Diablerie

On the street I wondered about Barbara Knowland’s story. Why would she lie about something like that? It made sense, if events occurred the way she related them, that she’d be petrified to see me at her reading. The police had already put her on the hot seat for murder; all I had to do was blame the killing on her. Maybe she thought that I’d come to blackmail her.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” a woman shouted from one of the apartments in my daughter’s new building.

I remember thinking that she’d have to hear her neighbors rutting all the time now that she was living in a building like this. It was the same way when I was a kid in Colorado. But back then I was the one doing the rutting; either that or I was passed out from liquor.

I knocked on her door and the screaming stopped. Even then I only marveled at the thinness of the walls: The lovers could hear me knocking right through my daughter’s walls.

“Who is it?” Seela called.

“Me.”

The silence that followed was profound. Sixty seconds passed before the door came open. My ugly-duckling daughter was standing there in a ratty blue housecoat next to a chubby white boy who was wrapped in a bright orange robe that was made for a woman. I could see the outline of his waning erection through the thin, tightly held cloth.

“Hi, Daddy,” Seela said. “This is Martin. My, um, fiend.”

“What happened to Jamal?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see. Martin?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Put on some clothes and give me a few minutes with my daughter. You could go down to the coffee place at the corner. She’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

They had been going at it on a thin mattress in the middle of the living room floor. Martin bent down to pick up his clothes and rushed into the bathroom. I walked over to the mattress and nudged it with my toe.

Seela busied herself at the sink, turning on the water and rinsing something. There wasn’t much furniture in the apartment. Seela had brought in a small red table and two blue chairs that she’d bought some years ago on a family vacation to New Hampshire.

I sat in one of the blue chairs and Martin came blundering out of the bathroom. The buttons on his shirt weren’t lined up straight.

“I’m going to go back to the theater, Seel,” he said. “Call me later.”

My daughter waved at him, not saying a word.

“What are you doing?” she said in a very loud voice the moment Martin closed the door behind him.

“Came to see my girl,” I said with my patented fake smile.

“And why mention Jamal?”

“He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?”

“So?”

“So what if Jamal came up here to see you and he hears Martin there fuckin’ you so hard that you sound like you’re in your own private church?”

Seela had never heard her daddy say anything even remotely like that. Her mouth opened but the words would not come. I believe that she would have cried if she wasn’t too much in shock to remember how.

“Baby,” I said.

“No. No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “Don’t you say anything else to me.”

I told my daughter that I had heard her fucking and coming through the door. I could have told her that I paid the rent on that door. I could have said that what she did was putting her business all down the hall. But none of that would have been right. I didn’t have to pay her rent. She didn’t have to respect me, or herself for that matter. I was wrong, but I hadn’t meant to hurt her.

While I had these thoughts, Seela began to cry. She was trembling from her diaphragm. Her hands gripped the blue cloth of her housecoat. She wanted to say something but there was nothing to say. My walking into her apartment and not averting my eyes or my words had stripped her bare. This was, I thought, a truly traumatic experience.

“Why, Daddy?” she said at last.

“Sit, baby.”

She sat across from me on the other crayon-blue chair. I smiled at her and reached out to touch her wrist.

She shifted her body away from me.

“Honey,” I said. “I don’t care about what you were doing here...”

“Martin’s Millie’s boyfriend,” my daughter said. “She’s at the theater working on stage design and he dropped by to pick up some of her plans. He’s the one that told Millie that she should share the apartment with me.”

“That’s okay, baby.”

“It’s not okay. I betrayed my boyfriend and my roommate.”

She was miserable at her perfidy. I could see that she felt I was some kind of divine justice come to damn her.

“It’s not so bad,” I said.

“How can you say that?”

“You’re just a kid,” I said. “I mean, I did worse than this almost every day when I was back in Colorado.”

“All you did was get drunk a lot,” Seela said. “Mommy told me that you drank until you had an accident and then you stopped.”

I was little more than a ghost in my daughter’s life, an apparition. We’d never talked about anything but money if she needed it, and math, her worst subject in school, when the homework was due.

“I used to have a friend back in those days named TJ,” I said, remembering him as I spoke. “He had this beautiful Danish girlfriend named Chara.

“TJ and me used to drink pretty hard. Some nights he was so drunk I had to carry him into his house and put him in the bed for Chara. One time she was so mad that she seduced me and we did it right there in the same bed where he was sleeping.”

Seela was looking at me now, into my eyes. With just those few words I could tell that I was no longer the milquetoast daddy that Mona had invented for her.

“You did it while he was right there?” she asked.

“Snoring like a bull walrus.”

I smiled.

She snickered.

I laughed.

Seela actually guffawed, showing all her teeth.

“What happened after that?” Seela asked once she’d gotten control of herself.

“I went out drinkin’ with TJ every night for two or three weeks.”

“No.”

“Oh yeah. And I’d pay for all his drinks. Every night Chara would be waiting at the door in her nightie. I’d ask her to go in the other room but she wanted to do it right up next to her boyfriend — either in the same bed, on the floor, or in his favorite stuffed chair.”

“Did he ever catch you?”

“One night we were goin’ at it in his chair when all of a sudden we heard him say, ‘Chara.’ He was sitting up in the bed. She said, ‘Go back to sleep, baby, me and Ben are just talking.’ He slumped back down and we went at it... like dogs.”

I hadn’t thought about TJ and Chara since I left Colorado. Remembering them brought Mona and Harvard Yard to mind. I was no better than them. As a matter of fact, I was worse.

“Daddy?” Seela was saying.

“What?”

“I asked you if you ever felt guilty.”

“Not then. Not consciously. The night after that I stopped going out drinkin’ with TJ. I took a construction job outside Boulder and never saw either of them again.”

“Do you feel bad now?”

I looked at the daughter I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. I opened my mouth but there was nothing to say. The silence that passed between us carried more information than nineteen years of the father-daughter relationship.

“Why’d you come over, Daddy?”

I could have told her that my life was Med with unanswerable questions like that one, that the fabricated structure that kept me going for two decades had fallen apart and now I was floating around like a baby black widow spider wafting on the breeze. I had no reason to be in that apartment, confessing to a youthful betrayal. I was looking for an anchor, and like a fool, I had snagged on to my little girl.

I should have walked out of there but instead I told Seela about the dinner Mona and I went to, about Star and Harvard Rollins and the man named Meeks. I skipped the part about spying on her mother having sex with Rollins, but I told her that I was sure they were having an affair.

“And when you saw Mommy, she turned away to this detective guy?” Seela asked. Martin and Jamal and Millie were the furthest things from her mind.

“Like I said, she’s been having an affair with him,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, honey. I’ve had an affair too.”

“With who?”

“That doesn’t matter right now. You don’t know her.”

“And did you kill somebody, Daddy?” my plain-faced daughter asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I certainly don’t remember killing anyone. I never entertained the idea until this Barbara Knowland came on the scene.”

“Maybe she’s lying,” Seela suggested.

“Why would she make up some elaborate lie like that?”

“Maybe she killed him. Maybe you did go up there with her and drink until you passed out. Then, then maybe this guy came back and she hit him from behind a door with a crowbar, and when you woke up, you left and never even saw him. And now that she sees you sitting in the audience, she’s worried that you figured it out and that you’ll send her to jail.”

Seela transformed in front of me at that moment. For years she had just been there: infant, toddler, child, adolescent. Whatever she was, it was as far away from me as a distant moon in orbit around a dead planet. I had only cared about her as a responsibility, not as a person, and she’d never said one thing that touched me.

But now that was all washed away. Seela had shown me how I might be fooled. Barbara Knowland walked up to me wanting to know why I was there. When I didn’t recognize her, she thought that it was an act; she believed that I was going to turn her in for the crime she’d committed decades ago. Maybe I’d heard about her publishing deal and meant to blackmail her.

Of course she would have been the one to kill this Sean Messier, not me. She had the relationship with him. She was pregnant by him. I was no more than a rolling drunk who came to a stop in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I reached out to take my daughter’s hands in mine.

“Seela,” I said. “You are my savior.”

“Daddy, are you all right?”

Someone knocked on the door. The sudden sound made us both gasp and flinch as if we were caught in a moment of criminal intimacy.

Seela stood up and went to the door. She opened it.

“Hi, honey,” she said to Jamal.

He was like many of Seela’s boyfriends: tall, very dark, and quietly handsome. She liked men and boys in that cast but always felt, her mother had told me, that she was never good enough to keep them.

I stood up and put out my hand to him. We’d met a few times when I brought clothes or books or, more likely, a check to the dorm for Seela.

“Mr. Dibbuk,” he said. “How are you, sir?”

“Lucky to have a daughter as wonderful as this child here.”

“Yeah, she’s great.”

I gazed into his dark eyes, wondering if his words were echoed in his heart. Very little I had ever said had meaning in my soul. My true feelings were trussed up in a thousand lies I used to get by. Hence, I never believed anything that anyone told me. This thought came to me like a revelation. I hardly ever believed anything but I did believe Star. I did not question her. Maybe that was because her accusations resonated with the man I buried deep inside me.

