Diablerie (9 page)

When I lit a cigarette, she was startled.

"What is this? You are smoking now?" she asked.

"Oh . . . yeah. I need it. I need it bad."

"But you have quit for so long," she said.

"The stuff on my mind is from so long ago that only smoking and drinking can get to it," I said, realizing that there was more truth to those words than I had considered.

"You are drinking too?"

"Not until I'm ready to die," I said.

"Ben," she said, a cry in that deep shadow of my dream. "Ben, why are you so sad?"

"I don't remember."

"What do you mean?"

"My mind," I said. "Something happened a long time ago. Something that I've forgotten. There's a woman who I ran into who knows what that something is. She thinks I remember too. When I told her that I forgot, she got worried."

"Can you ask her what this is?"

"I'm afraid to."

Svetlana's response was a smile, then a toothy grin.

"This is funny to you?" I asked.

"No, darling." It was the first time she had ever called me
darling.
"It is just that you are like a new boyfriend to me. Dark and filled with secrets, smoking at my table and crying in my bed. You are a new man for me, a second secret lover who throws me down on the floor and takes me."

We made love after that. And when we were finished, she kissed me, got dressed, and walked out the door without saying good-bye. Ten minutes later the phone rang. I answered, certain that she was calling to mend the oversight.

"Yes?" I said into the receiver.

"Who is this?" a man with a heavy Russian accent asked.

"My phone, your name," I said.

The caller hung up. It was no wrong number, surely. The Russian accent meant that it was some &end or acquaintance of Lana's. While I pondered this, the phone rang again.

"Yes?"

"IS Svetlana there?"

"Who's calling?"

"Who are you?"

"My phone. Your name first."

"I am Sergei, Lana's . . . friend."

"I am Ben. I pay for this phone." After these words, I hung up. There was a cold darkness in me. Not the darkness of race but the moonless night of a hunter looking for warm blood. There was no mistaking the thrumming in my chest. My fingers wanted to close on a throat, any throat.

It wasn't that I felt jealousy. I didn't care if Lana had a "friend." She was young and very pretty. I was getting on toward the later years when the body, mind, and heart start to wind down. I wanted to hurt someone, but not for revenge.

I reached for my Lucky Strikes, but the pack was empty.

*  *  *

Four blocks away I stopped at a kiosk to buy cigarettes. It was a very small stand that sold chewing gum and newspapers, instant lottery tickets and racing forms. I bought a pack of filterless Camels. Three blocks later I picked up a free copy of the
Village Voice.
I took the paper over into Central Park and sat down at another bench.

It occurred to me that Lana was right. I was a much different man than I had been just a day before. Yesterday I had been all herky-jerky, skipping down the street and lamenting my wife's betrayal. Today I had woken up devastated, blubbering like a child, but now I was as calm as a contract killer on the old TV show
Kojak,
waiting for his next job.

I smoked three cigarettes, found what I was looking for in the performances section of the paper, and watched a big blustering pigeon try time after time to mount shy and reluctant hens.

I wandered around for a long time, finally making it home at a little after three. I was planning to pack a bag and go to a hotel. There was a small place on Thirty-sixth Street, the Reynard, that rented rooms by the week. It wasn't far from Mrs. Valeria's apartment but she'd never know I was there.

I wanted to get in and out quickly but Mona was there sitting on the sofa that faced my river-watching chair. She was wearing a white skirt and a black T-shirt. Her white hair and copper skin made her seem somehow transcendent.

"My ancestors were the Indians who lived in the Caribbean before the Europeans came," she once told me. "They had red skin and straight hair. Not like the slaves."

"But your skin has a lotta brown in there," I said. "And you straighten your hair."

There I was, saying everything she didn't want to hear. No wonder she took lovers.

"Hello, Ben."

Without speaking I went into the bedroom, took out my small traveling suitcase, and gathered together my socks and underwear, jeans and shirts.

"Ben." She was standing behind me now, blocking the exit from our small sleeping room.

I snapped the latch on the bag and turned toward her, waiting patiently for her to move aside.

"You can't just walk out like this," she said.

There were rebuttals in my head but my mouth refused to utter them. I looked at her feathery white tresses and soulful deep eyes. She was as much a stranger to me as I was fast becoming stranger to myself. Our actions and words seemed to come from other players, understudies who had completely different takes on the roles of our lives.

"Talk to me, Ben," she said.

"You don't want to hear the words that come from my mouth . . . my gutter mouth," I said, feeling a profound satisfaction at being able to throw that term back at her.

Her face took on that rigid expression she used with such success in business, child rearing, and our marriage.

"You see?" I said with a smile, "all I have to do is remind you of the way I talk sometimes and it makes you mad. But tell me something, Moan. When your lover tells you to suck his cock, do you tell him that he can't use that language on you or do you get all soft and wet and call him 'baby doll'?"

"I don't know why you want to talk to me like this," she said. "I don't deserve it, and I have no lovers."

"No?"

I glanced at her vanity in the corner. There, right out on top, was the little leather satchel. I walked over to it. The abruptness of my movement made her jump backward. I took two steps toward the bag, opened it up, and brought out the package of condoms.

