Me and the Devil: A Novel (5 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t think about money much.”

“I guess that’s good. It doesn’t think much about you either.”

“That’s pretty much the way I look at it.”

Her voice was pleasant. She wasn’t really drunk, though she was getting there. She was wearing pants, but they were quite close-fitting, and her thighs looked good in them. Her skin was beautiful. Her lips were full. Her dark hair was not all that long, and she wore it in a ponytail, which made her look even younger. Its end formed a sweet, lush curl that filliped amid the down at the nape of her neck with her every slight movement. She raised her knees to rest against the bar. It was a beautiful sight.

So strange to be like this, sober in a bar as midnight struck. Strange and exhilarating too.

She seemed as beguiled by me as I was by her. I did not know, and did not care, how much of her apparent beguilement could be attributed to the alcohol’s warm, rising effect on her. The red
lipstick she wore set off the whiteness of her teeth. I was lucky to have been mindful to put my teeth in before I came out.

When she laughed I glimpsed the tip of her tongue dancing on the pearly white crenulations of those teeth, and I felt a twitch and a throb in the vein that runs down the length of my cock. In that instant, it was all I could do to keep from placing her hand to it. The nails of her fingers were the same color as her lips, and touching her hand under the pretext of making a point of something I was saying, I felt how soft and smooth those pale fingers were. The unseen parts of her body would be even more so.

Her laughter and my laughter became shared laughter. Her talk and my talk became shared talk. Truth be told, I was starting to like her. If only I were younger, I thought. Much younger. But I was not.

I had the basic facts of her, as far as she had chosen to give them to me. Age nineteen. Born in Minnesota; this cold did not bother her. An only child. Father a medical researcher, but not a vassal of the pharmaceutical racket; and, no, she herself had never really thought of pursuing science.

She had come here tonight after walking out on a date with “this guy I met.”

Why had she gone out with him to begin with?

“Because he was cute.”

What was she doing wasting her time talking to me?

“Maybe because you’re not cute. And you’re not telling me how much money you’re going to make and how to pronounce the dessert or how a single mother you heard about had her child taken away from her because she ate so many poppy seed rolls that she tested positive for opiates.”

When I told her that I wanted to take her home with me, that I wanted to end the night with her, she gave me a look with eyes
that seemed to demur, even to chastise. I did not further plead my desire but told her that I understood.

“Do you?” she said.

The taxi turned west on the corner of Broadway and Leonard. It was well after two. There was very little traffic. Furtive shadows seemed to appear and disappear in swirling blasts of wind.

“Thomas Paine saw a man hanged here,” I said. Looking out the backseat window, I wondered which corner of this intersection the gallows had occupied.

“Who’s he?” she said, glancing out the window.

“Friend of mine,” I said after a moment, then smiled to myself. This was going to be a good one.

I placed my arm lightly around her, and she leaned her head just as lightly to my shoulder. She asked me if I had a cat. I told her that I did not. She told me that she did not trust men who kept cats. I told her that I did not trust them either. It was true.

The liking for her that I had felt come over me in the bar seemed to grow stronger as we rode alone through the night. If only I were younger, much younger, I thought. If only I were looking for, if only I needed, something other than sustenance, other than moisture or cure. But what had I always hungered for, even without knowing it? What did we all hunger for, in our way? I wondered what unknown thing it was that impelled her to me.

It took far less time to get her from the couch to the bed than it had taken to get her from the bar to the cab. I left the music on. Rachmaninoff’s
Isle of the Dead.
To its grand thalassic echoes of the Great Dirge, I tongue-kissed her panties and the ankle from which they dangled so delectably. I did not hear the music end. I heard only her.

She uttered a little gasp. I felt her shiver and her flesh horripilate as I ran my nails down her hip and thigh. Her belly rose and
she shuddered. I put my mouth to her breast. She shivered again, and shuddered more deeply, deliciously. Her panties were in my hand. I raised them to her face as I kissed the warm dew between her legs. Her mouth opened and her tongue rose through the sheer veil of the panties. My free hand grabbed her thigh above the knee. I breathed long and slow into her, then lowered my lips to her leg. I licked, sucked, lowered my jaw, felt her flesh between my teeth. Her hand was on my head, her fingers raked my hair, softly, then roughly, then softly again. She seemed to await the clench of my teeth, the pleasure of a suffering so sweet, and the release it would bring.

I bit her. She muffled her own scream. I tasted her blood in my mouth, in my throat. I felt her body relax, and I heard her breathe as if she were lost in a dream that would not be remembered.

I was not aware of how much time passed. I wiped blood from my mouth, licked blood from her skin. Then I felt her upon me, her mouth upon me, her tongue upon that vein that throbbed and that twitched. I worked her ponytail like a suicide clutch. I felt her hand stir. She raised it to my lips, and again I tasted her blood. I came violently, heard the sounds of her sucking become the sounds of her swallowing; heard the sound of her hand in a frenzy between her taut legs. Her mouth slowed but did not cease. I could take no more, and I withdrew from her.

Our breath slowed and we fell to sleep, closely entwined, her arm around me. It was almost as if, young and innocent as she was, she knew about the monkeys.

W
HEN
I
AWOKE THAT MORNING
I
FELT INVIGORATED,
as if I had taken some sort of root tonic that had cleared and cleansed me and set me aright. With Melissa still asleep, I rose quietly. As I entered the bathroom to piss and shave, I saw there was a calm and sanguine smile on my face. For an instant I did not recognize that smile as my own, that figure in the mirror as myself. It was good to see me.

