The Boyfriend from Hell

This was the forum. The date. The "who-are-you, what-are-your-interests" venue. He reminded her of one of those preening males on the reality television shows where the women compete for attention, desperate to get to the next staged round. His blond hair was treated with something--she wasn't sure which particular hair product guys used to make their hair sit perfectly--gel, something. The hair was great, out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he was wearing an elegant pinstriped double-breasted suit she figured cost more than half her wardrobe; light brown eyes, narrow face; a former squash player for Williams College, which he wedged into the conversation, now a squash champion on the squash circuit. And a mergers-and-acquisitions champion, unusual for only twenty-nine, he told her. He needed to tell. He had a big day at the office and she happened to be his Monday night blind date. So he spun tales of himself, business warrior tales, converting the bar at the restaurant into his campfire, glowing with himself, a blondish, gel-ish glow.
 
He knew she had gone to Brown, so he seemed to place her somewhere within his social class and assumed she cared one whit about corporate life, or his corporate life. He rolled on, Lou Dobbs on Money Watch. With his credentials on the table he finally focused on her, obliged,according to the rituals, to show interest. She imagined him at this point with a Rockette, asking, "And how, exactly, did you learn to kick so high?"
 
He asked his questions and she answered. She was finishing an article for Vanity Fair about the new generation of young theater actresses. And how did she first get into writing? In high school. And where was that? Bronx Science. He nodded, saying nothing, and she surmised he had never heard of the place, or never met anyone in his life who went anywhere with a Bronx in it. He told her he once thought about writing for his high school paper--at Exeter. Exeter. Squash. They didn't play squash in her old neighborhood.
 
He was actually not completely terrible, this Sean. He went several minutes asking about her and seemed to be listening. She had sat for drinks with worse. What wasn't good was the smugness, the self-importance. He knew he looked terrific, he was doing well in the lists, making sure that she knew and, lucky girl, on a blind date she drew him. Did she have any idea what the odds were in this city to draw him? He never let on that he might have been lucky to draw her.
 
She was twenty-four, five feet four with a slender frame, small shoulders and a slim waist, modest breasts, ample enough as they were developing in her teenage years to save her from being taunted as flat-chested by the sidewalk savants in the neighborhood who were apprenticing to become jerks. She lacked the gym-sculpted upper body and neck muscles she recognized in some of the young actresses she had interviewed, and that was fine with her. She disliked the look and was bored in gyms. She ran around the Central Park reservoir a couple of times every few mornings, listening on a Walkman to National Public Radio. She knew it was elitist on her part, but she sized up her lover-aspirant as someone who never listened to National Public Radio, except for possibly Car Talk on a Saturday morning while driving through the Hamptons in his BMW.
 
"Do you own a car?" she said abruptly.
 
"Why?"
 
"Just curious."
 
"I do."
 
"What kind?"
 
"A BMW."
 
"What color?"
 
"Blue."
 
"Nice."
 
"Did you want me to drive you someplace?" he said, suspicious of her line of questioning. "Help you move something?"
 
"No, I was just asking. General background."
 
"And what does that tell you about me--as general background? You have me as one of those BMW guys?"
 
"But you are."
 
"But that's only part of me."
 
"Who said it was more?"
 
Her dark, nearly indigo hair was cut short with loose bangs, a contrast with her fair skin and pale green eyes, and she had a small pug nose. "My little colleen," the next-door neighbor, Mr. Flaherty, called her during her childhood years. The BMW owner was appraising her looks, calculating whether to go for another drink at the bar or offer dinner, applying his spreadsheet sensibility to whether or not he could get her into bed in the near enough future for it to be economically viable.
 
Smart enough to realize she had him down as a type on the car, defensively he went to his strength, his business wonderfulness. Claiming to value her opinion, he described a new company that he was helping to capitalize, movies on demand by computer. A long day spent transcribing interviews and now this champion--everything was apparently on a loop, right back to where he started, only with different corporate names, and she wanted to be in bed, alone. Not a terrible guy, just, well, who cared.
 
"I'm wasted. Maybe we could try this again another time."
 
"You don't really mean that."
 
"I do. The maybe part."
 
"Fascinating."
 
"What is?"
 
