The Demon Lover (35 page)

“That would actually be great,” I told Liz. “If it’s okay with Mara,” I added, glancing worriedly at the girl. We’d been talking about her as if she were a piece of chattel to be traded between us. But Mara looked almost as pleased as Dean Book.

“It will be an honor to work for you,” she said in her stilted, formal English. “I’m happy to be of use.”

I was still a little worried that some of my students—especially the ones who had crushes on Liam—would be jealous of my new relationship, but I couldn’t detect anything like that in class. After class that day, Nicky Ballard came up to tell me that she was glad I wasn’t all alone in “that house” anymore and that she thought Professor Doyle was perfect for me.

“You’ve both been so nice to me. I’m really looking forward to doing the independent study with both of you. I wrote a lot over Christmas.” Nicky, looking well rested and happy from her break, didn’t betray any sign of jealousy even though I knew she had a crush on Liam.

The only person who did begrudge my new romantic liaison was Frank Delmarco, who cornered me in the department office later that week.

“I hear you and Mr. Poetry are shacking up. That was pretty quick. Didn’t you just break up with some other guy? Do you think it’s such a good idea to move in with another man so soon—especially one you don’t really know anything about?”

“Who are you, my mother?” I snapped angrily—partly to cover up my inability to answer his questions.

I knew it was too soon, that Liam and I were moving too fast. At times I felt like I’d stepped on one of those conveyor belts that moved tired travelers through airports. How exactly did I get here? I would wonder, coming home at night to find Liam lighting a fire in the library and handing me a glass of wine to drink while he finished dinner. (I knew I should offer to cook sometimes, but I’d started working with Mara in the afternoons and I always felt so tired when I came home.) After dinner we’d curl up on the couch in front of the fire and I’d think, Who cares? Why question happiness? And when, later in bed, I watched Liam’s face above me, pale in the moonlight that struggled through the opaque ice-coated windows, I’d think: All we ever have is
now
—this moment—so how can it ever be too soon to be happy?

THIRTY-THREE

I
t was an unusually cold January all over, with record low temperatures from New York to Florida—where the citrus crops were destroyed, nesting sea turtles were brought into hotel rooms to keep from freezing, and manatees huddled around the warm currents coming from electrical plant pipes—but in Fairwick it was arctic. For most of the month the temperature stayed in the single digits. Who wouldn’t choose to hibernate? Each day I drew Ralph’s shadow and burnt it while repeating the spell for safe travel, but he remained soundly asleep. When I put him back in his basket I’d find myself wanting to crawl back into bed instead of tromping through the snow to lecture a class full of sleepy college students in an overheated classroom.

It was perfectly normal, I told myself, that I’d want to crawl back into bed when I came home from campus and that I’d want to spend all weekend curled up on the library couch with Liam. It’s not as if we made love
all
the time. Sometimes we’d read and Liam would make tea and cinnamon rolls at 4:00. Sometimes we’d watch old movies. Liam, as I’d guessed from his Facebook page, loved the same romantic comedies I did—the old classics like
Bringing Up Baby, It Happened One Night
, and
The Philadelphia Story
and also their modern counterparts, like
Annie Hall, Sleepless in Seattle
, and
You’ve Got Mail
. He knew them all practically line for line, and yet they still seemed to surprise him.

“They start out not liking each other, but then they fall in love. They keep fighting even while they are falling in love. Why is that? Do they have to start out not liking each other to fall in love?”

“It makes a better story,” I told him. “It would be too easy if they liked each other from the beginning and the things that irk them about each other … Well, maybe those are things they really are looking for but are afraid to believe exists.”

“Is that why they’re always with other people in the beginning? Because they’ve given up on finding the right person and settled for the wrong one?”

“Maybe,” I said, wondering if he was thinking of me and Paul—or him and Moira. When we got to the part in
You’ve Got Mail
just before Tom Hanks appears in Riverside Park and Meg Ryan finds out that her secret pen pal is really the man who put her out of business, Liam asked, “If I lied to you about something that big—pretending to be someone I wasn’t—would you be able to forgive me?” he asked.

“Uh-oh, don’t tell me, you’re a spy from the Dahlia LaMotte Society and you’ve been having wild, passionate sex with me just to gain access to her papers.”

I hoped the reference to “wild, passionate sex” would divert him—perhaps toward some more of the same—but instead he became even more agitated. He got up and started pacing back and forth in front of the bookcases.

“All these books you read and write about, your
romances
, do you think they really tell the truth about love?” He plucked a copy of
Evelina
from the shelf. “Could a person read them and learn how to be in love?”

“They’re not operating manuals,” I snipped, growing irritated now. I didn’t have the energy for a philosophical debate on the nature of love. Or maybe he’d hit a nerve. I sometimes wondered if the reason I read romances was to figure out what it meant to be in love. But then I sometimes worried that reading all those romances had left me dissatisfied with love in real life. “There’s no such thing. People learn to love from experience. It takes time. You can’t study it like studying the piano or economics …”

Perhaps it was my choice of economics with its reminder of Paul that teed him off.

“Then what good are they?” he asked, lobbing
Evelina
across the room and then stomping out of the library.

“Hey! That’s a 1906 edition!” I called after him. I considered following him, but I suddenly felt too tired—tired of Liam’s outbursts and just plain
tired
. I burrowed into the couch, covering myself with the fluffy alpaca throw that Phoenix had bought. It still smelled like Jack Daniel’s and Shalimar. The thought of Phoenix made me feel sorry for myself. Everybody left. Phoenix. Paul. Now Liam. I’d worked myself up to a good cry when Liam came back, repentant and smelling like the outdoors. His forehead was cool when he pressed it against mine.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want to watch the rest of the movie?”

