After some minutes of heated perusing, he pulled from the shelf above us a small blue book, the spine ribbed in the old fashion, the pages edged in dulled gilt. "I found this last night," he said with a tight, defeatist pleasure. "If I could have killed myself then, I would have."
I stroked my way to the title page. Elementary Treatise on Nicomanichean Morality, by Leonardo Gallimassi, translated by O. Ricari. It was an eighth printing, 1888. I looked at him without comprehension. "This is not proof," I said.
He stared at me with pure blank exasperation. "Damned girl," he swore softly under his breath, and grabbed my wrist gently and pulled me from the bookstore through the shell-shocked door. We were going back into the hotel, he blazing with furious grace and me shambling after, bedazzled by his prettiness. Fake or not, I was beginning to think I would follow him over a cliff.
Back in Suite 900 he tore off the London Fog coat, and paced the room, deep in thought. I sank back into my chair and began mechanically eating olives. At last he came to a halt in front of me and began to unbutton his sleeve, rolling it back over his forearm.
His skin was the same delicate whiteness all over, the veins standing bluely like rivers along the wrist and swelling into tributaries at the hollow of his elbow.
He seized the cheese knife and gashed his palm with it. We yelled out as one. Dark, viscous blood welled out of the wound and began to drip onto the parquet floor, like drops of molten chocolate. It was just not human blood.
And it was just not a human wound. Ricari stuffed the wound into his mouth and sucked at it, letting his saliva run down over his hand, then held it out to me. Almost visibly the wound was reducing in size and severity. The smaller it got, the faster it healed. "Can you do that?" he asked me saucily, drops of bright sweat standing out on his forehead. I looked into his eyes for a long moment, enjoying his expression of triumph, and when I looked at his hand again, the gash was merely a fat pink seam, pulsing as it closed the last gaps between the severed skin cells. Then it was a scar.
I looked at the drops of blood on the floor. They were black. I bent over to touch them; they were hardened, like disks of warm plastic, stuck fast to the wood inlay.
Ricari lay back onto the chaise longue, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.
"You do feel pain," I murmured.
"I do. As much as you do." He was paler than before, and looked shaken.
I stood up then, and came over to the chaise longue. I sat beside him and touched his shoulder under the satin—he was very cool, not quite cold, but not warm—and then I touched his cheek. He was very smooth and soft, and there, cool too. "You didn't have to do that," I said, quite sobered up.
"Obviously I did." He looked up at me wearily. "It worked, right? You believe me now?"
"Yes." Under my fingertips his skin seemed to vibrate. "I will make you a deal," I said.
"Yes?"
"Let me know you," I said. "Study you. Hear your story. Then I'll… I'll do the humane thing."
He took my hands between his, and kissed my fingertips. "All right," he said. "Promise me."
"I promise," I said. "You promise you'll let me know you first, though. I must… lay you to rest properly. You can live on in other ways."
He nodded, closing his eyes.
* * *
Chapter Three
"I sleep during the day," he said, "but I can go about in the day so long as I take care. Sunlight hurts my skin—burns me. I simply like night better. Not so many people about. I can conduct my business without looking so strange.
"You mustn't bother with any old superstitions. Very little hurts me. Only prolonged sunlight, immolation, being dismembered. Most don't make it as long as I. I avoid conflict. I try not to get dismembered or set on fire—perhaps a bad impulse, for it's allowed me to go on for this long. Most meet violent deaths before this point. Some go on longer. I am reaching the end of what I can stand—I am probably already going mad.
"I like it when you have garlic on your breath—please eat garlic. I love its smell on your skin. It's good for your blood.
"I cannot eat; once I could, but I stopped a long time ago. It seemed wasteful—I who do not need to consume food, stealing food from the mouths of those who need it to survive. I do not care for the less delicate natural functions of the human body, and once I was rid of them, did not wish to have them back again. It is one of the few freedoms I enjoy in this form."
