“I invited our new tenant,” I announced to no one in particular. “Pete Stravinsky, who's moving into the gatehouse after January first.”
“Oh, that's right,” said Dennis with as much irritation as he could muster at the moment. “Hugo, seriously, why did you have to do that without asking me first?”
“I lived here alone for so long,” I said mildly. “I'm not in the habit of consulting anyone on anything.”
“Well, next time…,” he said on his way out of the kitchen with a daughter's hand in each of his, which I took as grudging acceptance.
I realize I'm drawing out the events of the day and evening, when in fact I would prefer not to write a word about it, but there's no other way around it. If I'm going to get out of here, I have to purge myself of it all so it doesn't come with me, static-electrically, or however unresolved feelings accompany the dying to the afterworld, whatever the afterworld is. Of course, I don't believe in the afterworld. Still, I hope my thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes, and emotions stay behind with my mortal coil, embedded in these notebooks, soon to be buried beneath the floorboard under the armchair by the window which I've pried up and which is ready to be nailed down again once all is secured beneath it. No one will ever find them.
Marie and Louisa arrived. I heard bursts of hilarity and excitement, most of it in high childish voices, from the ballroom, where the decorated tree is. Vero and I were drifting around the kitchen in an oddly companionable silence; when she heard her sister arrive, she made a beeline for the ballroom and left me alone to smoke and stare into space and inhale the commingled Olde English fragrances of mulling wine and baking ham, mincemeat pies and figgy pudding.
Thus it was that Stephanie found me when she came drifting in about half an hour later, looking for a drink.
I couldn't help it; my heart pounded when I heard her unmistakably athletic tread coming through the passageway from the dining room. She burst into the kitchen looking like a shining and dangerous witch. She wore a red velvet dress with a shimmering gold shawl, and her hair was up in a complicated hairdo from which fetching little wispy curls had been encouraged to float freely around her head and neck in the manner of angels in Renaissance paintings. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyelids had been embossed with gold. She wore a copious amount of soft red lipstick, glittery diamond (or zirconium, of course that's what they were) earrings and bracelets, and spiky shoes perfect for putting out a man's eye or stamping a hole in his groin.
“Well, if it isn't Counselor Fox,” I said through the hard knot of venomous desire in my throat.
“Hugo,” she said, not meeting my eyes as she kissed my cheek (the scent of her perfume almost undid me—I had smelled it before, of course, in far more intimate circumstances). “Merry Christmas. I hear you've cooked a feast for all of us.”
“The feast to end all feasts,” I said, and handed her a cup of mulled wine.
“Can I have a teensy splash of something harder in this?” she asked. “It always makes it better.”
“Define ‘teensy.’ ”
“Oh, come on.”
I brandished the bottle of very good brandy I keep behind the oils in the cupboard. “Like this?”
“Thanks,” she said, and held the cup under her chin and inhaled the warm fumes.
I had nothing left to lose. I suspected this moment was the last chance I'd have, and I didn't want to waste it. “How have you been since I last saw you?”
“Very well,” she said dreamily. “Are you coming to join us all by the tree, or do you have too much to do?”
“I'm glad to hear that,” I said. “Dennis seems to be beside himself with joy lately as well. I'm glad you two have finally found your way into each other's arms. Does Marie know? I told her sister just now; I thought she'd be interested to know that Dennis's mistress is her sister's best friend.”
“For God's sake, Hugo,” Stephanie said sharply, her blissed-out holiday reverie abruptly gone. “Do you have to meddle in every single fucking pie that comes near your dirty finger? Is it impossible for you just to leave well enough alone?”
“I am capable of not meddling,” I said. “However, this particular pie is, so to speak, right on my table. It would be difficult to ignore it. Why haven't you returned my phone calls? Hell hath no vengeful rancor like a man ignored.”
“I haven't returned your one phone call,” she said, “because I thought we had nothing to say to each other. I'm sorry I stood you up for dinner. That was rude; I should have called the Roadhouse. Listen, okay, Dennis and I are… together. Please tell Vero not to tell Marie. It would devastate her to know. And we want to wait until both our divorces are final before we tell anyone. Please, Hugo.”
