Saving Elijah

and touched my mouth, just for a second. "When I'm in the presence of a beautiful woman, I lose all sense of propriety. Forgive me? I was just kidding."
    I was feeling weak in the knees. Well. He had smiled when he made the crack about her hair.
    "Now where were we?" Seth said. "Oh. Right. When the Devil first appears in the Goethe Faust, he appears as a poodle. You'd figure the Devil would be a Doberman or a shepherd. Poodles are a very smart breed, you know." Then: "Sit, Meph."
    Meph sat. Meph also walked, stayed, heeled, and shat when Seth Lucien commanded it to. It was the most thoroughly trained dog I've ever seen.
    Seth asked if I wanted to see him rehearse, explaining that he would have played Oedipus had he not promised to get a draft of his Faust play to its director by Christmas. I watched all afternoon from the back of the Little Theater, a small, shabby, subterranean auditorium that you entered through an alley, which was only loosely connected to the university. Other than my stint at the age often as the mayor of Munchkin Land, and successive Camp Pequot productions, my theater experience had consisted of working lights in my high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, where there was a lot of fooling around. The Playmakers were all serious theater types, some of them very talented. Though he was playing a small role, the shepherd who tells Oedipus that he's killed his father and married his mother, Seth was among the most impressive on stage.
    Between his scenes he sat next to me and gave me a running commentary on the actors. Gabby Sterling, playing Jocasta, a tall, lithe, ethereal junior, was "a decent actress, but she'll fuck anyone with a prick." She'd played Ophelia in their production of Hamlet last year. (Yes, he played the lead.) Patty Garfinkel, in the chorus, was "the best actress in the group, by far, but she needs to lose weight." (Well. I'd certainly never mention all that weight I'd lost, and thank God I'd lost it, because Seth Lucien would never have looked at me if I hadn't.) Jay Salisbury, playing Creon, a slightly built boy with thinning brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, "does good work, but he needs better direction." Rich Lender, playing Oedipus, was "going to make it as an actor, because if he doesn't, he'll kill himself." Then, with a laugh, "No great loss."

    *    *    *

    The poodle bounded ahead of us, up four flights in a decrepit building that once must have been a spectacular Washington house. Seth told me to wait outside for a moment, he just wanted to put away a few things before I came in, which I thought was kind of sweet, that he wanted to clean up for me. A minute or so later, he opened the door to his apartment and let me in, then went to the sink to get the dog some water. I just stood there in the long narrow attic room and looked around. His very own place! As a freshman, I had to live in a dorm. I took it all in: the tarnished brass bed; a Tiffany lamp that looked real to me, intricately leaded in a multicolored floral pattern; a large baroque mirror framed in gilt and gracefully carved in a floral-and-grapes motif presided over by two ripe cupids on each side. There was a table with a typewriter on it; an expensive-looking camera on a tripod set up next to a sewing mannequin draped in a purple and black and gold costume; a shelf filled with spools of film; an electric guitar and amp. Actor, photographer, filmmaker, and musician, too.
    Seth put an album on the stereo, The Doors' "Strange Days." Morrison's sardonic monotone filled the room as I ventured over to the extraordinary gilt mirror next to the bed and looked at my reflection. I touched one of the gilt Cupids but quickly withdrew my hand, startled by the voluptuousness of the carved figure. I could see the reflection of a smaller mirror strategically hung on the wall on the other side of the bed, and the bed, and myself, repeated over and over, each image a smaller version of the last.
    "Nice effect, isn't it?" Seth came up behind me, put his arms around my waist, moved my hair away, kissed the back of my neck. His lips to my skin made me shiver and I pulled away.
    "That was funny, what you did in class today."
    "I should have told him what I think of him. These socialists are whistling up their asses."
    Quite a statement to make on a college campus in the early seventies. "Why?"
    "Because there's the matter of the real world to consider. Communism is an idealist's delusion. Only inferior minds think