The Demon Lover (10 page)

“It was kind of
odd
,” I said, lowering my voice. I recounted the story of the painting and everyone’s reaction to it.

“Huh,” Phoenix said, squinting up at the dark man on horseback. “If
he
came into my dreams I don’t think I’d ever want to wake up.”

I nodded, turning away to hide my blush. There had to be an explanation for why he looked like the moonlight lover of my dreams. The painter of the triptych must have also designed the pediment over the door of Honeysuckle House … or used the same model … and that’s how I’d fashioned the face of the man in my dreams.

“… and when Frank told me I thought it sounded just perfect. What do you say?”

I realized that I’d been so intent on looking at the man in the painting and explaining his existence to myself that I’d lost the thread of Phoenix’s conversation. “I’m sorry, it’s so loud in here … what did you say?”

“Your spare room. Frank says you’re looking for a lodger for it. I was going to stay in an apartment in one of the dorms, but between you, me, and the lamppost, I don’t think I’m the dorm mother type. I’m sure the two of us together would have much more fun!”

NINE

T
rying to sway Phoenix from moving in with me turned out to be about as easy as persuading Hurricane Katrina to make landfall somewhere other than New Orleans. She was so
smitten with the notion
that she followed me home after the reception and swept through Honeysuckle House oohing and aahing over every detail. She thought the face in the carved pediment had “bedroom eyes” and the Greek gods on the mantel and on the dining room frieze “cute butts.” My library made her “want to curl up and read till doomsday.” I thought her ardor would cool when she saw Matilda’s spinster apartment, but she deemed it “darlin’ ” and said it reminded her of the room she had rented in a woman’s hotel in St. Louis when she was drying out and writing her memoir.

“This house is the perfect place for me to write!” she said, crushing me to her ample bosom in an impetuous hug. “You see, I sometimes have a teeny problem staying on track. Men are the biggest distraction—don’t you think that Frank Delmarco is just hunky?—and then there’s …” She extended her pinky and thumb and tilted her hand in front of her mouth in the universal sign for drinking. “… the demon rum. But I know that here the two of us will be quiet as church mice and drink hot cocoa in the evenings and get so much work done!”

I wondered what had happened to all the “fun” she’d promised me back at the reception. I was still trying to find a polite way of telling her I didn’t want a roommate, but if her moving in was inevitable—as it increasingly seemed to be—then I’d better at least make it clear that I needed lots of undisturbed quiet time in which to write.

“I do have an idea for a new book,” I said cautiously as we walked upstairs, hoping I wouldn’t jinx the idea by talking about it. “And I’d be working on it most of the time.”

“That’s perfect!” she cried. “Is this where you’re working?”

We’d come to the spare bedroom where I’d laid out all Dahlia LaMotte’s papers.

The door was propped open with one of the mice doorstops (“How adorable!” Phoenix squealed at the sight of it). I thought I’d closed it, but maybe Brock, who’d left after me, had left it open for some reason. He’d also hung something in the window—a little bundle of birch twigs and juniper sprigs tied with a red ribbon that I guessed must be some sort of Swedish good luck charm.

I explained to her about Dahlia LaMotte’s papers and the unusual terms of her will but didn’t mention that I’d discovered a secret trove of nineteenth-century erotica.

“What serendipity!” Phoenix clapped her hands and then held them out over the piles of paper as though blessing them. “I can
feel
the creative energy here. Oh, I just know I’d get so much work done in this house … which would be such a lifesaver. Did I mention that I’m six months overdue on delivery of my next manuscript to my publisher?”

As we walked down the hall to my bedroom, Phoenix told me all the reasons she hadn’t been able to
even start
her second book. There were the time constraints of touring, doing interviews, and writing blurbs, plus the pressure of living up to the expectations of her
dear readers
whose lives she had touched. “But most especially,” she told me as I opened the door to my bedroom, “you have no idea how hard it is having to use parts of your own life to create. I feel like the bird in that story who plucks feathers out of her own breast to weave silk.”

