Dating the Devil

by Lia Romeo

  Lewis asks me a couple of times what’s wrong, since I’m staring into my diet Coke instead of talking. I tell him nothing, I’m just tired from work . . . hearing an echo of Mel telling me the same thing in the kitchen that morning. He looks at me skeptically, but doesn’t question my explanation.

  “You know,” he says instead, “Linda should really pay you more, given that you work as hard as you do. What do you make—fifty?” I hesitate. “Less?”

  “Forty-five,” I admit. It sounds so paltry. Lewis can make three times what I earn in a year in a single weekend.

  “And you work weekends,” he says, “a lot of weekends—right?” I hadn’t actually worked this weekend, but I do work a lot of weekends. I nod. “When was the last time you got a raise?” he asks.

  “Um . . .” I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever gotten a raise. “Oh! After my first year. I started at forty.”

  “And you haven’t gotten one since?”

  “Linda doesn’t make a lot either. It’s a new company and we’re trying to grow, but—”

  “But that’s no excuse for underpaying you,” he interrupts me. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I could get you a job at one of the bigger firms.”

  My hand has been resting on his on top of the table, but now I pull it back and push back my chair. “I already told you I don’t want to steal Linda’s client!—and you said you weren’t going to—”

  “Lucy! Relax. I’m not trying to talk you into doing something bad. I’m trying to talk you into doing something good. I know you don’t want to steal the client . . . I just think you should ask for a raise.”

  “Oh.”

  He reaches out and takes my hand again. “You’re so sweet, and that’s one of the things I like so much about you.” He smiles, and I feel myself melting. “But sometimes that means you don’t stand up for what you really deserve.”

  I consider this, stirring the ice in my diet Coke and wondering if he’s right. I come in whenever Linda calls me, even on Sunday mornings—and I know I’m good at my job. “I’ll think about it,” I tell him.

  “Good,” he says. “Oh, by the way, speaking of work—I’m going to have to go out of town next week for a little while.”

  “Out of town where?” I ask him. “Back to Vegas?”

  “No, to Hell actually,” he says. “There are some administrative things I have to attend to.”

  “What kind of . . . administrative things?” I ask him, and then realize I probably don’t want to know. Is “administrative things” code for torturing sinners?

  As he often does, Lewis responds based on the look on my face. “I’m not actually in charge of administering punishments,” he says. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Who’s in charge of that, then?”

  “Well, there are hordes of demons who are responsible for carrying them out.”

  “Hordes of demons,” just doesn’t seem like a phrase that ought to be uttered in a cozy brick oven pizzeria. “But you decide what they are?”

  “No, actually,” he says, “they’re cosmically prescribed. The universe operates according to certain laws . . . you throw an apple, it comes down again . . . you commit murder, you spend eternity boiling in a river of blood.”

  “Wow.”

  Lewis starts to chuckle, and I look at him, confused. I fail to see what’s so funny about boiling in a river of blood. “No, no, no,” he says. “I’m not laughing at that. It’s just funny because sometimes the punishments change . . . evolve . . . as the world changes.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Like, for example, if you commit adultery . . . you have an affair while you’re married . . . the punishment used to be that you’d spend eternity being blown around a dreary plain by hurricane winds.”

  “Used to be? What is it now?”

  “Now you have to watch a sex tape—of the person you loved most in the world, whether it’s your spouse, or your lover—with somebody else. Over and over. Forever.”

  I laugh in spite of myself. “How do you get the sex tapes? Are they real?”

  “Yeah, there are some demons that are pretty tiny . . . they can climb through windows, hide behind pillows, that sort of thing. So we give them little cameras, and . . .”

  “Wow.” As always, when Lewis talks about his work, I’m torn between wanting to know everything, and wanting him to stop talking about it so I can just pretend he’s a normal guy, a guy who’s not sending tiny demons through people’s windows with cameras. “So what are the administrative affairs you have to attend to?”

