“You see extra gables and eaves on the house, do you?” said Dennis.
“It looks terrible. The proportions of the house were bad enough before, but now it's monstrous. What did you do?”
“Well, today I finished the bathroom wall,” he said, glancing at me with honest concern. “I raked leaves and straightened the tool shed so in the spring it'll be easier to figure out what to do about the yard.”
“Hugo,” mewed Bellatrix.
“What happened to ‘Dad’?” I asked. “I found it enchantingly ironic to be called ‘Dad.’ ”
“I don't want to call you that any more,” she said. “Because of what we said. Anyway, can you play my hand for a second? I have to go to the bathroom.” She handed over a grubby fan of cards.
I took it and peered suspiciously at it. “You've got them organized wrong,” I muttered, moving cards around with impatient little snaps of my wrist.
She didn't hear me; she had scampered off to the loo.
“Hugo,” said Sonia, finally deigning to speak, in a low,
sonorous voice that was evidently intended to convey her disappointment in me. “Hugo, it's bad for your daughter to see you like this.”
“It's all right,” I said. “She knows she's not my daughter. Now nothing I do can affect her in any way.”
Sonia slammed her hand against the table. “Don't joke about this!”
“It's no joke, Sonia,” I said with the unfortunate little laugh I produce when startled.
“You think this is funny?”
“Hugo,” said Dennis, “are you crazy?”
I flicked a chilly eye at him. “What the fuck business is it of yours, you cocksucking asshole?” It felt good to say; I could see what Shlomo was up to.
This rocked him back on his figurative heels a little, although he was sitting down. He inhaled sharply, suddenly all flushed. “Well, Hugo, it's the same sort of business my wife's life apparently is of yours. You yourself seem to have nothing better to do than interfere in other people's private lives. Why don't you do something around here instead of drinking and smoking and living off Dad's money while the house falls down?”
“Good question,” I said, “and thank you for the fraternal concern.”
I put Bellatrix's cards facedown on the table, stalked over to the counter, and began to rustle busily in my small bag of groceries. I was ravenous, despite the unappetizing detritus from the dinner Sonia had made. Raw red pepper just wasn't going to cut it. That had been for a different man. I needed real food; I needed food that didn't remind me of Stephanie, or my lovesick funk of the past week or two. Luckily, I had planned ahead and thought to add to my basket a nice big slab of aged porterhouse, two baking potatoes, and a rubber-banded swath of bitter-smelling broccoli rabe.
“Seriously,” said Dennis obtusely, “why don't you? Why did you end up like this?”
“He used to be a writer,” Sonia interjected. “He was working on two books. His work was rough and juvenile, but had a certain originality.”
“Actually,” I said, “I wrote two books. In that I completed them.”
Dennis looked at me with concern, of all things. “I never knew that,” he said.
“It never crossed my mind to tell you,” I said wearily. “And by the way, another thing you probably didn't know is that Sonia used to be an actress. Actually, she was a con artist pretending to be a performance artist who aspired to be an actress. But that all ended the minute she got onto my payroll. You could say, of the two of us, she's the greater success at her chosen vocation.”
“Pah,” Sonia spat. What else could she say? She couldn't deny it. I allowed my shoulders to shake with silent laughter, taking cold comfort in amusement at others’ expense wherever I could, as was my God-given right.
Dennis wasn't listening. “You know what your problem is?” he asked.
“I know all too well what my problem is,” I said.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bellatrix lurking in the doorway, out of sight of Dennis and Sonia, hovering there as if she knew exactly what bombs had been detonating in the kitchen in her absence and knew better than to walk into a catastrophe. I caught her eye and winked at her. She frowned and shook her head. Apparently she was in on this collective dressing-down of Hugo. And here I'd thought we were beginning to be allies. Just went to show, you could never trust anyone, which I'd never actually forgotten.
“All right,” Sonia burst out; she had been fulminating after my crack about her acting, and now she had her answering
salvo ready to go. “She's your daughter, Hugo. If you think she's not, then why don't you get a DNA test and prove it?”
I flicked an eye over to the subject of this conversation, but she didn't look back at me. She stared raptly into the middle distance, as if she were listening with all her ears.
