Afterward she asked me in her same old ragged postcoital voice to cook her a midnight supper, as I used to do in the old days. I had already cooked for two women that day, and now I found myself cooking for another one.
I have thought seriously about this, while my leg rotted out
from under me and my house fell down around my ears and a handful of desperadoes destroyed an ugly but symbolic part of the city that used to be the seat of my most cherished and treasured nostalgia, and I believe that all self-respecting American kitchens should be organized in such a way that any cook, at any time of day or night, can quickly make a satisfying meal from staples in cupboard and refrigerator. I've always prided myself on keeping on hand a permanent selection of ingredients—a jug of olive oil, bottles of hot sauce, cooking wine, and Worcestershire sauce, beef and chicken broth (usually I make my own, but in a pinch I'll use the best commercial brands available), jars of olives, pine nuts, and capers, cans of clams, shrimp, and tuna, boxes of noodles and cornmeal, onions, shallots, and garlic, frozen peas, lima beans, and spinach, hunks of Parmesan and Gruyère, cans of tomato purée, chickpeas, and white beans—ingredients that will yield, in various combinations and permutations, in roughly the time it takes noodles or polenta to cook, something that satisfies that particular late-night itch for savory comfort.
I didn't make anything as special as Seafood Newburg for Sonia, of course. While the elbow macaroni cooked, I sautéed minced shallots and garlic in oil, then added white cooking wine and a little chicken broth, black pepper, drained rinsed white beans, a can of tuna, and some frozen peas. I sprinkled the simmering stew with red-pepper flakes and fresh black pepper, and when the noodles were done I tossed the whole mess together and dished it up with grated cheese and a small dish of capers. I availed myself of the pine nuts but didn't offer her any, out of a perverse wish to have a better supper than she was getting. In retrospect, I'm even gladder about this now than I was in that moment, if such a thing is possible.
Sonia ate as she always has eaten, shoveling the food from plate to lowered face with rapid fork. I ate as I have always eaten,
painstakingly, savoring every bite with a prearranged order and design.
We ate it all up, and wiped our plates with pieces of bread. I lit a cigarette when both our plates were gleaming and empty. It was after midnight, and the house was quiet. Dennis was asleep, or at least elsewhere.
“You're not well,” Sonia said; she has never been able to let a comfortable silence get too comfortable. “Not healthy. I can tell. It's the cigarettes, isn't it. You're in pain a lot too, and you walk with a limp.”
I stared at her. She looked back at me with her skewed indigo eyes.
A certain knowledge descended on me like an avalanche.
“You can't tell anything,” I said, and laughed. The calmness of my voice, if she but knew it, might have been, if I were a different man, the one slender thread that sheltered her from certain death by evisceration and disemboweling with a butcher's knife, her exposed insides then to be sprinkled liberally with salt and lemon juice. If the line between sex and food is fine, the one between cooking and murder is finer still.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “I can tell.”
“I know how you know that, Sonia, and you can't lie. You read my notebook. You went snooping up to my private room when you first got here, with no right whatsoever to be there, and you found my notebook and read it, and now you have the gall to refer to what you read as if you had dreamed it up yourself. Frankly, I'm amazed and disappointed that you're still alive and no one has run you through with a dull blade yet. Of course, you've read my notebook, so you know what I think about the past and how I feel about you, and why. You knew I didn't want you here when we first saw each other, but you stayed anyway.”
She had the grace to look unnerved. “Hugo,” she said in a
wheedling breathy whine I know all too well, “you're still so paranoid, Hugo, always. Why? You have nothing to fear from me, I'm here for our daughter, Hugo, and to see you again. You were my great love. A woman knows when her husband isn't feeling well.”
She says my name repeatedly when she's lying, in order to flatter, lull, hypnotize me so I'll forget what I'm angry about.
“Sonia,” I said, fighting fire with fire, “Sonia. Sonia. You don't fool me now and you never did.”
“Hugo,” she snapped, “I know you, don't forget. You haven't changed at all, over these years. You still pretend you don't care about yourself. I know you're sick because you don't look well; I haven't seen you in all these years, and you've changed. Someone who saw you every day might not be able to tell. I can because I knew you so well in those days.”
“People don't change,” I said. “No one does. Why should I be any different?”