  “Basically just check up on things, make sure everything’s running the way it’s supposed to,” he says. “Beelzebub and Astaroth pretty much keep things going, but I do have to check in from time to time. I usually spend a week down there each month . . . but I haven’t been down in almost two months . . . not since I met you.”

  “So . . . when are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow,” he says.

  “And how long are you going to be gone?”

  “Just a few days,” he says. “I should be back Thursday or Friday.”

  The prospect of a few days without Lewis—especially now that Nat is (at least temporarily) dead to me, and Mel is off in her own world—stretches in front of me like a desert. “That’s a long time.”

  Lewis smiles. “You going to miss me?”

  I look down and take a giant bite of sausage and mozzarella, not wanting to admit how much. With a mouth full of pizza, all I can do is nod.

  “I’m going to miss you too,” he says.

  “How do you get there?” I ask him. “To Hell, I mean.”

  “There are portals all over the world,” he says. “Doors that lead down, if you know where they are. Here in New York, the portal happens to be in the subway.”

  I laugh. “That’s about right.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “it’s near the RW train platform at Canal Street. That station’s always been unusually warm, and no one knows why . . . the MTA workers are always talking about it.”

  “So you just . . .”

  “You walk down the tracks,” he says, “until you get to the door, which is a little ways down the tunnel, and then you open it. I usually try to go in the middle of the night, when there’s nobody there. Otherwise you get some odd looks when you climb down off the subway platform.”

  “But what if somebody else were to open the door—would they end up in Hell accidentally?”

  “It’s very unlikely. It’s not just an ordinary door . . . it’s enchanted. You can look straight at it and not even know it’s there, unless you happen to be looking for it. And nobody—except for me—ever goes looking for it.”

  LEWIS OFFERS to leave me his keys and let me stay at his place while he’s away, but honestly, the thought of being in the apartment without him kind of gives me the creeps. As long as he and I are together, it doesn’t much matter where we are, but the apartment’s so big and empty and somehow impersonal that without him it would just feel strange.

  And then there’s the closet full of fire, which is merrily burning away again after the fire department’s intercession. Lewis has told me he likes to go and sit in there and think . . . it reminds him of home. He’s assured me that he has the power to control fire, and he won’t let it escape, but I hate to think what might happen if he weren’t home and the fire somehow managed to melt the seals around the closet door again.

  So at five a.m. the next morning, I share a cab with him uptown. We stop first at the Canal Street station, where he gets out and kisses me goodbye, then hands the cabbie a twenty and tells him to continue on to my place. Watching him walk down the steps to the subway, then turn around, smile, and blow me a kiss, I have a feeling it’s going to be a very long few days.

  When I get back to my apartment it’s only five-thirty, but I figure that since I’m up I might as well make some coffee and go into the office early. Nat and Mel both have their doors closed. Nat’s probably out having sex on a p
ool table somewhere, and Mel must still be sleeping. This will probably be the first time I’ve ever left for work before Mel did.

  As I’m going down the hall to the shower, though, I’m halted by muffled sounds coming from behind Mel’s door. If it weren’t for the fact that I’d never seen her cry—not even in college, when she found out her first serious boyfriend had been cheating on her with the president—the male president—of the student council, I’d think she was crying. I wrap my bright pink towel more securely around my chest and knock on the door. “Mel? Are you okay?”

  A moment later, the door opens. Mel’s looking perfectly composed in her cream-colored cashmere bathrobe, her blonde hair loose around her face. “Luce? What are you doing up so early?”

  “I was at Lewis’s. Is everything all right? I thought—I thought I heard crying.”

  Mel shakes her head. Her eyes are dry, and not at all red. “I was playing my music . . . really softly.”

  “Maybe that’s what I heard,” I tell her. Although it seems odd that she would have turned the music off before she opened the door. “Sorry. Do you need the bathroom?—you mind if I use the shower?”

  “Go ahead,” she says, and is about to shut the door again when I stop her.

