Me and the Devil: A Novel (18 page)

As these thoughts merged with my slow, soft descent into slumber, I felt that I should talk with someone about this sublime but strange matter of new life and the blood of blossoming young beauty. Someone who was not judgmental. Someone who had been around, who had done, seen, and learned of things that most were unaware of.

That person would be Keith, I told myself as I slipped into the sweet untroubled sleep of the debtless, wantless, and sinless.

There was no telling how long I slept in this deep and dreamless state. When I woke, the morning light was rising full and the telephone was ringing. It was Melissa. She wanted to know if I felt like getting together tonight. There was nothing I should like more, I told her. She said she had to put in an hour or so at the library, then run a few errands, and could be down here by half past six or so. That would be great, I told her. She lingered on the telephone awhile, as people often do, without having anything of consequence to say. She spoke of the weather, of how it was now spring but it still felt like winter. She spoke of a documentary film she had seen the night before at the Film Forum. She asked me what I had done last night.

“Nothing,” I told her, seeing in my mind that dim red light and that Saint Andrew’s cross, tasting in my mind the feast of that Chinese food, tasting in my mouth and throat the residue of Lorna’s blood. “I started to read the collected letters of Samuel Beckett, but the book was too damned heavy to read in bed.”

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. “Something I think you’ll like.”

“And what might that surprise be?”

“You’ll see. If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, then, would it?”

“So you’ll be keeping me in a state of anticipation all day.”

“It’s nothing really. It’s something that has to do with my legs. Something I think you’ll like.”

“Ah, now you’ll be keeping me in a state of excitement all day.”

“I read Beckett’s
Stories and Texts for Nothing
last year.”

“Great stuff. ‘The Calmative.’ What’s the other one? ‘The End.’ Yeah, ‘The End.’ Great stuff. Unbelievable stuff.”

“Did you ever see
Waiting for Godot,
or did you ever read it?”

“I hate that shit. His plays suck. All of them except for
Krapp’s Last Tape.
”

“Why does writers’ worst stuff become their best-known stuff?”

“Because people are fucking idiots. The stupider it is, the more they eat it up. With the highfalutin idiots, the more they’re told it’s art, the more they eat it up. Stupid shit, stupid people. The secret to success.”

“So I’ll see you later on.”

“Have you noticed anything weird about my eyes lately?”

“You have great eyes.”

“I mean the way they change colors.”

“Yeah, it’s really something. Isn’t that what they call
pers
in French?
Pers
eyes. Eyes that keep changing colors.”

She was as good with that one as she was with Hesse’s name. She didn’t pronounce the
s
at the end. But she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“
Pers
eyes change between brown and green, or like the colors of the sea, or something like that. You haven’t noticed anything
weird
about the way my eyes change colors?”

“Are you stoned?”

“No.” I laughed. “Weird guy, weird eyes, I guess.”

“Who was that saint that carried around that plate with his eyeballs on it?”

“Oh, man, I forget. Those guys were always carrying around platters with some part of them on it. The broads too. Come to think of it, the only one I remember is Saint Agnes. I read this book once, some sort of sex manual from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.
The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Revealed.
Something like that. And the guy who wrote it started talking about women afflicted with Saint Agnes syndrome or something like that, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking
about. Then years later I found out that Saint Agnes carried around a platter with a pair of tits on it, because that was the way she was supposed to have been martyred, by having her tits cut off. All this just to say a woman was flat-chested.”

I thought of Lorna, my beautiful virgin flat-chested leopardess and her cross of Saint Andrew’s martyrdom. Then I realized I had the wrong saint.

“No,” I said, “not Saint Agnes. It was Saint Agatha. She was the one with the tits on the platter. Saint Agatha of Sicily, not Saint Agnes.”

“And oh yeah, the eyeballs, that was a female saint too,” Melissa said. “Saint Lucy. She was the one with the eyeballs on a golden plate.”