"I know it didn't work out and I know you're just saying maybe when you mean no way."
 
"I mean maybe."
 
"I haven't struck out like this since I was about fourteen."
 
"Then you're doing great. You've got nothing to worry about."
 
"You could've had a wonderful life with me."
 
"That's terrific. That's humorous." She took his shoulders as if she were a coach at a football game and shook him. "You could use more of that."
 
They parted outside the restaurant and she thought he showed a little flash there at the end, but she could see the signs. This guy needed a woman directly from his social background, someone who would be thrilled to listen to his CNN business riffs, or a B-school graduate working on her own riffs, not Veronica Ronnie Delaney from the Bronx.
 
Nine weeks since the end of the relationship and someone as good-looking as the squash champion didn't have a chance when she compared him to her portly, defiantly unathletic ex-boyfriend. She had met Michael Ruppert at a restaurant opening, an invitation that came through her roommate. Michael, thirty-one, was the chef, round-faced, cherubic, with an endearing smile, five feet eleven and clearly on the wrong side of appropriate weight charts. He chatted with her until he was pulled away by the restaurant owner, not before Michael asked for her phone number. He called and offered to cook dinner for her at his place on his night off and she wondered why he would want to cook when he wasn't working and he said, "Because you're beautiful and I'm nothing to look at and cooking is what I do best in the world, so it'll make me look good."
 
Michael lived in a SoHo loft with spare furnishings, but for the professional island kitchen. He made a salad with fresh ingredients from the Union Square Greenmarket, and spaghetti Bolognese from scratch, not a fancy meal at all, which she found spectacular. His hands were lightning fast as he chopped ingredients, talking her through the preparation, savoring every element, and she identified a quality in short supply in the New York dating scene, a passion for something, as opposed to a passion for one's self. He was also of the world, political, on the left side of the spectrum, a young chef who read The Nation magazine. "I know it reads quirky at times, but who else is saying this stuff?" When she went home that night she imagined being able to write a piece on "How I Fell in Love on the First Date with an Overweight Chef."
 
Ronnie and Michael began seeing each other immediately and exclusively. Michael was discovered while working as a caterer at a dinner party attended by a restaurant entrepreneur. He opened Stars and Stripes in SoHo, engaging Michael, who created a variation on a comfort food/road food menu that was an immediate success with critics and the public. After a year and a half Ronnie and Michael were both coincidentally in the same issue of New York magazine. He was in a group shot and included in a cover story on hot new chefs. She was in on a more mundane level with a piece she wrote about a zoning dispute on the Upper East Side.
 
The hours in dating and sometimes living with a chef were maddening to her. She was not a nocturnal person and liked to start the day early, the jogging and the National Public Radio. When she slept at his apartment she routinely set her clothes out in the living room the night before in order to make her early departures. He usually wandered in around 2:00 a.m., later if he went for a chef's night out with his colleagues. They made love as often when she was roused from sleep by the night owl as they did starting out together, as it were.
 
She couldn't equate how a Nation subscriber could be so aggressive professionally, so capitalistic. He was publicity-driven, no interview too small: cable television, radio, magazines, newspapers, conferences in other cities. Sometimes he invited her to travel with him, sometimes he said that she would only be bored.
 
"The Nation runs these cruises and they go to places like Alaska," he told her when they were at Pastis Restaurant on a Saturday, his breakfast, her lunch, "and they have lectures. And the thing is, the people who go, a lot of them are rich lefties. There's no contradiction between liberal politics and money. And I want to be successful."
 
"You already are."
 
"Not Emeril-successful. You get about two minutes at this."
 
"Andy Warhol said fifteen."
 
"Whatever. This is my moment. You have to know when your moment is."
 
Ronnie felt a specific bond existed with Michael. Both their parents were gone. Michael's mother died of leukemia five years earlier. He hadn't seen his father in twenty years; he didn't even know if the man was still alive. Ronnie's father, who worked as a botanist for the Bronx Botanical Gardens, died of a heart attack three years earlier. Her mother died when she was eleven. Ronnie's only living relative was an irascible uncle in Saratoga, New York, a retired horse trainer, whom she never saw. She called him each year at Christmastime and on his birthday and sent him gifts on both occasions. He did not reciprocate.
 
