Gabriel's Inferno 01 - Gabriel's Inferno (60 page)

Gabriel snorted. “You make me sound antique. You realize that when you’re thirty you will probably change your mind, if not sooner. And when that happens…”

She frowned and shook her head. “What do you expect me to say—that I don’t want you? I’m not going to say that. I love you, Gabriel, all of you. Please don’t push me away when we’ve finally gotten close.” She closed her eyes. “It hurts.”

“Forgive me,” he whispered, kissing the back of her hand.

She accepted his apology and tried to relax, weary from the day’s emotions.

Gabriel rubbed at his eyes so that he could think. But he soon realized that he needed space and time away from her in order to do that.

I won’t need to push you away when I tell you about Paulina…

***

The first week of December was the last week of classes. It was a quiet week, for the most part. Gabriel and Julia dutifully kept their distance from one another. Every evening he prepared his lecture for the Uffizi Gallery in his spacious condominium while she worked tirelessly on her essays and her thesis in her tiny hobbit hole.

They texted one another mercilessly:

Darling, I miss you.
Come over? Love, G

Julia smiled at the screen of her iPhone in such a way that even the iPhone blushed. Then she typed her reply:

G, I miss you too.
I’m finishing an essay for this
crazy Dante seminar I’m taking.
I’ll probably be up all night.
The professor is hot but demanding.
I love you, Julia

She turned her attention back to her laptop as she continued editing her essay for Katherine. Within a few minutes, her iPhone was chirping again:

Darling, You’re in luck—
I am a Dante specialist.
Why don’t you bring your essay over here
and I will help you with it…all night…
Love, G
P.S. How hot?

Julia giggled at his message and hit
reply
:

Dearest Dante Specialist,
My professor is hot like fire,
scotch bonnet peppers, and chicken vindaloo.
I know what your all-nighter
would include—and it wouldn’t be
finishing my essay.
Rain check for Friday?
Love, Your Julia. XO

Julia stared at her iPhone waiting for another text message. But it didn’t come until she was in the bathroom:

Darling Julia,
That’s pretty hot.
Your rejection of my invitation
has reduced me to a sea of loneliness,
which I will now chase away
with a shot of Scotch and
two chapters of Graham Greene.
Your X and O almost make up for it.
I Love You, G.
P.S. You are hot like the sun
but far more lovely.

Julia smiled to herself and sent back a brief message, telling him how much she loved him. Then she spent the rest of her evening working.

They finally met in person at his last seminar on Wednesday, which was made all the more interesting by Christa Peterson’s conspicuous behavior. She was quiet. She was still dressed fashionably, in an aubergine-colored cashmere sweater-dress that clung tantalizingly to her chest and derrière. Her makeup was flawless, her hair long and impeccably groomed. But her expression was sour, and she didn’t take notes. Her arms remained crossed defensively across her ample breasts.

When Professor Emerson asked a question that she knew, she refused to raise her hand. When he looked over the rims of his glasses to see if he could coax her into participating, she scowled and looked away. Were it not for the fact that his mind was on Dante’s
Paradiso
, he might have grown uneasy. But he didn’t.

Christa was conspicuous not only in her silence but in her blatant hostility toward Julia, for whom she reserved the vilest of glares.

“What crawled up her butt?” Julia whispered to Paul as soon as the class was over.

He snickered. “Maybe she finally realized Emerson will never pass her dissertation proposal so she’s contemplating a career change. There’s a strip club on Yonge Street that’s looking to hire. She might have what it takes to work there. Or not.”

Now it was Julia’s turn to snicker.

“By the way, I like your scarf. Very French.” Paul grinned at her good-naturedly. “A gift from the boyfriend?”

“No. My best friend back home.”

“Well, it looks nice on you.”

Julia smiled at him, and they both packed up their books and walked home through the delicately cascading snow, telling (slightly edited) stories about their separate Thanksgivings.

Chapter 31

By Friday, Professor Emerson was in a foul mood. He’d spent almost an entire week without Julianne, and he’d had to watch her walk away with Paul after his seminar, without so much as a glance in his direction. He had to keep his distance when all he wanted to do was touch her and tell everyone she was his. Sleeping naked in the darkness, the demons had come and nightmares had taunted and oppressed him—nightmares normally held at bay by her very presence, a luminescence unequalled by the brightest star. A star he would soon have to live without.

He knew that he had to tell his secrets before they boarded the plane. Thus, he rued the fact that his (possibly) last week with Julianne had been spent alone. He’d changed his ticket and made all of the reservations for Julianne to accompany him to Florence, but he did so half-heartedly and not without investing in travel cancellation insurance, for he truly believed that she would leave him. He dreaded the moment when her wide, innocent eyes would darken and she would reject him as unworthy. But he would not allow her to gift her innocence to such a demon unknowingly. He would not play Cupid to her Psyche.

For that
would
be demonic.

Consequently, it was with undisguised coolness that he greeted her Friday evening when she arrived in time for dinner. He kissed her forehead fraternally and stepped aside, indicating that she should enter.

Abandon hope
, he thought to himself.

