“Ow! Ohhhh, shit.” The water turned off. I stood outside the bathroom door.
“Gianna, are you okay?”
“No,” she sobbed. I opened the door. She stood inside the shower, huddled in a bath towel. Part of her hair was dripping wet and pasted to her face.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“It hurts. The water from the shower hurts my skin. That’s how achy I am. Pathetic, huh?”
“Gianna . . .” I moved to help her.
“No, don’t touch me. It hurts. Everything hurts. But I want so much to be clean, Lou.” Her bloodshot eyes pleaded with me.
“Why don’t you try a sponge bath?” I pulled a wash cloth from her towel rack and handed it to her.
“But what about my hair? That’s the worst part.”
“You could wash it in the sink . . . or I could wash it for you.”
“You’d really do that for me?”
“Sure. Yes. I would. I would do that.”
“Wow. Um, okay. Let me do this first.”
“Just come out when you’re finished.” I stepped out of the bathroom and closed the door. The impulse to leave her apartment and never come back swept over me, and then it was gone, as if a ghost of my former self had passed through my body on its way to oblivion.
I found a plastic basin and a small pitcher under the kitchen sink and filled them both with hot water. I moved her gifts off the couch to make room for her to lie down. As I set the large red department store shopping bag in the corner, I noticed the horn-blowing angel printed in gold on the side of the bag. I smirked, wondering how Michael tolerated these watered-down images of him and his colleagues.
Then my stomach went cold. Michael . . . What were his words? “Don’t assume Gianna will be as lucky as Doctor Faustus was.” I turned my head towards the sound of Gianna’s whimpers.
“You bastard . . . don’t you dare.”
The bathroom door opened. Gianna appeared with a towel around her neck and a bottle of shampoo in her hand.
“What are you doing?” she said.
I covered my paranoia with a smile. “I thought it might be more comfortable for you just to lie back on the couch and stick your head over this,” I pointed to the basin, “rather than standing over the sink. You could put the pillow under your neck.”
She didn’t speak, only nodded and settled herself on the couch. Her limp black hair was matted and oily. I dampened it, then worked the shampoo into her scalp.
“How’s that?”
“Nice, real nice.” Her voice was raw and hoarse.
“Tell me, is it normal to be this sick with the flu?”
“I hear it’s a nasty virus this year. Ellen was miserable from it. Maybe not this bad, though.”
“So you think you caught it from her?”
“Probably. The night you were hanging out with your brother I brought her some chicken soup and Popsicles.” Gianna frowned. “Maybe I should’ve worn a big plastic bubble to keep out the germs. But I could’ve caught it on the Metro or at work, or anywhere.”
“So it’s very contagious.”
“Yeah. Why? Are you afraid you’ll catch it?”
“No—I mean, yeah, a little worried. If I were sick I wouldn’t be able to take care of you.”
“Then we’d just take care of each other.” I began to rinse her hair. She sighed. “Lou, you’re so good to me.”
I almost dropped the pitcher on her head. “What did you say?”
Gianna opened her eyes, bright with fever, and looked up at me. “I said you’re so good to me.”
I stepped back, stunned. That word had never been ascribed to me before. I’d been called a good dancer, good chess player, good nuclear strategist, sure, but never simply . . . good.
She closed her eyes again. “I don’t think I ever really believed you before when you said you loved me. Now I believe you.”
I rinsed her hair, dried it, then changed her sheets and tucked her into bed. Gianna accepted my kindness without embarrassment.
“Feeling better?” I asked as she settled her head into the pillow.
“Much. If only I weren’t incredibly sick, I’d feel great.” She stretched out her hand to grasp mine. “Thank you.”
“Can I get you anything else?”
“Mmm-hmm. Please bring me . . .” she yawned “. . . everything.”
“For instance?”
“Medicine. Something so strong it’s barely legal to be sold over-the-counter.”
“Okay.” I picked up my coat.
“And some tea. Chamomile. And honey and lemon.”
“Right.”
“Tissues, too. A couple boxes. Soft ones.”
“Got it.”
“And throat lozenges,” she said. “The sugar-free kind so I can eat them after I brush my teeth at night.”
“Do you want to write this down for me?”
“No, thanks.” She fell asleep.
When I arrived at the drugstore, Beelzebub was coming out. “If it isn’t Santa Claus himself,” he said. “Did you have a merry Christmas?”
“It was interesting.”
He followed me back into the store. “We had a blast in Vegas. You wouldn’t believe how many little kids are there now that they’re trying to turn it into a family vacation destination. Nothing like playing with the minds of little people who still believe in the Bogeyman. It wasn’t the same, though, without you there.”
“I’m sure.” I found the cold medicine aisle.
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Getting something for Gianna.”
“Yoko’s got you running errands for her now?”
“She’s very sick,” I said.
“You seem a little freaked out, bro.”
“‘Freaked out’ doesn’t begin to describe it.” I turned to him. “I see her suffering, and there’s nothing I can do about it, nothing at all. We can’t heal, we can only hurt. We can’t create, we can only destroy. Doesn’t that ever bother you?”
