Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  “I don’t want to fuck you. Not in the conventional sense. And no, I don’t want to show you off.” I looked into her eyes. I felt it strange that we were saying these things. We had only been together a single night before this. Then again it had been a night not quite like any other. “I want what we had the other night,” I said.

  “I’m sore,” she said. It seemed, as soon as she said this, that she had not meant to say it, that it had just rushed out of her in a quick flight of breath.

  I didn’t say anything. It caught me off guard to hear a woman, or a girl or whatever it was that I should see her as, talk about her left thigh as if she might be talking about her breasts.

  “You’re not drinking,” she said.

  “No, I’m not drinking,” I said, perhaps a bit defensively.

  “You didn’t drink the other night either.”

  “I’m not drinking these days,” I said with a shrug, careful to give these words an air of casual insignificance. I watched her take a sip of wine. “I feel too good lately,” I said. “I want to write a new book. I don’t drink when I write. I can’t.” I was lying. I didn’t want to write a new book. Maybe I didn’t want her to know that I was trying to quit drinking forever, maybe because most people who drink don’t like to be around people who don’t drink, people who have quit drinking, especially people who go to meetings. And I didn’t want to lose her. I had just found her, and I didn’t want to lose her.

  “I should probably cut down too,” she said. “I drink too much.”

  Again I was caught off guard, to hear her, all of nineteen, talk as if she were hearing harps and harpies. I poured more wine into her glass.

  “Oh, you’re fine,” I told her. “Here, drink up.” I wanted her to relax around me. I wanted her to open herself to me. I wanted what I wanted to be what she wanted. It was good for her to drink the way she did. This wine would help her give me what I wanted. “Come on. You’re fine,” I told her.

  “Do your parents drink?” she asked.

  “My parents don’t do much of anything anymore. They’re dead. They’ve been like that for a long time.” I smiled. “My father was a heavy drinker. My mother didn’t drink much. She couldn’t handle it.”

  I heard my own words. It was curious how I spoke of whatever it was, physical or spiritual or both, that had stood in the way of my mother becoming a drunk like my father; how I spoke as if it were a failing, a shortcoming, a disability. The words came readily, easily: couldn’t handle it. How much more fittingly would they describe those who succumbed. It was drunks like me who couldn’t handle it.

  “My mom drinks a lot,” she said.

  I began to wash the dishes. She followed me into the kitchen.

  “How old is your mother?”

  “Forty-seven. No. Forty-eight.”

  At least her mother wasn’t young enough to be my daughter.

  “Let me do that,” she said.

  “You’re the guest,” I said. “What’s the good of being a guest if you have to wash dishes? Thanks, babe, but no.”

  I thought of her legs. I thought of her ponytail in my fist. I thought of the taste of her. I thought of her tongue on that vein that twitched and throbbed. I thought of her stringent warmth entering my mouth, trickling down my throat. I thought of what ran in the veins of gods and goddesses.

  “But sweeter to live for ever; sweeter to live ever youthful like the Gods, who have ichor in their veins; ichor which gives life and youth and joy…”

  I shut off the faucet and turned around. She was reading some lines of poetry that were held by a magnet to the side of my refrigerator. I knew that she would ask me about them. I embraced her from behind, put one hand over her mouth and the other on her belly. I pressed her to me. Her buttocks felt good against me. I kissed the downy little hairs and skin on the back of her neck and slid my hand down the front of her pants, feeling her silky panties and, through them, the tussock beneath. I worked my hand farther, and she squeezed it with her thighs. I could feel hot breath from her nostrils on my fingers. She began to nibble and lick at them with darts of her tongue. I unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, moved my hand into her panties, then into her. I peered over her shoulder down the front of her sweater to the hidden flesh and shadow of her breasts in white lace, and farther, to the movement of my hand in her open pants.