“No,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I think we ought to get you some more experience in the art of love.”

“Oh,” he said, scooping me up in his arms and heading for the stairs. “Like this?”

“Rhett Butler One-Oh-One—yes, exactly like this.”

As January slid into February, I had to admit that my constant fatigue was more than the effects of lots of sex. Something was wrong with me. Since I didn’t have a family doctor in the area yet, I went to the school infirmary before my class. After walking through a light snow I found a crowded waiting room full of sniffling, bleary-eyed students and a harassed nurse.

“What’s going on?” I asked when I signed in—I recognized some students’ names on the sign-up sheet: Flonia Rugova and Nicky Ballard and also Richie Esposito, whom I remembered from the creative writing class. “Is it swine flu?”

The nurse, whose ID badge identified her as Lesley Wayman, held up a finger for me to wait while she sneezed. “No,” she said. “That’s mostly passed. There’s something else going around. Dr. Mondello thinks it’s mono, although so far the tests have all come back negative.”

“What were their symptoms?” I asked.

“Fatigue, night sweats, anemia.”

“Huh. I have the fatigue, but I haven’t noticed any night sweats …” I said, but then I realized, blushing, that I did sweat a lot at night—but that was because of what I was
doing
at night. And I had no idea whether I was anemic or not, although I never had been before.

“Have a seat,” Nurse Wayman said. “The doctor will be with you as soon as she can.”

I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair—the only seat left—and took out a pile of papers to grade. The room was certainly quiet enough to get some work done. The only noise was the hiss of the steam heaters and the muted whisper of MP3 players plugged into many of the students’ ears. I graded two papers—adding the scratch of my red pen to the hushed atmosphere—before noticing something peculiar. I was sitting in a room full of college students and no one was talking. Shouldn’t a group of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, all attending the same small college, have something to say to one another?

I looked up and scanned the room’s occupants. Directly across from me, sprawled in a too small chair, was a shaggy-haired boy with a goatee and silver nose ring. I recognized him from Liam’s class, but didn’t recall his name. Wes? Will? Waylon? Something with a W. Or maybe I thought that because a flying
W
—the trademark of the band Weezer—was tattooed on his neck. His eyes were closed, his head bobbing to the music leaking tinnily out of his plastic ear buds … or no, actually, his head was nodding because he was asleep. Each time his head fell heavily forward he snapped it up again and made a strangled gurgle. It was painful to watch but also a teeny bit funny. I looked around to see if anyone else was noticing his nodding-out performance, but everyone else was either asleep or staring vacantly into space or out the windows at the now heavily falling snow. Not only wasn’t anyone talking, no one was even reading, writing, or sketching. The only person who even had a book in her lap was Flonia Rugova, who I noticed now curled up in the one comfortable-looking sofa. I got up and went over to her. She flinched when I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Professor McFay, where did you come from? I didn’t see you there.”

“I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes, but I didn’t notice you either. I was grading papers. I’d say you didn’t see me because you were so engrossed in your book, but although I’m not an expert on Czech, I’m pretty sure you don’t read it upside down.”

Flonia glanced down at the book in her lap—Czes
³
aw Mi
³
osz’s
Collected Poems
in the original. “Oh,” she said. “I’m reading it for the independent study I’m doing with Mr. Doyle and Dr. Demisovski. It’s really great but somehow I read two lines and then find myself staring into space.” She yawned. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I seem to sleep all the time and I have such strange dreams …”

“Flonia Rugova?”

I thought that Flonia had stopped midsentence because Nurse Wayman had called her name, but she hadn’t made any move to get up or acknowledge the sound of her name and when I looked down I saw that she had actually fallen asleep.

“Flonia?” I laid my hand on her bare forearm. Her skin was cold to the touch. “I think it’s your turn.”

“Oh!” she cried, startling awake. The color in her cheeks darkened and she stared at me as if she didn’t know who I was.

“Miss Rugova?” The nurse was standing over us. “Dr. Mondello will see you now.”

Flonia smiled at me and got up. The book of poems fell to the floor. I picked it up and handed it to her. “Czes
³
aw Mi
³
osz!” she exclaimed, as if she’d never seen the book before. “I love him. Thanks!”

Dr. Kathy Mondello, a tall woman with closely cropped gray hair and large serious eyes, listened as attentively to my symptoms as she did to my heart and lungs. She peered into my throat and ears, palpated my glands, and took my blood. She asked me the standard questions.

“Any shortness of breath?”

“No,” I answered, recalling the gasps I made while making love to Liam.

“Heart palpitations?”

“I don’t think so.” My heart felt like it was racing right then as I thought about Liam.

“Dizziness?”

“Not really.” I didn’t think the swoony feeling I got when I looked into Liam’s eyes counted.

“Weight loss?”

“I wish! I’ve been eating like a truck driver.”

“Really? Because I noticed your pants are loose. Have you weighed yourself lately?”

I admitted I hadn’t and she asked me to step on the scale. I was five pounds lighter than when I’d weighed myself last, which was just before Christmas.

“Do you eat at the cafeteria?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Why? Do you think this is some kind of food poisoning?”

“No, there’s been no stomach involvement, but I am seeing a lot of anemia. I wondered if there was some food at the cafeteria that leached iron from the blood. Certain foods are iron absorption inhibitors—red wine, coffee, tea, spinach, chard, sweet potatoes, whole grains, and soy. Have you been eating large quantities of any of those foods?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I answered.

She sighed. “Neither have any of the others who have anemia. I’m afraid it was a bit of a screwball idea.” She laughed good-naturedly at herself. “But not as screwball as my first thought.”

“And what was that?” I asked.

“Vampires,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows in mock horror. “Honestly, when I started seeing all this anemia my first thought was it’s like all these kids are being drained of their blood.”