Diablerie
DIABLERIE
A NOVEL
WALTER MOSLEY
BLOOMSBURY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The apartment reeked from the acrid odor of roaches—a whole colony, tens of thousands of them, seething and unseen in the walls and under the dull, splintery floorboards of the vacant tenement apartment.
"Isn't it great, Daddy?" Seela said.
Her smile was exultant. She hugged my arm.
I turned my head toward the window looking out on the East Village street. There I saw a Rastafarian wearing clothes that were once bright but now had faded into dull tatters, two transvestite prostitutes, and a powerful-looking drunk who was having a loud disagreement with a newspaper vending machine.
"It's only twenty-two hundred and Millie's going to split it with me," Seela was saying. "We can move in tomorrow."
"It looks like a dicey neighborhood, honey," I said, unable to keep the whine out of my voice. "What if that guy down there goes crazy and pushes his way in here?"
"Oh, Dad. Lots of kids from NYU live around here."
"What's so bad about the dorms?"
"I hate the dorms. There's always noise and parties and drama like you wouldn't believe. Please."
I'd never thought that my daughter was beautiful; she wasn't even pretty. But Seela was young and slender, and she had a friendly smile. While she beamed at me, the feeling that lurked in my shoulder blades took over. Not an emotion or something physical like pain or heat or cold, it was more akin to a void, a sensual numbness. I wanted to say something, to tell her that she deserved better, but the words didn't come and even the ideas behind them fell away. I couldn't speak, couldn't feel for her safety.
She stood there smiling at me, believing that I was her loving, concerned father.
Seela was medium brown, halfway between my dark color and her mother's light, coppery hue. Those big eyes stared into mine and I looked around the apartment, pretending to be assessing its worth.
"Can I have the money, Dad?" she asked. "It's not that much more than the dorms and, and I could get a part-time job."
Sure. I guess. But you're the one who has to convince your mother if she starts to go crazy. I just took my Sunday afternoon to see this place, but if your mom goes nuts about the neighborhood, well . . ." I let the words hang in the air.
"She'll listen to you," my daughter said confidently.
Seela threw her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. She might as well have kissed the wall or that drunk in the street. It wasn't that I felt nothing—not exactly. The truth was I couldn't feel anything but dread of those roaches teeming, unseen but still there.
"Your mom went to the hairdressers," I said. "She's waiting for me on Fourteenth. You want to have dinner with us?"
"No thanks. I'm seeing Jamal and his friends for dinner, then we're going to this indie film called
Herd.
It's all about . . ."
While she talked I shifted my gaze back to the window, this time into an apartment across the way. A couple was standing there arguing. The woman gesticulated with her hands above her head, held like claws, while he had loose fists up at chest level like a boxer reflexively defending himself, looking for an opening.
"I've got to get out of here,'' I said, not necessarily to Seela.
"Daddy, I was telling you about
Herd."
"I'll call you at the dorms tomorrow. Talk to you then, honey."
I was on the street before I realized that I hadn't kissed her good-bye.
I never liked kissing all that much—didn't see what people got out of it, really. Mona complained that I wasn't romantic enough when we made love. She pulled away emotionally but I wasn't terribly bothered. I sometimes grumbled when we hadn't had sex in more than two weeks. But then I started seeing Svetlana two or three days a week and things were better, at least for me, at least when I was sitting there quietly in Svetlana's West Side studio, after having made love, with the sun shining in and her reading Russian newspapers and smoking European cigarettes. It felt like I was safe then. I seemed always to be looking for a cubbyhole or corner to sit in, a place I could be quiet and unnoticed.
All I had to do was pay the rent and keep a tab open at the supermarket in Svetlana's name and she was mine. There was never any evidence of any other man in the house. When I called, she usually made time to talk, even if there was an exam coming up or she had a paper due.
She said she liked me because I didn't abuse her. She never worried about me hitting her. When her mother was dying, I bought her round-trip tickets and gave her enough money to keep afloat in Kiev for a month. After she came back, I told Mona I was going to a convention in Atlantic City so that I could spend two days at Svetlana's. I thought that she'd want to talk, but she didn't. We made love, had sex, once every four waking hours for two days and then she got restless—or maybe it just seemed that way to me.
She'd pick up a paper and then put it down, light a cigarette and put it out almost immediately, then go to the window, searching Eighth Avenue with her brooding gaze.
"Do you need me to leave, Lana?" I asked her.
"No," she said, shaking her tousled blonde hair. "Why?"
Svetlana was twenty-one, already in graduate school studying international relations at CUNY. Her figure was slight, almost boyish. Her hands were powerful though. She could hurt me with her grip. I liked that. Sometimes, when we were having sex and I couldn't come to orgasm, Lana would grab the back of my neck with her left hand and squeeze until the pain went down into my shoulders. While she did this, she'd smile like a naughty child doing something that she was bound to get away with. Whenever she did this, I had intense orgasms, like none that I remembered. Once I even passed out, something I hadn't done since my drinking days in the late seventies and before.
Sometimes I'd tell Lana, "Squeeze my neck, baby," but she wouldn't obey.
"It has to be my choice when," she'd tell me. "Otherwise it wouldn't work anymore."