“Are you ready?” Jamal was asking Seela.

“For what?”

“To go to Millie’s play,” he said.

“Oh,” Seela uttered. I could see Millie and Martin and her betrayal rising up into her face.

“Go on, baby,” I said then. “Get dressed. I’m gonna be okay now that we talked and you are too. We both know what’s important.”

“Really, Daddy?”

“I’m going home to talk to your mother now.”

I don’t know what she thought I was saying but the words seemed to give my daughter some relief. She put her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said, leaning back and looking into my eyes.

“I love you too,” I said. What else could I say?

Mona was on the couch crying when I got home. At first she thought I could have been someone else.

“Who is it?” she whined when I came through the door.

She was desolate on the cushions, crying into the roseate floral pillow. When she looked up at me, I could see that her despair had nothing to do with me.

“He dropped you?” I asked.

She pressed her face back against the pillow.

I sat down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She sat up and put her arms around my neck as our daughter had done.

“Ben,” she cried.

I wanted to tell her that Rollins would have left her anyway, that she was just a dalliance on a long road of women that the detective was traveling. I wanted to confess about my lies to him, but for some reason — for the first time in a long time — I didn’t want her to let me go.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I lost my mind. I wanted somebody to love me. I wanted it so bad. But he, he just told me that it was over, like he was mad. I don’t know what I did.”

I let her hold on to me, unbothered by her need to lament her lover’s abandonment. What did it matter anyway? I hadn’t been there for her. I couldn’t figure out how to talk to her in the bedroom, at the dinner table, in the morning when there was possibility in the air.

For a long time we sat like that. She molded to my form and bleated.

Many minutes later the phone rang.

“Should I get it?” I whispered.

She nodded.

“What if it’s him?”

“I don’t want to talk to him,” she said, looking up at me.

“Hello?” I answered the phone.

“Ben?” Harvard Rollins said. “What are you doing there?”

“What do you want?”

“IS Mona there?”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“I have to speak to her,” he said, with some urgency in his voice. “It’s important.”

“She said that she doesn’t want to talk. Maybe you could drop by her office tomorrow. Right now she’s on the couch crying her heart out.”

“You’re a motherfucker, Dibbuk. I could have you arrested for what you did to me last night.”

“I didn’t do anything to you, Officer Rollins. You just fell on your ass, man.”

“Let me speak to Mona.”

I hung up then and took a deep breath. I was still as lost as I had been before. But now I felt a little better. All the pieces to the game I was playing had settled into their places. Maybe I was going to lose my position, or my life, but it seemed possible that I could make some decisions from that point on. At least I had obtained some kind of free will.

“Honey,” I said to Mona as she lay dejected and wretched on our couch.

“What?”

“Let’s go out to dinner and then, and then let’s get Seela and go to that inn you like in Montauk.”

“It’s Saturday,” she said. “It’ll be booked up.”

“I’ll call,” I said. “If they’ve got a room, we could go there.”

Seela answered the door wearing the same blue housecoat.

“Millie and Martin are asleep,” she whispered.

“I got us a room in Montauk for tonight and tomorrow night,” I said. “Come with us.”

At any other time Seela would have said no. She didn’t like sudden changes. But I was sure that she was in bed thinking about her transgressions, and she must have felt especially used with Martin in bed with Millie again.

Seela was a good girl and easily made to feel bad.

“Okay,” she said, failing to make a smile.

“We’ll be in the car out front,” I told her.

I had already called Svetlana.

“I’m going to take Mona and Seela out to Long Island for a day,” I said. “I have to get things straight with them.”

“Okay,” Lana said.

“That’s all? Just ‘okay’? Aren’t you mad at me?”

“No. They are your family. I will be here — waiting.”

“Lana—”

“Don’t worry, Ben, darling. I am here... for now. You must live your own life. I will be here waiting for you.”

When I got down to the car, I found Mona asleep against the passenger-side window. We owned an old Citroen. It was olive green and had the look of a VW bug that had been squashed down by some heavy-footed behemoth. It had a hydraulic system that made you feel as if you were riding in a boat instead of a car. And owning a Citroen was unique; there were no other cars on the road to rival it.

I got in behind the wheel.

“Is she coming?” Mona asked.

“I thought you were asleep.”

I rubbed the palms of my hands along the laced leather guard on the steering wheel. The supple and yet rough texture against my skin elated me. I was alive and still able to move forward in my own life.

“I was watching two men have sex in that doorway across the street,” she said, almost wistfully. “One of them was dressed like a woman. He was fucking the other one. I was watching them and then I was in Saint Croix with my family on a vacation.”

“She’s getting dressed.”

“What are we going to do, Ben?” Mona asked, sitting and waking up with a twist of her shoulders and torso.

We hadn’t talked much at dinner. She was still too sad about Harvard and his sudden, inexplicable desertion.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Barbara Knowland?” I said in answer to her question.

We both knew how long it took for Seela to put together her things and so it made sense to start a longer conversation. We had at least fifteen minutes’ waiting time.

“Harv said that he should look into it before bothering you,” she said, avoiding looking into my face.

“Had you already started your relationship then?”

Mona hesitated a long while and then whispered, “Yes.”

“So you made love and then decided, or maybe it was the other way around,” I speculated. “Maybe he told you to leave me flapping in the wind and then he took you up in his arms.”

“You don’t have to be cruel, Ben.”

“Did you at least consider telling me?” I asked.

“Yes. Of course I did. But, you see, Barbara didn’t call me first, she called Harv. She knew him because he had talked to her in Oakland, to see if we should do the original story on her. He’s the one that told me about the accusation. Telling you would have involved him and that was just too... confusing.”

“But, honey,” I said in an evenly metered voice, “not telling me might have gotten me sent to prison for the rest of my life.”

Mona looked at me sorrowfully and Seela rapped on the window. She had a bag that was filled with enough stuff to go away for a week.

“Pop the trunk, Daddy.”

Mona and Seela slept on the long late-night drive. Or, when I think back on that night, maybe they just pretended to be asleep. Both of them had a lot on their minds. Mona betrayed me and in return was let down and deceived by both me and her lover. Seela was losing her parents, and she had in her own way betrayed those that she loved.

I worried about them on that ride, and not as distant relatives with vague problems, which is how I usually saw my wife and daughter, but as victims of my own wanton disregard.

I didn’t feel guilty about what I’d said to Harvard “Harv” Rollins. A man had to do something to derail an affair like that. But all those years of quiet indifference I showed Mona and Seela had taken from them the water of life. They were dried-up seeds hoping for dew or the sweat of strangers. And I was the drought, the famine that afflicted them.

Oddly, these thoughts soothed me on that three-hour drive. I felt that my passive crimes against my parents, my wife, and daughter explained why people were after me, looking to put me in prison.

It was as if I had summoned up Barbara Knowland and Winston Meeks, Harvard Rollins and my wife’s betrayal. I was guilty and this was my punishment.

Most guilty men, I’d been told many times over, see themselves as innocent; this is the tragedy of the criminal: Because of his denial of guilt, he can never learn and therefore cannot contribute to the rehabilitation, not of himself but of the world that he has wronged. But I was guilty and I knew it. Maybe I hadn’t murdered Sean Messier, but I had wronged my family.

When these notions came into my mind, I laughed out loud. The ladies roused in their slumbers, or pretenses, and then settled again.

We got a place at the beachside Montauk Manor House because someone had cancelled a reservation just an hour before I called. They left the door to our bungalow open and we tumbled in late that night, all of us going to sleep almost immediately. We didn’t even take our bags from the car.

I awoke to the sound of the ocean through the open window, the susurration of waves felt as if it were calling to me.

Mona was deep asleep. She didn’t stir as I climbed out of the rickety bed. I went into the common room of the suite. Seela’s bag was on the broken-down blue sofa. That meant she was up and had already gone to the car.

The sliding glass doors that led to the ocean were open.

I could see my daughter walking down along the beach in shorts, her dark legs scissoring the bright sunrise.

“Hi, baby,” I said, coming up to Seela.

I was barefoot, wearing gray suit pants and an old T-shirt.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, responding to her tone of voice.

“I don’t know how to talk to you now that you found me up there with Martin.”

“I already told you about me, honey, and it’s not like you did something wrong, Seela. You aren’t married to Jamal. Martin’s not married to Millie. It was me that was wrong for even mentioning Jamal’s name.”

“It’s not that,” she said.

The cold water from the sea rolled over my bare feet and pant cuffs. It crossed my mind that I would have never allowed my business clothes to get wet like that before.

“What is it then?” I asked.

“Are you going to break up with Mommy?”

“That has nothing to do with you or anything you’ve done.”

“When Marty came over yesterday, I had no idea what was going to happen,” she said. “Neither did he.”

“Nothing wrong with spontaneity.”

“No, but there’s something wrong with me. I feel it in my shoulders and at the back of my neck,” she said. “If a boy or a man touches me there, I can’t help myself. When Marty put his hand on my shoulder, he was just being friendly, but after that he couldn’t stop me. I’ve been like that ever since I was fourteen.”