“Your divorce? Does Bun know about this?”
“He and I have just begun to broach the subject of our… fundamental incompatibility. Our irreconcilable differences. It's a delicate conversation, one I'd like to keep private and without mentioning third parties. He wants children; I don't. We've reached an amicable agreement to separate.”
“I'm curious,” I said. “Why didn't you meet me that night? What made you think we had nothing more to say to each other? I liked you and saw no reason to think it wasn't mutual. Granted, you owe me nothing at all. I'm just curious.”
“First of all,” she said crisply, pitilessly, as if she were presenting
a case to a courtroom, “you lied to me about how Dennis felt about me. That alone is unforgivable. He and I have loved each other for a very long time, and you did your self-interested, sneaky, deceptive utmost to keep us apart. I don't know how I got involved with you to begin with. I guess I thought you were as close to him as I'd ever get. Second, there's the minor fact that you're committing slow and deliberate suicide. It feels unsavory, being around you, and when I'm with you I start to smoke too much too, and I cough all the next day and feel sick. Third, you have no inner life, no life of the mind—no life, period. You don't read the paper; you don't work; you have nothing going on whatsoever. And, finally, Dennis told me about the shameful treatment your wife and daughter suffered at your hands.”
“What shameful treatment?” I asked. I found, to my immediate interest, that I was no longer attracted to her. I may be a fool, but I'm not an idiot. I have never been attracted to a woman who was not attracted to me. The whole point of attraction to me is that it goes both ways. Suddenly Stephanie's head seemed too big for her body, her face too wide, her nose ludicrously small. And she has a screechy voice. Not constantly screechy, just every now and then, when you're not expecting it, so it sets your teeth on edge, like chalk on a board. “What did I do to them, according to Dennis, that was shameful?”
“He told me you forced them to live apart from you all these years because of your philosophical leanings.”
“So I have philosophical leanings but no life of the mind?”
She brushed this aside. “Apparently you sent your wife and infant daughter away because you decided you wanted to live a solitary life. He said your wife came back with your daughter, but you tried to stop her, and since they've come back you hardly talk to either of them.”
“My wife and I have been having regular marital relations,” I said with half a grin. This conversation was just so preposterous.
“And I took Bellatrix to school the other day. Maybe your husband neglected to mention it.”
“Bun? What does he have to do with any of this? Listen, I understand not wanting to be a parent in the first place; that's how I feel myself. But once the kid is born, don't you think you owe her anything? Dennis says you refuse to acknowledge her.”
“For your information, Sonia cheated on me and then she left me, and Bellatrix is another man's daughter, not mine. Nonetheless, I've supported them all these years, and I didn't ask for a divorce when I easily could have. You're a divorce lawyer, Stephanie. What is the legal likelihood of a woman's being granted a generous amount of alimony or child support if the kid is the product of an affair and she deserts her husband? What does it tell you that I willingly gave it, and have set up a trust for this child who isn't mine? I'm leaving her everything I have and own.”
“Whatever,” she said, brushing these pesky facts away and returning to the main thrust of what she wanted from me. “Just please tell Vero to keep her mouth shut.”
“I will,” I said, “but I want something in return from you. First, admit that Dennis might have skewed the facts about me. Maybe, because he was dipping his stick where mine had been, he couldn't bone you unless he destroyed me first. Which would be very male of him.”
“ ‘Bone me,’ ” she echoed with distaste. She drank deeply from her cup of hot wine and sputtered gently on the brandy. I had put a lot in there, assuming “teensy splash” had really meant “oodles.”
“Oh,” I said, “sorry. I boned you. Dennis makes
love
to you.”
She sighed.
“Do we have a deal, or not?”
“I will concede,” she said, “that he could have presented the facts slightly erroneously.”
“In a way calculated to make me look bad,” I prompted.
“Okay,” she said, and tapped her foot with bridled, fettered haste to be out of my company. “What else?”
“Two more things. An apology for toying with my affections. And I want to know, really and truly and no kidding around, whether you were telling the truth about Bun. About his proclivities. I assume you know which ones I'm talking about.”
