Me and the Devil: A Novel (45 page)

That letter is dated October 20, 1996. Another letter from her, this one handwritten on lined yellow paper, from a few weeks later:

“Oh Nick, I love you more than I have ever loved. You, Nick, you. Not an image of ‘man’ or of ‘Nick’ but small shards you let out that I glimpsed—Oh Nick, I love you so and your love”
—and here there is a verb that I have trouble reading; it begins with an
h,
almost surely ends with a
t,
but, I told myself, it cannot be “hurt,” it must be something else—“deep.”

I should have looked further, to see what the next letter from her was like, to see if there was a next letter. All I know is that we were together again about six or so years later, but I don’t know for how long.

Did what she described in her letter of October 20, 1996, ever happen? I do not know. I can’t even remember having received a letter like this from her. I know we had a lot of wondrous strange nights together. She was, somewhere in me and under these stars, one of the loves of my life.

There was an accordion file and five thick archival boxes of correspondence in my bedroom closet, all of which, along with the rest of my papers and notebooks and manuscripts, were set to be sold later this year to a university library. If I had forgotten this letter, as I had, I could surely forget anything. Maybe I should cull some of this stuff before it got hauled away.

The letter made me miss her and want her again very badly. It even made me think of calling her. If only I could hear her voice saying what she said in that letter.

Talk about change.

From praise for “a masterpiece” that was “the best thing I will ever have published,” and for which I could not be thanked enough, to being treated like a nigger slave. It was, as his website might have it, downright “tweepulsive.” People told me that I should be careful, that I should not burn my bridges behind me. I told them all the same thing, which was the truth: I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline.

From the love and wanton luscious desires of a lithe young beauty who walked and talked like a poem to nothing, to staring at a piece of paper and trying to remember.

Change. Yes, things had changed. And, yes, there was no way out. I could not step into that same river again. How many rivers had I stepped into, feeling it all to be the same river?

“Suck, baby. Suck. Bite. Draw blood.”

I got up, went to the drawer that held Melissa’s hosiery and shoes, took it all my arms, brought it to the garbage chute in the hall, and dumped it.

“I cannot thank you enough.”

I tore the fatuous flattering letter to shreds and flushed them down the toilet, where such words belonged.

Who was on a thousand-dollar bill?

“Draw blood.”

Grover Cleveland.

Was it she with her rosy golden youth who had put this blood quest into my mind?

The only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

Could it be that I had drawn her blood, then forgotten about it?

And the ten-grand note? What about the ten-grand note?

Impossible. I would have remembered.

Chase. Samuel P. Chase. He was on the ten-grand note. They stopped making them both, the grand and the ten grand—and
the five hundred and the five grand—all of them; they stopped making them all in 1946.

But how I wished she were here now.

No, not Samuel. I always got that wrong, his first name. Then again, what did it matter?

She mattered.

Love and loneliness, loneliness and love. How many times had these dice been cast throughout my life? How many testaments of endless love, how many vagrancies of the heart, lay forgotten in those boxes in my closet? When would I come to see that these things were, like breath itself, merely the inhalations and exhalations of my life, and, like breath, not to be dwelt on.

But I had seen it. I had seen it and forgotten it. A memory came to me.

Club de l’Aviation, avenue des Champs Elysées, Paris, December 2002, the middle of black night. I sit at the blackjack table with my beloved friend Héloïse because my hotel room is haunted, the hotel is haunted, all of Paris is haunted, as my heart is broken. Love has sly-rapped me yet again.

But you would never know this. For I have lived long enough to learn that all things pass, and that after every suffering, the gods have blest me with a happiness that I had never known. And so I smile and I laugh and I speak like a holy fool.

An elderly woman at the table begins to cough her brains out. She seems to go into apoplexy. She seems about to croak.

With a raised arm, the floor man in his tuxedo who has paused at our table calmly calls out with a smile:
“Cigarettes pour madame!”

A fresh pack of cigarettes arrives. The floor man opens the pack with alacrity and graciously offers it to madame, who, with what seems like her final act in life, places one of them between her lips and extends it to the waiting flame of the floor man’s lighter. She draws deeply. The coughing and hacking of what
seemed to be her death throes cease with a spasmodic breath of resuscitation.

It is good to know that madame is well.

The game resumes. Madame is dealt two aces, splits them, draws two face cards.

The floor man congratulates her and moves on.

It is good to smoke. It is good to drink. It is good to gamble. It is good to laugh. It is good to hold a kindred spirit close, in suffering or happiness, in the middle of the night. It is good to live.

How could I have forgotten, until now, the memory of that long-ago night and its dissolute magic?

Love and loneliness, loneliness and love. Flush times and lean times, lean times and flush times. Where would the dice upon their final toss come to rest?

As the demon barker said:
“Ev’rybody wins at Skill-o!”
The parting words of the god who fled.

It was getting late. Not just this night. All of it. There was no moon, and the ever-flowing, ever-changing river lay in darkness. I had little time to linger. Fuck lost love and fuck all those who would trespass against me. Maybe there was to be no more money. Maybe there was to be no more love. What was it all anyway? The one nothing more than ever more devalued paper scrip, the other just a temporary calmative for desperation.

And yet I craved them. But what I craved above all in this world of lies, this world of strife, as the old spook called it, was repose. If I could not summon gold from the maw of the Devil; if I could not summon her who had taken my cock into the exquisite passioning of her warm, wet mouth—and, yes, the sweetest girls always gave the best head—her who implored me to clutch and to bite; I could at least leave behind me all that was done and forever gone, and summon the strength to embrace change as I had embraced her.

