Demon: A Memoir (19 page)

24

I lay on the beach beneath an umbrella, the skin of my chest and back too pink to withstand the sun. That had happened the first day despite 45 SPF lotion. Between the sunburn and the swelling in my legs from the flights, I bore a stunning resemblance to a hotdog. But none of this mattered; I was glad to be out of Boston, to feel the air on my arms and chest, to sit with my laptop at the breakfast buffet and read—even with pen in hand—by the side of the pool. I could get used to wearing swim trunks every day, eschewing underwear, ambling over to the grill for a burger whenever the mood struck, and watching the bikini-clad scenery.

I passed on the Coronas and Dos Equis, which was no hardship, never having been a beer drinker, but a shot of tequila had never sounded so good.

I didn’t need it. I had run up my credit card getting here, but it was worth every all-inclusive penny. The only thing missing was Lucian. It was almost as though he had truly disappeared on the plane that day, leaving only his shoes behind. I tried not to think about it; doing so sent my heart into strange stutters even when I was at rest. Obviously, I needed this reprieve.
And I deserve it,
I thought, as I gazed out over the pale turquoise water. Out toward the Cabo San Lucas arch where the Sea of Cortez met the mighty Pacific, wave runners scored the surface with raised white welts, and the sun dappled the water with platinum as they receded.

I want to show you something. Do you know what they look like, these believers?

I saw the daubing brushstrokes of the sun on the ocean—except that it was no longer an ocean. The water was running too swiftly, and I could see the bottom. It was a brook, a creek, and the stones of the bed shone beneath it. They were iridescent, glittering through water that ran clear in the middle but muddy in the eddies. A clump of dirt broke off from the side of the stream, and the water clouded, but several of the shining pebbles glinted through the mud and debris.

A child ran pell-mell toward the water, chased by his mother. The sound jolted me, and I realized I had drifted into reverie.

Sometime later I looked out at the water and thought of Lucian walking along the beach by the light of the moon. As I considered the water, the bright blue of the ocean, a cloud passed before the sun, dimming it. I could not see from beneath my umbrella that it was a thunderhead.

THAT EVENING, RAIN PELTED the balcony of room 408. A rare storm, they called it. So unusual this time of year, the hotel workers said. But nothing seemed usual or unusual to me anymore, the words having become meaningless to me.

I was, however, troubled by Lucian’s near silence. I expected him to show up by the minute—every day, tonight even—to ramble at length into my internal tape recorder. I expected, alone at night, to purge myself of every word here, at this desk, before weaving them into the fabric of my manuscript like a bright thread. But despite his constant assertions that our time was short—was growing shorter, even—he never showed.

During the daylight, with burgers by the pool and smooth bodies lounging on chairs to distract me with thoughts comfortingly base, I could manage not to think about it too much. But by my fourth day I saw through the beautiful drinks on poolside trays to the cheap, plastic glasses and recognized the second-rate nature of the evening entertainment on the stage beside the outdoor bar as I ate my dinner from a scratched Fiestaware plate. I became aware of the fraying hems of the flamenco dancers’ costumes, the gauche makeup of the girls. And I began to notice the plaster peeling from the edge of the stage itself, the painted gold scrollwork chipped where careless workers had run into it, the cracking Mexican tile beneath the staircases.

I could not help but think of the home in Belmont, once so grand, reduced to a pile of rubble.

One night as I ate my dinner outside, I observed a man and a woman sitting at a table off to the side of the stage. They appeared neither raucously drunk nor so old that they applauded the dancers in the way that grandparents did at dance recitals.

In fact, there were no drinks on the table in front of them at all. And though the man—I judged him to be in his thirties—looked perfectly at ease in his Billabong T-shirt and cargo shorts, and the woman was elegant in her beaded halter, they reminded me of the men at the mall, of the two women at the bar in the Four Seasons Hotel, so that I finished my dinner in a rush, wondering if I only imagined the weight of their gazes upon my back as I strode across the pool area toward my room.

