Diablerie (6 page)

"Dad?"

He was there at the table and so was my mother, Svetlana, Seela, Mona, a man I had never met before, and Cassius Copeland. The strange man, a white guy wearing a cowboy hat, was looking off toward the back of the room, which was very far away.

My parents were sitting side by side, deep satisfaction radiating from them. They loved each other. They loved me—they said. I sat there watching them and feeling that I was somehow in that faraway distance that the stranger at our table was looking into.

The man I didn't know turned to me and asked, "Are you interested in real estate, Ben Dibbuk?"

"What kind of real estate?" I asked, wondering why he used my full name. Why not say "Ben" or "Mr. Dibbuk"? I was stuck thinking about his use of my name when Barbara Knowland began speaking.

"I've seen thousands of people die," she announced. "I've seen them shot and hacked, knifed and blown up, poisoned and beaten to death with steel batons. I've seen whole towns annihilated, countries decimated by famine. I've walked through infirmary halls with the smell of death so thick that if you cut it with a knife, it would bleed all over you."

Everyone was rapt in her hypnotic hyperbole.

What nonsense!
I thought.

But the man I didn't know leaned over and whispered, "Only the innocent can deny sin, my friend.'' Then he gave me his card. The name was written in runes but the title
Cowboy
was in plain type.

I got to work five minutes early. I was about to use my card on the turnstile when someone called to me.

"Ben."

It was Star, standing near the coffee concession that made its business out of a nook in the east wall of the huge entrance hall.

She was wearing dungarees and a tie-dyed T-shirt of mainly purple and yellow. Her hair was down and she wore no makeup. For a moment I thought I recognized her from another time, but that flash of insight faded.

I stayed where I was and she approached me.

"Ben."

"What?"

"You're still saying that you don't know me?"

"Lady, I don't have the slightest idea who you are," I said. "I saw you the night before last. I read a review of your book online . . . but I don't know you."

"We spent almost twenty-four hours living on whiskey and sex," she said. Her green eye seemed to shimmer while her brown one receded.

"What can I say? I did that a hundred times when I was drinking and rambling around."

"Why did you come to my talk?" she asked.

"I told you. My wife is working for Diablerie."

"I know. I called her office. I asked her why she brought you and she said that you usually didn't come to things like that.''

"Did she also tell you that she made me go this time?"

"What are you up to, Ben?" Star asked. "Are you trying to hurt me? Do you want something?"

"NO. NO. I don't even know you."

Once again the suspicion shone in her face. She backed away a few steps and then turned. She walked a few steps more and turned again.

It all seemed very dramatic, histrionic.

She left and I went up to work.

There were a few lines of code in a tax percentage program that I had to m o w almost every year because of ever-changing tax laws. I wanted to work on the subroutine but there was too much on my mind: Mona's abandonment, Lana's openness, and now Star's paranoia. Maybe I should have asked her what happened all those years ago. Maybe I should have pretended that I remembered her, that I missed her.

But why bother? What could she do to me?

I couldn't imagine any danger she might present but still I was uneasy, panicky even. I tried to concentrate on the printouts but for once they gave me no solace. I couldn't hide behind the jury-rigged logics, the objective commands that were perfectly precise but often wrong.

I was lost that day, but I told myself this feeling would pass. Over time Mona would come back home and Star Knowland didn't matter. Whatever she remembered, or thought she remembered, was more than twenty years ago and a thousand miles away.

At noon I gave up trying to work. I called my manager, Brad Richards, got his answering machine, and said, "Hey, Brad. This is Ben Dibbuk. I have some kind of virus or something so I'm going home. I should be better by tomorrow."

I hadn't been free on the street before five on a workday in years. I went out to lunch with Cassius every now and then, but that was always with the idea of coming back to work.

At first I walked toward our apartment because that's what I did every day. But somewhere around Forty-ninth Street I realized that the apartment would be lonely without Mona.

Lonely without Mona.
The words swirled in my head, holding other meanings. I never missed Mona. She could go out every night for weeks, and often did, and I never felt lonely. She was once working in San Francisco for three months, getting a new publication off the ground, and we barely called each other once a week.

But now, after less than a day, I was missing her.

I headed south. I had a destination, but not consciously. It wasn't until I got to Thirty-sixth Street that I realized I had been headed for Maria Valeria's apartment building.

Maria's husband, Isaac, had died when Mona was only eight. He and Maria had come from Jamaica in order to make a new life. They loved their daughter and even now Maria stayed in New York to be near Mona.

I rang the bell downstairs even though I knew Mona would be angry at my just showing up. But I missed her; I wanted to see her.

No one answered and I thought that I should leave and call her on her cell phone. But I had the keys to Maria's apartment in my pocket. Mona made me carry them in case she was out of town and there was an emergency.

I opened the downstairs door thinking that I'd knock, in case the bell was broken.

No one answered. I stood there a moment, knocked again, looked at my watch—it was 1:21 and I had nowhere to go.

I opened the door telling myself that Mrs. Valeria was sick with bronchitis, maybe she'd Men or had some kind of asthma attack.

But the apartment was empty. The kitchen was clean. Maria's bed was made and neat. There were no medicine bottles on the night table or extra blankets at the foot of the bed, no humidifier or oxygen tent, no evidence of respiratory illness at all.