“With other kids at school?”

“And two teachers.”

“What teachers?”

“I won’t say, Daddy. They shouldn’t have done it, but I’m the one who came on to them.”

Again I thought about being guilty. I humiliated my daughter by shining a light on her indiscretion. Now she opened a door for me to pass through. Where was I when she was so vulnerable? Where was I when she was a child having sex with men? And why would I burden her with my troubles? I felt responsible but out of control, like when I would go out on a drinking binge in California and Colorado.

My little ugly duckling, that’s what I had always thought about Seela. Could she have read my thoughts? Had I ever called her beautiful, as she was to me now? Had I looked into her eyes when she got home from having sex in the cloakroom with Mr. Hodges or maybe Mr. Rhynne?

My strength left me and I fell to my knees in the wet sand. Seela knelt down beside me.

“Don’t tell Mommy,” she said, “not ever.”

“Have you written about any of this in your diary?” I asked. “No one knows. I haven’t written about it and I haven’t told anyone, not a soul but you.”

The cold wave on my knees sent a tremor through me. And a thought came into my mind.

“On those days that you, that you did that, what did you write in your journal?”

“I just wrote down things that happened a long time ago,” she said, “or I made something up.”

She was my daughter all right. She protected herself automatically, like a seasoned boxer or some amphibian hatched onshore but who instinctively knows to run for the water before the ominous shadows descend.

“Would you consider going into therapy for a while, Seel?”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“Uh-uh, no. But I do think that you feel guilty for things you’ve done, and if you can talk to somebody who’s safe, maybe you’ll learn how not to feel bad.”

“But I don’t feel all that bad most of the time,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. But sometimes isn’t it like you can’t feel anything? Like there’s a dead space where your life ought to be?”

The glow of realization in her eyes told me I was right. My daughter had been created out of my own cold remove.

She put her arms around my neck and I felt naked, exposed. The passion of her hug was one thing, but there was much more going on. It felt as if I were on an abandoned beach with the first true love of my life. And in a way it was true. My ability to touch her was electrifying — something that I hadn’t felt for so long I couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. My heart was pounding. My breath was ragged and out of control.

“Daddy, you’re hurting me.”

“Let’s go wake your mother up and get some breakfast, okay?” I said.

On our walk back to the house Seela said, “I’d like that, Daddy.”

“What?”

“To see a psychologist. I’d like to talk to somebody about how I feel.”

I called my own therapist after pancakes and bacon at Myrtle’s Seaside Diner.

“I was waiting for you,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Shriver. I needed to take my family away. They’re hurting and most of it is because of me.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“I don’t know if we’ll be back. We might stay here another day.”

“If you can’t make it,” Shriver said, “I’ll keep the appointment open. I know you’re going through a lot, but try to get in to see me.”

“I can’t make it in the morning,” I said, “but I could do it about three.”

“Three then.”

I hung up and Mona was standing there smiling at me. Smiling. When was the last time that had happened?

That was the last day that we were a family: Mona, Seela, and Ben. We rented a rowboat but never made it more than a hundred feet from the dock. There was a strong current that our oars couldn’t master. But we laughed a lot and then spent the afternoon swimming. At least Seela and her mother did. I’m not a very good swimmer. I get frantic in the water, fearing I might sink. So I lay down on the sand and drifted in and out of wakefulness, having little naps and blinking at the sun.

In one reverie I was in a garden in Colorado in the spring. I was walking with a brown and beautiful woman wearing a see-through, gossamer white dress. Her dark nipples were hard, pressing against the pale fabric. We stopped at a rosebush with large orange and red and yellow flowers. The woman leaned toward a huge rose, got the whole thing in her mouth somehow, and bit it off. As she chewed the petals, I noticed that a thorn had tom her bottom lip. She felt the pain and licked off the blood and then smiled her bloody and beautiful smile for me.

I awoke with a start to see my wife and daughter on their knees on either side of me.

“Take us to dinner,” Mona said.

“Yeah,” Seela added.

That night our daughter fell asleep early. Mona and I were still wide awake. We had gone to bed, however, because that’s what we were used to doing. We had even kissed good-night but our eyes remained open.

I was thinking about Star Knowland and her testimony that I had murdered a man twenty-some years ago. Certainly there was the possibility in the air that I would spend the rest of my life in a Western prison. It didn’t matter if I was guilty or not. I could be convicted.

Fear was gnawing at me. It was building into panic when I turned to Mona and said, “Tell me how this thing with Harvard Yard started.”

“I thought this was a vacation, Ben.”

“It’s after midnight. By noon tomorrow you’ll be back at work. He’ll come to your office and you’ll fill into his big, strong arms.”

“It’s over between us,” she said, not looking at me.

“You mean, if he came to you and said he was sorry and that he loved you, you’d tell him no and spend the rest of your life with me?”

It almost was funny, how honest Mona was. She heard my words and considered them. Of course she’d run to Harvard; he was Ivy League, whereas I was just a two-year training college.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m sitting here in the dark thinking about prison. Because you knew about Barbara Knowland and didn’t even say a word. Not only that, you left me alone in the house to fend for myself when Winston Meeks was looking for me. Because you would have told him where I was if I had told you.”

Mona sat up exposing her breasts. This revelation was shockingly unsexual.

“You wouldn’t understand, Ben,” she said.

“What?”

“I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Why wouldn’t I understand that?”

“Because your whole life is like a day-planner. You wake up at the same time every day whether or not there’s an alarm or clouds or sun or if the curtains are pulled. Because you go to work each day and come home every night and you’re never mad or excited or frustrated. Because you never tell me that I need to do more or to be home. You never get jealous when men call and I flirt with them on the phone.”

“I was jealous of Harvard Yard.”

“His name is Rollins.”

“I don’t care what his name is.”

“That was the first time,” she said, “the first time you ever got the least bit jealous and I had already been fucking him for over a month.”

“So tell me how it started,” I said again.

Mona was seething. I was manipulating her but I didn’t feel guilty about it. She could see what I was doing and I needed the friction to save me from sliding down into the hole she had helped to dig.

“Do you remember when I went to Oakland to interview Barbara Knowland for the story?” she asked.

I remembered that she’d gone out of town to do an interview but I didn’t know with whom or even where. I nodded though.

“We were staying in the same hotel, Harv and I,” she said. “I had some wine at dinner and he walked me up to my room. I guess I had been talking about how I wanted more life out of... out of you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. And so when we got to my room, he tried to kiss me. I didn’t let him, not at first. Then I said just one kiss. He hugged me close then and we kissed with a lot of feeling. I pushed him away and he took my purse and found my key card. He opened the door and kind of shoved me into the room. I couldn’t help it, Ben. It made me gasp. Wherever I turned, he was there. And I was feeling him. Do you hate me?”

I pulled aside the blankets to show her my erection. Without another word she climbed up on it. The shock of entering her was something I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager. She looked into my eyes, grinning while she bounced her hard buttocks against my thighs. Every time I came close to orgasm, she stopped and stared at me as if I were a stranger to her.

“Do you know why I was so upset the night you fucked my ass?” she whispered.

I shook my head, astonished by the language she was using, the language she learned from other lovers.

“Do you know why I was bleeding?”

“No,” I gasped.

“Because I had just let Ham do that to me that morning in my office. I made him wear a condom but I was still so scared. He held his hand over my mouth and whispered things to me.”

“What?” I asked. I didn’t want to but I couldn’t help myself.

“He’d tell me when he was going to press deeper,” she said, “when he was going to give me more of his cock.”

The hunger and pleasure in her voice were completely alien to me. It was as if I were with some other woman.

“Come,” she said, seeing the orgasm build in me. She grabbed my hair and sneered at me. “Give it to me,” she whispered, and I screamed and lurched under her like some machine that had slipped its gears and was coming apart under its own force.

We were strangers again in the morning. On the long ride back Seela talked to Mona about her classes and her &ends in school. The things she said were probably true but I knew that they were a shield for my daughter’s real feelings and experiences.

I dropped Mona at our apartment and then took Seela down to her place.

“Are you going to be all right, Daddy?” Seela asked before getting out.

“Are you all right?” I asked back.

“I’ll be okay. But what about you and Mommy?”

“We’ll be okay, honey. We’ll make it. Maybe we won’t be together, but we’ll make it.”

By the time I had parked in the lot and walked back to our place, Mona was gone.

There was a light blinking on the answering machine. There were eight messages, all from Harvard Rollins.

“Mona,” he said in the h t one, “I’m sorry. Let’s talk.”

The installments got more and more intense until he said that he was going to call his &ends at the police department to make sure that she was okay.

That’s what dragged Mona out of the house. His passion and need, his love and willingness to act.

I felt bereft. Maybe, I thought, Mona had made such deep love to me so that we could both know what we were giving up. It wasn’t Rollins but our last bout of lovemaking that sounded the death knell of our relationship. As long as we didn’t say anything, didn’t get close enough to see who we really were, there was a chance that we could remain together. But now it was done. It was not possible for me to give her what Harvard Rollins could provide. And now that I knew about him, I could see too clearly into the fantasies my wife had to keep her from going mad.