“That's a bluff,” I said. As I talked I patted the steak with a paper towel, then rubbed it with a little oil and salt and put it in a broiling pan and set it aside for the nonce. “You know I'd never subject us all to that. Frankly, I like her fine, she's a talented musician and an upstanding citizen, but I'm not her father. No tragedy there for her.”
“He is lying,” she said to Dennis.
“I believe you,” he said foolishly. Clearly my own self-imposed restrictions against attractions to women my brother had a claim on didn't cut both ways.
Sonia gave him a soulful look that verged on the bovine.
“I know it's none of my actual business, but why isn't she in school?” I asked. “She's almost eleven, am I correct? Shouldn't she be spending her days in some classroom somewhere?”
Sonia stared at me. “You big idiot,” she said. “She goes to school five days a week. I enrolled her right after we got here.”
At this, I caught a faint smile from the upstanding citizen hiding in the shadows.
“Well,” I said, “good. Because that's the law of the land.” I scrubbed the potatoes at the sink, poked a few holes in them— perhaps stabbing them a little more vehemently than was strictly necessary—then rubbed them in oil and stuck them in the toaster oven on the counter to bake at 450 degrees.
Standing in the center of my kingdom, I surveyed its progress: family in a bit of a shambles, meat ready to go, potatoes under way, broccoli rabe to wash, chop coarsely, then put to steam in chicken broth and chopped garlic. More whiskey, certainly. I topped off my glass and set about chopping garlic heads. Sonia
and Dennis and Bellatrix, from her outpost, all watched me silently, each no doubt thinking admiring and complimentary things about my cooking skills, which weren't being taxed in any way by this simple exercise.
“You were going to tell me what my problem is,” I prompted Dennis.
“Your problem,” said Dennis, “is that you have lost all hope. Hope is not something you sit around and wait to have hit you in the side of the head. Hope is something you cultivate and develop through action—it's a skill.” He paused. “It's a moral necessity,” he added then, firmly.
“What I hope,” I said, “is that when you all go away again my solitary meditations will be that much richer, that much more fruitful, for having been violated during this brief interlude.”
“Do you ever engage with anything sincerely?” Dennis asked sincerely.
“Why, whatever do you mean?” I asked.
“You know what I mean,” he replied.
I laughed.
In the ensuing silence, I scraped the chopped garlic into a nice-sized heavy copper pan, then poured a little chicken broth into it.
“What has happened to you, Hugo?” said Sonia. “Something went wrong in your head before Bellatrix was born. I thought maybe, after all this time… I don't know why I was stupid enough to hope you would have recovered from it by now. Why should you have done that?”
I snapped the rubber band off the rabe and plunged it under the stream of cold water in the sink. I shook it gently, rolled it all around a little, so the water distributed itself evenly on the thick stalks of leaf and bud, and shook it again.
“Poor Hugo,” Sonia said in her “concerned” voice. “Dennis, I told you he's dying. We cannot stand by and let this happen.”
Bellatrix chose that moment to rejoin us. She slid into her
chair and took up her cards coolly, as if she'd heard none of the foregoing.
“Actually,” Dennis said, “the way I see it, he's choosing to kill himself this way. He's a big boy.”
For the first time in about twenty-five years, I almost liked him.
“I cannot believe,” Sonia said to him in the nineteenth-century manner, as if her heart were swollen with a distress so intense she could hardly speak, “that you are on his side.”
“I'm not at all,” said Dennis. “But he's got nothing to live for. He's not even any kind of father to his own daughter. To a man like me, with my strong paternal urges and sense of responsibility, that's the worst wrong you can commit. Might as well die if that's how you're going to play your hand.”
“I'm not on his side,” said Bellatrix softly, looking through her eyelashes at her mother. “I think it's stupid to smoke.”
Sonia stroked Bellatrix's wan locks with an absent, listless hand.
I burst out laughing at the sight of that fake limp white hand, but after one exhalation of laughter I realized it sounded insane, because there was obviously nothing to laugh at, so I forced myself to stop. In immediate playback, I realized that the whole thing had sounded as if I had barked like a dog out of nowhere, at nothing. Barking mad.
“Dad died before you really knew him,” said Dennis. “You couldn't have learned what I learned from him.”
