The Epicure's Lament (29 page)

“Oh my God,” said Dennis, staring at Sonia, looking very pale.

December 10—Finally, a break in the weather. Today is sunny, and I slept through the night with the help of my new drugs. I have nothing to say, because I didn't talk to a soul yesterday. Everyone kept a healthy distance from me, and I from everybody, and the day passed without incident, and now my mind, insulated by this one clear, clean, solitary day from the tangled mess of the day before it, is comfortable once more, soothed by the brief respite from my fellow humans.

A respite that just ended with a phone call from Fag Uncle Tommy. I just hung up the phone a few minutes ago. No one else is home.

It can't be. Or else it's part of a cosmic joke on me, one or the other, but I don't believe I'm important enough to have a cosmic joke of any degree played on me, even by my patron saint, Loki. Therefore, this isn't happening.

My father's elder brother, Tom, no doubt dying of AIDS at over seventy years old after a happy lifetime of sticking his pecker up other men's rectums in bathhouses, gay bars, Fire Island shares, bus-station men's rooms, and countless other creepy homo fucky-fucky hotspots, has announced that he is coming back to his childhood house, I assume to die; I further assume that the drugs are no longer working for him, and that, although he must have managed to stave off the full-blown disease for a number of years with a combination of the new AIDS medications, his number is now up.

He asked that his childhood bedroom in the tower be made available to him—which is to say, my room; which is to say a little more vehemently, the room I've been living in since my mother's funeral and have made my sanctuary and in which I myself want to die. The thing is, he has more of a right to be here than either Dennis or I: he is my father's only brother and owns half the house, whereas Dennis and I each own a quarter. Fag Uncle Tommy's got
droit de seigneur
, in a manner of speaking. Plus, he's dying more legitimately than I am: he's got something that could have been prevented by abstaining from his own particular addiction, or at least by doing it a little differently but can't be cured by stopping, whereas the thing I've got… Well, this might be Talmudic nit-picking. He's old and dying, I'm young and dying, so his death trumps mine.

Tommy is a very nice man, a trifle querulous at times, and not overly intelligent, but a nice, kind, gentle man about whom nothing worse can be said than that he always seemed like a limp-wristed pansy to me, with his high, fluted voice and his dandyish clothes and his taste in Broadway musicals and certain Verdi arias sung by other pansy-sounding fluted-voiced men or big ball-crushing divas. Well, he's a fag, what did I expect him to be like? He said just now, “I have no one else to go to, nowhere else to go.” Our father would come down from heaven and knock Dennis's and my heads together hard enough
to cause brain damage if we didn't do everything in our power to make the end of his beloved only brother Tommy's life as warm, easy, comfortable, and carefree as humanly possible. There is no doubt plenty of money still in Tommy's coffers to hire round-the-clock care for himself, but nonetheless I thought it the thing to do—the beau geste, in other words—to reassure him in return that Waverley currently offers quite a few people to provide a family for a lonely, sick old man, all with plenty of time to cater to any of his needs—turning over his Bette Midler records, fluffing up his pillows, playing cards with him, and fetching him another gin cocktail, for example, for all of which, I craftily thought, Bellatrix will certainly come in handy.

I am going to go out of my exploding fucking skull—I want to wring Fag Uncle Tommy's chicken neck and throw him down every flight of stairs in the house, or at least physically force him, doddering old weakling that he is, to sleep in any other bedroom but mine. I want to leave squashed-up dead shrimp in the floorboards of my room, once I vacate it, to render it uninhabitable to any semihuman nose. In short, I seem to be reacting to this turn of affairs with all the maturity of a five-year-old monster.

And then, to make matters worse, after I wrote the foregoing, the phone rang again. It was Stephanie.

“Dennis,” she said.

“No,” I said, and my heart pounded, annoyingly “This is Hugo. Hello, Stephanie.”

“Hugo,” she said, slightly more coolly. “Hello. Is Dennis around?”

“No, he's not,” I said. “You stood me up the other night.” “This isn't a good time to have this conversation,” she said crisply.

“All right,” I said. “When would be a better time?” “Please tell Dennis to give me a call,” she said. “It's urgent.” “I will, if you'll agree to have this conversation with me another time.”

“Hugo,” said Stephanie, “I'm hanging up now.” And she did. And then I stared at the receiver for a while. It seems I have, unless I'm mistaken, just been roundly, unceremoniously dumped. Rudely too. By someone I thought I was in love with, completely unexpectedly, just as I thought our affair was reaching some sort of critical mass.

Maybe she rejected me because she feels guilty about her betrayal of her husband. Or is it that she can't bear to get too close to a man she knows she'll lose? Since she won't tell me, I'm left fearing the worst: I wrecked it somehow, I fucked it up, and it's highly likely I'll never know what I did or could have done differently.

I could go mad, I realize as I parse this thing out to its furthest implications. There is nothing more disquieting than loving someone who does not love you back and won't tell you why, or give you any sort of glimmering of understanding. The insanity of heartbreak lies in the unfathomable mystery of another's heart—how can she not feel exactly the way I do? In other, more plaintive and pathetic words, how can she not feel joyous and enthralled about our time together, and yearn for more of it? How can she seem to feel so indifferent to me, so coldly uninterested? I had thought we were experiencing something together, and now it appears I've been a fool. There are no words to describe how humiliating and disappointing this is.

Well, of course there are words, I feel some heading down my arm into the pen now. Sonia disappointed me all those years
ago; I thought I had learned my lesson, which was to stay away from anyone who might make me vulnerable and trusting and therefore ripe for betrayal. In other words, to flirt with the Stewart's cashier, although, for all I know, if our affair ever got off the ground, she might smash my frail heart to bits of hamburger meat and squoosh them into the dirt with her sneaker heel. Stephanie was a bit of revenge on my brother, as I recall; the genesis of my interest in her lay in my urge to thwart his own. A spot of fun, I thought I'd have, at Dennis's expense, with a woman I didn't care about at all; she was a healthy specimen and clearly in need of a good fucking.

