The Demon Lover (27 page)

But I suddenly knew, without a doubt, that my happiness didn’t lie with Paul and that it never had. Maybe if I hadn’t been holding back a piece of myself things would have been different, but it was too late now. I got up. “I should leave,” I said. “I’ll go stay with Annie in Brooklyn.”

“No!” he said, jumping to his feet. “I planned to let you keep the room. The firm booked it for five days. I can go stay with …” He stumbled over Rita’s name and my resolve faltered as well. It was one thing admitting to myself that the relationship was over, and another sending him out to another woman.

But I could only delay that by one night unless I wanted him back.

“I think you’d better go,” I said. “But I’m warning you, once this really sinks in I might order a lot of room service.”

TWENTY-SIX

I
n the next two days I
did
order quite a bit of room service and I
did
at first get a rather perverse pleasure out of the outrageous prices—$34 for a pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream! On the second day I found Ralph eating M&M’s from the mini-bar. I gave him a stern lecture. He could have suffocated in my suitcase! He’d get us kicked out! Did he know how much those M&M’s cost? In truth, he was welcome company during the long nights when the wind shrieked outside the hotel like a banshee.

After a few days of walking along the Battery Park Esplanade through gale-force icy winds and eating expensive ice cream I was tired of feeling sorry for myself. On the twenty-fourth I called Annie and asked if I could spend Christmas Eve with her and Maxine.

“If you don’t mind delivering bread,” she told me.

I’d forgotten that she and Maxine donated bread to homeless shelters on Christmas.

“Sure,” I told her. “I can’t imagine a better way of spending the holiday.”

An hour later Annie picked me up at the hotel. The bakery van was warm and smelled like fresh bread. Annie gave me a bone-crunching hug that left me covered with flour and thawed the ice in my heart for the first time in two days. I promptly burst into tears.

“Spill it!” Annie ordered, pulling into traffic.

I told Annie about the breakup, about Rita and the Wall Street job and being left alone in a hotel room all by myself. I’d worked myself up into a snit of self-pity by the end of it.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said when I was done.

“About Paul?” I asked, shamming innocence. “I think I told you everything he said …”

“No, not about Paul. About what led up to Paul.”

“But I told you about the plane and the storm and Rita …”

“I don’t mean all that,” she said impatiently, shaking her head. Her dark curly hair was tied up in a high ponytail that swished angrily. I realized that some of the specks I’d thought were flour were gray hairs. “Paul would never have fallen in love with someone else if you hadn’t checked out first.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault,” I said angrily, remembering now how judgmental Annie could be sometimes. “I didn’t know you were such a big fan of Paul’s.”

“I’ve never said anything against Paul. As I’ve told you many times, I just didn’t think he was the right guy for you. I still don’t. If you had broken up with him I’d be saying ‘about time,’ but for him to break up with you means you haven’t been trying. And if you’ve been as out of it with him as you have been with me since September, I can understand why he went and fell in love with the first girl who held his hand on a bumpy flight.”

“Hey, that’s not fair!” I said, swiveling around in my seat to face Annie. “When you first got together with Maxine I barely saw you for six months.”

Annie raised one dark eyebrow but kept her eyes on the road as she turned onto Canal Street. “True,” she said. “So is that why I’ve barely heard from you these last three months? You’ve been having great sex with someone new?”

I began to splutter a denial, but one cool look from Annie silenced me. With Paul I’d been able to cling to the technicality that sex with an incubus—and one kiss with Liam Doyle—didn’t really count as cheating, but I wasn’t going to pull the wool over Annie’s keen hazel eyes.

“Sort of,” I answered. “It depends on how you define sex.”

“Well, hello, Bill Clinton!” Annie grinned. “And you’ve been keeping this from me because I’m so conservative and judgmental?”

“No, I’ve been keeping this from you because you’ll think I’m crazy.”

We’d pulled up in front of the Bowery Mission. Annie turned to me and shook her head. “Sweetie, who did I go to when I was thirteen and realized I liked girls better than boys? Who told
me
I wasn’t crazy, I was just gay?”

I returned her smile. “I’m afraid this is a bit more complicated, but if you’re sure you want to hear it …”

Annie crossed her eyes at me. “Complicated, crazy, unbelievable sex? Please, honey, start talking.”

And so I did. In between delivering fresh bread to more than a dozen shelters and soup kitchens, from the Bowery to Chelsea to Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper West Side, I told Annie everything that had happened at Fairwick from the first visitation of the incubus to his banishment, and about all the creatures I’d met—the witches, fairies, brownies, gnomes, vampires, and magical doormice—and the tantalizing glimpse I’d had of the world of Faerie through the triptych door on the Solstice. She listened in silence, her lips pursed, her eyes focused on the city traffic, opening her mouth only to hurl invectives at an SUV with New Jersey plates that cut her off. I finished just as we reached our last stop, the men’s shelter at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

She switched the engine off and turned to me. I was expecting her to tell me that I needed to get professional help. Knowing Annie, she’d offer to go with me and support me in any way she could. But all she said was “Come with me. There’s something I need to show you.”