“I apologize for toying with your affections,” she said bleakly, “although I had no idea you had any to be toyed with.”
“That's a bit halfhearted,” I said, “as was your first concession, but time is short, so that will have to do. And now I want the last thing.”
“Say again what you want me to tell you?”
“Is Bun really attracted to children? Little girls? Or did you make that up to be dramatic?”
“My husband,” she said softly, looking over her shoulder to make sure no one was coming into the kitchen or eavesdropping outside, “has an overwhelming instinctive urge to fondle and molest and, no doubt, if he could get away with it, fuck little girls. He can't keep himself from liking them, Hugo, but so far he hasn't done anything wrong. And he went through a lot of therapy to try to—”
“I have zero interest in that therapy,” I said. “Just his natural tendencies. Thank you for the information.”
The tension between us evaporated, the way it always has and does. There is nothing between us to anchor it or give it roots. This sort of instant evaporation happens either between people who have such a deep, unspoken, ancient intimacy there's no longer any point in sustaining any tension because they've been through everything together and come out the other side and know each other so well there's no need to argue any more, or between people who will never have any degree of intimacy because there is no magnetism or empathy between them to make it in any way worthwhile. Sonia and I
could have been the former if she hadn't turned out to be a cold whore, and Stephanie and I are decidedly the latter. I see this now.
“Do you need anything else?” she asked with restrained good humor. The alcohol was taking effect, and she must have remembered that she and Dennis were in love and it was Christmas.
“That's all,” I said with some joviality of my own, knowing that I was finished with her forever and that Dennis was welcome to her. “I'll have a word with Vero in a little while and tell her to keep your dirty little secret for now.”
“How do I know she'll do what you say?”
“Because she, unlike you, has a big crush on me. Okay, you're free to go now, and I promise I won't trouble you again, not even to give an obnoxiously revealing toast at your eventual wedding to my brother.”
“Oh, please, I'll never get married again,” she called gaily over her shoulder, drifting out to join everyone else. “It's much too much trouble.”
I took a couple more pain pills and poured myself a glass of whiskey, then made the salad. I took pains to establish a certain level of alcohol and drugs in my blood throughout the evening, so the final dose will certainly be fatal. I don't anticipate any trouble pushing my system just that much further…. I don't intend to wake up again. I don't intend to vomit either.
Back to my final catharsis. People came and went in the kitchen as I worked, but I wasn't alone with Vero until about half an hour later.
“It's too late,” she said in a hard voice when I'd said what Stephanie had asked me to say. “I already told Marie—we took a little stroll in the evening air—and she was shocked, of course, and furious. She's restraining herself right now from ripping out that woman's eyes. Her best friend, or so she thought.”
“You told her on Christmas? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I thought she should know immediately, and she's very grateful I told her, and grateful to you for telling me so I could tell her. She said it's infinitely better for her to know now than go through this evening blind to their treachery and then, afterward, feel like a fool for thinking Stephanie was her friend. She says to tell you she appreciates your loyalty to her. She also promises not to make a scene at Christmas dinner. But when we came back in I could see the look in her eyes…. Marie isn't an angry person, but when she's crossed… I don't know how Dennis and Stephanie can be unaware of her hatred of them.”
I watched her closely as she said this. Her face was open; her voice was nontheatrical and warm with feeling. Her dark French eyes flashed with sparks of wayward light. It struck me that Vero is extremely beautiful when she speaks and acts without considering the effect she's having on her listener. She should do this more often. She might find a husband if she did.
“Shit,” I said plainly.
“Anyway, I came to tell you, a strange man is here. He looks like a thug.”
“Shlomo,” I said.
“Shlomo?”
“I mean Pete,” I amended hastily. “He's our new tenant. He's renting the gatehouse indefinitely; I thought he should come and meet everyone, and it turned out he was going to be alone on Christmas. Although he's Jewish. But even Jews need somewhere to go on Christmas.”
“Well, he got here a few minutes ago. He was just standing in one corner, not talking to anyone, so Louisa, good girl that she is, went over and introduced herself. Then I offered him a drink and he asked for vodka. Is there any?”