Me and the Devil: A Novel (2 page)

All in the way of saying that people are often drawn to writers. Not so much as to buy or read what they write, but simply as bothersome parasites. If you’re not careful, they will drain you dry.

Women are not so bad as men in this regard. Still they too are drawn to writers, if only because this solitary and distressed way to make a living seems to them for some reason, or lack of reason, more alluring and more attractive than the usual occupations professed in bars.

And in bars, behind a mask that hides hatred or jealousy or fear or the unspeakable, everyone thinks he, or she, knows you, as you think you know them.

Where they knew me, where they thought they knew me, they came near, to drain what they thought to be my life force, or to
cough up the dregs of their own on me. I was anathema, accursed and consecrated. Yes. They came near. It was easy.

We were all monkeys about to die. I did not want to die.

Though my inchoate and unclear desires carried the air of the forbidden, they stirred in me something like what I remembered the commingled feelings of love and lust to be.

T
HE OLDER WE GET, THE MORE THE GHOSTS CROWD AND
claim us. Death does not deter the dead from living on within us and around us. We are under their spell. The world becomes irrevocably haunted.

It was she who spoke to me. I don’t know why. I was old. My looks were long gone. Maybe it was because I did not speak to her. I was quiet. One of the fungus-men was trying to talk her up, and she escaped by turning to me and smiling. Some girls liked those guys. Girls seeking attention. Seeking their fathers. Those guys fell for it, bought them drinks, got suckered in.

All I had seen was her long blond hair. Now I saw a face and a smile, and I liked what I saw. I deliberated for a moment on what I should say to her to set me apart from the others in that half-lighted barroom.

I could not see her legs, but her breasts in her pale blue cashmere sweater seemed modest. This was good. No woman with large breasts has comely legs. I wondered if the cuffs matched the collar. She looked like a real blonde. But I was drunk, even if only I knew it. I wanted to bury my face between her legs. I could tell if the cuffs matched the collar, I could tell if she was a natural blonde by the feel of the hair between her legs, how soft it was or was not on my lips. Even drunk. Even in the dark.

Better not to make too much sense at first. Better to lure her
with a gleam of inscrutability. Something that could be taken by her to mean and pertain to whatever she fancied.

“Thenceforth evil became my good,” I said, hoping that the hair between her legs was cornsilk blond and that she did not shave it.

“Where’d that come from?” she asked. Her smile curled a bit and her blue eyes brightened.

“Milton.
Paradise Lost,
” I lied. Milton said something like it, but he never said that. Maybe it was Mary Shelley. No matter. Better to quote Milton, even if it was a fabricated quotation. Had she ever heard of Milton? If she hadn’t, maybe she had heard of his big fat poem. As I said, I was drunk. “The words of Satan,” I added, returning to my drink.

“I think I read that in high school,” she said. I figured that she was lying too. That was good. I wasn’t expecting what she said next.

“Are you a Miltonist or a Satanist?”

“Neither,” I said. “I’m just an old, old man trying to live while I can.” Lefty Frizzell said that, or something like it; but she didn’t ask.

I made love to her in my way later that night. An old man and a young woman who was to me little more than a child. It was not what I wanted. It felt good for a moment, then left me feeling emptier and more alone than I had felt before her smile and our desultory lies.

“How long is your refractory period?” she asked, with a giggle and a purr.

“Forever,” I said. “Forever.”

The shades of the night were endless. Maybe it was the booze, I told myself. But I had only been drinking beer. Maybe it was the beer, I told myself. But I knew that it was not. I had entered her, but she had not entered me. There had been no slaking. I had
breathed no new life. Sustenance, moisture, deliverance were not mine.

The blond hair was real. My hands shook the next morning after she left. I have to stop drinking, I muttered aloud. I managed to make a cup of coffee and I sat there with it, smoking one cigarette after another. My stare was vacant, as if in mourning for myself. The last time I raised the cup to my lips, the coffee was cold. I took a Valium and exhaled. I do not remember her name.

