That was just how Aunt Willie was. She died that Christmas. I didn't go to the funeral—I had to study.
The semester was as dead as ancient Greek.
I sat alone in the room that was supposed to be my office and wasn't. When Ricari came and slaughtered the rats, all my things were moved down the hall, to a fallow room, and set up exactly the way they had been before. That was Dr. John's doing. He knew nothing of bereavement. I was bereft of the tiny crawling and snuffling life of my pet lab rats and of the sanctity of the space where Ricari had tasted me. He had pulled out of me not the concentrated cells and tissues of my painful month, but the very essence of who I was, who I had been, my lost potential to be, to create. I couldn't write, I couldn't read, I couldn't even doodle.
I had to get out of there.
I drove for a while, listening to the pop music Ricari despised. Joy Division, David Byrne, Hüsker Dü; nothing cheerful or plaintive, but the roughest voices, the thickest rhythms. I knew where Ricari was. Was he asleep during these last moist hours of the day, or was he awake, watching California sink into mists? How terrible to never feel the hot Vitamin D of the sunlight penetrating your skin, or the smooth gouts of a latté in your stomach. But he had the blood. He had power; he could divine the workings of my mind, and change them, and he could take a bullet and stop it, and vomit it up later for inspection. I needed to see him and speak to him, reassure myself once again that he was real.
But I was too shy to actually come round.
Was I? I was driving around Pacific Heights now, the smooth curve between it and the sickly throbbing heart of the City, the blazing nexus of restaurants and shops and crime and leopard skin that was Chinatown, North Beach, Tenderloin, Nob Hill. Night was getting there. The sky was already blue rather than gray. Friday night—the streets were clogged. I stole a parking space from a fish van outside Go Ran Chow Market, and began doggedly walking toward the Saskatchewan.
The old man at the desk looked up at me rather sternly. "Yes? Can I help you, young lady?"
He made me feel like some grungy kid. I looked like some grungy kid—jeans and dirty hiking boots, and a sweater with holes between the knittings, hooking my thumbs agitatedly through the holes in the sleeves of my winter coat. "I was—" My voice croaked out, destroyed from lack of use. I hadn't spoken in two days and I'd Smoked six packs of cigarettes. "I was wondering if you could buzz Suite 900 for me, and see if he's in."
The desk clerk eyed me for a second, then slowly leant over and tapped a plastic phone console, which, though outdated by about ten years, was startlingly modern in the dull brown Victoriana. He held the phone receiver to his face. "Someone here to see you," the old man said after a time.
A pause.
"He don't want to be disturbed," came the old man's reply. He began to replace the receiver on its cradle.
"Wait! Tell him it's Ariane. Ariane come to see him."
He arched one white brow, then repeated, "She says she's named Ariane."
Another pause. I rubbed NCIT mud off the toe of one boot onto the back of my jean leg. There was no way I could face going home and being alone with the television and my tea and rolling papers and the lonely sound of rain on the windows.
At last the old man hung up the phone and settled back down to his magazine. Without looking at me he said, "Go on up."
I praised whoever, and ran for the elevator.
The door to 900 was unlocked again, and I came in quietly and shut the door as softly as I could. I turned the lock and slipped the chain bolt together, whisking silently along its carriage like the piston of an arcane train.
Ricari was not in the front room, and I had to walk along the wall to the inside room, intoning softly "Ricari?" beginning to doubt that he actually was there. He had become invisible. I was sure he had heard of my coining up, and slipped out one of the windows, dropping soundlessly and weightlessly to the street below, startling a bevy of Filipino tourists.
But no, he was in the back, in the bedroom, in bed, wrapped in a heavy gray silk robe, his hair finger-combed only, and his face thin and white. "It's you, is it?" he said. He looked ill and sad.
"Yeah," I said, embarrassed.
"You look filthy," he commented.
"I sort of am. Muddy out there. Cold too."
"Why don't you wash and get into bed with me," he said coldly, calmly. "There is a bath through there."
