Me and the Devil: A Novel by Nick Tosches Page A

awareness that was utterly new to me.
    On one of my bedroom walls, in a shadow-box frame, there hangs a Wolford pantyhose package featuring one of a series of photographs taken for Wolford by Helmut Newton. These photographs, which Helmut felt to be among his best work, captured some of the most erotic images I have ever seen. The most striking of these, to me, was the black-and-white picture used on Wolford’s control-top Synergy packages. It was one of these rare, discontinued Synergy packages that Helmut inscribed to me a few years before his death, using a bold black Sharpie on the package’s unopened cellophane, writing with a vertical flourish over the thigh of the central image beneath it.
    It hangs above and to the left of a heavy mirror into which I rarely looked. One day, lingering before her reflection in thatmirror, Melissa pointed to the shadow-box frame without turning her eyes to it.
    “Would you like to see me in those?” she said. Her eyes looked to mine.
    “Not those,” I said. “But something like them. Yeah.” I heard the pace of my words slow and turn soft and subdued. “I should like that very much,” I said. “Very, very much. I really should.”
    “They would cover up the scar.”
    “That’s not why. I want to see you in them because they’re the only thing I can imagine that could make you even sexier than you already are.”
    And so I bought her some ultra-sheer Wolford pantyhose—the black Synergy, and others with improbably named shades: nearly black, anthracite, oyster, ecru—and a pair of Jimmy Choo black glossy snakeskin, Chantilly lace, and suede shoes with three-and-a-third-inch stiletto heels. Four packages of pantyhose cost over two hundred, and the shoes were almost nine hundred. It would have been worth it even for one night, even for one hour.
    The sounds of her movements alone—the
scroop
of nylon as she crossed and uncrossed her legs, the click of stiletto heels and the sinister hushed squeak of welts and uppers—set my heart pounding. It was so innocently demure and so maddeningly lascivious at once. I did not speak, but only watched her and felt the effect of her symphony like a rising, slow-swelling crescendo within me. On this night I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to fuck every part of her, and I wanted to fuck everything she wore. I wanted to fuck the sound of her, the scent of her. I wanted to fuck her very soul, her very existence, her every breath. She was mine, and I was blest, and no god had created more than we had in this moment. Together with grasping wrenching hands and nails we tore open the crotch of those fancy overpriced pantyhose as the bed shook and creaked beneath us.
    “Did you ever think of your mother licking your cunt?” I asked her. The words came deep on heavy breath.
    “Yes,” she said. “Would you like to see that?”
    It was then that I realized she would say yes to anything that I asked.
    “Yes,” I said. “Tell me what it would be like.”
    Then my seed exploded from me like rain, and she moaned as if in grieving disappointment, or as if taking a blow to the gut. She said no more but only held me close and soon was asleep. There was no biting that night, though before morning I dreamt that I drank from her while she slept. I woke with a start, for in this dream her silent, tranquil sleep was revealed to be death.
    It was good to see her stir beside me, stretching her arms in the early dim light, her eyes still closed. I got out of bed to make coffee. A few minutes later, as the water was starting to boil, she came into the kitchen with a sleepy smile and sat at the little table by the window. She looked out over the gabled roof of the old Mercantile building across the way. There were wisps of pink in a blue sky that grew heavy with gray. I brought her coffee to the little table and set it down before her.
    “Maybe here,” she said, still looking out the window, as if she were talking to the gathering gray clouds. She placed her