The next night my room seemed too dark, the light of the lamps insufficient and sallow against the moonless night, the black of the ocean seeming to encroach upon the beach. I was edgy, irritated, checking the clock, the calendar on my laptop.

The wind shifted, and water pelted the casing of the sliding glass door. I got up to close it, and as I did, the phone rang. The sound, so electric, so mechanical against the backdrop of rain, of the waves I was able to hear from my bed at night, startled me. I had not heard the ringing of a phone in four days.

I frowned. The tour desk had tried relentlessly to sell me any number of day excursions, all of which I had declined—could they have taken to phoning my room? But it was well past ten o’clock, the time when most hotel guests were out dancing, drinking, or in town at the Cabo Wabo Cantina hoping for an appearance by Sammy Hagar.

When I answered, the voice on the other end of the phone was thick and so emotive that I barely made out the sound of my own name.

“Hello?”

“Clay? How did you do it?”

“Sheila?” I said, confused. I had left the number of my resort with her in case anything came up at work—or if the committee felt compelled to rush me any good news that couldn’t wait until I returned. In fact, Sheila was the only one with my hotel number, as Mrs. Russo had not yet returned from Haverhill.

I thought again of Lucian’s warning to keep away from Mrs. Russo.

“How—how did you do it? How do you get by?” Her voice caught repeatedly as she spoke, making her sound like a child that had cried too hard to talk except in hiccupping gulps.

“Sheila, what’s going on?” My alarm mingled with impatience. I was in Cabo. I had come here from the opposite coast on two long flights in a carefully researched package deal to get away from the office, from my single life in Boston, and from the winter.

I had come here to write.

“How did you do it?” she choked between staggering breaths.

“Do what, Sheila?”

“Get by. After Aubrey left.” The last word was a sob.

“What do you mean, how did I do it? Sheila, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know how to do it.”

My impatience sparked annoyance. The last thing I felt like dealing with was Sheila’s self-inflicted turmoil. “I just did, Sheila.”

“He just doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know.” Her voice squeaked up an octave.

I’d never heard Sheila like this before—Sheila with her empathetic ear, who had never demanded much, if anything, of Dan, who turned the warm light of her love so readily on her family and children and friends.

“He doesn’t know what? What’s happened?”

“He’s left. He left.”

“I know, Sheila. But what happened tonight to cause this breakdown?” I hated the calm, measured sound of my own voice. It reminded me of the way Lucian talked to me that day in the bookstore.

“He—he doesn’t know if he’s coming back. Oh, Clay!” My name became a tight keen.

I sighed, tried to summon empathy. Had Aubrey cried like this when she left me? Had she ever shed a tear even? “Sheila, where are your children?”

“With Dan. They’re with Dan. He took them. I don’t mean he took them, but for the night.”

“All right. And you’re not worried about them, right?” I couldn’t imagine either one of them doing anything stupid when it came to their children.

“No. I’m not. I’m all right.” She inhaled sharply, her breath catching. “He doesn’t know what he wants. It’s all right. I’m not angry.”

I stared at the receiver. She wasn’t angry? She had cheated on him, and
she
wasn’t angry? I had to work to suppress my rage, rising like tar on hot pavement. “I don’t know what to tell you. It sounds like you have it figured—”

“You can’t hate her,” she said suddenly.

“Who?”

“Aubrey. She just didn’t know what she wanted. It was a mistake. She knew it. She had to know it.”

“Sheila, you’re babbling,” I said more firmly. I was trying to be diplomatic but found it more and more difficult. I was glad I wasn’t in town where I might feel compelled to ask if I ought to check on her. I was sick of being a good guy. “You know what I think? I think
you
need to figure out what you want.”

Silence. And then a sniffle. “You’re right. You’re right, Clay.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Thank you.”

I nodded, though I knew she couldn’t see it. I waited a moment more to hear the soft click of the line before hanging up the receiver.

