After Gym Girl collected her clothes from the floor (an activity I enjoyed watching, causing as it did legs to tighten and flex, buttocks to twitch, and breasts to dangle most fetchingly) and dressed, she pecked me on the forehead and left me staring at the ceiling, reflecting on how easy and uncomplicated my inaugural infidelity had been. She had extracted no promises from me of future assignations, had made no imprecations towards my character, had claimed no duress, had indicated no sense of ownership or intention to reveal all to Manda or James.
"This was fun," she'd said. That was all.
Fun. I didn't know how to respond to that. It had been fun. A part of me had wondered if it would be more than just fun and more than just one night. But she said nothing either way, and I let her go before I could collect my thoughts enough to ask, Is this going to happen again?
Did I want it to happen again? Yes, I realized. But maybe it was just meant to be a one-night stand. An emotional quickie. We'd been building to this for months and finally the pressure valve blew and for one night, steam erupted freely and without consequence. Now she was back to James. And I would have to go back to Manda.
If not for the deep, pleasant soreness of my cock and the neon-lit memories, it was as though it had never happened.
"And the smell," the devil said, sauntering into the bedroom with two already-opened Brooklyn Pale Ales. "The smell of sex. You guys really went at it. Good on ya." He handed over a beer.
I glared at him and at the beer. "It's morning."
"I'm sure there's a point in there somewhere, but it eludes me."
I took the beer. The bottle was cool and the beer felt more than tasted astonishingly refreshing going down, despite the early hour. The devil leaned against my dresser and stared at me in anticipation.
"Don't look at me like that. I know what I did. I'm a horrible person, right?"
"Not here to judge you." Still, that piercing gaze. Waiting for something.
"I don't even feel guilty," I admitted. "I guess I have you to thank for that. If 'thank' is the right way to think about it."
He shrugged.
"What do you want from me? I'm not going to tell you what it was like," I told him. "Besides, you were here for it."
"Only for the beginning. Once you people actually start going at it, I can't stand being around. All those noises and faces..." He shuddered. "I'm just waiting for you to thank me."
"For what?"
"For getting you off the ground, son! I got her wet and ready for you, man! Without me in your ear, your foreplay would have been a foregone disaster."
"Considering who and what you are, you're pretty needy."
The devil sulked.
"OK, OK, fine. Thank you. Thank you very much for helping me close the deal. I appreciate your fornicatory advice." I saluted him with my bottle.
"Fornicatory isn't a word, writer-man." He sounded sullen, but he was grinning.
"It is now. When I say it, it becomes a word."
"Good deal." He opened the window. "We should air this place out before she gets here."
"Before who gets here?" But I knew -- Manda. Shit!
And that's when my phone rang. It was Fi.
The devil raised an eyebrow and climbed out onto the fire escape.
"Can I come over?" Fi asked. "I know it's early and feel free to say no, but I really would like to come over and talk to you. So is that all right? You can totally say no."
"You can totally say no" is one of Fi's best tricks. She manages to speak the words with an intonation that conveys the precise opposite, somehow implying that only by dint of her permission could I actually say no, and since she was so generous in giving that permission, how could I possibly repay that magnanimity with a demurral?
"Sure, you can come over," I said, and scuttled around the room looking for my clothes.
"I've never seen that before," the devil commented from the fire escape.
"What's that?" I asked, slipping into my boxers.
"A man pussywhipped without any actual pussy involved."
"Get off my back."
"You fucked a prime piece of ass real estate last night and this morning," the devil said. "You've got this Manda woman who is more than happy to come over at the drop of your shorts and suck you within an inch of your life. Those two facts alone should prove to you that you can get laid. But you keep mooning after this crazy ex of yours--"
"Did you just say 'mooning?'" I buttoned up my shirt. "Did the devil, the lord of all evil, just use the word 'mooning?' Really?"
He poked his head into the apartment. "It's a perfectly acceptable and respectable word!" he yelled. "Don't go all writer on me and start editing my shit, man! I won't stand for that!"
I tilted my beer in his direction. "Shine on, you crazy demon thing, you. I'm not mooning after anyone."
"Then why the fuck are you cleaning up the apartment?"
