The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen Page B

him with all the hatred I bear him, which is a heavy force, although he's as ignorant of that as he is of everything else about me, including the fact that in a short while I'll be dead. Dennis can be counted on to be a narcissist in every particular until his own end, whenever that may be slated to take place. My one regret in being terminal is that I will never know this, or other things.
    He told me much, much more than I wanted to know, and now I feel unhealthily burdened and implicated. Nothing is more revolting to me than other people's unasked-for, sweaty, hot-breathed confidences, especially my brother's.
    In that even, earnest, self-justifying voice I know as well as the smell of my own shit, he announced that he had come back to Waverley because Marie had asked him to leave.
    She had forced him to admit that he had fallen out of love with her, and then she kicked him out.
    He didn't fight, which is typical of Dennis.
    I'm sure she must have anticipated that, since she knows him better than anyone else, even I.
    She must also have known perfectly well that even though the romantic part of their marriage was over, he would havestayed anyway, for the kids’ sake, for the sake of his vows, propriety, family honor, all the things he believes in most fervently, if she hadn't called his bluff.
    “We never have sex any more,” she'd apparently said the night before he left, in bed, just as they were falling asleep. The Bildungsroman narrator who channels himself through Dennis's vocal cords informed me that this statement came at my brother out of the depths of the darkness, trembling with outrage.
    They'd both lost interest in sex in recent years, he replied, or so it seemed to him. But it was so like her to blame him for the whole problem.
    “Well,” she said harshly, “do you still want to?”
    “Sometimes,” he said. It was true, Dennis told me now, as always wide-eyed at his own forthright goodness, priggishly astonished at other people's raging passions, their needs. And sometimes he did still want her. But she'd made herself so remote and inaccessible, the effort it seemed it would take to arouse her seemed as if it wouldn't ultimately be worth the payoff, so he'd just given up altogether. He had been under the impression that it was she who was no longer interested, and so he had stopped trying, rather than suffer the indignity of rejection night after night.
    I gazed up at my bedroom ceiling and followed with my eyes the long crack in the plaster that leads to nowhere.
    They'd never had a great sex life, as far as Dennis was concerned, even during their courtship. Making love (of course he calls it that) with Marie had always been oddly unsatisfactory to him, even though he was attracted to her and loved her body and thought she was beautiful, because Dennis wanted to do everything, all the time, no holds barred, and she didn't. He'd respected Marie's cooler temperament and romantic notions of lovemaking, and maybe because of this, he'd always been hot for other women throughout their whole marriage, sometimes tothe point of obsession, extreme temptation, but he'd never acted on his feelings. Though he could hardly admit this, he secretly felt that Marie should be grateful to him for overcoming his often intense yearning for other women. All right, for Stephanie Fox, she was the one he really wanted; he admitted it.
    I perked up a little at the mention of Stephanie Fox. “Will you call her now and confess your ardor?” I asked with real interest.
    “Other men would have cheated,” said Dennis, oblivious, or pretending to be, and in any case not to be deterred from the narration of the story he'd set out to tell. “I didn't. Of course I know this is slightly disingenuous. Why should my wife be grateful to me for being faithful? Why didn't I just have an affair?”
    “What I wonder,” I said, “is this: why, given your history, did she bring up the topic of your sex life in that accusatory tone? She