The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub Page B

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 won’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