The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen

Author:Kate Christensen [Christensen, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780385720984
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2003-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

November 27—Was interrupted then by Sonia, of all people, who rapped on my door. She wore a black and slinky dress, and her straw-colored hair was sleek from a recent washing and much brushing.

I asked what I could do for her in as frosty and uninviting a tone as possible; I knew exactly what I could do for her, and how.

“I have chosen to forgive you,” she said, “for your long silence and then your unfriendly letter. I am ready to resume our relations.”

“You've chosen to forgive me,” I said. “That's rich irony. I thought that might be the case, given your garb and demeanor.”

“My garb and demeanor,” she repeated in the familiar withering tone that for Sonia is direct flirtation. “Garb and demeanor, Hugo, really.”

I wasn't tempted so much as overcome with garum; I was in no position to withstand her. Sex is one of the only recourses in this mood, the only solution or distraction, and here it was, being served in a shiny black dress I shucked off my wife posthaste. Underneath she was white and smooth as an oyster out of its shell, quivering with briny juices and piquantly yielding to the teeth.

Speaking of oysters, M.F.K. Fisher's Consider the Oyster has enthralled me. I read and reread whole passages lately. One of these concerns the American regional varieties of oysters and Mary Frances's opinions of them. The chapter entitled “A Lusty Bit of Nourishment” is concrete lyricism, a cri d'estomac. I don't trust my adoration of Mary Frances, of course; she's too smug, too sure of herself, to fully merit such slavish admiration. For example, let's take the following: “I have thought seriously about this, while incendiary bombs fell and people I knew were maimed and hungry….” After this introduction she then has the breathtaking audacity to maintain, in her consistently light and reasonable tone, that a reinstatement of brown bread in restaurants served alongside raw oysters would make nostalgia seem like a lusty bit of nourishment, rather than a perversion…. Meanwhile, her beloved husband was dying of Buerger's disease, and wouldn't, the same way I won't, quit smoking. No matter what her own personal tragedy may have been in those days, only a preternaturally, even unreasonably confident woman would calmly discuss the essentialness of brown bread with oysters in the same breath as starvation, maiming, and bombs. She must have been angered beyond reason by his stubbornness, but in the diaries she wrote while he was dying, she is nothing but supportive, loving, admiring, claiming that Timmy can't be expected to live without cigarettes because that wouldn't be a whole man's life, it would be some kind of sissified loserdom, a concession to mama's-boy Goody Two-Shoes crybaby scaredy-cat pansyhood.

Well, of course I agree.

As for her final thought about nostalgia's being a form of perversion usually, I don't know exactly what she means and am far too slothful to parse it out, and I have my own strong ideas about nostalgia, but nonetheless this passage makes

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