Diablerie (7 page)

The poorly made table rocked and squealed along with Mona. She was cheering, shouting, screaming, "Fuck me goddammit! Fuck me!"

I wondered many things in my dark closet. The only light brought images of my beautiful middle-aged wife, wanton with passion for a man I hardly knew.

I wondered why I wasn't aroused by the sexuality and why I wasn't angry at either of them. I hypothesized on whether or not Mona had used that kind of language with all men but me. And I thought about Harvard Rollins; had he been her lover long?

"Oh yeah," Harvard said; it was almost a whisper. "Oh God, yeah. Here it comes." He doubled, then tripled, his already frenzied beat. Mona was singing a wordless song of praise. She got louder and louder while Harvard just kept hammering away. When he finally came, he emitted three hard grunts. Mona sat up, using her well—defined abs, and stared longingly into his eyes.

They stayed in that position for some time, gazing at each other, tremors going through their bodies at odd moments.

After maybe two more minutes he lifted her again and carried her to the bed.

They lay side by side and she kissed him carelessly, something she had never done with me. With me her kisses were always short and accurate. With Harvard you had the feeling that she wanted to lick his face.

I thought about Lana then, her licking me.

"What are we going to do about Ben?" she asked Harvard.

"I don't know yet," he replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "Tell ya the truth, I find it hard to believe."

"But maybe he did. Maybe we never knew each other."

A laugh deep inside me strained to get out. The idea that I was in their conversation and in the closet at the same time seemed too bizarre. I wanted to walk out casually as my wife held Harvard's now flaccid penis, to sit on the bed and make some wisecrack.

"Do you think he has a lover?" Harvard asked.

"He's not interested in sex," she said dismissively. "Never was, really. He never let go, not even in the beginning. You know how it is. Some men think because they can get it up that women love it."

"But you said that you might not really know him."

"Yeah," she said. She sat up and leaned over to kiss the head of his cock. "It's so beautiful."

"Are you sure you want me to do this?"

"Fuck me?"

"Look into Ben's past."

"Fuck me first," she said.

I didn't watch the next two bouts of lovemaking. I sat back in the closet while Mona moaned and Harvard grunted, wondering why my wife would want to investigate me. She'd said that she didn't think I had lovers. She was wrong about that, but if that wasn't her worry, what was?

I was beginning to feel fear in that closet. What was happening to me? Why was my past, a past that held nothing but a few drunken benders, coming back?

There was nothing to worry about. I hadn't done anything but have an affair with a young Russian student.

Still the threat of Harvard Rollins looking into my past made me wish I had a weapon. I thought about holding a pistol in my hand. This thought was so alien and yet so natural that I began to fear my own response. What was wrong with me?

When the door to the bedroom closed, I realized that I had stopped paying attention to the lovers. A moment later the front door to the apartment opened and closed. I could have left then. I should have left before Mrs. Valeria returned, but I stayed in the dark wondering why my innocuous past had become so important.

I felt safe in the darkness. From there I could watch and still remain hidden. Maria could have come home and never once looked behind that door. In the night, while she slept, I could sneak out and get water and food. I wondered semi-seriously how I could make a life like that—hidden.

On the train ride up to Lana's place I was going over the past few days with Mona. She had been talking about divorce, had been thinking about the settlement. She believed I didn't have a lover and so she needed Harvard Rollins to help her prove her case against me. Of course that was it. It wasn't my past but her need to somehow incriminate me that made Mona turn to Rollins.

Maybe when she had talked to Barbara Knowland, she came up with the idea to find out about my wild drunken days in Colorado. Now it was making sense. She wanted to make sure she could prove that I was the bad guy before suing for divorce. Of course.

"Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben," Lana cried over and over as we made love for the third or fourth time that night. While we fucked on the floor next to her bed, I was thinking, couldn't stop thinking about Mona and Harvard Rollins. There was no jealousy to it. I was excited about how she kissed him and how she didn't even complain when he wouldn't wait for her to bring out the condoms. I could see in her face how excited she was that he would not be limited by her.

