Bad Habits by Melissa Darcey Hall
It’s not until they reached the dessert course that Carl told Gioia that he was the son of Satan.
Of course. Carl hadn’t acted particularly Satan-y—she’d dated worse—but that was her luck lately. Her mother called it punishment for that abortion Gioia got back in college; for fucking her way through Italy the way one might sample pasta during her semester abroad sophomore year.
“I want to carve my own path here on earth,” Carl said, spearing three blueberries with the outer tine of his fork. Now, his odd eating habits took on a new meaning. During the main course, he’d ordered a rare steak and lapped at the blood before ripping the filet in half with his hands.
A few years ago, Carl decided he wanted to live on earth. This disappointed his father—Satan couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to live in Hell—but Carl was rebellious. He wanted to try out humanity with its ethics and feelings. “It seems quaint,” he reasoned. “What you’d see in the movies.”
Carl had watched Casablanca too many times. He wanted to be Rick Blaine, with a steely exterior but a moral compass. Someone capable of murder, but for the right reasons. Carl had, in fact, murdered a handful of people. There’d been some torture and burning at the stake, too. But now that he lacked Satan’s protection (along with immortality since he’d chosen a life among the humans), he had to play by society’s rules. His days of thievery and murder without consequence were over.
Gioia had lots of questions for Carl, but it would be rude to ask them all at once, so she prioritized.
“Satan named his son Carl?” she asked.
“No, my birth name is Damien. But as I said, I’m reinventing myself,” Carl explained. He’d kept the steak knife from dinner and ran its sharp edge back and forth across one of his inch-long stiletto fingernails. “I plan to change it legally to Carl in the next couple of months.”
“Huh.” Gioia took a swig of wine. Of all the names, Gioia liked to think she’d choose better than Carl. Carl was the name of an accountant. Of someone who drove a dusty Toyota Corolla and wore Dockers. Perhaps he’d consider changing it.
“What about the name Logan?”
Logan was the name of Gioia’s favorite TV character. She’d always wanted to fuck a Logan, to cry out his name and pretend it was Logan Rocha, resident bad boy and star of Vampire Archives.
“Logan,” Carl repeated. “I’ll think about it.”
At the end of dinner, Carl insisted on paying (with counterfeit bills, he admitted, but it was the thought that counted), and walked her to her car. In the dimly lit parking lot, Gioia felt her pupils expanding, desperate to make sense of the night’s shadowed shapes that surrounded them.
“I would ask you to come to my place,” Carl started, a lock of black hair falling into his yellow-green eyes.
Gioia sucked in a wisp of air. She shouldn’t go home with him, but if he asked, she would. She found it all too easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and let her body do all the thinking. Sometimes, she skipped shaving her legs for weeks because it was the only thing that prevented her from sleeping with a man after their date.
“But I want to be good,” Carl said. “I’m–”
“Turning over a new leaf,” she finished for him.
Carl considered the metaphor. “Yes, exactly.”
She felt a warm finger under her chin as Carl lifted her head to meet his eyeline. He leaned in and kissed her. It was a deep, aggressive kiss—she wondered if his abnormally extended tongue was genetic or a Satan thing—and she worried he would rip out her larynx. But his tongue slithered out, and he released her face, still intact.
“Can I see you again?” He smiled.
Gioia laughed and nodded, and a smirk remained plastered to her face the entire drive home.
Similar to Carl, Gioia also wanted to turn over a new leaf. She’d spent much of her twenties and early thirties avoiding the dark hole of responsible adulthood and, along the way, had picked up a few bad habits. There’d been some cheating in her previous relationships; a few missed bills here and there; a smattering of lies. She smoked cigarettes, which California considered as contemptible as waterboarding. And there was also the stealing. Lipstick from the drugstore. An antique candlestick from an estate sale. A crystal decanter from her cousin’s wedding shower. “You’re not a very good person,” her mother had told her when she’d found the decanter in Gioia’s kitchen.
