Dating the Devil

by Lia Romeo

  When I look up again, wiping my mouth with my white dinner napkin, a circle of horrified faces greets me. “I’m very sorry,” Lewis mutters to the table. “Lucy, we have to go.” He takes my elbow, but I stumble over my chair as I’m trying to stand up, so he picks me up, heels dangling, and carries me out of the Greek and Roman Antiquities hall, back through the museum entryway, and out the door. My last thought before I lose consciousness, somewhere on the way down the stairs, is that at least I won’t have to think about whether I should cut things off with him anymore, since after tonight I’m sure he won’t ever want to see me again.

  – 17 –

  THE NEXT MORNING, I wake up in Lewis’ bed with an aching body and a pounding head for the second time this weekend. This time, of course, I have nobody to blame for it but myself. It’s a Monday, and normally I’d have to be at work, but it’s Columbus Day and Linda, thank God, actually believes in taking federal holidays off. It’s a good thing, because even getting out of bed seems like an impossible prospect, let alone getting showered and getting myself to the office . . . and I couldn’t very well call in sick for the second time in a week. Though, speaking of sick, I can smell a faint odor of vomit, which seems to be coming from my hair.

  I pull a clump of hair around in front of my eyes and look at it. Yes, there are definitely greenish chunks in there. I sit up in bed, and the world swims for a second, then steadies. I manage to stand up and make it into the bathroom, where I throw up again. This actually makes me feel better, and I’m able to get my clothes off and get in the shower.

  I stand under the hot water for a long time, wishing I could wash away the memory of last night. I’ll have to borrow some clothes from Lewis, I guess, since I can’t exactly take a taxi back to my place in my four-thousand-dollar dress . . . and then maybe I can go home and sleep for eighteen hours and try to forget this ever happened. At least I’m unlikely to see any of the people who were there ever again, since I don’t exactly make a habit of attending black-tie benefits on a regular basis.

  I get out of the shower, wrap one of Lewis’ giant red plush towels around myself, comb out my hair and go back into the bedroom. Lewis, who’d been sleeping in bed beside me when I first woke up, is gone. I groan silently. Not that I’d been planning to see him again after last night anyway . . . but I wish I hadn’t made such a fool of myself that he didn’t even want to talk to me. I would have liked to preserve my dignity, to leave him with an image of me looking beautiful in my coral-colored gown . . . not vomiting all over said gown, not to mention the tablecloth.

  Besides which, I don’t have any clothes to wear home. I open the top drawer of Lewis’ teak dresser. Maybe I can just grab a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and then drop them back off with his doorman after work tomorrow. But as I’m rummaging through the drawer, I hear his voice from behind me.

  “That’s not actually where I keep the cocaine,” he says, “if you were wondering.”

  “Oh!” I spin around. “I’m sorry. I was just—”

  “Looking for some clothes?” He holds up a shopping bag. “I was hoping you’d join me for brunch, and I figured you couldn’t very well do it in that.” He gestures to his closet, where my dress is hanging.

  “You . . . were?” I’m dumbfounded.

  He hands me the bag. “You’re a small, right?” Inside is a pair of supersoft, heather grey cashmere track pants and a matching zip-up hoodie. I rub the delicate material between my fingers. “Oh!” he exclaims. “I forgot shoes.”

  “That’s all right, I can wear my heels,” I say automatically, and then catch myself. Am I really going to brunch? I thought I was going to walk away and never see him again. Then again, I also figured he was going to walk away and never see me again. And I can’t very well not go to brunch if he’s bought me an entire outfit to go to brunch in.

  So twenty minutes later, we’re seated outside at a French café called Pamplemousse. It’s an unseasonably warm October morning, and my wet, newly highlighted hair is drying in waves in the sun. I’ve purchased a pair of oversized black sunglasses from a street vendor, since despite two Excedrin, my head is feeling like it’s filled with broken glass and I can’t handle the direct sunlight. Lewis tells me that in my tracksuit and heels, with my oversized shades, I’m looking very Mafia princess. I’m not feeling very Mafia princess, I’m feeling very hungover idiot . . . but I’ll take the compliment anyhow.