Which means I poached my brother's game, sort of. Which is another thing I've always sworn I wouldn't do.

There were moments between us in Atlantic City, disconnected, anxious, which I may have overlooked because of the idiot swoon that had overtaken me, but which are occurring to me now, for the first time, with a little clarity and some perspective, not to mention a healthy reason to examine them closely.

Now that she has maltreated the heart I proffered her without reservation, a certain expression of blandly snooty preoccupation, which at the time I chalked up to her superiority to all other mortals and her understandable impatience with us all, returns to my mind's eye with a different interpretation: I suspect she may simply be just that, blandly snooty and preoccupied. She certainly sounded snootily preoccupied just now on the telephone, and her voice was bland. Worse—she sounded disdainful and brusque. Rude! My love is like a red, red rose with thorns.

She sings horribly, embarrassingly, speaking of that poem. On our way to Atlantic City she sang along with a song on the radio, one I in fact deplore, which was popular when Stephanie and I were seventeen or so, by a group called Heart. “Oh, this
song!” she cried approvingly when the opening chords issued forth from her truck radio, sounding even more tinnily cheap for the tinny cheapness of her speakers. And then her voice chimed in with the singers’, surprisingly nasal, tuneless, and as bad as her taste in music. I thought it charming, back when I believed she was equally charmed by me.

And occasionally there would fall between us an odd silence, although I felt, as I recall, that I had no end of things to tell and ask her. I thought it indicated, once more, her superior depth of character to mine, her thoughtfulness and inscrutability, and respected her desire for silence, proud of my ability to understand her complex and subtle inner workings so early on in what I assumed would be an ongoing liaison. This silence was, I realize now, strained and without mercy, brought about by her lack of interest in me and her self-absorption.

And then there was the matter of that hangover remedy, the beer with tomato juice. “I don't want one,” I said firmly as we sat at the Poseidon Grill's booth, the one in the bar, nearest the door, because I didn't much care for the looks of the meaty-forearmed, beer-bellied, tattooed Hell's Angels types in the back room, and thought I might need to beat a hasty retreat if they happened to feel the same way about me when they got a gander at me.

“No,” she said, “you have to have one, Hugo. Trust me, you'll love it. They're really good, I promise.”

Like a sap I let her order me one, and like an even sappier sap I choked the damn thing down, sip by revolting sip. I got myself through it without gagging because I was focusing on Stephanie, who was reading me bits of the newspaper, which I also told her I didn't want.

“I don't like to hear any news over breakfast,” I said. “Or ever, really.”

“Oh, Hugo,” she said with a smile that wrenched my heart,
“don't be such an ostrich. We have to know what's going on in the world.”

“Why is that, exactly?”

“Because otherwise we'll just live our myopic lives of luxury and ease, thinking the whole world has it this good. Knowing about famine and war and torture of political prisoners at least allows us the illusion that we're compassionate and aware. It alleviates some of the guilt from our happy little lives.”

“I don't have a happy little life,” I said. “I have plenty of my own misery, and don't want to know about anyone else's. I don't feel any guilt anyway. What I feel is a hangover, and I would appreciate being left to it.”

I wasn't joking, but she laughed heartily and began to read aloud from the front page.

And, sap that I was, I sipped my medicine and kept my piehole shut. My headache was like… a headache. No more metaphors after that visit from Young Hugo.

I watched this woman I had just fucked for three days straight reading aloud things that hurt my brain, and choked down a noxious concoction she had forced upon me, and I was so gaga I didn't put it all together: She had no interest in what I might or might not have wanted, anything I myself might have thought would be a good idea to drink or not to drink. She wanted me to be her puppet, and I obliged.

What a fool I was. That's exactly what happened with Sonia, and Sonia betrayed me in the worst imaginable way.

But although I may still be as much of a sap as ever, at least now I can recognize the signs early enough to quit the whole unfortunate cycle before it runs me over. I will not call Stephanie, nor will I be friendly to her if and when we next meet. I am made of stone, ice, glass. I am an island, a mountain, a—oh, metaphors will creep in, no matter what fences I
try to build to keep them out, like raccoons—a hermit, and therefore people don't matter to me, even unspeakably beautiful ones who melt in my hands in a way that drives me to delirium. It's only delirium, and I know it. The fever has broken.

THIRD NOTEBOOK

December 21—I'm reluctant to start this new notebook; it implies a hold on life I feel less and less every day. And meanwhile the landscape has almost died. Outside, branches are bare and knobby under lowering skies, shaking in the strong wind. There's a spitting, nasty rain, the kind that goes down the back of your collar and seeps into your spine. The surface of the Hudson is a churning brown chaos. Today is the first day of winter, the shortest day of the year.

Despite these conditions, I feel an odd giddiness. This may have to do with the decision I've reached concerning my end. I sit and smoke in my armchair, and enjoy it all the more knowing I won't be doing it for much longer.

Many hours have gone by since I wrote that last sentence, during which I was required by unforeseen circumstance to have social commerce with a number of people, which made me chafe and itch.

First Bellatrix came up to my room with a cup of coffee and found me sitting, staring into space, and exhaling smoke. She was spruce and clean. She carried her violin case and wore a backpack affair with an unattractive, big-cheeked female cartoon character on it. It looked ridiculous on such a serious child.

“I need a ride to school today,” she said. “Mama says she's sick and she can't take me, and Dennis said to ask you.”

I felt highly disinclined to get into my truck at such an absurdly early hour.