Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  She wore no panties under the corselet. She drew closer. I buried my face in the soft ringlets above her cunt, moved my hands over the tactile Eden of her nyloned legs, kissed the bare skin between the lace of the corselet and her stocking-tops, ran my tongue along the taut garters, sucked at the hook-and-eye fittings half exposed and half veiled through the lush nylon welts.

  My cock was risen full and rock-hard in resurrection. There was no end to this renewal, this rejuvenation. I had a hard-on like an eighteen-year-old.

  “Where did you ever get these?” I whispered, one hand on the nylon at the bend of her knee, the other moving slowly on the nylon that ever so thinly covered her shin.

  “I found some place in Leesburg, Virginia. I was on the computer in the library, looking for a chronology of Predynastic Egypt. I ended up in Leesburg, at this place called Secrets in Lace. They had a Bettie Page Collection in their Leg Salon section. A lot of cool stuff. I got these stockings. I got these gloves. This”—the corselet—“I got at a fancy-pants place up on Madison in the Sixties. What a store. Learned the difference between a corset and a basque. Absolutely no relevance to Predynastic Egypt, but then again. Agent Provocateur or something like that. Splurged. Check from daddy.”

  As much as I wished I could savor her as she stood before me, I could not. My hands trembled, unable to relax and luxuriate in the lavish delights of her. Seeing her like this was too much. Restraint did not present itself as a crescendo of pleasure, but only as an unbearable torture. There was no fending back what surged within me. I felt like a madman with a knife in my hand. Savage consummation was the end, the means, the all.

  What had she said? “Something you can sink your teeth into.” Yes, those were her words. They shot now through the fire in my brain. “Something you can sink your teeth through.”

  I sank my teeth through the nylon into her thigh as she stood there. It seemed for a moment that the shuddering of her body as she gasped would take all balance from her and cause her to fall. But, clutching my shoulders as she swayed a bit, she remained upright and gasped again.

  The first mouthful of her blood quenched me. It was divine replenishment. Consummation. The violence of my sucking eased, but I could not stop. I chewed on the sheer nylon, reached down to grasp her ankles and the heels of her shoes, as I drew her blood into me, more and more gently, as if sipping sparingly of one of those wines gathering the subtle nuances of increasing grace in the dark of my closet.

  I coaxed a bend into her left knee, raised her leg as she clutched my shoulder all the more for support, brought her foot to rest on the edge of the couch between my legs, the toe of her shoe nudging at my crotch. I worked my cock and laid it on the black rat-snake skin, Chantilly lace, and suede of the shoe’s upper. Bending round, I brought my mouth to the flesh below the haunch of her upright leg and bloodlessly kissed and sucked as I slowly stroked my cock against her raised shoe. Grabbing her buttock to both steady her and fill my hand with her, my mouth still to her flesh, I began to fuck her shoe. The thrusts of my hips grew harder, faster. I bared my teeth. The bloodless kiss was bloodless no more, and I grasped her ankle and watched my cock twitch in a fierce spasm, as the white stain of its eruption spread, darkened, and penetrated the nylon where her shin flexed in response, raising and tilting the heel, snakeskin, and lace of her shod nylon-shimmering foot against my crotch.

  At that moment she uttered a sound, low but clear, like a whispered hiss: “Jst.” Her breasts undulated as she breathed, looking down at me through half-lowered eyelids. She repeated it, accenting and lingering long on its sibilance: “Jssst.”

  Then I recognized it. The true name of Isis, uttered as if it were she, the goddess herself, announcing her presence and dominion.

  She let down her raised knee to the couch, then brought her other knee to the couch as well, straddling me as I sat there, spent. She leaned forward, pressing herself to me, my face to her breasts. Then she arched her back, so that there was between us freedom to breathe more easily.

  “You don’t want to get blood on that thing,” I said. She knew I was talking about the fancy batiste lace and silk-satin that clung to her. She caressed my face with black satin fingers. Already my cock was stirring again, and again I imagined the clench of her gloved hand.