“No. Besides, it’s just the flu.”
“Today it’s just the flu. But what happens someday when it’s cancer or congestive heart disease or some virus they haven’t even discovered yet?”
“She’s young,” Beelzebub said.
“She won’t always be young.”
“So what are you saying? That you’re gonna stick it out with her until she dies?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why not? Her life is just half a breath compared to mine. It’s hardly any time at all.”
“I suppose.” He twirled his bag around his finger. “Hey, if she had a tumor, you could destroy that.”
“I’ve thought of that. But if I did, I’d destroy her in the process. I’d be worth no more than chemotherapy or radiation.”
“I don’t know, Lou, but death and disease sound like two good reasons not to get mixed up with mortals for more than one night.”
An old man shambled into the aisle. Beelzebub moved a few feet away from me. The man searched the cough syrup shelf, picking up one bottle after another and reading it.
“Anyway, you seem to be doing all you can for her.” Beelzebub gestured to the shelf in front of me.
“No more than anyone else could. Even less, actually.” I opened my arms to the shelves. “There must be three hundred different cold medicines here. How is anyone supposed to know which one to take?”
“I don’t know.” Beelzebub scratched his head, then pointed to a blue box in front of me. “That one has a pretty cool commercial.”
“Yeah.” I picked it up and examined it. “But it says non-drowsy formula. Shouldn’t she be getting lots of sleep?”
“But you don’t want her to conk out while you’re having sex.”
The old man looked over at us.
“That’s not an issue,” I whispered to Beelzebub. “That’s how bad she feels.”
“Whoa. Then you definitely want the medicine that’ll put her to sleep.”
The
old man chose a cough syrup and left the aisle shaking his head.
“I think I’ll just get one of each color and let her decide,” I said. “So what are you here for?”
Beelzebub held up his bag. “Condoms.”
“You, buying condoms? I thought you swore you’d never do that.”
“Yeah, well, humans these days, they insist. And rape isn’t as much fun as it used to be.”
I dropped three of the cold medicine boxes. “Look, I have to make a couple of other stops before I go back to Gianna’s, so I’ll see you later, okay?” I walked toward the cash register.
“Okay. Hey, what are you doing New Year’s Eve?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“Right.” He stuffed his bag in his jacket pocket. “I guess I’ll see you around, then.”
I didn’t look at him. “Yes, you will.”
Gianna’s fever burned through the night, and my lack of need for sleep came in handy. Twice I changed her damp sheets and pillowcases for fresh, cool ones.
At 4 A.M. she awoke from another fifteen-minute bout of fitful sleep and said, “Is there anything on TV?”
“I checked already,” I said to her from the couch. “Four different shades of snow and an infomercial on a new peat moss.”
“I can’t sleep. I need a distraction.”
“Wanna have sex?”
“No,” she said. “Read me something. What are you reading over there?”
“The new Ronald Reagan biography.”
“Oh, Lou, that thing’s just a Republican PR campaign. Reagan’s not even dead yet.”
“I guess they figure he’s not going to do anything else memorable,” I said. “Get it? Memorable?”
“You’re sick, and I love you.”
“You sure you don’t want to have sex? You wouldn’t have to do anything. I’m very self-sufficient.”
“If you’re so self-sufficient, then why don’t you just jerk off?”
“Not in front of Reagan.”
“Ow, don’t make me laugh,” she said. “It hurts to laugh.”
“Should I make you cry?”
Gianna giggled. “Tell me a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“Any kind. But not a funny one, remember.”
“Okay.” I dragged a chair next to her bed and sat in it. “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”
“Oh, please.”
“Wait, this is going somewhere. See, the dark and stormy night is a metaphor for, uh, the psyche of our story’s hero. Yeah, that’s it.”
“Go on.”
“It was a dark and stormy night, inside the psyche of our story’s hero. For he was a monster, cursed to be alone and miserable throughout his existence.”
“Who cursed him?” she said.
“A sadistic, omnipotent wizard. No more interruptions, please.”
“Sorry.”
“No one knows why he was cursed. Perhaps it was all a big misunderstanding, but the fact was, he was cursed. He lived alone in a fabulously furnished tower, cursed and miserable, miserable and cursed, with nothing but his misery and his curse to keep him company—that and a talking iguana, but then the iguana died.”
Gianna batted me with a limp hand. “No funny stuff.”
“It’s not funny. He really liked that iguana. Anyway, our hero missed his pre-curse days, because he wasn’t always a monster. He was once a glorious prince, beautiful in both body and spirit, but his beauty had disappeared. However, somewhere it was written, although the monster didn’t know about it—it was probably a footnote in the sadistic wizard’s curse book—that the only way to break this curse was if a beautiful and intelligent woman would come to love him.”
“This sounds an awful lot like ‘Beauty and the Beast,’” she said. “And how come dumb ugly women don’t count?”
“Hey, at four in the morning, don’t expect originality or political correctness. So the monster meets hundreds of beautiful, intelligent women, and has some brilliant times, but none of them love him, because he’s a monster, remember, and besides they don’t get much of a chance to love him, because they never see him again.