I knew that she was very smart, that she would move on once she had her degree and started working in international finance or diplomacy. But I didn't care.
I didn't care about much. This lack of sentiment didn't bother me unless Mona or Seela would complain. But then the void in the hollow of my shoulders would take over and I'd watch an old movie or go see Svetlana. Sometimes I'd just go to work or to bed—it was all the same to me. I was lucky in that way.
Mona had a favorite coffee shop on Fourteenth Street near Fifth Avenue. She usually went there on Fridays. "To decompress after a week of bullshit," she'd say. It was called Augie's and they made a French roast coffee so strong that I had to cut it with an equal portion of steamed milk. But Mona loved the bitter brew and the tough Irish waitresses, two of whom had worked there since Mona was a teenager.
That Sunday she was sitting at the counter holding her long fingers to her lips in a smoker's pose. Mona hadn't had a cigarette in twenty-five years, since before I met her, but she still held her hands like a smoker.
She'd let her hair go gray, but for some reason, with the help of the bright carmine lipstick she wore, this only served to make her look younger. She was in much better shape than I was; an hour and a half in the gym six days a week made her muscles feel like tough young bamboo: resistant and resilient, springy with hardly a trace of softness.
That day she wore the maroon dress suit with red high heels and a scarlet bag.
The lady in red,
I thought.
"How was it?" Mona asked as I came up to the stool next to her.
It was decided, long before, that I would talk to Seela when she asked for something big. I didn't mind saying no and I never got upset. "Fine. Clean. Sixth-floor walk-up. If nothing else, she'll get a little exercise."
I sat down. Mona took the imaginary cigarette from her lips, her island-brown eyes studying me.
"What?" I asked after an appropriate wait.
"Why do you stay with me, Benny?"
"Come again?" I said, to keep my distance until I could gauge the virulence of her attack.
Because it would certainly be an attack. Mona wanted more out of me, more out of everything. Seela wasn't a good-enough student, I wasn't a good-enough husband, her parents had never done right by her either. Only her cousin Minna, who'd died of cancer years ago, had ever been exactly what Mona wanted.
"Are you . . . happy?" she asked.
"Of course I am," I said. "I could be dead but instead I have a daughter at university and a wife so pretty that she could have a twenty-year-old boyfriend if she wanted."
"Bullshit."
"What's wrong, Mona?"
"I think it's because it would cost you too much," she speculated. "College plus two households. You'd have to take care of me for life, you know."
"I see you've thought about it," I said, still feinting, still gauging the opposition.
"Do you love me?" She brought the phantom cigarette halfway to her mouth.
"Yes. But it's more than that, you know."
"No, I don't know."
"Do you remember when we met?" I asked.
"Yeah?"
"I was sick and getting sicker all the time."
"You had viral pneumonia," she said, as if correcting me. "You needed rest and medicine."
"That was the outside of it. But on the inside I felt that I was hanging over a precipice, like I was dangling from a frayed rope that was only holding on by a thread."
"You were sick," she said. "People feel like that when they're sick."
"No. I was like that all the time. I'd left Boulder and stopped drinking. Every day I felt like I was going to fall into that hole. The pneumonia was just a part of it. I ate junk food and was depressed but didn't know it. When you nursed me to health, you saved me from falling in. You do it all the time, almost every day. That, that hole, that abyss, is a fixture in my mind, and if it weren't for you, I'd have fallen in and broken my neck a long time ago."
I don't know why I said all that to Mona right then. I hadn't even seen Barbara Knowland yet. I hadn't thought about Colorado in many years.
"What are you saying, Benny?" Mona asked. "Is this some movie you saw or something?"
"What do you mean?"
"Abyss? Frayed rope? Holding on by a thread?"
"It might be trite but I feel it all the time," I said, lying by telling the truth. "I felt it today with Seela. If I didn't have a family, I wouldn't have anything."
There was a colony of competing and conflicting thoughts behind Mona's stern grimace, like the roaches I smelled teeming beneath Seela's floors.
My words stymied the argument she was nursing. They rang of truth somewhere, and Mona always reacted to truth. She was angry that she couldn't let the rage in her breast roil up against me. I had admitted something personal and she had no rebuttal against that.
"But you don't tell us that," Mona said. "You just, you just sit there staring out the window."
"Yeah, I know. Way in the back of my head there's this, there's this, I don't know. You're the only one who sees it, honey. When you call me on it, you call me back."
"You still don't talk to me."
"What am I doing right now?"
The frustration showed in Mona's slender, still quite lovely face. The only thing I had to do was to stifle the grin rising from my diaphragm. Whenever I defeated her in our jousts of words, I wanted to smirk—not laugh or smile or chuckle. I wanted to gloat over her stumble. Here she had laid a trap for me, the goal of which neither of us knew or understood. We just wrangled, disputed over anything: Seela's future, our sex routines, what life had or had not brought to either of us.
"You're saying that I save you?" she asked. "Me. The woman you barely touch, hardly ever talk to. Me, the one lying in your bed when you come back from who knows where in the middle of the night."
Three months before, the phone rang at a little after two in the morning. Mona answered it.
"Benny?" she said, tugging my shoulder. "It's work."
"Hello?" I called into the void of the receiver, wondering what reason anyone at work had to call me in the middle of the night.