I stopped in my tracks. He was right. After getting dressed, I'd started straightening things up, unconsciously preparing for Fi's arrival.
"Fuck that," I said out loud.
"Amen, brother!" He swigged long.
I dropped a dirty sock where I'd originally picked it up. The bed was a jumble of sheets, the pillows scattered everywhere. I'd leave it like that. Let Fi see it. Let her wonder about my sex life. Ha.
Soon, the buzzer sounded and Fi entered the apartment, clearly wearing the previous night's clothes, her hair a tangle, her expression despondent. She launched into her usual Fi-alogue:
"Hey, thanks for this, I really appreciate it. I know how ridic it is, but I just needed to talk and I figured you'd be willing to listen, maybe, and I'm such a bitch, right? I know, I know. You're cool to do this. Is that new?" She pointed to a painting that had once hung on a wall in the apartment we'd shared, then went on before I could answer. "You were probably asleep. Were you asleep? Did I wake you up?" She dropped her purse by the door.
"Uh, no."
"Can I have a glass of water? Would that be OK? You would not believe the night I had. Just fucking insane."
I thought of my own fucking insane night of insane fucking as I poured her a glass of water. Fi was still eminently fuckable, though in my post-Gym Girl glow, I could rationally admit that Gym Girl was hotter. Still, there was something about Fi...
"...started out at Club One," Fi was saying, gulping the water, "which is where shit always starts, you know me, right? So I met this guy there and we drank more tequila than any non-Mexican should drink. Is that racist?"
"I don't--"
"You won't tell anyone I said that, will you? I have a couple of Mexican clients now, and they would kill me if they thought I was a racist. Anyway, lots of tequila." She finished the water and handed the glass back to me. "Tequila led to whiskey which led to vodka and by then we were at, like, our fourth bar. Some neighborhood place over in Red Hook, I think, and then he mentions that he has a bottle of fucking absinthe back at his place. And I'm all like, 'I haven't had absinthe since I was in England,' and he's like, 'We have to rectify that.' And we went back to his place. And by the way, at this point I still don't know the guy's name and I don't think he knows mine, either, but I'm not sure. Isn't that horrible?"
I thought of Gym Girl -- Abby! -- and shrugged.
"So we go back to his place and he actually did have a bottle of absinthe, which was sort of a surprise." By now she had wandered from the front door through the living room, nearing the bedroom.
The devil -- invisible to her, of course -- leaned into the apartment and whistled low and loud. "Someone's been rode hard and put away wet," he said. "If you get my drift." And dropped a salacious wink, just in case I didn't get it. Behind Fi, I waved furiously for him to go away, but he just shrugged and said, "If you've still got a stiffy for her, I'd forget about it right now. She's pumped full of another man's squishy."
"...keep ending up with these fucked-up guys," Fi was saying. "Not you, of course. I didn't mean to imply that." She turned at the bedroom
door and leaned against the frame. "What's wrong with me, Randall? I'm cute, right? I'm smart, right? I have an awesome career and I'm really good at it, but I keep ending up with these fucking..." She growled in inchoate confusion.
"Was he married or something? Have a girlfriend? Was it bad absinthe?" I joked.
"No, no, none of that. The absinthe was really good shit and he was good with his hands and I was really digging him and then... God, what is it with guys!"
"What do you mean?"
"I can't believe I'm gonna tell you this." She gazed at me from under heavily lidded eyes. Hangover eyes. Shame eyes. But also, far, far back there, mischievous eyes.
"Tell me."
"Everything was going great and he was pretty good and I was so drunk and high that 'pretty good' was really good and then he's like... He like says..." She blew her hair out of her eyes. "He wanted to come on my face."
Behind her, the devil chortled and mimed jerking off. I did my best to ignore him.
"How gross is that?' Fi said. "What possesses a guy to say that?"
"And on the first date, no less," the devil commented.
"Does he think I'm his fucking living, breathing porn movie or something?"
"Considering that you fucked him without knowing his name," the devil mused, "I'm gonna go with 'yes.'"
"Who knows what that shit would do to my skin?"
"It's actually--"
I managed to glare the devil into silence without Fi noticing. I wanted the conversation to be over. I also wanted it to keep going. And I also now couldn't get the image of coming all over Fi's face out of my mind.