“Who came up with this shit? Who were these sick fucks who concocted these stories? It’s like some fat kike Hollywood mogul or something: ‘All this martyrdom shit is getting tired. These martyrs are getting to be a fucking dime a dozen. We need some pizzazz. We need to sell some popcorn. That blonde. Let’s cut off her tits before we kill her. And that other one, what’s her name, that bitch with the bedroom peepers. Let’s rip out her eyeballs before she gets it.’ Is there some kind of art historian at school you could ask? I really want to know. The first Christian blue plate special. I want to know which saint and what was on his or her platter.”

“You’re on a roll. What did you have for breakfast?”

“I just woke up. Slept like a baby. I’ll probably just go with a Mexican breakfast, cup of coffee and a cigarette. What about you?”

“A bagel.”

“We’re livin’, kid. So before you run off to find that tits-on-a-plate professor, tell me more about this surprise.”

“No.”

“Come on, just a hint.”

“It’s something you can sink your teeth into. Something you can sink your teeth
through.
”

“Oh, man,” I said, then gave up.

She was in a sprightly mood, and I was feeling great. That cup of coffee was just a few minutes away.

“Did you ever think of killing yourself?” I said. The words just came out.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“No. Have you?”

“Never?”

“Maybe once when I made a cake for a school bake sale in the fourth grade and it fell apart and I tried to put it back together again with toothpicks and it came apart again even worse than before and everybody laughed at me. That may have been my suicide moment. I was saved by the intervention of my mom and dad buying me a cake with buttercream frosting at the corner bakery, which I palmed off as my own, blaming my previous failure on a faulty oven knob. I didn’t really think of killing myself. I just cried to my mom that I wanted to die. Which was pure schoolgirl melodrama. I was no good in the school play, either.”

I made a sound between a grunt and a laugh.

“Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering what you were doing with that suicide thing in your bag the other night.”

“What suicide thing?”

“That brochure. That what-a-difference-a-day-makes thing?”

“A friend of mine at school. She’s getting pretty spooky. She doesn’t talk it, not directly. But it’s getting to where it seems like just a matter of when and how. I really like her. She’s a really good kid. But as it turned out, that brochure was just a plug for an overnight walk to help prevent suicide. Something like that. Don’t ask
me how a bunch of people marching down a street at three o’clock in the morning is supposed to help somebody a mile away not commit suicide. But there was also something in there about an informational meeting, but you had to register, your address and phone number and everything, which means they’ll probably drive you to suicide by bugging you for donations. I did learn that, according to that brochure anyway, suicide is the third biggest cause of death among teenagers and the second biggest cause of death among college students.”

“What’s the first?”

“They didn’t say. That’s probably a different brochure.”

“A lot of broken cakes out there, I guess.”

“You’d like her. She likes cutting herself a lot.”

“Bring her down sometime. I’ve never made a cocktail of two bloods. Is she pretty?”

“Shut up.”

I was smiling, enjoying the fact that she couldn’t see it over the telephone as I hung up. Actually it was an idea not without appeal. Two girls, four thighs. A nip from one, a sip from the other, long drinks in the dark from soft young legs entwined.

This brought to mind the fifty-milliliter sample vials, decanted from bottles of rare liquor, I had ordered from Oxygénée in England. A pre-ban Absinthe de Ville Chabrolle. A pre-ban Absinthe Gempp Pernod. And the one I really wanted, an extinct tea liqueur that was older by far than the century-old absinthes: a pre-1850 Crème de Thé from the cellars of Badminton House.