“Do you know what it means, to die? Have you thought about what this will do to our daughter, who's just met you?”
“She's no daughter of mine,” I said, laughing.
Sonia gasped as if I'd slapped her. This made me feel zingy and terrific.
“How can you say that?” she said, her mouth hanging open like a thirsty weasel's.
“If she were my daughter,” I said reasonably, or so I flattered myself I sounded, “I would know it. She's nothing like me at all. Her father was obviously one of the other men you strung along, you heinous slut, you porn rat, you dishwater skank. Was it old Albert the caretaker? He's dead now, by the way, so if he's her father she'll have to cope with that somehow. Was it your holistic therapist?”
“He was a homosexual!”
“So you said.”
“He was!”
“So you said.”
She had begun to hyperventilate, an old trick she's always used during fights to throw me off. “You,” she said with venom, “should behave like a father instead of pretending she's nothing to do with you. If you're determined to kill yourself, at least grow up a little before you go.”
I rolled my eyes. “Actually,” I said, “none of this surprises me at all. You're still as vicious and scheming as you ever were.”
“I am not what you think,” she said hotly. “You never knew me, and you never will now.”
“Did you let Dennis read it too? Did you tell him about Stephanie?”
Unconvincingly, true to form, she denied everything. Per-spicaciously, and equally true to form, I saw through it. I knew she was lying, she knew I knew, and so forth. If I took myself or my life or anything else seriously I might have killed her, or at least sought some means of retaliation, but as far as I can see, the rest of my life should be dedicated to pure enjoyment. What else is there? Life is but a dream.
I went up to bed and lay awake, sweating, steeling myself against a particularly relentless onslaught on my nerve endings, until dawn.
I got up shortly after the sun came up and went downstairs to forage for some toast and coffee. I walked in on Dennis on the phone in the dining room with his back to me. He had it pressed to his ear while I stood and watched him, and then he abruptly hit the disconnect button and clonked the phone onto the table.
As if he sensed me standing there, he whirled around. “Oh,” he said enthusiastically, “you're up early.”
“I certainly am,” I said. “Making crank calls?”
He looked puzzled. “Want some coffee? It's freshly made.”
“In a minute,” I said. “Who were you calling?”
“None of your business.”
“Yes,” I said, “that may be true, but you and I have no history of respecting each other's privacy, so I'll reiterate: Who were you calling just now? Your wife?”
“Like I said, coffee's made. I'm taking my cup out to the porch.”
He walked past me, out of the room, toward the porch. If that was really where he was going.
I picked up the phone and hit redial. It rang a few times, and then an answering machine clicked on. As I expected, I heard Marie's recorded voice saying the usual things, out or unable to come to the phone, leave a message, etc.
I went out to the porch with my own cup of coffee and said to my brother, “Why do you call your own family and hang up without leaving a message or talking to anyone?”
He took a sip of coffee with an expression of innocent absorption, as if he were the protagonist of a novel about an intelligent, sensitive, handsome man beleaguered by the combined forces of fate, change, time, and the inferiority of everyone around him. “I'm thinking of moving back to the city,” he said. “Get myself a loft in TriBeCa, be closer to the gallery.”
This took me so aback I had to sit down immediately in the chair nearest to his. The willows at the foot of the lawn looked exhausted this morning, like the unwashed hair of overworked waitresses; the river had that glum, pissy look it gets sometimes, as if it were just sick of running along in the same old goddamned riverbed, century in, century out. Since the end of its golden era, the attentions and celebrations of the Hudson River School of painters, the river must have been in something of a snit. Getting to end its eternal run straddled by George Washington and shooting its wad into New York Harbor can't possibly be adequate recompense.
“Why are you moving to New York?” I asked.
“Part of it,” said Dennis piously, “is that I'm beginning to feel ready to get back into the life down there now that I'm single again. The girls can come down and visit; it would be more fun for them than coming here. Anyway, your family is back now, so it makes sense that you'd like me to clear out so you can all be alone together. I feel a bit like a third wheel, actually.”
I filed this surprising knowledge away for later use. “Even though my family and I have nothing to do with each other?”
“Oh, I think that's because I'm here,” he said.
