Sympathy for the Devil

by Christine Pope

  It didn’t help matters much when I got into my car the next morning and stared at the fuel gauge in bewilderment. I could have sworn that it was getting close to empty; in fact, I’d made a mental note a few days earlier that I’d probably have to get gas on Wednesday. But there it was, the needle just a hair past full.

  Trying to win my affections with free gas? I thought, then shook my head and carefully backed the car out of the garage. There wasn’t a lot of room between it and the building, so even though I’d been doing the same thing for almost two years now, I still took it easy. Then I climbed out of my car, and shut the garage door and locked it.

  I was running a few minutes late, since my sleeplessness of the night before had led to some definite sluggishness this morning, but I doubted anyone would notice. Most of the magazine’s staff tended to be late-morning people. I got in around eight-thirty most days, and the only one who arrived before me on a regular basis was Marta, the receptionist, who had to be there so she could answer the phones. It was a good morning if anyone else showed up much before nine o’clock.

  I liked having that time to myself at the start of the day; it allowed me to attack whatever bits and pieces might have come in after I left the afternoon before. Besides, the one good thing about getting to work before my boss was that she didn’t have a clue about what time I actually showed up.

  The art department had produced a few layouts late in the day — they were waiting in my in-basket after I let myself into my office. Michael, the art director, and Jesus, his assistant, rarely appeared before 10 a.m., but they also usually stayed until at least six or seven, depending on what sorts of deadlines they had breathing down their necks.

  Yeah, I know — Jesus — very funny. But I didn’t name the guy.

  Anyway, I logged the layouts as being turned in and then went to put them in the feature editor’s inbox. As I was walking back from his office, Marta called out to me.

  “Hey, Christa! Delivery for you!”

  Mystified, I turned and made my way over to the receptionist’s desk. An enormous bouquet of roses in a cut-crystal vase sat there, almost obscuring Marta’s bright-red hair.

  “These just came,” she said.

  Of course the roses were my favorites — the creamy ivory type with deep red edging along the petals. There had to be two dozen of them — no lightweight baby’s breath helping to fill the vase here. Just glorious roses, so many I could smell them from a few feet away.

  Marta was looking at me with a mixture of envy and curiosity. Certainly no one in my dating past had ever shown any evidence of being this extravagant.

  I saw a cream-colored card almost obscured in the masses of flowers. I didn’t want to open it in front of Marta — not when I was fairly certain who had sent the flowers — so I only smiled and said, “Thanks, Marta. I’ll just get these back to my office.” And I scooped up the vase and hurried away before she could start asking any questions.

  Once I was safe within the confines of my own office, I plucked the card off the little plastic holder and sat down in my chair. With fingers that trembled just a little I ran a fingernail under the envelope’s flap and opened it. The card inside was the same plain ivory stock, so the black writing on it stood out plainly.

  Thank you for a wonderful evening. I’ll call you soon.

  The only signature was a scrawled “L.” For Lucifer?

  My phone rang. I jumped and dropped the card. Heart beating a little more quickly, I leaned over and looked at the display on the phone. All it said was that it was a wireless caller, with no number shown. Still, I had a pretty good idea of who it might be.

  Strange how I could identify his voice right away after only one evening spent in his company. “Do you like the flowers?”

  “They’re — they’re gorgeous.” All the normal questions, such as “how did you know those were my favorites?” or “how did you get this number?” seemed superfluous. Instead I asked, “How did you find a florist that was open this early?”

  “You have such a practical mind, Christa. I like that.” He paused, and then said, sounding amused, “There’s a place up on Crescent Heights that opens at eight.”

  “Oh.”

  Of course I couldn’t see his face, but somehow I got the impression he was smiling. “I wanted to know if you were available this evening.”

  Well, he was persistent. I’d give him that. “I can’t go out with you tonight,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  Because you’re the Devil, I thought, but I only replied, “I can’t go out every single weeknight — ”

  “What about this weekend?”

