(This is long before any of that. This was a very long time ago.)
Meggie tells the demon lover a story:
Two girls and, look, they’ve found a Ouija board. They make a list of questions. One girl is pretty. One girl is not really a part of this story. She’s lost her favorite sweater. Her fingertips on the planchette. Two girls, each touching, lightly, the planchette. Is anyone here? Where did I put my blue sweater? Will anyone ever love me? Things like that.
They ask their questions. The planchette drifts. Gives up nonsense. They start the list over again. Is anyone here? Will I be famous? Where is my blue sweater?
The planchette jerks under their fingers.
M-E
Meggie says, “Did you do that?”
The other girl says she didn’t. The planchette moves again, a fidget. A stutter, a nudge, a sequence of swoops and stops.
M-E-G-G-I-E
“It’s talking to you,” the other girl says.
M-E-G-G-I-E H-E-L-L-O
Meggie says, “Hello?”
The planchette moves again and again. There is something animal about it.
H-E-L-L-O I A-M W-I-T-H Y-O-U I A-M W-I-T-H Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S
They write it all down.
M-E-G-G-I-E O I W-I-L-L L-O-V-E Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S
“Who is this?” she says. “Who are you? Do I know you?”
I S-E-E Y-O-U I K-N-O-W Y-O-U W-A-I-T A-N-D I W-I-L-L C-O-M-E
A pause. Then:
I W-I-L-L M-E-G-G-I-E O I W-I-L-L B-E W-I-T-H Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S
“Are you doing this?” Meggie says to the other girl. She shakes her head.
M-E-G-G-I-E W-A-I-T
The other girl says, “Can whoever this is at least tell me where I left my sweater?”
Meggie says, “Okay, whoever you are. I’ll wait, I guess I can wait for a while. I’m not good at waiting. But I’ll wait.”
O W-A-I-T A-N-D I W-I-L-L C-O-M-E
They wait. Will there be a knock at the bedroom door? But no one comes. No one is coming.
I A-M W-I-T-H Y-O-U A-L-W-A-Y-S
No one is here with them. The sweater will never be found. The other girl grows up, lives a long and happy life. Meggie goes out to L.A. and meets the demon lover.
W-A-I-T
After that, the only thing the planchette says, over and over, is Meggie’s name. It’s all very romantic.
(1974) Twenty-two people disappear from a nudist colony in Lake Apopka. People disappear all the time. Let’s be honest: the only thing interesting here is that these people were naked. And that no one ever saw them again. Funny, right?
(1990) It’s one of the ten most iconic movie kisses of all time. In the top five, surely. You and Meggie, the demon lover and his monster girl; vampires sharing a kiss as the sun comes up. Both of you wearing so much makeup it still astonishes you that anyone would ever recognize you on the street.
It’s hard for the demon lover to grow old.
Florida is California on a Troma budget. That’s what the demon lover thinks, anyway. Special effects blew the budget on bugs and bad weather.
He parks in a meadowy space, recently mowed, alongside other rental cars, the usual catering and equipment vans. There are two gateposts with a chain between them. No fence. Eternal I endure.
There is an evil smell. Does it belong to the place or to him? The demon lover sniffs under his arm.
It’s an end-of-the-world sky, a snakes-and-ladders landscape: low emerald trees pulled lower by vines; chalk and apricot anthills (the demon lover imagines the bones of a nudist under every one); shallow water-filled declivities scummed with algae, lime and gold and black.
The blot of the lake. That’s another theory: the lake.
A storm is coming.
He doesn’t get out of his car. He rolls the window down and watches the storm come in. Let’s look at him looking at it. A pretty thing admiring a pretty thing. Abandoned site of a mass disappearance, muddy violet clouds, silver veils of rain driving down the lake, the tabloid prince of darkness, Meggie’s demon lover arriving in all his splendor. The only thing to spoil it are the bugs. And the sex tape.
(2012) You have been famous for more than half of your life. Both of you. You only made the one movie together, but women still stop you on the street to ask about Meggie. Is she happy? Which one? you want to ask them. The one who kissed me in a movie when we were just kids, the one who wasn’t real? The one who likes to smoke a bit of weed and text me about her neighbor’s pet goat? The Meggie in the tabloids who drinks fucks gets fat pregnant too skinny slaps a maître d’ talks to Elvis’s ghost ghost of a missing three-year-old boy ghost of JFK? Sometimes they don’t ask about Meggie. Instead they ask if you will bite them.
Happiness! Misery! If you were one, bet on it the other was on the way. That was what everyone liked to see. It was what the whole thing was about. The demon lover has a pair of gold cuff links, those faces. Meggie gave them to him. You know the ones I mean.
(2010) Meggie and the demon lover throw a Halloween party for everyone they know. They do this every Halloween. They’re famous for it.
“Year after year, on a monkey’s face a monkey’s face,” Meggie says.
She’s King Kong. The year before? Half a pantomime horse. He’s the demon lover. Who else? Year after year.
Meggie says, “I’ve decided to give up acting. I’m going to be a poet. Nobody cares when poets get old.”
Fawn says, appraisingly, “I hope I look half as good as you when I’m your age.” Fawn, twenty-three. A makeup artist. This year she and the demon lover are married. Last year they met on set.
He says, “I’m thinking I could get some work done on my jawline.”
You’d think they were mother and daughter. Same Viking profile, same quizzical tilt to the head as they turn to look at him. Both taller than him. Both smarter, too, no doubt about it.
Maybe Meggie wonders sometimes about the women he sleeps with. Marries. Maybe he has a type. But so does she. There’s a guy at the Halloween party. A boy, really.
Meggie always has a boy and the demon lover can always pick him out. Easy enough, even if Meggie’s sly. She never introduces the lover of the moment, never brings them into conversations or even acknowledges their presence. They hang out on the edge of whatever is happening, and drink or smoke or watch Meggie at the center. Sometimes they drift closer, stand near enough to Meggie that it’s plain what’s going on. When she leaves, they follow after.
Meggie’s type? The funny thing is, Meggie’s lovers all look like the demon lover. More like the demon lover, he admits it, than he does. He and Meggie are both older now, but the world is full of beautiful black-haired boys and golden girls. Really, that’s the problem.
The role of the demon lover comes with certain obligations. Your hairline will not recede. Your waistline will not expand. You are not to be photographed threatening paparazzi, or in sweatpants. No sex tapes.
Your