Me and the Devil: A Novel (6 page)

No, I was not counting days. But I knew the importance of meetings and the inspiration and sense of fellowship I took away from a good meeting.

I decided that I would go on Ash Wednesday to Our Lady of Pompeii in the Village. With Palm Sunday it was one of the two days of the year when I went to church. Back when the old women—or their husbands, seeking free beer—came into Dodge’s bar on Bedford Street with palms from Pompeii that they had taken home and woven into sprays as their mothers had taught them to do, Ash Wednesday was the only day of the year that brought me to church. The observance of these two days were all that remained of my Christianity. They were the only Roman Catholic rites in which I engaged, as I saw Christmas and Easter as good pagan feasts that had been co-opted by the early Church. I liked the ashes, the frond-leaves and little plaited crosses of palm. I had it timed so that I missed the Mass and arrived just as the ashes or palms were given out. I don’t know what it was that I liked about them, but I liked them.

I would eat breakfast, take the subway to Sheridan Square, go to a meeting on Perry Street, then hit the church at the end of the nine o’clock Mass, when the lines for ashes were formed and moving rapidly. After that I would walk round Bleecker Street to Faicco’s, buy some ground pork and sausage. Then I would go to Murray’s and see if the
parmigiano
had the right shade of age to it in the half inch or so under the rind. If it didn’t, I’d go down to Dean & Deluca. I had been craving pasta with the sauce that was better than my grandmother’s, better than any chef’s, here or in Italy. It was better because I had taken the best from wherever I encountered it, and I had blended the best together, and then had made it better. And I would make it tonight, and I would eat it tonight and
for the rest of the week. There was already a big jar of stock in the refrigerator. I had boiled it up the other day. It was good to be getting back my cooking jones.

Perry Street was one of the places where I once had done those ninety meetings in those ninety days, where I had learned that this was not a good thing for everybody, that it was more important to be sober and serene without counting on a string of beads that might choke us when the last bead was counted. That was sixteen years before, in a different winter, a different springtime. I had encountered a lot of good people at those meetings. And a few arch assholes. When one chose to speak at a meeting, it was customary to introduce oneself by first name, followed by the phrase “I’m an alcoholic.” Some people unnecessarily embellished this to “I’m a recovering alcoholic,” or “I’m a gratefully recovering alcoholic,” or some such thing. Among the habitués of the Perry Street meetings was a smarmy little putz who always wanted to speak and who always introduced himself as “an alcoholic and a sex addict.” I was sure it was his way of cruising for cock. I couldn’t stand him. And I had a hard time with the people who manifestly had little or no background of heavy drinking, who came to these meetings as others might attend church socials or coffee klatsches, solely to hear themselves talk. And talk, and talk. These people could and often did drive you to drink. I sometimes needed to absent myself from them or risk relapse.

I saw some people I remembered fondly, and it was good to see that they were still there and doing well. They looked older, as no doubt did I. But they all looked better, while I knew I looked worse. As I walked up the church steps, people marked with ashes were already leaving. I felt comfortable here, in this familiar old parish church, this church that misspelled Pompeii on its own calendars. I kept one of those calendars on my kitchen
wall year after year. The local Italian undertaker was their featured advertiser.

The pale stone holy water font attracted me. I wetted my fingertips, genuflected, and made the sign of the cross on my forehead, where ashes, sprinkled with holy water, would soon be. I also liked holy water, the idea of it, the feel of it on my skin. I used to enjoy lighting candles as well, but the old votive candles and thin wooden candle-lighting sticks, with which you kindled one candle from the flame of another, had been replaced here and in most churches by electric candles with little toggle switches. So I did not pay to light a candle, and I did not light a candle. I put money in the poor box instead.

