Demon: A Memoir (10 page)

I assumed what she meant by “this” were the vestiges of an elaborate culture. Otherwise, for all practical purposes, this room was a cult tribute to death.

“After that,” she said, “we waited. Even as the man began his life with the woman, feeding her and lying down with her, we waited to see what they would do, sure there would be more. But El was finished. And there was nothing for us.”

She leaned over the sarcophagus of a princess, turning her ear to it as though to listen for tapping on the inside. “I wonder, sometimes, what it must be like to die.”

I turned away.

“Oh, don’t.” She was at my side again, her arm twining through mine.

“I want to know what this has to do with me.”

“If you don’t understand the beginning, the rest will mean nothing to you, and we’ll have wasted our time. And neither of us can afford that.” She picked a piece of lint off my sweater.

A few other patrons drifted through the mummy room as I remarked again to myself at the lack of traffic. I wouldn’t have minded more; a shallow part of me felt gratified to be seen like this with such an obviously beautiful woman on my arm. And another part of me remembered that this was no woman, no human, at all.

Wheels, skidding on pavement . . . blonde hair and blood . . .

“You picked the perfect place for me to tell you all of this. Here, among your artifacts that have managed to outlast millennia of humans like you. Can you grasp what I’ve told you? That I watched the first rising of the sun, strolled the best beaches on earth before human feet soiled the sand?”

Her head tilted toward my shoulder. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m giving away my age.”

HER VOICE DROPPED TO a conspiratorial whisper. “Lucifer claimed it was spite.” She might have been any woman gossiping to a friend. Across the room, a man in his twenties tried not to openly stare at her. He mostly failed.

“It was spite, he said, that El communed with these new creatures as though they were more than walking mud, as though they could ever be worthy of anything. He knew then what we hardly dared believe: that El had created a new favorite. I have a present for you, Clay.”

I was startled by the sudden sound of my own name. “You do?” I frowned. “What is it?”

“You’ll see.” Her lips curled up, catlike.

I didn’t like that smile.

She tightened her arms around mine, hugging it to her. “Now Lucifer addressed the Legion:
‘What is to stop us from becoming their kings? Their gods? What else could we possibly be to these new creatures? Let us walk in the garden as he does. Let us be as gods to them and exercise our influence over them and turn them away from this fellowship with Elohim, as we have turned away.’”

We paused before a statue of the falcon-headed Horus. I hesitated and then marveled at her implication. Did I imagine it, or had she winked at it? I shuddered. She nuzzled my shoulder, her eyes on the statue. My head was spinning.

“Lucifer became obsessed with the humans. I didn’t know what to make of his fixation. I had never seen him like this. Even in the throes of his failed ascent, he had never been so intent, driven by such singularity of purpose. He studied them. He lost interest in the new world. He forgot us and even ceased to taunt El. The whole world had shrunk to this one thing: the humans.” She leaned away, her arm never leaving mine, to inspect a burial mask with vacant eyes and dark, curling hair, to trace its shape on the Plexiglas.

“He prowled the garden, inspecting for himself the handiwork of El like the jealous critic who judges the craftsmanship of the master, turning the work slowly between his hands, searching for the slightest weakness.” Her finger squeaked down the front of the display case. “And who, after long days and years of searching, finds it at last.”

For the last ten minutes or so there had been a new flow of visitors circulating through the room, coming in and out of the entrances on adjacent sides of the gallery. And so I paid no particular attention to the couple that entered the room just then until I felt, rather than saw, one of them falter. I glanced up just as Lucian twined both arms around mine once more.

Aubrey.

I HAD DREADED AND anticipated this day. Would it be at Old Beijing on a weekend? On the pedestrian mall outside Macy’s, or coming out of Peet’s? Would I look up in the
T
station to see her waiting across the track . . . or would it happen at all?

In the weeks since Lucian’s intrusion into my life, I had found new fears to rival my dread of running into Aubrey. Since then there had even been a growing number of days when I thought about Aubrey only once or twice. I panicked upon realizing this at first, feeling that the last traces of her were slipping away from me completely, too quickly. Later I tenuously congratulated myself, thinking that in the midst of this new madness I had begun to move on.