  “I’m going down to Orange County to see my mother on Saturday.”

  “Friday, then?”

  Resistance was obviously futile. “Oh, all right,” I said. Besides, it wasn’t as if I had anything else going on.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven. Enjoy the flowers.” And he hung up.

  I sat there for a minute, holding the handset and looking at it blankly, then replaced it in the receiver. It figured that my social life required the Devil’s intervention to bring it back from the dead.

  Trying to force him out of my mind — and not succeeding very well, with those amazing roses staring me in the face — I booted up my computer, then checked my email for any articles that might have come in the evening before. Several of our contributing editors worked freelance and just emailed their Word files from home. I’d been expecting three and had only gotten one. Typical.

  Still, it gave me something to work on. I opened the Internet radio client on my Mac and chose a classical music station; I needed something to calm my nerves. After a while, I got back into the rhythm of things, tightening the prose, fixing some egregious run-on sentences. Seriously, you’d think some people never paid attention during their high school English classes.

  Then I heard the voice of Jacqui, my managing editor, inquire in disbelieving tones, “Do not tell me those came from Danny!”

  “Um, no,” I replied.

  She came around the corner of the desk and looked from the roses to me and back again. “Spill,” she said.

  “Um….” I hedged. Luckily, I’d already hidden the card in my desk drawer, but still it was fairly obvious that Mr. On-Again, Off-Again Koslowski wouldn’t have sent me anything so amazingly beautiful. Or expensive. “I sort of met someone.”

  “Oh, thank God!”

  I wasn’t sure that was who she should be thanking, but I managed a smile.

  Jacqui was about fifteen years my senior and generally treated me less as an employee than as the long-lost little sister she never had. Most of the time I didn’t mind — in a lot of ways we were closer than I was with my own sister. But it also made for some awkwardness in the workplace. For one thing, she’d never approved of me seeing Danny. It wasn’t just that we were on the borderline of the whole “employees shouldn’t date other employees” policy. The magazine I worked for didn’t have a big enough staff to justify a full-time on-site IT person, so we contracted with an outside company to handle our computing issues. That’s how I met Danny in the first place — he’d come in to handle the upgrade of my older-generation iMac to a dual-processor machine with a cinema display.

  Maybe I was starry-eyed over my fancy new computer, and that was the reason I’d agreed to go out with Danny in the first place. But as time dragged on and it became patently obvious this was a relationship that was going nowhere fast, Jacqui had become more impatient with the situation.

  “Dump him,” she told me a few weeks earlier, after he’d blown off yet another date. “I’ll just have IT Solutions send someone else over here when we need service.”

  I pondered the surreality of getting dating advice from my boss, then shook my head. “I don’t mind,” I said. “We always knew it was going to be casual.”

  She gave me a dubious look. “If I were you, I’d stop wasting my time,” she said. “You think you have all the time in the world, and
then boom! You’re thirty-five and wondering where all the good men went.”

  Harsh experience motivated her, I knew; she’d spent almost ten years in one relationship, always thinking that eventually they were going to get married, and then one day he’d come home and told her he thought it wasn’t working out.

  Maybe Nina had the right idea. On the surface, women did seem to be a lot more reliable.

  “So now you can dump Danny,” Jacqui said, sounding very pleased with the universe.

  “I don’t know about that,” I protested. “I’ve only been out on one date with this guy.”

  “One date, which just happened to be on your birthday?”

  I didn’t bother to reply. I knew she was going to read whatever significance she wanted into that particular fact.

  “And he sends you flowers the next day?” She pushed her glasses back up on her head and gave me a piercing look. “Where did he take you?”

  “Campanile,” I said with a sigh.

  “A-ha!” She looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary. “So what’s this guy’s name?”

  “L-Luke,” I replied. After all, he told me to call him that, even though I was having a hard time thinking of him as anything except the Devil.

  “Luke what?”

  Well, that was a good question. He’d never given me a last name. “I’d rather just leave it at Luke for now,” I said.

