The memory of my wife faded. The past ceased to exist. Women came and went through the revolving door of the blogosphere. I met many women online, including a precocious tart by the name of Sandra. That was a mistake I shall probably live to regret, of course, but I couldn't help myself. God forgive me, she was the best of the lot: exquisite, mature beyond her tender years, remarkably precocious in her sexual proclivities, and as dumb as the day was long. You would not believe the extent to which she would go to exercise the outrageous fantasies buzzing around her infantile brain, an attribute that I am ashamed to say I found irresistible. I shall make no excuse for my lapse in judgment, except to tell you that the interlude during which we were in flagrante lasted barely a moment in time. But, as Nabokov suggested, while it lasted the candle burned ever so brightly. Of all the women I met in chat rooms and on threads, while there were the usual fringe benefits, most were less than expected, less than advertised, and well below the standard I had set for myself. I cannot complain, though, for my "ladies-in-waiting" went out of their way to satisfy my needs, which had become, for lack of a better word, excessive. The great restaurant had become the deus ex machina and the focal point of my adventures. I spared no expense, and a good time was had by all. But it wasn't enough. And then I met Donatella, and everything changed.
THE MAN WHO DINED AT LE CIRQUE
A NOVELBy BARRY ARBILOFFiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Barry Arbiloff
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-4977-3Chapter One
Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street in New York City is the center of the universe for ready-to-wear
haute couture. My wife shopped at Bergdorf's every day of the week, except on Tuesday. On Tuesday we had lunch at Le Cirque, at our favorite table, the one by the window near the sidebar with the fancy books.
Helen died on her thirtieth birthday. It happened on an agreeable Tuesday morning—in Bergdorf's, in the handbag kiosk (on the first floor). We were supposed to go to Le Cirque to celebrate; she went to Bergdorf's. The "Birkin" had arrived. I was on the other line when a salesperson called to give her the good news. I had no idea what a Birkin was until I heard him mention the name Hermés and the word pocketbook in the same sentence. Helen said that she had been waiting over a year for the "Noir Togo" with the Palladium hardware, the thirty-centimeter handbag, which I subsequently discovered was a must-have accessory among women of a certain class. She called it a bargain at $12,400. I had never seen her so excited. She kissed me on the cheek and ran out of the house. Her blouse was hanging out of her skirt, she was dragging her coat, and I was once again reminded of the power of wearing apparel and accessories to cause titanic shifts in the female persona. That was the last time I saw my wife alive.
Five minutes after walking into the store, while she was waiting for the manager to bring out the bag, a car on Fifth Avenue ran a light. The man driving the car lost control, and the car went through the window and slammed into a display case stacked with Birkins. The case came down on Helen's head. She was dead before she hit the floor. I went downtown to the medical examiner's office to identify the body and passed out when I saw the remains. I shall never forget that experience as long as I live.
Helen and I had been married for ten years. We loved each other, but we were not lovers. Our marriage was rarely consummated in the customary manner. Helen was afraid of sex, and I was afraid of her. There were brief interludes when passion gave way to pleasure, of course; I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But those good moments were rare by any standard. My wife considered the relationship between a man and a woman inviolable, but not in the usual way. Sex, she believed, was for procreation and not gratification. "Fucking," she said, "is the Devil's work," a notion that had been drilled into her head since childhood, which she firmly believed was the reason why intercourse was so painful.
Our honeymoon was a disaster. We went through the motions. Like most young men, I fumbled; like most young women, she had no idea what I was doing. She squirmed and cried out in pain, but remained steadfast in the moment of my repeated assaults on her virginity. She didn't say much before or after these unpleasant interludes, and she didn't have to. I later discovered that her plumbing was defective. She was as dry as desert sand. Her vagina was bulletproof. Penetration was impossible, with or without a lubricant. The pain was such that neither of us had the slightest desire to suffer the effort. I am trying not to be indelicate, and I am cringing as write this, but there is no other way to say it. Eventually, we consulted with a specialist at one of the prestigious teaching hospitals in New York. After a thorough examination and all the required laboratory tests, he put his arms around both of us and said that we were in the best of health. Then he told us to give it time, and he escorted us out of his office.
I didn't know what to believe. At first, I thought I was at fault, but that didn't make sense. I was good-looking, healthy, and more than willing. Everyone thought I had a marvelous personality and all the attributes that any woman could possibly want. It's true that I was intimidated by women, but so what? No one is perfect. My psychiatrist said I had an Oedipus complex. He said that I harbored a repressed desire to kill my father and possess my mother. Jake, my best friend, said he was full of shit. I wasn't sure what or whom to believe. The truth was probably somewhere in between the two extremes, although I never gave it much thought. Either way, as I subsequently discovered, my inhibitions had very little to do with Helen's inability to become an active participant in the boudoir.
How Helen and I ended up together is a mystery. We were opposites in every respect. The only thing we had in common was that both of us were well made, young, and exceptionally good-looking. My IQ was off the charts; she was barely able to read and write. She was the youngest sibling of a fire-breathing, God-fearing, Bible-toting lunatic who took the Good Book literally; I was the only son of a successful architect—a hard-drinking, womanizing atheist and conservative activist. She came from a shack in a swamp in a backwater parish, in the southern part of Georgia. I was brought up in a penthouse on Park Avenue, in the rarefied atmosphere of the rich and famous.