At noon I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Ben,” she said, and then she paused for maybe half a minute. In those thirty seconds she swallowed the years of anger and complaints. I could almost hear the unspoken grievances smothered in the silence on the line.

“How are you, Ben?” she asked at last.

“Okay, Mom. What about you?”

“I’m all right,” she said in a voice too high.

“I’m sorry about the other day,” I said. “I got a lot on my mind and when you kept on ragging on me, I just couldn’t take it.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Why did Dad used to hit me and Briggs so much, Mama?”

“Is that it? Is that what’s bothering you? Your father’s discipline?”

“Discipline? He whipped us with that strap until we were covered with welts, and we never did anything wrong.”

“Never did?” she said. “You were defiant. You disobeyed. You, you ran in the streets.”

“We were always home by four.”

“You were supposed to be there by three thirty. Don’t you understand? He had to stay on you like that. If he hadn’t, you might have turned out bad.”

“Like Briggs?” I asked.

That started my mother crying. It had been many years. I’d forgotten the tears, her defense against male anger.

“Did beating Briggs keep him from dealing drugs?” I asked.

“Why are you persecuting me?” my mother asked. “Why are you saying these things? We only tried to raise you right.”

“By Dad beating one of us every other week? By him threatening us with beatings every day? By him refusing to let Briggs stay at home after they arrested him that first time?”

“Your father had to teach Briggs a lesson,” my mother said. “He couldn’t spank him anymore. He was a man. And, and we had to worry about you.”

“By taking away my brother?” I said.

“You don’t understand.”

“All right,” I said. “Maybe I don’t get it. Maybe he was trying to do something that I missed, that Briggs missed.”

My mother was the depth of night on the other end of the line — silence and darkness made up the whole of her presence.

“So let me ask you a question to see if maybe we can talk about this a little... Mom?”

“Yes,” she uttered.

“Let’s say Pop didn’t like pork chops,” I said. “Let’s say he hated pork chops. He told you never to put pork chops on the table when he came home to eat.”

“But your father loved pork,” my mother said from a field of fond memory.

“But let’s say he didn’t.”

“Okay. But he did, you know.”

“And so one day,” I continued, “you found this recipe for pork chops that you were sure he was going to love. You spend the whole day making these very special pork chops. And when he gets home and he sees those chops on the table, he grabs you by the hair...”

“No.”

“...he grabs you by the hair and throws you on the bed. He takes off all your clothes until you’re buck naked and he twists your arm so that if you try to squirm it hurts like hell...”

“No!”

“...and then he pulls off his strap with one hand and whips you and whips you until there’s welts all up and down your legs and your body...”

“No.”

“...and when you say, ‘Please stop,’ he tells you that he asked you not to make pork chops but did that stop you? And he keeps on beating you until your arm feels like it’s breaking and your body feels like it’s on fire.”

“Please, Ben, stop.”

I heard my own plea in her voice. I was my father using my tongue as the strap. The receiver in my hand was her arm all twisted and mangled.

“Would that be okay, Mom? If he did that to you like he did to Briggs and me. Would you have stood quiet and forgiven him?”

I expected her to hang up on me this time. The susurrous sounds made by some soft friction on her end made me think that she was quivering with rage and sorrow. I had said everything I had ever wanted to. I was ready to give up on my mother.

“You never understood your father, Ben. He had a hard life, a scary life. Nobody ever showed him the slightest bit of love after he was seven and his parents and sisters died in the fire. He loved you and Briggs more than anything, and all he ever wanted was to make you boys into men.”

What she said was no doubt true. Rage stoked the fires of his love, but it was still love. He worked twelve-hour days and never bowed down under the weight of his responsibilities. He never abandoned his family. The beatings were filled with his passion for us. I could see that.

“I have to go now, Mom,” I said.

“You must forgive him, Ben.”

“Would you forgive him if he beat you like that?”

“I would have rather he did it to me than you, Ben. I would have taken your punishment if I could, because seeing your pain was the worst thing in my life. I stood by because the only other thing I could have done was to take you away. And if I did that, your father would have died.”

It was the truth. I knew it. My father, who loved me as much as nuns love God, had to beat me in order to stave off the demons that bedeviled him. And my mother had to watch or to kill him. The only other answer would be that I was never born, that some other child had taken my place in my father’s torture chamber of love.

There on the east side of Midtown I sat with the phone pressed to my ear. Thousands of miles away my mother sat in the same pose. Both of us were silent, both of us grieved for the love we did know.

Time passed effortlessly in the face of that shared, silent misery. I realized that I had no notion of what my mother felt. I understood that I could have gone to my father’s funeral. I could have gotten on a plane and said good-bye.

I had never been to his grave site, never sent flowers or even asked what was written on his stone. Maybe my name was there... Derek Dibbuk survived by Briggs and Ben. I didn’t even know if my father had a middle name.

They say we live in the most advanced culture in the history of the world. But there I was, more ignorant than any lump of coal.

“Ben?” my mother said.

“Yeah, Mom?”

“You have to let it go, baby.”

“But, Mom,” I said. “It’s all I have. I’ve hated Dad every day since I can remember. I never think about it. But all he ever was to me was a beating waiting to happen. He broke Briggs. That’s why I used to call you, to try to explain why I drank and ran around so much.”

“But you cleaned up,” my mother said. “You got a good job and gave us a grandchild. Your father was very happy about that.”

“I didn’t clean up, Mom. I gave up. I stopped feeling. At least when I was drunk I was feeling something.”

“I feel sorry for you then, baby,” she said.

I hung up.

On Dr. Shriver’s couch I continued thinking about my dead father.

“...he would tell us stories about when he was a tough down in Texas,” I was saying, “but when we asked him how life was when he was a child like us, he got all broody and quiet. If we pushed too much, one of us would have ended up getting a whipping.”

“Did you love your father?” Adrian Shriver asked.

“Not in the way I wanted to.”

“What does that mean?”

“I loved him because I needed him... for my survival,” I said. “I needed him to save me and at the same time not to beat me. I needed him for food and shelter and protection against the outside world. But I never loved him for who he was. He scared me. He came from a world that I never wanted to see. He was angry and drunk and smelled like cigarettes.”

“You smell like tobacco now,” Dr. Shriver said.

“These cigarettes are more important than therapy,” I said. “If I didn’t have them, I’d go mad.”

“How would that look?”

“I’d get violent. I’d, I’d holler and shout. I’d go out and kill Harvard Rollins for sleeping with my wife. I’d kill her too...just for good measure.”

“Would you really?” he asked.

I sat up on the sob, clasping my hands tightly. I looked at the gentle doctor. My reflection in the lenses of his glasses hid his eyes from me. I stared at myself, my hands grasping at each other.

“That is the central question of my entire life, Adrian,” I said, his first name unfamiliar on my tongue. “Would I actually lose control? Could I? Have I?”

The therapist shifted his head and his eyes came into view. There was sympathy in that gaze, real concern.

“And the answer is,” I said in my imitation of a game show host, “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“And so when Barbara Knowland suggested that you committed some heinous crime, you believed that it might be true.”

“It echoed with something deep inside of me,” I said. “My mother said to me just today that my father beat me because he loved me. What kind of lesson is that?”

“Your mother is still alive?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Did I tell you that my father died seven years ago and that I didn’t go to his funeral because I had too much work?”

“Mr. Dibbuk,” a serious and masculine voice announced.

“Yes?”

I was coming out the front door of the therapy office. This door was a few feet below the sidewalk. The men were waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

“Officer Bandell,” the white man who called to me said, identifying himself. He was showing me a badge and an ID card in an open wallet. “I’m sorry but you’ll have to come with us.”

Mona had heard me on the phone. That was the only way they could have known I’d be there that afternoon.

There were two cops with Bandell: one black, the other Asian. The Asian man put handcuffs on me. The black officer took me by the arm. I was in the custody of the military arm of the Rainbow Coalition. Soon I’d be thrown at the feet of Jesse Jackson and asked to repent my antisocial ways.

They locked me in a cell with a middle-aged man like myself, only he was white and short, silent as a stump, and almost without affect. He sat on the corner of his cot, across from me, staring off into space — less like a thinker and more like a coma victim or maybe even an open-eyed corpse.

The officers said very little to me on the way to the precinct. They told me before taking my belongings that I was being held for up to seventy-two hours while someone higher up was considering my case.

“What case?” I asked them.

“I have no idea,” Officer Bandell replied.

They took my fingerprints and my shoelaces. They itemized the contents of my pockets and took down my name, social security number, date of birth, and home address.

There were no bars on our cell. The door was metal, painted green, and solid. There was only a slit that I could look out through. If my roommate wanted to kill me or I wanted him dead, there was no one to stop us.

I didn’t find out the squat white man’s name. He never even spoke a proper sentence to me.

“How you doin’?” I said to him upon entering the cell.

“Huh,” he replied with a nod.

“Dibbuk?” a man said.