I was grinding away at Lana even though I knew that I'd had my last orgasm of the night an hour before. But when I thought of the grunting pleasure Mona exhibited while watching Rollins ejaculate, as I watched secretly over her shoulder, I came again—painfully hard. In the middle of that passionate surprise the muscles of my left buttock went into a spasm and I tumbled off Lana and cried out in pain.

"What's wrong, Ben?"

"I got a charley horse in my butt," I said, laughing and groaning at the same time.

Lana rolled me over and began massaging the taut cheek with her elbow. After a minute the pain subsided. As soon as it did, I began feeling excited about her massage.

"You have never made love to me like this," Svetlana said as she kneaded my quivering backside.

"I don't know what it is," I said. "Mona stayed away from home and I made a beeline straight to you.''

Lana turned me over and looked into my eyes.

"Are you falling in love with me?" she asked.

"I don't know what's happening, baby," I said. "There's something, something wrong. But I don't know what it is. If you had asked me a week ago what I'd be doing with my life in twenty years, I would have told you that Mona and I would be in the same apartment and I'd be at the same job. But now I don't know where I'll be tomorrow."

"Is it because I called you that night?"

"No. I don't know what it is."

"You never make love to me like this," she said again.

"Like what?"

"Like you are hungry for me, like animal. I get afraid a little and I like this and I'm scared too. Maybe when you were biting me, I was feeling a little like I was falling in love."

My heart was pounding but not with the feeling of sex. I was afraid. I closed my eyes, and even though Lana kept talking, I stopped listening. I tried to figure out what had happened, what had scared me so.

It was hard to concentrate. My well-ordered little life had come apart like a flower that drops all its petals after having finished its work. I felt desperate, when only days before life had been parsed out like plain white bread, one slice after the other all exactly the same.

"Maybe we should take a vacation," I said, interrupting whatever it was Lana was saying.

"Where would we go?"

"Maui? Hawaii."

Lana kissed me and then stood up, pulling me toward the bed. When we were under the covers, she sat up on my chest and cupped her hands around my face.

"You mean this?" she asked.

"Yes."

"What will you tell your wife?"

"Nothing. It's none of her business."

Svetlana took a deep breath through her nose and then moved up so that she was straddling my face. My lips and nose were right there next to her sex. I could smell our lovemaking there.

"Make me come again," she said.

The next morning found me walking down through Central Park a little before seven. Every time I stepped forward with my left leg, that testicle hurt with a deep aching that I hadn't experienced in years.

It was early July and hot every day except that morning, which was cool, even a little brisk. Every sound and color was clear and crisp to me; my fingertips were alive at the touch of stone or bark or the thread-textured cloth of my jacket.

I kept slapping my hands together and then rubbing my fingertips. I was muttering to myself about sex and Hawaii, my wife and the sudden and unexpected crash and burn of our marriage.

Seela was old enough to weather the breakup. She had her roaches and her roommate.

Harvard Rollins wouldn't stay with Mona very long but she'd find some minor celebrity to share her bed and accompany her to those interminable magazine parties.

I wanted a drink more than I ever had before in my life. But drinking would kill me, I knew that for sure. I had almost died twice in Colorado before I came out to New York. I'd put my fist through a plate glass shower door, ripping my forearm wide open and bleeding out at least two pints of blood. My neighbor, Charles Dagger, had saved me that time. Then, two months later, I drove my Dodge station wagon off the side of an embankment, totaled the car, and nearly fell down an eighty-foot drop. That's when I decided to leave Colorado.

Drinking brought me to death's door twice; the third time, I was sure, would be my end.

But I still wanted a drink. The mildly citrusy tang of tequila was on my mind. Tequila or cognac, either h i t y liquor would do just fine.

I started skipping at every fourth and then fifth step. I wasn't aware of it at first but then I saw people shying away from me. I guess I looked kind of loony. I was a little nuts. But why shouldn't I have been? My life was spiraling from its orbit for no good reason.