She lived with a roommate, Nancy Briggs, also twenty-four, a sturdy blonde of five feet four, a former lacrosse player at Brown, with wide bright blue eyes and freckles, so sunny and all-American-looking she could have been a poster model for women's sports. Nancy worked as an assistant to a literary agent. Ronnie and Nancy's apartment was in an old building on West End Avenue and 111th Street, a two-bedroom rent-stabilized place, courtesy of Nancy's boss, Jenna Hawkins, whose son owned the building; New York insider stuff. They both fashioned home/office setups in the bedrooms, decorated from the Workbench. The living room and small dining room featured hand-me-downs and flea market items.
 
Nancy's boyfriend was Bob Fox, a lawyer who lived a few blocks away, and Nancy slept at his house frequently, so on nights when Ronnie was not with Michael the apartment was essentially hers. As Chef Michael rolled along on his careerist track he and Ronnie were together about twice a week, usually sleeping at his place. They introduced each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Then, with disastrous consequences for the relationship, he made room on his plate for another girlfriend.
 
He was working on developing a Cooking with Michael show for the new Dining-In Network on cable. Ronnie was enthusiastic; what could be more accessible for the general public than Michael's variations on basic home cooking? She was convinced he would be a great success with it. But he was unavailable to her for three weeks as the show went from production meetings to taping.
 
Nancy called Ronnie from work. She needed to go right out and get a copy of the current Time Out magazine. She did so and found a photograph captioned, "Rosetta Dupree, the cabaret singer, and ace chef, Michael Ruppert, at her opening." They posed cheek-to-cheek for the camera.
 
Furious, she made several calls and couldn't reach Michael; she left messages. She considered going to the restaurant and confronting him and decided against it for her personal dignity. She was going to give him the following day to call back, and then she would walk in on him at the restaurant.
 
He called the following morning at ten thirty.
 
"Hey, you were trying to reach me."
 
"Hey, I saw Time Out, Michael."
 
"The paparazzi. They escalate things."
 
"No, they take pictures."
 
"Main thing is, they gave me a green light on the show."
 
"Congratulations. And how long have you known this? Have you already celebrated with Rosetta what's-her-name?"
 
"Ronnie, I've been under a lot of pressure."
 
"Yes?"
 
"At odds and ends."
 
"And is this Rosetta an odd or an end? Are you sleeping with her, Michael?"
 
"That's not the issue."
 
"How can that not be the issue?"
 
"The issue is I need to be open to new things these days."
 
"New things?"
 
"Like the show. And new people. And new business opportunities. And I care for you too much to just string you along while I go through all this."
 
"You mean your moment?"
 
"For however long it lasts. I think an exclusive relationship feels a little too exclusive right now."
 
"So what are you saying, you want to sleep with me and sleep with her, or just sleep with her? And how exclusive can it be if we haven't been together in weeks?"
 
"Ronnie, this is hard to say. I think it would be better all around if we were just friends."
 
"You don't end a relationship, eighteen months, Michael, with a phone call. There are things to talk about, feelings to be honored. I'm coming over."
 
"No."
 
"Is she there?" He didn't respond. "She is, isn't she? And she's using soap I bought."
 
"That's not so funny."
 
"I mean it not so funny. A cabaret singer. I get it now. You keep the same hours."
 
"You're a tremendous person, Ronnie."
 
"I thought you were, too, but you just got less tremendous. All the best with the restaurant and the new show and the new girlfriend, or girlfriends, and the new business opportunities. Did I leave anything out?"
 
"Ronnie, this isn't going the way I wanted it to."
 
"It could get worse. I could take out one of those personals in The Nation and tell all your fellow readers that you and your cuisine only seem proletarian. Good-bye, Michael."
 
 
He sent flowers and called, not looking to get together again with her, rather to offer a rewrite on the break-up, which he felt he handled badly. He even clumsily offered for her to eat in his restaurant anytime, to bring a guest if she wanted.
 
"I think he may have blundered into giving me a lifetime comp," she said to Nancy over breakfast on the run.
 
"You should do it. Just keep showing up."
 
"The hell with him. It's a weird culture, to parlay meat loaf into celebrity."
 