Julia knew that something was wrong, and it wasn’t solely because she could hear the strains of Puccini’s
Madama Butterfly
wafting from the living room. Usually Gabriel greeted her with a hug and a few passionate kisses before removing her coat. Instead he stood there, not even making eye contact, waiting for her to speak.

“Gabriel?” She reached up to touch his face. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” he lied, turning his face away. “Can I get you a drink?”

Julia resisted the urge to nag him for information and instead requested a glass of wine. She hoped he would be more forthcoming over dinner.

He wasn’t. He served their dinner in silence, and when Julia tried to make polite small talk over the roast beef, he responded monosyllabically. She told him she’d completed all of her schoolwork for the semester and that Katherine Picton had agreed to turn her grades in before December eighth, but Gabriel only nodded in response, glaring into his soon to be empty wine glass.

Julia had never seen him drink so heavily. He was already drunk the night she rescued him at Lobby. But this night was different. He wasn’t flirtatious and happy, he was tormented. With each glass, she grew more and more worried, but every time she opened her mouth to say something, she would catch a glimpse of fleeting sadness on his face, which made her refrain. He grew progressively cooler and more detached with each drink, so much so that by the time he served one of his housekeeper’s homemade apple pies for dessert, Julia waved it aside and demanded that he silence Maria Callas so that they could talk.

That drew his attention, since the pie (and the
Butterfly)
was the culmination of his supper. His Last Supper.

“Nothing is wrong,” he huffed, as he strode over to the stereo to stop the operatic performance.

“Gabriel, don’t lie to me. It’s obvious you’re upset. Just tell me. Please.”

The sight of Julianne, innocent Julianne, with her big brown eyes and her now furrowed brow almost undid him.

Did she have to be so sweet? So giving? Did she have to be compassionate? With a beautiful soul?

His guilt compounded. Perhaps it was a mercy that he hadn’t seduced her. Her heart would mend more readily now, since they had not known each other sexually. They’d only been together for a few weeks. She would dry her tears quickly and maybe find a quiet, peaceful affection with someone good and constant, like Paul.

The thought made him violently ill.

Without a word, he walked over to the sideboard and grabbed one of the decanters and a crystal glass. He returned to his seat and poured two fingers’ worth of Scotch. He drank half of it in one swallow and thumped his glass down roughly. He waited for the burning sensation in his throat to abate. He waited for the liquid courage to adhere to his insides, fortifying him. But it would take much more Scotch to dull the ache in his heart.

He took a deep breath. “I have some—unpleasant things to tell you. And I know that when I’m finished, I’ll lose you.”

“Gabriel, please. I—”

“Please, just let me say it.” He tugged at his hair wildly. “Before I lose my courage.”

He closed his eyes and inhaled once again. And when he opened them, he peered over at her like a wounded dragon. “You are looking at a murderer.”

Sounds hit her ears but didn’t sink into her consciousness. She thought she’d heard wrong.

“Not only am I a murderer, I took innocent life.

“If you can stand to remain in the same room with me for a few minutes, I’ll explain how this came to be.” He waited for her to react, but she sat quietly, so he continued. “I went to Magdalen College, Oxford, for my master’s degree. You know this already. What you don’t know is that while I was there I met an American girl called Paulina.”

Julia inhaled sharply, and Gabriel paused. Every time she’d asked him about Paulina he’d always put her off. He’d tried to make her think that she was not a threat, but Julia hadn’t believed him. Of course Paulina was a threat to their creeping closeness. Paulina had pulled him away in the middle of dinner back in October. And before he’d run away Gabriel had stood, haggard, quoting Lady Macbeth. Julia trembled slightly in anticipation.

“Paulina was an undergraduate. She was attractive, tall and regal with blond hair. She liked to tell people that she was related to the Russian aristocracy, an Anastasia of sorts. We became friends and would spend time together on occasion, but it wasn’t physical. I was seeing other girls, and she was pining away for someone…”

He cleared his throat nervously.

“I graduated and moved to Harvard. We kept in touch via e-mail for a year or so, very casually, and she told me she’d been accepted to Harvard for her master’s degree. She was studying to become a Dostoyevsky specialist. She needed help finding a place to live, so I told her about a vacancy in my building. She moved in that August.”

He gazed at Julia searchingly. She nodded, trying to keep her trepidation from showing on her face.

“The year she arrived was my most difficult. I was working on my dissertation along with being a teaching assistant to a very demanding professor. I was staying up all hours writing and getting very little sleep. That was when I started doing cocaine.” His gaze dropped, and he fidgeted with his hands, drumming atop the table.

“I used to go drinking with the guys from my program on the weekends. We’d get into fights, on occasion.” He laughed. “I wasn’t always on my best behavior, and sometimes we’d go out looking for trouble. It paid off, though, with Simon.”

He leaned forward in his chair, resting his forearms on top of his knees. Julia watched his legs bounce nervously. With every sentence he grew more restless, indicating that he was approaching closer and closer to the edge of the abyss in which he had hidden his secret.

“One night someone passed around some coke. I wondered if it would help me stay up so I could work. That’s how it started. I used it as a stimulant, and I alternated its use with alcohol. I thought because I went to Harvard, I was a respectable recreational drug user. I thought I could control it.” He sighed deeply and the tone of his voice dropped. “I was wrong.”