25

On the morning I left Cabo, my plane sat on the tarmac for an hour. The storm had caused cancellations and delays, and now that the sun was shining again, planes were baking in line on the runway like fish laid out to dry. I glanced repeatedly at my seatmate, trying to ascertain if he was less human than he looked in his Bermudas and flip-flops, until he dropped his head back, let his mouth fall open, and started snoring.

Gazing out the window, I stared at the gray cement until I, too, dozed. I woke, dry mouthed, just before the plane began its descent into the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. I wondered if I should have kept Sheila on the phone longer or called Helen, wondered where Lucian had been these five days, what the committee thought of my book.

My book. Sometime in the last few days it had evolved from my manuscript to “my book.” I had already decided that if Brooks and Hanover didn’t take it, I would submit it elsewhere. Maybe I would ask Katrina to represent it, to take it to one of the Titans—Random House, perhaps, or Hachette.

But I needed to know how it ended.

Sitting in a bank of seats at my gate in Dallas, I reached for my cell phone but hesitated before turning it on. Pushing that button carried so much finality; either there would be a message waiting from Helen, or there wouldn’t. If there were, I might know now, before I even boarded my plane, the fate of my book. Or at least whether I should be calling Katrina.

What I would not know is how to finish it.

I didn’t turn it on. I told myself that I should welcome this limbo. I had languished in purgatory through my separation, in between appointments with Lucian, nearly every moment of the last three months. Now, perhaps on the cusp of something—some new direction—I should sit here during this layover and savor the feeling of truly being in transit. In between.

I put the phone in my bag, shoved it toward the bottom, pulled out a pen and the last few pages of one of the manuscripts I had taken with me. My legs felt swollen again, the skin tight across my calves. I had meant to walk around for a little while, but they would only swell again on the next flight, and I had promised myself I would return home with every piece of work I had brought with me finished. Every piece except my own.

My pen hovered above the page as, with the same apprehension with which I noticed Aubrey’s increasingly frequent absences in the months leading up to my discovery of her affair, I wondered where Lucian could be, where he went when he was not with me.

That’s so pathetic.

Someone was staring at me—a woman, sitting in a row of boarding area seats across from mine and one row over. Her legs were crossed beneath a long, stretchy skirt. Her brown hair was slightly frizzy, pulled back into a ponytail that gave her a girlish appearance, though a closer look at the lines around her eyes and mouth put her, I guessed, in her forties. She wore one of those fabricated pieces of jewelry they sold at women’s stores, the kind Aubrey used to disdain for looking like an antique or an art piece, though they were mass-produced and sold at exorbitant prices. Except for the jewelry, she would have fit in perfectly in Boston; she was wearing all black.

“Look at that sunburn,” she said to me, the furrow above her lip marred by a thin scar. “The committee loved what we gave them, by the way.”

I almost dropped the pages on my lap, so great was my relief. It was quickly followed by anger. “Where have you been?” I hated how transparent I was, how desperate I sounded.

“Roaming.” She pursed her lips into a little kitten mouth. “I thought you deserved a vacation before things got busy.”

“Busy? What do you mean busy? You said our time was short.”

She came over to sit next to me. She was broad-hipped but not ungainly, her nails manicured with those square, white tips, the appeal of which I had never understood.

“They called it compelling, brilliant. They compared you to Poe, to Blake’s
Urizen.
”

I exhaled a silent exclamation, unable to speak.

“I’d ask for a slightly larger advance than what they’re offering, but otherwise, I think we’re almost set.”

It was happening. It would happen. I fell back against the seat, papers sliding to the floor around me. And then I lowered my head to my hand. And laughed. It bubbled out of me, grew in volume until I was laughing so hard that the sound came out with the same near-hysteria I had noted in Lucian—and then I laughed harder.

Long moments later, that wild, roiling laugh still in my ears, Lucian regarded me with patronizing calm before reminding me that my story was not finished.

