Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

It took far less time to get her from the couch to the bed than it had taken to get her from the bar to the cab. I left the music on. Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. To its grand thalassic echoes of the Great Dirge, I tongue-kissed her panties and the ankle from which they dangled so delectably. I did not hear the music end. I heard only her.

  She uttered a little gasp. I felt her shiver and her flesh horripilate as I ran my nails down her hip and thigh. Her belly rose and she shuddered. I put my mouth to her breast. She shivered again, and shuddered more deeply, deliciously. Her panties were in my hand. I raised them to her face as I kissed the warm dew between her legs. Her mouth opened and her tongue rose through the sheer veil of the panties. My free hand grabbed her thigh above the knee. I breathed long and slow into her, then lowered my lips to her leg. I licked, sucked, lowered my jaw, felt her flesh between my teeth. Her hand was on my head, her fingers raked my hair, softly, then roughly, then softly again. She seemed to await the clench of my teeth, the pleasure of a suffering so sweet, and the release it would bring.

  I bit her. She muffled her own scream. I tasted her blood in my mouth, in my throat. I felt her body relax, and I heard her breathe as if she were lost in a dream that would not be remembered.

  I was not aware of how much time passed. I wiped blood from my mouth, licked blood from her skin. Then I felt her upon me, her mouth upon me, her tongue upon that vein that throbbed and that twitched. I worked her ponytail like a suicide clutch. I felt her hand stir. She raised it to my lips, and again I tasted her blood. I came violently, heard the sounds of her sucking become the sounds of her swallowing; heard the sound of her hand in a frenzy between her taut legs. Her mouth slowed but did not cease. I could take no more, and I withdrew from her.

  Our breath slowed and we fell to sleep, closely entwined, her arm around me. It was almost as if, young and innocent as she was, she knew about the monkeys.

  WHEN I AWOKE THAT MORNING I FELT INVIGORATED, as if I had taken some sort of root tonic that had cleared and cleansed me and set me aright. With Melissa still asleep, I rose quietly. As I entered the bathroom to piss and shave, I saw there was a calm and sanguine smile on my face. For an instant I did not recognize that smile as my own, that figure in the mirror as myself. It was good to see me.

  I pulled on my pajamas and went into the kitchen to make oatmeal and coffee, enough for the two of us. It was not so warm in my place that bitter winter. My big old banging gas-guzzling HydroTherm MultiPulse AM100 heating boiler had finally broken down irreparably the previous year, and I had ended up replacing it with a fancy new wall-mounted, energy-efficient Lochinvar Knight. This was a nine-grand mistake. I should have had the old boiler rebuilt from the concrete up. But that would have taken brains. All I had was hindsight. The new boiler was so energy-efficient it didn’t give off any heat to speak of. After Con Edison came to inspect it and I got my energy-efficient residential gas rebate and tax-credit authorization, I had the energy-efficient wiring disconnected, and the damned thing still did not work worth a damn. I got more warmth from the little twenty-buck space heater I kept on the end table by the couch than I did from my five radiators. The new could never replace the old. This was true of all things. But the old boiler had pulsed and clanged and banged its last. The concrete in the base of its tank and the cinder blocks beneath it had rotted clean through and the water that seeped through them flooded the boiler closet. How I yearned for the old antediluvian warmth that I had known. But on this morning the chill did not bother me at all. I didn’t even feel it.

  I sliced a banana into the simmering oatmeal, added some raisins, a nutmeg, a bit more cinnamon, stirred in buttermilk, stirred in butter, a little chestnut honey. She had crept up behind me, barefoot and wearing my robe. I asked her how she liked her coffee. Cream and a little sugar. I had no cream, only milk and half-and-half. Like most Americans who asked for cream, she meant milk. I asked her if she wanted a shot with it. Her “no, thank you” was enwrapped in a low sleepy giggle. I poured out the steaming oatmeal into bowls, the steaming coffee into cups. I turned on Rachmaninoff again. What’s good for the dark of night is good for the morning light.

