Diablerie (2 page)

"I want to suck your cock right now," Svetlana whispered into my ear. "I got up thinking about you and now my pussy needs your cock."

"So . . . what's wrong?" I asked, trying to keep my erection down and Mona from figuring out it wasn't work at all.

"If you don't come fuck me right now, I'm going back to my old boyfriend in Coney Island. My pussy is crying over you, weeping all over my bed.''

"Did you try the JCL?"

"I've got to have your cock right now, before one hour I have to have your cock deep, deep, deep.''

"Okay. All right. I'll come in. Yeah. Run the other jobs, all except the totals routine. If you run that, the whole system will go down."

I stumbled from the bed gasping for breath, my nearly fifty-year-old cock stiff as a mummy's thumb. I was thankful that Mona didn't turn on the light, just yakked at me in the dark room.

"Who was it?"

"I don't know who's on night shift anymore," I said. "But the checking account subroutine went down and I have to go fix it. Fix it."

I had hurried on my pants and was buttoning a loose-fitting shirt that hung down over any vestiges of the erection.

I put on shoes with no socks and then hit my shins on the night table.

"You haven't had to go in at night in twelve years," Mona said, doing the math in her head and sounding suspicious.

She turned on the light.

At this time of morning she looked all of her forty-five years, and then some. Sleep was hard on Mona. Her disappointments and perceived failures gathered in the pool of night.

"I don't know what it is. Maybe some date trigger or an update to the system that no longer accepts the JCL."

"You know I don't understand anything about computers," she said angrily.

"I don't know why," I said in retort. "I've been a programmer ever since we met. I talk about it every goddamned day."

"Don't raise your voice to me."

"And you could get your fuck ass outta bed and offer to help me, to make me a coffee or call me a car. Instead you complain that you don't know what I'm talking about when I'm going to work to pay the rent."

"You know I hate it when you use that kind of language."

"And you know I have to go to work."

On the street, in the nighttime East Side, there was a solitary yellow cab prowling for a fare. I waved it down and hopped in. It smelled of woody incense and resounded with Indian music. The driver sang along with the high-pitched woman vocalist. He only asked me for my destination. I only gave him Svetlana's address.

She was waiting at the door in a bright yellow terry cloth robe.

"Take off your clothes and lie down on the couch," she commanded.

I was very excited, still erect. I did what she said in seconds.

She dropped her robe, squatted down over me.

"Is your heart beating hard?" she asked.

I nodded, suddenly aware of the thunder in my chest.

"I don't want you to move," she said. "I will do everything. Just lie there and feel it. If you move, I will scratch your face with my nails and you will have to explain that to your wife. Do you understand?"

I nodded again, my heart doubling its effort.

As Lana lowered down onto me, bringing me inside her, she asked, "Was that your wife who answered the phone?"

I cried out a syllable that has no counterpart in English and nodded.

She was rocking back and forth slowly.

"Was she suspicious?"

"Yes."

"Will she leave you?"

"Only, only a little wary," I said. "She thinks I'm at work."

"Do you want me to make her leave you?"

"Do you want me?" I asked, more timidly than I would have liked.

"No."

"Then why . . . ?"

Svetlana, her elbows on her knees, started moving her hips in a slow circle. The sensation took away my breath.

"Look at me," she said. "In my eyes."

I gazed at her gray eyes, eyes that saw me but seemed as if they were on some other plane. They were hungry eyes, wolflike.

"Talk to me," she said. "No. Don't look away. Look at me and talk to me while I fuck you."

"What should I say?"

She said something that I didn't understand.

That's when the void began to creep out from its lair. I could feel it extending from the caves in my shoulders where it slumbered. I moved my head to the left, trying to avoid the cold grip of deadness. I closed my eyes and Svetlana slapped me—hard. It hurt and in the pain I could see something . . .

It wasn't anything I remembered at all, just a shadow that I knew hid an entire mountain. For some reason this terrified me.

When I opened my eyes, I was standing over Svetlana. The coffee table was upended and she was on the floor. Obviously I had dropped her there.

I was shivering, holding my hands like the woman I saw across the street from Seela's new apartment. Svetlana was frozen between fear of me and fear for me; I saw this in her face.

I didn't know what to do so I grabbed my pants from the floor and put them on. Svetlana had just said something but again I didn't understand. We stared at each other over the void of physical violence, both of us silenced and fearful.

The phone rang then. It was a loud, brash ring, like old phones made when I was a child. It seemed that the ring was something calling to me from a long time ago: my dead father with one last admonition, an appointment I had failed to keep . . .

The phone had rung six or seven times when I realized that Svetlana wasn't answering it, maybe she didn't even hear it. She was mesmerized by me. The look of fear and wonder in her face was in turn fascinating; it seemed to have something to do with that ring.