“You’re right. And I have”—I checked my watch, which struck me as so ironic I almost laughed again—“a half hour before I board.”

“Then calm down and listen.”

I was going to publish. The advance didn’t matter. But I would negotiate anyway.

“As you’ve noticed, I’m something of a philosopher. Now, after the ascension of the God-man and the conversion of these believers, I thought perhaps he was tired of being abandoned by the strongest of his creations, the most favored of his people. Who can guess the reasoning of El? I only know this: He is the author of the paradigm of the unlikely. Clay, listen!”

“I’m listening.” I could buy a new table. I would get some new pants. I would go out on dates. Would Aubrey hear? Would she call to congratulate me?

“I’ve said Israel was special to El. But now something happened. Up until those days there was a great separation between the Jews and everyone else. The Jews were set apart by law and favor of El, and the rest of the world was on its own unless someone converted. El was a faithful lover of his people. But now these new believers were going out and giving this message indiscriminately to anyone they met, Jew and non-Jew alike. The rich man, the widow, the priest, the fishwife, the orphaned beggar on the street.

“Let me tell you something, these non-Jews, upon hearing and believing and accepting this new grace, this new gift, looked exactly the same as the other believers to my eye. All those shining stones like luminescent pearls in the muddied waters.”

I recalled my vision on the beach. I had thought it a daydream.

“I saw this with appalled fascination. I laughed like a fool, much like you just now, and heard something wild in my voice. Why not? Why not. Tell them all. How like El to be so extravagant and so longsuffering. Why limit his affection—and now it had grown to a great and totally undeserved gift—to any one race? Soon enough the entire ball of earth would be populated with pardoned, shining souls, a great deposit of glowing stones, imperfect yet brought into the fold of that relationship as only that first man and woman had experienced so long ago.

“I was manic, despairing. El had bestowed upon these believers the rights of his own children, authority over all fallen things, if they wanted it. Over me.” She shoved a square-tipped fingernail into her sternum. “Imagine! And now I was being ordered about, told to leave, cast out of homes and presences by an authority belonging only to El himself.”

I had never, in a thousand years, thought of this. And now my thoughts returned to Mrs. Russo, to the steeliness about her the day at the co-op, at the seeming sanctuary of our apartment building.

“I had found my place with Lucifer, and among you. How could I bear to be ordered about, ruled over by humans so frail and filthy and base?” At some point she had gripped my arm, and now those square nails dug into it. I remembered again the sight of her on the
T
, pulling at her skin as though it were covered with fungus.

“But I need not have worried. Lucifer, clever prince, had a plan. His efforts until then were paltry by comparison. We had been a haphazard force at best, only tenuously united—if you haven’t noticed, loyalty and devotion are not our strong suits. Now Lucifer unleashed a great storm of demons, myself among them, a battery of guerilla assaults, and attacked the children of El with every imaginable weapon.” Her eyes were mad, her lips animated by a terrible smile.

“How he hated these new children of El! They might be assured of a future, but they were mortal yet.”

“What did you do?” I sat very still.

“We killed many of them. A dead believer is a believer who cannot spread the word of redemption to any others. And I’m certain their ends made a good many humans think twice about making the same choice.”

In my mind I saw the slain woman, the blood mottling her blonde hair on the pavement. My jubilation over my manuscript sobered.

“Lucifer conscripted us all. He would show the Almighty how quickly the redeemed would forget him, how little this covenant would change anything. The clay people were a miserable disappointment, and so they would continue to be, redeemed or not. They would scoff at El’s great act of grace, and Lucifer would see to it. Lucifer, the accuser called Satan, declared war.”

A rustle of gray passed in the periphery of my vision. Two nuns in orthopedic shoes and stockings were looking for seats. Lucian stood up and, with a gracious smile and flash of a white watch face on her wrist, indicated her seat and the empty one next to it. “Sisters, please.”

The nuns thanked her, and Lucian, demurring, glared at me over a perfect smile.