The Devil Is in the Detail
“Okay, you win.”
Regina Wiley eyed an unfamiliar arrangement of rainbow-colored fireflies in the darkened room. Miniature bulbs, strung across the top of an overstocked bookcase, fell in strands to the floor at either end, like jerky illuminated sideburns. She regarded her husband from comfortable habit. Not counting past lives, they had logged thirteen years of marriage, with no formal attention paid to Christmas—no tree, no carols, and no midnight candlelight service. Old souls, in sync at the start, they had declared New Year’s Eve to be their personal celebration. They had fled from the year-end chaos of the city to raise gloved hands, tilt reddened chins and swig from a bottle of vintage Champagne—their gift to each other—as they greeted possibility on the cold, hard sands of Montauk. This year would find them again wrapped in the susurrus at land’s end, braced for the pulsing sea.
“The lights look great,” she cheered and immediately shuddered. Here it was. That feeling of well-being that sometimes unnerved her.
“I support sustainable marriage,” her husband quipped in a British accent worn at the heel after more than a dozen years in Manhattan. David Hawthorne knew he’d prevailed. He’d made the effort this year. Christmas was always largely ignored at her request. Or rather, at her hedging a bet that if it were left up to him, no move would be made.
Two young cats skittered around his ankles, chasing an ethereal mouse. They had visited the shelter a month before. Just to look. Still, maybe, not quite over the death that summer of her old cat.
“We can call them fairy lights,” Regina said.
“Besides, it’s their first Christmas,” David insisted.
David held fast to the memories of his family in Leicestershire, where he’d grown up. The clutter and sparkle of cheap decorations lovingly preserved, the fireplace mantle topped by miniature village scenes sunk into blankets of artificial snow. He remembered, fondly, the desiccated turkey and overdone veg, gorging on sponge cake soaked in sherry, always feeling a trifle bombed by the end of the night. The three of them—an insular family—never tempted by the outcropping of aunts and uncles and cousins, and always within taut personal boundaries. The death of his parents contrived to hold these memories in place.
Regina had an unholy attachment to family that she longed to sever, but could not. Christmas, for her, recalled a tree painstakingly trimmed, all the more remarkable because her overdone father was blind drunk by the time he’d perch precariously on the hassock and, ever so delicately, like a sheepish driver submitting to a sobriety test, place the angel atop the tree. There was nothing remotely sweet about her mother, who invariably threw up her hands, angrily insisting on ordering dinner in. Her sister—bitter and vengeful at predicted disappointment—tore through presents with cyclonic force. Regina’s parents were dead. Her sister’s life had been reinvented, Regina sidelined.
“I smell heat,” Regina sniffed. “What the—? Why do they do that? It’s practically summer out.”
“The radiators are off,” David reminded her.
“I know. I know,” she huffed. “But it gets worse every year.” Regina hurried to yank the living room window open from the top a few inches. “Can’t let the terrorists win. Get the phone, would you?”
Recognizing the number, David knew Regina was on the outs with the caller. “It’s Gabe.”
“Let the machine get it,” she shot back. “I don’t have time for his shit.”
“No message,” David said. “Still pissed at him?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t want to spoil the moment.”
“Steady on. You know how he is,” David replied.
“How he is,” Regina muttered, “is what pisses me off.”
After Regina had lost her full time editorial position, her husband had put down his guitar full time to pick up the slack. David found work as a security guard. The pay was negligible but he was outdoors a good deal at a wildlife conservancy in Queens, and they needed health insurance. They agreed it was only temporary.