  “Blood,” she said low, almost whispering, as if to dismiss my mention of it. “Phoenician purple, the dye of royalty, the most coveted dye of empire. Reddish-purple slime from the slimy glands of slimy crawling mollusks. One slimy ounce of it worth far more than its weight in gold, and far more coveted.”

  She smeared her satin fingers in the blood that had run down her outer thigh from the haunch of my bloodless and bloody kisses. She put the satin fingers to my lips, anointed them, then to her own, opening her mouth to them and sucking them.

  “The true dye of empire,” she said. Her voice was trancelike, so different from the voice I knew. “More precious than gold and Phoenician purple together. Caesar had all of both he could ever want. But this was the dye”—again she ran her moist satin fingertip across my lips, again she put it to her mouth and sucked it—“that turned out to be the one true dye of his imperium. The dye of himself. The dye of his fate. The dye of his immortality. The dye that blotted out all the gold-threaded Phoenician purple of that—what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Toga?”

  I felt so comfortable, so glutted, so full, so dreamily relaxed. I knew the pattern now. First this, the becalmed lassitude, then the serene rest, then the renewed and ever more heightened vitality, the waking to new life.

  “Yeah, but the all-purple one. All Phoenician purple. The fabulously extravagant thing that Caesar took to wearing as his regular everyday street clothes. Toga something-or-other. Come on, help me out here. You know Latin.”

  “I don’t know Latin,” I said drowsily. My cock was no longer stirring anew. I was floating in placidity, white clouds and soft light flickering through leaves and boughs above. “I can bluff Latin, that’s all.”

  “Well, bluff me what I’m trying to think of here.”

  It was good to again hear the voice I was used to. No more of that trancelike stuff.

  “Toga picta,” she said.

  “See,” I said, “you’re the one who can speak Latin.”

  “No. I’ve been thinking about this. I looked it up. Then I forgot it. Now I just remembered it again.”

  I had never heard the expression before. I wasn’t about to get up and look in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. I wasn’t even about to get up. Merely lighting a cigarette seemed something like a labor of leisure.

  “The dye of fate. The dye of life. The dye of death. The dye of immortality. The dye that blotted out and obliterated all the gold-threaded Phoenician purple of that toga picta.”

  What the fuck was she talking about?

  The foul smell hit me. I had lit the wrong end of a Parliament. I let it fall in the ashtray. I repeated this labor of leisure more attentively. I looked at her. Those satin gloves. Lace and nylon. That ponytail. I almost wished she’d put on my robe. But that would never cover all of her, and even if it did, I would know what was under it. My cock, which I did not want to stir anew, stirred anew.

  Blood. She was talking about blood. That’s what she was talking about.

  I thought of the girl in Uncle Mike’s. The blasé one. The one who might make no sounds at all. The dead one. I took Melissa to bed. All that satin and lace. The nylons, the shoes. The bared flesh. I laid her out on top of the bed and arranged her. She was pliant, asked no questions, said nothing. I shut off the lights and lit a candle.

  “Be still,” I whispered. “Like you’re asleep.”

  I kissed her on the forehead, on the lips, ever so gently on the forehead once more. Extreme unction.

  She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. I knelt over her, took my cock in my hand, rubbed it to the lace, the nylon, the bare flesh. She mewled faintly.

  “Sh-sh,” I whispered. “Like you’re asleep.
”

  She lay still beneath me as I knelt between the open unmoving legs. I worked the swollen end of my cock slowly into her wet cunt. She made not a sound. She understood.

  I fell to sleep that night like a rock falling deep into the cradling sea, feeling her arm close around me.

  IN THE MORNING SHE WAS GONE. SOMETHING IN ME HOPED that she had left behind a note of love or endearment or light-hearted fondness. But the dark stains of her blood that here and there mottled my skin were all the billet-doux I found.

  As I bent slightly forward, bare-chested, to look at them in the mirror, I saw that the flesh of my chest extending to my armpits no longer sagged. The tissue of the pectoral muscle beneath the flesh was fuller, firmer. The same was true of the skin and tissue of my neck.