I examined his face closely for any glimmering of irony or self-knowledge but as usual found none whatsoever. “Really?” I said, raising my eyebrows over the rim of my coffee cup.
“Of course,” he said. “Sonia and I have always had a very friendly connection, and because I have daughters, it's only natural that Bella” (I almost snorted at this hilariously unlikely nickname, but forbore, so as not to shake him from his topic and disrupt this revealing conversation) “should gravitate to me. I'm used to little girls, I'm good with them; you've never been a father before, you've never really taken to my own daughters. And from living with Marie all these years, I'm used to women too. I really do feel, though, that, with me out of your hair and a bit of time, you'll get the hang of it. I was always so ambitious, so domineering, so focused, it must have been difficult to be my younger brother. The fact that I have a successful career, I've raised children, bought my own house…” He didn't finish the sentence, just let it trail off into a marsh of implications.
I nodded as if in complete agreement.
“Why do you think I had to disappear for all those years when we were young?” I asked with a hangdog expression.
“I can imagine why,” he said. “I can also completely understand why you've been so paralyzed all these years, why your
marriage failed so quickly. I told Sonia I thought it was courageous of her to come back and give it another shot with you.”
I had an immediate image of Dennis and Sonia, late at night around the kitchen table, hunkered elbow to elbow with my bottle of whiskey between them while Sonia played Dennis like a violin, more specifically like the violin of a certain someone who was at that moment sleeping in my mother's former bed.
“Did you,” I said.
“She said she had never stopped loving you, all these years, and she just couldn't give up on you.”
“Ah,” I said. “You still haven't answered my question.”
“Which question?”
“About your crank calls to Marie.”
“Crank calls? Me, to Marie? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I hit redial just now and got her machine, which you had just hung up on. I might add that it wasn't the first time this has happened.”
“I'm under surveillance?”
“Are you trying to scare Marie into taking you back?”
He shook his head in mock disgust. I'd struck a nerve.
“That strikes me as semi-dirty pool,” I said mildly, “not that I'm above dirty pool myself, but you at least pretend to be.”
His nose twitched as if he'd suddenly smelled something off-putting and foul. “Why are you suddenly Marie's champion? And why are you suddenly going over to that house for dinner?”
“Someone's got to keep her company since you spend all your evenings in cozy chummy little tête-à-têtes with Sonia.”
There followed the usual rounds eight, nine, ten, all a draw; I'm used to it now. No one owns up to a thing at Waverley, myself included; no doubt there's something in the air or water. Well, he knows I know. That's all we can hope for around here.
Then I went into the kitchen and made my annual batch of mincemeat out of finely chopped cooked beef hearts and livers, plenty of lard, nuts, dried fruit, and brandy, and packed it into sealed jars to fester in the pantry like garum until Christmas. I don't know who will eat it this year; I don't know where I'll be.
Dennis's moving to New York provokes in me, in addition to relief and delight, a torrent of nostalgia. This nostalgia is somewhat bogus, or at least it's someone else's. If I had chosen to have the kind of life in which I behaved as if I were some sort of protagonist of a novel the way Dennis does, which I manifestly have not, I would have settled in New York City. All self-styled protagonists of novels seem to migrate there self-consciously, to seek their own kind—all the other former drama nerds, bookish eggheads, debate-club champs, chess prodigies, and school-orchestra dweebs, anyone too loud, egotistical, big for his britches, blatantly hungry, alienated, and overweening to make a big splash in the high-school yearbook, marry another lowbrow popular sort who likewise peaked at sixteen—anyone too much of a misfit to remain contentedly in the provinces. Not to mention all those hundreds of thousands of other, Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants, that abrasive sect of Jews in medieval garb, the hordes of Negroes and Orientals. A recipe for disaster: take this stomach-turning Otherness, the maddening fact that the city proper is not like anywhere else despite the current mayor's determination to turn it into another Akron, not to mention what's generally agreed upon by natives and tourists from the hinterlands alike to be its incandescent, unquenchable allure and thrum, and you get a bubbling, messy stew of emotions in various outsiders, among them fundamentalist terrorists and myopic schlubs who would never be able to cut the mustard in New York themselves. I hasten to add, I am not one of these; I think I most likely could have cut the mustard there if I'd had any sort of hot dog I wanted to put it on.