Diablerie (11 page)

Why would Mona betray me? But then I thought, why not? I was like an old doorway in her life, something she passed through each day. But I just served a purpose; a barrier against the wind, a surface upon which some suitor might knock. Nothing I said had made Mona laugh in years. I was there to help take care of our daughter and, less and less, someone to go through the motions of physical love with. I brought home a paycheck when she was between jobs, but she never laughed or came or needed me to help her understand a thing.

I watched a children's movie on the hotel pay-per-view system. It was about a young sorcerer with a past he could only guess at. At the end of the film, when he was still in the dark about himself, I became teary.

While the credits were rolling, the phone rang.

It had to be maintenance or maybe the turndown service wondering about the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign I had hung on the doorknob. No one outside the hotel knew I was at the Reynard. I'd used cash to pay the two-week bill upfront.

"Hello?"

"Can I come up?" Svetlana asked.

"How did you know I was here?"

"Star sixty-nine."

She entered my room all in a rush. She hugged me and kissed me, stared into my eyes as if she were looking for some sign across a vast twilight terrain.

"What's wrong, Lana? Why are you here?"

"Don't you want me anymore, Ben?" she asked.

"Yeah, sure. But I just needed to be alone, to think."

"I wanted to talk to you," she said.

"About what?"

"Sit."

Svetlana was wearing a tiny black dress, no hose and no jewelry. She didn't have any makeup on either. There was something vulnerable about her and the fact that this was probably a calculated vulnerability made her seem all the more defenseless.

She sat next to me and put her hands against my chest. I wondered if she wanted me to kiss her. It didn't seem so. Lana was looking for something, for a way to stop me from moving on, moving away.

"I'm here, honey," I said.

She put her strong arms around my neck and squeezed with all her might. It was a painful embrace. I would have tried to push her off but she was crying. Her faded perfume was a scent that was musky and not at all sweet. I remembered the first time that I met her when she was waitressing at Bulfinch's C&e-Restaurant. It was this scent that opened my nose and made me talk to her.

"I told Sergei not to call me anymore," she said, her voice muffled against my chest.

"What?"

She leaned back, still holding my neck with her powerful fingers.

"For a long time you were telling me that you were going to leave me," she said.

"I never said that."

"You said that you expected me to go," she retorted. "Is that what a man says who wants a woman? You would come to see me in the daytime mostly and if I ever said I was busy, you would never complain. It was like you just needed a pretty girl to be on your arm sometimes, or a whore to help you relax because your wife was not so interesting."

"I never said any of that."

"But now, when you finally look at me, Sergei calls and you tell me you cannot see me."

"Who is Sergei?"

"Why didn't you call me back after I hung up on you?"

"I don't know, Lana. I got a lot on my mind. I made you mad once . . . I figured anything I said after that would just make you angrier. "

"Because you are mad about Sergei."

"I don't even know who he is."

The words finally got through to her. She was so passionate, so sure of why I was doing what I was doing, that she had mis-calculated. She came to tell me that her lover didn't matter when I had only the mildest of suspicions about the rude Russian on the telephone.

I didn't want to duel with the young grad student. I didn't know what I felt. Everyone except maybe Cass had betrayed me. And in turn I had let down everyone I knew. I didn't want revenge. I didn't want to be angry.

"I never made love to him without condom," she said. "And I never let him kiss my pussy or put his thing in my mouth."

Her gray eyes were not quite human to me at that moment. Her blunt honesty made me want to smile.

"Sometimes you wouldn't see me for two weeks," she said, reading her own guilt into my silence.

"And you needed company," I said. "You're a pretty young woman. Beautiful."

"Don't throw me away, Ben. I told Sergei that I wouldn't see him anymore. I mean it."

"But why?" I asked. "Why wouldn't you want a young man who speaks your language and wants to be with you?"

"Why do you say these things to me?" she cried. "Don't you want me?"

For the moment I had the glimmering memory of another woman crying somewhere, another woman asking me for something I didn't understand.

"I did not love Sergei," she said. "He was just there and he wanted to see me."

"The night you called me and said that you were from my job," I said. "Was that because Sergei wouldn't come to you? Were you using me to make him jealous?"

The gray eyes turned suddenly human. Svetlana jumped to her feet and ran for the door. I let her go. I didn't want her to leave but I let her go. I hadn't meant to vex her with my question. I was just trying to understand-no, nothing so deep as understanding; I just wanted to imagine a world outside my mind.

The door slammed behind her. Now Lana was gone from my life too. At least she didn't know anything about Barbara Know-land. At least she couldn't betray me to Harvard Rollins.

I didn't see Lana being with Sergei as unfaithfulness. She was young and smiling and I paid the rent. I might have done it without the sex.

I had been going to Bulfinch's for a few months, mostly for the chance that I could have a brief chat with the Russian girl. One day she was telling me about how hard she worked.

"I work seven days to pay for everything," she said. "I work so hard that I can only take one class a semester."

I asked her how much it all cost. It wasn't much, less by far than Seela's tuition and room and board were at NYU.

"I could pay for that,'' I said, realizing that it was an offer as it came out of my mouth. "And if you become a big-time international businesswoman, you could pay me back."