We met at an after-hours club while I was in basic training at an army base in Georgia. I was on a weekend pass. She was moonlighting as a waitress. I wanted to kill time; she wanted to earn a few dollars to pay for new finery. Had her father known that she was working in an after-hours joint, he would have crucified her. I met the man once, and once was enough.
Helen and I fell madly in love the moment we met. We were both kids, but one look was all it took. When I saw her for the first time, with golden-blonde hair and the biggest and bluest eyes I had ever seen, I became light-headed. My heart was beating so fast I thought it would push through my chest. Three weeks later, an old preacher in Opelika married us.
Abstinence was something I had not anticipated, but I never said a word to Helen. I was much too young and too much in love to risk speaking my mind. Young men usually swallow their pride to prevent getting on the wrong side of a relationship with women they think they are madly in love with. What they don't know is that women do not respect weakness. Jake said that women have to be ruled with an iron fist. For all I know, he may be right. There was a time when I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping my mouth shut. "How is it at all possible for a man to have the slightest respect for himself if he has presumed to find pleasure even in the very sense of his own humiliation?" The quote is attributed to Dostoyevsky. He was right, of course.
I thought I could suppress my emotions, but Helen was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. The image of her white, dovelike skin caused an immediate reaction in which every sensory receptor in the lower portion of my body was aroused. It took days for me to recover if, by happenstance, I came upon her while she was removing her clothes. I can still smell her scent, see the almost invisible fuzz on her thighs, and in my dreams feel the gentle slope of her hips, breasts, and buttocks. The combination of her looks and my desire was lethal. Lust ruled my life. I could never understand how or why a glimpse of a thigh, soft flesh, and other parts of the female body can affect a human being with a penis and testicles to the extent that it does. My heart pounded when I looked at her. I trembled when we touched. A napkin on my lap was sufficient to cause an erection. The positions she assumed at any given moment, even while making toast, were enough to set my genitals in motion. The sight of her underwear hanging in the bathroom lit a fire in my loins. In the mornings and evenings, when she dressed and undressed, I would sit on the end of the bed holding myself, a towel over my lap, and a whopping erection just out of harm's way. Half the time I was so worked up I had an orgasm when I brushed my teeth.
There was a time when I had to carry a briefcase for fear of exposing myself. I am reminded of an advertisement for Viagra, in which the voice in the background says that you should see a doctor if an erection lasts more than four hours. I had an erection for weeks at a time. When I told my urologist, he said that it was nothing my right hand couldn't cure. I didn't know what he was talking about, until he made a motion with his hand. So I took to masturbating, but it only exacerbated the longing. The more I did it, the more I had to do it. My right hand became a close associate.
I ached for the pleasure that other young men and women shared. My prostate grew larger, and I experienced intermittent headaches. I couldn't eat or sleep. I had an overwhelming urge to urinate, especially at night when I watched strange people on television making five-foot cakes.
I could have paid for pleasure, and maybe I should have. God knows, other men did. My urologist prescribed antibiotics and massaged my prostate. My psychiatrist filled me with antidepressants and listened in almost complete silence to my innermost thoughts. Three days a week he sat by my side, stretched out in this great armchair with a platform for his legs, occasionally nodding his head, perhaps to let me know that he was still awake. Except for infrequent references to Freudian doctrine, which I did not understand, the man hardly spoke. When the alarm clock on his desk rang, signaling the session had ended, we were both relieved. Fortunately, the good doctor kept me supplied with antidepressants and antianxiety medication. Abstinence became the rule rather than the exception, and my right hand became a substitute for all that I longed for.
I was not unique in the pursuit of unrequited love. Nor did it serve a purpose for me to think of myself as empowered in the absence of the unconditional love of my wife. Not to mislead you, in spite of our differences, there were happy times. Helen and I managed to salvage the relationship by redirecting the energy of our divergent passions in the pursuit of (dare I say) the finer things in life. We had more than most. We were in the best of health. She became a pampered woman and found happiness in the department stores. I listened to classical music, designed buildings, wrote unsuccessful novels, and ate the best food money could buy. That was the good part.
So it came to pass that we became partners in what outwardly seemed to be the ideal marriage. We shared many worthwhile pursuits. I remember with fondness dining in the best restaurants in New York, especially Le Cirque, where all the difficulties I alluded to previously were subordinated to the extraordinary gratification of eating exquisitely prepared food by culinary artists without peer. I still loved Helen in my own way, but I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that our differences were monumental. As in all things, with the passing of time, her image tarnished. I was less inclined to allow my emotions carte blanche, and I learned to cope with our differences, which were not insignificant. Life became marginally tolerable. Which reminds me of something Tolstoy said: "Real love does not consecrate marriage, it ruins it." I'm not sure what Tolstoy had in mind, but I am now quite convinced that there cannot be true love in the absence of a relationship consecrated by the pleasures of the flesh and nurtured by mutual respect. I don't see how it's possible, although I do think about it from time to time. These are thoughts that keep me awake nights.