She’d met Gabriel Price in the aftermath of 9/11, when many with comfortable incomes were forced to recalibrate and take meaner positions with fewer incentives. Gabriel was a couple of decades younger than Regina. He blinked at her radical political views, critical and unwilling to take it all on until he’d recycled the information, tailoring it to his peculiar proselytizing. From a Fundamentalist Christian family, he agonized over what was obvious, confiding in Regina, the older freelancer, with whom he felt safe. Although he was characteristically flamboyant among his social circle, and generally out with his coworkers, he feared the denunciatory edicts of his mother and the church back home in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Earlier, Regina and David had spent the day in SoHo, at the offices of God’s Love We Deliver. They’d joined an amiable bunch of volunteers, many of whom they recognized from year to year. They stuffed gifts donated for the homebound into paper shopping bags decorated by school children. Regina knew it didn’t entirely define the holiday for her husband, but he loved the whole New York feel of it.
On Christmas morning, the volunteers would meet at Cleo’s on Ninth Avenue, usually frequented by lifers in the theater. At an hour long before regulars took their customary bar stools, sleepy-eyed altruists gathered around a fearsome confectionery mound provided by a popular doughnut shop. They downed steaming cups of hot coffee. Fortified by sugar and caffeine, they’d head to their assigned neighborhoods to deliver gift-laden shopping bags, along with a prepared holiday meal. They had—and would do so again—visited emaciated young men in tenement walk-ups, grizzled warriors in SROs, resourceful old queens in rent-controlled apartments and low-income women in housing projects, some with children staring wide-eyed at the strangers bearing gifts.
At Regina’s suggestion, Gabriel—not one to be left out—had also signed on to volunteer. He couldn’t “do Christmas” because he was flying home, but he eagerly agreed to help fill the Christmas bags. For weeks around the office of a teen magazine, where he and Regina free-lanced, he’d babbled enthusiastically, basking in the attention he received for his “good deed.’’ He’d failed to mention Regina’s part in it.
As the morning inclined toward afternoon in SoHo, David had had to remind Regina over and over what Gabe was like, that maybe it was a rural thing, his inattention to time.
“To anyone else’s time,” she’d snapped, stuffing a bag. “Girl, you need to get one of them cell phones,” she minced, making David laugh. Afterward, exiting onto Sixth Avenue on an unusually temperate winter afternoon, she recognized Gabe’s car at the curb. He waved frantically, laughing and mouthing the familiar “sorry” refrain, beckoning them to the car. Breathless, Gabe leaned across to the passenger side window.
“Oh my God! You won’t believe what happened. I was so, so, so on time and then—.” Regina studied her watch. He giggled, the prelude to wangling forgiveness. “Let me make it up. Buy you guys a drink?”
They had dismissed Gabe, pleading a prior engagement. Undaunted, he’d called after them, “Have an awesome day folks. Love ya!” Seemingly on the spur of the moment, David had stopped into a hardware store and purchased the lights.
“Tea?” David asked, heading for the kitchen.
“M-m-m, dunno Sweetie.” Regina watched the cats following David, their Piper. She turned to the rows of books and cds shelved like subway riders in rush hour. “Is it too early for a drink?” She picked a cd at random. Her personal timeline ran from doo-wop through to the Beatles and Dylan, to the Sex Pistols, jazz, rockabilly, to the classical music she received as gifts. Though nowadays she rarely listened to any music other than her husband’s.
Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate bubbled from the cd player and filled the room. David hollered from the kitchen, “Haven’t heard that in a while!”
Regina scanned the shelves. Her gaze traversed a lifetime of books, her old friends. She lingered on an author she’d once read avidly. She reached up to stroke the thick spine of Flannery O’Connor before grabbing it off the shelf. “Born disenchanted,” she muttered.
David handed her a full glass of Pinot Noir. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” she replied, putting the book down. Palming her glass, she said, “Well, I mean the lights look fab.” She smiled, more inwardly, but he got it. She raised her glass to him, to the lights. “Thanks for all this.”
He nuzzled her shoulder, intuitive as ever. “Pecker up, lad. I’ll make us something to eat. Get that wine down your neck.”