  For a minute I thought she was going to keep prying, but maybe something in my expression told her she wasn’t going to have any luck. “That’s all right — you can keep your secrets if you want. But he sounds like a keeper to me.”

  Her comment made me want to burst out laughing. Somehow I managed to maintain a straight face, though. “He’s very thoughtful,” I said after a brief hesitation. That much was the truth, at least.

  Jacqui gave me another penetrating look, and shrugged. “Kick Mr. Koslowski to the curb,” she said, then departed, leaving me to stare at the roses and wonder exactly what I’d gotten myself into.

  It never rains but it pours. Well, that isn’t exactly true in Los Angeles, where we get lots of drizzly, misty stuff and not a lot of downpours. But in terms of my personal life, the saying pretty much hit the nail on the head.

  That afternoon, one of the sales guy’s PCs went blooey. The editorial staff and art department used Macs, of course — they’re pretty much the industry standard for anything on the creative side. But the sales and operations people used regular PCs, and they tended to crap out on a much more regular basis than the Macs did.

  So who shows up to fix the temperamental PC? Why, the absent Mr. Koslowski, naturally.

  After he was done with his business on the second floor, he slouched his way down to my office, where I was poring over a layout covering the opening of a new art gallery on the Westside.

  “Where the hell did you get those?” he demanded from the safety of my door frame.

  I looked up from the color laser printout occupying my attention. “Oh, hi, Danny. Anything leap to mind about yesterday?”

  “It was Tuesday. Who sent you those flowers?”

  “Tuesday — very good.” I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose. The glasses were just for close-up work; I had a mild astigmatism in my left eye and started to strain after a few hours of looking at ten-point type. “A Tuesday which just happened to be my birthday.”

  For a few seconds he didn’t say anything. Then he muttered, “Oh.”

  “Exactly. Thanks for the call, by the way.”

  His sandy eyebrows drew together. “What call?”

  “The one you were supposed to make wishing me a happy birthday.”

  “Okay — Okay, I’m sorry. I blew it. I should have written it down in my phone.”

  God forbid he should have to think or remember anything on his own. I wondered if he needed the iPhone to tell him to wipe his ass.

  Then his frown deepened, and he said, “That doesn’t explain where the flowers came from.”

  “Well, actually, it does. It was my birthday, and someone sent me flowers. Mystery solved.”

  “Who sent them?”

  “I don’t have to tell you that,” I replied, my tone a little snottier than I intended. But the contrast between Danny’s adolescent behavior and Luke’s — okay, the Devil’s — was almost overwhelming, and I could feel myself rapidly losing my patience. I was sure Jacqui would have approved.

  “But — but — we’re dating!” Danny spluttered. “I thought you said we were exclusive!”

  “Maybe I made a mistake,” I said coolly. “I mean, what kind of a person in an ‘exclusive’ relationship forgets his girlfriend’s birthday?”

  “What kind of girl in an exclusive relationship goes out with someone else on her birthday?” he shot back.

  “The kind who doesn’t want to sit home alone,” I said.

  That sort of pulled the rug out from under him. He opened his mouth, then shut it, looking both angry and embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, his tone sulky in the extreme. “Let me make it up to you. Let’s go out Friday night.”

  “I can’t,” I said, a little surprised at how good it felt to say the next sentence. Hell hath no fury and all that. “I have a date.”

  “With him?” Danny jerked a thumb toward the roses.

  A little amazed at how calm I was, I replied, “Yes.”

  He crossed his arms. I noticed, as if I were looking at a stranger, how the tie his company forced him to wear had been knotted off-center, how the name tag pinned to his pocket was a little crooked. He was still sort of cute, in a rumpled, geeky sort of way, but I really did wonder in that moment why I’d ever thought I was attracted to him in the first place.

  “Are you dumping me?” he asked at last, as if it had taken a long time for the thought to occur to him.

  “No,” I said. I reached up to adjust one rose slightly, felt the velvet-soft petal brush against my thumb and forefinger. “Let’s just say that we’re no longer exclusive.”