"I let him come on my boobs instead. I guess he liked that. Seriously, what is it with you guys?"
"I don't know."
Why did I let Fi do this to me? Why did I let her come to my place and ramble about her life and tell me things I didn't want to know and badger me for advice and wisdom that I either lacked or didn't want to give? Why didn't I tell her to get out of my apartment, out of my life?
I didn't know. I felt strangely powerless in her presence, paralyzed into inaction by some combination of apathy and propriety. It felt like anything I did -- engaging her, discarding her -- would be wrong, so I took the path of least resistance and did and said as little as possible.
She deflated against the doorframe. I felt a completely inappropriate yet completely understandable desire to fold her in my arms and tell her everything would be all right. Idiotic. She wasn't my girlfriend anymore. And how the hell could I know if everything would be all right?
Fi flounced onto the bed with a groan and two warring impulses reared up in me like stallions and clashed forehooves. On the one hand, I wanted to shout, "Get off my bed! You don't sleep here anymore!" On the other hand, the sight of her in/on my bed again aroused not arousal, but rather a wistful sadness at what I'd lost.
And then she put her cheek to the sheets in precisely the same spot where I'd fucked Gym Girl not long before and with all my willpower, I just barely managed to suppress a burst of derisive laughter. The devil actually did a spit-take with his beer.
"Should I not be doing this?" she asked in that tone that said she expected me not to demur.
"Stay as long as you like," I told her, savoring a delicious irony that only I could taste.
"How are things with...what's her name? Mandy? How are things with Mandy?"
Fi had the ability to ask a solicitous question with the air of a corrupt defense lawyer.
"Manda. It's Manda."
"Sure. Sure. I knew that. How are things with her?"
"Fine," I said, not knowing if that was the truth or a lie.
"Do you think I'm a bad person? For going home with that guy?"
"Fi..."
"I know. I know. I need to stop fucking around and actually meet someone, but it's tough in this city. So is it so wrong to go home with a guy?"
"Probably not." As if I had the moral authority to judge.
"What about letting him come on my boobs? Was that OK?"
"Fi!" I actually laughed here.
"It made me feel skanky."
"She says that like it's a bad thing," the devil chimed in.
"You're both consenting adults."
"I still feel like a skank."
"The congealed jizz deep down in her cleavage sort of supports her on this one."
I thought I might throw up. Fi could tell there was something wrong with me and she sighed in that very special, very theatrical way she had. "You do think I'm a skank. God, I'm such a total whore. What is wrong with me?"
"There's nothing wrong with you," I assured her, not really sure myself and not particularly caring one way or another. I had had a sudden epiphany: Fi and I were over. For good. It was more over than over. It was beyond over. It was in that area of the relationship map where explorers of yore once wrote "Here be Dragons," a land hither and yon from which no one could return. I had never had the oft-spoken-of break-up sex with Fi, and I never would.
And I was fine with that. Though she was still undeniably sexy, my desire for her had waned, whether as a function of last night's romp with Gym Girl or Fi's own account of her night or the combination thereof. Looking at her, I now felt no more attached or drawn to her than I would to any other hot woman glimpsed on the street.
It was a pretty big moment for me. I didn't realize another was about to come.
Wherein the World Changes
After Fi left, the devil stayed out on the fire escape, claiming to be unfazed by the heat and humidity, a fact simultaneously obvious, clichéd, and revelatory. I stayed inside and paced.
"You're making me nervous," the devil chimed in. "Cut that out."
The thought that a mere mortal could make the devil nervous was laughable. I kept pacing.
"This is what happens when you lose your soul, isn't it? You become a cheater."
"Are you married to Manda? Committed to her?"
"I'm not not committed to her. We're not seeing other people."
The devil rested his now-empty beer bottle on the windowsill. "Get me another, would you?"
Grumbling, I fetched him another beer. "I gave you my soul and now you better live up to your end of the deal."
"Was that a threat?" he asked with idle amusement, taking the bottle.
I retreated to my desk. My superstitious ritual of going to Construct seemed juvenile all of a sudden. Maybe it was my success the previous night with Gym Girl -- it was as though my apartment (specifically centered in my bedroom) had become a sacred and mystical place, and my fingers flew on the keyboard with ease. It was going to be another multi-thousand-word day, and I was so used to my fecundity that this no longer amazed me. It seemed as objectively truthful as the fact that I'd bedded Gym Girl.
