Diablerie Read online

  "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."

  The light changed to green but I turned to Mona instead of crossing. There was serious concern in her face for me. I wondered what it might be like to feel that way: pained at someone else's grief, a grief that person didn't even know.

  "I'm fine," I said, and we crossed together. "What's the dinner for tonight?"

  Sighing in defeat she said, "It's the premiere issue of a new magazine I'm working for—Diablerie."

  "What's that mean?"

  "It depends," Mona said. The strain in her voice lightened as she began to talk about her work. "The word can mean either mischievous or evil. The magazine is a blend of both—articles about sexy new stars, naughty getaways, and puff pieces about people in the news. Tonight they're going to have Barbara Knowland as a guest at one of the tables. She may even address the audience."

  "Who's Barbara Knowland?" I asked, happy not to be discussing my lapsed therapy.

  "She was the woman who was held hostage by that guy who went on that killing rampage in Tennessee and Arkansas," Mona said. "The one the police held for a year and a half because they thought that she was involved with the killings."

  "Yeah," I said, "I remember. They finally found those videotapes of her tied up and that guy, whatshisname, came out of the coma . . ."

  "Ron Tellman," Mona said. "He testified that Card, the killer, kept the Knowland woman gagged and handcuffed to a steel bolt in the back of his covered pickup truck."

  "Damn. So now she's written a memoir or something?"

  "Scorched Earth: From Communes to Killers, by Barbara Know-land."

  We were at the hotel by then. We signed in at the reception table and got our name tags: MONA VALERIA and MONA VALERIA'S GUEST. I went to the table in the main hall while Mona made the rounds, chatting up &ends, potential clients, and competitors at the cocktail party held in the lobby.

  There were forty-six round tables set up for the banquet. All the chairs were empty. Only the black-clad waitstaff was there, bustling around putting salads at place settings and making sure everything was perfect.

  "Wine, sir?"

  I looked up to see a very lovely young Asian woman carrying a bottle of red wine in one hand and white in the other. She was quite fetching in her short black skirt and black stockings that let through the barest glimmer of pale skin.

  I almost said yes. My incipient reply was so obvious that the question of which kind rose almost visibly in her throat.

  "No," I said. "I
better not."

  "Why not? It's a party, right?" Asian features with a New York soul.

  "I took a drink one time when I was on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles," I said. "The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a flophouse on the Bowery . . . five and a half years later."

  "That's not good."

  I could have been friends with that woman. I was sure of it.

  "You have Diet Coke?"

  "Cola," she said, annunciating the syllables.

  "Okay. Cola," I replied, mimicking her locution.

  She smiled for me and went away. I decided that it was worth coming to the party after all. Those few words with that lovely child more than made up for the blowhards, backstabbers, and twits that inhabited Mona's life.

  I was watching the waitress walk across the large hall when a woman said, "Ben?"

  There was a hand on my shoulder. She was fortysomething, five foot two, natural brown hair with only a strand or two of gray. She wore a low-cut blue dress that seemed to be a size too small and had a shawl made from peacock feathers pinned to her left shoulder.

  Her eyes were different colors, brown and green. For some reason this was very important to me. It meant something.

  "Ben?"

  "Yes?" I said, telling her with the tone of that single-syllable utterance that I didn't know her.

  "It's me," she said. "Star."

  "Um . . . I seem to have forgotten . . ."

  '"I seem to have forgotten'?" she said, as if those words shouldn't have come from me. "Come on, Ben. You can't forget me, us, that day . . . not something like that."

  She didn't have a name tag identifying her field or magazine.

  "What day was that?" I asked.

  "Pretending won't wash it away, Ben. We were both there.'' "I have no idea what you're talking about, Star."

  "June 28,1979," she said, more an accusation than information.

  "That's back when I was still drinking," I said. "I was just telling the waitress there that I've forgotten more nights than I remember from those days."

  "Forgotten? You don't . . . ?" Star's face twisted into an expression that was either fear or distaste—maybe both. "Why would you come here if you don't remember?"

  "Listen, lady, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm here with my wife because she's an editor for the magazine. That's all. I don't know you. I don't remember you. Maybe we met a long time ago when I was drunk. If we did, I hope I was a gentleman. If I wasn't, I hope you got over it."

  Suspicion overwhelmed any other emotion in Star's reaction to me.

  "Here's your diet cola, sir," the young Asian waitress said.

  I was happy for the interruption.

  "Thank you," I said, and when I turned back, Star was gone.

  "This is my husband, Benny Dibbuk," Mona was saying.

  The table was full now, as was the rest of the hall. My wife was introducing me to Harvard Rollins, some sort of fact-checker for the magazine.

  "Ben," I said, a little too forcefully, "Ben Dibbuk. So you're an editor too, Mr. Rollins?"

  "No. Not me. I wouldn't know what to do with a comma to save my life."

  "We do more than add commas,'' Mona said, putting her hand on the handsome white man's forearm.

  Everyone at the table seemed to think that this was a hilarious joke.

  "So what do you do?" I asked as a kind of shelter against the laughter I couldn't share in.

  "Kinda like a detective. Sorta like that. When they get a story in that no one else has, they put me on the trail to make sure everything's copacetic, if you know what I mean. Mostly it's on the phone, and Internet stuff but I hit the bricks now and then."

  Harvard was lean and olive-skinned, in his midthirties. His eyes wanted to be brown but didn't quite make it. His mustache had to have been waxed to stay so perfect.

  "Wow. Is that common? Having a detective on staff?''

