The light changed to green but I turned to Mona instead of crossing. There was serious concern in her face for me. I wondered what it might be like to feel that way: pained at someone else's grief, a grief that person didn't even know.
"I'm fine," I said, and we crossed together. "What's the dinner for tonight?"
Sighing in defeat she said, "It's the premiere issue of a new magazine I'm working for—
Diablerie
."
"What's that mean?"
"It depends," Mona said. The strain in her voice lightened as she began to talk about her work. "The word can mean either mischievous or evil. The magazine is a blend of both—articles about sexy new stars, naughty getaways, and puff pieces about people in the news. Tonight they're going to have Barbara Knowland as a guest at one of the tables. She may even address the audience."
"Who's Barbara Knowland?" I asked, happy not to be discussing my lapsed therapy.
"She was the woman who was held hostage by that guy who went on that killing rampage in Tennessee and Arkansas," Mona said. "The one the police held for a year and a half because they thought that she was involved with the killings."
"Yeah," I said, "I remember. They finally found those videotapes of her tied up and that guy, whatshisname, came out of the coma . . ."
"Ron Tellman," Mona said. "He testified that Card, the killer, kept the Knowland woman gagged and handcuffed to a steel bolt in the back of his covered pickup truck."
"Damn. So now she's written a memoir or something?"
"Scorched Earth: From Communes to Killers,
by Barbara Know-land."
We were at the hotel by then. We signed in at the reception table and got our name tags:
MONA VALERIA and MONA VALERIA'S GUEST.
I went to the table in the main hall while Mona made the rounds, chatting up &ends, potential clients, and competitors at the cocktail party held in the lobby.
There were forty-six round tables set up for the banquet. All the chairs were empty. Only the black-clad waitstaff was there, bustling around putting salads at place settings and making sure everything was perfect.
"Wine, sir?"
I looked up to see a very lovely young Asian woman carrying a bottle of red wine in one hand and white in the other. She was quite fetching in her short black skirt and black stockings that let through the barest glimmer of pale skin.
I almost said yes. My incipient reply was so obvious that the question of which kind rose almost visibly in her throat.
"No," I said. "I better not."
"Why not? It's a party, right?" Asian features with a New York soul.
"I took a drink one time when I was on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles," I said. "The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a flophouse on the Bowery . . . five and a half years later."
"That's not good."
I could have been friends with that woman. I was sure of it.
"You have Diet Coke?"
"Cola," she said, annunciating the syllables.
"Okay. Cola," I replied, mimicking her locution.
She smiled for me and went away. I decided that it was worth coming to the party after all. Those few words with that lovely child more than made up for the blowhards, backstabbers, and twits that inhabited Mona's life.
I was watching the waitress walk across the large hall when a woman said, "Ben?"
There was a hand on my shoulder. She was fortysomething, five foot two, natural brown hair with only a strand or two of gray. She wore a low-cut blue dress that seemed to be a size too small and had a shawl made from peacock feathers pinned to her left shoulder.
Her eyes were different colors, brown and green. For some reason this was very important to me. It meant something.
"Ben?"
"Yes?" I said, telling her with the tone of that single-syllable utterance that I didn't know her.
"It's me," she said. "Star."
"Um . . . I seem to have forgotten . . ."
'"I seem to have forgotten'?" she said, as if those words shouldn't have come from me. "Come on, Ben. You can't forget me, us, that day . . . not something like that."
She didn't have a name tag identifying her field or magazine.
"What day was that?" I asked.
"Pretending won't wash it away, Ben. We were both there.'' "I have no idea what you're talking about, Star."
"June 28,1979," she said, more an accusation than information.
"That's back when I was still drinking," I said. "I was just telling the waitress there that I've forgotten more nights than I remember from those days."
"Forgotten? You don't . . . ?" Star's face twisted into an expression that was either fear or distaste—maybe both. "Why would you come here if you don't remember?"
"Listen, lady, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm here with my wife because she's an editor for the magazine. That's all. I don't know you. I don't remember you. Maybe we met a long time ago when I was drunk. If we did, I hope I was a gentleman. If I wasn't, I hope you got over it."