Ronnie and Nancy discussed online dating as a means of meeting someone new and she went so far as making an exploratory move, registering with a Web site. It seemed daunting to her, going through the e-mail gamesmanship, marketing herself electronically. The clincher was an article in The New York Times Magazine, which suggested relationships that came by way of the Internet often had a way of rapidly ending, as if someone hit a delete button. She experienced the departure of Michael as akin to a "delete text." She wasn't eager to repeat the experience. Nancy offered the squash champion via her boyfriend as a way of Ronnie getting past Michael. Ronnie was untroubled that it didn't work out with the guy. She found work was turning out to be the best antidote. She worked hard on the article for Vanity Fair, it was accepted and scheduled for the March 2005 issue.
 
Ronnie Delaney was virtually the writer equivalent of the new generation of young actresses she interviewed for the Vanity Fair piece. In college she wrote for The Brown Daily Herald, largely features about campus life. She intended, upon graduation, to get a job with a newspaper, and then circumstances fortunate and unfortunate conspired to direct her toward becoming a freelancer in New York.
 
In her senior year she queried The New York Times Magazine about doing a piece on political correctness within the Ivy League and was given the assignment. Researching and writing carried her through the time of her graduation into the summer and she stayed in her apartment near school.
 
The writing style she developed was breezy, colloquial, and, with guidance from a good writing course in college, grounded in research. Her editor at The Times Magazine suggested that none of the major metropolitan newspapers in America would be likely to hire her as a feature writer, a level at which she was already functioning. She had gone past conventional entry-level jobs. The Times Magazine was publishing her piece and they wanted to use her again. She never even got her résumés into the mail. The piece ran and she was given another assignment. Then her father died. He suffered a heart attack while walking through the sylvan grounds of the Bronx Botanical Gardens. That he died there, in a place of calm, on a mild summer day, doing nothing more than strolling, she considered a statement by her father, as if he had willed himself to die. With the small inheritance from her father's insurance policy she could help support herself and try to make a go of it as a freelance writer, the level to which she had already evolved, rather than step back into an apprentice job.
 
She moved in with Nancy, a literature major who had come to New York from Wilton, Connecticut. Ronnie worked on a variety of pieces, dated around, usually men introduced by friends of friends from school, or people she met at parties. She had zero tolerance for bars and clubs and wrote a piece for The Village Voice on "The Latest Terrible Opening Lines at Bars and Clubs." She and Nancy bought shares in a group house in Fire Island, which resulted in Nancy meeting her boyfriend and Ronnie meeting no one. She followed this with a piece in The Village Voice on "The Latest Terrible Opening Lines at the Beach." Over the next two years she wrote articles for various publications and attracted attention among editors as a lively new writer.
 
While researching the Vanity Fair piece she asked each of the actresses to tell her, if they cared to, about "the wiggiest guy they ever dated." One of the actresses described a weekend relationship with an otherwise "semi-ordinary guy," a musician who revealed "an unbelievably strange side." He turned out to be a member of a satanic cult which held Black Masses on 129th Street.
 
Ronnie looked into the cult, the Dark Angel Church, unashamedly featured on the Internet and highlighting its leader, Randall Cummings, at Darkangelchurch.org. She called her editor at New York magazine and pitched an article on the basis that the city was amazingly fragmented with special interest and demographic groups, but this was beyond beyond.
 
She was assigned the article and placed a call to Randall Cummings. He was smooth spoken and articulate, invited her to a mass, and was perfectly willing to be interviewed. He loved the idea of an article in New York magazine, as befitted the head of a satanic cult so modern that it had its own Web site.
 
The Dark Angel Church was located in Harlem in a narrow one-story brick building on 129th Street near the overhang of the West Side Highway, the exterior painted black with a small black plaque near the front door identifying the church. Harlem was known for its many churches, so it made sense to her that an anti-church group would not draw heavily from the minorities who lived in the area. Of the sixty or so people who entered the building while Ronnie observed, most were Caucasian. The worshippers wore unfashionable clothing, several men in work shoes, giving her the impression of a predominantly working-class crowd.
 
She waited for the stragglers to enter and approached the door. She was confronted by a bone-thin man of five feet six in a black suit, black tie, black shirt, and black shoes. The blackness of his appearance was broken by the man's complexion, nearly ghostly white. Ronnie detected makeup.
 