  Who said that? Why did it whisper of ancient Egypt? Was it from the Pyramid Texts? The Book of the Dead? No, I had never read or heard those words before. Nor had I ever said them, written them, or thought them before.

  She was looking at the wound on her leg, the red cicatrice of her broken skin and the livid swollen flesh around it. She seemed rapt by it as she ran her finger gently over it.

  “Do you want to kiss it?” she asked.

  I bent over her, lowered my lips softly to her thigh. This gave me no pleasure. I did it to please her. She closed the robe over the scar and returned to her oatmeal.

  “Do you want to put something on it?” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Peroxide. Ointment. I don’t know.”

  She did not respond to this. Instead she asked me about the music. I told her what little I knew about it.

  “I was fooling with you last night,” she said.

  I was taken aback. I asked her what she meant.

  “Thomas Paine,” she said. Her eyes danced with a sly playfulness. “Common Sense.”

  “Oh.” I felt a sense of relief, and my spirits brightened again. “I should have known. History major.”

  “Ancient history,” she said. “But I remember him from high school.”

  I gestured to the open doors of my library. “I’ve got a wallful of books in there on ancient history, ancient writing, ancient mythology, ancient everything. The shelves on the left.”

  My library had been carefully gathered together over the course of a lifetime, and in the course of a few years I had for the most part lost interest in it. Had I sent her through those doors, to those books, because I was experiencing the spark of a renewed closeness to them, a rekindling of my sense of their importance to me and to my life?

  She went into the library, but, as I saw from where I sat, the cuneiform tablets on the wall immediately facing her caught her eye and she went directly to them.

  “When are these from?” she asked with her back to me.

  “They were put out to bake about four thousand years ago,” I said. “Sumerian. Third Dynasty of Ur.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They’re an accounting of cult offerings to a god of war called Shara, from a temple in a Mesopotamian town called Umma.”

  “Can you read them?”

  “No. Can you?”

  “No.”

  She seemed transfixed by them. Only after some minutes did she turn to browse the shelves of books I thought might interest her. As she left the room, she paused to peer through the glass of the case that held the books that I had written.

  “You’ve written a lot of books,” she said.

  “Yes and no,” I said. “Most of the books in there are just different editions and translations of one book or another. Most of them I can’t even read. Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, Dutch, this, that, the other thing. I can’t understand a word of what’s in most of those books. They just have my name on them. They just look good.”

  As I said those last words, I was thinking of how good she looked, standing there in the light of day that spilled from the northeast through the library window. Once again I was struck by doubt. Why had she come with me? What had she seen or sensed in me? Maybe I should just ask her. But not now. Not now. My questioning doubt left me as quickly as it had risen.

  In our ways we all are gods or goddesses, even if we be forgotten in the end. Better not to dwell on our powers or attributes or the offerings and sacrifices made to us.

  For a long time I had felt grim mortality closing in on me. Now, on this morning, in this moment, I felt that something lay before me, forthshining and resplendent. And in this moment, on this morning, that was all and enough.

  I KNEW THAT I HAD NOT TAKEN A DRINK IN MORE THAN A month, but I was not counting days. And I was not goi
ng through the rigmarole of attending ninety meetings in ninety days. I had done this years ago, and in the end celebrated my success by going on a bender that lasted almost as long and landed me in the hospital.

  I had asked people years ago about the significance of those ninety days. Why not sixty days, or a hundred days? Why ninety? No one could give me an answer. Someone suggested there were spiritual implications inherent in the passage of ninety days, but he could not expound further and in the end admitted that he really did not know what he was talking about.

  I had also asked about the purpose of all who had fewer than ninety days of sobriety openly declaring their day count at the start of meetings. Someone suggested that it was to encourage others to open up more freely. I maintained the belief that it was for the entertainment of those who said such things.

  The truth seemed to be that most of those in the program dealt with sobriety as they had dealt with alcohol, obsessively and compulsively. They did not liberate themselves from their alcoholic ways. They merely transferred them to a sobriety that seemed to me self-defeating and dangerously precarious, little more than a Pyrrhic victory over the torments and ill-being that had fucked them up and enslaved them in the first place. A sober invalid was still an invalid, a sober slave was still a slave.