But a few months ago, when Gioia fell ill with a flu that clung to her body for two weeks and that she felt certain would kill her, she decided she needed to settle down. To avoid an obituary in which the line “the landlord discovered her body in her apartment after a neighbor complained of a sour smell” appeared. To do everything she was supposed to do for the world to consider her a successful adult. At her age, it looked suspicious if you didn’t have a mortgage, spouse, and established job. She also craved the comfort of a reliable partner. Someone with whom she could have consistent birthday plans. Someone to take to the annual holiday party at her work. Or, at the very least, someone who would run to 7-11 at midnight for cold medicine.
In all honesty, Carl’s looks weren’t what caught Gioia’s eye. He was average looking, his hair too inky against his pale skin. More anemic than sexy vampire. But Carl had been the only halfway decent match within thirty miles of her location across the five dating apps she’d joined, and so when he asked her out, she said yes.
Gioia considered herself a realist. She knew what she brought to the table. She was a thirty-five-year-old broke librarian. Worse, she looked thirty-five, which might as well have been fifty-two in Los Angeles. Needles terrified her too much to try Botox, and she assumed eye creams were a scam, like cage-free eggs or multivitamins. Any abs she’d had in her early twenties had abandoned her, and her breasts were the same size they’d been in her teenage years—34B. If men aged like fine wine, the world viewed women as deli cheese, crusty and moldy once past its expiration. Since turning thirty-five, the only men messaging her were sixty-plus widowers and forty-somethings who couldn’t live within a thousand feet of a school.
But Carl was different. He was a successful real estate investor—the kind that somehow made more money the worse the economy was—with a vacation home in Ojai and a bulldog named Dwight. Other than his terrible choice in names (and the whole father-is-Satan thing), Carl outranked all the men she’d ever dated. By their third date, Gioia thought he might be the one.
They were in the early weeks of dating, and Gioia didn’t want to jinx it, but things were going well. They both liked the Scream movie series. On Saturdays, they had dessert before dinner. Carl planned to take Gioia to Ojai next month when the weather cooled down.
“It’s hotter than hell there right now,” he said.
“And you’d know.” Gioia winked. She’d gotten used to the whole Satan thing. If anything, it contributed to the attraction. As Carl had revealed on their first date, he wanted Gioia to help him turn good.
Not boring good, though, he clarified.
“I’m not joining the board of a nonprofit or giving away my money or anything. I want to be less–” He paused and sipped his wine. Gioia noticed he did this a lot, as if he were learning the language. That, or he worried that his first choice of words would horrify her. “Destructive,” he settled on.
Carl’s motivations were refreshing. Gioia usually attracted the opposite—good guys who sought a few months of bad, like a grownup Rumspringa, before they inevitably returned to their high school sweetheart from ten years ago. She gave off a reckless vibe, one date told her. Possibly, it was her overreliance on dry shampoo, or her enthusiasm for instigating bar fights. Maybe she simply fulfilled an adolescent fantasy—fucking a librarian in the science fiction section after closing (which she’d done more times than she cared to admit). But here was Carl, certain she could save him. She enjoyed being the good one for a change.
The issue with his name gnawed at her. She hadn’t convinced him to change it to Logan.
“I don’t know. I’ve grown fond of Carl,” he said one night as they were lying in bed. She’d made the mistake of bringing up the name change after sex instead of before. She should have been more strategic.
Gioia added the name to the con column of her list. She had a pros and cons list for each man she dated. A cheat sheet for a game, it helped her decide if a relationship was worth the effort of blow dries and blow jobs. Along with his obsession with Nickelback, his name sat alone in the con column. She’d removed the Satan thing from the list altogether. She couldn’t decide if it was a negative or an unfortunate circumstance, like having butt dimples or an allergy to peanut butter.
The old Gioia would have added a few more bullets to the con column (Carl’s collection of severed squirrel heads he kept in a shoebox in his closet, his history of murder, his road rage and impatience for the elderly that resulted in threats of torture and death by nail gun), but the new Gioia was grateful he didn’t have a fetish for flashing teenage girls on Halloween like the last guy with whom she’d matched online.
