Sympathy for the Devil Page 9

  It seemed as if the more time I spent in his company, the harder it became for me to remember he was something more than a man. Maybe that was his intention — for me to become so familiar with him that his true identity was no longer a barrier.

  And then what?

  Well, that was a good question. I somehow got the feeling this wasn’t just about sex...assuming he was capable. Probably; otherwise, why take on the form of a human man at all? Had he done this before? Was I just the latest in a long string of mortal conquests? Maybe he needed a lay once a century to keep on his game. I just didn’t know.

  Exactly. I didn’t know anything, and although he’d let slip a few interesting tidbits, they’d all been calculated to put me at my ease, not to give me any more information about why he’d come to me, of all the women on the planet. The choice snippets he’d told me seemed, in retrospect, to have been carefully chosen to put me off the scent, to get me distracted by anything but the central question of our relationship.

  If you could even call it that, considering we’d only seen each other twice. The sad thing was that even in our limited time together, Luke and I had had more meaningful conversations than I’d had in the entire six months I’d been dating Danny.

  Danny, who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the planet. Not that that was particularly unusual, but his silence seemed almost ominous. What was he up to?

  Probably nothing, as usual. Maybe he had a gaming convention or something to go to. Repressing a shudder, I recalled the time when he actually dragged me to one of those a few months ago. I’d gone along, because at the time I’d still thought we might actually work out as a couple, even though his parents acted like I was the Whore of Babylon or something because I wasn’t Catholic. They were so hardcore they’d even had portraits of the Pope hanging on the walls of their living room.

  At any rate, Danny had looked like a GQ model compared to the collection of misfits, nerds, and downright freaks I saw at that gaming convention. It didn’t help that there weren’t many other women there, especially ones in skinny jeans and high-heeled boots; the conglomeration of geeks in attendance kept staring at me the way a starving dog would stare at a steak, and I’d finally faked a headache and made Danny take me home.

  But he hadn’t mentioned any events of that sort coming up, and he usually did tell me about them, in a half-wistful, half-cajoling way: “If you’d just give it a chance, you could have a lot of fun!” Yeah, right. I’d cop to playing games on my phone while waiting at the doctor’s office or something, but I certainly didn’t devote large chunks of my life to gaming the way those guys did.

  Well, Danny would just have to take care of himself, and Luke as well. Not that I had any doubt as to his capacity to keep himself occupied. God knows what the Devil did in the hours when he wasn’t wining and dining me. But maybe He didn’t, either. I still hadn’t exactly figured out that particular relationship. There hadn’t been any animosity in Luke’s voice when he spoke of God — if anything, they sounded like a manager and a subordinate who usually got along fairly well but who every once in a while had a difference of opinion.

  That didn’t sound much like what I’d read about Lucifer, about the supposed war in Heaven and all that, but maybe the passage of time had mellowed things. Maybe one of these days we’d be someplace private enough that I could actually try to get straight answers to some of my questions.

  Then again, that could be asking for trouble. I was beginning to wonder if I could trust myself to be alone with Luke for anything longer than five minutes.

  It was a good thing I’d planned alternate routes down to Orange County, because, as I’d worried, someone had decided it was a really good day to wrap his car around a light pole. I had to make a detour that took me a good bit out of the way and actually put me on a freeway that ran closer to the coast. Ironically, the change in route meant that I was going to drive right by the exit I would have taken to get to my father’s house. But of course I couldn’t go there now — I still had lunch to get through somehow.

  I did use some of the time I spent sitting in traffic to finally call Nina back and try to set something up with her for a belated birthday get-together. She still sounded a little cloggy, but she protested when I said we could just postpone things until she was all the way better.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m going stir-crazy anyway. Let’s get out and do something.”

  “All right,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t involve food. After this week I don’t think I want to ever eat again.”

  “Another big date, huh?”

  “He took me to Griffith Observatory.”

  A few seconds of silence as Nina digested that statement. “Wow, that sounds really...fun.”

  “It was,” I replied. “It was lovely.”

  “‘Lovely’? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that word to describe a date before.”

  “I guess I never had a date before that deserved it.”

  Nina remarked, “I’m impressed. So when do I get to meet the wonder stud?”

  I winced. “Um — ”

  “Yeah, I know. ‘Our relationship is in a delicate beginning stage, and I don’t think it’s time yet to introduce him to my friends.’”

  Despite myself, I laughed. “Something like that.” With a grin, I added, “Tell you what — you introduce me to Gina, and I’ll introduce you to Luke.”

  “That was underhanded.”

  “All’s fair.” The words hadn’t left my mouth before I began to wonder, So is this love...or war?

  “Fine.” But I could tell Nina wasn’t upset with me, because I heard a little undercurrent of laughter in her voice. “Have a good day with your mom, and tell her I said hi.”

  “Will do,” I replied, and then we made our good-byes. I hit the “end” button on my phone and tossed it back into my purse.

  Although I’d been down to Irvine just a scant month earlier for the holidays (no “Christmas” in my mother’s house...she just refers to the winter celebration as her solstice observance), it seemed as if the place had gotten even more crowded in the intervening time. The developers appeared intent on covering every square inch of land with over-priced tract houses, and shopping centers sprang up in the sections that weren’t occupied by over-extended homeowners and renters.