Suspicion overwhelmed any other emotion in Star's reaction to me.
"Here's your diet cola, sir," the young Asian waitress said.
I was happy for the interruption.
"Thank you," I said, and when I turned back, Star was gone.
"This is my husband, Benny Dibbuk," Mona was saying.
The table was full now, as was the rest of the hall. My wife was introducing me to Harvard Rollins, some sort of fact-checker for the magazine.
"Ben," I said, a little too forcefully, "Ben Dibbuk. So you're an editor too, Mr. Rollins?"
"No. Not me. I wouldn't know what to do with a comma to save my life."
"We do more than add commas,'' Mona said, putting her hand on the handsome white man's forearm.
Everyone at the table seemed to think that this was a hilarious joke.
"So what do you do?" I asked as a kind of shelter against the laughter I couldn't share in.
"Kinda like a detective. Sorta like that. When they get a story in that no one else has, they put me on the trail to make sure everything's copacetic, if you know what I mean. Mostly it's on the phone, and Internet stuff but I hit the bricks now and then."
Harvard was lean and olive-skinned, in his midthirties. His eyes wanted to be brown but didn't quite make it. His mustache had to have been waxed to stay so perfect.
"Wow. Is that common? Having a detective on staff?''
"I'm not a licensed P.I.," he said, "just an ex-cop who doesn't want the NYPD to send him into back-alley crack dens anymore."
Mona loved it. One of the things that she'd always felt had been kept from her was excitement. The reason she was attracted to me in the first place was because I had hitchhiked around the country, been a hobo, a drunk, and a womanizer—that was until I got a job programming computers and started living like a regular guy.
"What about you, Ben?" Harvard asked me.
"Do you ever sit at your desk copying notes from a piece of paper onto a computer?" I asked him.
"Sometimes. I transcribe tapes, copy notes from interviews."
"Okay," I said. "Now imagine doing it with numbers, and not all the numbers, just the ones and the zeros."
"Yeah?"
"That's what I've done every day for more than twenty years."
At other tables people were laughing and joking around, but in our little comer there was a solid five seconds of blank silence. No one knew what to say about the tedium of my life. Everyone, I was sure, felt sorry for me-everyone except Mona, who, I hoped, would never bring me to another work-related event.
She glared at me and I pretended not to notice.
After that the conversation broke down and people turned to whomever it was they sat next to. I was placed beside a young woman named Daria Hunt, who edited a section of the magazine called Toys.
"What's that?" I asked, as I was supposed to do.
"The magazine is for twenty-to thirtysomethings, mostly white," the tiny, pale-skinned woman said, "upwardly mobile, urban, conservatives-thinking-they're-liberal, prescription-drug dependent or alcoholic, college-educated, postfeminist, post-Christian office workers. Maybe Wall Street, maybe Fifth Avenue. And what, you ask, would this surprisingly large group of people want to know more than anything?"
I was completely entranced, forgetting the handsome but humble ex-cop and the mysterious, mistaken Star. Daria Hunt filled up my horizon with her sharp wit and extraordinarily accurate sound bites.
"I have no idea," I said slowly, the counterpoint to her fast tongue.
"Toys," the plain Jane with the bedroom eyes said.
"Like Legos?"
"Maybe. Yeah, Legos for the thirty-year-old, latent-adolescent stockbroker who both lives and works on Maiden Lane. He also needs a sixty-inch plasma TV, a radio-controlled multicolored lamp that goes from green to red depending on how the stock market is doing at any given moment, and a handheld, twelve-ounce computer that could land a rover on Jupiter while downloading gobs of porn featuring women who only look like children and men he really wants for himself."
"I see," I said. "And what do the women in this select group want?"
"Sex," Daria said, throwing up her hands. "Sex stories, sex toys, sexy underwear, sex inhibitors, sex stimulants. Sex aroma therapy, orgasm gauges, dental dams, female condoms, and let's not forget video phones for a secret worldwide link where they can anonymously expose themselves to men anywhere, at any time, while never having to smell their panting breath or unwashed nethers."