"Lana, the phone. Lana!"

Now aware of the ringing, she crawled toward the phone, which was on the floor, and answered: "Hello? . . . Yes, Mrs. Hightower. . . No . . . My boyfriend was playing around and he fell . . . No, nobody is hurt. I'm so sorry we disturbed you . . . I know it is late . . . Bye. Sorry."

When she hung up, I said, "I have to go."

Svetlana got to her feet and touched my left hand. I could feel it distinctly. It was a light touch, almost a tickle. I turned away and went out her door.

On the street I realized that I was still shivering. I was trying to remember what we were talking about before I dropped her. I stood there for many minutes but the conversation was gone.

"If I'm such a savior," Mona said to me at the counter at Augie's three months later, "then come with me to the banquet tonight."

I hated Mona's work functions. She was a magazine editor, freelance. She worked for quasi-intellectual fashion magazines. Her friends were the gushing emotional sorts or aloof scholarly types who asked questions that I didn't even understand.

"So you save me just to punish me?'' I joked, hoping that she only wanted to see me squirm.

"Really, Benny. Rudy bagged out and I can't go alone. You know, some people have started saying that I really don't have a husband at all, that I made you up because I'm a lesbian and I don't want anybody to know it."

"They'd like your fantasy girl&end more than they'll like me.''

"I saved your life," she said inflecting her words with false drama. "Now it's your turn."

We took a taxi to our place on Fifty-first near the East River. It was a nice-size, prewar apartment, with thirteen-foot ceilings and more than enough room for a one-child family. We had a big window that looked out over the water into Queens. Sometimes I'd sit in the white stuffed chair and watch the river for hours.

It was easy for me to lose track of time, which is why I adhered to such a rigid daily schedule. I left the house for work every day at 8:25, getting to the main offices of Our Bank at Forty-second and Madison by 8:50. I left work when the job was done and came right home. Schedules kept my mind, and me, from wandering. Left with no destination or time limit, I could walk all day or sit in a coffee shop until it closed for the night.

"Are you wearing that?" Mona asked me.

I had been standing at the picture window, looking at the skies fading over Queens, holding my hand up to the pane as if I were gauging the city's anatomical form.

"What's wrong with what I'm wearing?" I asked.

I had on a tan jacket, dark brown pants and shoes, and a light-yellow shirt.

"Not the bow tie, Benny."

"When did you stop calling me 'honey'?"

Mona had donned a very dark, thin-strapped gray dress that made her body look no more than thirty. Her deep brown eyes shone and her silvery, straightened mane was tied up at the back of her head like the comb of some exotic rain forest bird.

"The first year that you forgot my birthday," she said.

The simplicity and quickness of her reply shocked me. When was her birthday? February? And how many years had it been since I remembered?

"I don't have any regular ties," I said.

"So don't wear one. Go loose for a change."

The Houghton Arms was one of the oldest hotels in the city. It was on Park, above Forty-sixth and below Fiftieth, but I never remembered the exact cross-street. Mona and I decided to walk since the weather was fair and to clear the air between us.

I was quiet on the way because nothing I could say would make up for the years of forgotten birthdays. I was disquieted also because of my abandonment of our daughter and my ever-increasing distance from everyone, including my illicit lover, and because I didn't care at all about Mona's unheralded birthdays. What difference did any of it make? Why were we even walking together?

"Benny?"

"Uh-huh."

"Have you thought about going back into therapy?''

"Say what?"

"You heard me." We'd come to a stop at a light, at Fiftieth and Park.

There was a brief span of time, four years earlier, when I'd wake up yelling every night. This had gone on for three months when Mona finally said that either I went into therapy or I slept in another room.

She found me the therapist, Dr. Adrian Shriver, and I reluctantly made an appointment. The nightmares stopped a week before the first session. But I went anyway; Mona insisted.

The truth was, I would have been happy to sleep in a separate room. After all, we rarely had sex and never held each other in the night, we didn't confide little secrets about our days. And though she didn't snore, Mona breathed heavily—sometimes I felt that she was sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

But I couldn't move to another bed. Mona would have seen that as a betrayal—even if she was the one who demanded it.

Eventually I told Mona that I had quit therapy. In reality Dr. Shriver had let me go.

"It has been three years," he said to me one autumnal day, "and you haven't told me anything substantive about your family history or your childhood."

"Is that important?" I asked him.

"Let's take a break for a while, Mr. Dibbuk," Dr. Shriver said. "The dreams haven't returned. Maybe you can come back when you feel safe enough to reveal yourself."

"Back to therapy," I said. "Why should I? I haven't had one of those dreams in years. I'm fine. I'm happy."

"Like hell you are. Anytime I ever come up on you when you're alone, you have the saddest look on your face."