In her early twenties, everyone accused Gioia of not being picky enough.
“Just because he offers doesn’t mean you have to fuck him,” her college roommate told her.
But ever since she entered her thirties, people started reminding her she couldn’t be too picky.
“No man is perfect,” her mother told her.
“You’re not getting any younger,” her sister warned.
But now she had Carl, and if anyone could make her feel like a good person, it was Satan’s son.
Gioia had worked at Howell University’s library for five years as a history librarian. She didn’t particularly enjoy her job, but after three years of graduate school, she wasn’t ready to quit and start over in another field.
She worked with a handful of other librarians, along with a circulation specialist and archivist. Though around Gioia’s age or a few years older, her colleagues were worlds apart from her. They were married (some long enough to have renewed their vows, which Gioia didn’t know was a thing), and most had kids. They all thought Gioia acted more like the undergrads and grad students on work study. Twenty-somethings who reeked of weed, gossiped about who was fucking who, and collected traffic tickets like lint. One of the grad students, a frizzy redhead named Helga, was writing her thesis on unicorn paintings, which Gioia found endearing but the other librarians considered childish.
In the past, Gioia didn’t mind allying with the grad students. She preferred them to her colleagues; they made her feel better about her own life. At least she had her own apartment. At least she had voted in the last election. At least she knew better cures to hangovers than greasy hash browns. But the dynamic had shifted in the last year, and the students started treating her more like a mom figure than a slightly older yet wiser compatriot. Even Helga had distanced herself from Gioia, buddying up to the medieval languages librarian. Now, Gioia didn’t fit in with anyone.
“You need to inspire more confidence. Let your colleagues see you as the leader I know you can be if you tried harder,” the dean, Robert, explained. He’d called her in for a performance review meeting because she’d been caught smoking on the second floor for the third time, and one of her colleagues ratted her out.
It had to have been Allen, the engineering librarian and resident narc. He liked calling out Gioia’s bad habits, such as her stealing K-Cups from the employee kitchenette and taking two-hour lunch breaks. Plus, they were both vying for the newly vacant Library Director position.
Gioia didn’t really want the position. She had no desire to work more hours overseeing budgets and policies and other boring spreadsheets. But a responsible adult would want it. Money, power, and a LinkedIn update. Also, she didn’t want Allen to get it because Allen was a dick.
“The holiday party is coming up. It’s a good opportunity to mingle. The hiring committee members will be there, so make a good impression,” Robert continued.
Gioia appreciated Robert’s confidence in her, even if he was a terrible judge of character. A few years ago, he admitted that, as a teenager, he’d dated Jeffrey Dahmer for a few months and thought he was the sweetest man he’d ever met.
Gioia told Robert she would do better and left his office. She tried a few deep breathing exercises she’d recently learned from YouTube, but they didn’t work. Instead, she slashed a tire on Allen’s car and felt instant relief.
By their fourth month of dating, Carl had made noteworthy strides in his behavior. His road rage rivaled the average Angeleno (it helped that he’d thrown away the nail gun he kept in his car trunk), he’d accepted that the elderly would die soon enough, and Gioia had convinced him that the squirrel heads were best left buried in his backyard. He still had a few bad habits—speaking openly to strangers about the benefits of torture to reduce recidivism rates in America; cheering whenever he heard a child cry; masturbating to photographs of roadkill—but if she had to encounter a man in a dark alley, she’d sooner trust Carl than half the men she’d dated. If that didn’t signal true love, what did?
“Is this too generous?” Carl asked one afternoon, a glass bottle in his hand hovering above the recycling bin in Gioia’s kitchen. He worried about overdoing things and disappointing his father more than he already had.
“God, no. That won’t actually save the planet. But it makes people feel better about themselves.”
“Wonderful,” he said, tossing the bottle into the blue bin.