  “Hey. You haven’t—you haven’t talked to Nat, have you?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Mel says. “I’ve been working late, and then she’s been out for the night by the time I’ve gotten home.”

  “So what do you think I should do?” I ask her. “I mean, I’m still mad about the Jim thing—but she’s my best friend—”

  “Look, Luce,” Mel says. “I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, with work and . . . and everything, and I really don’t have time to worry about you and Natalie fighting. I’m sorry.”

  And with that, she shuts the door in my face, leaving me standing, stunned, in the hallway.

  – 23 –

  LUCKILY, IT’S A BUSY day at work, so I don’t have too much time to spend moping about the fact that not only is my boyfriend out of town, but I’m also now somehow fighting with both of my best friends. Kruger has decided to come out with a line of small kitchen appliances—toasters, blenders, and so on—and so we’re pitching them to every media outlet on our lists. We work straight through lunch, ordering in salads from a restaurant around the corner, and we’re in the office until eight p.m . . . and in between phone calls to reporters, I find myself thinking about what Lewis said. I work long hours for a salary that’s barely enough to live on, at least in Manhattan. Maybe I really should ask for a raise. It couldn’t hurt. The worst Linda could do is say no.

  So the next morning, I screw up my courage and go into the inner office to talk to her about it. After I make my case—I work hard, I’ve been there for four years, the cost of living has gone up—Linda looks down at her desk and buries her head in her hands. Oh, no. I shouldn’t have asked. Then she looks up. “Well,” she says, “you know you’re invaluable and I don’t want to lose you. Money is tight, but let me think about it and see what I can do.”

  Later that afternoon, she comes out and tells me she can bump me up to fifty-two thousand, starting in January. It’s not a lot, but it’s a lot more than I was making, and I’m elated. I want to call Lewis and tell him all about it, but cell phones and email aren’t able to bridge the gap between the underworld and this one, and he’s told me he’ll be incommunicado for the week.

  As I’m walking home after work, though, I check my phone and see that I have a message from an unfamiliar number. Maybe Lewis has figured out some way to call me after all? I press 1 to listen to my voicemail . . . and my heart skips a beat, as an entirely different male voice comes through the phone.

  “Hi. Lucy. It’s, uh—it’s Ben. I’m really sorry to call you, I just—” His voice catches. “I just don’t know what else to do. I, uh—I lost my job. Lerner Locke, they’re, uh—they’re downsizing—they’re not doing very well—and I, uh—I can’t make my rent, so I ended up getting evicted from my apartment. And Kelly and I—with all the stress, we, uh—we broke up. And now I don’t have anywhere to go, and I’m wondering if there’s any chance I could possibly crash with you for a little while. Just a couple of days. I’m so sorry to ask you this, I just—I honestly don’t have anywhere else to turn. Most of my friends were work friends, or her friends, and now . . . well, I remember you told me once that if I ever needed anything . . . and I do. So if you could call me back. Please.”

  I almost drop my phone to the sidewalk. Fortunately, I manage to catch it on its way down and return it to its place in the front pocket of my leather tote bag. I’ve stopped stock still in the middle of the sidewalk on Thirty-Fourth Street to listen to the voicemail, and people are circling around me . . . or bumping into me. I duck into the Starbucks on the corner, sit down at the front counter, then take out my phone and listen to the message again, thinking about what I should do.

  I had told Ben that if he ever needed anything, he could come to me. This was after our breakup, when he’d revealed to me that he’d been sleeping with Kelly, his shapely blonde coworker, for the past three months, and was going to break up with me to be with her . . . and that as a result, I was going to have to move out of our apartment. It was as I was moving the last of my boxes, about to get in the cab that would take me over to Melissa and Natalie’s place. I’d told him, through my tears, that I still loved him in spite of everything, and if he ever needed anything from me all he would have to do was ask. It makes me cringe now just thinking about it.