  No, I was not counting days. But I knew the importance of meetings and the inspiration and sense of fellowship I took away from a good meeting.

  I decided that I would go on Ash Wednesday to Our Lady of Pompeii in the Village. With Palm Sunday it was one of the two days of the year when I went to church. Back when the old women—or their husbands, seeking free beer—came into Dodge’s bar on Bedford Street with palms from Pompeii that they had taken home and woven into sprays as their mothers had taught them to do, Ash Wednesday was the only day of the year that brought me to church. The observance of these two days were all that remained of my Christianity. They were the only Roman Catholic rites in which I engaged, as I saw Christmas and Easter as good pagan feasts that had been co-opted by the early Church. I liked the ashes, the frond-leaves and little plaited crosses of palm. I had it timed so that I missed the Mass and arrived just as the ashes or palms were given out. I don’t know what it was that I liked about them, but I liked them.

  I would eat breakfast, take the subway to Sheridan Square, go to a meeting on Perry Street, then hit the church at the end of the nine o’clock Mass, when the lines for ashes were formed and moving rapidly. After that I would walk round Bleecker Street to Faicco’s, buy some ground pork and sausage. Then I would go to Murray’s and see if the parmigiano had the right shade of age to it in the half inch or so under the rind. If it didn’t, I’d go down to Dean & Deluca. I had been craving pasta with the sauce that was better than my grandmother’s, better than any chef’s, here or in Italy. It was better because I had taken the best from wherever I encountered it, and I had blended the best together, and then had made it better. And I would make it tonight, and I would eat it tonight and for the rest of the week. There was already a big jar of stock in the refrigerator. I had boiled it up the other day. It was good to be getting back my cooking jones.

  Perry Street was one of the places where I once had done those ninety meetings in those ninety days, where I had learned that this was not a good thing for everybody, that it was more important to be sober and serene without counting on a string of beads that might choke us when the last bead was counted. That was sixteen years before, in a different winter, a different springtime. I had encountered a lot of good people at those meetings. And a few arch assholes. When one chose to speak at a meeting, it was customary to introduce oneself by first name, followed by the phrase “I’m an alcoholic.” Some people unnecessarily embellished this to “I’m a recovering alcoholic,” or “I’m a gratefully recovering alcoholic,” or some such thing. Among the habitués of the Perry Street meetings was a smarmy little putz who always wanted to speak and who always introduced himself as “an alcoholic and a sex addict.” I was sure it was his way of cruising for cock. I couldn’t stand him. And I had a hard time with the people who manifestly had little or no background of heavy drinking, who came to these meetings as others might attend church socials or coffee klatsches, solely to hear themselves talk. And talk, and talk. These people could and often did drive you to drink. I sometimes needed to absent myself from them or risk relapse.

  I saw some people I remembered fondly, and it was good to see that they were still there and doing well. They looked older, as no doubt did I. But they all looked better, while I knew I looked worse. As I walked up the church steps, people marked with ashes were already leaving. I felt comfortable here, in this familiar old parish church, this church that misspelled Pompeii on its own calendars. I kept one of those calendars on my kitchen wall year after year. The local Italian undertaker was their featured advertiser.

  The pale stone holy water font attracted me. I wetted my fingertips, genuflected, and made the sign of the cross on my forehead, where ashes, sprinkled with holy water, would soon be. I also liked holy water, the idea of it, the feel of it on my skin. I used to enjoy lighting candles as well, but the old votive candles and thin wooden candle-lighting sticks, with which you kindled one candle from the flame of another, had been replaced here and in most churches by electric candles with little toggle switches. So I did not pay to light a candle, and I did not light a candle. I put money in the poor box instead.