Why would a sober man, a man who intended to remain sober, be making exorbitant purchases of uncommon booze? I could tell myself that it was the collector in me. I could tell myself that I was making investments. There were, in fact, in my closet bottles of great-vintage Margaux and pre-ban absinthe, even a bottle of 1811 Cognac Napoléon Grande Fine Champagne Reserve,
all of which had remained sealed and undrunk through numerous mad and mindless benders. But the three little vials of rarest booze I had ordered, as well as several wine futures I had bought, were not purchased, like the bottles in my closet, when the idea of sobriety was nothing more than an occasional fancy. These, the little vials and the futures, were bought in what I felt to be the full and never to be sundered embrace of sobriety. The snake in the alky’s skull. The self-deceit so consummate. Was I methodically, meticulously planning, as if in somnambulance, a bender to end all benders? In a few days I would be seeing the doctor, and was glad that I might likely be leaving his office with a prescription for baclofen. If it was not in my pocket when I left, I would go to one or another of those walk-up doctors’ offices in Chinatown and get a prescription there.

I relished a smoke and the hot strong brew lightened with half-and-half of my
petit-déjeuner mexicain.
I relished looking forward to spending the night with my sweet Melissa. I relished the little quiver of boyish excitement the prospect of her “surprise” presented. I relished the slow serene progress of drifting from this morning to this night that lay ahead of me, each breath of it a relishing to come. I relished the eidetic image of Lorna stretched and gagged in ecstasy on her Saint Andrew’s cross in the dim red whorehouse light of the poky black-curtained sanctum of her Hell’s Kitchen flat. I relished the sense of strength and renewed life and peace that ran through me like a soft current of spring brook water, reflecting the glistening twinkling light of godliness. I relished the very relishing of it all, and the growing sense of the all within me.

I placed a pair of old Ray-Ban sunglasses—more than thirty years old, in fact, in a style no longer made—on the kitchen counter beside the plastic cup that held my fake teeth. Two things now, instead of one thing, to which to attend before venturing
out into the day: one to put in, the other to put on. I wondered idly if the color wheels of my irises were any more noticeable to passing observers than the fake teeth in my mouth. No one, after all, had commented other than Lorna, in her talk of “that look.” What if on Friday morning my doctor should cast the ray of his penlight into my eyes? What would he see and what would he say? Would it matter? Would it mean anything? There were biochemical “laws” that supposedly governed and explained muscle tissue growth. But none of them applied to the recent growth, the recent resurgence of my muscle tissue. And regardless of what might be seen in the narrow beam of a penlight, I knew my eyesight to be sharper and more acute than it had been in years. Was I outstripping the bounds of accepted medical science, which, for all its advancements and its posturings of understanding what it did not, remained not so far removed from its medieval antecedents?

Paeon, the physician to the gods, carried no stethoscope or disposable wooden tongue depressors.

There is a large black jagged rock that juts from the sea close to a secluded cove on Levanzo, an island off the western coast of Sicily, in the ocean waters off Trapani. The natives have a name for this eternal large black jagged sea-presence: Faraglione. In warm seasons of many years, I used to lie naked on the solitary little stony shore looking at it from early morning to sunset, immersing myself in the tossing blue waves between me and it, watching the sun turn from gold to fiery red, increasing in size as it did so and descended. It was easy to see how this great perfect circle of the red sun descending was a god to those who once dwelled in the caves in the high rock above where I lay; easy to see that while theologies and religions die, true gods do not. Since I felt cured of everything when I left that place and walked the long distance back over the hills to the island’s little hamlet, Cala
Dogana, in the chill of nightfall, I had my own name for Faraglione. I called it
il dottore,
the Doctor.

I don’t think I knew about Paeon then. I had likely read of him in Homer without either awareness or memory. No, I did not know of him, but I felt his being there, nameless and unknown to me, all the same, whispering into the wind to me, or through the voices of the birds that flew overhead: “Someday, you who see and long for and worship what is right. Someday.” Paeon.
Il dottore.
The Doctor. It was when I stopped pilgriming to him and lying naked all day before him in the sun that my darkness fell and claimed me. Paeon.
Il dottore.
The Doctor. He was ready to see me now, by name, and I him. I felt him to be with me. I felt him everywhere. The only true value of his lessers lay in their prescription pads.