As always, my eyes were attracted to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the eastern apse. As always, I wanted to fuck it, wanted to rub my naked cock against the cool, smooth white alabaster of the Virgin Mary’s ankle and face. I knew that this was a gratification I would never have. At its unattended sanctuary in Cyprus I had fucked the sacred black stone that is believed to be the oldest of venerated objects, the slab in which the Great Mother was first perceived. Not far from there, at the edge of the Mediterranean, I had fucked the hard wet sand of the shore near the big rock where Aphrodite was said to have first stepped from the sea. But city churches were no longer kept open through the night. I thought of all those reliquaries in the Vatican and throughout Europe that contained the true blood of the Virgin Mary. I wondered whose blood it was, drained from the dead or from kicking stuck pigs.

Holy water. Seawater. The priest before the altar touched ashes to my forehead and spoke.

“Remember,” he said, “that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Like a phoenix, I thought, like a phoenix.

I ended up walking to Dean & Deluca, then walking home
from there. The cold winds were still bitter, but the knowledge that the spring equinox was only weeks away made them seem less unbearable. I stopped to buy a bottle of wine for the sauce I would make. I decided on a good Barbera.

This was something that many in those meeting rooms would not do: cook with wine. Some would not even go into a liquor store or wine merchant’s. Some would even ask in restaurants if this or that dish was prepared with wine or alcohol of any kind. Such bits of stagy melodrama were usually affected or at best delusional. Who, having tasted both, could not tell the difference between the taste of life and the taste of death? Who could not tell the difference between the taste of good wine and the taste of dead-monkey juice?

I would use only about a cup of this wine, not measured but poured slowly from the bottle. It would be a shame to let the rest go to waste. I thought of Melissa. I thought of the rich red sauce. I thought of the deep scarlet wine.

It was all so much better when one was sober. All of it. I put on an album of Bach cello suites, sorted the groceries, took down a big enameled cast-iron pot and set it on the stove. I poured a glass of milk, took a ten-milligram Valium, sat on the couch, lit a cigarette, and relaxed. It would be a nice evening. And evening would become night. Yes. It was all so much better.

I
T AROUSED ME TO SEE HER EAT.
T
HE SLIGHT LOWERING OF
her eyelids and full dark lashes as she opened her mouth. The movements, as she quietly chewed, of her nose, philtrum groove, and the perfect angel’s cleft of her upper lip. The soft lissome undulations of her flawless smooth throat as she swallowed. It was more seductive than any slow forbidden dance.

“I love this,” she said. “What’s in it?”

“A little butter, a little olive oil. A lot of onions, a lot of garlic. Porcini mushrooms, cremini mushrooms. Ground pork, ground beef. A little stock.”

“What kind of stock?”

“Pork on the bone, beef on the bone, veal on the bone, chicken on the bone. Onion, leek, garlic. Celery, carrot, tomato. Some parsley, a few black peppercorns, a few white peppercorns, a little sea salt, a bay leaf, a clove, water, an eggshell.”

“Why an eggshell?”

“To clarify it.”

I paused, then went back and picked up where she had first cut me off when I was trying to finish telling her what she wanted to know, which was what was in the sauce.

“A little tomato paste. Basil, parsley, oregano, thyme, pepper. A little salt. That wine you’re drinking. San Marzano tomatoes. Sweet sausage, hot sausage. A bay leaf.”

“It’s really fucking great.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was glad she liked it. I didn’t go by what she said, I went by how she ate. And I was glad she didn’t say it was awesome. “It’s missing one thing,” I said.

The look in her face, and my undercurrent of arousal, allowed my imagination to sense a vague thrilling expectation of the unknown. But I saw a trace of unease in her look, and I wanted her to be rid of it. So I told her.

“Parmigian,”
I said. “I couldn’t find any good
parmigian
cheese. It was all too young.”

The trace of unease subsided, but it was not gone.

“Am I too young?” she said. Now she herself tried to hide that telltale trace behind a smile of sorts.

“Too young for what?”

“For what you want.”

“And what do you think I want?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to fuck me? Do you want to show me off? I really don’t know.”

“I don’t want to fuck you. Not in the conventional sense. And no, I don’t want to show you off.” I looked into her eyes. I felt it strange that we were saying these things. We had only been together a single night before this. Then again it had been a night not quite like any other. “I want what we had the other night,” I said.