  As always, my eyes were attracted to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the eastern apse. As always, I wanted to fuck it, wanted to rub my naked cock against the cool, smooth white alabaster of the Virgin Mary’s ankle and face. I knew that this was a gratification I would never have. At its unattended sanctuary in Cyprus I had fucked the sacred black stone that is believed to be the oldest of venerated objects, the slab in which the Great Mother was first perceived. Not far from there, at the edge of the Mediterranean, I had fucked the hard wet sand of the shore near the big rock where Aphrodite was said to have first stepped from the sea. But city churches were no longer kept open through the night. I thought of all those reliquaries in the Vatican and throughout Europe that contained the true blood of the Virgin Mary. I wondered whose blood it was, drained from the dead or from kicking stuck pigs.

  Holy water. Seawater. The priest before the altar touched ashes to my forehead and spoke.

  “Remember,” he said, “that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

  Like a phoenix, I thought, like a phoenix.

  I ended up walking to Dean & Deluca, then walking home from there. The cold winds were still bitter, but the knowledge that the spring equinox was only weeks away made them seem less unbearable. I stopped to buy a bottle of wine for the sauce I would make. I decided on a good Barbera.

  This was something that many in those meeting rooms would not do: cook with wine. Some would not even go into a liquor store or wine merchant’s. Some would even ask in restaurants if this or that dish was prepared with wine or alcohol of any kind. Such bits of stagy melodrama were usually affected or at best delusional. Who, having tasted both, could not tell the difference between the taste of life and the taste of death? Who could not tell the difference between the taste of good wine and the taste of dead-monkey juice?

  I would use only about a cup of this wine, not measured but poured slowly from the bottle. It would be a shame to let the rest go to waste. I thought of Melissa. I thought of the rich red sauce. I thought of the deep scarlet wine.

  It was all so much better when one was sober. All of it. I put on an album of Bach cello suites, sorted the groceries, took down a big enameled cast-iron pot and set it on the stove. I poured a glass of milk, took a ten-milligram Valium, sat on the couch, lit a cigarette, and relaxed. It would be a nice evening. And evening would become night. Yes. It was all so much better.

  IT AROUSED ME TO SEE HER EAT. THE SLIGHT LOWERING OF her eyelids and full dark lashes as she opened her mouth. The movements, as she quietly chewed, of her nose, philtrum groove, and th
e perfect angel’s cleft of her upper lip. The soft lissome undulations of her flawless smooth throat as she swallowed. It was more seductive than any slow forbidden dance.

  “I love this,” she said. “What’s in it?”

  “A little butter, a little olive oil. A lot of onions, a lot of garlic. Porcini mushrooms, cremini mushrooms. Ground pork, ground beef. A little stock.”

  “What kind of stock?”

  “Pork on the bone, beef on the bone, veal on the bone, chicken on the bone. Onion, leek, garlic. Celery, carrot, tomato. Some parsley, a few black peppercorns, a few white peppercorns, a little sea salt, a bay leaf, a clove, water, an eggshell.”

  “Why an eggshell?”

  “To clarify it.”

  I paused, then went back and picked up where she had first cut me off when I was trying to finish telling her what she wanted to know, which was what was in the sauce.

  “A little tomato paste. Basil, parsley, oregano, thyme, pepper. A little salt. That wine you’re drinking. San Marzano tomatoes. Sweet sausage, hot sausage. A bay leaf.”

  “It’s really fucking great.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I was glad she liked it. I didn’t go by what she said, I went by how she ate. And I was glad she didn’t say it was awesome. “It’s missing one thing,” I said.

  The look in her face, and my undercurrent of arousal, allowed my imagination to sense a vague thrilling expectation of the unknown. But I saw a trace of unease in her look, and I wanted her to be rid of it. So I told her.

  “Parmigian,” I said. “I couldn’t find any good parmigian cheese. It was all too young.”

  The trace of unease subsided, but it was not gone.

  “Am I too young?” she said. Now she herself tried to hide that telltale trace behind a smile of sorts.

  “Too young for what?”

  “For what you want.”

  “And what do you think I want?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want to fuck me? Do you want to show me off? I really don’t know.”