Demon

His words were an exasperated exhale. “But that’s so boring. Butterfly should at least murder the second wife.”

I was the one noting the time now, calculating how late I might be up tonight. I needed to get through the stack on my desk before I allowed myself the indulgence, the release, of transcribing our meeting today. And then there was Helen, expecting to see something soon on this “demon memoir,” still the only viable project I had to give her—not because I didn’t have anything of merit from another author, but because it was the only one that mattered to me.

“I would think you might enjoy the tragedy.”

He crossed one leg over the other, brushed at his pants. “Tragedy is this: creating something excellent and having it go wrong . . . and then choosing a new and certainly less-deserving favorite. I had begun, by the time of the receding flood and the birth of El’s favored nation, the Israelites, to see this pattern. And I have seen it repeated now for millennia.”

The curtain had lifted, and stagehands were pulling apart the set. Beneath us on the mezzanine, ushers patrolled the rows, picking up discarded playbills.

“But here now, is the crux of it”— he stared at me—“there are those of us damned for one single, failing moment while you have the favor of an utterly partial God, willing to offer second chances again and again and again.”

THAT NIGHT I FELT my focus like fervor. It was well after 2:00 a.m. by the time I went to bed, spent, never having touched the stack of reading in my bag.

As I lay in bed calculating the maximum number of hours I could sleep and still get in an hour of reading before leaving for the office, it occurred to me that that was the real demon, the thing I dreaded, to which I gave my reluctant and disinterested eye. It did not move me; I did it because I must.

Sometime in the last three years, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was a better editor than writer. That I was not destined to see my name in print again except on the acknowledgments page. Now I began to admit to a dancing modicum of hope that I had been wrong. In the last week I had felt more creatively alive—if physically drained—than I had in years, even if the story I sculpted was not my own. Lucian’s story had taken root in the last fertile corner of my imagination, where surviving pieces of hope, ambition, even professional pride had gathered in silent refuge. I felt manipulated, and I still did not understand his motive in telling me any of this. But for the first time in more than a year, I felt a seed of volition in an existence that otherwise had none.

17

On the subway, I fought to stay awake. I drifted, my limbs slackening into a rolling lull where neither deadlines nor demons existed, where I was neither editor nor divorcé, where there was nothing but an oblivion that I had not known since infancy.

I shifted the bottle of Shiraz to the seat next to me. It was wrapped in a gold bag with a piece of evergreen twisted around the top, courtesy of the woman at the liquor store.

I had initially decided against attending Helen’s party. But after nearly ten hours of staring at twelve-point print, I could no longer pretend to care if my newest author’s manuscript consisted of three long, Dickensian sentences spanning 250 pages. I was weary of coming-of-age stories, of personal pain disguised as literature, of Ayn Rand-esque discourse that would take me as long to get through as it took to write Atlas Shrugged. By five o’clock it was all tasteless.

Sitting on the subway now, however, I regretted my decision to go. The three hours it would take to attend Helen’s annual holiday function were three hours I might have spent in the accounts of my meetings with Lucian, which had just recently begun to cohere into a single narrative.

But it was too late. Phil, whom Sheila affectionately called “Philly,” would be waiting at the Newton stop to take me to Helen’s upscale house in her upscale suburb where $520,000 might buy eleven hundred square feet in a hundred-year-old home if you were lucky. Of course, being lucky would mean you were too poor to belong there.

Aubrey had been enamored with the idea of moving to Newton—once her job in marketing took off and I had written my best seller, she said. Which meant, of course, that it was really just a pipe dream to support and inspire me; we both knew her income would always be the greater of our two. I never spoke about my vision of Belmont—Newton had been her dream, and so it necessarily eclipsed mine. After a while it didn’t matter; even her encouragements had begun to feel like a perpetual list of grievances, and I had retreated into silence.

Until that night.