Chapter Two
At the tender age of thirteen, when I was at Boy Scout camp in Monticello in Upstate New York, I happened upon a partially undressed woman. As I watched her remove her clothes, which she did slowly and undoubtedly for my benefit, for she was certainly aware that I was watching her, I entertained my first erection. Naturally, I had no idea what it was. Days later, it happened again in the latrine. I was taking a shower. The older boys said I was growing another foot. They were pulling my leg, but I didn't know it, and I was frightened. So I went to see the camp doctor. We had a man-to-man talk. He took the time to explain what was going on, and although I didn't understand a word he said, I was greatly relieved. On that day, I learned that truth is rarely what it seems—that what is real and what is not may be two sides of the same coin.
The gods had granted me a new lease on life when Helen passed away, or so I thought. I hesitate to say that, for a brief moment in time, I was actually relieved, being inordinately comforted by the realization that I was free at last to indulge myself in the pleasures of the flesh. As it turned out, I became inconsolable. The outside world ceased to exist, except for the occasional sounds of movement and what I thought were voices filtering in through the windows and walls of my imagination. During the day, I took hot baths and stared at the ceiling; at night, I listened to classical music and stared at the ceiling. I had become half-vital.
For some unearthly reason, I became preoccupied with a composition written by the distinguished American composer William Schuman, called George Washington Bridge. I had been introduced to Schuman's work in my sophomore year of college. I was in the school orchestra. The snare drum was my instrument. I was not talented, but I was a willing participant in the study of music written for concert band, and I thoroughly enjoyed being in the presence of so many gifted musicians. It was great fun while it lasted, thanks to our beloved conductor, who took a liking to me and allowed me to stay in the orchestra, even though I could hardly read a note of music. As fate would have it, he suffered a premature heart attack and died during a difficult passage of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. His replacement, a young man with a corpulent abdomen and an inflated ego, was a taskmaster. He was also a devotee of Schuman's work. George Washington Bridge was his favorite piece. Five minutes after he walked into the concert hall, he told us that we were going to spend the rest of the semester deconstructing and rehearsing the score. True to his word, we took the Bridge apart. We peeled off the layers and put them back together so many times that I could play it in my sleep. The problem was that I couldn't play it while I was awake. I remember it well. A few hundred bars into the score and just before the grand finale, the snare drum is featured in a one-bar drum roll, rising in a crescendo from p in an unusual time signature. From beginning to end, the drum roll occupies less than a moment in time in the universe of the score, yet for me it served as a trigger for the spectacular finale in which the percussion section is featured. The conductor would raise his hand in anticipation of the glorious moment. He would point at the bass drum. The bass drum would sound the countdown with a thud, and then another. A sequence of contrapuntal rhythms followed. The ground would shake and my heart would pound. When the music was so loud that all else was blotted out, the conductor would raise his hand and point—at me. I would raise my sticks; he would raise his arm. When his arm was almost directly above his head, he would make a fist. His fingers would turn white. He would stretch his arm until it looked as if it would pop out of its socket. And when his face turned blue and spittle drooled from his lips, he would send his arm hurtling toward the floor in a sweeping motion, which was my cue to play the drum roll, and in so doing ignite the percussion section in an orgy of syncopated rhythm the likes of which you could not possibly imagine.
In the days and weeks following Helen's death, I sat in my living room watching YouTube and various orchestras playing Schuman's extraordinary composition. I counted bars and waited for the signal to play the drum roll. It seemed to take forever. But when the moment finally arrived, when the conductor inside the television set raised his arm and turned toward me, I took a deep breath and readied myself. When his arm dropped, I would play the drum roll on my coffee table with silverware. I was usually off by at least three bars.
When Helen died, I stopped working. I had been designing properties at the behest of a prestigious multinational firm. We were in the middle of two projects: the creation of a sprawling hotel and golf course on the precipitous end of the Isle of Wight, and a new museum in the Antibes to feature Guernica, the painting by the great artist, Pablo Picasso. When Helen died, the president of the firm personally called to tell me he would put both projects on hold. He told me to take as much time off as necessary and to come back whenever I was ready. He emphasized the word "whatever," and it was nice of him to say that. Not that it mattered. I had long since become used to having my way in affairs of business. With an established reputation for excellence, having designed spectacular buildings on two continents, my star was in the ascendency. I was in great demand. Needless to say, my expectations were unreasonable. I did not have to punch a time clock, or wear a shirt and tie, or spend time in an office in the World Trade Center looking at blueprints or pouring over ledgers. I was able to pick and chose projects. I demanded unheard of fees and absolute control over the construction and production of the work I designed. I retained the right to work at my own pace, at my home or an office of my choosing. I received more money than other architects in the business, and I was relatively happy with my exalted position in life—except in the affairs of the heart.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE MAN WHO DINED AT LE CIRQUEby BARRY ARBILOFF Copyright © 2012 by Barry Arbiloff. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