  Then I caught sight of my eyes. I had forgotten to ask Melissa to look closely at them the night before, and she had remarked nothing. But it seemed to me that their courtly minuet of changing colors was becoming a sprightly galliard of shades and nuances, like the mingling fluctuations of unearthly dawns and sunsets set awhirl.

  I shaved and showered, using the Dr. Hauschka Blackthorn Body Wash that Melissa had left on the edge of the tub for herself some weeks before. It felt good, and I enjoyed the notion that my skin might have the scent of her skin.

  It was raining softly, silently. I stood near the kitchen window, watching it, lost in it, feeling good as I drank my coffee.

  The pattern was becoming familiar to me. The ravishing, the lassitude, and the deep rest; the renewed strength, the rejuvenation, the increased sensibilities, powers, serenity. Lust and beatitude, blood and being. I would never again feel or fear the desperate fate of the dead monkeys, or be shaken by the foretelling memory of their final, fatal clinging.

  The frieze of the dead monkeys would remain forever to gaze upon whenever I looked up to the architrave of the temple within me. But the image would be nothing more than that. A mysterious icon of a mystery religion, born in the cave-temple of myself, its meaning unknown even to the initiates and celebrants chosen to enter into it by me, a god without name who drank of eternal nectar dew from the very blossoming of those initiates and celebrants.

  I got down the Oxford Latin Dictionary. The adjective picta, the feminine form of pictus, meant painted or colored. I went to the long entry for toga, where I did indeed find toga picta, defined as an embroidered toga worn by triumphing generals, perhaps originally by royalty. Neither the definition nor the chosen illustrative quotations specifically mentioned Phoenician purple, but I was willing to go along with her on that one. Impressed, I returned the stately weight of this volume of more than two thousand pages to its place on the shelf.

  Ogni giorno è la scuola, I told myself with a degree of satisfaction at having fulfilled this good Italian saying. Every day is school. One learns something new, or should learn something new, every day.

  My mind was again on that carved mammoth-handle knife. I walked to the shop on Warren Street, stopping off at Dunkin’ Donuts to pick up another cup of coffee on the way.

  I rested the container of coffee carefully on the glass showcase and sipped from it as I looked at the knife, slipped off my shades, and asked for it to be removed so that I could study it more closely. I had not thought of it before, but it now occurred to me that most fossil wooly mammoth tusk bone came from Russia, and I suspected that the mammoth bone from which the handle of this knife had been carved was from the earth of that place so close to Japan.

  I despised Russians, a loud, gaudy, overbearing, smarmy, and obnoxious people. They could make the most elegantly faceted blue-white diamond look like a cheap zircon simply by wearing it. The legacy of their literary greatness, in reality based on little more than the pomposities of a bunch of lice-ridden beards, was as fraudulent as they were; and the only good thing at all that could be said about them was that they paid to translate and publish my books. I refused even to eat Russian caviar, though it probably often came from the same sturgeon that swam off the Iranian side of the Caspian Sea.

  My suspicion about the source of the mammoth bone was confirmed. To me this tainted the handle of the knife, as beautiful as it was.

  I saw not far from it in the glass showcase another one-of-a-kind Togiharu gyuto that had previously escaped my notice. The blade was similar: hard, strong, gleaming steel, about nine and a half inches in length, hand-forged and hand-finished by the revered Seki sword maker Hiromune Takaba. Its unique handle was fashioned by the same master craftsman, Koji Hara, who had made the mammoth-bone handle.

  How I had overlooked this one I do not know. Perhaps it was because the handle, which far surpassed the other in its beauty, also far surpassed it in the subtlety of its beauty. It was of rare petrified blue maple. The delicate grain and veining of this wood-turned-to-stone was an infinity of deep colors and a penumbra of shades and hints of shades thereof. As if with black magic, the slight strains of storm blue with the rock-wood seemed to emanate intimations of every color and every hue, an effect brought to perfection by the understated luster brought to it by the seeing brilliance of Hara-san.

  It was like looking into my own eyes.