Abruptly I stopped to sit on a park bench. I jumped to the seat rather forcefully and the couple sitting there got up and left.

"You don't have to leave," I said after them, but they didn't seem to hear.

What was wrong? How had I gotten to that place with no warning, no diagnosis? I was tapping my left foot and clapping my hands three-quarters off beat. It was a rhythm I had thought up years before, even before I left Los Angeles, but I had never been able to do it. It was a musical exercise and I was in no way musical. But on that bench I could keep up the tempo and even riff off of it, calling out notes again from the offbeat.

I guess I was getting pretty loud when the policeman walked up to me.

"Excuse me, sir," the uniformed and armed cop said. "Is there a problem?"

I lost the cadence and this enraged me. I stood up from the bench, a little too quickly, and said, "No, Officer. What makes you think that?"

"You're creating a disturbance, sir," the officer said, holding his head to the side, searching my eyes for signs of alcohol inebriation or drug use.

"Got a lot on my mind, man. Wife left me yesterday. Twenty-two years and she bolted like a teenage girl."

"Can I see some ID?"

I produced my employment card and the cop studied it.

"You have a license?" he asked.

"Don't drive much. It's in my bureau," I said. "At home."

"Try to keep it down, okay, Mr. Dibbuk? Your behavior is erratic and it's causing some consternation.''

It was that last word that made me look closely at the peace officer. A white guy, maybe thirty, maybe not quite; he had light brown eyes and a brutal mouth. I would have bet a hundred thousand dollars that he would have never used the word
consternation.

"Excuse me, Officer. I'll try to calm down."

The policeman walked away, taking all my nervous energy with him.

When I got home, it was a little after eight fifteen. I wanted to change for work. And even though I was going to be late, I was at peace again. The policeman cured me of my alcohol jones and my worries.

Mona was gone. That part of my life was over. I could accept that. Maybe Svetlana would be a better wife or lover. Maybe I could become a freelance expert in computers and double my salary so that the bite of alimony wouldn't feel so bad.

I walked in and went right to the kitchen. I was looking in the refrigerator for an English m u h when Mona called out, "Ben? Is that you, Ben?"

She came from the bedroom hall wearing the same striped dress that had fallen down around her thighs when she was commenting on the flavor of Harvard Rollins's cock.

I stood there listening to the hard breath blowing through my nostrils. My heart followed with a drumbeat. I imagined the knife on the counter buried in her chest.

All this felt like a second body rising out of the shell that I was: a man who I didn't know, or at least did not remember, rising up to take control.

I held my breath and took a step backward.

"Ben? What's wrong?"

"What are you doing here, Mona?"

"My mother is doing better," she said. "I came home last night."

"Better?"

"Yes. Where were you?"

"I . . . I thought you had left me," I said quite honestly.

"Left you? Just because I went a few blocks away to take care of my mother?"

"You just left a note . . . hung up the phone on me . . ." I wanted to add that she allowed Harvard Rollins to use words that were strictly taboo between us, but I felt that speaking about her infidelity would expose me. I needed to keep my knowledge a secret.

"I was busy," she said. "Is that what you think? That I'd just walk out the door and that would be it?"

"You were talking about divorce the other day at Augie's. You were looking at Harvard Rollins like he was the man of your dreams." Honesty as far as it would go, I decided.

"So where were you?"

"With Cass," I said, realizing that the truth would only take me so fir.

"Who's Cass?"

"A guy I work with."

"What were you doing with him?"

"Getting drunk."

"You had a drink? You said that you'd never—"

"So now will you leave me because I had a drink?"

"What's wrong with you, Ben? Why do you keep on saying that I'm leaving you?"

"We got drunk," I said. "I was too wasted even to take a cab, so I stayed at his place."

Mona took a step toward me and I, afraid of the knife on the table and in my mind, took another step back.

"What's wrong, Ben?"

"Why aren't you calling me 'Benny'?"

"You told me that you didn't like it."