  The waitress comes over and we order eggs. I look down at the table, its slatted iron casting interlocking shadows on the sidewalk, and play with my napkin for a minute. Then I force myself to look up at Lewis. “So I’m really sorry about last night,” I tell him.

  “I feel terrible,” he says at the same moment.

  “You . . . what?”

  “I was encouraging you to drink . . . in the limo . . . even though you told me you’d had enough already. It’s like even when I try to, I can’t stop myself from telling people to do bad things.”

  I’m stunned. “Lewis . . . it isn’t your fault I drank too much. It’s mine.”

  “But if I hadn’t given you that champagne . . .”

  “If you hadn’t given me that champagne I still would have had three glasses at the salon and, I don’t know, four at the party? Which would have been totally sufficient for me to make a fool of myself.”

  “Really?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “I acted like an idiot all on my own. And I want to apologize for it.”

  He smiles. “Well,” he says, “you were very entertaining. I’m sure it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to any of those people in months.”

  I can’t help but smile back. “Oh, I don’t know. They probably see starlets vomiting all over the tablecloth all the time.”

  “Actually, that’s probably true,” Lewis admits. “Although I bet the starlets don’t look as pretty vomiting all over the tablecloth as you do.”

  “Um.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “That wasn’t a very good compliment.”

  “I’m just glad you’re still willing to speak to me,” I tell him. And I am glad. I can’t help it. It’s so nice to sit here across from him, sipping our coffee, watching the people hurrying by on the sidewalk. Most of them are in business suits . . . apparently people in finance don’t get Columbus Day off. I remember what Lewis said to me the first night we met—“everyone’s lost, but they all look like they know exactly where they’re going.”

  “So tell me some more about what the world used to be like,” I tell him.

  “Okay,” he says. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about . . . the French Revolution.” Ever since my parents took me to see a touring Broadway production of Les Misérables when I was in middle school, I’d been fascinated by that particular period in history. “You were there for that, right?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Right in the middle of it.”

  And I suddenly realize that maybe I don’t want to know. If Lewis was there on the barricades, urging people to kill each other, spurring on bloodshed . . . “Um. You know what? Never mind. Let’s talk about something else.”

  Just then the waitress sets down our plates: a ham and Swiss omelet for me, bacon and cheddar for Lewis. “Lucy,” he says once she’s stepped away from the table. “I don’t . . . enjoy . . . human suffering, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  How does he always know what I’m thinking?

  “Knowing what people are thinking is sort of my specialty,” he says, answering the question I didn’t ask again. “But you’re easier to read than most. You wear your heart on your sleeve . . . it’s one of the things I like about you.”

  “So . . . if you don’t enjoy suffering . . . then why do you do what you do?”

  “I have to,” he says. “It’s my . . . it’s my purpose. It’s my job to keep the world in balance, to make sure good people are rewarded and bad people are punished. In certain religious traditions, they refer to me as the Adversary,
and I’ve always kind of liked that idea. Because if you never get tested—if you never get matched against a worthy adversary—then how can you really know what you’re made of?”

  “So it’s your job to test people.”

  “It’s my job to test people. Some of them pass—like you have. Some of them don’t.”

  “So who decides whether they pass?—whether they go to Heaven or Hell? Is it you? Or, um . . . God?”

  “I think it’s God. But I can’t be sure. He’s never deigned to tell me much about how the whole system works. And of course, I haven’t seen him in many many years—not since I—” He breaks off, looking a little embarrassed.

  “Oh, yeah . . . didn’t you . . .” I pause, trying to recall what I learned in my twice-a-year church visits as a child. “Didn’t you raise up an army in Heaven against Him, or something?”

  Lewis looks more embarrassed. “I did, yes. Back when I was young and very arrogant.”

  “And then He cast you out of Heaven?”

  “Yeah. Though not personally. It was more of a flaming abyss of fire sort of thing.”