Gioia rewarded him with a kiss. She considered it her duty to model positive behavior for Carl. He relied on her for guidance, after all. The responsibility motivated Gioia to improve her own habits, too. She’d cut back on her alcohol consumption, donated two bags of clothing to Goodwill, and started showing up to work on time. With the holiday party weeks away, she was so close to success, she could nearly taste it.
That night, she asked Carl to be her date for the holiday party.
“I don’t have the best track record,” she explained. “And I need this to go really well.”
“Oh?” Carl asked, his mouth curling into a smirk. He loved hearing stories about other people’s pain, including Gioia’s. It was one of his bad habits they were working on fixing.
Gioia had attended the last three holiday parties, and they’d ended in embarrassment or disaster or both. The first year, her colleagues found her passed out in a study room with cupcake frosting smeared on her forehead. The second year, she set a display of new books on fire with the ash of her cigarette, which she wasn’t supposed to smoke indoors, anyway.
But last year’s mistake had cemented her bad reputation at work. She’d had too much to drink (again) and ended up in the science fiction section fucking (again) a work-study student. In her defense, he was a grad student, not an undergrad. And Gioia couldn’t resist the magic of the science fiction section—her favorite in all the library. She visited it often, inventing excuses to wander to the second floor, which housed everyone from Asimov to Zamyatin. It was the only section with its own mural: an octopus stretched across the back wall; its black eyes bewildered by whatever it saw (Gioia fucking someone, apparently). She remembered staring into the octopus’ eyes as Jeremy or Jeff (or whatever) thrusted, her back tapping against a collection of LeGuin books. She couldn’t help it; being ogled by an oversized, enthusiastic mollusk turned her on.
Her colleagues didn’t appreciate the octopus. They joked the octopus saw all that happened in the library and across its four floors; a pervy Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. But, Gioia thought, at least the octopus withheld judgment and kept his damn mouth shut. No one had witnessed Gioia and Jeremy or Jeff (or whatever) in the act, but he must have told someone. By Tuesday, four days after the party, she sensed the bemused smirks from the other student workers and the sharp stares from her colleagues. With a student? Really? On her desk, someone (Allen, most likely, the bastard) had left a university’s health office flier advertising free STD testing.
Gioia considered how much to reveal to Carl. “Let’s just say that my colleague, Allen, hates me and we’re both up for the same promotional position. I have to show everyone how responsible I am.”
“I’m sure I could talk some sense into him–” Carl started, but Gioia knew any of Carl’s plans would only end in fire and blood and chaos.
“No, I need you to be your wonderful self. Your new self, I mean,” Gioia corrected herself. “This has to go perfectly.”
This year, she would be responsible Gioia—a woman in a monogamous, adult relationship and with a respectable drinking limit.
The limited party budget meant the library still resembled a library, other than for a few silver helium balloons and a banner above the reference desk that read HAPPY HOLIDAYS, HOWELL! Along with the library staff, their spouses, and the student workers willing to spend their Friday night with a bunch of thirty and forty-year-olds, Robert and a handful of professors and department directors were in attendance. At least two dozen people crowded the ground floor, sandwiched between tables arranged with cupcakes and plastic champagne flutes.
Carl wore a silver suit so metallic it bordered on criminal, and Gioia wore a short, strappy black silk dress with crimson velvet loafers. She’d aimed for tastefully festive, but ended up resembling a retired Playboy Bunny at a cigar lounge. Whatever. She’d make up for the blunder with her performance: sober and attentive to her colleagues and the six hiring committee members. Gioia would laugh at the HR Director’s lame jokes, pretend to find the circulation specialist’s husband interesting, and nod along as the medieval languages librarian recounted her trip—yet again—to Egypt five years ago.
Gioia made the rounds with Carl at her side.
“This is my partner, Carl,” she repeated a dozen times. Boyfriend sounded too childish for this crowd.
Everyone asked the same boring questions—what do you do? What’s your alma mater? Is it true that interest rates will drop in the next six months?—but Carl had a polite answer for everything.