  She lay naked in my bed, her lower lip between her teeth, her legs spread, her eyes probing mine. Her labia were swollen and wet, rosy pink and glistening. I slipped the head of my cock, no more, into her and dallied a bit. She let loose her lip and breathed from deep within. I dimmed the light, grasped her hips, laid my head between her legs and stared at her hand on herself in the obscuring dark. I ran my fingers, then my tongue along the inside of her upper right thigh, which was unmarked, very close to the scent of her and the muffled accelerating sound of her hand. I opened my mouth, and I sank my teeth and tore. She exhaled with violence, like an ecstasy of storm wind through trees.

  I felt a sudden thick rushing gush of blood that filled my mouth and would not be stopped. Even as I closed my hand over it, the blood rushed through my fingers. We scrambled to our feet in alarm. There was blood everywhere. And still it gushed.

  I wrapped a towel around her thigh, tied the belt from my robe tightly above it. Nothing. The blood flooded and spurted wildly from her. She was pale unto fainting.

  Saint Vincent’s had been shut. I wouldn’t bring a dog to New York Downtown. I called Lenox Hill, told them to send an ambulance. No cab would take us the way she was bleeding.

  “What did you do to her?” the doctor asked me in a tone that accused.

  “I bit her too hard,” I said matter-of-factly. I did not look away from him. “She likes to be bitten. But I bit her too hard.”

  “You severed her femoral artery,” he said. “You could have killed her.” The doctor shook his head slowly.

  They wanted to keep her there awhile after stitching her up. She needed more blood. I went out for a smoke, then went back in to be with her. She looked away from the blood going into her through the catheter in her arm. For a few moments she looked away from me. I stood there.

  “They asked me if I want to press charges,” she said.

  I said nothing. I knew that if she were thinking of pressing charges, she wouldn’t have told me this. Not the way she did, anyway. I put my hand on her arm and kissed her forehead.

  She later told me that they also asked her if she wanted counseling. She told me that she had thought about it. She told me that she was still thinking about it.

  Her color returned. She began to smile again, to laugh again. I enjoyed buying good wine for her. I wondered if, pouring it unseen and telling her nothing about it, she would find the bottle of Cheval Blanc I had hidden away for her to be special in any way. I wondered what might have happened if I had killed her.

  I thought often of that terrible night in the days and weeks that followed. When I did, a shiver went down my spine and my eyes sometimes closed. That first reinvigorating billow of blood that had filled my mouth and overrun my chin and chest was like nothing I had ever known or imagined. The dangerous rush of blood from her artery had been for me a rush of life. After the events of that night and its aftermath had passed, I felt physically stronger than I had felt in years, and I enjoyed a sense of calm awareness that was utterly new to me.

  On one of my bedroom walls, in a shadow-box frame, there hangs a Wolford pantyhose package featuring one of a series of photographs taken for Wolford by Helmut Newton. These photographs, which Helmut felt to be among his best work, captured some of the most erotic images I have ever seen. The most striking of these, to me, was the black-and-white picture used on Wolford’s control-top Synergy packages. It was one of these rare, discontinued Synergy packages that Helmut inscribed to me a few years before his death, using a bold black Sharpie on the package’s unopened cellophane, writing with a vertical flourish over the thigh of the central image beneath it.

  It h
angs above and to the left of a heavy mirror into which I rarely looked. One day, lingering before her reflection in that mirror, Melissa pointed to the shadow-box frame without turning her eyes to it.

  “Would you like to see me in those?” she said. Her eyes looked to mine.

  “Not those,” I said. “But something like them. Yeah.” I heard the pace of my words slow and turn soft and subdued. “I should like that very much,” I said. “Very, very much. I really should.”

  “They would cover up the scar.”

  “That’s not why. I want to see you in them because they’re the only thing I can imagine that could make you even sexier than you already are.”

  And so I bought her some ultra-sheer Wolford pantyhose—the black Synergy, and others with improbably named shades: nearly black, anthracite, oyster, ecru—and a pair of Jimmy Choo black glossy snakeskin, Chantilly lace, and suede shoes with three-and-a-third-inch stiletto heels. Four packages of pantyhose cost over two hundred, and the shoes were almost nine hundred. It would have been worth it even for one night, even for one hour.