  Right, of course, that sort of thing. “So then you . . . what? Just went down to Hell and set up shop there?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “Basically. God created Hell to keep the world in balance, and He decided that since I clearly wanted to rule somewhere, Hell would be an appropriate place.”

  “So He just . . . opened up a flaming abyss of fire, and down you went?”

  “Pretty much,” Lewis says. “It was the first revolution in history . . . and one of the shortest. But I’ve ended up pretty happy where I am. I get a bad rap, of course . . . but Hell is necessary, just the same way that prisons are. Bad people have to be punished . . . so I punish them. Simple as that.”

  “Except not quite, because you go around trying to get good people to do bad things so you can punish them too.”

  “Most of the people that end up in Hell do it without any help from me,” Lewis says. “I just work on the ones that could go either way . . . that haven’t done anything really great, but haven’t done anything terrible either. And even those . . . I’m only one man—or, demon, I guess—so I only get to a very small percentage.”

  “Aren’t there . . . other demons?”

  “There are,” he says, “but they don’t do this work—it’s too delicate. They mostly work down in Hell . . . doing administrative tasks, maintenance, keeping everything running smoothly.”

  “Huh.” I look down, stirring the ice cubes in my water glass with my straw, thinking about what he’s said. It’s a whole different way of looking at things . . . not in terms of good and evil, but in terms of balance, justice . . . it actually makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know how Father Tom, the pastor at the Catholic church my family went to occasionally, would feel about it . . .

  “Oh, by the way,” Lewis says, “on a completely different subject. I’ve got tickets to see The Book of Mormon on Broadway on Tuesday. I meant to ask you last night, but you passed out before I got around to it . . . will you come?”

  I shouldn’t. I should tell him I have a work obligation, or plans with friends. But I don’t have a work obligation or plans with friends, and The Book of Mormon is supposed to be hilarious . . . and besides, I’m thinking about Lewis differently after our conversation. It’s not that I’m completely fine with what he does . . . but I’m not completely ready to walk away from him because of it. I remember him looking at me last night in the museum, telling me that every time you get involved with somebody new you’re making a choice to trust them, even though you don’t know whether or not you should.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “Sure. That’d be great.”

  – 18 –

  LEWIS AND I fall easily back into the pattern we were in before: spending three or four nights a week together, except when I work late or have other plans. We start watching Breaking Bad, because neither of us has seen it, and we watch an episode or two each night before we go to bed. It’s just as good as everyone says it is, which worries me, because I know if Lewis and I break things off again I’ll associate the show with him, and I won’t be able to keep watching. Ben and I broke up when we were in the middle of season two of Twin Peaks, and I still haven’t been able to find out who killed Laura Palmer.

  I love the time I spend with Lewis, but I can’t quite feel comfortable, can’t quite bring myself to think of it as something that will last. Part of it is that there are so many things we can’t really talk about. I keep running into conversational roadblocks, stopping myself when I’m about to ask a question. I can’t ask him about his family, because he has no family, and I can’t ask him about his childhood because he didn’t have one. I can’t ask him about friends, because he doesn’t have those either, at least not here on earth. He tells me he’s close with Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Astaroth, and a few of the other major demons . . . but after he tells me a “hilarious” story involving Asmodeus, Astaroth, a gallon of whiskey and the eating of a puppy, I decide not to ask anything more about any of them. And of course, he doesn’t really consider any humans his friends, since none of them know who he really is.

  There are people who think he’s their friend, of course, or their business associate (or their lover?—my mind keeps whispering, though Lewis insists that since he met me he hasn’t played that role with anyone else). There are people he spends his days with, talking, coaxing, tempting—but I want to know as little about those people as possible. I’m more comfortable with what Lewis does, now that we’ve talked about it, but I’m definitely not completely at ease with the whole idea.

  Part of it, too, is my friends’ not-so-hidden disapproval. They don’t come right out and tell me I ought to stop seeing Lewis, but there’s none of the “How are things going?” or “We should all go out together sometime!” that usually happens when one of us gets involved with a new guy. (Or that happened when Mel got involved with Brandon, at least—I haven’t been involved with a new guy since Ben, and “involved” is not exactly in Natalie’s vocabulary.)

