“Bun, how would you describe Arnold?”
“Arnold,” said Bun democratically. “Well, he's a decent poker player, and he's reasonably well groomed.”
“Come on,” said Stephanie, “you can do better than that.”
“What do you want me to say? He's a guy,” said Bun to Marie. “Men don't describe each other. Right, Hugo? It's not done. We'd have to admit we looked at each other, and we're squeamish about such things. I admit, though, to peeking occasionally at a urinal, but only for comparative purposes.”
Again, he looked my way for affirmation. I regarded this curiosity of a man and didn't say anything. Who talked this way? How did a man who talked this way get a woman like Stephanie to marry him? I accepted anew the fact that I'll never understand my fellows no matter how long or closely I'm required to observe them.
“Okay, Bun,” said Marie, “but let's say you had to describe Arnold to a jury.”
“That I can do. He's shorter than I am but not by much, say five ten, balding but not bald, glasses, beaky nose, sallow skin, slight paunch,” said Bun. “A real catch.”
“Bun!” said Stephanie. “He does not have a paunch, Marie, he's just solid, and he's balding in a sexy way, and he's Jewish; it's that Mediterranean skin, which is actually more olive than sallow. Anyway, he's a writer, a novelist, and I think you might like him. And, Bun, that beaky-nose comment was just beyond the pale.”
“His nose,” said Bun, “is beaky. It's an objective fact.”
“Bring him on,” said Marie. “Beak and all. Why haven't I met these guys before?”
“Because you were married and had no need of them.”
“Oh, Stephanie,” said Vero. “I'm curious about something: did you and Bun fall prey to the ripple-effect syndrome when Marie and Dennis split up? You know, seismographic trauma in your own marriage caused by your friends’ breakup, making you question everything, et cetera?”
“That is quite frankly none of your business, Vero,” said Stephanie pleasantly.
“She means yes, we did,” said Bun. “We almost split up ourselves. Stephanie got the idea that our whole marriage was a fifteen-year mistake. I had to summon all my rhetorical powers, every lawyer trick I know, to persuade her otherwise. I'm still not entirely sure I succeeded.”
“I'm not entirely sure you succeeded either,” said Stephanie, smiling coldly at him, “but here we sit, man and wife, at dinner.”
“Well,” said Vero through an exhaled plume of smoke, “let's discuss Louisa, then. How is she working out?”
“All right, on the whole,” said Marie. “She's nice, Vero, but she's a little annoying sometimes. She's so eager to please, it gets on my nerves.”
“She is a great girl,” said Vero. “Her mind is one of the sharpest I've ever encountered in all my years of teaching. I'm encouraging her to apply to a few good schools during her year off.”
“When can we meet her?” asked Stephanie as Bun cleared
his throat and jiggled his knee up and down and looked around distractedly. “Bun, pay attention, you're acting like a three-year-old.”
“Twenty-year-old au-pair girls should be of paramount interest to middle-aged men,” said Vero. “You should be riveted by this conversation.”
“Twenty-year-old au-pair girls are of interest to me primarily when they're taking care of my own children,” said Bun. “Which I hope will happen someday soon.”
“Be nice to her,” said Vero to Marie. “She's had a rough time of it lately.”
“I am nice to her,” said Marie. “I'm nothing but nice.”
“What sort of rough time?” I asked.
“Oh, she's got a couple of dark secrets,” said Vero.
“She has?” said Marie.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” said Vero, “but they're secrets all the same. And she doesn't know I know, so I'm certainly not going to tell any of you.”
“Well, did she do something wrong?” Marie asked, laughing. “Is she a criminal?”
“I recommended her for a job in my sister's house, taking care of my two little nieces,” said Vero. “The children I care about more than anyone else in the world. Would I have done that if I didn't think absolutely highly of her and trust her completely?”
“They're my nieces too,” I said pleasantly, offhandedly. They all ignored me.
Stephanie and I washed the dishes together while everyone else sat around the table over cheese and fruit and Armagnac. Since
I'd crashed the party it seemed like the least I could do; also, although I tried not to seem too happy about it, this was my first and only chance to be alone with Stephanie. “He's always like this,” she said, handing me the salad bowl. “I think he thinks he's being charming and witty. He thinks this is adult conversation, to discuss his sexual problems and marital conflicts and vaguely anti-Semitic leanings. Well, not anti-Semitic, but he thinks his English master race is superior and doesn't mind if it shows. He thinks these are all things people want to hear about.”