She asked two of the helpers at the soup kitchen if they wouldn’t mind unloading the bread (they didn’t), and took me up a flight of back stairs to the cathedral. While at grad school at Columbia, I’d gotten into the habit of visiting the massive, unfinished Episcopalian cathedral. I didn’t consider myself religious, but I liked the peace of the hushed, vaulted space and the beauty of the stained-glass windows. I liked, too, the cathedral’s philosophy of interaction with the modern world. I had learned on a tour that each of the side aisle windows was devoted to an aspect of human endeavor, such as the arts and communication. These windows had secular and often surprisingly modern details—like a panel with Jack Benny playing his violin in front of a microphone in the Communications window. I also liked St. John’s mission. First constructed in 1893, the same year as Ellis Island, the cathedral was dedicated to aiding immigrants. There was a sense of inclusion and tolerance—symbolized perhaps most notably by the huge gold menorahs and Shinto vases flanking the altar, but also by the Chapels of the Seven Tongues which circled the apse, each one dedicated to an immigrant group. It was to the Italian chapel—St. Ambrose’s—that Annie now took me.

“Did you know I used to come here to pray when we were in high school?” she asked as we entered the ornate, Renaissance-style chapel.

“No,” I said, sitting down beside her on a folding chair. “I thought you gave up the Church in the eighth grade.”

“The
Catholic
church,” she said, folding her hands and looking up at the altar. “I figured why should I keep going to a church that told me I was going to hell because of what I was? But after a while I missed something—a feeling I’d gotten at Mass sometimes, you know?”

She looked at me, an uncharacteristically uncertain look on her face, and I realized she was embarrassed. We talked plenty about our sex lives but never about religion. “Yeah,” I said, “I think I know what you mean. I used to come to the cathedral between classes—for cultural and art history reasons, I’d tell myself—but also for the feeling I got sitting here.”

“Huh, so we’re both closet church groupies and we never knew it.” She grinned, looking more like the self-assured Annie I knew. “I came to this chapel in particular because it’s dedicated to an Italian saint. I figured it was one thing to give up being a Catholic, and another to give up being
Italian.
”

“Dio mio!”
I exclaimed in mock horror. “Perish the thought!” And then, in a more serious voice, I asked, “Did you really think you’d have to give up being Italian because you’re gay?”

“I know it sounds stupid, but I didn’t know what—or who—I might have to give up. I was relieved that I didn’t have to give up my best friend”—she gave my hand a quick squeeze—“but you know I didn’t tell my mother until I was sixteen. The day I was going to tell her I came here first. I prayed that my mother wouldn’t be too upset, and that I wouldn’t lose my temper if she was—and that she wouldn’t … stop loving me.” Annie’s voice broke on the last words and I reached over and gave her hand a squeeze. I kept hold of it while she continued. “So I’m sitting here and this old woman comes in and sits down next to me. She looks like your typical Italian
nonna
. Black dress, black kerchief tied over her hair, which was gray—I was sure it was gray when she sat down—a widow’s hump the size of a basketball, no teeth. She was muttering something under her breath when she came in. Some prayer, I figured, although it didn’t sound like Italian or English or even Latin. Anyway, we’re both sitting here and after a couple of minutes she puts her hand on mine, just like you have your hand on mine now, and she says to me, ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Anne Marie, your mother loves you for who you are and she will always love you.’ I started to ask her how she knew what I was afraid of—did she know me?—but when I turned I was blinded by a light behind her, from the window, I thought, only it was an overcast day. I could still see her silhouetted against the light, but she was no longer stooped and old, and her hair was long and shiny white. Then I looked away for a moment and she was gone. Lying in the chair where she’d been was this …”

Annie removed from her pocket a small, round white stone. It was worn away in the center so that one edge formed a slender crescent. “I took it with me and held it in my hand when I told my mother I was gay. You know what she said, right?”

“ ‘Better you should like women than be a
putta
like your cousin Esta,’ ” I said, repeating the line that Annie had told me years ago.

“And then she hugged me and scolded me for not telling her sooner. The old woman was right. My mother never loved me any less …” Annie wiped her eyes. Sylvana Mastroanni had died of breast cancer when Annie was eighteen. “That old woman gave me the courage to face my mother and if I hadn’t—and she had died before I did …” Annie stopped, unable to finish the thought. After a few moments she continued, “I’ve always believed that old woman was some kind of angel … or maybe, after hearing what you’ve told me, a fairy or an ancient goddess. So I believe that you’ve ended up at a college for witches and fairies.” She smiled. “Hell, I’m not even that surprised. You were always a little … different.”

“Thanks!” I said, swatting her on the arm. “You make me sound like a head case.”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that your background—dead parents, frosty, forbidding grandmother …”

“My grandmother wasn’t that bad,” I interrupted, thinking guiltily that I ought to call her tomorrow. I hadn’t spoken with her at all since I’d called to tell her that I’d gotten the job at Fairwick, but then she’d been so snippy that I hadn’t wanted to speak to her for a while. “And she did her best for a sixty-year-old woman suddenly saddled with an obnoxious tween.”

“Okay, okay, I meant no disrespect to Adelaide. I’m just pointing out that you always had the
setup
to turn into the heroine of one of those Gothic romances you’re always reading … and now you have.”

“I’m not a heroine,” I pointed out, trying to hide my immense relief that Annie believed me behind a façade of grumpiness. “Merely an assistant professor. I don’t even have tenure yet.”

Annie put her arm around my shoulder. “Hey, from what you told me, you’re important to these people … uh, fairies … witches … whatever they are. You’re the doorkeeper! They’ll have to give you tenure!”