How intriguing. I moved into the bathroom and shut the door. White light bounced cruelly off the polished white tiles. I thought about John as I began unlacing my boots and shedding layers of sweaters and Tshirts. He hadn't called me, and I hadn't expected him to. John was terrible on the phone—inarticulate and heavily accented, and not at all filled with comforting pronouncements of love or social interest. He was a letter writer if anything, and I checked my box every day, waiting for his fat dull envelopes filled with scathing anecdotes about the food and the other professors. Was what I was doing immoral in any way? Was I betraying the special trust that we shared as lovers by bathing in the vampire's hotel room, and planning on getting into bed with him, and attempting to warm my cold toes against his inhuman body? At any time the vampire could kill me, I thought as I stepped into a hot shower and wet my hair; at any time Ricari could rescind his agreement and snack on me, leaving smears of me across the white froth of bedsheets, and the old man downstairs, probably his blood-bound ghoul, hypnotized to do his bidding, would bundle me up in the sheets and sell me to the organ banks.
I washed myself with hotel soap, dried off, and bound myself with a hotel-issue white terry-cloth robe, satisfyingly rough and impersonal, and walked back into the bedroom. It was dark in there, lit only by ambient street light and the shining whiteness of Ricari's face and the translucency of his eyes. I knelt on the bed, and he parted the covers for me.
We lay alongside each other. Ricari was wide awake, but languorous. He stretched out one spidery arm vertically along the pillowcase, the same paleness of his skin; only the pillowcase lacked the Nile of veins that merged up his gray silk sleeve. I touched his throat experimentally. He was very cold to the touch. No toe-warming here.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
"I just wanted to see you," I explained.
He sighed. "Why," he said.
"What have you been doing?"
"Nothing at all," he said with a sigh. "Reading poetry journals. Talking to vagrants in the park. To my lawyer, who may be a vagrant in the park soon enough. He's going to give up law as soon as I'm taken care of."
"Have you fed?"
"No. I have no interest." As he said this his jaw tensed, and a colorless vein rose at his temple.
"Are you going to stay in bed tonight then?" I asked.
"That was my plan," he said.
"Why do you want to die so badly?"
"Can't you imagine? How dull it is to be me! Nothing is new to me. It's all the same. Paris; Topeka, Kansas; Johannesburg—it's all the same, human selfishness and greed and stupidity. Yes, I'm staying in bed today, and not getting out of it."
"You're so filled with self-pity." I smiled. "Come on. Get up. Put on sexy clothes and we'll go out, see the town."
"I've seen it."
"Do you want me?"
The quick shock of what I'd said traveled through both of us, like a shared earth tremor. It came out of me so naturally, I wasn't sure afterwards how I'd meant it. He stared at me for a long while. His face was very cleanly shaven and smooth, the skin texture like powdered velvet, and he looked a few years older, his eyes prominent. He hadn't had blood since the last time, and he aged, ever so slightly, when he hadn't had the blood to keep him plump and keep his hair and skin lively. "You're mad," he said finally.
"No," I said. "I offer myself. I'm not selfish. I'm something other than that human greed and stupidity. I want to make you happy. I want to make you alive."
"No," he said. "This was not our agreement."
"It doesn't have to be. I would do no less for any stra
y cat."
He seemed to crumple, and he turned his face away and buried it in the pillowcase. I wanted him so badly then. The tensing of his wrists was like a religion to me, the curl of his fingers and his claws piercing the smooth cotton and tearing the fibers across, and the visible tension of his back like an African sculpture. How I wanted him. I touched the narrow stretch of tense gray silk with my fingertips.
He rose half up and picked up a small scalpel from the table beside the bed, where it had rested naturally, like a travel alarm or a bottle of pills or a set of earplugs. I lay back and closed my eyes. "No, watch me," he breathed, "see what you're getting yourself into." So I watched him bare my arm above the elbow, to the fat reservoir in the crook of my arm. He kissed and licked and sucked the spot, making it tender and sensitive, and making the pinkness rush to the surface. He set his lips and drew the scalpel across the vein with a quick expert stroke, opening an incision perhaps two millimeters wide. It didn't hurt until it was long over and the hot trickle ran out and caught in the spikes of terry cloth.