I woke up out of a completely dreamless sleep. My summoner wore a gray uniform with a hat that you’d expect to see on someone who worked for the railroad.

“That’s me,” I said, trying to get my head straight.

“Come on.”

He turned and left the cell. I followed. Three other men were waiting for me outside. One wore a blue uniform; the other three were clad in gray. They surrounded me in diamond formation, their protection unbreakable. They didn’t even bind my hands.

We went down an extraordinarily long hall of green cell doors and lighter green walls, turned a corner, and walked down a hall the same length again. Then we came to a huge elevator. The man who retrieved me from the cell pressed one of the middle buttons. The elevator moved so slowly I didn’t know if we were going up or down.

We came out into a large square room that was lined by doors on all sides. They brought me to an office in the far-right corner. One of my guards opened the door and I entered, wondering if I could have subdued those men and made my escape if I were some great martial arts master.

Sitting behind a very messy desk was a huge-faced white man with a pink wart on his nose. His nameplate said BILL TORNAY. Tornay was reading a file, maybe mine, and scowling hideously.

“Sit,” he said without looking at me.

There was one chair but it had a few dozen manila folders on it. I wondered if I should remove the folders or just sit on them.

The monster looked up at me after a few beats of indecision. “I said, sit down.”

I sat on the folders.

“Ben Arna Dibbuk,” he said. “Is ‘Ben’ short for ‘Benjamin’?”

“No, it’s not.”

“What are you in here for, Dibbuk?”

There was an odd scent in the air. I didn’t know if it was the man or just his environment, but it was a sour odor that had a ripe edge to it. I felt my butt slipping on the slick folders.

“I have no idea,” I said, scooting backward in the chair. “Officer Bandell just picked me up and said that they were going to hold me.”

“Did he allow you a phone call?”

“No.”

“Did he read you your rights?”

“He never asked me anything and he said almost as little.”

My turn of phrase caught the ugly man’s attention.

“It says here that you’re a computer programmer,” he said. “Where do you work?”

“Our Bank.”

“Are you in trouble there?”

“Not that I know of.”

He studied my face, looking for signs of criminality or depravity. He leaned back and the office chair cried out as if in pain.

“Do you want to make a call?” he asked.

“Do you know what time it is?” I had lost track of the hour.

“Eleven fifteen.”

“Tuesday morning?”

That got the man to smile. He was even uglier when showing good humor.

He called to the men in the hall and they took me to a corridor of pay phones. One of them handed me a quarter and they let me loose among the dozen or more little cubbies that contained the phones. The corridor was actually a cul-de-sac, so they didn’t have to worry about me running away.

“Hello?”

“Hey, brother man,” I said.

“Ben,” Cassius Copeland said with real happiness in his tone. “Where are you?”

I told him about my arrest. He took down all the information I could give him and said that he’d look for a lawyer. After he hung up, I sat there for a while longer, pretending to speak to someone in low tones. I didn’t want to go back to that cell. As long as I was in there, it was okay, but now that I was out, I wanted to stay out.

Finally I knew I had to get off. I hung up and went back to the jail guards.

In my cell again I wondered about Mona. She was definitely with Harvard again. Sex with him would always be better. She was even fucking him while using me for the cock. But maybe she hadn’t actually betrayed me. Maybe she had mentioned about the therapist and he passed the information on without her knowledge.

I didn’t hate her for loving someone else; I was just lonely. My daughter most likely didn’t even know that I was missing. I felt completely alone in that cell. I think I would have cried if my silent cellmate weren’t there.

I wondered if this was how it would be in Colorado once I was convicted for the murder I may or may not have committed. Would I just be sitting on a cot staring into space, counting the days, looking forward to rice pudding on Friday nights and letters from my daughter?

She would get married, have kids, and send me photographs. I would look at those pictures, feeling distant, disconnected. But I’d write letters telling her how beautiful the children were and I’d send them little gifts that I’d make in the wood shop or metal shop that the prison afforded.

I spent the rest of my jail time having fantasies like that. I thought about my mother coming and apologizing for her negligence. I thought about my brother getting out of prison and him coming to visit me so that he could gloat over how far I’d fallen.

“You were always the one they liked more,” he’d tell me.

“They never liked either one of us,” I’d say to Briggs. “We were both failed experiments — like Frankenstein’s monster or American democracy.”

A few hours after I’d been to see him, the green metal door opened and Bill Tornay entered. The cell stank from my roommate’s use of the commode. I was embarrassed that the warden coming in would think I had made that smell.

I had closed my eyes while my cellmate took his grunting shit. We’d had two meals; powdered eggs for breakfast and bologna sandwiches on white bread for lunch.

“Mr. Dibbuk,” the hippopotamus-faced ugly man said, “come with me.”

He was alone. Standing up he was more of an oddity than he was behind the scrim of refuse piled on his desk. He had small, slender shoulders while his legs were huge, shapeless pillars of flesh. He walked as an elephant might if an elephant stood upright on two legs. It was a shambling, side-to-side motion that had very little to do with everyday humanity.

The sour-ripe smell did come from Tornay. It wafted behind him, making me want to take the lead. But I couldn’t do that. I was a prisoner; I would be for the rest of my life.

We took the long halls again, rode in the elevator again, but this time we exited into a room that had sunlight in it. We went to an office, where a white man in a sharp dark suit stood.

“Mr. Dibbuk,” the man said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Agent Lawry. I’m with the FBI.”

“What does the FBI want with me?” I asked.

Bill Tornay was already gone. The door closed behind him.

“The FBI has no interest in you, sir,” Lawry said. “I’m just here to take you somewhere.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

After giving me my things back, Agent Lawry took me to the police garage. He drove a black Ford. There were no frills in the company car. It seemed like a rental; impersonal and clean.

Lawry was of medium height and in shape. He had no facial hair, pimples, or blemishes. His brown hair was cut short, but not too short. Once we were in the car, his sentences were all five words or less.

For all his studied anonymity, the FBI man had a very peculiar face. It was both flat and thin. This seemed like a contradiction. Long faces needed to come out and flat ones belonged on round heads. If I had ever seen Lawry on a street or across a room, I would have remembered his odd mug.

I asked him questions about my arrest and him coming to retrieve me. His answers were all short and meaningless.

He’d driven us for a dozen minutes, no more, when we came to a stop. I was surprised to see that we were parked in front of Joey Bondhauser’s Steak House.

“Here you go,” Lawry said.

“So we’re finished?”

His only reply was a nod.

“Ben!” fat Joey said in greeting.

He was sitting at the bar, drinking from a large glass of clear liquid.

My hand disappeared into his powerful, fleshy grip.

He pulled me to a bar stool, where I perched nervously.

The ex-intelligence officer had brown eyes and brown hair that was probably dyed. His face was very round, rotund actually. His smile held no warmth or even mirth, but that seemed to me an honest expression. He didn’t know me; why feel all personal and cuddly?

“Cass says you got problems,” Joey said.

“Yeah.”

“Between him and me, we’ve seen a whole world of trouble,” Bondhauser confided. “Magda.”

“Yes, Mr. Bondhauser.”

Magda was wearing a red dress that day. She was so beautiful that I could imagine someone aching just by looking at her.

“Make the rooms ready for Mr. Dibbuk here. He’ll be meeting Cassius Copeland up there.”

“Yes, sir.”

When she turned away, I felt a little sad. My time in jail, however long it was, had made me feel that I would never behold beauty again. There was a feeling growing in my chest. It was like a small sphere of radiant energy, pulsing out of sequence with my heartbeat. After a moment I realized that this feeling was yearning — something that I had never allowed myself to feel as an adult.

“You want a drink, Ben?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What’s your poison?”

I wanted to say cognac, cognac in a big snifter with a lime peel on a dish at the side. And not just one snifter, but many of them over the next few days, while the police searched for me and while my wife rutted with the detective — rich amber liquor moving through my veins like chamber music on a sunny afternoon in a many-windowed room in July.

“Cranberry juice,” I said. “No ice but a twist of lime.”

Bondhauser called the order over to his bartender. There was a hint of disappointment in his tone.

“Cass is a great friend of mine,” Joey said then.

“He’s a good guy.”

Joey looked at me, pondering my diffident reply.

“Lotta good guys in the world, Ben,” he said. “Work friends, drinking buddies, guys who’ll lie to your wife when you need ’em to. But a great friend, a friend like Cass, is there when you need him and he’s there for the long haul.

“There was a time once when I was out on my own. My boys didn’t want me and their enemies wanted me dead” — it seemed as if Joey was staring straight through my forehead, into my mind — “I was what they call persona non grata. And Cass was the only man in the world who would go to bat for me.

“I’m not talkin’ about raisin’ his voice and complaining. He put his ass on the line. And when it was all over, and I was back in the saddle, he didn’t even ask for a — for an extra nickel or the slightest consideration.

“You see how he eats at the counter here?”

I nodded as the bartender brought my red drink.