I had discussed Bun Fox quite enough for one night. I was thoroughly sick of him.
“When can I take you out to dinner?” I asked, wiping the bowl clean with a paper towel so the wood gleamed with lingering traces of oil.
“How's a week from Monday?” she asked, in such a matter-of-fact way I wanted to leap in the air with something like joy. “The twelfth.”
“You're in luck,” I said. “I just happen to be free on the twelfth. You choose the time and place; keep in mind that the sky's the limit and I don't mind paying through the nose to eat well, especially when I lose a bet.”
“The Turtle Inn, at eight,” she said. “In the lounge.”
“Done,” I said. “So why did Dennis really call you tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what did he want? Besides just hearing the sound of your voice.”
“I thought you said…”
“What did you think I said?”
“I thought you said he didn't…”
I waited for her to give my lie right back to me, but her nerve seemed to fail her, or else she couldn't bear to say aloud that Dennis didn't want her because her heart was broken; either way, I didn't care, because I was the one having dinner
with her on Monday week. But I hadn't meant to give her any hope.
“Of course,” I said hastily. “But he regards both you and Bun as dear friends; he told me so.”
“Actually,” she went on after a moment, “he sounded lonely.”
“How can he be lonely when he has me?” I said, doing a little jig with the dish towel. Somehow we had switched places, so that she was washing now and I was drying. I wasn't sure suddenly how or when this had happened. Our bodies seemed to know the score a lot better than we did. I had also at some point begun to sport a semi-erection, which was now rubbing against the edge of the counter and threatening to grow into a whole one if I didn't switch on the thing in my brain that controlled it. “Please don't go fixing my sister-in-law up with some goon,” I said. “She has a husband already, Stephanie. I'm disappointed that Dennis's so-called friends would collude so easily in the ultimate destruction of his happy marriage.”
“He doesn't have a happy marriage!” she said, laughing. “No one does. So what if Marie wants a boyfriend?”
“I smell an ulterior motive,” I said agitatedly. “Stephanie, despite what you would no doubt love to believe about this situation, my brother's happiness depends upon his ultimate reconciliation with his wife. I have been doing everything in my power to help him bring this about. What do you think I'm doing here tonight? Do you think I was invited? Marie can't stand the sight of me. Normally I respect this and keep my distance from her. Tonight I dropped in uninvited, without any hope of thanks or appreciation, to encourage her to give him another chance. So I'm pained and even irritated by your attempts to thwart my altruistic scheme with a selfish one of your own.”
She laughed. “Are you, now?” she said. Her arms were bare in a black sleeveless shirt with little straps; she had taken off her
sweater during dinner. She has very nice arms. They are muscular, but imperfect: there are flaps of skin in the back, virtually the only part of Stephanie that betrays the fact that she is my own age, which is to say, middle-aged. I'm frequently at a loss to do verbal justice to the glorious mysteries and complexities of women's anatomies, but I find those flaps touching and vulnerable imperfections on an otherwise impeccably and even dauntingly muscular and perfect body. Although I'm sure she reviles them and would loathe my mentioning them, they only increase my already overwhelming desire for her. I am delighted that she is imperfect. She won an unwinnable bet, but— aha!—she has arm flaps. However, plunged into the dishwater, gleaming in the soapsuds like a doubloon in a sunken ship, her wedding ring looked silly and vestigial, especially now that I had met her husband.
“How are you feeling lately, Hugo?” she asked then, scrubbing the roast pan. “You're smoking as much as ever, I see, not that it's any of my business.”
“Yes,” I said.
“ ‘Mais que j'aie fait mes otrennes, honnite mort ne me dèplait.’
You'd like to know what the hell that means. Well, essentially it means that death is my fair due.”
“Showoff,” she said. “I don't buy that you really feel that way.”
“ ‘Mais oiX est le preux Charlemagne?’
Which is to say, my own mortality is more immediately in question than most, but we all share it. And according to Montaigne, the most pardonable suicide is one that allows escape from unbearable pain.”