It wasn't until the second month of my paying the bills that she had me over for dinner. It wasn't until the third dinner that we went to bed.

It seemed somehow inevitable that we became lovers. It was like a shared responsibility. I never believed that she wanted me. Somehow I thought that all Russians looked down on black people. I don't know where I got that from.

But, I felt, Lana was trapped. She needed someone to take care of her. And if a man foots the bills, then she had to play footsy with him.

There came a knock on the door. Svetlana rushed into my arms again. This time we kissed. I could taste the salty tears on her tongue. This excited me. I threw her on the bed and slapped her when she tried to rise. Then I was on her. Then she was on me.

The love we made was oceanic. She was feeling adrift from me and I was like a man dropped in the middle of an unending sea.

"I need you,'' we said together, laughing at our synchronicity.

"You need me?'' we asked together, this time feeling more.

"You are the first man ever to care about me," she said.

"Come on now, Lana," I said, "Woman like you? I bet they line up just to say hi."

"No. I mean, yes. They line up but not because they care. You paid for me and I had to beg you to come to my house. I wore skimpy little dresses and no underwear but you did not try to take me. It wasn't until I took off my clothes that you made love to me.

"You didn't want my body and you didn't want to see my grades or even to see papers that said I was enrolled in school. I just told you that I was needing and you helped me. I have always loved you since then.

"Many men want to fuck me. Many men want me to put on a nice dress and make other men want to fuck me. My teachers want to fuck me and for me to make them look good with my grades and my many languages. I don't mind. I do the work. I fuck them sometimes. But it is always trading a salami for some cheese, a loaf of bread for wine. I live like this and I don't mind. I give my mother money. I will send for my brothers one day.

"But when I meet you, you just say, 'I will pay for that,' and that's all. I have to love you. I have no other choice."

These declarations were simple and straightforward, like her. That's what I had always liked about Lana. Even at the restaurant she was always honest, uncomplicated. It was so much different than with Mona or my parents.

"I did something a long time ago," I said. "Before you were born, I think."

"What?"

"I'm not sure. It was a bad thing, but I don't remember."

"How do you know then?"

"It's been coming up lately. There's a woman who knew me back then who says that we did something, but she didn't say what."

"Did you ask her?"

"I didn't remember her," I said. "I thought that she was mistaken or just mad about me messin' around with her."

"But now you think that she knows something?" Svetlana asked.

"I don't know. But I feel different. I feel like you say, like a new man."

"But you don't like this," she suggested, and then she kissed me. "I don't know what I did."

"Come," Lana said.

She took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom.

"Stand in the tub," she told me.

I was already naked. She turned on the water and began to soap my thighs. She scrubbed and washed me from head to toe using a glass to rinse off the lather with warm water. She dried me with the plush red towels the Reynard used, and then she took me to the bed and massaged me—for hours. Whenever I tried to speak, she shushed me. Whenever I tried to turn over, she pushed me back on my stomach. Her hands were strong and seemed to get stronger as the night went on. At some point I lost consciousness. It didn't feel like falling asleep but more like tumbling down a dark, dark hole.

I awoke to the sounds of a man yelling and then something both hard and soft, something that made me sick. I sat up in bed gasping. The sounds gripped my heart and pummeled my lungs. For a while I didn't realize that it had been a dream, a sleeping vision.

Svetlana was lying next to me, naked and uncovered. I watched her for a while and calmed down. Age was creeping up on me; life was passing by as if through the window of a car in the country somewhere. All of a sudden there's a beautiful young woman lying on a bench at the side of the road. You see her and slow down. You approach her but wonder what you would do here by the roadside with a beauty who is there for you and unashamed. And then, once you decide that she has more to offer than you can take, you look back at the car and think about the monotonous road ahead of you . . .

These were my thoughts on that morning. It was all very poetic. It was also true. I could stay with Svetlana or go back to Our Bank. I could ask Cassius to ask Joey (or someone like Joey) to kill Barbara Knowland so that my life could begin again with Mona or Lana.

"How are you?" the Russian girl asked.

"Wondering."

"About what?"

"If maybe the idea of suicide is not a good one for a man like me."

Lana sat up and put her arms around me. That was what I wanted. But why hadn't I just asked her to hold me?

Dr. Shriver's office was at the very end of East Fifty-fourth Street. His second-floor window looked out on the East River, just like my window did. But his view seemed more intimate.

"Hello, Mr. Dibbuk," the rangy white man said. He was my age with graying blond hair and the perpetual hint of a smile on his lips. "How have you been?"

I took the seat across from him, the one that looked out over the river. There was a lone tugboat out there, 90 percent engine and 10 percent boat.

"All that power and nothing to do," I said.

Shriver's face framed a question that he did not utter.

All around his office were placed and hung African images: masks, paintings, photographs, and jewelry. When I had first come to his office, he tried to engage me about African culture. He knew Africa quite well, had been there a dozen times. But he soon realized that I knew nothing about that continent, that dark unconsciousness of a hundred million displaced descendants of slaves. I didn't know and I didn't want to know.