My stomach seized. I doubled over, acid scratching at my throat as I spewed yellow-green toward the hair-caked tub drain. For five minutes I sat there puking before my nausea subsided. Then I climbed sweat-slick and trembling from the tub, on limbs sleep-numbed and clumsy. My legs wouldn’t support my weight. I assumed — mistakenly as it turns out — that they were merely asleep due to the position in which I found myself when I awoke. I slumped to the floor, leaning heavily against the lip of the tub as I waited for my circulation to return. But the smell of vomit was overpowering, and my stomach once more threatened mutiny. I twisted the bulbous cold-water X to rinse away the sick; the knob squeaked, but nothing happened. So instead, I pushed away from the tub in an awkward, leg-dragging crawl and looked around, trying to suss out where the hell I was, and how I’d wound up here.
The room was gloomy, cold, unlit. Empty, but for me. An unmade bed. A rickety dining room table and four chairs, one upturned. A face-down bookshelf beside a yellowed basin sink. Crumbling, nicotine-stained walls barren of art, of photos, of cheer. Age-dulled wooden floors more gray than brown, and coarse beneath my stocking feet. Scarcely three hundred square feet of space — small even by New York standards — and every inch of it depressing. The size suggested I was still on the island of Manhattan — tenements in the other boroughs had a hair more breathing room; that’s why me and Liz wound up on Staten Island. The run-down condition suggested I was someplace dodgy; Alphabet City or the Village. But I’d expect the latter to be funkier than this, what with all the artist-types about, and the former should be awash with city sounds. All I heard was continuous thunder, though no lightning flashes accompanied it, and, from somewhere distant — through the wall, perhaps — a radio nattering on in angry, animated German. Of course, as near as I could tell, all German sounded angry. The latest of Hitler’s polemics, no doubt. Couldn’t wait for our boys to finally take that asshole out.
The sky outside the apartment’s gap-toothed window frames was overcast. Morning, afternoon, or evening, I couldn’t tell. Another rumble — this one closer — and I was dusted with fine powder from above. It pricked like pepper at my sinuses, daring me to sneeze. A jagged triangle of glass that had clung stubbornly for God knows how long to the right angle of its frame when the rest of the pane shattered finally surrendered, tinkling to the floor with a champagne-toast clink. Or, at least, what I imagined a champagne toast to sound like. Me and Elizabeth, we never had the dough to pay for bubbly, let alone the fancy stemware in which to put it. Our idea of splurging was a wicker-basketed Chianti and a thin-crust pie in one of the Italian joints that lined the streets of Rosebank, Staten Island, a short hike from our apartment.
Of course, it wasn’t our apartment anymore. And she was no longer my Elizabeth. But maybe, just maybe, I could change that. Make things right. Maybe that’s why I was here.
Maybe God had given me a second chance.
“Oh, good,” came a voice from behind me, bourbon layered over honey. “You’re up.”
I wheeled toward the voice, or tried. My equilibrium was out of whack; I wound up dizzy, disoriented, and staring, cheek pressed to rough wood floor, at a sideways woman in a slip dress of black trimmed in red that seemed designed to highlight her bare legs, feet, and shoulders. She was standing between me and the tub, not three feet from where I lay, in a spot I was certain had been empty, having recently vacated it myself. My passing had disturbed the plaster fines that dusted the wooden floor like powdered sugar on a cake, mirror-image handprints on either side of the wide swath left by my dragging legs. And my every movement elicited a squeal of protest from the creaky floorboards. But the dust around this woman remained undisturbed, and I hadn’t heard so much as a mouse-squeak from them to mark her passage before she spoke.
Foolish as it sounded, it was as if she appeared from thin air.
I propped myself up on one arm and sat agape as, upright, her full beauty became evident. She was, it shames me to say so soon after selling my soul to save the love of my life, the most stunning woman I’d ever seen. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one to find her so — even the radio in the other room had fallen silent upon her arrival. Her eyes glinted emerald and onyx, somehow suggesting throaty laughs and whispered secrets and traded glances from across a crowded room that led wordlessly to clothes discarded and limbs tangled in passion. Her cheeks and shoulders were dusted with freckles, and the sultry scent of sun-warmed skin clung to her, as if she’d wandered through a summer orchard on her way to these bleak environs. Her hair tumbled lustrous red across her shoulders in undulating waves and curls, the last of which on either side curved to frame her perfect breasts, which seemed to ever-so-slightly strain the mere molecules of silk that attempted to contain them. And her lips, painted the color of fresh blood, were so sensuous — so transfixing — I couldn’t help but wonder what foolhardy acts men had perpetrated with the hopes of kissing them, of tasting her breath, of simply seeing them smile.
They weren’t smiling now.
Her gaze traveled from my prostrate form to the vomit-specked tub and her face crinkled with distaste. Then she strode past me so close the silken hem of her dress dragged cool across my cheek — clean-shaven, I was surprised to discover, as last I recalled I wore the ratty, unkempt beard of an indigent — and righted the upturned kitchen chair. She dropped into it with an easy grace and crossed her legs. Her toenails, I saw, were painted blood red to match her lips. No footprints marked her trip across the room.
“Who–” I said, but then I stopped. The word felt foreign and awkward on my tongue — my lips contorting as if unsure how to wrap themselves around it — and sounded so, as well. I wondered then if I’d suffered a stroke. Perhaps the stress and scavenged food and rotgut booze had finally caught up with me, and my memory of dying was nothing more than a hallucination brought on by a blood clot lodging itself somewhere in my brain and starving it of oxygen.
Hell, maybe the clot had been building for a while, and was responsible for ginning up the whole Dumas-is-a-demon-to-whom-I-sold-my-soul madness I’d been clinging two these past few months. I had to admit, it seemed the likelier option. And if it were true, maybe it was modern medicine and not God who’d granted me my second chance. Either way, I swore then and there, to myself and to Elizabeth, I wouldn’t squander it.
If I only knew then how hard a promise that would be to keep.
“Don’t worry,” said the woman, noting my puzzled reaction to my own halting utterance, “speech is tricky at first, particularly in a foreign vessel such as yours, it requires close marriage of thought and fine motor skills, and his are calibrated to another tongue, but I’ve no doubt you’ll get the hang of it.”
I swallowed hard and tried again to speak, this time with exaggerated care. “W-who are you?” It came out with a few more syllables than I intended, and my voice sounded unfamiliar to my own ears, but I think it got the point across. Herr Grumpypants on the radio in the other room seemed to disagree. His nattering started up again, far louder now, with a barked Nein, nein, nein! It was an ice pick to the temples. I could barely hear myself think.