  These knives arrive from Japan with their blade edges at seventy to eighty percent of their maximum sharpness. After buying the knife with the black-magic blue maple handle, I had the shop’s knife-sharpening master, Chiharu Sugai, hone its blade to a razor edge. At the sunken basin of water at which he squatted, he worked at the blade with expert movements on a series of wetted sharpening stones of increasing fineness.

  As he did so, I went to a farther glass showcase in the little shop. Set off by themselves, near a variety of folding knives designed by Koji Hara—handsome blades in handsome handles of stag, abalone, exotic hardwoods, silver inlaid with mother-of-pearl—were a couple of stranger and much older-looking knives.

  The blades of these knives were about three inches long and remarkably slender, narrowing to sharp points from a maximum width of barely a quarter of an inch near where, with a small flourish of twenty-four-karat-gold symbols laid into the steel, they were set into thin ebony handles not much longer than the blades. Each had a fitted sheath of wood, with a removable metal ring to which were attached braided colored cords intended to be fixed to sash-belts. These knives, I was told, were called tosu. They were among the last made by the last of the master tosu craftsmen, Uegama Nobuyiki, who retired some years ago, bringing to an end the long history of tosu artisanship that began more than two thousand years ago.

  “What are these used for?” I asked.

  Young Keisuke smiled his friendly smile. There was in that smile now an element of implied but unspoken knowledge that he seemed to suspect I already shared.

  “You could use them, I guess, to open letters,” he said, smiling still. “Maybe to eat fruit.”

  They were assassins’ knives. So deadly, so beautiful. The one of the two on which my eyes were fixed had a sheath of snakewood with a hand-wrought silver finial and an elaborately embroidered woven-gold Nishijin storage pouch.

  So deadly, so beautiful. And so much more costly than the best of the cutlery that New York’s most celebrated chefs came here to buy.

  We got past the letter-opening and fruit-peeling. For the last few hundred years, I was told—there seemed to be only the merest hint of warning, the merest hint of advice—tosu were used only as part of ceremonial or decorative dress, or bought only as collectors’ items.

  Sugai-san had finished with my big magic-handled knife. It was being placed in a sheath of light magnolia wood and arranged in a hard black felt-lined, silver-clasped carrying case.

  The assassin’s knife, I knew, was also to be mine. I asked Sugai-san if he could restore the tosu to its razor-like cutting edge. He was a knife-sharpening master. A blade was a blade. I was told that the relatively fragile nature of the tosu blade was such that I should make careful use of tsubaki oil, derived from the camellia plant, to tend it well.

  I was still sipping coffee, tho
ugh it was cold, when I put my shades back on and left the shop, a few grand lighter, but pleased with my black magic knives. Words came to me from nowhere, and I said them as I dumped the empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup into the trash on the corner of West Broadway:

  “One for the kitchen, one for the killing.”

  SO THERE I SAT IN THE CROAKER’S OFFICE ON THE UPPER East Side. He was a good guy, a general practitioner who specialized in gastroenterology, whom I had inherited as my internist from my previous doctor, Allen Yanoff, who was the greatest man of medicine and one of the greatest human beings I have ever known. The two doctors had adjacent offices and shared examination rooms on East Sixty-third Street. Yanoff had always spoken highly of his colleague, and so when Yanoff, who did not smoke, died of lung cancer, I began seeing his friend and fellow doctor.

  I had once gone for more than thirty years without seeing a doctor, except for an Italian-Swiss guy in the Village, also now passed on to the Hippocratic beyond, who simply asked me what I thought I should be prescribed and then gave me the prescription for the drug that my self-diagnosis had been calculated to call for.

  What had brought me to Dr. Yanoff was the inexplicable loss of more than thirty pounds within barely three months. I figured it was the end. But how to find an actual good doctor? I knew that good, honest physicians were as rare as good, honest grease monkeys or good, honest lawyers. It was my old friend Richard who, when I told him of my quandary, provided me with the sage advice that led me to Allen Yanoff.

  “Ask a healthy person,” he said.