RAPTURE
You probably can’t tell by looking at me now, but once, back in my twenties, I slept with the Devil. We met at a Halloween party in a closed-down store space in Manhattan, Union Square, in 1981. I was nursing my third Snake Bite in the corner. Silhouettes danced to “Memorabilia,” backlit by a makeshift red-and-blue-neon installation stuck to a crumbling brick wall. The Devil was sitting alone on a beat-up brown corduroy sofa. I was inauguration Nancy Reagan: a tighter version of the red Adolfo dress, black gloves, a wig between chestnut brown and dirty blond, topped with a red pillbox hat. He wore an ill-fitting suit, a faded orange wig, and some bad foundation. I walked up to him and asked what he was, yelling over the music. He said he was the future. I told him his costume sucked. He smiled and said he was often misunderstood, scanning the room as if hoping for a specific somebody else to show up. I began spinning the first thread of his story: a woman in a white dress, a cheap Halloween bride costume, would walk in holding a veil in her hand. I imagined him watching as the woman looked for someone too, but not him. As I thought this, the Devil nodded, almost imperceptibly, as if privately approving of something, but continued looking at the room with that slight sadness, that want. I recognized some of what I’d been carrying inside, mirrored on his face.
I thought my friends had stood me up. In my mind, I superimposed said friends, Michael and Angela, over the scene. Michael and Angela as I introduced them to each other at the company Christmas party the year before. Michael and Angela discreetly brushing their hands as they passed each other en route to the elevator, when I first realized they might be together. Michael and Angela the day I found them in the bathroom during lunch break. Those days, I saw Michael and Angela everywhere. I feared the two dancers in the corner, her arms over his shoulders, his pulling her by the waist, were Michael and Angela. Though it was useless to fear it now that everything was out in the open. If it weren’t happening here, it would be happening somewhere else. In her bedroom, in his, in the entry hall of their apartment building because they couldn’t wait, in a taxi on their way here.
I downed the rest of my drink.
“Are you waiting for someone?” I asked the Devil.
The Devil suspended his search and looked at me straight on for the first time. Something awakened in my body. Despite his ridiculous clothes, he looked like a 1940s movie star, with that strong jaw, his nose just the right amount of imperfect. It had been so long since I’d felt anything like that. Even with Michael, the hurt had coiled up around that feeling and all but strangled it. Yet here it was again, that fledgling want serpentining up my bones. I didn’t want to lose it. I wanted it to stay inside me.
The Devil gave me a sly smile and complimented me on my nice family values. I held my fake pearls, feigning shyness, and sat next to him, then stretched my legs over his lap. I grabbed a cigarette and dangled it from my matte-red lips as I fumbled for my matches. He offered me a light. It was as if he held an invisible lighter: there was his hand, and there was the flame. But it was dark, and I wasn’t exactly sober. I leaned in. He moved the fire an inch away from my reach and said I could just say no, smiling as if it were some kind of inside joke. I didn’t know what he was on about, but I had always liked dorks. I pulled his hand toward my cigarette and inhaled.
A heat fluttered up from my fingertips where they touched him. It was so unexpectedly pleasant, the sparkling sensation on my skin, the warmth rising through my veins up to my palms. I let go of his hands while I still could. I took off my red pillbox hat, my Nancy wig, fluffed up my hair. I’d recently cut it like Kim Wilde, though my hair was brown. I slid his wig off, revealing his immaculate black hair slicked back. I covered it with Nancy’s hair while facing him, our mouths inches away as I adjusted the wig and topped it with the red hat. Remaining close, I stared into him and put his orange wig on myself. He didn’t look away as other men would have. Blondie’s “Rapture” started playing. Our lips were on the verge of touching. Deep in his eyes (had they been green?), the reflection of the red neon looked like fire.
I might have stayed there, trapped in the darkness, in the fire. But someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I came back to my body. They had come after all. Angela was dressed up as Princess Diana, Michael as Prince Charles, their hands glued together as usual. Angela adjusted her tiara, leaning into Michael. Their costumes were brilliant, and my heartbeat was choking me. I wanted to vomit.
“And you are?” Angela asked the Devil.
The Devil answered he was the Devil.
“What happened to the future?” I asked.
He said the future was his costume, but who he was was the Devil.
