The Demon Lover (24 page)

“I was heading to Bates Hall to talk to Professor Demisovski about an independent project for Flonia Rugova. Flonia is writing some lovely poetry in Albanian and I thought if she could read some of the poetry of her homeland it would help her find her voice. I hear that Rea Demisovski is one of the world’s leading experts in Slavic poetry.”

“You’re certainly very dedicated to your students,” I said.

He glanced at me, his lips quirking up in a sideways smile. “I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me.”

I sighed. “I don’t blame you after hearing me mocking your poetry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I don’t know what came over me. I
like
that poem. Especially the last two lines:
And summer once more will make winter liar, but I won’t warm. You’re all I’ll ever desire.
”

He stopped—we had reached the center of the quad where four Japanese maples marked the corners of two diagonally intersecting paths. Their bare branches arched above us, shielding us from the snow. Liam took his glasses off to wipe the snow from the lenses and shook his head, scattering snowflakes from his hair.

“You memorized lines of my poem. I’m flattered. Unless you memorized them to make fun of them with Frank Delmarco.”

“No!” I said, touching his arm. He looked up, surprised at the urgency in my voice, and our eyes met for the first time without the barrier of his glasses. They were dark, but there was a light in them, a white spark that gleamed like one of the snowflakes once again spinning out of the night sky. Looking into them made me feel a little dizzy. “I memorized those lines because when I read them for the first time I had to read them again immediately … and then again and again. I couldn’t help but learn them by heart.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. I supposed he was wondering if he could trust me. I wouldn’t have blamed him them he decided I was making fun of him again and walked away in disgust.

“By heart?” he asked, placing his hand over his own heart. “I like that phrase. I suppose that makes more sense than memorizing poetry to make fun of it. Thank you.” He reached his hand toward my face and moved a step closer. For a moment I thought he was going to kiss me—I might have leaned a quarter inch closer—but he only brushed some snow from my hair. I shivered as his hand touched my face.

TWENTY-THREE

L
uckily, I still had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s left over from Phoenix’s stash. I poured us two glasses while Liam lit a fire in the library fireplace.

“What a great room!” he enthused. “I’ve never lived long enough anywhere to have my books in one place.”

“Oh?” I remarked casually, determined not to reveal how much I knew about his peripatetic lifestyle from my Internet searches. “I suppose a writer-in-residence must move around a lot.”

“Yeah, that’s my excuse,” he said, smiling ruefully and saluting me with his glass of bourbon. “But sometimes I wonder if I don’t use the job as an excuse to move on. Like I’m under a curse that keeps me from staying in any one place for too long. Maybe that’s why I’m so touched by Nicky Ballard’s poems. They sound like they’re written by a girl who thinks she’s doomed.”

I stared at him, wondering if he did know something about the Ballard curse, but then I realized that he’d just cleverly deflected the subject from his own history to Nicky’s. Well, talking about Nicky was the reason I’d asked him in. Wasn’t it?

“It
is
almost like she’s cursed,” I said, carefully navigating around the couch and sitting down in the armchair by the fire. He took the opposite chair and I proceeded to tell him what I’d heard about the Ballard family, avoiding any supernatural elements and focusing instead on the legacy of dwindling fortunes, disappointed women, teenage pregnancy, and alcoholism.

“Poor Nicky,” he said when I’d finished. “I’ve passed by that house. You can guess the family’s blighted from the street. She must feel it’s inevitable that she’s going to wind up like her mother and grandmother. We have to keep her from making their mistakes.”

“We?”

“Don’t you know how much Nicky admires you, Cailleach?” It was the first time he’d said my full first name and it caught me by surprise. Most people didn’t pronounce it right on the first try.

“I think it’s you she admires … Liam. Come on, surely you know that every girl in your class has a crush on you.”

“Now you’re teasing me again, and I’m dead serious. Nicky talks about you all the time. She thinks the sun rises and sets on you. She especially admires how independent you are, being a woman on her own and all.”

“Oh, well … actually, you know, I do have a boyfriend.”

Liam’s mouth twitched and he looked away. The reflection of the firelight flashed across the lenses of his glasses, so I couldn’t see his expression. “No, actually I didn’t know. Brilliant. What’s his name? And where is he?” He looked around the room as if I had a man hiding under the couch.

“Paul. He’s finishing up his doctorate in economics at UCLA. I’m going to California to visit him next week. Hopefully he’ll get a job on the East Coast next year.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

I shrugged. “We’ll figure something out. What about you? It must be hard maintaining a relationship with all the traveling you do.” I lifted my glass to take another sip of bourbon but found the glass was empty.