  Following my parents’ divorce, my mother had gotten possession of the house where I’d grown up. It was located in Woodbridge, a subdivision located pretty much in the center of the city, and the homes around it were well-maintained, many of them expanded as much as city ordinances would allow. My parents had never bothered with additions or any of that, since the place had four bedrooms to start with, but it was freshly painted a few years back and so blended in fairly well with the rest of the neighborhood. I doubted you could say the same for its interior.

  True, most of the furniture had stayed the same country-ish oak that had been in place ever since I could remember. But after my father moved out, my mother began to indulge her passion for folk art and ethnic crafts until the house began to look like an overcrowded shop. No wonder my brother spent so much time roaming around the city with his friends, looking for places they could hang out on their bikes and skateboards before the Irvine P.D. caught up with them and forced them to move on to the next hangout.

  I just wished my mother would wake up and realize what a slacker Jeff was turning out to be. He wasn’t a bad kid — despite spending the hours he wasn’t free-floating around town holed up in a friend’s room and smoking weed. My father had been pretty much hands-off ever since my parents split up, and my mother spent so much of her time taking classes on basket weaving or throwing pottery or whatever else had lately taken her fancy that she seemed to have no clue that her youngest child was on the fast track to nowhere. Now, I didn’t pretend to be some huge over-achiever. I certainly wasn’t my sister, with her million-plus in real estate sales and her mortgage broker husband. But even I had done the best I could to try
to live life for myself, away from my parents. Jeff, from what I could tell, seemed content to spend the rest of his days living in the bedroom he’d occupied ever since he was five years old and sponging off my parents. From time to time he’d get a part-time job, but none of those seemed to last very long.

  Even though I knew it was uncharitable of me, as I pulled up into the driveway I found myself hoping that he wouldn’t be home. Probably not; he tried to avoid the family togetherness thing as much as possible, and going out to lunch would have required putting on a clean shirt. Besides, he hated the whole organic/vegan thing as much as the rest of us. My mother fed him top-of-the-line holistic stuff, and then he went out with his friends and spent his pocket money on McDonald’s and Del Taco.

  The rain had lightened up a bit as I headed south, but I still needed my umbrella to get from the car to the front entry relatively unscathed. I rang the doorbell and waited a few seconds until my mother answered the door.

  Looking at her was always sort of strange for me. We were a lot alike — same straight dark hair and big brown eyes, same short little nose and rounded chin. For years she colored her hair to keep the gray at bay, but after the divorce she let it pretty much go, and now it had heavy silver streaks through it. She also put on weight immediately after my father took off, but once she went on her vegan diet she lost most of the extra pounds and got pretty trim. Actually, she looked damn good for someone her age, so it gave me hope that I’d be able to hold up fairly well as the years went on.

  Still, coming face to face with her was always like meeting up with an older version of myself, and it could be kind of disconcerting. It didn’t help that she invariably wore jeans and flowing, boho-style tops that made her look younger than her fifty-six years, despite the gray in her hair.

  She hugged me and told me I was looking wonderful — her standard greeting — and then led me back into the house, chattering away about this fabulous new place she’d found in Laguna whose chef was a huge proponent of the whole raw food movement, and how much I was going to adore it. I sighed inwardly, steeling myself for a meal composed of hummus, pine nuts, and God knows what else, and managed to smile. At least I could look forward to getting some real food in me after I met up with my father later in the afternoon.

  Some vaguely Celtic new age–sounding music played softly in the background, and the house smelled of patchouli. Sometimes I really did wonder if my mother thought it was still the ’70s or something. I still couldn’t quite figure out why my parents — who met at Berkeley — had ever decided to settle in staid Irvine all those years back.

  “So what’s new?” I asked, hovering in the living room as she went to retrieve her purse. “Any new projects?”

  My mother worked as a freelance book designer, and she made a decent living at it. Of course, the continuing support from my father probably didn’t hurt, but she did have a steady stream of jobs coming through, mainly from small presses that couldn’t afford full-time designers.

  She emerged from the kitchen, clutching an oversized faux-suede bag (no leather products for my mother) and smiling. “Oh, yes, a wonderful new book from Chanson Press about the baskets of the Chumash people. It’s very exciting.”

  Well, at least she was able to combine two of her great loves. I could see two examples of her own handicraft perched on one edge of the fireplace surround. Good thing she never actually lit a fire in there — too wasteful of natural resources.

  “Sounds great,” I said. Then — because as much as I hated to drive in Laguna, getting in a car with my mother behind the wheel was a surefire recipe for disaster — I asked if she wanted me to drive to the restaurant.

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that — ” Her protest sounded a little half-hearted, though. I think deep down my mother knew she was a lousy driver.

  “No problem,” I said hastily. “Um...is Jeff coming?”

  “No,” she replied. “I think he was going to the movies with a friend. I told him he should see you, since it was your birthday and everything, but he said you’d understand.”