The guest bedroom also doubled as Maria's office. It was where she knitted and wrote letters on a wobbly cherry table/desk that I had made when I was studying woodworking at the Y.

Mona's little satchel was at the foot of the bed. It was obvious that she just wanted to get away from me for a while. Maria wasn't sick.

I knew that I should leave, but Mona's desertion of our home, her lie about her mother's illness, made me suspicious. That's why I emptied her satchel out on the bed.

A toothbrush, her favorite yellow towel, cartridges for the Mont Blanc Mozart fountain pen, aspirin, Ambien, and a package of six ribbed condoms were arrayed on her neat blankets.

It was not possible for me to explain away those condoms. We hadn't used them for years. Her tubes were tied after Seela. The pregnancy was so hard on her that we both decided to be happy with one child.

Mona had a lover somewhere. For how long? Had it started with that trip to San Francisco? Was it only one, or was it many lovers?

Little hints came back to me as I knelt there next to the bed so as not to muss her tightly tucked covers. For a while she had talked during our nightly dinners about a man named Tom Inch. He was a journalist, and she let it slip one day that they had gone to see a film while in Las Vegas at a convention.

I was a little bothered by this and said so.

"It was nothing," she told me. "We were doing a profile on that young actress Jessa Sterling. She had a small role in the film. It was just business."

I forgot about it before dessert.

Then there was another guy, I had forgotten his name. He was an artist, I remembered, and used to call the house. They had long talks on her office phone. She laughed loud and hard while talking to him. Once, after a brief talk with the artist, she told me that she was going to her mother's for the evening. I didn't think about it at the time. It seemed . . . ordinary. And I didn't ask a lot of questions.

The image of my father, a giant, came into my mind. Tall and dark-skinned like me, he went up and down the lane beside our house watering the rosebushes—the huge multicolored orange and yellow and red flowers releasing their heavy, sweet scent all around us.

"What if the sun came down on that mountain, Daddy?" I asked.

"It wouldn't do that," he said, watching the stream from the green hose, making sure that he didn't wash the soil away from the roots.

"But what if it did?"

"Probably be a forest fire up there, I guess."

"And what if it was a fire, Daddy?"

"It would burn the trees and the flowers, if there are any flowers up there."

"And if it was flowers, they would burn?"

"I guess."

"What if all the flowers burnded up, Daddy?"

"The bees would have trouble makin' honey, honey."

I giggled and asked, "And what if the bees couldn't make their honey?"

The whole afternoon was spent asking one question after another. Remembering that I knew there was a time when I questioned everything.

There came a sound: the front door of the apartment opening. I scooped Mona's things into her bag, put it where I found it, and tiptoed into the closet, closing the louvered door behind me.

I was sure that it was Mrs. Valeria coming home from the market. She would putter around for a while and then go out again. That's how Maria spent her days—in and out of the house, going on made-up errands. All I had to do was wait until the front door opened and closed again; it wouldn't be more than an hour—probably less.

They came through the bedroom door kissing. Their heads locked together as they twisted into the room. His erection was out and in her hand. His hand was under her skirt, the forearm jerking upward and turning again and again.

"Oh, yeah," Mona said, the orgasm teasing behind her panting breaths. "Right up in there. Deeper. Oh. Hold it right there. Don't move. Don't move."

She was on her toes, biting her lower lip, her eyes closed. A high-toned squeal escaped her throat.

"Kiss that cock," Harvard Rollins said.

She looked at him then. I knew what she'd say. Mona hated it when men talked like that. "Gutter mouth," she called it.

"You want me to take that big dick down my throat?" she asked him.

He took her by the shoulders and threw her to the floor. She fell like a rag doll, her dress dropping away from her shoulders. She came right up on her knees and went at his long, slender erection hungrily. Her face was hidden from me but I could tell that she was looking up at him. He stared down at her lovingly. Every now and then he'd make a hissing sound, letting us both know how wonderful she made him feel.

She held his manhood away from her lips and said, "I can taste your come. Hold it back."

As Mona stood up, her striped dress fell away fi-om her slender hips. She wore no underwear. Then she turned her back to him and leaned over to reach into her little leather bag.

I froze, worried that she might see the jumble of her things and realize I had gone through it. But she didn't.

"I have a condom in—" she began to say, but Harvard moved quickly, sinking the entire length of his stiff erection inside her.

"Oh my God," she cried. "Oh my God."

Harvard was fucking her hard while holding on to one of her wrists. Every time he slammed into her, she almost lost her balance, almost came, while he somehow kept her from falling, kept her panting.

"I'm coming!" he shouted.

Mona turned around quickly and got back on her knees. She grabbed his thing and stroked it and he began to ejaculate. As the long streams leaped from the snakelike head of his pink erection, Mona laughed and urged him on. Even after it was over, she kept pulling on it.

"Come again," she begged. "Come for me. Show me you love me. Do it again."

For a moment I was sure that he was going to push her away, but then he bent over, lifted her by her waist, and put her on the table I had made. He entered her again and repeated his exuberant pounding. The slapping of flesh was like one man's hearty applause in a room full of doubters.