THE COLDEST MONTH OF THAT WINTER PASSED SLOWLY. Even the wolf moon when it arrived seemed frozen in the sky as I gazed at it through my kitchen window. It was there, to the west, looming high and big over the river, at four o’clock in the morning, and it was still there, seeming not to have moved, more than three hours later, after seven, when I went back to bed. The winds howled to gusts of fifty-five miles an hour in the wake of that moon.
More snow and frigid sleet came down upon the city. I took a taxi to the Lower East Side, telling the driver to let me off at the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue B. Leslie would be tending bar at the Lakeside Lounge that night, and I knew that she would accept, perhaps even be happy to see, that I was not drinking.
I liked Leslie a lot, and it was good to see her. She had a smile that always worked on me like mellow medicine, even when I encountered it through barely seeing narrowed eyes. But I was there for another reason. Whatever strays were out on a desolate night such as this, I figured, belonged to nights such as this.
“What brings you out?”
Leslie was one of the few people who ask this and elicit a thoughtful answer. It was the way she asked it.
“I feel like sucking a damsel’s blood,” I told her. She smiled that smile of hers, and I saw that she thought I was being merely glib and playful. “I’m serious,” I said.
It was no use. I did better when I lied than when I told the truth, it seemed. She asked me what I was having, and I told her that all I wanted was a club soda with a piece of lemon. She brought it and pushed my money back to me. I looked around. It was dark, and it took a while to make out the animated or torpid forms at the bar. It felt good to be sober, to see and think clearly amid the slurred mutterings and the wailed descants of misery, complaint, and lunacy.
Leslie was talking across the bar to a girl several seats down to my left. When the girl laughed, I saw that she was quite pretty. She was alone and had a full drink in front of her.
I felt slightly demonic. It was a not unpleasant feeling. Old Nick or Nicholas the Ancient. Wasn’t that it? No, no, no. Old Scratch or Nicholas the Ancient. And ancient was spelled in a peculiar, antiquated way. What was it? Antient. Yes, that was it. Old Scratch or Nicholas the Antient. Where had I found that? Something British, no? Seventeenth century, eighteenth century?
Maybe that explained the words on that scrap of paper. Maybe I had read them somewhere, and somehow they had come back to me when I was half asleep, and I had set them down and not recalled doing so. Or maybe I had written them long ago, completely forgotten them, and, yes, somehow they had come back to me when I was half asleep, and I had set them down and not recalled doing so. Memory and the subconscious could be very tricky.
But as I told myself these things, I did not believe them. I wanted only to solve that piece of paper and the words on it, to be rid of the uneasy strangeness they had left me with.
“Who’s she?” I asked Leslie. “The girl you were talking to.” Without turning I gave a toss of my head in the direction of the girl down the bar. Leslie followed my gesture with her glance.
“Oh. Melissa. I don’t really know her. She seems like a nice kid.”
“She just got one.”
“Back her up.”
She went over, said something to her. They both looked my way. Leslie lightly rapped the bar in front of her.
Old Scratch or Nicholas the Antient. A leopard in the bowering shade.
I shook loose these words from my mind.
The girl finished her drink. Leslie set another before her and took money from me. The girl raised the drink to me, then drank.
I wasn’t about to approach her. That was something that foolish young men did. I too may have once done such a thing. But I was a foolish old man now, and my folly was not without dignity. At the same time, I knew that she was not likely to approach me. I found myself walking toward her. After a few steps I decided to keep walking, to walk past her, as if I were barely aware of her, and to go outside and have a smoke. An inspired move. I made as if to be preoccupied and not to notice the curiosity in her eyes as I passed.
The awful cold and winds seemed not only to have rid the streets of people but also to have rid the sky of clouds. The moon had waned to a delicate falcated sliver, and stars were visible. As a child I had seen many stars in these night skies, but now it was rare to see one. Tens of billions of planets, suns, and moons in the Milky Way, and we had disconnected ourselves from them all.
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.
I flicked my cigarette butt at a parked car and saw the wind take it, red embers flying and vanishing.
I wish I may, I wish I might.
“So, Melissa, tell me. Can you control the tides by crossing and uncrossing your legs?”
She looked at me awkwardly.
“Do you like to drink strong drink, go mad, and dance with the apparition of freedom?”
She seemed about to say something but giggled instead.
“Do you like to watch old men masturbate and know that they too once were young?”
“Who are you?”
“I was asking myself that just the other day.”
“Leslie says you write books.”
“I used to.”
“What do you do now?”
“I’m retired. I enjoy the fruits of my past labors and contemplate the pains of hell. What about you?”
“I’m a student. I go to school.”
“What do you study?”
“History.”
“How do you plan to make a living off that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think about money much.”
“I guess that’s good. It doesn’t think much about you either.”
“That’s pretty much the way I look at it.”