I pulled on my pajamas and went into the kitchen to make oatmeal and coffee, enough for the two of us. It was not so warm in my place that bitter winter. My big old banging gas-guzzling HydroTherm MultiPulse AM100 heating boiler had finally broken down irreparably the previous year, and I had ended up replacing it with a fancy new wall-mounted, energy-efficient Lochinvar Knight. This was a nine-grand mistake. I should have had the old boiler rebuilt from the concrete up. But that would have taken brains. All I had was hindsight. The new boiler was so energy-efficient it didn’t give off any heat to speak of. After Con Edison came to inspect it and I got my energy-efficient residential gas rebate and tax-credit authorization, I had the energy-efficient wiring disconnected, and the damned thing still did not work worth a damn. I got more warmth from the little twenty-buck space heater I kept on the end table by the couch than I did from my five radiators. The new could never replace the old. This was true of all things. But the old boiler had pulsed and clanged and
banged its last. The concrete in the base of its tank and the cinder blocks beneath it had rotted clean through and the water that seeped through them flooded the boiler closet. How I yearned for the old antediluvian warmth that I had known. But on this morning the chill did not bother me at all. I didn’t even feel it.

I sliced a banana into the simmering oatmeal, added some raisins, a nutmeg, a bit more cinnamon, stirred in buttermilk, stirred in butter, a little chestnut honey. She had crept up behind me, barefoot and wearing my robe. I asked her how she liked her coffee. Cream and a little sugar. I had no cream, only milk and half-and-half. Like most Americans who asked for cream, she meant milk. I asked her if she wanted a shot with it. Her “no, thank you” was enwrapped in a low sleepy giggle. I poured out the steaming oatmeal into bowls, the steaming coffee into cups. I turned on Rachmaninoff again. What’s good for the dark of night is good for the morning light.

Who said that? Why did it whisper of ancient Egypt? Was it from the Pyramid Texts? The Book of the Dead? No, I had never read or heard those words before. Nor had I ever said them, written them, or thought them before.

She was looking at the wound on her leg, the red cicatrice of her broken skin and the livid swollen flesh around it. She seemed rapt by it as she ran her finger gently over it.

“Do you want to kiss it?” she asked.

I bent over her, lowered my lips softly to her thigh. This gave me no pleasure. I did it to please her. She closed the robe over the scar and returned to her oatmeal.

“Do you want to put something on it?” I said.

“Like what?”

“Peroxide. Ointment. I don’t know.”

She did not respond to this. Instead she asked me about the music. I told her what little I knew about it.

“I was fooling with you last night,” she said.

I was taken aback. I asked her what she meant.

“Thomas Paine,” she said. Her eyes danced with a sly playfulness.
“Common Sense.”

“Oh.” I felt a sense of relief, and my spirits brightened again. “I should have known. History major.”

“Ancient history,” she said. “But I remember him from high school.”

I gestured to the open doors of my library. “I’ve got a wallful of books in there on ancient history, ancient writing, ancient mythology, ancient everything. The shelves on the left.”

My library had been carefully gathered together over the course of a lifetime, and in the course of a few years I had for the most part lost interest in it. Had I sent her through those doors, to those books, because I was experiencing the spark of a renewed closeness to them, a rekindling of my sense of their importance to me and to my life?

She went into the library, but, as I saw from where I sat, the cuneiform tablets on the wall immediately facing her caught her eye and she went directly to them.

“When are these from?” she asked with her back to me.

“They were put out to bake about four thousand years ago,” I said. “Sumerian. Third Dynasty of Ur.”

“What do they say?”

“They’re an accounting of cult offerings to a god of war called Shara, from a temple in a Mesopotamian town called Umma.”

“Can you read them?”

“No. Can you?”

“No.”

She seemed transfixed by them. Only after some minutes did she turn to browse the shelves of books I thought might interest her. As she left the room, she paused to peer through the glass of the case that held the books that I had written.

“You’ve written a lot of books,” she said.

“Yes and no,” I said. “Most of the books in there are just different editions and translations of one book or another. Most of them I can’t even read. Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, Dutch, this, that, the other thing. I can’t understand a word of what’s in most of those books. They just have my name on them. They just look good.”

As I said those last words, I was thinking of how good she looked, standing there in the light of day that spilled from the northeast through the library window. Once again I was struck by doubt. Why had she come with me? What had she seen or sensed in me? Maybe I should just ask her. But not now. Not now. My questioning doubt left me as quickly as it had risen.

In our ways we all are gods or goddesses, even if we be forgotten in the end. Better not to dwell on our powers or attributes or the offerings and sacrifices made to us.

For a long time I had felt grim mortality closing in on me. Now, on this morning, in this moment, I felt that something lay before me, forthshining and resplendent. And in this moment, on this morning, that was all and enough.

I
KNEW THAT
I
HAD NOT TAKEN A DRINK IN MORE THAN A
month, but I was not counting days. And I was not going through the rigmarole of attending ninety meetings in ninety days. I had done this years ago, and in the end celebrated my success by going on a bender that lasted almost as long and landed me in the hospital.

I had asked people years ago about the significance of those ninety days. Why not sixty days, or a hundred days? Why ninety? No one could give me an answer. Someone suggested there were spiritual implications inherent in the passage of ninety days, but he could not expound further and in the end admitted that he really did not know what he was talking about.

I had also asked about the purpose of all who had fewer than ninety days of sobriety openly declaring their day count at the start of meetings. Someone suggested that it was to encourage others to open up more freely. I maintained the belief that it was for the entertainment of those who said such things.

The truth seemed to be that most of those in the program dealt with sobriety as they had dealt with alcohol, obsessively and compulsively. They did not liberate themselves from their alcoholic ways. They merely transferred them to a sobriety that seemed to me self-defeating and dangerously precarious, little more than a Pyrrhic victory over the torments and ill-being that
had fucked them up and enslaved them in the first place. A sober invalid was still an invalid, a sober slave was still a slave.