Ricari spoke easily and fluidly as we walked at midnight along the piers at the Marina. It was cold now, but the rains had stopped, and I had put on a long scarf and gloves and joined him on his stroll. The cold did not seem to affect him much, though he was bareheaded, wearing only the London Fog coat over some black dress pants and a turtleneck sweater. He gesticulated in the free Italian style as he walked and talked, and often turned to me with a knowing look that reminded me of the Italian grandmothers in New Orleans. He had come to meet me after going to an evening mass, and he was aglow.
"How long have you been in San Francisco?" I asked.
"Eh… fifteen years…"
"And before that?"
"Before that, New York City. Before that, Canton—Hong Kong now. Before that Cornwall. Before that—"
"Before that?"
"Berlin," he said reluctantly.
"When was that?"
"Nineteen-twenties," he said.
"That must have been interesting," I said.
"Yes," Ricari replied distantly.
Sensing a dead end, I switched the subject. "How long do you stay in a place before leaving it?"
"Oh, it depends. Anywhere from a year to twenty or thirty years. Before it was easier. Not so many photographic records and things to give away the fact that I still look like a youth." The lean boyish face pouted, odd against the weary pattern of his speech. "I am coming up on my time to leave this place—I died, after all, and was buried. If that poor undertaker sees me passing on the street, he'll likely lose his mind and be locked up. That is where you come in."
"Yeah, yeah," I said impatiently.
He smiled at me so sweetly that I put my head against his shoulder. He tensed at the contact and I removed myself, but then he took my hand impulsively, pulling off the glove and touching the bare flesh. His dry smooth skin tingled against mine, as if trying to make it a part of him. I shivered. "Thank you, Ariane, for your promise," he said.
"Oh," I said, embarrassed, "no."
He pulled my glove back on, adjusting the fingers, and we walked along. The great black expanse of the Presidio was over the rise, looming up like something out of Joseph Conrad. "What makes you think I won't betray you?" I asked.
"Betray me? You cannot."
"No?"
"Who would believe you? And if they did believe you, I'd kill you. And then 'they' would kill me. That would suit everyone just fine. But I don't believe that is what you want, Ariane."
I said nothing.
"You will not betray me," Ricari said, pleased.
I got cold, and we left. Ricari adored my car. He was terrified of them, and didn't know how to drive, but he was as thrilled as a kid on a roller-coaster to be my passenger. He was fascinated by my CD player and piles of discs. "It's completely different from being in a taxi cab," he enthused. "I hate taxi cabs. I can walk faster than half of them can drive, what with them wanting to screw you for fares. What is this music—what is New Order? They sound very fascist."
"They are," I said, amused. "They aren't. They're just a pop band."
"Oh, I don't like pop music at all."
"What do you like?"
Ricari frowned slightly. "I like… tortured Russian composers," he decided. "And Debussy."
"Is there any music from the twentieth century that you like?" I asked.
"I don't know. I suppose I like the Beatles. I don't hate them. They're the only pop band whose name I can remember."
"I have Beatles," I offered.
"No, no, I don't want to hear them. There is too much mus
ic. Let us listen to silence, and car noise."
"I have Prokofiev at home," I said.
"Yes! I like that!"
We went to a late-night cafe and I had a mocha to keep me awake for the rest of the night, and then I drove him to my apartment. It was in disarray—I hadn't thought to clean it in the week or so that I had had Ricari in my life. I hadn't planned to bring him over, but I'd blabbed about Prokofiev, and I needed another sweater if we were going to be outside.
Ricari seemed to enjoy the mess. He moved quickly about the room, jumping between piles of cast-off cardigans and back issues of Pathogenesis Journal, the tails of his coat flying out behind him. He came to rest on my chair, peering out from under his flyaway bangs.
I put on Prokofiev, and water for tea to warm me.
"Ariane," he said, covering his cheek with his hand, "come here."
I approached him.
He took my face between his hands and gazed into my eyes. "I'm hungry," he whispered.
I pulled off my gray sweater and pulled up the sleeve of my shirt, exposing my wrist. The green veins sighed under the winter-paled, fine skin. Ricari looked at the wrist, and then he looked at me.
"Go ahead," I urged.
