Saving Elijah

smoke.
    I covered myself with the blanket and sat up next to him, against the headboard. Not inhaling, so I wouldn't cough.
    "No ... it was fine." Actually, it hurt, but not very much, less than I'd expected.
    He lit a cigarette for himself and inhaled deeply, blew a curl of smoke out of his mouth that wafted up around us in a lazy spiral. "I know when people are lying, Dinah. I have a sense about it."
    "Okay. It was my first time. I'm sorry you didn't have fun."
    He assured me he had, then kissed my neck, took the cover down and moved his lips to my breasts. When his head came back up, I covered myself.
    "Looking at your body gives me pleasure, Dinah, you know. You've got a lot to learn about pleasure." He took the blanket down again. "You know what I think? You're afraid of revealing too much to me. You didn't want to admit that you have no experience because you were afraid I'd think less of you. Right?"
    I shrugged. His intuitiveness was disconcerting, to say the least.
    "You think I care you're a virgin? What I care about is honesty. A man and a woman must be totally honest to truly love each other. So now, tell me something important about yourself." He took another drag.
    "You tell me something first." Suddenly bold, I traced a fingertip along that ugly bas-relief on his foot. "What happened to your foot?"
    He stared at me for a moment, then smiled. "You know, the Devil has a mark on his foot."
    "Be serious," I said.
    He took another drag on his cigarette. "Look it up if you don't believe me. In any book on the history of Christianity."
    I knew nothing about the history of Christianity, or Judaism, for that matter. "Come on, tell me what happened."
    "I was in a plane crash." He said it casually, as if it were something you heard every day. "I was ten years old. We were heading for Los Angeles. Crashed in a cornfield over Kansas."
    "Did people die?"
    He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. "On impact, the plane cracked into two pieces. We'd been sitting in row five. Everyone in the back died, everyone up front who survived was in really bad shape. I was wedged underneath a section of the wreckage with a piece of jagged metal cutting into my foot. Took them hours to free me."
    "My God, Seth. The pain must have been incredible. What did you do?"
    "Lay there in incredible pain." He played with a dribble of wax from the half-burnt candle.
    "How many died?"
    "If you include the people who died later in the hospital, fifty-four. Including my mother. My father was in the hospital for months."
    I took the odd, almost boastful, way he told this story as a stoicism to be admired. "My God, Seth. I'm so sorry. You were lucky to have survived such a thing."
    He tipped his head as if my sympathy puzzled him. "I never think about it anymore." He smiled. "Now tell me what you've learned to live with."
    "I don't have anything like that."
    "Way of the world, Dinah. Quid pro quo. I give you, you give me. Any old deep dark secret will do. Doesn't have to be as dramatic as mine."
    Without realizing it, I was already beginning to be alarmed by his sangfroid in such matters, even while his overall demeanor was edgy, almost agitated. I gave him the safest deep dark secret I could come up with. "I feel kind of bad saying this since you lost your mother, but I can't stand mine." I stopped. But he said nothing, so I went on. "I used to think it was my fault she screamed at me all the time, and hated me, but she sent me to this psychologist who helped me see it's her problem, not mine."
    Seth giggled. "Ah, so that's why you want to be a psychologist. All right then, if psychology explains everything, and Mama Rosenberg is a sadist, why aren't you a sadist? Or perhaps you are."
    "Ha, ha. Very funny. I didn't say she was a sadist. I just think she can't control her anger. It's probably something in her upbringing that made her this way."
    "So then her parents are terrible people?"
    "They seemed fine." I wasn't about to tell him my grandmother had been a little strange, not to mention a drunk, and that she and my grandfather seemed to hate each other.
    "There goes the upbringing theory," Seth said, leaning back against the headboard, his hands behind his head. "Take my father, for example. The asshole."
    "You don't get along with him?"
    He touched my nose. "Understatement of the year, babe. Of course he didn't bring me up, anyway. I brought myself up."
    "It's also possible people have chemical things, or genetic things," I said