  The sounds of her movements alone—the scroop of nylon as she crossed and uncrossed her legs, the click of stiletto heels and the sinister hushed squeak of welts and uppers—set my heart pounding. It was so innocently demure and so maddeningly lascivious at once. I did not speak, but only watched her and felt the effect of her symphony like a rising, slow-swelling crescendo within me. On this night I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to fuck every part of her, and I wanted to fuck everything she wore. I wanted to fuck the sound of her, the scent of her. I wanted to fuck her very soul, her very existence, her every breath. She was mine, and I was blest, and no god had created more than we had in this moment. Together with grasping wrenching hands and nails we tore open the crotch of those fancy overpriced pantyhose as the bed shook and creaked beneath us.

  “Did you ever think of your mother licking your cunt?” I asked her. The words came deep on heavy breath.

  “Yes,” she said. “Would you like to see that?”

  It was then that I realized she would say yes to anything that I asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell me what it would be like.”

  Then my seed exploded from me like rain, and she moaned as if in grieving disappointment, or as if taking a blow to the gut. She said no more but only held me close and soon was asleep. There was no biting that night, though before morning I dreamt that I drank from her while she slept. I woke with a start, for in this dream her silent, tranquil sleep was revealed to be death.

  It was good to see her stir beside me, stretching her arms in the early dim light, her eyes still closed. I got out of bed to make coffee. A few minutes later, as the water was starting to boil, she came into the kitchen with a sleepy smile and sat at the little table by the window. She looked out over the gabled roof of the old Mercantile building across the way. There were wisps of pink in a blue sky that grew heavy with gray. I brought her coffee to the little table and set it down before her.

  “Maybe here,” she said, still looking out the window, as if she were talking to the gathering gray clouds. She placed her fingers to where the back of her thigh and her buttock rested on the chair. “Maybe here. Next time. Maybe you could bite me here.”

  She took a sip of coffee. An extravagant wind whistled through a narrow breach in the window. A beautiful elemental sound.

  “I don’t think there’s any blood to be had there in that sweet meat,” I said, then slowly smiled. The coffee was good and hot. I leaned against the black granite countertop of the island in the center of the kitchen, facing the little table where she sat, so that we both looked out on the same sky, the same pink wisps and blue, all but gone now, and the gray clouds that grew bigger and began to roll, fuller and darker, in the wind.

  “It’s the blood, not the biting?” she said, and her voice seemed as lost in that sky as she was.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s the blood.”

  It seemed that she was waiting not for me but for the lowering clouds and umbrous sky to explain my words. She drank her coffee. There was another whistling through the window, and a rattling of the pane; and then distant thunder.

  She asked about the lines of poetry on the refrigerator, and I told her.

  “From Charles Olson’s ‘Maximus, from Dogtown’—‘We drink / or break open / our veins solely / to know. A drunkard / showing himself in public / is punished / by death’—and there’s more, but those are the lines that mean something to me.”

  “And what do they mean to you?”

  “I can’t put it into words. It’s hard to dissect or explain beauty or power.” I gestured to the sky through the window. “Maybe if you can dissect or explain it, then it’s not beauty or power. Maybe true beauty and true power defy reason and intellect and explanation by their very nature. They hit below the belt of those things. I don’t know. To me they’re like a light in the sky of a faraway star that died a thousand years ago. The light of Gnosticism. ‘Solely / to know.’ The search for freedom through wisdom beyond learning. But the Leviticus of fear and morality cannot allow such a thing. As far as the poetry of it goes, you can see Olson’s brilliance. Seven lines, and the central line, the fourth line, is shared by the Gnostic infinitive—‘to know,’ followed by a full stop—and the opening words of a killing law set against all that is inherent in that infinitive, the freedom and wisdom, no matter how high or how low, that fears, laws, and moralities must destroy. But that’s not why I like it, not really. The bedrock of the thing—the rhythm, the meter—is majestic. It could bust a bronze Homeric pickaxe. But it goes so much beyond that. Like I said, I can’t say because I just don’t know. It’s like that whistling wind, that thunder a few minutes ago. I can feel it but I can’t explain why and what it makes me feel what I feel.”