He clamped his mouth on the wound and drank the blood into his mouth. I moaned out loud, begging him for something wordlessly, meaninglessly. He sighed like a baby at the breast, moving closer to me, embracing me, snuggling his head against my rib cage, resting as he drank with slow calm swallows. Almost immediately joy rushed into me from my arm, quite warm and cold at the same time, as if the blood lost was replaced with pleasure. The longer he drank, the intenser the pleasure became, until he was gripping my body tightly with one knee and one arm, and I convulsed slightly beneath him, my disassociated cunt seizing up and shuddering down, gathering itself up in a great tensile knot and striking loose.
And he was done. He lifted his face with a great breath. His mouth was lipsticked in the bright vital orange-red that is oxygenated blood, and traces of it daubed his chin and the tip of his slightly upturned nose. He looked a good three or four years younger than he had when I came into the room, and his face was quite red, shading to a pale human tone. He smiled and licked his lips. Together we brought my arm up and rested my wrist against my shoulder.
"I don't understand," I murmured, dizzy from the orgasm. .
"I do," he said. "I know why you came tonight."
"Do you?"
I slid my leg between his knees.
To my surprise, he frowned and moved away, sliding to the edge of the bed and hooking his coltish legs over the side. "Did I make a pun? Sorry, I didn't mean to. Yes, let's do go out," he decided, informing me over his shoulder. He wiped his nose. "You must change, though. I won't go anywhere with you dressed like a lumberjack. Do you want new clothes? I could buy you new clothes."
The gash in my arm soon faded to a throbbing, clean incision. We put a Band-Aid on it. He dressed behind a paper screen and we went out.
He insisted on buying me something to wear, but the only places open were the most expensive shops in Union Square. So he bought me a rich velvety long dress of a green-blue that I would have never chosen for myself, and black suede shoes, paying for it with a credit card he handed over with a distracted aplomb. I didn't want to think about how much it cost. Ricari nearly ran out the door without the card, though, and he took a great deal of time signing the receipt, fiddling with the cheap plastic pen as if doubting his ability to write with it.
Ricari then proceeded to take me to dinner at a tiny restaurant where we had to linger at the bar for two hours before we could be seated; and the headwaiter gave Ricari a look of absolute poison when Ricari refused to order anything. He bought me soup, appetizers of delicate calamari, vegetables, fish and rice, tiramisu, and coffee, and enjoyed my swaying determination to get through such a meal after having had three vodka martinis.
After that, he dragged me bodily to a cafe-bar, and ordered me cocktails of evil-tasting cinnamon liqueur. "You eat and drink well," he commented, nearly the first words he'd said since we left the Saskatchewan.
"I guess," I said, my head lolling upon the red vinyl booth cushions. I had great difficulty lighting a cigarette, which I needed intensely.
"You are not like a modern girl at all."
"How so?"
"You are not tall. You are neither grossly fat, nor bony like a peasant. Your face has soft angles."
I leaned back and took off my new shoe, the heel of it already worn down and the suede soaked through with rain and sweat. "You have a lot of money," I said.
"It was all in banks in Hong Kong. I gave almost all of it away. I intend to give the rest away to you." He placed his hand gently over my mouth to stifle my protests. "No, it is settled. You agreed. Now. How shall it be done?"
"How do you want it to be done?"
In the red smoky light of the bar his smooth boyish skin was luminous. He gazed away into space as if contemplating which pair of shoes to wear to the dance. "I don't know. The least painful way would be to sever my head."
"Mmm-mm, Ricari."
"No, really. My body will not be a burden. It will quickly dissociate itself. You could bury me in your backyard. No bones will be found. It is quicker, more humane, than burning me. That, however, would be total, and you would not have to deal with the problem of how to sever my head completely with one blow—if you missed I would not die—"
"No. I don't want to talk about this."
"You must." He frowned at me.
