Gabriel's Inferno

He moved a step closer. “Why did you sign the note the way you did?”

“Why do you care?”

He heard the elevator approaching and knew that he had mere seconds to get answers to his questions. He closed his eyes, her previous words thundering in his ears. She looked for him in Hell. He’d begged the brown-eyed angel to come looking for him. Of course, she hadn’t. Hallucinations don’t respond to begging.

What if Beatrice wasn’t a hallucination? What if… He felt something like fear begin to creep across his skin. Once again, the impossible floated before his eyes. If he concentrated, he could see her in his memory, but her face was blurry.

The ringing of a bell signaled the arrival of the elevator.

His eyes snapped open.

She stepped through the open door and shook her head at him, at his confusion, and at the intoxication that still swam in his eyes. Everything hinged on this. She could tell him or she could keep secret what happened between them just as she always had. Just as she had for six fucking years.

As the door slowly began to close, she saw a wave of realization wash over him.

“Beatrice?”  he whispered.

“Yes,” she said, moving so she could maintain eye contact with him until the last possible second. “I’m Beatrice. You were my first kiss. I fell asleep in your arms in your precious orchard.”

Gabriel sprang forward to stop the elevator door from closing. “Beatrice! Wait!”

He was too late. The door closed at the sound of her name. He pressed the button furiously, hoping to reopen the doors.

“I’m not Beatrice anymore.” As the elevator began its slow but unstop-pable descent, Julia burst into tears.

Gabriel pressed his forehead and palms against the cold steel of the elevator door.

What have I done?

Chapter 15

Old Mr. Krangel looked out his peephole into the hallway and saw nothing out of the ordinary. He’d heard voices, a man and a woman arguing, but couldn’t see anyone. He’d even heard a name — Beatrice. But he was unaware of any tenant called Beatrice on the floor. And now the hall appeared to be empty.

He’d already ventured out once that morning; he’d had to return his anonymous neighbor’s Saturday paper, which had been delivered to his door by mistake. The Krangels didn’t take the Saturday paper, but Mrs. Krangel suffered from dementia and had picked it up and hid it in the apartment the day before.

Slightly annoyed at having his Sunday morning thus interrupted by a kemfn  in the hallway, Mr. Krangel opened his door and stuck his aged head out. Not fifty feet away, he saw a man leaning against the closed elevator door. His shoulders were shaking.

Mr. Krangel was immediately embarrassed by the pathetic sight before him but was momentarily mesmerized.

He didn’t recognize the man, and he wasn’t about to introduce himself.

Surely a grown man who would waltz about the thirtieth floor of an apartment building barefoot and casually dressed and…doing whatever it was he was doing, was not the kind of person he wished to know. Men from his generation never  cried. Of course, they never took their socks off in hallways, either. Unless they were — odd. Or lived in California.

Mr. Krangel retreated quickly, closed and locked his door, and called the concierge downstairs to report a barefoot crying man out in the hallway who had just had a screaming kemfn  with a woman called Beatrice.

It took five tiresome minutes to explain to the concierge what a kemfn was. Mr. Krangel vocally lamented this fact, choosing to place the blame on the Toronto District School Board and their narrow, waspish curriculum.

It was late October, and the weather in Toronto was already cool.

Julia was without something warm under her coat as she slowly and miserably walked home, because she’d left Professor Emerson’s fouled sweater behind. She hugged her arms tightly across her chest, wiping away angry and resigned tears.

People passed her on the street and gave her sympathetic glances.

Canadians could be like that — quietly sympathetic but politely distant.

Julia was grateful for their sympathy and even more grateful that no one stopped to ask why she was crying. For her story was both too long and too utterly fucked up to tell.

Julia never asked herself why bad things happen to good people, for she already knew the answer: bad things happen to everyone. Not that this was an excuse or a justification for wronging another human being. Still, all humans had this shared experience — that of suffering. No human being left this world without shedding a tear, or feeling pain, or wading into the sea of sorrow. Why should her life be any different? Why should she expect special, favored treatment? Even Mother Teresa suffered, and she was a saint.

Julia did not regret looking after The Professor while he was drunk, even though her good deed had not gone unpunished. For if you truly believe that kindness is never wasted, you have to hold tightly to that belief even when the kindness is thrown back in your face.

She was ashamed that she’d been so stupid, so foolish, so naïve as to think that he would remember her after a drunken binge and that they could return to the way things were (but never were, really) that one night in the orchard. Julia knew that she’d been swept up into the romantic fancy of a fairy tale, without any thought of what the real world, and the real Gabriel, was like.

But it  was  real — the old spark was there. When he kissed me, when he touched me, the electricity was still there. He had to have felt it — it wasn’t all in my head.  Julia quickly pushed those thoughts aside, willing herself to stick to her new, non-Emerson diet. It’s time to grow up. No more fairy tales. He didn’t care enough to remember you back in September, and he has Paulina, now.