  “Damn, you can talk.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I smiled. “Without saying much of anything that makes sense.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You talk beyond sense. You leave it in the dust. I like that.”

  “Maybe that’s where it belongs, in the dust.”

  Was this her way of saying she understood about the blood? Her way of telling me I didn’t have to make sense of it for her? Or was it just idle talk over coffee, to be forgotten when the cups were rinsed? I didn’t know, I didn’t care.

  “I’ve got a paper due next week,” she said. “I better go and get to work on it. Can I borrow that book you have in there, Whom Gods Destroy, I think it’s called? There’s some stuff in there I want to paraphrase.”

  “Don’t paraphrase. Steal,” I said.

  Soon after she left I experienced a ravenous appetite. This was somewhat out of the ordinary, as my usual coffee and cigarettes left me with little desire to eat on most mornings, and breakfast for me was either desultory and meager or more often completely bypassed. But on this morning I feasted on a thick broiled pork chop, pan-fried potatoes with sage, thick smoked bacon, three eggs sunny-side up, and buttered toast to mop up the yolks, with two glasses of buttermilk and another steaming cup of coffee. And as I wolfed it all down, my mind dwelt on sausage, banana pancakes drenched in butter and real maple syrup, and a bowl of blood oranges, peaches, raspberries, and strawberries.

  It was as if the sallow hollows and wormy protruding veins in weak sagging skin were demanding sustenance for what seemed like a regeneration of flesh and strength, a reversal of long, slow wasting away, a feeling of coming renewal of flesh and strength, a filling of the hollows and the sagging where muscle once had covered sturdy bone gone brittle. Even as my morning feast settled warm and filling within me and I lit another cigarette and drew deep satisfaction from it, I thought of the big, thick rib eye steak, sautéed onions, mashed potatoes, and sautéed greens and garlic that I would eat that night, the warm apple pie that would follow it, and the pancakes, sausage, fruit and berries drizzled with hundred-year-old balsamic vinegar that I would wash down with thick creamy milk and hot coffee tomorrow.

 
As startling as my appetite was, so was the heightened pleasure with which I indulged it. There was nothing of gluttony to my eating, nothing of idle displaced hunger apart from the good, healthy hunger of belly and body.

  Substance and strength were in fact returning to me. Not only could I feel it, I could see it. My flesh, which had withered with the years, began to return to fullness. The atrophied musculature in my limbs subtly thickened to a former solidity that flexed beneath my skin and moved and performed tasks with greater ease and power. And even my skin itself, so loose and sickly for so long, seemed to tighten and glow with a newfound nourishment. When I lay very still I could feel a faint, pleasant tingling inside me, like the cells of my body blithely stirring after a long deathlike sleep.

  For most of my life the power that hung and hardened beneath my abdomen had been the sovereign of force and might at the center of my being. I mourned, hurkled, and entered my own shadow with the dwindling of that power, as it became little more than a weightless invalidity, a specter of what once had been; something in extremis that on occasion throbbed and twitched and weakly spat, but had for the most part been drained of force, might, and thews.

  Now intimations of replenished life could be felt there, in that fallen temple, as well. Nerve endings pullulated anew. Brutal sinew thickened.

  My balance was improving. I could get into my socks, shorts, pants standing up without reaching out for walls, doorjambs, the edges of tabletops.

  I thought at first that these changes might possibly be attributed to my having quit drinking and the long-lasting effects of the alcohol beginning to leave my system. But this was a cleansing process that took months and did little or nothing to fix what permanent damage had been done. It brought remission, not metamorphosis. And it was nothing less than a metamorphosis that I seemed to be undergoing.

  I felt whole. For a while I reveled in feeling as I had in my prime, when I rode the bull of this life into the crashing sea and wild woods of whatever might be. Then I came to realize that this was no lost feeling wondrously returned. For I had never known such a feeling before. Never.