Let there be no more lamentations, self-mourning, and woe. Enough of hollow or treacherous praise, of words of love, or of this bitch or that bitch crying that I drank too much.

It was all the same, and it meant nothing. I could give myself all the praise, love, and reproach that I needed. There was no need to seek it elsewhere. If it came, it came. If I chose to take it, I would take it with a laugh, and I would not take it as praise or as blandishment, as love or as desperation, as reproach or as madness.

This memory, the feeling evoked by this memory, by all memory, echoed through me.

It was good to drink; it was good to gamble, good to laugh; good to hold close a kindred spirit, even if it was yourself, in suffering or happiness, in the middle of the night or fulgent day. It was good to live.

I need not seek. I would simply take what came; take it as a breeze of change that might, if only for a breath, bring repose.

After all, as I had told myself, I was to die very soon. Old leopards, I liked to say, doddered on because they never really knew how old they were. But it was a good thing that I was not a leopard, because, even if unknown to them, their lives in fact rarely lasted more than seventeen years.

Christ, I had barely got going by the time I hit seventeen. Beautiful to behold, the leopards, and to sense, or to imagine sensing, their spirit within. But, no, I was not one of them, and I was damned glad that I was not. They didn’t have a name for cats like me.

I
T WENT BACK TO WHEN
I
WAS AN ADOLESCENT, ABOUT THE
age at which some leopards die.

My left eardrum was punctured with a thin pointed stick by a five-buck doctor seeking to pierce an abscess that he said might prove fatal if it got to my brain.

He succeeded in piercing the abscess. Pus drained from my ear for a week.

But the damage to the eardrum left me with the shrill ringing in my ear that never went away and made the experience of silence impossible.

In later years, I had far more costly doctors examine my bad ear thoroughly. After a battery of tests, it was concluded that my condition, to which a fancy name was now given, could not be alleviated. When blocked, even by a pillow, it was worse, almost maddening. This is why I always slept on my right side, never my left.

That night, after coming across the letters and looking at my life through enhanced eyes, I lingered awhile, then went to bed.

It took me a few minutes to realize it, but the shrill ringing had become something like the sound of a rushing freshet.

Almost peaceful, almost lulling, after what I had heard within my damaged ear for the past fifty years or so.

“The river,” I murmured to myself as I fell asleep, “the river.”

I felt a smile on my face. I could not remember the last time I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

When I woke the next morning, the shrill ringing was still gone. I could still hear the soft-running river. It was like a miracle, the inflection, the modulation of the sound in my inner ear.

I told myself that it was nothing more than a miraculous respite, a passing blessing. But the banshee stayed away. The river kept flowing.

W
HEN
I
WENT OUT INTO THE DAY THAT MORNING,
I felt beautifully alone and beautifully oh so not alone as I walked through a world that forthshone amid the world of lies.

With every breath I took, I was aware of stepping into a new river of infinite possibilities.

I was free. Free of it all, even as I walked in the midst of it all.

What had been, had been. What would be—fuck it. What was, at this very breath, was all that mattered.

I was answerable to, responsible to, myself alone. Well, all right, myself and the law. But fuck the law. Fuck those who imposed it. Fuck those who enforced it. Fuck those who abided by it.

As I sipped my coffee from a paper cup, I realized that I had never done it before. You can’t sip the same coffee twice. If you are free, you can’t do anything twice. You can’t take the same breath twice.

And I was free. Now and forever.

I was free to drink again, free to kill again, free to write again.

It could never be the same drink, the same killing, the same book.

But did I want to do these things, any of them? Was the desire to do what I had done, no matter how different the outcome, in
the breeze of this breath? Or were these mere wisps of mere velleity?

Would these things, any of them, bring me repose?

Was it for me to know, or even to ask?

As one of the Gnostic tractates had it: “What is the light? And what is the darkness?” These words, written near the end of the second century or early in the third, survive in the Coptic fragments of what is known as the Testimony of Truth, a forbidden sacred text that tells the story of the Garden of Eden through the eyes of the serpent.

I slowly sipped the last of my coffee and luxuriated in my freedom.

My freedom to drink, to draw blood, to write again.

Could I think of nothing else that lay in the limitless vast of freedom?

Yes. Food. There was always the delight of food.

My feeling of exhilaration and elation seemed to fade for a moment. It returned, then seemed to fade again.

Could they really be right after all? Michael, in saying that I was happy only when I was writing; Lee, in saying that I could never stop writing?

Maybe I should write another book, just one more. It was a freeing thing, to write. And a freeing thing seemed to befit a free man.

I had no real desire to drink.

I had no real desire to draw blood from young flesh, let alone to kill. Christ, with the deep periodontal pockets round the few remaining real teeth I had, I was lucky not to have got some kind of disease from one of those girls’ blood.

Had my lust-driven desire for rejuvenescence, which brought me madness instead, been a manifestation of sickness of mind or soul or body? I did not know, I never would; and I did not care.

The Apophthegmata Patrum, the sixth-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers, tells of a monk who cherished the memory of a very beautiful woman. When he heard that she was dead, he went and dipped his robe into her decomposed body, that he might live with this stench to help him fend off the constant thoughts of beauty that beset him.