  Which was Jeff code for Hey, sis, hope you have a good day, but I don’t really give a crap whether I see you or not. I still hadn’t decided whether the feeling was mutual or not.

  My mother and I shared an umbrella as we went back out to the car. For a second I worried that she might to try to convince me that driving her Toyota hybrid would be better than the Mercedes, but since the rain was coming down harder now and the Mercedes handled beautifully in wet weather, she apparently decided safety won out over conservation.

  I backed the car out of the driveway and headed back down to the 405. From there we’d pick up a highway that wound its way through the hills and on into Laguna. For a while we were both quiet; I needed to focus on the road, and I thought she could sense that. But after I pulled onto the 133 and slowed down to about fifty to accommodate the winding, slick pavement, my mother stirred in her seat and gave me a thoughtful look.

  “Something seems different about you.”

  “I’m a whole year older,” I replied, without lifting my gaze from the road.

  “No, I think it’s more than that.”

  Well, I’ve met the Devil, I thought. And he sent me flowers for my birthday.

  I didn’t say anything, though. That was a conversation I really didn’t feel like getting into quite yet.

  “How’s Danny?” she asked, her voice altering subtly. Now, my mother is probably the world’s most understanding person. She didn’t even rant and rage and despair when my father left. We’ve become different people, she’d said, looking somewhat wistful, but that was about it. With Danny, though, I always got the definite vibe that she didn’t quite think he was good enough for me, even though she would never say such a thing out loud.

  “Fine,” I said, lifting my foot off the accelerator as we hit the inevitable crawl that started at Pacific Coast Highway and backed up onto the 133 by a distance determined only by the quality of the weather. Since it was raining buckets, I only had to wait about three phases of the light before I could turn left onto PCH.

  “It’s on the right, about two streets down,” my mother instructed. “There’s parking in the back — ”

  I caught a glimpse of the restaurant in time, and turned right, then right again into a cramped parking lot. Still, that was better than a lot of places around here, which often had only street parking. For a few minutes we were occupied with getting out of the car and into the restaurant without being soaked in the process. It wasn’t until we’d been seated at a small table toward the back and handed our menus that my mother was able to pick up the previous thread of the conversation.

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, sure,” I muttered. What I wasn’t enthusiastic about was the contents of the menu. No meat, of course, but not even anything with dairy in it. I was overcome by sudden visions of cheeseburgers and fries and bit my lip, forcing my mind away from such forbidden fruit. “We just had a little spat a few days ago, that’s all,” I added. I figured it couldn’t hurt to cheer her up a little bit with the prospect of Danny and me having difficulties.

  “A spat?”

  The waiter showed up, and my mother ordered an herbal iced tea. I asked for the same, since nothing else was remotely appealing.

  Then she requested some scary-sounding kind of wrap, and I ordered the pesto pizza, since I couldn’t see anything else on the menu that didn’t frighten me. We handed the menus back to the waiter, and my mother fastened me with a penetrating look, the sort I used to get in high school when I tried to lie about how late I’d been out the night before.

  “He forgot my birthday,” I said flatly.

  “Oh, dear,” she said.

  “Yeah. As you can imagine, I wasn’t too thrilled about it.” The waiter placed the iced teas in front of us, and I figured I might as well go for it. “But that’s all right, because I’ve actually met someone else.�
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  “You have? Who?”

  That was a good question. “Um, just this guy. His name is Luke.”

  “What’s he like?” she asked.

  If it had been my father or my sister, probably the first question they would have asked would be, “What does he do?” But this was my mother, and of course she cared more about this unknown suitor’s personality than what he did for a living.

  Unfortunately for me, neither question offered an easy answer.

  “Charming,” I said, after a long pause. “Intelligent. Good-looking.”

  “Sounds good so far,” she replied, smiling. “Does he work in publishing as well?”

  “No — he’s — he’s sort of independently wealthy.” That was good enough for now. At least it explained the cars and the house in Hancock Park.

  She lifted an eyebrow, as if she didn’t completely believe me. But, being my mother, she didn’t press the issue. “So you’re not seeing Danny anymore?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I guess I thought I’d see what it was like to go out with a few different people at the same time. It’s not as if Danny and I were serious, anyway.”

  “That’s not like you, Christa.”

  That was for sure. Up until this point my entire romantic life had been an exercise in serial monogamy. Even when it wasn’t really working out, as it hadn’t been with Danny, I was always afraid to try seeing several people at the same time. Nina didn’t have the same scruples; she made it sound as if she were seeing only the unknown Gina, but I didn’t know for sure. During college she usually had at least three guys on the string at any one time.

  “I guess not,” I admitted. “But maybe it’s time I tried something different.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but then the waiter showed up with our meals, and I had to spend the next few minutes listening to her gush about the food and how wonderful it was and how healthful, yadda yadda. To me, it tasted as if I were eating the dining-room table run through a blender and covered with pesto, but somehow I managed to keep taking bites and nodding enthusiastically. If it made her happy, I could suffer for a few hours (or maybe more, depending on what this stuff ended up doing to my digestive tract, but I was just going to cross my fingers and hope for the best).