“Paulina was constantly around. She’d knock on my door at all hours because I was always awake. I’d write, and she’d sit on my couch and read or make Russian tea. She started cooking for me. Eventually, I gave her a key since she was over all the time. When I was doing coke, I didn’t eat much. She was the only reason I ate anything nutritious at all.”

Now Gabriel’s voice took on a darker tone, as if the guilt inside him was clawing to get out. He read the question in her eyes and his jaw set.

“She knew about the cocaine. At first I tried to hide it, but she was always there. Finally, I gave up and started doing it in front of her. She didn’t care.”

Now he avoided Julia’s gaze. He looked ashamed. “She’d lived a sheltered life. She was completely innocent about drugs and a lot of other things. I was a corrupting influence. One night, she stripped out of her clothes and suggested we snort lines off one another. I wasn’t thinking straight, obviously, and she was naked…”

He exhaled slowly and shook his head, keeping his eyes on his fidgeting hands. “I won’t make excuses. It was my fault. She was a nice girl who was used to getting what she wanted. And she wanted me—the drug addict downstairs.” He rubbed at his chin with the back of his hand, and Julia suddenly realized he hadn’t shaved that morning.

He squirmed in his chair. “The next morning I told her I’d made a mistake. I wasn’t interested in being monogamous. The coke made me crave sex, although it eventually impaired my satisfaction. Karma, I suppose. I was used to being with different women every weekend. But when I told her all of this, she said she didn’t care. No matter what I said or did, or how much of an asshole I was to her, she kept coming around. So that’s how it was. She acted as if she was my girlfriend, and I acted as if she was a convenient lay. I didn’t care about her, I only cared about myself and the drugs and the damned dissertation.”

Julia felt her heart sink. She knew that Gabriel had never wanted for female companionship. He was a handsome man who was sensual in the extreme. Women fell all over themselves in order to attract his attention. Julia wasn’t pleased about his past, but she’d accepted it and told herself that it didn’t matter.

But Paulina was different. She’d known this intuitively from the first time she heard the name. Even though she believed Gabriel was no longer involved with her, what he was beginning to describe was much more serious than a one-night stand. The green specter of jealousy curled around her heart, squeezing it.

Gabriel stood up and started pacing, back and forth and back and forth. “Everything came to a crashing halt when she told me that she was pregnant. I accused her of trying to entrap me and told her to get rid of it.” His face contorted with emotion, and he looked as if he were in pain.

“She cried. She got on her knees and said that she’d been in love with me since Oxford and that she wanted my baby. I wouldn’t listen. I threw some money at her for an abortion and pushed her out of my apartment as if she were trash.” Gabriel groaned—a twisted cry that seemed to come from the depths of his soul. He rubbed at his eyes with his fingers.

Julia placed a shaking hand to her mouth. She hadn’t expected this. But as her mind raced ahead, a number of pieces of the puzzle that was Professor Emerson began to come together.

“I didn’t see her again for a long time. I assumed she’d had the abortion. I didn’t even bother to find out, that’s how fucked up I was. A couple of months later, I stumbled into the kitchen one morning and found an ultrasound snapshot on my refrigerator. With a note.”

He slumped back in his chair and placed his head in his hands. “She wrote,
‘This is your daughter, Maia. Isn’t she beautiful?’”
Gabriel’s words were half strangled by the sob that escaped from his chest.

“I could see the outline of her little head and nose, her tiny arms and legs. Little hands and little feet. She was beautiful. This beautiful, fragile little baby. My little girl.
Maia.”
He swallowed another sob. “I didn’t know. It wasn’t real.
She
wasn’t real until I saw her picture and…” Gabriel was crying.

Julia saw tears roll down his cheeks, and her heart ached. As her own eyes filled with tears she moved to go to him, but he raised a hand to stop her.

“I told Paulina I’d help with the baby. Of course, I was broke. I’d spent all my money on drugs and had already run up a tab with my dealer. Paulina knew that and somehow she still wanted me. We got back together, and she’d read on my couch while I wrote my dissertation. She stayed away from the drugs and tried to take care of herself and the baby. I tried to quit, but I couldn’t.”

He pulled his head up to look over at Julia. “Do you want to hear the rest? Or are you ready to leave now?”

She didn’t hesitate. She walked over to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “Of course I want to hear the rest.”

He clung to her tightly, but only for a moment before he pushed her away and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. She stood to one side awkwardly while he continued his confession.

“Paulina’s parents lived in Minnesota. They weren’t wealthy, but they would send her money. Grace used to send me money too, whenever I called her. Somehow we were able to stay afloat. Or at least, delay the inevitable. But I used most of the money for drugs.” He laughed darkly. “What kind of man takes money away from a pregnant woman and wastes it on cocaine?”

He quickly continued. “One night in September, I went on a bender. I was gone for a couple of days, and when I finally came home I collapsed on the sofa. I didn’t even make it to the bedroom. I woke up the next morning completely hungover. I stumbled down the hall and saw blood on the floor.”