“Oh, that's just bravado,” she said, staring hard at the caked-on lump of caramelized animal fat she was going at with a bit of steel wool. “You could easily cure yourself, you said so the other night. You just choose not to.”
“I'm no different from you or anyone else,” I said. “The human race is dying out too. The race could save itself if we all
collectively chose to forgo our addictive pleasures, fossil fuels, corporate growth, and ecological despoilment for our own gains, but collectively we choose not to, and so we will certainly perish. As for you, Stephanie Fox the individual, you're doing the same thing I am, only more slowly, and less honestly. You drive a car; you use plastic products; you do whatever the hell you do knowing full well that it's contributing to the end of everyone, and a lot of other animals besides. So don't get all more-life-affirming-than-thou with me, missy, you're on your way out too. In a way, you could see me as the canary down a mine shaft, or maybe synecdoche, the small part representing the whole.”
“I know what synecdoche means.”
“Of course you do.”
“When you're really dying, or even when you really face amputation and immobility, I'll bet you won't sound so macho and devil-may-care about all this. I bet you another dinner that you'll quit smoking long before it gets bad enough to make you kill yourself.”
“You're on,” I said. “It's a bet. It almost makes me want to lose, just for the pleasure of buying you another meal. How will I collect if I win, though?”
She busied herself then, and didn't answer. Scrub, scrub. At this rate those arm flaps would be gone; she attacked the underside of the pan, which probably hadn't been washed in ten years. My erection, I was interested to note, was gone, poof. I stood there watching her, the wet dish towel folded neatly over my forearm as if I were the maître d’ in some down-at-heels bistro. She rinsed the shining, like-new roast pan, set it in the now empty (thanks to my rigor with the dish towel) dish rack, and pulled the plug to drain the now gray water from the sink. It glug-glugged steadily for a while as it ran out into the pipes, then all at once it sucked itself violently away down the drain, and was gone.
“I know I'm right,” she said then, stubbornly.
“I love it when someone reads my mind,” I said. “It makes me want to sing and dance.”
“Of course it does,” she said with a smile, turning to look at me. “And when are you going to tell Dennis that you're sick? It's not right that your own brother doesn't know.”
“He wouldn't care,” I said breezily.
“You have to tell him, Hugo.”
“You seem to have a lot of strong opinions about all this,” I said, “although you did preface them by reminding both of us that it's my beeswax you're minding here.”
I'd had the impression that she had been about to say a lot more, but she let it drop. “Let's go have some dessert,” she said. She'd had a brisk sound in her voice, I realized, since this topic had arisen. The topic of my death. Which didn't exactly arise: she brought it up.
We rejoined the others at table. The rest of the night went by, I had some fresh warm gingerbread and coffee, then a snifter of Armagnac and some very good cheddar and a sliced pear, and then I thanked Marie and said good night to everyone else and came home.
Dennis was awake, sitting at the kitchen table with a book, a glass and an opened bottle of wine. Of course the book was
Anna Karenina.
I took my new bottle of whiskey from my coat pocket and set it on the table. Then I got a glass from the cupboard. The glasses had recently, I was interested to see, been arranged as I had requested. I felt an internal click of satisfaction.
I pulled up a chair and poured some whiskey into the glass.
“Where have you been?” Dennis asked. He looked to be in some need of attention.
“Your old house,” I said. “For dinner.”
“Where?”
“Marie's house,” I repeated patiently. Dennis is always a bit thick when you catch him off guard with unexpected information about any goings-on that don't directly involve him. I often suspect that he imagines the world is a dark stage on which he himself is the sole spotlit actor. “She was having a dinner party,” I added cruelly. “Bun and Stephanie Fox were there, as well as her awful sister, Vero.”
He looked crestfallen. “She invited you over for dinner?”
“I dropped by,” I said.
He ran both hands over his face as if he could just erase all this. “And she invited you to stay?”
“Well,” I said, “she did. I think she was feeling in need of a stand-in for you somehow. She seemed to recollect all at once that I am her brother after all. She makes the most delicious roast. You never told me.”
“You never asked,” he said with a grim smile.
“I dropped by,” I said, “in order to ascertain her agreeability to your return. I was trying to do you a favor.”