A few nights later I was sitting at the bar at Circa Tabac with a vodka and soda and a smoke. My buddy Lee, who runs the place, sat down next to me with that inscrutable grin of his on his face.

“Happy Candlemas,” I said.

“Is today Candlemas?” he said. “I thought it was Groundhog Day. What’s Candlemas?”

“The Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Something like that. Lots of candles.”

“Yeah? What do I know? I’m a Jew, and I don’t even know Jew holidays.”

“Also the first of the four traditional witches’ Sabbaths of the year.” I drank and drew smoke. “What I want to know is: how did Candlemas become the witches’ Sabbath, and how did the witches’ Sabbath become Groundhog Day?”

“It’s when the groundhog comes out of its hole.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know.” He drank and drew smoke. “You writing these days?”

“Next question.”

“How are the girls treating you?”

My reaction was spontaneous. I don’t know what my face looked like, but I think I uttered “Oh, God” and managed a laugh that ended in earnest with the words “It’s sad” and a sound of a different kind.

At this he in turn managed a laugh.

That was the night I met her, right there at that bar on Watts Street. Her name was Sandrine, and she liked to be raped after bathing in warm water and milk and brushing out her hair. She was in her early twenties. If she had told me she was seventeen, I would have believed her. Maybe she was. I had not been with a redhead, not such a pretty one, in a long, long time.

I
HAD NEVER READ ANY OF THE BOOKS, BUT
I
GOT A KICK OUT
of the old movies. Bela Lugosi was a hoot.

I read a biography of him once. The only thing I remember from it is his craving toward the end of his days for a kind of oily peppery paprika bread that he had longed for since leaving Hungary. I remember this because I’ve been craving a kind of oily peppery paprika bread that a few of the old Italian-Albanian women in my boyhood neighborhood made in their black cast-iron ovens. I’m pretty sure it was called
zallia,
or something like that. The recipe seems to have died with the last of them, as I haven’t been able to find it again in more than forty years of searching, and I’m beginning to feel that I never will. What they called
tarallia,
pretzel-shaped anise bread, I’ve found a lackluster echo of in
taralli.
And what was called—though the final vowels were never pronounced—
culliaccia,
the rich, buttery egg bread they made in glazed braided rings, I’ve found a more distant approximation of in what has been served to me as a dismal confection called Italian egg bread. But
zallia
remains a maddeningly tantalizing memory. When I read about the bread the Hungarian actor so longed for, I was sure it was pretty much the same thing; and in time all I retained from the story of his life was the mention of that bread.

In the pictures, they don’t eat. And the mere sight of garlic can bring about a seizure. They react worse than a WASP schoolgirl
to it. It’s ridiculous, not only to a wop but probably to Hungarians and Romanians too. Italy isn’t the only place in Europe where they’re big on garlic soup.

And what is this malarkey about the light of day? Are they all supposed to be independently wealthy? No nine-to-five working stiffs? It’s like the nonsense about the cross. And wouldn’t a stake through the heart do in just about anybody? I mean, come on. Think about it. Not at all afraid of rats, mind you; but afraid of garlic, daylight, and crosses. Who came up with this stuff?

I really get a kick out of the fangs. Hell, between Sandrine and the next of the four witches’ Sabbaths, May Eve—yes, I’ve observed only pagan holy days, from Christmas and Easter to the four Sabbaths, for a long, long time—I had nine teeth pulled on a single day, and another had worked itself out of the gum on a day soon thereafter. As I had already lost a bunch of teeth before these ten, I was left practically toothless, with a loose, unsure contraption of plastic and wire to make do in my mouth.

How those guys on Bedford Street, on Sullivan Street, on Thompson Street shook their heads and laughed low and down at those Mafia pictures. A ban on dope dealing, mother love, a code of honor. Same thing. Garlic, light, crosses, and fangs.

It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. Nowhere but in truth will you find the truth.