“He doesn’t have to do that. I let all my old friends, the ones that abandoned me, eat at the bar. But Cass knows that he could come up to my house any day and eat up in the bed with my wife and kids. He could have my whole damn house, my bank account, and I wouldn’t flinch. Cass is a great friend. There’s not enough gold in the Federal Reserve to pay for something like that.”

I said nothing to all this. Bondhauser had gotten passionate over his notions of Cass, and even though I agreed with him, I didn’t believe anything I could say would match his fervor.

“And so,” Joey said, “when Cass comes to me and tells me that one of his best friends is in trouble, I stand up. I call the FBI. I tell my man there, Heydrich Lawry, that I need him to come up with some pretext to bring that man out of the tombs.

“Don’t get me wrong, Ben. You don’t owe me a damn thing. I did all of that because of Cass. He’s the real article and I owe him big.”

Magda came up behind her voluminous employer. I was glad to see her. Joey Bondhauser’s emotional demonstration made me nervous. I didn’t know what to say or even how to sit or hold my hands.

“The rooms are ready, sir,” she said.

“Good,” Joey said to her while looking at me.

He gripped my hand again and brought his face close to mine.

“I will go as far as Cass asks me to help you, Ben. Don’t forget that.”

The “rooms” made up a beautiful suite on the top floor of the skyscraper that housed Joey Bondhauser’s Steak House. The sitting room had a western view. The Hudson was prominent and buildings leading uptown glittered in the afternoon sun.

“Would you like me to stay with you?” pale-eyed Magda asked.

“Don’t you have to be at work?”

“Mr. Bondhauser says that you are my most important job today.” Her look was both defiant and submissive.

“Wow. Imagine that. A lowly computer programmer tended by a woman worth ten of him.”

“What can I do for you?” she said in the same mild accent that Svetlana had.

“I’ll call the restaurant if I want anything,” I said. “Right now all I need to do is rest.”

Magda nodded and left the room.

I went to the window and stared at the stone and steel, the glass and smatterings of flesh that made up my adopted city. My fingers were tingling, and if I closed my eyes, I was back in that cell with the man who never spoke. The smell of the jailer who had released me was still in my nostrils.

I thought about Cass’s offer to kill Star Knowland. Her death would have probably vouchsafed my freedom. That, along with the view, brought to mind the scene in the movie The Third Man where Orson Welles asks Joseph Cotten, what difference would it make if one of the tiny ants so far below stopped moving?

Very little, I thought, but still I couldn’t be the one to give the order. I could not ask for her death. I didn’t believe that I had murdered a man. If I had, wouldn’t I be able to kill Star, a real enemy?

“Hello?” she said.

“Hey, Lana. How are you?”

“Ben. Where have you been? I thought you’d be back yesterday.”

I told her about my arrest.

“Are they going to take you to Colorado?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. But will you meet me at the hotel tonight?”

“Yes. I have missed you. I want to make love.”

There were many books on the shelves of Joey Bondhauser’s little getaway. He had the complete works of Dickens, Twain, Hugo, Balzac, Conrad, Zola, James, and many others. One shelf was stacked with modern, well-read paperbacks. I got the feeling that Joey let many people stay in his “rooms.” The classics on his shelves were probably put there by some designer, but the paperbacks were brought in by his guests.

I glanced through these soft-cover books, uncharacteristically drawn to the stories told. I read the first few pages of a couple of thrillers, but they didn’t grab me. There was one book, however, among the mysteries and nonfiction hits, that struck a note. It was a book called The Night Man, about a guy, a kind of mortal vampire, who only went out after the sun set. His name was Juvenal Nyx and he abhorred the daylight because of a philosophical turn of mind. It was a story, of course, about unrequited love. Juvenal fell for a woman who was a painter, a watercolorist, a child of light. The fiber of him was antithetical to everything she thought and believed, but he loved her anyway.

It was a silly story, really, contrived to an absurd degree. Even the names announced themselves as symbols and metaphors. But for some reason I found myself identifying with the man that lived in darkness.

The doorbell was a small line from some piano sonata. When I first heard it, I thought that a radio alarm had gone off. But when the musical phrase repeated, I went to the door.

Cass was standing there. Unexpectedly for both of us, I put my arms around him and held on tight.

“That’s okay, brother,” he said as I released him, looking sheepish. “Jail’s a bitch, ’specially when you ain’t been there before.”

We went to the living room and sat. The way Cass was dressed was unusual for him. Instead of black on black he wore a dark blue business suit with a yellow shirt, a burgundy tie, and ruby cufflinks. He smelled of sweet cologne and carried a fancy red-brown leather briefcase. After asking me about “my head,” he got up and concocted a drink from gin, orange juice, seltzer, cranberry juice, and a powder that I didn’t recognize. He made this drink at the stand-up bar placed at the end of the bookcase.

“You got trouble, Ben,” Cass said after he was seated again.

“No kidding.”

The security chief reached into his briefcase and came out with an edition of Diablerie. It must have been the second issue, because the first, I knew, had a picture of Lena Hess, the new singing sensation from France, on its cover.

This copy sported a glamour-mug portrait of Michael Lord Hampton. He was a rapper before but now was making a name for himself as a serious actor. He was a handsome man — dark and deadly-looking.

Superimposed in red upon his blue jumpsuit was the headline, DIABLERIE EDITOr’s HUSBAND SUSPECT IN 20-YEAR-OLD COLORADO MURDER CASE.

The brief article was on page 36:

There was no byline but I was sure that Mona had written it. And she would have had to have done it before we went away to Montauk. Seeing her words damning me in a national publication almost defeated me. I was going down and my wife was helping secure the weights to my ankles.

“That’s a bitch,” Cass said when I looked up.

“In more ways than one.”

“How could she do that to you?”

“I don’t really understand,” I said. “It’s almost as if she hated me. But I haven’t done anything to warrant that much, um, passion from her.”

“What do you want to do, Ben?”

“If I go to my therapist, will they arrest me again?”

“Probably.”

“I have an appointment with him at six today. Do you think Joey has a phone that can’t be traced here?”

“We could come up with something,” Cass said. “But what can a therapist do? You got to spill some blood, man.”

“No. I don’t know what happened yet.”

“It doesn’t matter what happened,” Cass argued. “Some bitch wants to put you in prison, for a long time. And you know they’re gonna try to blame you for this guy that died in jail. You need to act.”

“Just get me a phone, Cass. I’ll tell you what I want to do by tomorrow.”

Cass left and a while later Magda brought me a beat-up old cell phone.

“Mr. Bondhauser says that this is what you wanted,” she said.

“Yes,” Shriver said, answering his office phone.

“I can’t make it in today, Doc,” I said. “I hoped we could do this on the phone.”

“Why can’t you come in?”

“The police want to arrest me.”

“For what?”

“I think it’s that Colorado wants to extradite me and the NYPD has offered to hold on to me for a while. There weren’t any charges.”

“It’s hard to do deep therapy over the phone, Mr. Dibbuk.”

“What if I lie down and close my eyes while we talk?” I asked.

“We can try.”

“I’m worried that maybe I killed somebody, Adrian,” I said. “This Barbara Knowland says I did.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know. I mean, at first I didn’t even think I knew her. I still don’t remember. But then she seemed to know me and I wondered why would she lie about all this?”

“That’s a good question. Why would someone lie about you?”

“Do you think I could kill somebody, Doctor?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “There’s a rage against your father in you. With that level of anger, anything is possible.”

“Why can’t I remember?”

“There could be many reasons,” Shriver said. “You may simply have blacked out because of the drinking. You said that there might have been a struggle, maybe you were struck in the head and experienced limited amnesia. And of course none of it may have ever happened. Barbara Knowland might have her own reasons for blaming you.”

“How can I get my memories back?” I asked.

“Are you sure you want to remember?”

“Yes. More than anything.”

“Okay,” Shriver said. “Every morning when you wake up, sit in a comfortable chair with your eyes closed and think about Barbara Knowland’s face. Can you get a picture of her when she was younger?”

“Yes. There’s one in her book.”

“Every morning concentrate on that face for a minute and then close your eyes. Try to summon her up in your memory.”

“We could leave the country,” Svetlana said at three in the morning.

We had not made love. My mind was elsewhere.

“Where could we go?”

“Europe. I speak many languages. Asia. I have always wanted to live in Brazil during Carnival.”

“What about international relations?” I asked.

She shrugged and brought two cigarettes to her mouth. She lit both and put one between my lips.

“Things are always changing,” she said. “I wanted to come to America so that life would be like Disney World. You know... everything safe and nice. But then I meet you and I am forced to love you. Love is not something you can say no to. You can quit a job or a club or even a country, but you cannot quit love.”

I looked at her thin legs, her dense and golden public hair. I tried then to summon up in my mind some resentment about Sergei. Hadn’t Lana betrayed me too? Yes. But I couldn’t be angry with her. I couldn’t afford the pain.

But neither could I call up the love that she was talking about.

“You can learn to love me,” Svetlana said.

“Can you read my mind too?” I asked.

“Only your face,” she said smiling. “You look so worried when you can’t love me back.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What do you want from me?” Svetlana asked.