He took a few hesistant breaths, then lay his mouth against the skin of my wrist. His lips were icy cold and the inside of his mouth, when he opened it, chilled me where it struck. At first he only breathed against the skin, then kissed it, openmouthed, as you would kiss the lips of a lover. I closed my eyes.
The teeth hit me, plunging in between tendons, piercing me deeply. I gasped and staggered, and he pulled me firmly into him, bending my arm so that I had it around him and he could sip at the hot blood welling from the puncture wound. It would not be much—a puncture wound from a bite like that doesn't bleed until it's pressured. But then he sucked, turning the bites inside out, and how the fluid rushed from me into his mouth!
Then it was over. He was settling me back upon my couch; pressing his thumb, suddenly very hot, against the bite in the soft part of my wrist. I had fallen, I guess. I'd had my eyes closed, and so lost any kind of visual cue that I was losing consciousness. My body felt swollen with pleasure. Ricari kissed my forehead with blood-warm, blood-damp lips. I opened my eyes and looked up at him. He was radiant, his flesh a deep human rose, mouth red as berries. "Yes?" he said.
I managed a tired "Hm."
He got up and fixed the tea for me, and brought it to me, watching intently as I sipped at it while holding my wrist at a strange angle. "Look at it," he urged me.
I set down the mug and dared to peek at the wound. I am not a fan of puncture wounds—they are pretty gruesome, as opposed to the clean stern beauty of a cut. But there was only a trace of it there—some oozy plasma traces, rapidly hardening to a crust between the two cords of my tendons. "What?" I said. "How does that work?"
"I can heal you too," Ricari said. "My bite leaves no trace, if I taste. My saliva heals any small wound completely. You will, I'm afraid, have a slight scar."
It still hurt, but only vaguely now. I lay back and sipped my tea, praying it would replace my lost fluids. I had never given blood for blood banks, having indulged in unsafe sex with men of dubious heterosexuality in the past five years, and I had no idea how much blood I could lose before passing out. Not much apparently. Ricari stroked my forehead gently with his fingertips, the edges of his lethal claws lightly brushing my hair. Like an Irishman after too much ale, he began to speak to me in an intimate tone about himself.
"It's that you remind me of my sister, Elena. She was the eldest sister, with three sisters between us, but we were closest to one another. My mother was dusky, a southern woman, and some of the children turned out darker-skinned than others. Elena was one. She was dusky and had red hair, like you. Oh, she was beautifully tall, and strong-willed, and she wanted to take over my father's estate when he died, but since I was the only son, it was going to go to me. I didn't want it. I was irresponsible, I cared nothing about sheep or grapes or olives, and I still don't care anything about money. I wanted to lie around in the sun and listen to my sisters singing and paint and make up songs in Greek. Oh, don't get the impression that Elena was all bookkeeping and looking after servants and doling out responsibilities. She was also quite wild. It was the red hair—that Gallic influence—and she was the eldest, and she was very proud, and she felt slighted by my father, who was dense and very stern and always did what was right. Elena encouraged me to be the way I was, she thought I was pretty, I was her little darling, she had always been the one to carry me when I was a baby."
"What happened to her?" I asked Ricari softly.
He sighed. "Oh, dead, long, long ago. I think she married and took the estate, and she didn't love the man she married, of course. I broke my father's heart, you know. I ran away rather than be a man and take the estate and run the vineyards. I ran away to Geneva to be with the Shelleys."
"Did you get there?"
"Oh, I did, but I was too late. There was no news media in those days to keep one updated on which celebrities were where. I fell in with the other admirers, and we 'hung out' as you say, on the shore of the lake, and encouraged each other's childishness." Ricari looked down at me fading on the couch. "I shall leave you now. You should sleep. The sun will come soon."
"Not that soon," I insisted, rising off the couch. This time the visual warnings were right there—the world divided into chips of color and form—and I sank back onto the couch, my head resting on my green cardigan. I was so tired.
"Yes, soon. I will leave. It's stopped raining. I won't melt." He leant over and pressed his warm cheek against me—he was warmer than me now, his cheek glowing bright. His stubble was a pleasing texture. "Sleep. Sleep, little one."
