At least he had come east to see Seela. At least that.
I often thought that I should go out west again but I got tired even thinking about it. My mother’s house is too small to stay in; I could have stayed in a hotel, but the traffic in L.A. is awful and room rates are way too high.
Anyway, my mom would be appalled at me not reading.
It didn’t seem as if I was missing anything by giving up books, except at times like that morning, when turning on the TV would have awakened Mona. I could have read in the late night hours after nightmares and before the dawn, but I was out of practice. “Ben?”
It was a little after five. The sun was a glowing promise out beyond Long Island somewhere.
“Yeah, babe.”
Mona was wearing only her panties but she held her hands in front of her breasts when she stood before my east-facing throne. I had made her shy with my aggressive sexual appetite. I had made her hurt and bleed but she had also had powerful orgasms and put deep scratches into my left forearm.
I reached for her. It was a quick motion, and before she could move away, I pulled her down into my lap. She fell against me as if she had no bones at all and cried for a very long time — forlorn bleating like a nocturnal beast that had lost its mother to the night.
I don’t think that we had ever been closer, that there was ever so much love between us. We hadn’t spoken hardly at all since coming back from the party. I came at her and she froze, wanting me and not wanting me.
“Are you okay?” I asked when the sun had become a red ball on the horizon.
“I was &aid of you,” she replied. “I wanted to say no but I was afraid of what you might do.”
“Have I ever raised my hand to you or Seela?”
“You didn’t see that look in your eye. It was like you, like you hated me.”
“I don’t hate anybody,” I said, thinking, nor do I love or fear or worry about anyone.
“You hated me last night. You pulled my hair and hurt me.”
“I thought you always said you wanted me to be like that, to take you like that.”
“I know I said it,” she said, “but I didn’t really mean it... at least not like that. I wanted you to love me, not come at me making those sounds and, and hurting me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, now stroking her hair. “I guess I got carried away. Here, let me put you back in the bed.”
I stood up holding her in my arms and carried her into the bedroom. While putting her down, I got the intense desire to ravage her again. The passion invaded my breathing so I turned away quickly.
“Aren’t you going to join me, Ben?”
“No. I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, the werewolf turning away from his lover as the full moon begins to rise.
I locked the door to the bathroom and sat there trying to calm down.
Mona was right. I should have gone back to Dr. Shriver but I was worried what we might find. Maybe I had some chemical imbalance that got worse with age. Maybe the next time I’d lose control.
That made me laugh, and laughing was good. The idea of me, Ben Dibbuk, losing control, for even a moment, was ridiculous. I quit smoking on the first try. I stopped drinking and never even missed it.
There was no unrestrained side to me. It was just sex. Good sex. Nasty, low-down, hard-fucking sex. That’s not losing control. It’s just human.
Mona was deep asleep by the time I was ready to go to work. I came in to kiss her good-bye but her face was buried away in the blankets.
I didn’t know it at the time but that was to be my last normal day of work.
I used my electronic key card at the turnstile-type entrance to Our Bank. Then I came to the bank of elevators, where Molly Ammons greeted me.
“Good morning, Mr. Dibbuk,” the chubby white woman said. “Smile.”
She pressed a red button on the little stand in front of her and the camera eye above her head snapped a photo of me.
I took the express car to the forty-seventh floor, where I used my key card again to open the glass doors that led to my section. My office was just down the hall to the right, but first I had to sign in at the desk there, where Tina Logan sat every morning brushing her hair or chattering on her cell phone. She never said good morning or anything else to me.
One morning a few years ago, I walked in while Tina was leaning over with her head on the desk whispering into her cell phone — sharing secrets with her best girlfriend or some new lover. I was having a problem that day. One of the quarterly runs was putting out a totals sheet that didn’t balance with the ATM system. I knew that I was supposed to sign in but I didn’t. After all, what difference did it make? They already had my key-card code and picture.
So I went to my office and pulled down the red file for the quarterly master and started reading through the code.
Two hours later there came a knock on my doorless door frame. “Ben?”
It was Cassius Copeland, maybe the only man in America who had been born after Cassius Clay’s first stunning victory over Sonny Liston and named for that champion before he changed his name to Muhammad and then KO’d Liston a second time with the famed “phantom punch.”
“Hey, Cass,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“You, my brother,” the dark-skinned security expert intoned.
Cassius’s uniform was black trousers and a tight-fitting black turtleneck sweater-shirt that showed off his well-developed physique. He took a stack of red folders off my visitor’s chair, threw them into a comer, and sat down.
There was no disrespect in these actions. Cass knew that I had a finely honed sense of my messy office, that I would be able to find any program folder whenever I needed to.
“Me?”
“Uh-huh.” He held up a blue slip of paper.
“For me?” I asked, really surprised.
“Tina Logan says that you refused to sign in. She says she asked you but you just shined her on and walked by.”
“She had her head on the desk,” I said. “And she was talking to her girlfriend or somebody on the phone.”
“You want me to write up a slip on her?” Cass offered.
“I don’t know why she even works here,” I said. “Why do we need a key card, a camera photo every day, and a sign-in sheet? You told me yourself that none of it makes any difference if somebody really wants to mount an attack.”
Cassius Copeland smiled enigmatically. His dark features were more compelling than handsome. His eyes seemed like they held a trove of forbidden knowledge.
“Security,” he said. “They asked me to set up a security system and that’s just what I’ve done.”
“But we’re not any safer now than we were before nine-eleven and all these procedures.”
“Not safer,” Cass said, holding up a powerful, instructive finger, “but more secure.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Security, Ben, is a feeling. You got your security blanket, your good-luck charm, your friend on the phone saying you’re all right when everything around you is goin’ to hell. That’s what they hired me for.”
“They hired you so that no mad bomber comes in here and blows them all to hell.”
“And I promise you, Ben, nobody is gonna blow up the main offices of Our Bank.” Cass smiled and I laughed with him.
He tore up the blue slip and dropped it on my overflowing trash can.
From that day on, I signed in every morning at Tina’s desk and never felt the slightest bit put out by the absurd security precautions implemented by Cassius Copeland for Our Bank.