Even so, I was invariably conscious of her specter almost every time I left home—following me down Tremont or into the Harvest store in Cambridge, seeking me in places we had never been together before—whispering in my mind,
Is today that day?
And though I had exhaustively premeditated it, I knew when that day happened, I would not be prepared.

But I was less—so much less—prepared for it today. Especially upon seeing her with a man, the arm of whom she had instinctively clasped upon seeing me.

Richard.

Now at last I would confront him. But what I saw confounded me more than the faceless man he had been to me all these months: Other than his height, he did not resemble at all the chiseled-featured lothario of my imagination. Granted, he was tanned as if he had just come in from Saint Martin, and he had a full head of sporty brown hair. But his features seemed somehow soft, his eyebrows ill-formed over the pale color of his eyes. I thought his chin receded a little bit as well. In fact, other than the obvious understated quality of his clothing, he was disappointingly average, which evoked in me first relief and then incredulity. And I wondered, as I had a thousand times before, what the draw had been, that thing that caused Aubrey to gravitate toward him when she compared the two of us side by side as she must have done.

As I did now.

I noticed the black cashmere scarf draped around his neck: Aubrey’s trademark gift. She had given one to me and her boyfriend before me. I wondered if he knew that.

Aubrey was tanned, too. They must have just come from some no-doubt exotic location. And it irritated me to think that as I wondered almost daily if and when I would run into her, for part of that time she had not even been in the city.

The introductions went smoothly—thanks, surprisingly, to Richard.
The
Richard. Smooth as Richard. To his credit, he stuck out his hand, congenially and formally, as though it were a peace offering. I saw my hand clasp it, heard myself say something not nearly as clever as I had said in my rehearsals for this moment.

It was then that I caught the scent of her perfume, the bottle of which, shaped like a blue star, had sat every day on the bathroom counter. I was suddenly besieged by memories: her shoulders in the dress she wore to her office party our last Christmas together, the indentation of her pillow in the morning, the hair across her face as she slept, her clothes, pooled by the side of our bed.

“Clay,” Richard said. I detected, in the single syllable of my name, a slight accent. British. Wouldn’t you know it.

“You look good,” Aubrey lied. She seemed flushed, as though too warm in her cable-knit sweater and corduroys, a mixture of slight confusion and what I would recognize later as benign detachment in her eyes. Her lips, glossy and pink, were parted, as if on the cusp of a remark. I remembered the shape of that mouth, found myself first gazing and then staring at it. She had a front tooth that had always been at a slight angle so that it nudged her upper lip. She had been self-conscious of it, but I had thought it endearing. It kept her otherwise aristocratic look somehow approachable, more human. But now I was certain there was no discrepancy between those white edges. She had gotten it fixed! The lips closed, parted again as her blue gaze flitted from me, to Richard, and back like a moth, settling at last on the woman coiled at my side.

“Yvonne.” The demon smiled in that magnanimous way women do when they know they’re the prettier of the two. Her head tilted just perceptibly then, and I recognized with alarm a faint buzzing in the air. Her smile broadened. “Clay was just telling me how you used to come here together.”

I was mortified. I wrapped my arm around her. Aubrey gave a slight smile.

“I’m surprised to see you in the mummy room.” I wanted to accuse her—of getting her tooth fixed, of coming to the mummy room though she didn’t like it.

“I insisted, having never seen it before. Quite spectacular, really,” Richard said, coming to her rescue.

I hated him.

“So nice to meet you, Yvonne.” Aubrey’s expression was benign, betraying no insecurity or envy, only a bare hint of surprise. “Are you from the city?”

“Yes. I’m an attorney,” the demon said.

“Ah.” Aubrey was obviously impressed, her gaze bouncing from “Yvonne” to me, and back. And with ex-husband perception I heard her thinking that she would never have thought an attorney to be my type. “What kind of law?”

“I litigate product liability lawsuits,” Lucian said with a smile. I had no idea what that meant but felt an instant alignment like gratitude toward her that both surprised and unsettled me.

Richard checked his watch. “Well, I’m a bit peckish. Do you mind much, Bree, if we head up to the restaurant for some lunch?”

