Read Online The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen - Free Book Online Page A

have been all too typical of him. So, after he'd gone back outside, Encyclopedia Brown, boy detective, made his stealthy, sleuthy way down the stairs, took possession of the telephone, and cleverly hit the redial button.
    “Hello?”
    It was Marie's voice, unmistakably.
    I didn't say a word.
    “I'm calling the police,” she said as I was hanging up.
    So. Dennis has made a silent call to his own wife for reasons I can't even begin to guess at. At least one: who knows howmany other times he's done it? And now I've done it too, after breaking into her house and making off with the au pair. What will we do next?
    My old easy, habitual life of deception and crime seems to be smoldering to life again. Before I know it, I'll be running drugs or crashing uninvited in other people's houses once more.
    No, I won't. Instead, I have a strong and not at all innocent desire to contact Louisa, to try to trick her into seeing me again. I could have asked whether she was home just then, instead of hanging up on Marie, and pleaded total ignorance of that other call and caller. But she would have suspected me, of course, and of course my entire life has been arranged to avoid getting in the middle of anything. Aha, she would have thought, Hugo—I knew it all along! I'm the natural enemy of my sister-in-law.
    October 19—Last night, on my way across the river, the headlights cut through the darkness as if I could follow them and they'd take me wherever I wanted to go.
    Rex's Roadhouse is an old shack on a small stream, set back from the road, lurking in the woods. Weekend people don't come here much, just locals—adulterers, drunks, college kids, and regulars. The back wall is almost all glass, so you sit at the dark bar and look out at the lit-from-below woods and stream. It's all very romantic, ramshackle, rough-hewn. The room is about the size of a basement rec room and holds an unassuming bar, some cracked red leatherette booths with scuffed tables, a dartboard, a cigarette-burned pool table, and a jukebox stocked with old country-and-Western legends’ B-sides. The whole place smells of wet rags that have wiped used ashtrays and beer spills and then been left to molder in a wet heap in a bus tub.
    I sat at the far end of the bar and ordered a shot of whiskeyand a draft. While the droopy yokel behind the bar applied himself fervently to bottle and tap, I examined my hands, which I'd cleaned carefully that morning, along with every other inch of my visible self, in addition to trimming my nose hairs, cutting my toenails, and shaving twice. No more filth on my person, was the general idea I was suddenly espousing; Hugo goes a-hunting-oh in poontang season. But there was already a layer of dirt under my fingernails. And even as I write this, although I've cleaned my nails again in the interim, the grime has come seeping back, the exfoliated by-product of my unfulfilled yearnings.
    That's a bunch of hogwash.
    My yearnings have been fulfilled, every one of them: sex, revenge, trouble.
    A woman came in when I was halfway through my second round. That made three of us here at Rex's: me, the yokel, and her. She stood in the doorway for a moment while her eyes got used to the murk, her face bright and anticipatory. She was older: no postpubescent girl, this was the real thing, established, professional, almost certainly married to a male counterpart, a matching duo of doctors or therapists or professors. She had a white-gold, wavy, but carefully managed mane, wore a low-cut white blouse and a form-fitting skirt that came to just above her shapely knees, and was an utterly acceptable variant of my librarian-taking-off-her-glasses fantasy except that she wore no glasses, and her hair, rather than being in some degree of bun, floated freely around her head and neck. She shimmered with the muscular vibrancy of someone focused, driven, healthy but very bored, that cerebral, pent-up lustiness that's always made my blood rise like a war cry from over