  Under the weight of their unspoken concern, I find myself blowing Lewis off here and there to go out with the girls, flirting with boys at bars who don’t interest me in the slightest, just to show my friends I still can. Nat and Mel encourage these flirtations . . .“That guy was so cute!” . . . “I think he’d be perfect for you!” I want to tell them I’ve already found a guy who’s perfect for me—except, of course, for the one obvious way in which he’s not.

  My dilemma comes to a head one Wednesday night, almost three weeks after Lewis and I have started seeing each other again. We’re at an Italian restaurant in the Village called Mia Sorella. It’s a classic trattoria—red and white checked tablecloths, old Neapolitan music playing, ham hocks and strings of peppers hanging from the ceiling. Our waiter is an effusive, miniature Italian man in his sixties, and as soon as we come in he takes my coat, pulls out my chair, and tells me, “Oh, signorina!—you are looking so beautiful tonight!” He turns to Lewis. “Is she not?”

  I’m still in my work clothes . . . basic black pants, white tank top, blue cardigan . . . and the eye shadow and mascara I applied before I left this morning wore off hours ago. But Lewis smiles, looking at me. “She is,” he says.

  “She is your girlfriend?” our waiter continues.

  “Yes,” Lewis says, and at the same time I say: “No.”

  All of us pause, the waiter looking back and forth between us. After a moment, Lewis says: “No.”

  “I will bring the wine list!” the waiter says, and hurries off into the kitchen.

  “You’re . . . not?” Lewis says once he’s gone.

  “I don’t know—I—I mean we’d never talked about it . . .”

  “Let’s talk about it,” he says. “Are you seeing anyone else?”

  “No,” I tell him.

  “Do you want to see anyone else?”

  “No . . .”

  “Neither do I. So that makes you my girlfriend.
Doesn’t it?”

  “I . . . don’t know?” I don’t know how to tell him that I’m just not sure I’m ready for the title of “Satan’s girlfriend.” It sounds like it should be the sequel to Rosemary’s Baby, not a description of my life.

  The waiter returns with the wine list, and Lewis selects a pinot grigio from the Lombardy region. The waiter nods, smiles, hurries away again.

  “Look,” Lewis says after he’s gone. “I mentioned to you—a while back—that this has happened before.”

  Lewis and I haven’t talked all that much about exes. He knows about Ben, but just the broad strokes, no details. And I don’t know if he’s had other liaisons of the kind that we have. I assume he must have . . . it would be naïve to think I’m the first girl he’s ever fallen for in all of history. But I haven’t wanted to ask. I haven’t wanted to know how his other affairs turned out.

  “Not often,” he continues, “and not for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “The last time was almost two hundred years ago,” he says. “I was working in Prussia then, at the court. She was a countess—half-Russian—a member of the nobility. Her name was Tatiana von Vordenstam.”

  I’m already jealous. I’m picturing Tatiana and Lewis kissing next to a fountain in the gardens outside a Prussian palace, her flowing brocade gown nipping in her tiny waist, her hair a blonde mass of curls. Of course, I have no idea what a Prussian palace actually looks like . . . or what Tatiana actually looked like . . . or even what Lewis looked like at that point. “So what happened?” I ask him.

  “I fell in love with her,” he says simply, and my jealousy intensifies. I tell myself that it’s ridiculous to be envious of a girl who’s been dead for two hundred years. “It started the way it always does,” he continues. “I met her, we became lovers . . . and I began trying to discover the temptation she couldn’t refuse. Usually it only takes a couple of weeks—but she was like you, she was very good-hearted, very pure. After a few months had gone by, I realized I was beginning to develop feelings—strong feelings. She was unmarried, and I began to think about asking for her hand. She thought I was a diplomat—so I could travel around the world and continue my work, and then return to her, to our estate, maybe even to our children. And then one day I forgot to lock the door to my chambers, and she walked in on me while I was changing my socks.”