"What do you want?"
 
"I'm Veronica Delaney. I'm here at the invitation of Mr. Cummings."
 
"Last row. No tape recording. No pictures."
 
"I'm going to take notes. That's what I'm here for."
 
"Do it quietly." And he stepped aside allowing her to pass.
 
 
The interior of the church was painted black, the space illuminated by candelabras with glowing black candles mounted along the side walls. The worshippers were sitting in pews. Randall Cummings, their leader, stepped to an altar, an imposing six feet two, wearing a hooded black robe, and she amused herself by wondering if he might be wearing black underwear with little Calvin Klein logos. He peered at the congregants before speaking. His face was elegant from what she could see of it, with a long, thin nose. The voice, as on the phone, was soft, resonant, Middle Atlantic announcer style. No, better than that, she decided, good enough for a voice-over on a PBS nature special on seabirds. She was having difficulty taking this seriously, it was so Halloween to her.
 
"My fellow worshippers, it was a good week for the forces of evil. But then it always is. And yet, does that translate into your everyday lives? In hard cash? In business opportunities? In a level playing field for people such as yourselves who are not the entitled heads of corporations, the CEOs who get rich on the backs of those who do the work, the Wall Street boys in their private jets and their weekend houses and their fancy boats and their fancy cars, and their lawyers in their weekend houses and fancy cars with their mistresses and lovers, in a system where the rich get richer and the hardworking work harder?"
 
In college she had taken a course on modern political movements and as she listened she thought it could have been an updated Socialist Party speech by Eugene V. Debs from 1920.
 
"But it doesn't have to be thus," as he began to depart from Debs. "You can channel a force greater than all the forces on earth--and do unto others before they do unto you. You can level that playing field. You can be allied with the power of darkness, which exists, as you know. As you all know."
 
The ghostly doorman wheeled out a cart with a television set attached to a DVD player, flipping it on with a remote. A fast-cutting series of images flashed on the screen, brutal images: war scenes, concentration camp scenes, American GIs dead in the streets of Iraq, dead or malnourished African children, crime scenes, an unremitting montage of civilization's inhumanities, the worst of Mankind, torture scenes, lynchings, floggings; and on the bottom of the screen, flashing repetitively, a crude attempt at subliminal messaging, the words: "Satan lives . . . Satan lives . . . Satan lives." She made a note for herself on the use of the footage for proselytizing--"unconscionable."
 
"Is there any question in your minds," Cummings said, as the five-minute film came to an end, "that evil--pure, constant evil--exists on this earth? It didn't just get here. It didn't just show up one night. It is the handiwork of the Prince of Darkness, whose power we are here to harness. And you will."
 
Cummings then encouraged participation, for people to stand and bear witness to the injustices done to them that week, a litany of slights at checkout counters, work settings, parking spaces, doctors' offices. The injustices, she noted, could easily have been from a Larry David routine on Curb Your Enthusiasm. But these people were in earnest. In each case Cummings offered words of encouragement of a perverse nature, that the aggrieved parties should lie, cheat, steal--summon the powers of evil to even the scores against them--and then he added that they should be sexually adventurous, too, illicit, if need be, to get their due in the world. Ronnie thought that was a tidy bonus, an invitation to sex folded into a satanic message.
 
She sensed that he walked an interesting legal tightrope, never overtly encouraging violence, keeping the fires banked on his particular modified view of evil, perhaps with an eye toward avoiding jail if any of his people were arrested for their actions.
 
Most of the testimonies from cult members were trivial, although some people expressed genuine pain over the illnesses and the deaths of loved ones. For these he offered a consistent form of guidance--take action. One congregant lost her husband in a farm accident in upstate New York.
 
"Your husband, what was his name?"
 
"Tom."
 
"Your Tom's unnecessary death proves the very existence of Satan. This week do something evil. Steal something. Take something that does not belong to you or something you have not paid for. There is nothing you can do about your husband's death. What you can do is learn from it and empower yourself--through Satan. Be powerful through evil. Channel the evil that took him. What will you channel?"
 
"Evil."
 
"And whose power is with you?"
 
"Satan."
 
"Amen," he said. "Whose power is with her?" he asked the congregation.
 