Perhaps it was the reference to one of my favorite folktales, “The Crane Wife,” that softened me, or perhaps it was the affinity I felt to Phoenix’s struggle to write her second book, but in the end I think it was because I was frightened. I’d begun thinking today that the shadow man in my dreams was real. Surely that was a sign that I was spending too much time on my own. And if anyone were capable of filling up this old house with life, it was Phoenix.

Phoenix was so excited about
getting to be roomies
she insisted we have a drink to celebrate. We opened a bottle of Prosecco that had come as a welcome gift from In Vino Veritas Wines and Fine Liquors.

“Better Prosecco than Prozac, that’s my motto!” Phoenix toasted, clinking her glass against mine.

I must have nodded off on the library couch with the light on because the next thing I knew it was eight in the morning and Phoenix was back with a pickup truck (borrowed from Frank Delmarco, I later learned) full of her belongings. She was moved in by nine and by noon her room looked as if she had lived there for years. There were paisley shawls draped over the iron bed frame, framed photographs of her with various celebrities she had met on tour and old prints on the walls, colored glass bottles on the windowsills, and glimmering crystals hanging from the window frames. Even her collection of Franciscan Desert Rose chinaware had made its way into the kitchen cupboards.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked as she arranged the cream, pink, and green teacups on the empty shelves. “They look so pretty in these old-fashioned cupboards. I inherited the set from my mamo. You know it’s the china Jacqueline Kennedy chose for the White House.”

When she took a breath for air I told her I didn’t mind at all. And it was true. As I told Paul that night on the phone, the house felt less empty with Phoenix and her things in it. He concurred that it was good for me not to be alone in a big house, unaccustomed as I was to living in the country, and since Phoenix’s writer-in-residence term was only for one year I wouldn’t be stuck with her forever if she turned out to be a horrible roommate.

I went to bed as soon as I got off the phone with Paul, determined to get a good night’s sleep before the first day of classes. I turned out the light, confident that the dream wouldn’t come back now that I wasn’t alone in the house.

But it did. The room was awash with moonlight, but I knew immediately that
he
was there in the shadows … that he
was
the shadow. I couldn’t move or breathe. He stood over me, watching me, but not touching me. Was he angry that I’d turned on the lights to banish him from the library? Or that I’d brought someone into the house?

The shadow hovered over me and I saw his face—not angry, but sad … and aged somehow. Stark lines were etched around his mouth and deep shadows were carved beneath his eyes. He’d grown weaker in the few nights I’d denied him. Perhaps I could still keep him at bay. As he stretched himself over me, hovering millimeters from my skin, I could feel the static electricity between us. Every hair on my body stood erect; my skin tingled with his nearness. Only his lips touched mine, pressing hard, trying to force my mouth open to inhale my breath.

He sucks them dry like a vampire
, Soheila had said.

But what harm could he do me if he was just a dream? Why not enjoy the dream?

I parted my lips. For a moment he hesitated, and then his tongue slid along my upper lip, teasing me, punishing me for my delay. His teeth tugged at my lower lip. I opened my mouth wider and he forced his tongue inside, suddenly hard and urgent as he sucked the breath from me. When he blew his breath into my lungs I could move, but only at his bidding and only to his rhythm.

Which was fine by me.

Tonight he was neither as violent as he’d been the first night nor as gentle as the second. Instead he seemed to have learned the particular rhythm that opened all the locked rooms inside of me. He made love to me as though he knew my body as well as his own … as if he were inside my body and mind, anticipating my every desire before I even knew what they were. Looking into the face that hovered above mine, his eyes dark shadows, his lips parted over mine, was like looking into my own face … only just when I was about to see it fully, just when the moonlight was about to illuminate all of him, the shadows swept across his brow, like clouds passing over the moon, and I felt myself sucked into a deep, endless darkness in which there was nothing but the two of us, making love all night long.

I knew that time was deceptive in dreams and that dreams of a minute might feel as though they lasted all night, but that’s what if felt like—as if we made love all night. When I awoke I was covered in sweat and my muscles were sore. When I touched myself between my legs I was wet and the insides of my thighs were tender.

