Dennis,” said Stephanie to the table at large, slathering butter on a piece of bread.
“You did?” I echoed more sharply than I would have liked.
“He called to say hello just before we left to come over here. Maybe he was feeling left out of our dinner.”
“But he's at the movies,” I barked. “With his children.”
“What I'm trying to say,” Marie broke in, spreading butter
on her own piece of bread, “is, who's going to fix me up with someone nice and eligible?”
“Marie,” Vero cried with soap-operatic dismay, “his side of the bed is still warm.”
For the first time, I felt an unspoken alliance with the horrible Vero. “She's right,” I said. “I'm not sure I want to hear this.”
“I know a very nice man,” said Stephanie slyly. “Two of them, in fact.”
“Who?” Bun asked curiously, perking up from a reverie he'd fallen into. “What two nice men do you know? I don't think we know any.”
“Look, Vero,” said Marie, “don't get all sanctimonious with me. You never had anything nice to say about Dennis while we were together, so it doesn't wash that you're suddenly so loyal to him now.”
“Not loyal to him,” said Vero, “loyal to propriety.”
“Right,” said Marie. “You're the poster girl of propriety; I forgot.”
“Well, I like to think I am,” said Vero, holding her forkful of meat in midair, two spots of color high on her cheeks. “What on earth do I do that isn't absolutely proper?”
“Anyway, they're probably both present or former clients of mine, like everyone else around here,” said Marie dourly.
“Bun,” said Stephanie, “don't you think Jim and Marie would like each other?”
“Jim might like Marie, but she wouldn't like him,” said Bun.
All of the women ignored him.
“We'll have you both over for dinner,” Stephanie told Marie. “You can look him over at your leisure; I promise I won't say anything to him about you. He lives down in the city, but he comes up here every so often.”
“Maybe
I 'd
like Jim if he lives in the city,” said Vero. “Marie can have the other guy.”
“Arnold,” said Stephanie.
“I wouldn't want to marry him, though,” said Vero. “A husband? What would I do with a husband underfoot all the time? But I'd let the right person visit me every now and then, if I ever met him.”
Marie gave her a sidelong glance. “Visit you? Is that a nineteenth-century euphemism, or what?”
Vero was too busy with her fork and knife (which she handled, I noticed, the sophisticated continental way her parents had no doubt taught her, knife remaining in right hand and fork in left with tines facing down, rather than the gauche American switcheroo technique the rest of us were employing) to respond to this.
“So,” said Marie, turning to Bun and Stephanie, “who's Arnold? I don't like the name Arnold.”