"Satan," was the answer in unison.
 
"Who?"
 
"Satan," they said, louder.
 
"Who will you win with?"
 
"Satan."
 
"Win with Satan."
 
He shook his head in the affirmative and she had an image of them pouring out of the church as if they had all been in a football locker room and were collectively going to rob a liquor store.
 
At the conclusion of the dozen testimonials, which lasted an hour, Cummings brought the service to an end by instructing them to join hands as he led them in chanting, "Satan is power, Satan is power, Satan is power."
 
She left the building quickly to get ahead of the cult members leaving. Her intention was to stand outside the doorway and pick up any random conversation. Everyone departing was concerned with a scene unfolding across the street. A police barricade was set up with a squad car parked nearby and two police officers on duty. Behind the barricade three men and two women were shouting, "Go to hell, go to hell!" They looked more rabid and unstable in their anger than the people leaving the satanic mass. A van bearing a New York news logo was parked curbside, a camera crew shooting the proceedings.
 
Cummings came up alongside her outside the building.
 
"Are you Ms. Delaney?"
 
"Yes."
 
"A little commotion for your article."
 
"Apparently."
 
Across the street several cult members shouted back at the demonstrators. The two sides yelled at each other for a couple of minutes. Under pressure from the police, the cult members dispersed and the protesters, without a target, shouted a few epithets, random barks winding down, and trailed away themselves.
 
The camera crew turned their attention to Cummings and walked toward him as he stood near the doorway, in his robe, hood up, preposterous in most settings; comfortable, though, in his own skin, under his hood, against the backdrop of his church. The crew consisted of a cameraman, a sound man, and a woman reporter in her twenties, a perky brunette. Here was a street demonstration protesting a satanic cult, which she was dealing with as if covering the Thanksgiving Day Parade.
 
"Mr. Cummings?" the reporter said, beaming. "I'm Sonya Brill."
 
"Randall Cummings."
 
"A pleasure."
 
Ronnie leaned back against the church wall, observing.
 
"Could you tell us, what are your goals with your organization?"
 
"We worship Satan, darling. We respect Satan. We make a study of Satan's work and we extract life's lessons."
 
"Which are?"
 
He launched into his speech with the do-unto-others portion, empowerment through evil acts.
 
"How long have you been in existence?"
 
"Two years."
 
"And how did you come to this?"
 
"It came by way of a gradual awareness. When I realized that evil is endemic to our society. So we worship its dark creator to channel evil, to combat evil with evil, to level the playing field for our members."
 
"I see. Well, those people across the street, they didn't approve of you worshipping Satan."
 
"They have every right to protest against us and we have every right to congregate." And then in an apparent bid to use the television coverage to snare some new members he added, "We will win with Satan. We're here every week at our church and every minute on the Internet at Darkangelchurch.org."
 
"We have been talking to Randall Cummings on 129th Street, where protesters objected tonight to a satanic cult within their midst. Live for New York News, this is Sonya Brill."
 
She shook hands with Cummings and was off with her crew.
 
Ronnie turned to Cummings.
 
"You don't mind if I add to that, do you?"
 
"Ah yes, print versus TV. I'm sure you have a few other questions."
 
He led her along the outside of the building to a rear entrance, opened the door, and showed her to his office. The room contained a sleek black desk, a built-in television screen above an elaborate stereo system, gray walls, black Venetian blinds; the room was illuminated by an aluminum ceiling fixture and a stainless steel desk lamp for Cummings's work area, which included a computer and printer.
 
"It's a modern Satan we're dealing with, I see," she said, positioning a mini tape recorder on his desk.
 
"No, a timeless Satan. But to reach people today, you do need to be up to date."
 
"And how many cult members do you have, Mr. Cummings? It is Mr. Cummings, isn't it? There's no formal title?"
 
"A little sarcasm there, Ms. Delaney? That would be beneath you."
 
"Yes, a little, nonetheless--"
 
"It is Mr. You-can-have-fun-with-us. Shooting fish in a barrel. So easy to belittle the simpletons with their Satan worship, their cult. A sophisticated New York girl like yourself, Vanity Fair and the like."
 
"You researched me?"
 
"I did."
 
"I did the same with you. There's not much on you."
 