“I’m sore,” she said. It seemed, as soon as she said this, that she had not meant to say it, that it had just rushed out of her in a quick flight of breath.

I didn’t say anything. It caught me off guard to hear a woman, or a girl or whatever it was that I should see her as, talk about her left thigh as if she might be talking about her breasts.

“You’re not drinking,” she said.

“No, I’m not drinking,” I said, perhaps a bit defensively.

“You didn’t drink the other night either.”

“I’m not drinking these days,” I said with a shrug, careful to give these words an air of casual insignificance. I watched her take a sip of wine. “I feel too good lately,” I said. “I want to write a new book. I don’t drink when I write. I can’t.” I was lying. I didn’t want to write a new book. Maybe I didn’t want her to know that I was trying to quit drinking forever, maybe because most people who drink don’t like to be around people who don’t drink, people who have quit drinking, especially people who go to meetings. And I didn’t want to lose her. I had just found her, and I didn’t want to lose her.

“I should probably cut down too,” she said. “I drink too much.”

Again I was caught off guard, to hear her, all of nineteen, talk as if she were hearing harps and harpies. I poured more wine into her glass.

“Oh, you’re fine,” I told her. “Here, drink up.” I wanted her to relax around me. I wanted her to open herself to me. I wanted what I wanted to be what she wanted. It was good for her to drink the way she did. This wine would help her give me what I wanted. “Come on. You’re fine,” I told her.

“Do your parents drink?” she asked.

“My parents don’t do much of anything anymore. They’re dead. They’ve been like that for a long time.” I smiled. “My father was a heavy drinker. My mother didn’t drink much. She couldn’t handle it.”

I heard my own words. It was curious how I spoke of whatever it was, physical or spiritual or both, that had stood in the way of my mother becoming a drunk like my father; how I spoke as if it were a failing, a shortcoming, a disability. The words came readily, easily:
couldn’t handle it.
How much more fittingly would they describe those who succumbed. It was drunks like me who couldn’t handle it.

“My mom drinks a lot,” she said.

I began to wash the dishes. She followed me into the kitchen.

“How old is your mother?”

“Forty-seven. No. Forty-eight.”

At least her mother wasn’t young enough to be my daughter.

“Let me do that,” she said.

“You’re the guest,” I said. “What’s the good of being a guest if you have to wash dishes? Thanks, babe, but no.”

I thought of her legs. I thought of her ponytail in my fist. I thought of the taste of her. I thought of her tongue on that vein that twitched and throbbed. I thought of her stringent warmth entering my mouth, trickling down my throat. I thought of what ran in the veins of gods and goddesses.

“But sweeter to live for ever; sweeter to live ever youthful like the Gods, who have ichor in their veins; ichor which gives life and youth and joy…”

I shut off the faucet and turned around. She was reading some lines of poetry that were held by a magnet to the side of my refrigerator. I knew that she would ask me about them. I embraced her from behind, put one hand over her mouth and the other on her belly. I pressed her to me. Her buttocks felt good against me. I kissed the downy little hairs and skin on the back of her neck and slid my hand down the front of her pants, feeling her silky panties and, through them, the tussock beneath. I worked my hand farther, and she squeezed it with her thighs. I could feel hot breath from her nostrils on my fingers. She began to nibble and lick at them with darts of her tongue. I unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, moved my hand into her panties, then into her. I peered over her shoulder down the front of her sweater to the hidden flesh and shadow of her breasts in white lace, and farther, to the movement of my hand in her open pants.

She lay naked in my bed, her lower lip between her teeth, her legs spread, her eyes probing mine. Her labia were swollen and
wet, rosy pink and glistening. I slipped the head of my cock, no more, into her and dallied a bit. She let loose her lip and breathed from deep within. I dimmed the light, grasped her hips, laid my head between her legs and stared at her hand on herself in the obscuring dark. I ran my fingers, then my tongue along the inside of her upper right thigh, which was unmarked, very close to the scent of her and the muffled accelerating sound of her hand. I opened my mouth, and I sank my teeth and tore. She exhaled with violence, like an ecstasy of storm wind through trees.