“What’s the difference?” Angela asked.
“And you.” Michael looked at me, my red dress and the orange wig. “Fire?”
“A dumpster fire,” I replied.
Michael and Angela laughed, a little uncomfortably.
The Devil nodded as he repeated the phrase “dumpster fire,” then said he would have to steal it.
“You look great.” Angela smiled at me, but her eyes were filled with pity. Maybe to spare me from seeing it, she looked away. She put her free hand on my shoulder for a few seconds, then moved it away.
The Devil said he’d always liked red as his hand ran up my calf to the back of my knee, just under the hem of my dress. He said, slowly, that red was a picker-upper. My face contorted, overwhelmed with pleasure. He broke contact, and I opened my eyes just in time to notice Angela’s and Michael’s confused looks moving between my leg and my face, then looking away, a little embarrassed. Thank you, I thought. The Devil stood up and whispered in my ear that I was welcome, then told us he would get us some drinks.
Michael had his hands in his pockets. Angela crossed her arms and rubbed her elbows gently. They looked away awkwardly for a few seconds as if they needed time to reassess how to see me. Gradually, they leaned into each other again and looked at me anew.
I wished I could hate them then. But I didn’t. I loved Angela and was in love with Michael. But I resented that they hadn’t been a little kinder to me over the whole thing. And that they’d left me waiting for them in a sketchy party where the Devil could proposition me, steal me away. But the Devil hadn’t done either of these things. What was the deal?
“So?” Angela asked in a mock conspiratorial tone.
“So?” I played coy.
“Tell me more about Prince Charming.” She let go of Michael and joined me on the sofa, locking arms with me.
Michael followed, smiling dimly.
“There’s not much to tell,” I said, pretending there was much to tell.
Except that, supposedly, he was the Devil, I thought.
Somewhere on the opposite side of the room, someone had turned on a fog machine. The room smelled sweet and chemical.
The Devil winked at me as he walked back into the room, a pyramid with four old-fashioneds on his right hand, on his left hand, a flaming B-52.
He leaned down to the sofa where the three of us were sitting now and offered me the burning drink, a long straw turned toward my lips, the flames somehow blowing in the opposite direction. He handed Michael and Angela their glasses, placed the other two on the table, and sat on the armchair beside me. After the first sip, I thought I might throw up. But the Devil reached in and lightly touched my stomach. It felt like flowers were blossoming inside me, emanating from where he had touched. The nausea was gone.
Unprompted, he told me it really was him. He was what he was.
In the space across the room, people danced to the end of “Primary” by the Cure: a couple; a group of five in a circle, jumping up and down; and several lone figures moving slowly but somehow in rhythm. The fog was thick and made them look like shadows walking in front of an old movie projector or the shapes on the walls when the power went out and my aunt used a flashlight to tell us stories. As they danced, I imagined the beginning of their story. Each of them would have lost something: the person in the middle had a recent breakup, the next one a job, the one in the corner a friend, whom she had visited in the hospital for months. Maybe they were all here, unknowingly, to meet the Devil. The Devil himself, the real one, as he had just told me, who was watching me now, pleased.
“Why do you keep saying that?” I shouted over the music.
He said he liked being honest.
“That’s not what I hear.”
He shook his head and looked away from me, as if a little disappointed. After a few seconds, he sighed, looked back at me, and began talking again. He said I should reconsider my sources. History was written by the victors, scapegoating, etc. “Boys Don’t Cry” came on, to squeals of approval on the dance floor. The Devil had perfect teeth. As he talked, he had this look, a wounded look under the slight frown. His eyebrows were perfect. I wanted to run my fingers over them. I leaned just a little closer, wondering what he would smell like. And he was so tall, I thought. Like Michael.
The song ended and this time was not followed by another straightaway. It felt quiet for a second. Then, as if someone had turned up the volume of the ambient noise in the room: A woman dragged a chair to sit with a new group forming next to us. Loud laughter broke out from a loose circle of people waiting on the dance floor. “No! No! Not true!” said a tall skinny guy, also laughing. The fog had mostly dissipated.
The Devil wanted to know what was so special about Michael.