“But one night he meets the smartest, most beautiful woman in the whole world, and she sees through all his monster bullshit and somehow figures out that there’s a prince hiding underneath.” I touched my fingertips to Gianna’s. “And the marvelous thing is, she loves both the prince and the monster, so he gets to be something in between.”
“And they live happily ever after?”
“Yeah. At least until they get run over by a big yellow steamroller.”
26
Dies Irae
Gianna’s flu receded over the next few days, and by New Year’s Eve she was able to walk without tottering. We returned to my apartment to get ready for our all-night revelry at the finest hotel in Washington, D.C.
As we passed through my living room, I stole a quick glance at the rug in front of the fireplace—no scorch marks.
“I have an idea.” I unbuttoned her blouse. “To save time, let’s shower together.”
“Save time, right.” She nudged my hands away. “We’re running late as it is.”
“Gianna, it’s been almost a week.”
“Then a few more hours of celibacy won’t kill us. I don’t want to get tired before our evening even starts. I’d like to be conscious at least through the end of the year.” She hung the dress I gave her on the back of the bedroom door. “Speaking of which, do you have any New Year’s resolutions?”
“I’m going to get a new tuxedo,” I said from the closet.
“That’s not very ambitious.”
“I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself.”
“I’m going to run for office,” she said.
I backed out of the forest of clothes. “What?”
“I said I’m going to run for office. I’m tired of kissing politicians’ asses, throwing myself on their mercy to get changes made. They’re not any better or smarter than I am, so why shouldn’t I take their jobs?”
“Gianna, that’s fantastic.” I embraced her. “What brought you to this decision?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Indirectly, yes,” she said. “Louis, since I met you, I’ve cared more about life, more about what I believe in, than I ever did before, even though you don’t believe in the same things.”
“I believe in you.”
“Exactly. It brings it back to me, to what I can do, the changes I can make.”
“You can, and you will.” I clutched her hand. “Gianna, you are so much stronger than you realize. Your power is incomprehensibly huge. Don’t ask me how I know, and don’t ask where it comes from, because I don’t know. I do know that if you unleashed it out there the way you do with me, the world would fall at your feet, just like I do.”
“Wow. You’re not just saying that to seduce me, are you?”
“If I were, would it work?”
“Probably,” she said.
“Then, no, I’m not.” I kissed her forehead. “Go take a shower.”
While we got ready, I formulated a strategy to make her president within fifteen, twenty years at the most. I decided not to startle her by revealing it all at once.
We arrived at the New Year’s Eve bash just as dinner was being served and thus decided to bring our bags up to our hotel room after midnight.
While we waited in line at the coat check, Gianna said, “I’m not going to drink tonight, except maybe champagne at midnight. I had to take an antihistamine before we left. The last thing I need is to make a drunken fool out of myself in front of the illustrious and powerful.”
“Someday you’ll be illustrious and powerful yourself, then you can drink all you want. Like me.”
“I don’t want to be—”
“Gianna? Is that you?”
We turned to see Adam Crawford standing next to the line. Beside him stood a short black woman with lively eyes and a wide
smile.
“Adam.” Gianna gritted her teeth. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re not the only one with friends in high places.” He put his arm around his companion. “Lorraine Morrison, you remember Gianna O’Keefe, and this is her . . .” He cleared his throat. “This is Louis Carvalho.”
Lorraine shook my hand and grinned. “Of course, from the Carvalho consulting group. You’ve made quite a name for yourself on the Hill. I work for Representative Livingstone, one of the House Judiciary Committee members.” Now I remembered her as the person talking with Gianna and Adam outside the Rayburn building after Gianna’s testimony.
Adam took Lorraine’s arm. “We’d better head into the dining room now. Good to see you both again.”
“Well, that was less painful than a root canal,” Gianna said when they were gone. “At least he seems to be moving on.”
“You didn’t see the way he looked at you. I bet this isn’t the last we’ll see of him tonight.”
Dinner was sumptuous and productive. I procured a few new clients from the Office of Management and Budget, and Gianna managed to wrangle an appointment with a Senate committee chair’s chief aide.
“You’re the only person I know,” I told her as I led her onto the dance floor, “who can lament the plight of the hungry while eating triple chocolate terrine.”
She didn’t answer me, and I noticed she was watching Adam and Lorraine dancing.
“Are you jealous?” I asked her.
“Huh? Oh, no. Not at all.”
“She seems nice.”
“Yes, she is. It’s just weird that less than a week ago he was begging me to marry him.”
“He proposed to you on Christmas? We didn’t hear that part.”
“You were eavesdropping?”
“Marc and I, yeah.”
She shook her head and sighed. “My brother’s a bad influence.”
“Maybe I should go over there and defend my honor. The nerve of that guy, proposing to my girlfriend while I was in the next room. I’ll get my dueling glove. Pistols at dawn, squire!”
Gianna laughed. The music changed to a slow dance. She wrapped her arms around my neck and began to sway with me. I shut my eyes and pulled her close to inhale her perfume.
Requiem for the Devil Page 23