The Hellfire Club

something. You're too young for menopause. When my mother went through it, she had a lot of white hair, she was over fifty, and she turned into a total bitch. She was impossible, she was like in a rage for at least a year.'

'People have different reactions. It's nothing to be afraid of.'

'People in menopause don't have periods. You had one a little while ago.'

'I had a period that lasted more than two weeks. Then I didn't have one for about six weeks.'

'I don't have to hear all the gory details.'

'The gory details are my department, right. But everything's going to be all right. This is temporary.'

'God, I hope so.'

What did Davey hope was temporary? Menopause? Aging? She moved across the sheet and put an arm over his shoulder. He turned his face away. Nora kissed the back of his head and slid her other arm beneath him. When he did not attempt to shrug her off or push her away, she pulled him into her. He resisted only a second or two before turning his head to her and slipping his arms around her.

His cheek felt wet against hers. 'Oh, honey,' she said, and see the tears leaking from his eyes. Davey wiped his face then held her close.

'This is no good.'

'It'll get better.'

'I don't know what to do.'

'Try talking about it,' Nora said, swallowing the words for a change.

'I sort of think I have to.'

'Good.'

Now he had a grudging, almost furtive look. 'You know how I've been kind of worried lately? It's because of this thing that happened about ten years before I met you.' He looked up at the ceiling, and she braced herself, with a familiar despair, for a story which would owe as much to Hugo Driver as to Davey's real history. 'I was having a rough time because Amy Randolph finally broke up with me.'

Nora had heard all about Amy Randolph, a beautiful and destructive poet-photographer-screenwriter-painter whom Davey had met in college. He had lost his virginity to her, and she had lost hers to her farther. (Unless this was another colorful embellishment.) After graduation they had traveled through North Africa. Amy had flirted with every attractive man she met and threw tyrannical fits when the men responded. Finally the two of them had been deported from Algeria and shared an apartment in the Village. Amy went in and out of hospitals, twice for suicide attempts. She photographed corpses and drug addicts. She had no interest in sex. Davey once said to Nora that Amy was so brilliant he hadn't been able to leave her for fear of missing her conversation. In the end, she had deprived him of her conversation by moving in with an older woman, a Romanian emigree who edited an intellectual journal. He had never explained to Nora how he had felt about losing Arny, or spoken of what he had done between the breakup and their own meeting.

'Well,' Nora said, 'whatever this is, it couldn't have been much stranger than life; with Amy.'

That's what you think,' Davey said.19

'It was about a month after Amy left. You know I think I was actually kind of happy for her. Some people acted like they thought I should be disturbed by what she did, but I didn't know why. Amy never liked sex anyhow, so it was more like getting worked up about who she wasn't doing it with than who she was, and that's ridiculous. Anyhow, after about a month, I repainted my apartment and put new posters on the walls, and then I got a really good stereo system and a lot of new records. Whenever I found anything that reminded me of her, I threw it out. A couple of times when she called up, I hung up on her. Because it was all over, right?'

'You were pretty angry,' Nora said.

Davey shook his head. 'I don't remember being angry. I just didn't see the point of talking to her.'

'Okay.' Nora reached over the side of the bed and picked her bra and blouse off the floor. She tossed the bra into the clothing bin and put on the blouse.

'I wasn't angry with Amy,' he said. 'Everybody kept telling me that I had to be, but I wasn't. You can't get angry at crazy people.'

Nora gave up and nodded.

'Anyhow, I was in a funny mood. After my apartment was all redone, I reread Hugo Driver - all three books - after I came home from work. Then I read Night Journey all over again. I felt like Pippin.'

In other words, Nora thought, he felt as though Amy had killed him.

'I couldn't stand being in the apartment by myself, but I hardly had any friends because Amy, you know, made that difficult. I didn't want to spend time with my parents because they hated Amy, and they loved telling me how lucky I was. I went through this weird period. Sometimes

I'd spend the whole night staring at the tube. I'd listen to one piece of music over and over, all weekend.'

'I guess you got into drugs,' Nora said.

'Well, yeah. Amy always hated drugs, so now that I was free… you know? A guy in the mailroom named Bang Bang sold stuff, which Dad didn't know about. So one day I saw this guy coming out of the mailroom on a break, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I followed him outside. I got some coke and some pot, and I pretty much did those for about a year. At work I stayed pretty straight, but when I got back to my apartment, boy, I poured myself a glass of Bombay gin on the rocks, did two big, fat lines, rolled a joint, and had a little party until I went to bed. Or didn't. I was thirty, thirty-one. I didn't need a lot of sleep. Just take a shower, shave, drop in some Murine, couple lines, fresh clothes, off to work.'

'And one day you met this Girl Scout,' Nora said.

'You sure you want to hear about this?'

'Why don't you just say, 'Nora, once when I was fooling, around with drugs I had this messed-up girlfriend, and we got crazy together'?'

'Because it's not that simple. You have to understand where I was mentally in order to understand what happened. Otherwise it wouldn't make any sense.'

It occurred to Nora that whatever he had to say, strictly factual or not, would be instructive. Maybe Davey had been a weekend punk!

'This isn't just about a girl, is it?'

'Actually it's about Natalie Weil.' He pushed himself upright and pulled the sheets above his navel. 'Look, Nora, I didn't tell you the truth the other day. This is the real reason I wanted to get into Natalie's house.'

She tucked up her legs, leaned forward, and waited.20

'I was in a stall in the men's room one morning, feeling lousy because I'd stayed up all night. I snorted some coke, and my nose started to bleed. I had to sit on the toilet with my head back, holding toilet paper against my nose. Finally the bleeding stopped, and I decided to try to get through the day.

'I came out of the stall. Some little guy was going toward the sinks. I grabbed some towels and dried my hands, and this guy was messing with his hair, and I looked at his face in the mirror, and I almost had a heart attack.'

'The little guy was a girl.'

'How did you know that?'

'Because you almost had a heart attack.'

'She was in the art department. She had short hair and she wore men's clothes. That's all I knew. I didn't even know her last name. Her first name was Paddi.' He looked at her as if this were of enormous significance.

'Patty?'

'Paddi. Two d's and an i'. Okay, my nose started bleeding again. I grabbed another towel and held it up against my nose. Paddi was dumping two piles of coke on the sink in front of her. 'Try this,' she said. We're right in the middle of the men's room! I leaned over and snorted the stuff right off the sink, and bingo! I felt a thousand percent better. 'Get it?' she said. 'Always use good stuff.'

' 'What planet are you from?' I asked her.'

'She smiled at me and said, 'I was born in a village at the foot of a great mountain. My father is