Me and the Devil: A Novel (14 page)

Next year, I told myself. I would have sufficient heat next year. It was good to feel that there would be a next year.

And it was good to know, as that leaf told me, that the passage of breath and seasons between now and then would unfold and resplend with the fulfillment of a mysterious promise so profound that it and its fulfillment were one and unnameable.

My coffee and my cigarette brought me great pleasure. I felt a stirring that also brought me great pleasure. For the first time in a very long time I raised pen to paper with a sense of purpose, a sense of desire.

Purpose, yes. Desire, yes. But, so strangely and beautifully, not a wisp of prescience as to what was to come when the pen touched the paper. And yet there was no hesitation, no doubt that something was to come.

Only then did my hand and pen pause. And only for a moment. Then once again they moved.

I put down the pen, gently pushed the sheet of paper along the surface of the desk, away from me. The sense of purpose and desire that had brought me to raise that pen to that paper were released from me, and had released me from them. I felt as I had felt just minutes before, when I figured out that I needed to disable the night-setback function on the boiler. I felt good.

With no reason, for no reason, I placed the leaf on the piece of paper. It was where it belonged. There was no reason involved. No reason at all, no thought at all. It was simply where it belonged.

From the couch I looked toward the sheet of paper and the desiccated leaf. My mind wandered, to the familiar, and to the curtain-partings in dimmed lights of what might or might not be.

“Hi. My name’s Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a sex addict.”

I had always detested that face, that voice, that presence. But in years past, when I first came to know the cumulative vileness of that face, voice, and presence, I found it almost as often to be a source of perverse entertainment as I found it to be a repellent that drove me at times not only from the room but very nearly from A.A. itself. While I would not have minded seeing violence done to him, I had never felt an urge to inflict violence on him. Now I realized that this was not so the other morning. I did not flee from him in abhorrence. I fled from my urge to squash him as one would a relentlessly annoying insect. It was, however momentary, an impulse to kill. But it was as real and impelling as it was
momentary. As my brain flashed white with rage, I could see nothing but his destruction at my uncontrollable angry hands. That is why I rose and left the room. It was not he, but a new and terrible rising in me, that caused my flight. And among the marvelous heightened senses of that day, from the fluttering of that sparrow’s wings to the Eucharistic feast of those croissants and that coffee, I had not thought of the intensified new sense of brutality that I had also experienced. What if my increased sensitivities toward and receptiveness to all that was good and pleasant in this life were accompanied, by the very nature of that enhancement, by an increase in all that was evil and monstrously pleasurable? What if the new dimensions of this new existence allowed me to taste of heaven while at the same time consigned me more deeply to the unexplored regions of the private hell that had darkened and defined my old life?

These thoughts gave me unsettling pause, but I turned away from further pondering on them. I could not turn far. What had brought me to that meeting in the first place that morning? It was my inability to speak to Melissa, the self-deceiving that led me to believe that alcohol would enable me to speak what I could not speak. I had been fortunate to see this self-deceit for what it was. Now I thought of the night I met her. There had been no compunction as to biting into her flesh. And now I loved her. Why then, the other morning, should there have been any faltering or unwillingness to open my mouth to gain entry to her mind and soul, which might have been in need? And even when I realized it was a matter of my wanting to open my mouth to nothing but drink, I blamed her, damning and cursing her in my mind, as if she were the Eve to my serpent. Was this only a passing disorder, an outrageous tumult of confusion and derangement, or was I the serpent, seeing and feeling himself forever an angel forever wronged?

If I were turning into a god, it was a god most strange.

T
HEN AGAIN, BECOMING A GOD AND BEING A GOD WERE
not quite the same. And even gods knew madness at times.

I wanted simplicity and serenity without interlude. But this could not be. I decided to go to another meeting, a different one, where there would be little or no chance of encountering the bane of the self-adoring sex addict.

What I did encounter was a young, tall, thin, sexy, longhaired, flat-chested girl in skintight blue jeans. There was a time when I did not like them thin and flat-chested. But time changes everything.

“You’re doing what I should’ve done,” I said to her after the meeting. She looked dead straight at me. The light of the cold sun settled in her long straight chestnut hair.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Coming here in time. Quitting in time.”

“ ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ is that it?” she said.

I couldn’t tell if the look on her face was antagonistic, suspicious, or good-natured. This is probably because it was all those things, a vacillation to and fro of all those things.

“No. I mean, I’ve wasted my life.”

I felt that these words flowed honestly from me and had much truth in them. Then I thought of the books on shelves, the ones I had written, the “postcards” of my life that attested that I had
been more than a drunkard wasting away in bar after bar, drinking bottle after bottle, the postcards that attested that I had accomplished things, more than most, and that what I regretfully saw as a life of discarded years, shiftlessness, and drunkenness was in truth much more than that. Maybe that was why I kept those books around. Maybe I needed those postcards.

These thoughts shot through me in an instant. There was no noticeable pause between what I had begun to say and the words that followed: “You have yours still ahead of you. All those years to live.”

“You’ve got a face like a map,” she said.

Again, antagonistic, suspicious, or good-natured. Again, probably all those things.

I tongued and sucked my false teeth into place for what I wanted to say and I said it: “Terrestrial or celestial?”

“Both.”

Good-natured. No ambiguity, no vacillation. A good-natured look.

“Thank you,” I said.

I smiled, then she smiled too. Her teeth were pearly and perfect. I hated her for them. I wanted her for them.

We ambled from the room together. I was careful to speak calmly, easily, casually.