I resisted mutely, swaying my head back and forth. I reached for my cigarette, upsetting my tiny cocktail glass. It appeared between Ricari's finger and thumb—he caught it faster than my eyes could follow. Not noticing that he'd done anything wondrous, he set it back upon the table almost out of my reach, touching the sticky rim with fascination. I licked my lips, wondering if he could feel the traces of my tongue and mouth when I did this. Lost in thought, I stroked my belly and my breast through the fabric of the dress. Ricari watched me. "How would you like to do it?" he asked me.
"I guess I'll burn you," I said distantly.
"That is for the best. I will only hurt for a little while."
"Incinerator at school."
"Yes…" he agreed.
"Did you ever dance the quadrille?"
"Many times," he smiled.
"Orfeo," I said to myself.
He caught up my wrist where the two scars had faded as if years marked them, and pressed it against his mouth. He kissed up my arm until he reached my sleeve, pressed his cheek against the velvet. "You smell of sin. My darling."
"I want you to take me home," I said.
"Are you tired?"
"I'm wasted." I tasted the sticky-sweet dryness of my palate, and laughed. "I love you."
"You cannot." He laughed too, and rose from the red vinyl booth.
I sat there and watched him stand and stretch his lilylike body, arms reaching out under the white satin, satin stretching across his tiny tight belly, and satin dropping to a voluptuous mass at his waist where it tucked into his black trousers. He saw I had not moved, and he slid back into the booth and tugged gently at my shoulder.
The cocktail waitress, who had been watching us all night as she made her rounds, returned to our table. "Your check?" she offered, slipping a black plastic tray onto the table next to my half-full thimble of Goldschlager.
Ricari accepted the ticket, and brought out his card again. As he handed it to her, she caught sight of his hands. "You have really cool hands," she remarked, her icy reserve evaporating in wonder; then she took a good long look at the joints and the claws, stretching out impossibly, more the joints of the wings of a bat than a plump ordinary man's hand, and I saw her face lock into a blank incomprehension. She glanced up at Ricari's eyes in a slight panic.
Ricari rose again and took her by the arms, smiling into her face; she was taller than he by many inches and stiletto heels, and he had to look up to fix her with his eyes. I felt the emanations of his presence radiate outward like heat, until it roared through my head and I could barely see; and I heard him, heard him say to her sotto voce, "Completely ord
inary." But his lips never moved. Or perhaps I was drunk and I never caught an after-image of his mouth. I felt sick. I slumped in the red booth and closed my eyes.
The cocktail waitress was at another table, bending down in her tight black satin chamseong, a beautiful serving mannequin again. Ricari was pulling me from the booth. "Come on, sweetheart," he said, "let's go now. Now, please."
I dimly remember a taxi; Ricari bending in and saying something to a driver; my building presenting itself from the mists, walking inside without paying anything to the taxi driver and no hassle. I don't remember taking off the dress and shoes and getting into bed, but I was there, alone, queasy, the room spinning as the gray dawn rose again.
* * *
Chapter Four
"Hi, honey."
"Merry Christmas and all that."
"Thanks."
"How are you? What time's it there?"
"Mmmmmmmm. Um, it's um, eleven-twenty."
"I thought I'd call now—I figured you'd be awake."
"I'm sleeping in today."
"I wish I could." Transatlantic clicking—crystal-clear fiber optics my ass. "I'm at Mum's house. It's snowing. You were right."
"Wearing your boots?"
"Yeah." He laughed, and there was more silence, more clicking. "How are you?"
"I'm kind of unhappy."
"Yeah? Miss me?"
"Yeah. Yeah, a lot."
"I think about you all the time."
"Yeah," I said.
"Doing anything later?"
"I'm just gonna sleep. I've got a pot hangover."
"Now, don't go to the dogs now I'm away, right?"
"I've been to the dogs for years, hon. I do miss you."
"I, er, couldn't think of a present for you, I'm sorry.
Is there anything that you want? I could pop it into the post on Tuesday—"
"No, don't worry about it. I don't need anything. I'm glad to hear from you."
Voice of the Blood Page 5