"What's this?" I asked her, holding the box in an open palm.

The look on Mona's face reminded me of why I married her. It was a look both calculating and transparent. She saw that she was caught in a lie and a tryst. But a box of condoms, she reasoned, visibly, was certainly no conviction.

"I haven't used them," she said.

"Come on, Moan, don't be like that now," I was talking in a way that I had so long ago that I hardly remembered. "That man been in your pussy like a gopher down his own hole."

I said it perfectly, even curled my upper lip in a disparaging sneer.

"You bastard," she said.

"Then stand out of the way and let me leave."

Mona saw through the ploy. She realized that I had used words to anger her enough to let me go. But did she also know that I wanted her to see through me, that I wanted to find out what she was up to with Harvard Rollins and his looking into my past.

"I'm not going to let you bait me, Ben," she said. "I want to know what's going on with you, why you're acting so strange."

"Me? You're the one who went to your mother's and didn't even call. And she's not sick either. I doubt if she's even in town."

Again Mona needed time to regroup her defenses. She didn't know how much I knew. I had the key to her mom's place. I could have come by. I knew about the condoms. I at least suspected Harvard Rollins of being her lover.

I let her stew in these fears for a moment and then said, "Why don't we go in the living room and talk this out like adults?"

She sat on the sofa and I on my chair. She held her legs at a slant, knees together. I sat spread-legged, hands out to the side.

"What?" Mona asked, her eyes moist, her voice taut.

"I've only had one lover since we've been together,'' I said, speaking lightly, feeling the liberation of truth. "I know you've had at least three, the last of which is this Rollins guy. I don't blame you. I can only hope that on the off chance that we make love, that you have made sure he's . . . healthy."

Mona was frozen. Her eyes did not know me. The way I was sitting, the words I spoke; I was another man for her—the way I was, but not who I was, for Svetlana. If she would have spoken honestly at that moment, Mona would have said that I had never paid such close attention to her. She would have said that she felt stripped naked and that she didn't like it—not one bit.

"So you admit having a lover?'' she said finally.

"Come on, Mona. I won't use the words but you've been doing it too. You've been doing it a lot. And I don't blame you.''

"You don't?"

"Baby, listen to me," I said, my own words in my ear. "For years, all the years that you've known me, I've been like a cold-water fish at the bottom of the lake. I haven't done a thing for you except to give you Seela. I don't know how to fuck—excuse me, how to make love. My job is more boring than fungus growing in the dark. I know. You haven't said anything and I just went on. And so now it's out. You got a man who makes you want to carry condoms around in your bag. And me . . . I just need to get back into therapy and figure out what it is that made me into such a, such a blank space."

Every word I said rang true and clear but it was all a cover for what I really wanted from my just-now-estranged wife.

"You don't care if I have a lover?" she asked.

"I care, babe," I said. "It's just that I understand why you would need one. Your life is Med with excitement and sexy people. I've done the same thing every day almost without exception for twenty-two years."

It's odd being so hyperaware of your own words and intentions. I
had
lived an extraordinarily humdrum life. I ate the same kind of doughnut—chocolate, chocolate glaze—every day for twelve years. Then I switched to strawberry yogurt. I loved my job but it was as dry as sawdust, as plain as brown wrapping paper. Mona would be better off with some arty guy with less security and more character.

But all that was over now. I wasn't the same man I had been. Mona was as good as gone. But I needed to know what she was talking about in that bed with Harvard. I needed to know what they knew about me.

"Are you leaving me?" Mona asked.

"I'm gonna move out for a while," I said. "Maybe we'll get back together, but I can't see why you'd want to. I mean, I'm just a lump—that's all I'm ever gonna be."

"What's going on with you, Ben?" Mona asked.

I could tell by her voice that she had accepted my lover and was admitting to her own &airs. She didn't argue about Harvard. She wasn't going to try to keep me home.

I felt a twinge of jealousy, realizing that she'd run out of the house tonight to be in her new lover's arms. But I had no time to worry about that. There was something else happening, something more important than all the last twenty-plus years of gray days and lightless nights.

"That's what I wanted to ask you, Mona."

"What, what do you mean?"

"Am I in some kind of trouble, baby?"

"Trouble? What kind of trouble?"

"Why didn't you come home?" I asked simply. "I mean, if you just wanted to be with a lover, you could have met him in the daytime or pretended to be at some event at night."

"My mother—"

"No, honey. Your mother's not sick and we both know it. You were afraid of something, &aid of me."

"The way you, the way you made love to me," she said.

"No. That's not it. You were upset about . . . me. You asked me to go to therapy, you joked about divorce . . . Are you afraid of me? Is there something you're not telling me?"

"No," she said, shaking her head the way she always did when she was hiding something.

I knew then that I wouldn't get any more out of her. She wouldn't break down. The only thing I could hope for was that she was looking for ammunition in the divorce.

She was looking down while I peered over her head at Queens.

Then the phone rang and I got up to answer.

"Hello," I said, remembering Sergei.

"Hey, bro, what you know?"

"Hey, Cass. What's happenin', man?"

"You, my brother, you."