  “Fine,” he retorted, and jammed his hands into his pockets. He turned to go, then tossed an angry glance back over his shoulder. “But don’t think I’m going to give up that easily.”

  I lifted my shoulders. What, had he suddenly decided to become the gallant knight, jousting for his lady love? Yeah, right. He might be angry right now, but I seriously doubted his emotions had been engaged enough for him to be upset for very long. No, probably all he was really suffering at that point was a case of hurt pride.

  “Good luck with that,” I said, then turned back to my layout.

  “Right,” he snapped, and slammed my office door behind him.

  The feeling of elation I experienced after my emancipation proclamation lasted approximately thirty minutes. Then, as usual, guilt started to set in.

  Maybe I’d been too hard on Danny. Some guys just couldn’t remember dates to save their lives. And what the hell had I been thinking, flaunting my next date with the Devil…Luke…whoever…with him? I’d talked as if that relationship actually had some kind of future. How could Luke possibly be doing anything except amusing himself with me for some reason I’d probably never discover?

  The door opened. “Stop that,” Jacqui said.

  “Stop what?”

  She put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. “I saw Mr. Koslowski storm out of here earlier, so I’m assuming you finally told him off.”

  “I didn’t tell him off,” I said. “I just told him I couldn’t go out with him Friday night because I already had a date with someone else.”

  “Close enough. I’m sure that was sufficient to bruise his poor tender little ego.”

  Bruise, and possibly sprain. I didn’t know for sure, because Danny had always been very good at not showing much of what he was feeling (if anything). Certainly he’d gotten a lot more excited about advancing his character a level in Warcraft than he ever seemed to be about spending time with me.

  “Anyhow,” she
continued inexorably, “you putting him in his place is certainly no reason for you to be sitting in here and beating yourself up about it.”

  “I wasn’t — ”

  “Oh, yes, you were. I saw the look on your face.”

  I began to wonder if I should start going around with a paper bag over my head. At least that way people wouldn’t be able to tell what I was thinking all the time. I reflected that it was a good thing I had never gotten into playing poker, then said, “All right. I guess I do feel a teeny bit bad about it. But I suppose I gave him enough chances to shape up.”

  “More than enough,” she said. “So you already have another date lined up for Friday night? I’m impressed. Where’s he taking you this time?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I think it’s supposed to be sort of a surprise.”

  Jacqui pursed her lips. “That could be good or bad.”

  You have no idea, I thought, but I said only, “True, but at least I know it won’t be dull.”

  “Thoughtful and interesting?” she replied. “Hang on to this one, kid.” She shot me a grin and disappeared down the hallway.

  Somehow I doubted she’d be quite so encouraging if she knew who Luke really was. Then again, considering the way men had treated her and so many other women I knew, maybe she would have thought the Devil was an step up.

  The funny thing was that I’d never really thought all that much about God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell. My parents both ditched Christianity (“too much guilt,” according to my father) during their hippie days, and Lisa, Jeff, and I were raised in a cheerfully agnostic family with some slight Buddhist overtones. My mother got more into the spiritual stuff (in a strictly nontraditional way) as she got older, but I’d never been brought up to believe in a fiery Hell or a fluffy Heaven with angels playing harps and all that. I didn’t believe in reincarnation, either, even though my mother swore she’d experienced past-life regression in several sessions with a hypnotherapist. If it made her happy, great, but I wasn’t buying into it.

  But to go from that religiously neutral background to facing an entity who claimed he was the Devil and in fact exhibited all the powers that such a supernatural being might actually possess — well, that was enough for me to feel as if my world had been seriously upended. I spent a considerable amount of time when I should have been working that afternoon trying to read what I could on the Internet about Lucifer, Satan…whatever. Of course I got everything from nutcases who swore they’d been possessed by the Devil to scholarly discussions of the linguistic roots of his name, but most of what I read didn’t particularly paint him as a nice guy.