It was a generational thing, she reasoned, her upset with Gabriel. She’d had many close gay friends in her life, still did. Years ago, some, younger than she, had struggled painfully
Now was the time, though, that you wanted someone—gay or straight—serious and mad as hell. Someone who put aside feather boas and inconsequential personal drama. Gabe’s circle seemed so self-congratulatory, frothy and liable to disappear when you needed them. She had to be honest with herself. She was angry with Gabe, not so much for his absence earlier, but for something that had happened less recently.
Just before Thanksgiving, he’d confessed to her that he dreaded the return home, how flustered he would be, so closeted with his family. He and Regina had talked for hours. She’d urged him to come out. Mothers need to know, she told him, and lies just made everyone sick. She had seen it in her own family. He’d returned from the holiday in high gear, ready to take on the world. “Whew-e-e-e!” He knew what it meant to be truly born again. His family was shocked. Shocked! But he had prevailed. Then, in a heartbeat, he’d turned on Regina over some remark she’d made regarding the furor that had resurfaced over “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” She’d cautioned against being deflected from even greater issues.
“dadt’s lobbed around like a political football,” she said.
His response was instant and lacerating. “You are a hetero! What do you know about it?” To her amazement he unleashed a tirade. “I’ll tell you what you know about it. Nothing. You know nothing about it!”
She’d come home steaming. “You get too involved,” her husband had chided.
Regina flipped through a hefty volume of letters. “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. Maybe she was just worn down by circumstance, unfairly harsh with Gabe. At least he was true to himself, not like that pastor who chastised his congregation for going to social networking sites, calling them “portals to infidelity.” Later it was revealed that he’d had a three-way with his wife and a male church assistant. Gabriel didn’t so much apologize as seduce her with his capacity for fun. Better playmate than friend, she thought.
Caller i.d. prompted Regina to pick up the phone. Her expression caused David to lower the volume on Teresa Stich-Randall, and he watched as Regina’s jubilation disappeared. He picked up that it was something to do with family. She replaced the phone in its cradle. It was late. Taxis were dear, but they would have to get a cab downtown from the Upper East Side to an address in Greenwich Village. She advised David to bring his cell phone. “This is bad. This is very bad,” she said.
In a nondescript, reconverted warehouse on Greenwich Avenue, a thickset, unsmiling policewoman stood sentry at Lucien’s front door. David liked Lucien Edwards well enough, though he saw his wife’s cousin rarely and had never been to his apartment. He knew the cousins had hit a speed bump some time ago and slowed the pace of their relationship.
Regina presented the requisite paperwork from the local precinct. The officer, somewhat mollified, guided them under the taut strip of caution yellow stretched across the entrance. Inside, Regina and David moved stealthily through the gloom, as museum-like as its place in her memory.
A muted yelp brought the policewoman to Regina’s side.
“Sorry, Ma’am. Didn’t they tell you at the precinct?”
Regina averted her eyes from the mirrored walls reflecting a king-size bed, from the tangle of burgundy-colored satin sheets enveloping the long, white limbs of her dead cousin. His pronounced jaw was still exaggerated by a delicately drawn line of beard that met a trim goatee at his chin. He was sprawled like an afterthought, one eye open, and mouth agape, unclothed but for black boxer briefs, a full-page Calvin Klein advertisement.
“They haven’t come yet,” said the officer. “It’s a bad night. Lotta parties.”
Regina and David stared uncomprehendingly.
“The Coroner’s office, they should be here soon. I’m only here because the Sixth is having their party. I was sent over from the Seventeenth.”
“The seven—?” Regina started.
“Sutton Place. It’s pretty quiet over there.”
“Oh,” said Regina, eyes downcast. “We just need to pick up some clothes for the, you know, the funeral.” She shivered and the officer acknowledged that she had opened the windows earlier.
“He’s been here a while,” she added, not unkindly.
Regina blanched. “I feel a little weird.”
David hurried Regina to the kitchen and ran cold water from the faucet. Alone, they conversed in lowered tones. Regina knew they had more to do than gather a good suit, shirt and tie from her cousin’s closet. And shoes. Even dead he would need socks and shoes.