Liam picked up the bottle and leaned across to fill my glass. “Yes, I think that may be why I do it. I haven’t … Well, something happened to me in college and I haven’t really wanted to ‘get involved,’ as you Americans say, since then.”

“Bad breakup?”

He grimaced. “Not exactly,” he replied. “It’s …”

“Complicated?” I suggested when it looked like he wasn’t going to finish his sentence. I was only trying to lighten the mood, but when he turned away from the fire and took his glasses off to wipe his eyes I was sorry.

“I suppose you could say that. You see, she … Jeannie, my childhood sweetheart … she died.”

“It was my first year at Trinity,” Liam began after I refilled our glasses. “I came from a little town in the west. My father was a horse-trainer and Jeannie’s family ran the drapery shop—in Ireland that means a shop that sells just about anything made out of cloth. We’d known each other since we were children. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t already planning to spend my life with her. But I also loved reading and writing … and I was good at them. I started winning poetry contests when I was ten. Jeannie was so proud of me. It was she who talked me into trying for the scholarship to Trinity … and she who told me I had to go when I got it. She told me we’d be together on holidays and when we’d saved up enough money she’d come join me in Dublin.”

“It sounds like a reasonable plan,” I said. “You were lucky to have a girlfriend who believed in your promise and didn’t begrudge you a chance in the world.”

“Yes,” he replied, downing the last of his bourbon. “I was lucky. I just didn’t realize it. And I didn’t realize how I’d change. I was so excited to be in the big city, surrounded by brilliant people … my professors, sure, but also the other students. Folks who had grown up with books and educated conversation. There was a particular set of Anglo-Irish students who’d gone to boarding school together that I fell in with: Robin Allsworthy and his pal Dugan Scott and Robin’s cousin, Moira. I thought they were very glamorous. Everyone in our year looked up to them and talked about them. When they befriended me I couldn’t believe my luck. I think I was in love with all three of them, but of course Jeannie didn’t see it that way.”

“How did she find out about Moira?”

“She came in the last week before Christmas break—this time of year, come to think of it. It was meant to be a surprise. She’d gotten a room at a fancy hotel …” He blushed. “We hadn’t … you know, been together like that and I think she was afraid that’s why I’d become distant from her. But when she came I was out in the pubs with Robin, Dugan, and Moira celebrating the end of finals. Poor Jeannie went from pub to pub, following our trail. When at last she found us she saw me with Moira. It was only a drunken snog … I can’t even remember how it happened, but I’ll never forget Jeannie’s face.”

He fell silent, staring into the fire as if he could see his childhood sweetheart’s face in the flames.

“Did you try to explain?” I asked after a few moments.

He shook his head. “She ran away. The streets were crowded around the pubs and I lost her. I looked everywhere for her, but finally Robin, Dugan, and Moira convinced me I should go back to my room and call the hotel. When the hotel said she’d checked out my friends convinced me that she must have gone home and I could put things right when I went home for the holidays.”

He lapsed into silence again, staring now into the empty bottom of his glass. I didn’t prompt him this time. I wasn’t looking forward to hearing the end of this story.

“But she hadn’t gone home. Three days later they found her body in the River Liffey,” he said at last.

“Do you think she …?”

He looked up before I could finish the question. “I don’t know,” he said miserably. “Did she kill herself? Did she fall? Did someone push her? I’ll never know. But what does it matter? It might as well have been me who pushed her into the river. It was my fault she died.”

I shook my head. “You can’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”

He grimaced. “That’s what Moira said. She told me that Jeannie had been weak.”

I winced, and he nodded at my reaction. “Yes, I know, how craven was I to listen to her? But I did because I wanted desperately to forget Jeannie. I spent the next three and a half years with Moira, learning to drink and indulge in other inebriants, and acquiring expensive and dangerous tastes. In my worst moments I found myself thinking I’d been lucky that Jeannie had died … and then I would drink to forget I’d ever had that thought. It’s a miracle I finished college. Somehow I managed to keep writing. I had one teacher who believed in me despite my debauchery and he got me the fellowship to Oxford. I thought Moira would be thrilled. She was always talking about getting out of Ireland, but then it turned out she’d made other plans. She and Dugan were going to Paris together to study painting. She told me not to worry, that we’d see each other on holidays, that we’d figure something out.”

It was just what I’d said a moment ago about Paul and me.

“Instead I figured out that I didn’t mean anything to her. I’d just been an amusement. I sobered up then—literally and figuratively—and started writing about Jeannie, always hoping, I think, to find her again in my poetry.”

“And you haven’t … been with anyone since?”