W
HEN
I
BIT INTO
S
ANDRINE’S THIGH WITH MY
mouthful of plastic, wire, and the few real teeth that still cut, her moan turned to a jagged scream that slashed the night, and her scream turned to a wild sigh that was deep as the sea.

I tasted her blood in my mouth. It could not have been more than a few drops, a thin trickle, but it was as if I suckled on her very soul and the inmost mystery of her. That taste and the sweet taste of her flesh, soft and young, in my mouth were one; and the sound, which seemed to come from a distance, dreamlike and timbrous, of her surrender and her giving was a beckoning to enter more deeply into the strange black forest of lust on the edge of which we trembled.

She was mine, I was hers. We seemed to merge, I into her, she into me. I clung, quenching my tongue in the sweat and blood of her thigh. Sustenance, moisture, deliverance. I was lost, beautifully lost, breathing and feeling as I had never felt before.

I opened her lips with mine and had her taste what I had tasted, the taste of what she had given me, of what I had taken. We kissed gently. I collapsed, falling into a sleep without dreams, a sleep without hauntings, aware of nothing but a vague and comforting sense of enchantment.

This sublime feeling lingered when I woke. We did not talk about what transpired. Her presence was with me long after she
left. I went more than a week without drinking. Then I returned to the bar where we had met. She was not there. I asked Lee if he had seen her. He told me that he had never seen her before and he had not seen her since.

I went home alone that night, not really drunk but feeling the old loneliness welling up in me.

She returned there a few nights later. I brought her home with me, but it was not the same. She seemed to regard me as a danger, as one who knew something unutterable about her, and it was as if the possibility that I might utter the unutterable put her on edge and made her ill at ease. I was not with the girl who surrendered and gave, the girl who had gone to heaven and hell when I broke her skin. No. I was with the girl who liked to be raped after bathing in warm water and milk and brushing out her hair. It was then that I knew her to be troubled. It was then that I knew her mind was not right. In the morning, when I walked her to the door and kissed her good-bye, she lowered her head and turned away and began to silently weep.

She had surrendered and given the heart of her youth to something far worse than I, who had taken her but for a single earthly night. She had chosen hell over heaven long before that night, and that night had not cured her.

We were to meet again.

I
T IS ALWAYS EASIER TO SEE IN ANOTHER WHAT WE ARE
uncomfortable with in ourselves. A few days after my second encounter with Sandrine, it struck me that when I felt that I was looking into her heart I was really looking into my own.

The blonde whose cuffs matched her collar had been the first woman with whom I’d had old-fashioned, missionary-style sex in a very long time. It had been years. I had grown jaded. My sex drive had evanesced and with it my virility. I looked like a man but I was not.

Once upon a time I had known the heat of passion every day and every night. The combustions of sensuality consumed me. Now there were only passing moments of lukewarm velleity. The prospect of being close to a woman, to anyone, repelled me. I could no longer bear a human touch without recoiling. Maybe this is what disturbed and haunted me about the prophecy of those dead monkeys. They had foretold not only my fate but my escape from it as well: an escape that involved the closeness to another of which I was ever more incapable. They had seemed to present a choice, unclear and unknown, between one terror and another. The terror had increased through recent years, as I grew more bound to the loneliness and desperation of my descending darkness and at the same time more loath to caress or be caressed by another.

I had embraced the blonde in my drunkenness. It had always been this way. Alcohol enabled me to do what I otherwise could
not. The many lovers, remembered and forgotten, I had known in younger years were as much a part of my drinking life as of my love life. At times those lives seemed inseparable.

Why were they attracted to me? Not the women of my past. The blonde and Sandrine. What had possibly moved them? They were young and it was a young man’s world. I was a toothless wraith of a man that once had been. It was not what they saw, I concluded, it was what they sensed. Was it a certain world-weariness that I evinced? The unrevealing nuances of a perverse vestigial cupidity? The hint of what they had never experienced? All of these, none of these? What beguiled them? Was the answer as elusive and ultimately unknowable as the parts of their souls that lay hidden to themselves?