When she entered her little hobbit hole, she took a long shower and changed into her oldest and softest flannel pajamas — pajamas that were pale pink with images of rubber duckies on them. She threw Gabriel’s tshirt to the back of her closet where it hopefully would be forgotten. She curled up on her twin bed, clutching her velveteen rabbit, and fell asleep, physically and emotionally spent.

While Julia was sleeping, Gabriel was warring with his hangover and fighting the urge to dive into a bottle of Scotch and never resurface. He hadn’t gone after her. He hadn’t run for the stairwell and stumbled down thirty flights to meet her at the lobby. He hadn’t taken the next elevator and raced to the street to catch her.

No, he’d stumbled back to his apartment and slumped into a chair, so he could wallow in nausea and self-loathing. He cursed the roughness with which he’d treated her, not just this morning, but since his first seminar back in September. A roughness made worse by the fact that she had suffered saint-like in silence, all the while knowing exactly who and what she was to him.

How could I have been so blind?

He thought of the first time he’d seen her. He’d returned to Selinsgrove in depression and despair. But God had intervened, a genuine deus ex machina. God sent him an angel to rescue him from Hell — a delicate, brown-eyed angel in jeans and sneakers with a beautiful face and a pure soul. She comforted him in his darkness and gave him hope. She seemed to cherish a sincere affection for him despite his failings.

She saved me.

As if that salvation wasn’t enough, the angel appeared to him a second time, the very day he’d cruelly lost the other strong force of goodness in his life, Grace. The angel sat in his Dante seminar, reminding him of truth, beauty, and goodness. And he responded by snapping at her and threatening to push her out of the program. Then this morning, he was cruel and compared her to a whore.

I’m the Angelfucker now. I’ve fucked over the brown-eyed angel.  Gabriel cursed the irony of his name as he walked to the kitchen to retrieve her note.

Holding her beautiful, fragile message in his hand, he saw his own ugliness — not an ugliness of body but of soul. Julianne’s note, and even her breakfast tray, confronted Gabriel’s sin in a manner that was stark, convict-ing, and absolutely unrelenting.

She could not have known this, but in that moment her words from a week ago rang true. Sometimes people, when left alone, can hear their own hatefulness for themselves. Sometimes goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is.

Gabriel dropped her note onto the counter and buried his face in his hands.

When Julia finally awoke it was after ten o’clock in the evening. She yawned and stretched, and after making a very sad bowl of instant oatmeal and barely being able to choke down a third of it, she decided to check her voice mail.

She’d turned her cell phone off when she arrived at Gabriel’s the night before because she was expecting a call from Paul. She was not in a mood to speak with him, then or now, even though she knew he would likely cheer her. She just wanted to be left alone to lick her wounds, like a puppy that had been kicked repeatedly.

So it was with a heavy heart that she checked her messages, scrolling through to listen to the oldest ones first, frowning when she realized that her inbox was full. Julia’s inbox was never full, for the only people who ever called her were her father, Rachel, and Paul, and their messages were always short.

“Hi Julia, it’s me. It’s Saturday night and the conference went well. I’m bringing you back something from Princeton. It’s small, so don’t worry. You’re probably at the library, working. Call me later. [Pregnant pause…] I miss you.”

Julia sighed and deleted the first message from Paul and moved to his next one.

“Hey, Julia. It’s me again. It’s Sunday morning, and I should be home sometime tonight. Do you want to meet me for a late dinner? There’s a great sushi place over by your apartment. Call me. Miss you, little Rabbit.”

Julia deleted Paul’s second message and quickly texted him, saying she’d come down with the flu and was catching up on her sleep. She’d call him when she was feeling better, and she hoped he’d arrived home safely.

She did not tell him that she missed him.

The next message was from a local number that she didn’t recognize.

“Julianne…um, Julia. It’s Gabriel. I…Please don’t hang up. I know I’m the last person you want to hear from, but I’m calling to grovel.  In fact, I’m standing outside your building in the rain. I was worried about you, and I wanted to be sure you got home safely.

“I wish we could go back to this morning, and I could tell you that I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than the sight of you in my living room, happy and dancing. That I’m incredibly lucky that you rescued me and stayed with me all night. That I’m an idiot and a fuck-up, and I don’t deserve your kindness. At all. I know I hurt you, Julia, and I’m sorry.

[Deep inhale and exhale.] “I should never have let you go this morning — not like that. I should have run after you and begged you to stay. I fucked up, Julia. I fucked up.

“I should have humiliated myself in person, which is what I’m trying to do now. Please come outside so I can apologize. Actual y, don’t come outside — you’l catch pneumonia. Just come to the front door and listen to me through the glass.