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ELEVEN
The demon lover didn’t appear that night…or the night after that, or the night after that.
I should have been grateful, but instead I was restless. I lay awake watching the shadows of branches quivering in the moonlight until the moon passed over my house and the moonlight faded. Then, since I still couldn’t sleep, I would pad barefoot into the spare room and take one of Dahlia LaMotte’s handwritten manuscripts back to bed with me. I read them quickly and uncritically, devouring the lurid tales of governesses and brooding masters, orphans and mysterious benefactors, with the added bonus material of extended sex scenes.
The demon lover insinuated himself into every one of Dahlia’s books just as he insinuated himself between the legs of her heroines…and under their skin. In each book the heroine found herself addicted to a demon lover.
I crave him as an opium addict longs for his pipe, India Wilde exclaimed inThe Far Moor. He is my opium. I inhale him and he comes to life. I take him inside me and I come to life. He is my life. Without him I would wither and die.
As I began to fear I would if I couldn’t shake off his hold on me.
I would read until the gray shadows of dawn fell where moonlight had fallen before. Then I would go out jogging before classes, choosing the woods again for my route. I ran as far as the honeysuckle thicket where I’d stop and listen for a moment to the thickly intertwined branches rubbing againstone another in the breeze. I would listen for birds caught in the underbrush, but the thicket was empty and melancholy. I thought of the painting in Briggs Hall of all those fairies and demons marching out of this world and into another through a thicket like this one and felt a peculiar tug at my heart. What would it feel like to leave one’s home and wander for eternity through an ever-tightening maze, the passage back narrower and more twisting with each passing year? It was a strangely evocative metaphor for exile that haunted me on my cool-down walks back to the house with the feeling that I, too, was an exile. Not from my old life in New York City—that I hardly missed at all—but from the demon lover I’d scared away.
Although the long runs and colder weather should have increased my appetite I found myself eating less in those first weeks of October. It was just as well since Phoenix abruptly stopped cooking.
“Do you mind?” she asked, handing me the takeout menus for the local pizzeria and Chinese restaurant. “I’m a little swamped right now reading my students’ work. They’re really on fire, especially Mara.”
“Does she write about her experiences in Bosnia?”
“Sort of. She’s writing a parable thatstandsfor her real-life experiences, which are too painful for her to face. I’m encouraging her to keep writing the parable with the hope that she’ll eventually confront the real facts of her life—as I urge all my students to do—but the parable itself is so vivid and violent, sodisturbing, I can only begin to imagine how horrendous the truth behind it is.”
“Really? Do you think you should show it to anyone…professional?” I was thinking of the shooting at Virginia Tech a few years ago and the violently disturbed writing the shooter had submitted to his creative writing classes, which might have, if it had been seen by a mental health professional, given a warning. But Phoenix was appalled by my suggestion.
“Oh no! I’d lose her trust entirely! I’ve promised her I won’tshow it to anyone until we’ve worked on it together. I’m meeting with her every day to go over her drafts.” Phoenix held up a two-inch thick purple folder. “So I’m sure I’ve got the situation under control.”
I wondered how well she had it under control. I’d been so absorbed in my own obsession that I hadn’t noticed right away how absorbed Phoenix was in hers. She was always reading Mara’s work. When I came down at dawn for my runs I’d find her asleep on the library couch with the purple folder lying open beside her, red-marked pages strewn all over the floor like blood splatter. When I passed her coming into Fraser Hall in the afternoon she was always clutching the purple folder.
Once, delayed in the hall by a student asking for an extension on a paper, I passed by Phoenix’s room fifteen minutes into the class and noticed that the teacherless room was full of students texting and playing games on their fancy cell phones. I caught Nicky Ballard’s eye and motioned for her to come out into the hall.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Is Phoenix here?”
“So to speak,” Nicky said, biting her lip, which I noticed was chapped and peeling. She also looked like she’d lost more weight. Guiltily I recalled that I’d meant to keep an eye on her, but I’d been too deep in my own funk to notice how bad she looked. “She’s in her office with Mara having another ‘writing conference.’” Nicky made air quotes with her fingers—the nails of which were bitten down to the quick. “We’re supposed to be working on our memoirs until she calls us in for conference, but she never gets around to anyone but Mara.”
“Uh-oh, that must not be going over so well. Has anyone complained to the dean?”
Nicky shrugged. “I don’t think anyone wants to. The little bit of Mara’s writing that she reads out loud in class is so…painful. No one wants to complain about the time Phoenix devotes to her.”
“But it’s not fair for one student to shanghai the wholeclass…” I began, but then, seeing how uncomfortable Nicky looked, changed tack. “How are you doing? Are you adjusting okay to Fairwick?”
She shrugged again—a gesture which I was beginning to see had become a sort of nervous tic for her. “There’s a lot of work. I keep trying to explain to Ben that I can’t hang out all the time because I have more work than him, but then he just accuses me of lording it over him for being at my ‘fancy private college.’” She air quoted again and I wondered how much of Nicky’s new life required the ironic distance of finger brackets.
“It’s hard on a relationship when one partner—especially the female one—is more successful.” I was thinking of how hard Paul tried not to mind when I’d gotten into Columbia and again when my thesis got a big commercial publishing contract and he had to rewrite his at his advisor’s request. “But that doesn’t mean you should feel guilty or not take full advantage of the opportunities you’ve earned. If Ben really cares about you he’ll understand.”
Nicky nodded, but she looked like she was about to cry. “Yeah, but the girls at community college don’t have to stay in the library on Saturday night. How long will it be before he figures out it’s easier to hang out with one of them?”
I sighed. Of course I’d wondered the same thing with Paul—not that UCLA was community college, but L.A. was full of leggy blondes and surfer chicks who weren’t three thousand miles away. To keep myself from being tortured by jealous fantasies I’d had to shut off a part of my brain—and, I had to admit, a piece of my heart. I worried sometimes that the result was that I didn’t love him as much. Sometimes I wondered if I had ever really loved him enough or if Annie was right—that if I really loved him I’d have found a way to be with him. Lately when we talked at night I found myself impatient to get off the phone. I should have been counting the days until his arrival on Thanksgiving, but instead I was mooning over a phantom lover. Was that why I’d summoned the demon lover—because I wasn’t satisfied by Paul? And was the reason I’d never been satisfied by Paul that I’d been measuring him against the fairytale prince of my teenaged fantasies?
“If it’s meant to work out it will,” I said, wishing I could think of less lame advice to offer Nicky. But she nodded as if I’d said something sage.
“Thanks, Professor McFay. It’s nice of you to spend the time talking to me. I know you must be busy.”
Guiltily I thought about the stack of ungraded papers lying on my desk at home and the ones weighing down the messenger bag strapped across my chest. I’d been feeling so despondent that I’d let myself get behind in my work.
“I do have your last essays to grade,” I said, patting my bag. “I’d better be going…but, please, if you need to talk…”
“Thanks, professor. I will.”
Nicky went back into class and I headed across campus. Although it was only the last week in October, most of the leaves had fallen from the trees already and it was cold enough for a winter coat—but I hadn’t worn one. I was wearing the Armani tweed blazer, turtleneck, skinny jeans, and thigh-high boots that were my favorite fall outfit. Back in the city it got me through the season to Christmas, but here I saw I was going to have to put on a down coat and long underwear by Thanksgiving. I was so cold crossing the quad that I decided to pop into the library and do some work there. Every time I tried to grade papers at home I ended up in the spare room reading a Dahlia LaMotte novel. Maybe working in the library would give me the discipline I needed to finish grading these papers.