“Dennis,” I said, “what can you possibly be trying to say?”
“Look at yourself,” said Dennis.
I looked down at my shirt, which was clean.
“Your wife left you ten years ago,” he went on. “You've been alone ever since, doing nothing.”
“This line of inquiry is so tedious I can't even—”
“He went crazy on me, Dennis,” Sonia burst out, clutching Bellatrix's hand. Not for the first time, I had the feeling that she
would have happily played all our parts if we had let her, like a one-woman melodrama with an accordian-folded piece of paper pinched in the middle that doubled as the heroic Dennis's bow tie and the villainous Hugo's mustache. Instead, she had to content herself with bringing to her portrayal of Sonia all her black and sparkling intensity. “That's why I left. I was afraid of him. Every time I went to the grocery store and stayed away five minutes too long because of a line at the checkout, or traffic, I would come home and find him in a rage, ready to stab me through the heart. Then, when I got pregnant…” Her voice caught with the precious memory of this pregnancy, during which she was a hormonally raving madwoman, in almost constant agony from morning sickness and backaches. “… he lost it, he went crazy.”
“I brought you bowls of ice cream at three in the morning,” I reminded her. “I massaged your feet, I stroked your head. I felt like I was living with my mother again, in fact. And I never complained. I was devoted to you, you bitch.”
“The things you call me in front of our child,” she said, suddenly haggard with pain. The air in here was so thick I could hardly breathe, and it wasn't the cigarette smoke.
“You like them well enough when it's just the two of us,” I pointed out.
“Hugo,” said Dennis warningly, “don't say these things in front of Bellatrix. This is her mother you're talking about.”
He was right—I do happen to know when I'm out of line— but I was inflamed, I was a bloodhound on the trail of a weasel, and I couldn't stop to protect the young and tender heart of an innocent bystander.
“You wonder why this marriage failed?” I asked Dennis. “Ask Sonia. Given the turn of affairs, so to speak, in what I had viewed as a lifelong marriage, I could have sent her off without a sou, but my sense of responsibility, instilled in me by the same father who gave you yours, forbade me. Bellatrix,” I added with
sincere apology, “I'm sorry. She's your mother and the only one you have, and I don't actually know who your father is, because I could never catch her….”
“Catch her what?” Bellatrix asked, as well she should have.
At this rate my dinner would never get done. Couldn't they genetically engineer quick-baking potatoes on the same principle as fast-rising yeast? I poured myself some more whiskey.
“You,” said Sonia to me, “are so fucking insane.”
“Such language in front of the child,” I said.
“You didn't catch me,” said Sonia, “because there was nothing to catch. Never, Hugo, not even once.”
She gave Dennis a trembling, saccharine smile; he was obviously the intended audience for this little display. Dennis made a move from across the table as if he were about to leap to his feet and embrace her, but thought better of it and managed to restrain himself.
“Well, once was all it would have taken,” I said back. “ ‘Not even once’? Once would have been a bullet in my head. But it was a lot more. How many women do you think I've ever loved enough to marry? Let's take a head count.”
“Oh, Hugo,” she moaned “piteously,” as Dickens might have called it. “You never used to be so bitter. You became so paranoid. But in the early days of our love, you were such a prince, Hugo, such a romantic and tender husband. We were so happy together. Why did you have to change? You broke my heart!” Her voice broke.
“Did you cheat on him, Mama?” asked Bellatrix.
Sonia covered her eyes with her hands, apparently too overcome to answer.
Bellatrix looked straight at me. I looked back at her. Then she turned and tapped her mother on the shoulder. “Did you, Mama? Tell me.”
“I cannot believe you are asking me such a question,” Sonia said in a hard voice, her face pressed to her hands.
“Look at me and answer,” Bellatrix persisted. “I want to know.”
“Bellatrix,” Sonia said, “don't listen to him, he is really crazy.”
“Mama, look at me.” Bellatrix put her hand on her mother's cheek and tried to lift it to her own eye level.
Sonia resisted, sinking her face even lower in her hands. Bellatrix looked up at me with a bewildered, compassionate stare.
“There's your answer, Bellatrix, and it might be the only one you ever get,” I said with equal compassion, and turned to prod the potatoes to hurry them along.