“Nothing.”

“No. This cannot be. Love is jealous and what do you call it... small-minded. You must want something from me. My body, my money, my freedom.”

“But what if I wanted you to feel pain?” I asked, not knowing where the question came from.

“Then I suffer for you.”

“But that’s not good.”

“Love is not good,” she said with intense disgust on her face and in her voice. “It is not a little boy turning in his homework. Love is when you fuck me in the ass and my blood and my shit is on your cock and on my sheets and I clean you and my bedclothes and I am happy doing this. I am happy to have you back even when you have been with another woman. I am happy when you ask me to leave my husband and my children to go running where men are trying to kill us.”

Lana was breathing hard. She took a deep draw on her cigarette.

“Love is when I call you in the bed with your wife and tell you to come to me.”

She was lying. No, not lying, but saying what she thought I needed to hear. And she was right. I needed an example of someone giving up everything for another.

“And if I go to prison in Colorado?” I asked.

“You must ask me to come with you to see if I love you.”

“But you’d be throwing away your life.”

“No... I wouldn’t,” she said.

This answer was enigmatic but I had no desire to decipher it.

I leaned over and kissed her between her breasts. She crushed out her cigarette, then mine, and hugged me like a man hugs a woman.

In the morning I thought about young Star Knowland. I imagined her, tried to remember her for over an hour. I got nowhere and so I took out the beat-up cell phone that Magda gave me and called information.

“Plaza Hotel. How may I direct your call?” a woman asked.

“Winston Meeks,” I said.

“One moment please.”

“Hello.”

“Ben Dibbuk here, Mr. Meeks.”

The straight line of words stopped there for a moment. Meeks was shocked into silence.

“Where are you?” he asked slowly, deliberately.

“I’m willing to be debriefed here in New York,” I said.

“My boss now says that he would like to see you in Denver.”

“One step at a time, Mr. D.A. Promise me that I can leave and that you will not get the police to arrest me and I’ll come over, today if you like.”

“How can I get in touch with you?”

“You can’t.”

“Call me back in two hours,” he said. “Call me then and I’ll tell you.”

Lana went off to school and I sat in the bed thinking about love. I was almost happy that I’d run into Star Knowland. She opened my life up like an overripe fig. I had been festering inside. I was rotting and didn’t even know it.

I believed that I could never really love anyone but now I saw that I could if I allowed myself to feel the pain. This was a wholly new concept for me and it was astonishing that a virtual child had shown me the way. My careless generosity with her, my callous treatment of her life, created something that marital vows and fatherhood had not given me.

It was almost beyond belief that I could have lived for forty-seven years in backward stupidity about something as simple as this.

My father beat me and I loved him for it. Not in spite of the pain but because he touched me with care, no matter how violently. He needed me to crawl and so I crawled. He needed me to hide from the light of others’ feelings and so I built myself a shell out of alcohol and then later with that feeling in my shoulders.

It didn’t matter. I had loved him from the first moment we met. I would keep on loving him until breath left me.

I called Cass at Our Bank and asked him to ask Joey for one more favor.

“Sure thing, buddy,” he said. “It’s no fun around here without you.”

“We are willing to make the deal,” Winston Meeks told me.

“Okay,” I said. “A lawyer will call you this afternoon at four. He will lay down the terms for any meeting I agree to take. When he calls me and tells me that it’s okay, I’ll come over.”

“You don’t need a lawyer just to talk to us, Mr. Dibbuk.”

“Oh yes I do. And you know it too.”

It took three days to work out the agreement. Meeks had to promise to leave the NYPD out of it and also to allow a “crew” (Cass’s word, not mine) to come with me to the Plaza suite.

In that time I got my life together as much as I could.

I went to Augie’s coffee shop at four fifteen on Friday afternoon. Mona was there. Her visits to that coffee shop were like my tight regimen of going to work. If I had wanted to kill her, I could have done it then. I thought about it but there was no reason really. Svetlana had taught me something about love — enough to know that I had never really experienced it as an adult. I couldn’t blame Mona for that. I asked her if she knew about the article they published on me.

“Yes,” she said, once again holding her phantom cigarette.

“Did you write it?”

She seemed like a computer program in a loop then. Her face and hands were stock-still; her eyes didn’t even blink.

“Yes,” she said, looking down. “What of it?”

“Are you back with Harvard Yard?”

“His name is Rollins.”

“I know what the fuck his name is. I even know that you lick the end of his cock and tell him how much you like the taste.”

Mona made to rise but I took hold of her forearm.

“Let me go.”

“This is the last time we’re ever going to speak, Mona. Let me get a little angry, huh?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m going to see the D.A. from Denver tomorrow. He’ll try to figure out if I should be extradited and put on trial. So either I’ll be in jail or otherwise gone.”

“What about Seela?”

“Why didn’t you tell Seela’s father that there was a woman who was blaming him for a murder that he doesn’t know anything about?”

Mona’s face shifted then. It dawned on me that she had had a strange look on her face ever since she’d heard Star’s story.

“You think I did it?” I said.

“You didn’t?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t remember her. I certainly don’t remember killing anyone.”

An unspoken, maybe even unconscious, apology crossed her face. She brought her fingers to her lips, the invisible cigarette forgotten.

“How could we be together for so many years and have this little trust?” I asked her.

“Harv said that there had to be something to it. Barbara knew too much about you.”

It’s funny how words are so delicate and still powerful. I could see Star at that moment lying across a couch or a bed. She was naked, big boned but young and also handsome. I did know her back then.

“But that doesn’t mean I killed anybody.”

“But...” Mona said. Here we were having our last verbal joust and she had just lost.

I smiled, relishing the empty victory.

“Could it be that you betrayed me because you love him, Mona?” I asked. “That all those years we spent building this life were nothing?”

“You never loved me, Benny,” she said.

“No. But we made Seela, we made a home for her.”

“I was sure that you were a murderer,” she said. “I was frightened.”

“Because if you told me, you thought I might have to kill you?” I asked. “Because you never knew me and you were &aid of your own mistakes?”

“I just didn’t feel safe,” she said. “That’s all.”

I was intent on allowing Mona to have the last word. It seemed right, especially since I had won our last argument.

I stood up from the stool. She touched my forearm.

“Where are you going?”

“That’s not really up to me, honey.”

“You smell like cigarettes,” she said, and I turned away.

We’d probably see each other again. In lawyers’ offices, in courts, at our daughter’s graduation if I was free, but the relationship ended there. I could feel it.

Svetlana made a home for me in her apartment. She cooked every night and bought me new clothes. When I tried to tell her that I might go away to prison, she wouldn’t listen.

“You and I are in love,” she’d say. “God wouldn’t take something like that away.”

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

“He believes in me,” she said with unqualified conviction.

We set the meeting with Winston Meeks for that Saturday. I overslept but that was my only symptom of fear. I met Cass’s “crew” at a coffee shop around the corner. Cass was wearing black slacks and a black turtleneck, like I was used to seeing him in.

The security expert was accompanied by Leonard Gideon, a bald white man with enough hair on his lip to make up for what was missing up top. He was bursting with energy that teetered on the verge of rage. Gideon was my lawyer. He shook my hand and asked a few questions, then he smiled under that bale of mustache, saying, “We’re gonna kick their asses, Arna, all the way from here back to the Rocky Mountains.”

Accompanying Cass and the lawyer was Charles Milford. Milford worked for the federal government in some capacity that was not clear to me. But Cass assured me that no city or state entity could arrest me if Milford objected.

Meeks’s suite was on the ninth floor. It should have been called an apartment it was so big. There were seven people waiting for us: the stenographer, two Colorado marshals, two female assistants from Meeks’s office, and the lie detector expert. The machine itself was set up on a table next to a plain pine chair. For some reason the setup brought to mind the electric chair. That made real the worry that I could be executed for the crime Star Knowland said I committed.

Gideon started the conversation. He presented Meeks with a stack of papers to sign. Whenever the Western D.A. balked, Gideon threatened to leave with his client, me.

After the preliminaries were done, Meeks and I sat across from each other surrounded by our seconds.

“Did you kill Sean Messier?”

“No,” I said, thinking, not to my knowledge.

“Did you know him?”

“No.” Again with the sentence finished in my mind.

“Did you hit him with a heavy metal object?”

“I just told you that I didn’t know him,” I said. “How could I have hit him if I didn’t know him?”

I could make out Gideon’s smile through the thatch of his mustache.

“Do you mind taking a lie detector test?”

“No. But I want to know something first.”

“What’s that?”

“That machine scares me. This whole thing is very anxiety provoking. How can you tell the difference between me being scared and me lying?”

The lie detector expert, who had been introduced to me as Roger, spoke up then. He was a short guy with bright eyes and facial hair that failed to become either a proper beard or mustache.

“We screen your emotions with test questions distributed throughout the interrogation,” Roger told me. “In other words, we factor in your fear quotient.”

“How accurate is it?”

“If you’re a sociopath or a deranged psychotic, it won’t work, but otherwise it’s a hell of a lot better than an eyewitness.”