Regina studied the dark eyes in the officer’s plainspoken face, an expression that was not altogether official. “Listen, I need to ask you something.” She took in the close-cropped wiry hair, the masculine posture. “There’s things….”
“Ma’am,” the officer counseled, “Do whatever it is you needa do. My mother…” She stopped and gestured toward the vcr. “I’d start over there with that.”
Regina’s younger self—more boisterous and outspoken—had knocked around with Lucien. They were the oddballs in the family and their friendship was a kind of protest. Lucien was fiercely tall and he had a wicked laugh. Used to have, Regina thought. Though he’d been demonstrably out in the city, Lucien shrank into a straight man’s carapace around his widowed mother, Eve. Regina guessed it was the same for him in the school where he’d taught music. He was also organist and choir director at a church in Greenwich Village, but Regina had little time for that aspect of him. She had been urged to a few of his concerts and always came away disconcerted at seeing her Aunt Eve. Afterward, Regina was eager to reward herself with numbing cocktails at the Waverly Inn nearby. The strait-laced imperative of her aunt to “show generosity of spirit and embrace the Lord” drove her nuts. Eve was a bitter, closed-minded, holier-than-thou propagandist. She repelled Regina. Prediction slipped off her aunt’s tongue like a satiated leech. “Burn in hell” was a familiar conclusion. Oddly, Regina was still profoundly affected by an uncharacteristic wobble in her aunt’s voice on the phone earlier when she told Regina about the detective’s call. Lucien had not shown up at school. Her son was dead.
Fueled by dry gin martinis and heart-pounding meth, Lucien had once revealed the contents of a darker closet—bizarre things Regina had gazed at glassy-eyed, things she wanted immediately to forget.
It was too much information, even for the free-spirited Regina. He’d boasted newly installed bedroom mirrors, satin sheets that, when lit from above, called up a burning bed. She had not understood and discomfort had crept over her like sunburn. How could he do all that good work in the church, teach music to children and still—?
“Because the church is Satan’s workshop,” he’d told her.
When he’d heard Regina was married, Lucien insisted on meeting the lucky guy. They kept their meetings playful and public, usually at Lucien’s favorite Spanish restaurant, where he inevitably ordered the Shrimp Diablo, until those meetings tapered off.
David announced that he’d found the trash bags. “Let’s get to it,” he said. Resolute, they began with the videos and uncovered a large cache of Polaroid images of young men—too young. Very quickly they discarded the idea of sifting through the lot for anything that wasn’t questionable. There would be no keepsake photos for Aunt Eve.
They searched through the hall closet. She pulled a conservative dress suit from a hanger, quickly picked a black tie from the rack. A collection of military caps was tossed in the trash; Lucien’s leather motorcycle jacket left untouched. David added a pair of black shoes and socks. Regina held out two dress shirts for appraisal.
“Blue or pink?” she asked.
“Pink,” David replied with a sly grin.
Lucien’s final dress shirt would be periwinkle blue.
Regina peeked into the bathroom, at the walls papered with old Playbill covers. She cleared the medicine cabinet.
In the bedroom, Regina searched under the bed, careful to avoid looking at her cousin’s body. She found nothing. At the officer’s direction she lifted the seat of a boxy chair at bedside. She spied the contents in the false bottom. Grasping the edge of the bed, she sat down before hastily rethinking her miscalculated move.
David dragged the trash bag to her. She hauled out whips, handcuffs and leather masks, sex toys that were more frightening than playful to her. She interrupted David’s inquiries with, “Don’t ask.”
“Anyway,” David said, “it was his life.”
Regina forced herself to breathe. “Exactly.”
They rummaged through desk drawers. “Quickly,” Regina urged.
“But we don’t want to toss anything his mother might need,” David said. “You know, bills and bank stuff.” He held up a sealed envelope marked personal. “What about this?”