  "I'm not a licensed P.I.," he said, "just an ex-cop who doesn't want the NYPD to send him into back-alley crack dens anymore."

  Mona loved it. One of the things that she'd always felt had been kept from her was excitement. The reason she was attracted to me in the first place was because I had hitchhiked around the country, been a hobo, a drunk, and a womanizer—that was until I got a job programming computers and started living like a regular guy.

  "What about you, Ben?" Harvard asked me.

  "Do you ever sit at your desk copying notes from a piece of paper onto a computer?" I asked him.

  "Sometimes. I transcribe tapes, copy notes from interviews."

  "Okay," I said. "Now imagine doing it with numbers, and not all the numbers, just the ones and the zeros."

  "Yeah?"

  "That's what I've done every day for more than twenty years."

  At other tables people were laughing and joking around, but in our little comer there was a solid five seconds of blank silence. No one knew what to say about the tedium of my life. Everyone, I was sure, felt sorry for me-everyone except Mona, who, I hoped, would never bring me to another work-related event.

  She glared at me and I pretended not to notice.

  After that the conversation broke down and people turned to whomever it was they sat next to. I was placed beside a young woman named Daria Hunt, who edited a section of the magazine called Toys.

  "What's that?" I asked, as I was supposed to do.

  "The magazine is for twenty-to thirtysomethings, mostly white," the tiny, pale-skinned woman said, "upwardly mobile, urban, conservatives-thinking-they're-liberal, prescription-drug dependent or alcoholic, college-educated, postfeminist, post-Christian office workers. Maybe Wall Street, maybe Fifth Avenue. And what, you ask, would this surprisingly large group of people want to know more than anything?"

  I was completely entranced, forgetting the handsome but humble ex-cop and the mysterious, mistaken Star. Daria Hunt filled up my horizon with her sharp wit and extraordinarily accurate sound bites.

  "I have no idea," I said slowly, the counterpoint to her fast tongue.

  "Toys," the plain Jane with the bedroom eyes said.

  "Like Legos?"

  "Maybe. Yeah, Legos for the thirty-year-old, latent-adolescent stockbroker who both lives and works on Maiden Lane. He also needs a sixty-inch plasma TV, a radio-controlled multicolored lamp that goes from green to red depending on how the stock market is doing at any given moment, and a handheld, twelve-ounce computer that could land a rover on Jupiter while downloading gobs of porn featuring women who only look like children and men he really wants for himself."

  "I see," I said. "And what do the women in this select group want?"

  "Sex," Daria said, throwing up her hands. "Sex stories, sex toys, sexy underwear, sex inhibitors, sex stimulants. Sex aroma therapy, orgasm gauges, dental dams, female condoms, and let's not forget video phones for a secret worldwide link where they can anonymously expose themselves to men anywhere, at any time, while never having to smell their panting breath or unwashed nethers."

  "Do you have all those things?"

  For some reason this question threw Daria out of her well-rehearsed, world-weary persona. She cocked her head and looked at me sideways. Maybe there was something to me.

  "In my office," she said at last.

  "Wow. That's really amazing. I guess businesses send you free samples hoping for a favorable review."

  "I have enough condoms in my, excuse the expression, drawers to keep the red-light district of Paris going for a week."

  I like plain-looking women. What they lack in movie-star headshot style, they make up for in intensity. I think maybe my posture and tone imparted these predilections to the young, pseudo-jaded editor.

  "Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen," a voice over the loud speakers said. "My name is Trina MacDonald—"

  Before she could continue, the audience broke out into loud applause and cheers. A few people rose to their feet; Mona did.

  This was a mild shock to me. Here I had never even heard the name Trina MacDonald
and my wife of twenty-two years stood to applaud her. I wondered, if I were to receive an award for assembler language programming, would she get up out of her chair, slap her hands together, and call out for everyone to hear.

  "Thank you, thank you," Trina MacDonald's amplified voice boomed. "Please sit down. This is too much, really. Diablerie is just another periodical aimed at the heart of America."

  There was some polite laughter and the people who had risen returned to their seats.

  "Tonight is not about fund-raising or rabble-rousing or vying for power in the White House. You, every one of you here tonight, have been invited to celebrate the start of this oh-so-important publication . . ."

  She said more but the renewed applause drowned out the words.

  After the ovation subsided, she spent the requisite time thanking the people without whom this undertaking would have, could have, never gotten off the ground. When their names were called out, those people stood to be adored by the crowd. Mona was singled out. So was Daria.

  This social business taken care of, Trina, a fiftyish and in-shape woman clad in a form-fitting, green sequined gown, got serious.

  "Diablerie is a really good time. Our stories are about the world today, about how to get ahead and stay there without going mad. It also covers some of the stories about people who were given up for lost but who made it back by resuscitating themselves when the monitor had gone flatline. One of those women is Barbara Knowland. She was lost in the sex-crazed, drug-filled nightmare that has destroyed so many misguided, self-medicating Americans. She was accused of murder and nearly convicted when a series of lucky events kept her from a long Me in prison. But it was this terrible possibility that woke Barbara up. She decided to get straight and write about that Me, to use her experiences to deliver her from depravity. I can only hope Diablerie will be able to do the same thing for its readers.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, Barbara Knowland."

  Trina held out a hand and a woman rose from a table up front. It was a short woman in a blue dress. Star.

  The peacock shawl fluttering behind her, Star ascended the stairs to the podium. She and Trina kissed and then the publisher left the stage like an aging movie star who had just passed her mantle into younger, abler hands.