Michael had spilled a little of his drink on Angela’s leg and tried to wipe it off with his sleeves. They both laughed. With his hair like that, he did look a little bit like Prince Charles, though skirting the opposite side of the ugliness threshold, like a good-looking actor begrudgingly made to play Prince Charles. Angela messed up his hair, and it pained me. Why her? Why was I not enough? They locked arms and drank in a pretend nuptial toast. I countered the Devil by asking what the Devil would be doing there, hanging out with me.
A song finally came on: “Faith” (someone was on a Cure bender). But the tempo was much slower than the previous songs, and the people dispersed from the informal dance area into the rest of the party, except for three stragglers, eyes closed, as they slowly danced to the long intro.
The Devil continued: It was his favorite night, he got around, it’d been a good year, he too deserved to celebrate, yadda, yadda, yadda. He didn’t seem to want to get into his devilish ways. He paused. I stepped closer, feeling an urge to nuzzle into his neck like a feral but needy kitten. Plus, he said, he liked spending time with kindred spirits.
“Meaning?” I frowned. I might have been a little messed up at that moment, but I wasn’t Devil level. I was not evil.
He sighed, paused, looked at me, and said he was not evil. Then he continued moving through each point as quickly as he had been before: He was often, lazily, offered up as a solution to the problem of evil. But he wasn’t it at all.
I squinted at him and said I was more interested in what he had meant by “kindred spirits.”
He apologized for the rant (he didn’t even like talking about himself, preferred to listen, but this, pet peeve, sore spot, etc.). Then he told me what he meant: He also tended to want most what he couldn’t have.
I looked at Michael, and the snake coiled tighter inside me.
The Devil put a hand on my shoulder and loosened the snake’s grip just enough so I could keep breathing.
* * *
Pardon me if things get a little fuzzy from here on. All this was decades ago, and things get distorted like a cassette tape jammed and unraveled. Sometimes I feel like my memories merge a little with dreams, movies, music clips, maybe just absorbing their atmosphere, the shape of their threads, their hopes. And I’m sure I had some trouble remembering that night, even the next day. Boy, could I drink then. I was so young; in the pictures my face has that aura, that thing you can see clearly when looking at old pictures of celebrities when they were younger in those “look at how they aged” posts, some magical glow sparkling from their full cheeks. Also, in my old pictures, there’s a sadness in my eyes, though I wonder if anyone other than me can detect it. I can almost feel it, a phantom pain that allows me to imagine it, even though I can’t conjure it back completely.
I remember the red light in the room. One of the red bulbs in the corner started flickering halfway through the night. I remember closing my eyes for a few seconds, spreading myself from the sway of the alcohol, inhaling and exhaling as I heard the voices: the Devil, Michael, and Angela. I can still hear the Devil, his calm radio-host voice asking someone (who had he asked?) what their story was. I remember the four of us doing shots together and laughing. Angela and Michael warmed up to the Devil. He had his ways. The four of us danced to “Tainted Love.” The Devil was a great dancer, goofy in the right way. Michael somehow had the Nancy wig now. Angela was still in Diana’s. They were already becoming the same person. The Devil flicked his finger, and the TV turned on to MTV. It played a new song, “Thriller,” though it wouldn’t come out until 1982.
“The future is here,” the Devil toasted.
“It’s not even the future,” I replied.
Angela and Michael stepped farther away, to give us some space, or maybe have each other for themselves. I put the Devil’s orange wig back on him. For a second, his skin seemed to glow a strange orange, like a cheap but radioactive tan. But maybe it was the neon lights, maybe I just imagined it.
“I like him,” Michael mouthed at me from across the room.
Angela nodded and gave me two thumbs up.
As I adjusted the wig, I touched the Devil’s skin and felt that delicious, strange heat again. It spread, running up my arm, about to reach my elbow. I had closed my eyes. He moved away from my hand, bringing me back.
We watched Angela and Michael dance. I fantasized about asking the Devil to split them up but did not say anything.
The Devil said he could, easily, if I wanted him to.
I didn’t respond, some of the heat still in my fingers.
Suddenly, Angela and Michael were arguing. I only heard fragments of what they were yelling at each other. I heard Reagan’s name, and “I was just saying,” and “he did nominate the first woman.” I don’t remember who had which position. Angela stormed out.
Copyright © 2024 by Ananda Lima