He put his empty glass down on the table and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and looked up at me. Despite all he’d drunk, his eyes were clear. “Not seriously. I’d had enough of girls like Moira and when I meet someone who reminds me of Jeannie … Well, I remember what I did to her. I see her face … So, my relationships don’t usually last too long.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that there are more than two kinds of women? That not every woman is an innocent like Jeannie—or a bitch like Moira?”

He laughed at that. “You make a good point. Perhaps …” He leaned farther forward, his hands braced on his knees. For the second time tonight I thought he was going to try to kiss me … but he was just getting to his feet. “… perhaps I should consider that when I haven’t had quite this much to drink. Thanks for telling me about Nicky Ballard,” he said, walking to the door. I followed him. “I think it’ll help in dealing with her. Maybe between the two of us we can keep her from going the way of her mother and grandmother.”

“That’s why you worry so much about your students,” I said when we reached the door. “Because of what happened to Jeannie.”

“I’d like to think I’d care even if Jeannie were still alive. Look at you. You care about your students and nothing so awful happened. You’ve still got your Paul.”

“Yes, I do,” I said, opening the door for him. He rocked forward unsteadily on his heels, but this time I had no illusion that he was going to kiss me. He was just drunk. I gave him a little push out the door. “Think you can make it across the street?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he assured me. “I just hope I can make it upstairs without breaking any ornaments or dragging down the holly swags on the banister.”

I wished him good luck as he turned to go. He staggered a bit at the foot of the porch steps, but then I saw that he was just looking at one of the frozen ornaments Brock had made for me—the one with the fairy stone embedded in the ice. After a moment of studying it, he weaved across my front lawn, leaving a meandering trail of footprints in the new snow. I watched until he made it across the street up to the porch. Then he turned and waved as if he’d known all along that I’d been watching him.

I got out my phone to call Paul when I went back in, guilty that I’d missed our midnight call, but I didn’t want to call right away. While I was feeding Ralph—he’d stayed hidden when Liam was here—I wondered if I should tell Paul that I’d spent the evening with the new Irish heartthrob writer-in-residence. I’d already told him all the girls had crushes on him. Or maybe I should just tell him I’d been busy grading term papers.

“What do you think, Ralph?” I asked the little mouse as I scooped him up in my hand and carried him upstairs. “A little white lie? Or maybe it wouldn’t hurt to make Paul a teensy bit jealous just so he doesn’t take me for granted.”

Ralph’s cheeks were bulging with cheese so he didn’t answer. Not that he’d shown any talent for communication so far, magic doormouse or not.

But Paul had spared me the choice between lying and teasing. When I got upstairs and flipped open my phone I saw that there was a text message from him.

Missed your call tonight and have to GT bed early. Change of plans: I’m coming to NYC for interview and have booked room at Ritz-Carlton Battery Park and cancelled your flight to L.A. I’ll explain when I see you. <3 Paul
.

I texted back asking him who the interview was with. It was unusual for a university to interview over the winter break—and even more unusual for Paul to stay at a hotel as pricey as the Ritz-Carlton. But since he didn’t reply I’d just have to wait until tomorrow to find out what was going on.

I fell asleep quickly, no doubt aided by all the bourbon I’d drunk, but then woke with a start in the middle of the night. What if Paul had booked the fancy hotel because he was planning to surprise me with the news that he’d finally gotten a job in New York? And what if he was planning to celebrate by asking me to marry him? It had long been understood between us (I couldn’t remember who had first broached the subject) that we’d get married as soon as he got a job in New York and we could live together. Why else would he pay for such a fancy hotel? And why, I asked myself with my hand clamped over my left breast, was my heart beating so hard? I sat up in bed and looked toward the window. No moonlight poured in tonight, no shadow branches fell on the floor. I got up and walked to the window, my bare feet cold on the uncarpeted floor, and saw why. It was snowing again—a soft, feathery snow that absorbed the moonlight and cast a hushed pall over the outside world. I sat on the windowsill and looked up at the flakes spinning out of the black sky. They looked like an unwinding spiral staircase. Ralph crawled out of his basket and curled up in my lap. I sat watching the snow for a long time, wondering why I didn’t feel happier.

The next few days were consumed with finals, grades, and student conferences. I tried calling Paul but my calls always went to voicemail. When I texted him he texted back that he’d explain everything when we saw each other in the city on the twenty-second. Paul was lousy at keeping secrets. He probably knew that if we talked I’d get him to tell me where he was interviewing and why he’d booked the room at the Ritz-Carlton. When I found myself hoping that he wouldn’t get the job I knew I had a problem, but I pushed the thought away and focused on my last conference of the semester—the one with Nicky Ballard.