I liked Roger. He was objective. A week before we could have been friends.

I was attached to the machine by my arms and one hand, my jugular, left armpit, and temple. They took my blood pressure beforehand and then attached a thimblelike cap to my left index finger to keep track of my heart.

They started with simple questions about my name, my marital status, my job. They asked me did I love my wife and I said no. They asked did I want to hurt her and I said no. They asked me if I had ever committed a crime and I said, not to my knowledge.

We went through preparatory questions like these for twenty minutes by the digital clock that sat on a table to my right.

After that the serious questions started.

“Did you kill Sean Messier?”

“No.”

“Did you strike him with a crowbar?”

“No.”

“Do you know Barbara Knowland?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t remember?”

“That’s right.”

“How long ago did you meet her?”

“Probably more than twenty years ago, back in Colorado.”

“Have you ever been to Sean Messier’s house with her?”

“Not to my knowledge. You see, I only have one fleeting memory of her lying on a sofa. It seems real enough, but that’s all I can remember.”

When the lie detector test was over, Meeks came back at me. He asked me about Harvard Rollins.

“Why does he have such a hard-on for you in this thing?” Meeks asked.

“He’s having an affair with my wife.”

“Did you go to Knowland’s hotel room?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To ask her to explain what was happening. She claims that I killed someone and I have absolutely no knowledge of that.”

“What did she tell you?”

I repeated what she said word for word.

When I was through, the room went silent. For long moments we just sat there, eleven men and women communing with some external force.

“Is that all you need, Mr. Meeks?” Leonard Gideon asked at last. “I’d like to know how to keep in touch with your client, Mr. Gideon.”

“You have my card.”

“He lives with you?”

The lawyer smiled and stood up.

“I could still have Mr. Dibbuk arrested as a material witness,” Meeks exclaimed.

“At the Brown Palace maybe,” Gideon said. “But the Plaza is in New York state and you couldn’t arrest a cockroach here.”

I took all my money out of the various accounts I owned and gave most of it to Cass.

“Put it someplace safe,” I said to him.

I quit my job and moved permanently into Svetlana’s studio. She seemed very happy to have me there. She got a job at a bookstore and told me to take at least six months off.

“You need to rest,” Svetlana told me. “Take it easy for a while and then, later on, you can do something else and I will finish my school.”

We made love every night, and in the morning I’d sit in my chair trying to remember Star and what we had done, or not, that long ago day.

I was still in therapy too. I paid Dr. Shriver in cash and he gave me a discount.

Six weeks after my deposition Leonard Gideon called me.

“They decided that there wasn’t enough of a case to prosecute,” he told me. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t plan any ski vacations in Aspen anytime soon.”

“How much do I owe you, Mr. Gideon?”

“I was happy to help a fiend, Ben,” he said.

I knew that I was not the fiend he was helping but I was grateful anyway.

Svetlana got pregnant and Mona moved in with, then broke up with, Harvard Yard. Since I was without a job, our lawyer told us that I could ask for alimony but I demurred.

Seela hates me now. Dr. Shriver found her a therapist who uncovered all the damage I had done to her. She sees the divorce as me abandoning her — that, and she can’t stand the idea of me with a woman as young as Svetlana.

They arrested Barbara Knowland after questioning her sister about the car they junked back in the late seventies. In her attempt to save herself from me, she put herself on trial. It seems that when her sister was deposed, she said things about the murder that were never in the news.

I get together with Cass on Thursday evenings at Joey’s Steak House. We never talk about anything important or emotional. I still don’t know a thing about sports, and talking about sex is definitely a no-no. But we seem to have a good time anyway.

I had been slipping back into my old ways with Svetlana. The numbness and the distance were always threatening to descend. And then one day I saw a news clip online as I was looking around for a new job.

At the trial Barbara maintained that I had been the killer. The defense and the prosecution wanted me to testify but I kept telling them that I had no knowledge of the murder, the man, or even of Star herself. Whatever she thought had nothing at all to do with me.

I never went to Colorado or participated with either side of the trial.

That night was Lana’s last night of work. I told her that I could cover the rent until she delivered and after that I’d get a job.

I felt secure in the presence of the Russian’s ferocious love. I didn’t understand it and I couldn’t share its intensity most of the time. But its power was like a great beating heart that protected me.

After she’d fallen asleep, I dozed off sitting there next to her.

I had a dream.

I was with Barbara Knowland on a blue couch that stood upon a white shag carpet. We were having quite vigorous sex. I remembered, somewhere outside of the dream, that when I was drunk or high I could really enjoy sex. Barbara was looking up into my eyes, her whole body shuddering every time I slammed into her. She screamed but not in pain or pleasure. And then someone grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to my feet.

It was a big guy wearing a greenish leather jacket and a cowboy hat, the stranger from my medieval dream.

He said something in the dream that wasn’t clear but I knew that he wanted me to go outside with him.

The next thing I knew, we were out next to a barn near a woodpile. I was naked, standing in the mud, and he was Illy dressed. The rain was coming down.

“Let me tell you what I’m gonna do, son,” the white man said to me in a frighteningly calm voice. I was drunk and nude — as vulnerable as you could get.

“I’m gonna beat you to the ground and then I’m gonna shove your head in with one’a them there logs.” He hit me then, hard. I went down and he turned to get the log to kill me with. I jumped to my feet and leaped on his back. He twisted around and hit me twice. I fell again. He turned again. I struggled up and got him in a bear hug from behind. I was begging him not to kill me.

“You should’a thought about that before you broke my window,” he said.

“I’ll pay for it,” I cried.

“You sure will,” he promised.

He twisted around, breaking my grip, and hit me three times. I tried to hit him back but he had pugilist training. He made it to the woodpile that time and hefted a log that had to weigh twenty pounds. I ran at him and he threw the log at me. It hit me with a glancing blow to the head. I went down but the fear of death kept me from going unconscious.

There was a length of steel pipe next to me. The cowboy had turned back to the woodpile. And then, for one brief moment in eternity, I became the soul of human perfection. I grabbed the pipe and willed myself to a standing position. I staggered forward as he was hefting an even larger log. As he turned, I swung and the pipe landed perfectly on his right temple. I remembered the feel and the sound of bone crunching. And then I remembered nothing until it was night and I was coming awake in the muddy yard.

I didn’t see his body, didn’t really remember it. I went to the house and found my clothes. The pipe was still in my hand. I dressed, took the pipe to my car, and drove for hours. Somewhere along the way I threw the pipe down an embankment. A little after that I parked and drank from the last whiskey bottle in my trunk.

By morning all I had to remember the past day was a cut on my scalp along with a few bruises, nothing out of the ordinary. There had been a woman and a fight, but by the time I was back home, those memories might as well have been dreams.

The sleeping vision woke me up. It was just after three in the morning and Svetlana was asleep. I wondered if I should call Winston Meeks. Star was innocent. She hadn’t killed anyone. But she did steal his money and his car. She had left me to shift for myself in the company of Sean Messier’s corpse. And she had tried to build a case against me with the Colorado D.A. and in Diablerie.

I looked down at my young girlfriend and a feeling of love rushed through me. I kissed her temple and she smiled. It occurred to me that the emotion I was feeling went far beyond Svetlana. It had little or nothing to do with Star Knowland’s self-demolition or the lucky break I got with the Colorado courts. There was an exhilaration in the dream I had. I was the killer. I had taken Sean Messier’s life. It wasn’t murder. It was most certainly self-defense, though I could have never proven that. But I didn’t need proof.

My whole life I had felt naked and defenseless, under the authority of a force much greater than me. When Messier dragged me out into the yard and explained to me how he was going to end my life, I felt that this had been the place I’d been coming to since I was a child. I gave up, accepted death, and then went through the motions of trying to survive.

The memory of my victory gave me a feeling of elation, but not only that: The emptiness in my heart was suddenly Ned. I was a whole man lying there next to that Russian child. I was a complete person — flawed, guilty, craven to a degree, but still these things and my victory made me whole.

I got up out of bed and sat in my favorite maple chair, naked. I was leaning forward with my elbows on my knees and my fingertips all touching. The dream I had was like a vision for Joan of Arc or some other religious zealot. It was like a deity touching my mind, awakening my imperfect humanity.

The path I’d traveled was strewn with victims: my wife and daughter, Sean Messier, Grant Timmons, and Star Knowland, even my mother, who stood in the shadows while my father beat me with love in his heart. My brother, I felt, was my victim too. I thought back over my many crimes and misdemeanors. But I felt no remorse, only a giddy happiness. I’d been waiting for this moment with no hope of ever achieving it. I hadn’t even known that I was my own hero, that I stood up to my death. And though I approached this test begging and whimpering, I still won.

These thoughts were part of a long train of ideas that passed through my mind that late evening. The sun began to rise and Svetlana reached out in her sleep. When she didn’t find me there, she sat up.

“Ben?”

“Don’t ever call me ‘Benny’ okay, honey?”

She blinked at me and nodded.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Thinking that maybe we should stop smoking,” I said. “It’s really not good for the baby, you know.”