I had to drink half a pot of coffee to get myself ready for my first class. I was afraid I wouldn’t be up for it, but once I was standing in front of the class I was fine. More than fine. Ignoring my notes, with a reproduction of Fuseli’s
Nightmare
projected on the Smartboard behind me, I talked about the demon lover in literature for thirty minutes. As I spoke I found myself often looking toward Mara Marinca, who sat at the back of the class and maintained a steady, interested gaze. I’d discovered on my book tour that certain people had better “listening faces.” It might have little or nothing to do with what they were actually thinking—people who’d scowled throughout a reading had come up to me afterward to say how much they had enjoyed it—but it was unnerving to focus on someone who looked bored or skeptical. Better to focus on someone whose face expressed polite interest (not the girl next to Mara, whose bland moon-shaped face expressed little but the desire to nap) and Mara had the perfect listening face. She looked as if she was drinking in my every word.

My students burst into excited discussion as soon as I opened the floor for questions. Half a dozen came up afterward with more questions—or begging to be let into the class even though it was closed.

Since I’d let in Mara Marinca, I didn’t feel like I could turn them down.

Mara herself came up once the crowd had dispersed, with the bored moon-faced girl in tow.

“You see,” she was saying to the girl, “I told you Dr. McFay was a wonderful teacher. Now you want to take the class, no? Dr. McFay, this is my roommate, Nicolette Ballard. She wants to take your class but it is closed.”

I looked at Nicolette Ballard. The roundness of her face was accentuated by her unfortunate haircut—the same choppy pageboy that I’d seen on Alice Hubbard and Joan Ryan. There must be some sadistic barber in town. “Are you interested in Gothic literature?” I asked.

Nicolette yawned. “I don’t really like all that romance stuff,” she said, looking at the floor, the ceiling, and then scowling at Fuseli’s
Nightmare
, which was still projected on the wall. “But I see you’ve got
Jane Eyre
on your syllabus and it’s my favorite book.”

“Nicolette is helping me most kindly with my English,” Mara said. “It would be so very helpful to me if she were in the class so we could study together.” I looked down at my class list. I was already six over the maximum enrollment. I looked back up, into Mara’s wide tea-colored eyes, which were glowing gold in the light from the projected image.

“Sure,” I said, signing my name to Nicolette Ballard’s add slip. “What’s one more?”

I sailed home on a rosy cloud of satisfaction and contentment. I should have been exhausted but the talk had given me an idea for the Dahlia LaMotte book. I wrote for four hours until the smell of dinner cooking drew me downstairs. I groggily recalled that sometime last night I’d agreed to exchange part of Phoenix’s rent for cooking.

I ate two servings of crawfish étoufée with cornbread and sweet potato pie and then stayed up late, drinking wine with Phoenix and talking about the students we had in common. (“Did you have that waiflike child from Bosnia?” Phoenix had asked. “You wouldn’t believe the things she wrote in her first assignment. I read it aloud and there wasn’t a dry eye in the classroom!”) I went to bed so exhausted that I was sure I wouldn’t have the dream again.

But I did. I had it that night and every night for the next three weeks. Each night I woke—or thought I awoke—to a moonlit room. The shadows reached for me and swelled into the dark lover. I’d feel his weight on my chest and then, just when I thought I’d suffocate, he’d press his lips to mine and blow his breath into my lungs and we’d make love—long, deep, utterly spine-rocking, toe-curling sex that went until the first light of day.

The vivid erotic dreams must come, I decided, from reading Dahlia LaMotte’s uncensored manuscripts. Tired as I was each morning, I came home in the afternoon to the empty house (Phoenix’s classes were in the afternoon) and immediately started reading the manuscripts, stopping only to eat the elaborate dinner that Phoenix would cook. Then I’d write late into the night until I’d fall asleep … and have the dream again. It was as if I’d found a loop of creativity, a closed circuit that could endlessly feed on itself.