  Ben and I have hardly talked since we split up. There was some talk of remaining friends, and we went out for coffee a couple of times, but for me it was painful and time-consuming . . . I had to borrow just the right outfit, apply enough makeup to look “done” but still “natural,” obsess about whether I’d gained a couple of pounds since we broke up—only to spend an hour at Starbucks listening to Ben rattle on about how great his life was. As for Ben, I think he was more or less indifferent. After a few months, we just stopped calling each other . . . and beyond the occasional Google search (or, okay, the daily Google search—but only for the first few months!), I’ve had nothing to do with him since.

  So what am I supposed to do now? I desperately wish I could call Natalie and Melissa, tell them to meet me at Vinoteca, and analyze the situation in depth over a bottle of wine. But that isn’t going to happen. Instead I get in line, order a tall skim white chocolate mocha, and sit back down at the counter to analyze my options.

  I know I’d be within my rights to blow him off completely. I certainly don’t owe him anything, after the way he treated me. But, on the other hand, I’d said I’d help him out if he ever needed me to . . . and even though he didn’t deserve it—then or now—it feels like I’d be going back on my word if I didn’t follow through.

  Besides, I have to admit that part of me likes the idea of Ben needing me for a change. My newly better-paid PR job might not be as glamorous as working at a top hedge fund, but at least it’s secure. I might live in a closet, but at least I’m not getting evicted. My boyfriend might be the devil, but at least I have a boyfriend. I like the idea of showing Ben how well I’m doing without him.

  So I pick up my phone, heart beating fast, find his number at the top of my missed call list, and press send. An hour later, there’s a knock on my door. Ben, holding an enormous suitcase and wearing a sheepish smile, is standing outside in the hallway. I’m a little surprised that one suitcase is all he’s got. He must have put the rest of his stuff into storage along with his furniture.

  He looks good. He’s let his curly blond hair, which he always kept cropped short, grow slightly longer, and he’s in a grey Lacoste polo, jeans, and loafers. He looks casually sexy, like he belongs on a yacht, or in a cologne advertisement. His eyes widen when he sees me.

  “Wow, Luce,” he says. “You look fantastic. You cut your hair.”

  “Oh,” I say casually, “yeah.” I run a hand through my bouncy, highlighted waves
. “Come in. You can put your suitcase in the living room—you’ll be on the couch.”

  He drags his suitcase inside and sits down, stretching his legs out and admiring the view from the living room window. “This is a nice place,” he says.

  Usually when people say this kind of thing, I feel the need to make some kind of disparaging remark about how I live in the closet. But instead I just nod. “Yeah, we like it.”

  “Well, you’re a lifesaver, Luce,” he says. “Seriously. I don’t even know how to thank you.”

  I look down at the rug, slightly embarrassed. “It’s, uh—it’s no problem.”

  “And you really do look great. I like that outfit.”

  I’m wearing Lewis’ cashmere tracksuit. “Thanks,” I tell him. “My, uh—my boyfriend got it for me.”

  “Oh,” Ben says in a neutral voice. “You have a boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow, uh—since when? I mean, is it serious?”

  “Just a couple of months,” I tell him. “But it’s going really well.”

  Am I imagining it, or is that a look of disappointment on Ben’s face? He looks down at his loafers for a moment, then looks up and gives me a smile. “That’s great,” he says. “Couldn’t have happened to a better girl. So tell me everything—how’s life been going?”

  And over the next couple of hours, I find myself telling Ben all about the problems I’m having with Natalie and Melissa. He knows them both well, of course, since we all went to school together. There’s nobody else I’ve been able to talk to about the situation . . . and it’s a relief just to have a sympathetic ear and tell somebody what I’ve been thinking about.

  Ben, in turn, tells me all about his breakup with Kelly . . . which apparently took place shortly after he lost his job three months ago. Kelly had managed to keep hers, despite hard times at Lerner Locke, and hadn’t looked favorably on Ben’s failure to do the same. “She wanted to date a banker,” he says, “not some guy who sits around in sweats on the couch.”