Richard to the rescue again. Aubrey excused them both with a smile and nod. “It’s good to see you, Clay.”

When their footsteps had receded out into the American galleries, I turned on Lucian. “You had no right,” I hissed, feeling the heat of the initial meeting still in my face.

“I think that went quite well.” She let go of me. I stared past the funerary mask of the dead princess, quite unable to believe that it had finally happened and happened so uneventfully that they were even now walking into Bravo, the upstairs restaurant, as I stood blinking in the middle of the mummy room.

But now that it was over, I was angry. Angry at Aubrey’s detachment, at being caught off-guard, at Richard’s heroics. I hated Richard for stepping in the way he had, first into our marriage and now today, for saving her from the need to answer for herself, as though to protect her from me.

“Is that why we were here?” I asked Lucian finally.

“You chose to come here, Clay.” She was smoothing her hair back in a way that reminded me of a Siamese cat. She peered up at me, then, her expression indulgent, the smile I hated was back again.

12

I could not sleep the night after the museum—not until I transcribed every word and expelled every nuance of that otherworldly drama from my memory. This process, normally focused to the exclusion of even hunger and fatigue, was interrupted regularly that night as I stared out the window or at the wall, seeing neither, seeing only the image of Aubrey’s hand on Richard’s arm, the pink curve of her lips over those perfect teeth, the imperfect shape of Richard’s face, Aubrey’s gaze fluttering between Lucian and me. And I searched that memory for any glint of her reaction to the sight of Lucian and me together.

Richard had called her “Bree.” Aubrey used to hate that.

I replayed the scene in my mind, outfitting it with every witty rejoinder, smug comment, and cryptic well-wish I had rehearsed for months. But finally, upon contemplating yet again the distance in Aubrey’s gaze, the fixed front tooth, I decided that she had retreated too far beyond me to be touched by any of them.

The image of them together, of the formerly faceless Richard, had preyed upon me in waking and dreaming moments for more than a year. But now that it was over, I found something disappointingly unremarkable about the reality.

I had always assumed he and Aubrey had no chance of making it, having started the way they had. But thinking back to Richard’s quick rescues, I wasn’t so sure. She had seemed in utter possession of the situation despite his protection of her. And I found something pathetic in his safeguarding her, in his willingness to be fitted into the mold of her expectations like a mummy in a coffin made for someone else.

I WENT TO WORK and sat in meetings. But even as I did, my mind roamed the heavens, walked the shore by moonlight, passed among the reeds on the bank of Eden’s river.

At home I made my way through manuscript chapters, jacket copy, and e-mail, my gaze wandering often to that pile of pages, scratched in frantic pen and harried pencil, growing on the corner of my desk, to the rumpled receipt I had saved from the Bosnian Café that first night. It seemed a year, an age ago.

“I’m going to tell you my story, and you’re going to publish it.”

Staring at the pile, I considered the narrative tension of his story, the larger-than-life qualities of his characters (and how could they be otherwise when they included both God and the devil?), the unlikely point of view—like the monster of John Gardner’s
Grendel
telling the tale of Beowulf ripping off his arm. A stepsister’s account of being born ugly. A tale turned on its head, a sympathetic character from an unsympathetic source.

No. There was nothing sympathetic or likable about this teller. I thought again of Sarah Marshall, her hair matted on the pavement.

If it was a hoax, it was the most elaborate one I had ever heard of. And if it was, I found that a part of me did not want my disbelief proven, for through it the wheels of my creative mechanism, which I’d feared indefinitely jammed, had begun a familiar, albeit creaky, new motion in me.

I thought of Katrina’s proposal.
L. Legion.
How clever. I tried to locate it, but it was apparently buried beneath a ream of paper-clipped proposals and sample chapters.

Later, well past 1:00 a.m., I returned to my account. I had combed it a dozen times in the last week but left each time feeling that something was missing. Even as he took me speeding through the heavens and introduced me to Eden, he was coy, refusing to put me at the edge of his understanding as I demanded my authors do in their narratives, holding back some vital piece of information.

I checked my calendar.

The blank grid stared back.