I put together a plate of cheese, crackers, and wasabi-roasted almonds to nosh on as I wrote, and the devil slipped into the apartment with a chaotic sort of regularity to swipe goodies with the air of a child who thinks he's getting away with something.
The phone rang. Caller ID said it was my father, making this a literally unprecedented second phone call in one week. Had something amazing happened in the world of hockey? Something he felt the need to share with me? Or, more likely, was he calling to see if I had any of Fi's used panties lying around, to give him that little push over the edge?
Reluctantly, I answered the phone, flipping a mental coin. Heads, he wanted to talk hockey. Tails, he wanted to talk...tail.
"Are you watching TV?" he asked, and the coin kept turning in the air. Could go either way: Hockey game or hot chick on the cell phone commercial.
"No, Dad." Coin still turning in the air, still indeterminate.
"I think they're talking about your book."
"That's impossible, Dad." My books don't get discussed on TV. Even my third book -- described as "sure to ignite controversy" by PW -- ignited precisely no controversy. (It's tough to ignite controversy when no one buys the book.)
"Turn it on. You're
the only Randall Banner who wrote Flash/Back, right?"
I sighed and hit the remote. "Yeah, Dad, but they're not--"
The coin finally landed. On the edge.
Wherein I Am Famous
Lacey Simonson was on my TV screen, as she always was, but this was Lacey Simonson as I had never seen her before. She was moving, for one thing.
For another, she looked like she'd been dragged through hell by her ankles. Her face was thin and drawn, her hair ragged and tangled, with a bald spot above her left ear. She licked her cracked lips over and over as she spoke to a group of reporters, wrapped in a rough gray blanket stenciled in yellow: "FDNY." A crawl at the bottom of the screen read:
LACEY SIMONSON FOUND ALIVE IN QUEENS PARKING GARAGE AFTER ESCAPING CAPTOR. IMPROMPTU PRESS CONFERENCE AT QUEENS FIREHOUSE.
But what did this have to do with my--
"...saved my life," Lacey was saying, her voice raspy and choked with emotion. "I read it over and over. It was all I had with me and it inspired me to--"
No. No way.
The crawl scrolled:
SIMONSON CREDITS NOVEL "FLASH/BACK" BY RANDALL BANNER WITH "KEEPING ME SANE" DURING ORDEAL.
I swallowed so hard that I thought my vocal cords might invert.
"--just so inspirational," she said, weeping. "I couldn't have survived what he did to me without--"
"See what I mean?" Dad said. "That's your book, right? I think I have one around here somewhere..."
"It's on the middle shelf on the bookcase in the living room," I told him absently, staring at the TV. They were re-running the same footage over and over -- it wasn't a live press conference. She had emerged and given a brief statement a half hour ago. But had the cameras...?
Oh, God. They had.
For a brief moment, the camera picked up Lacey's hand before it ducked under the blanket. She clutched a copy of Flash/Back like a teddy bear. And, bless her, it was in hardcover.
"Dad, I have to go. My call waiting is going nuts."
It was Sam, of course, who launched into a monologue before I could even say hello.
"You've seen? You've heard? If you haven't, turn on the news. Any channel, doesn't matter. Or go online. It's everywhere. I can't talk long because my phone is ringing like crazy and Fatima--" his assistant "--can't keep up on her own. God, Randall, I've never seen anything like this. Flash/Back is already going back to press. They have orders like you wouldn't believe. And they're doubling the print run for Down/Town. You won't be able to walk into a bookstore without being buried in an avalanche of your books, Randall. And the new one... The one you're working on. We're tearing up the contract. I've already got calls from Harper and Hachette. They want to buy out your contract. I've never seen anything like it. We need to do a deal. Fast. Send me a synopsis. Send me something. Oh, God, I have to go. That's our Hollywood guy on the other line. He's wetting his pants for you right now, Randall. You wouldn't believe it. And the publishers... They are horny for your new book. They are in lust with it and they haven't even seen it yet. They want to tie it down to the bed and do horribly kinky things to it. Get back to work. You're about to make a lot of money."