Saving Elijah

people are good, Dinah. People are greedy, predatory, and egocentric."
    "I don't agree," I said. "I think most people try to be good, most of the time. I do."
    He made a psshing sound between his teeth. "I hope you're not one of these so-called radicals we're overflowing with on this campus. Want some wine?"
    My mouth and throat were very dry. Radical? Everyone I knew was a radical, or a pseudo-radical, anyway. It was a down-with-the-establishment time. What I wanted was water. He moved back to the kitchen area, took a bottle of red wine from a cabinet, expertly opened it. He filled two goblets and handed me one. "To us?"
    "Sure." No one ever drank to me before, let alone to an "us."
    We clinked.
    "What beautiful wineglasses," I said. They were. Delicate cut crystal, a swirling design.
    "They were my mother's. These wineglasses are about all I have of hers."
    "What happened to her?"
    "She's dead."
    "I'm sorry, Seth. When did she die?"
    "I was ten. It was an accident." He took my hand and walked me toward the bed. "Have you ever been with a man before?"
    I didn't mind his just assuming that I was going to sleep with him. I was. Even if he didn't use a condom, which he didn't. I'd worry about birth control later.
    I didn't answer him. I was quivering, a leaf in a strong wind.
    "Come." He led me to the bed, set our goblets on the small chest next to it, sat me down on the edge. He started to kiss me.
    "Can we put out the lights?" I could see our reflections in the gilt mirror.
    He pulled away. "Dinah, do you have any idea what happens, or should happen, between a man and a woman?"
    This seems now the first of many cruelties, to use my inexperience against me, though of course I didn't see it that way at the time. Nor did I laugh, as I should have, when he kept referring to me as a woman. I was barely eighteen. This was calculated flattery on his part.
    I nodded. "Of course." I hadn't spent my high school career studying the subject with Julie to not know anything. I'd been pawed at a few times, read Dan's nudie mags, my mother's hidden copy of Kinsey.
    "I'm not talking about the sexual part of it, babe." He tapped his head. "What's going on up here is far more important. For two people to really love each other, they have to really know each other. Completely. Nothing held back."
    I wondered how he already knew he would love me. I wanted him to, so much that I remember thinking, hoping, he'd said that because he already did.
    He took two black candles and a pair of wooden candlesticks from a drawer in the little chest by the bed, set them on top, and lit them before switching off the Tiffany lamp. In the trembling light, he began again.
    "I can't with him sitting there." I could see the dog next to the bed, watching.
    Seth snapped his fingers and pointed. "Meph. Scram."
    The dog turned around and walked over to the table, beneath the stained glass window. There it sat through my entire deflowering.
    In the coming days, the dog quickly became a point of contention between us. It gave me the creeps to have it watching that way, but Seth refused to put it out. He commanded it to sit under the window, but it still watched, never lay down and fell asleep, moved closer and closer. There were times when it would actually rest its long, sharp muzzle on the edge of the mattress before Seth commanded it to move again. Perhaps he had trained it to do this, I do not know. In any case, sometimes, even as I saw our bodies reflected in the mirror, over and over and over, framed by those two little Cupids, I would feel that dog's hot breath on my bare skin.
    Afterward, Seth sat up against the brass headboard. Beautiful and sleek as he was, I'd noticed that his left foot was badly scarred. Ugly white welts encircled the ankle, snaked over the top of his foot, around the arch and the toes, as if his foot had been mangled and sewn back together again. He also had a small star-shaped tattoo under his left nipple. I asked about that.
    He shrugged as he lit a cigarette. "Just something stupid I did when I was younger."
    I took the cigarette he held out to me. And coughed.
    He took it back. "Never let it be said that I corrupted you."
    And back I grabbed it. "Too late. Besides, I smoke once in a while." Julie and I had tried smoking cigarettes when we were fifteen. Her asthma stopped her cold, and since we did everything together, I didn't continue. Now I took to it like an addict in training.
    "You didn't enjoy the sex," he said, watching me