"Do you have all those things?"
For some reason this question threw Daria out of her well-rehearsed, world-weary persona. She cocked her head and looked at me sideways. Maybe there was something to me.
"In my office," she said at last.
"Wow. That's really amazing. I guess businesses send you free samples hoping for a favorable review."
"I have enough condoms in my, excuse the expression, drawers to keep the red-light district of Paris going for a week."
I like plain-looking women. What they lack in movie-star headshot style, they make up for in intensity. I think maybe my posture and tone imparted these predilections to the young, pseudo-jaded editor.
"Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen," a voice over the loud speakers said. "My name is Trina MacDonald—"
Before she could continue, the audience broke out into loud applause and cheers. A few people rose to their feet; Mona did.
This was a mild shock to me. Here I had never even heard the name Trina MacDonald and my wife of twenty-two years stood to applaud her. I wondered, if I were to receive an award for assembler language programming, would she get up out of her chair, slap her hands together, and call out for everyone to hear.
"Thank you, thank you," Trina MacDonald's amplified voice boomed. "Please sit down. This is too much, really.
Diablerie
is just another periodical aimed at the heart of America."
There was some polite laughter and the people who had risen returned to their seats.
"Tonight is not about fund-raising or rabble-rousing or vying for power in the White House. You, every one of you here tonight, have been invited to celebrate the start of this oh-so-important publication . . ."
She said more but the renewed applause drowned out the words.
After the ovation subsided, she spent the requisite time thanking the people without whom this undertaking would have, could have, never gotten off the ground. When their names were called out, those people stood to be adored by the crowd. Mona was singled out. So was Daria.
This social business taken care of, Trina, a fiftyish and in-shape woman clad in a form-fitting, green sequined gown, got serious.
"Diablerie
is a really good time. Our stories are about the world today, about how to get ahead and stay there without going mad. It also covers some of the stories about people who were given up for lost but who made it back by resuscitating themselves when the monitor had gone flatline. One of those women is Barbara Knowland. She was lost in the sex-crazed, drug-filled nightmare that has destroyed so many misguided, self-medicating Americans. She was accused of murder and nearly convicted when a series of lucky events kept her from a long Me in prison. But it was this terrible possibility that woke Barbara up. She decided to get straight and write about that Me, to use her experiences to deliver her from depravity. I can only hope
Diablerie
will be able to do the same thing for its readers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Barbara Knowland."
Trina held out a hand and a woman rose from a table up front. It was a short woman in a blue dress. Star.
The peacock shawl fluttering behind her, Star ascended the stairs to the podium. She and Trina kissed and then the publisher left the stage like an aging movie star who had just passed her mantle into younger, abler hands.
Star was carrying a folded square of paper that she placed on the podium. Then she went about moving the microphone down so that it would accommodate her shorter stature. She unfolded the paper, looked at it, looked up, squinting at the spotlight, and then down at the audience.
She took in a quick breath, as if she was about to speak, but no words immediately followed.
"My name is Barbara," she said at last, "but for more than twenty years I was known as Star. One dictionary I looked up that word in said, I quote, 'a pinpoint of bright light in the darkness.'" She looked around. The audience was completely silent. "That was me. I lived on communes with virgins and murderers. I sold sex in the cities for men I called my boyfriends. I carried drug-Med condoms in my stomach across fifteen borders, and I was tethered by a chain to the back of a truck while Leon Cargill raped, murdered, and dismembered men, women, and children right there next to me."
She stopped for a moment then. Maybe others thought that she was experiencing pain from those appalling memories, but I didn't think so. I had met the real Barbara, Star. The woman who chided me for forgetting some long-ago tryst was not going to show real weakness. You could see that in her small, bicolored eyes.
"And then just when I thought the nightmare was over, the police charged me for the crimes. For a while there, when they thought Leon was too crazy to stand trial, they wanted to make me the mastermind. They speculated about my death sentence in the daily papers in Memphis. They found blood on my clothes and in my shoes. They said all kinds of terrible things about me. That's when I turned to Buddhism, when I started meditating."