Her voice was pleasant. She wasn’t really drunk, though she was getting there. She was wearing pants, but they were quite close-fitting, and her thighs looked good in them. Her skin was beautiful. Her lips were full. Her dark hair was not all that long, and she wore it in a ponytail, which made her look even younger. Its end formed a sweet, lush curl that filliped amid the down at the nape of her neck with her every slight movement. She raised her knees to rest against the bar. It was a beautiful sight.
So strange to be like this, sober in a bar as midnight struck. Strange and exhilarating too.
She seemed as beguiled by me as I was by her. I did not know, and did not care, how much of her apparent beguilement could be attributed to the alcohol’s warm, rising effect on her. The red lipstick she wore set off the whiteness of her teeth. I was lucky to have been mindful to put my teeth in before I came out.
When she laughed I glimpsed the tip of her tongue dancing on the pearly white crenulations of those teeth, and I felt a twitch and a throb in the vein that runs down the length of my cock. In that instant, it was all I could do to keep from placing her hand to it. The nails of her fingers were the same color as her lips, and touching her hand under the pretext of making a point of something I was saying, I felt how soft and smooth those pale fingers were. The unseen parts of her body would be even more so.
Her laughter and my laughter became shared laughter. Her talk and my talk became shared talk. Truth be told, I was starting to like her. If only I were younger, I thought. Much younger. But I was not.
I had the basic facts of her, as far as she had chosen to give them to me. Age nineteen. Born in Minnesota; this cold did not bother her. An only child. Father a medical researcher, but not a vassal of the pharmaceutical racket; and, no, she herself had never really thought of pursuing science.
She had come here tonight after walking out on a date with “this guy I met.”
Why had she gone out with him to begin with?
“Because he was cute.”
What was she doing wasting her time talking to me?
“Maybe because you’re not cute. And you’re not telling me how much money you’re going to make and how to pronounce the dessert or how a single mother you heard about had her child taken away from her because she ate so many poppy seed rolls that she tested positive for opiates.”
When I told her that I wanted to take her home with me, that I wanted to end the night with her, she gave me a look with eyes that seemed to demur, even to chastise. I did not further plead my desire but told her that I understood.
“Do you?” she said.
The taxi turned west on the corner of Broadway and Leonard. It was well after two. There was very little traffic. Furtive shadows seemed to appear and disappear in swirling blasts of wind.
“Thomas Paine saw a man hanged here,” I said. Looking out the backseat window, I wondered which corner of this intersection the gallows had occupied.
“Who’s he?” she said, glancing out the window.
“Friend of mine,” I said after a moment, then smiled to myself. This was going to be a good one.
I placed my arm lightly around her, and she leaned her head just as lightly to my shoulder. She asked me if I had a cat. I told her that I did not. She told me that she did not trust men who kept cats. I told her that I did not trust them either. It was true.
The liking for her that I had felt come over me in the bar seemed to grow stronger as we rode alone through the night. If only I were younger, much younger, I thought. If only I were looking for, if only I needed, something other than sustenance, other than moisture or cure. But what had I always hungered for, even without knowing it? What did we all hunger for, in our way? I wondered what unknown thing it was that impelled her to me.
It took far less time to get her from the couch to the bed than it had taken to get her from the bar to the cab. I left the music on. Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. To its grand thalassic echoes of the Great Dirge, I tongue-kissed her panties and the ankle from which they dangled so delectably. I did not hear the music end. I heard only her.
She uttered a little gasp. I felt her shiver and her flesh horripilate as I ran my nails down her hip and thigh. Her belly rose and she shuddered. I put my mouth to her breast. She shivered again, and shuddered more deeply, deliciously. Her panties were in my hand. I raised them to her face as I kissed the warm dew between her legs. Her mouth opened and her tongue rose through the sheer veil of the panties. My free hand grabbed her thigh above the knee. I breathed long and slow into her, then lowered my lips to her leg. I licked, sucked, lowered my jaw, felt her flesh between my teeth. Her hand was on my head, her fingers raked my hair, softly, then roughly, then softly again. She seemed to await the clench of my teeth, the pleasure of a suffering so sweet, and the release it would bring.
I bit her. She muffled her own scream. I tasted her blood in my mouth, in my throat. I felt her body relax, and I heard her breathe as if she were lost in a dream that would not be remembered.
I was not aware of how much time passed. I wiped blood from my mouth, licked blood from her skin. Then I felt her upon me, her mouth upon me, her tongue upon that vein that throbbed and that twitched. I worked her ponytail like a suicide clutch. I felt her hand stir. She raised it to my lips, and again I tasted her blood. I came violently, heard the sounds of her sucking become the sounds of her swallowing; heard the sound of her hand in a frenzy between her taut legs. Her mouth slowed but did not cease. I could take no more, and I withdrew from her.
Our breath slowed and we fell to sleep, closely entwined, her arm around me. It was almost as if, young and innocent as she was, she knew about the monkeys.