"You're littler than me," I mumbled, and he sank away into the sweet dull depths of my sleep, and I could watch as he disappeared into the rising dark. I felt my arm slip off the couch and dangle, but I had no strength to lift it and set it to rights.
It had been less than forty-eight hours since I'd seen Ricari last, and he had supped on the blood from my wrist, but it didn't seem like enough and I wanted him to have more of me. I thought to myself that he must be terribly hungry now, poor moral creature, and it would be a whole night and day and night before he could attend Mass again. I thought of him in the church, pinching off his prayers with the words that must have been in his mouth like taste buds by now, and I wanted to arrive at Mass in a flowing white dress, and for him to ravage me upon the altar. Crimson spots on the white lace. Jesus Christ would weep to see his little girl so defiled.
I wasn't a Catholic and I never had been. My mother's family had been Catholics, that New Orleans brand of Catholic, weaving habit and superstition into a cloak that barred the cold wind of agnosticism, and kept my mother and her sister, Wilemina, out. My aunt was too skeptical for religion and my mother, too unstable.
I never knew my mother; she ran away weeks after I was born and nobody knew what had become of her. My Aunt Willie had her theories, sacks full of them—Mother in San Francisco, hippie consort of Hell's Angels, and dying alone by the side of the road gasping for junk and pills; Mother in the Southwest desert, schizophrenic, looking for angels and devils in the windswept mesas, finally dying alone of thirst by the side of Route 66; Mother, most likely, still in N.O., haunting the dank caverns where my father was last seen, trapped into a life of white slavery in one of the innumerable rotting hotels, dying alone and confused, schizophrenic, gasping for junk and pills.
I couldn't confess to Aunt Willie that all those prospects seemed hopelessly romantic to me, orphan mulatto child, bereft of religion and chemical releases. Aunt Willie, so patrician and practical and academic, caring only for the New Yorker and PTA meetings and dusty 78's of the Haskins Vocal Group, told stories designed to disgust and straighten me out. In a lot of ways they worked. I didn't so much blossom as shoot up like a brainy weed, a self-disciplined schoolgirl, a science freak who was allowed to dissect grasshopper
s on the dinner table. I didn't touch drugs or alcohol or men until I left home and went to college.
At Tulane, when I was sixteen, I "went bad," as they say. I buzzed my barbecue curls down to a fuzz, dyed what was left poison-green, memorized the Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist, started drinking whiskey and dropping acid. I was always alone. People thought I was awfully strange. I found myself strange as well—too young to be in college, but able to instantly transform myself into the freak I always felt myself inside. And on top of that, having a lineage that included madwomen and slick, untrustworthy pimps who slouched, Tom Waits style, along the swinging doors of N.O. dives—I was afraid of myself.
I had never even seen a photograph of my father. Aunt Willie told me that none existed. My father, she'd said, was an unwholesome specter, unphotographable as swamp mist, vague, flaky, yellow of skin and of character. My mother had fallen into his seduction as inevitably as dinosaurs fell into the La Brea Tar Pits. She had played around with bennies and reefers before she met him, and in the three weeks that they knew each other, he gave her smack, crabs, and motherhood, and vanished into the alleyways that spawned him. My mother dully endured the pregnancy in Willie's parlor, staring out the window to the street below, which was wilting with kudzu, then coughed me out painfully, pulled out her episiotomy stitches, and blew town in the middle of the night.
Aunt Willie never really minded having me. She was unmarried, homely, and uninterested in hearts or flowers; she mainly tended to vegetables, math, and little inquisitive minds. She told me on a spring break before I went to Stanford that she had enjoyed molding me. "You were a pleasure," she said, her teeth still white in the putty-gray of her face. Cancer had claimed her hair and mobility, but she still did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. "You weren't a little girlie, all Barbies and tea sets. You brought home dead birds and asked me why they went stiff, and when you had that compound fracture—remember?—you didn't cry. You looked at the bone sticking out and asked me why you couldn't see the marrow."
Voice of the Blood Page 4