"We're new. So you've got an inside track here, Ms. Delaney. Now my advice is, don't be fooled. Someone as clever as you wouldn't be taken in by all the candles and atmosphere, I would expect. But Satan is real. I believe that."
 
"Do you?"
 
"Yes. And so do most God-fearing priests, the ones who aren't just filling time. There's too much evil in the world and the evil is too profound to be accidental." He peered deeply into her eyes as he said this, the same technique he used with his congregants. "What is your religion?" he asked.
 
"I was Catholic once."
 
"They have you forever, unless, of course, you'd like to come over to me."
 
"How many people are in your group?"
 
"About a hundred at services, another thousand via the Internet."
 
"And how do they worship exactly?"
 
"They receive the minutes of our masses. They can exchange e-mails with me. Buddy up with other congregants."
 
"And you've been at this two years. Before that? Where did you come from, your basic bio?"
 
"I'm from Chicago. I taught acting and drama at Macalester. And then there was a turning point in my life. What you heard me tell that woman about her husband's death. That comes from personal experience. My wife, a beautiful woman, kind, generous, was raped and beaten to death. They never found the murderer. You want to talk to me about evil? You want to say to me, there's no Satan?"
 
She couldn't tell. He had her. He could have been truthful about a wife, or not. She didn't know. And he knew he had her. She could sense it in his expression.
 
"I'm missing something, Mr. Cummings, in the philosophy here. The connection between the Satan you say exists and the practical means of harnessing Satan's powers, as you put it--"
 
"I encourage my people to lie, to cheat, to steal, to do nothing other than the big boys on Wall Street do, and the wheeler-dealers in those fancy-ass corporations."
 
"Lie, cheat, steal, but nothing worse?"
 
"I don't limit their imaginations."
 
"You don't seem to encourage them either. As though you're being careful."
 
"I don't write specific prescriptions, if that's what you mean."
 
"You seem to be limiting your culpability by not suggesting anything violent. Almost as if you've had benefit of counsel on limits, on being a co-conspirator."
 
"They can choose their evil."
 
"It seems to be within limits."
 
"That was hardly a Sunday sermon. I'm not telling them to run bake sales."
 
"That thing of sexual freedom. I can see where it can be a big draw. Illicit sexual behavior as a sanctioned activity."
 
"Whatever works. It's all up to them. Truth is, they need encouragement. They need someone to tell them they can be empowered. And I'm the messenger. They'll be better off for the message, doing unto others before they can be done unto, better off channeling evil, than they'd ever be mired in their helplessness."
 
"So what all this is, really, is kind of a self-help course with Satan as the hook."
 
"Oh, you're just too, too sophisticated, aren't you, Ms. Delaney? Our church is growing. People are helped." He had a manila envelope on his desk. "Here are minutes of previous masses. Testimonials from members. Some general background we provide to people who inquire about membership."
 
"Yes, I logged on to your Web site. It costs a thousand dollars a year to be in the cult, per person, fifteen hundred per family. That's not nothing for people without means."
 
"It's nothing for the empowerment they get." He handed her the envelope. "Try to go through this with an open mind. Give us the benefit of a fair-minded appraisal, without a 'gotcha' in it, if that's possible. And visit us again if you wish, attend another mass. Call me if you have any other questions."
 
"I will."
 
"I'd like to ask you a question: Would you ever go to dinner with a satanic cult leader?" he said wryly.
 
"Thank you for your time."
 
"Thank you, Ms. Delaney. And I'm serious about the dinner. As you may have noticed I'm very empathetic and supportive."
 
She prepared to leave. He studied her with his mannered, probing look. She had taken herself to a Black Mass, interviewed the cult leader. She was not intimidated in the least by him, but as she left his office, she was unnerved by his closing remark.
 
"We might do something about that sadness I see in your eyes."
 
The dream came again that night. The same elements. The little girl lost in the playground. The shattered glass. Something new this time. Cummings's face. He was peering straight ahead. She awoke, cold and sweating at the same time. She was all right while she was at the church, but she presumed it must have frightened her on some level, the darkness of the place, the violence of the film, the invocations of evil. She was angry with herself. A year since the last time. She thought the dream was gone.
 
Copyright 2006 by Avery Corman, Inc.