Regina tore it open, suspecting the contents. There it was: instruction to destroy everything listed on the sheet of paper she held in her trembling hands. The false-bottom chair and the videos had already been taken care of.
“Right.” She exhaled slowly. “Let’s start at the top.”
They were halted by conversation in the front room. Two men, one doughy and pale, the other red-faced and thin, strode into the room like a silent comic duo. They nodded and quickly set about preparing the body. A gurney was retrieved. In a heartbeat her cousin’s body was bagged and gone.
The officer asked how it was going. Regina grimaced, showing her the list. “Okay, Ma’am. Let me know if you need any help.”
Regina pulled back a length of black velvet hung from the ceiling. It revealed a closet door. She stared at the doorknob. Her next move could pitch her down a very dark hole, a tainted Alice.
David ripped the cloth from its moorings and shoved it into a bag. “Let’s just get on with it,” he urged.
Religious vestments hung in the closet like forgotten extras in “The Exorcist.” Gingerly she pushed through them, revealing vestments embroidered with symbols she had shunted from memory a long time ago. On the shelf above stood engraved chalices and thick, black candles roped into bundles, like dynamite. Sealed tightly in the kind of plastic bags that usually housed more innocent items, such as sweaters and woolly hats, were the books she knew to be The Satanic Bible and The Book Of Lucifer. Another shelf held folders with pages and pages of liturgies and musical scores—her cousin’s handiwork—and she flinched when she recognized his feathery handwritten notes scrawled in the margins.
Like a curious child who had made the wrong turn in search of a gingerbread house deep in a frightening forest, she imagined tearing away from the terrible scene as fast as her legs would carry her. She jumped at a gentle nudge from David. “You okay?” he asked. Regina assured him that she was.
David lifted the last of the trash bags into the hall. They watched as the officer sealed the apartment. She lifted one of the bags, directing them to the elevator. “I can’t drop you anywhere. Regulations,” she told them apologetically.
In the street, David took the bag from her. They shook hands awkwardly, surrounded by the jumble of trash bags.
“We need to—,” David started.
“There’s a dumpster around the corner,” the officer advised.
Freed of their burden and clasped tightly to each other, Regina
and David headed toward Christopher Street, seeing no one in the quiet neighborhood normally rollicking with tourists and hardcore inhabitants. They crossed Sheridan Square and spied an all-night coffee shop.
and David headed toward Christopher Street, seeing no one in the quiet neighborhood normally rollicking with tourists and hardcore inhabitants. They crossed Sheridan Square and spied an all-night coffee shop.
“Coffee?” David asked.
Regina answered quietly, “Yes, please.”
They sipped tepid coffee in the flyblown interior, picking at a puck-hard round of coffee cake.
“I’ll call him.”
“Who?” David asked.
“Gabe. I’ll call him after the holidays.”
At the counter a disinterested cashier rang them up. His fingers shot from the register as if it was white-hot.
“Whoa,” he whispered. “Number of the Devil.”
Regina stared, fascinated: $6.66.
Before she could say anything, David slammed a packet of mints on the counter and the cashier readjusted the total. “There you go,” David declared. “We just beat the Devil.”
The taxi sped uptown with the kind of abandon cab drivers embrace in the middle of the night. The radio was tuned to some talk show that enabled shouting. They rode in silence until they reached their corner.
Regina sat up. “Shit!”
David rolled his head, coming out of a comfortable slump, digging for his wallet. “What?”
“The fridge! I didn’t check that. God, there’s probably poppers in there.”
Confused, David responded, “Popovers?”
“No,” she replied. “You know, the disco drug.”
David paid the driver. “Too ’80s. They don’t still do that?”
Regina imagined aloud her aunt uncapping a small brown bottle of liquid and sniffing out of curiosity.
A passerby saw them emerge laughing from the taxi, and smiled inwardly at the couple’s gay evening.
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