“Have you been coming here a long time?” She knew that I was referring to this specific meeting, at this particular room.

“Oh, for about a year or so,” she said.

That was good. It meant that she wasn’t a newcomer to the program. There was an unwritten law that there should be no interaction with newcomers in their first ninety days of sobriety that did not relate directly to the program, and especially no interaction of even the most vaguely romantic kind.

We walked slowly south on Sullivan Street. She said she was
returning to work. Even in her old-fashioned Keds Champion sneakers, she was as tall as I. Wanting not to force foolish conversation, I fell silent and waited for her to say something. I was curious as to what, if anything, it would be.

“This has been the worst fucking winter,” she commented idly.

I nodded slowly, deliberately, before adding my words to hers. “Yep. It sure has.” A brief pause. Then, ruminatively: “But, then again, I guess it beats six feet under.”

Her quiet laugh was like the hint of a cough that did not come to pass.

“You live around here?” she said.

“Yeah, down a ways, below Canal.”

“Tri-Beh-Ca,” she said, in a manner that served as an open indictment of real estate agents.

“Tribeca. Treblinka. Whatever.”

This time her laugh escaped her thorax, and she smiled. “It’s nice there,” she said.

“Yeah. Springtime in Treblinka. It was a lot nicer before they ever gave it that cutesy-poo name.”

“What did they call it before then?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a great name,” she said. “They should’ve kept it.”

“Where do you work there?”

“On Greenwich. The Tribeca Film Center. The Treblinka Film Center.”

“Do you know Chiemi Karasawa? She’s got an office there. Isotope Films.”

“Oh, God, Chiemi. I love her.”

“I’ve known her more than twenty years. She’s the best.”

“Really? What’s your name?”

“Nick. Just tell her you met her friend Nick.”

“My name’s Lorna. Yeah, Chiemi’s one of the few people in that building that actually care about making movies. Real movies. The kind without the 3-D glasses and the pre-production merchandising deals. Not like the people I work for. I think she’s on the fifth floor. I’m on the fourth.”

I was in. I knew Chiemi. I was no longer a stray pervert set only on getting into those skintight blue jeans. I mean, I was. But not in her eyes, not now. I hoped.

“And what do you do there?” I asked.

“Bookkeeper. Every bit as boring as the movies they make.”

She asked me what I did, and I told her, adding that I hadn’t been doing much of it lately. She said she had heard of two of the books I had written. She didn’t say she’d read them, only that she’d heard of them. That was good enough. This was getting better as it went along. I suggested we stop for some breakfast on the way.

We managed to get a quiet corner table at Locanda Verde. I never used credit cards and I never made reservations, so I never got mistered by name in these joints. But I guess they knew me by face and could match the face with the tips, so they treated me all right. I got the
uovo modenese.
She got the oatmeal with grappa-stewed fruit, and we split an order of garlic potatoes. She asked for a cup of coffee and was surprised when I didn’t.

“I thought everybody in the program was a coffee junkie,” she said.

I told her that I drank more than my share of coffee, too. But I never drank it unless I could smoke with it.

“Cross-addicted,” she said with a smile.

“Cross-addicted? Vector-field-addicted,” I said with a smile of my own.

As we ate, we talked about this and that—How did she like
the potatoes? Did I come here often?—with the customary reserve and politeness of two people conversing for the first time.

I mentioned something that Johnny Depp had told me about the movie business, being sure to use his name but being also sure to glide smoothly and glibly over it, as if the name were nothing more than the equivalent of “somebody” or “this guy.”

“You know him?’

“Yeah. I’m the godfather of his son.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s a good guy. A really good guy. I liked him better when he was living in France, before he moved back to Hollywood. Probably that’s because I saw more of him then.”

“I didn’t know he had a son.”

“Yeah. Jumpin’ Jack. He’s got a birthday coming up. April ninth, something like that. Getting big. Probably wouldn’t recognize me if he saw me. It’s been that long. Too long.”

I had eaten the same thing for breakfast here many times before. But never had it tasted so delicious. It was another Eucharistic meal. My newly heightened senses had lost none of their keenness.

With my fork I moved some cotechino hash through some egg yolk, raised it to my mouth, chewed it slowly—my only option—then said what I wanted to say. She was in the movie racket, even if she was just a bookkeeper with few kind words to say about the racket. But you never knew with these people. Still, I wanted to say what I wanted to say. In a way, I needed to say it.

“L.A. is a fucking disease. It’s the land of death. It’s like the Egyptians said. The Western Lands. Death.”

I imagined the taste of her blood. I would get no closer to it than that, I was sure: imagining it. That’s why it didn’t matter saying what I said. But who knew? The writer angle. Chiemi. Johnny. The garlic potatoes. Who knew? It was a good breakfast, if nothing
else. I was ready to order a cappuccino to go, take care of the check, walk her down the block to where she worked, make a left, and go home.

All of a sudden I saw that she was looking at me—into me—in a way that left it all far behind, as if the morning until this very moment had never been. The writer angle, Chiemi, Johnny, the casual reserve, the breakfast, everything that had transpired or been said. It was as if a mask had suddenly been torn from me, revealing someone, or something, that had lurked behind it. That may have been true. But when my heart slowed, I saw that it was she who had torn the mask from her own face. The beauty of that face was still there. In fact, she looked more beautiful. But her now unsmiling beauty reminded me of the beauty of a big cat in the wild: a leopard daring any other creature to peer into the irresistible splendor of its eyes, at which fatal instant, the instant of eye contact, it would by nature pounce and kill.