The party was going perfectly. Gioia had stuck to a single glass of champagne, only one colleague mentioned the shortness of her dress, and Carl was a hit. He shook hands and exchanged jokes about university pensions, and no one noticed his exceptionally sharp fingernails or tongue. Carl and Gioia resembled a couple of responsible and mature adults; the kind who went on Caribbean cruises, monitored their cholesterol, and complained about the rising cost of avocados.
While Carl defended the blood diamond industry (“only for the sake of playing devil’s advocate,” he prefaced) to a group of economics professors, Gioia slipped outside to steal a smoke in the garden. It was one of her last remaining bad habits. She’d stopped stealing, she hadn’t cheated on Carl, and she only told white lies now. She was a new woman. When Robert named her the next Library Director, her first project would be to make Allen’s life hell.
The cigarette didn’t calm her nerves, so she chased it with half of a weed gummy. She usually reserved these for a Saturday night at home, but fuck it. Tonight was a significant moment for her career. In a few minutes, she’d return to the library and wow Robert with a speech she’d prepared on why she was the most qualified candidate for the Library Director role. Gioia knew the exact brand of champagne she’d drink to celebrate her new job title.
Gioia’s stomach growled from indigestion. Should she feel happier about all this, or would that come later? Right now, it felt like losing, rather than gaining, something. The days of sex in front of the octopus would be over now. She’d need to attend meetings and actually listen. This might have been her last cigarette.
When Gioia returned to the library twenty minutes later and moderately stoned, she felt the shift in the party’s mood; a stiff quietness that hadn’t been there when she’d left.
The HR Director walked up to Gioia, shaking his head.
“What the hell is wrong with you? What kind of person dates a lunatic and brings him here?”
Behind the HR Director, a crowd circled Allen. A woman dabbed at the blood smeared across Allen’s throat, while another poured water on a smoking trash can. A few feet away, champagne dripped down the skirt of the red plastic tablecloth.
Well, fuck.
Gioia didn’t ask what had happened. She’d learn soon enough, likely in a termination letter or restraining order.
“Where’s Carl?” Gioia asked.
“Upstairs. Get him out of here without any trouble and we’ll chat on Monday,” Robert said, approaching her side.
Robert, her constant ally. Though possibly not for long.
Gioia sprinted to the second floor and found Carl standing before the octopus mural.
“He’s fantastic,” Carl said, pointing at the octopus, surprisingly (or, perhaps unsurprisingly) calm for a man who’d stabbed someone.
“He’s my favorite part of this library,” she said, searching for renewed inklings of his previous homicidal tendencies.
“Allen is as awful as you said he’d be,” Carl said. “Poor thing. I couldn’t help myself. I hope you’re not too mad.”
She should be. For fuck’s sake, he’d started a fire and stabbed Allen in public. They needed to work on Carl’s discretion.
Downstairs, the faint buzz of voices echoed. Robert called her name.
“We need to go. They might let this all blow over, call it a drunken mistake, if we leave now,” Gioia said.
Carl turned away from the mural and toward her. He fingered the left strap of her dress, so thin he could snap it in two tugs.
“Is that what you want?” he asked, brushing the strap off her shoulder. His smirk hinted he didn’t regret his actions. Maybe he was tired of being good. Maybe they’d made too much progress too fast. Maybe no one really ever changed.
Gioia could explain to Carl why he couldn’t stab people at parties, including assholes like Allen. They could leave quietly. On Monday, Gioia could beg Robert not to fire her if she promised to break up with Carl. Allen would get the promotion, of course, but she could keep her job if she kept on her best behavior. The thought of it made her nauseous.
Carl’s fingers crawled to her other shoulder and fingered the remaining strap on her dress.
Gioia listened for footsteps, for Robert to make his way upstairs. She glanced at the octopus, eyes trained on her, before turning towards Carl. She smiled and waited for the other strap of her dress to fall.
Melissa Darcey Hall is a writer and high school English teacher in San Diego, California. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast Journal, phoebe, Nimrod, Fugue, and elsewhere. View more of her work at www.melissadarceyhall.com.
2 January 2024
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