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

the distant hills.
    When she met my eyes, she headed straight toward me.
    It occasionally happens that I meet people who become instant intimates. This happens more or less according to theperiod of my life I am in. This woman and I seemed to know something about each other right away, and dispensed accordingly with the usual sideways tactics.
    Head-on, she slid onto the stool next to mine.
    “Hi there,” she said easily. I resisted a strong temptation to kiss her on the mouth. We had plenty of time, and our pick of five or six old motels within a mile of the place. “Been here long?”
    “Feels like years,” I said. “Where've you been?”
    “Oh,” she said with a half-smile, “you don't want to know.”
    “What are you drinking?”
    “Hooch,” she said to both me and the bartender. “Bombay-gin martini, very dry, shaken, and straight up with olives.”
    We sat elbow to elbow, looking out at the woods. She smelled lemony. I finished my whiskey and set the shot glass back down on the bar so it made a satisfying rap against the cheap wood.
    “Who are you, anyway?” she asked.
    “I'm Hugo.”
    “Are you sure?” she asked, puzzled. “You don't look like a Hugo.”
    “Oh, but I am,” I said grandly.
    “No, you look like a David,” she said.
    “Well, I'm not a David.”
    “Wait a minute. Hugo who?”
    “Whittier,” I told her, my pride suddenly all gone.
    “Hugo Whittier,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Not Dennis's brother?”
    “Well, I'm a lot more than that,” I said.
    “I'm Stephanie Fox,” she said. “Dennis and Marie are good friends of my husband's and mine.”
    “Dennis is not such a good friend to your husband, actually, Stephanie.”
    Her martini came. She lifted the big inverted pyramid inboth hands and took an oddly humble sip, as if she were a mendicant who'd been handed a charity soup bowl.
    “Ah,” she exhaled, licking her lips, then returned her attention to me. “Hugo, please tell me what you're talking about.”
    “I'd better not,” I said, having used the interval of her tasting her drink to collect my wits, or as many of them as could be summoned, which had turned out to be just enough to realize that this line of inquiry was not in my own best interests.
    She wasn't laughing, but her merriment was clearly visible, an effervescence around her head like tiny cartoon champagne bubbles rising from an uncorked bottle. “Fair enough,” she said. “Although I hope you meant what I think you meant.”
    The bartender's pointy ears twitched with the effort to look as if he weren't listening.
    “I'll have another whiskey,” I said, and he leapt to the bottle and slung a good dose into my glass, hoping he wouldn't interrupt this conversation, which was the most entertaining thing to come down the pike in a while.
    “So Dennis has moved back to his old house,” she said.
    “Pathetic, isn't it?” I said swiftly. “Running home to the roost.”
    “Well, he had to go somewhere,” she said. “How is he these days?”
    “Miserable,” I said, baring my teeth at her in a smiling mammalian display of harmlessness, but inwardly violent.
    “Poor thing,” she said, her voice cracking with held-in laughter. “I'm laughing,” she hastened to explain, possibly sensing my mood, “because he seemed like a fish out of water in that Stonekill house. Do you know what I mean? Wearing one of Marie's aprons in that kitchen, making chicken nuggets for the kiddies, watering the herbs on the windowsill, giving Marie a rundown of his day. Maybe because he strikes me as a born bachelor. Does it run in your family?”
    “I have a wife, and her daughter bears my name,” I said.
    “At Waverley?”
    “They chose to go elsewhere, oh, about ten years ago. But I am married, as is Dennis. Born bachelors don't tend to get themselves into such situations.”
    “They do if they're caught in them.”
    “Meanwhile, I came here to escape Dennis, and now you're insisting on talking about