The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub Page A

this is the time it happened.”
    “But you’re not an old woman.” He rolled over and half-buried his face in the pillow. “I know what’s wrong. I got too excited or something, and now you’re turned off.”
    “Davey, I’m starting to go through menopause. Of course I’m not turned off. I love you. We’ve always had wonderful sex.”
    “You can’t have wonderful sex with someone who wakes up moaning and groaning almost every night.”
    “It isn’t . . .” This was not going to be a fruitful remark. Neither would it be fruitful to remark that you couldn’t have sex with a man who would not come to your bed, or who left your bed to worry about work or Hugo Driver or whatever it was Davey worried about late at night.
    “Well, a lot of nights, anyhow,” he said, taking up her unspoken comment. “Maybe you need therapy or 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 moved her head back to 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 father. (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 émigrée who edited an intellectual journal. He had never explained to Nora how he had felt about losing Amy, 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.