Ricari stared into the separating depths of his coffee. "Once," he responded.
"You're kidding. I can't believe it. It must have been a long time ago."
"It was," he said. "Earlier this century. A long time ago."
"What happened? Was it really traumatic?"
He grunted and peaked his eyebrows. "Yes," he said, his mouth twisting with irony.
"What happened?"
"I let myself be seduced by loneliness and decadence again, and it exploded in my face. I made a terrible mistake even speaking to that person, let alone making him into a horrible creature like myself. I regret that more than any act in my life—and I won't do it again, so you can just forget about it."
"You have to tell me about this," I insisted.
"My goodness, you're sober," Ricari said.
"I'm frequently sober. Thank you very much."
"When did you last eat a decent meal?"
"When did you?"
He relaxed in his chair, smiling at me. "You want dinner? I feel generous."
"Why can't you just say you missed me?"
"All right," he sighed. "I missed you."
"Because I'm annoying?"
"Because, in your way, you are Christian."
"What!"
"You turn the other cheek. You give balm to lepers."
"You crack me up sometimes," I said.
I took three swallows of the mocha and we left.
After we went to a Chinese restaurant and I had set to a lovely chicken hot-pot and some clear soup, Ricari settled into his narrative mode, gesturing with a china cup of tea, which he held to keep his toothpick fingers warm. "I ended up in Berlin out of boredom, hearing that amazing things went on there. Until then—I had spent the First War in Switzerland, ignoring the whole thing. But Berlin was filled with fascinations—I particularly wanted theater, which I had been starved of for many years—not much theater in Switzerland. I certainly got what I came for, and then some. The place was lousy with Americans then, that was almost literally the first time I had ever met Americans and I thought they were enchanting really—"
"Is this other one an American?"
"Oh, no, German. I was merely prefacing. But I went to see a lot of Brechtian plays and performances, and became rather well known as a patron then. I had lots of money, which was not in very large supply, and I had stopped eating food, mainly I spent it on plays and buying rounds for other people. I get very popular that way.
"At any rate, there was one young man with a wide reputation for being the strangest fellow in Berlin—he was a great student of the Dadaists, and he seemed to glory in destroying things and horrifying little old ladies as they went to buy cheese. This interested me. Everyone else's decadence, as will happen after a while, gets rather boring and trite and you find out quickly how conservative they all really are. So I set out to meet this young man—not knowing that he had also set out to meet me.
"I went to one of his performances in a little theater—a garage really, with some wooden crates stacked on end to form a narrow little stage, and it was all quite dark, lit only by some tallow candles which smoked horribly and made everyone cough. There on the crates was this tall skinny man with very, very long hair—for that time anyway, even the homosexuals had their hair cut short—wearing a tattered tuxedo and a tin crown, playing an out-of-tune piano like the house was on fire. I wasn't very impressed, to tell you the truth, and afterwards I tried to leave. This young man jumped off the stage and ran and caught me by the shoulder, and said, 'Please—do stay—shall I put out the candles? I've wanted so much to meet you, Herr Ricari.' I swear on the Virgin that he said it exactly like that. He was not a beautiful creature or anything, but his passion impressed me, and so I stayed."
"What's his name?"
"Daniel," Ricari said with a little sigh. "Daniel Blum."
"And?"
"And… he insinuated himself into my life. He was a real sociopath—everyone did as he said because at any moment he might fly off the handle and start breaking things, only to come apologize later with a smile and a stein of lager and say he was only being artistic. He got me so turned around I didn't know day from night, and he discovered I was what I am, and he fell completely in love with me."
"Did you return the love?" I poured myself the last bitter dregs of the tea.
Ricari did not respond for a long time. "I shall not lie," he said. "Yes, I loved him completely, consumingly, we were as one. He acted out my most monstrous impulses. He never minded anything I did, he loved me totally, and he clouded my head so much that the thought of going a single day without him by my side was terrible. It seemed… inevitable that we would be together, he made it seem so, he told me every day that as soon as I made him we would be unstoppable, that we could do whatever we chose, we could be madly in love forever." He sighed heavily. "So, I did it. Regretted it instantly."
"Instantly?" I doubted, smiling.
"As soon as he took his first breath as a vampire, I felt fear and shame and loathing and remorse and all those good things. I thought to kill him at once—I, being older, was far stronger—but he was too young and naive, and it would have been like killing a baby. I thought that I could change his ways—that once he saw through these eyes that he would learn compassion and remorse and learn morality—but exactly the opposite happened. I learnt that I cannot change anyone by my powers, I can only destroy them, make them mad, or add fuel to their madness. God has given me one chance to redeem a single human being, and that is myself. I plan to do exactly that."
I sighed. My back hurt in the stiff restaurant seat, and the cold had seized up my muscles. The garlicky hot-pot had helped somewhat, but not altogether. "So what happened? Why aren't you still with him, wallowing in your regret?"
"You like to mock me, don't you? We ended it, after a few weeks together as blood-drinkers—his methods disgusted me, and he had only gotten worse in his iconoclasm. He is one of the most strident anti-Christians I have ever known—not merely atheist, but emphatic about the absence of a Christian God. He used to delight in crucifying rabbits and chickens and baby birds upside down on my wooden crucifix, until it became putrid from the blood and I had to burn it, much to his pleasure. He made airplanes out of the pages of my family Bible. I couldn't handle seeing him with other people either. He was infectious in his evil. I am not jealous by nature even slightly, but if I saw him cuddle up with barmaids, with American soldiers, drag queens, even little children on the street, who were his favorite victims—I would fly into a rage and we would fight. With fists and everything. I smashed his cheekbone once, but the next day it was healed, and he drove a pointed stake into my chest, not knowing it would not kill me. I pulled out the stake and threw it across the room and kicked him between the legs—what are you laughing about?"
"That is awesome."
"No, it's not. It's terrible. Have you any idea how much being staked in the heart hurts?"
"Probably about as much as being kicked in the family jewels."
"Anyway, you morbid child, I went away, since Berlin was becoming an awful place for anyone who was not a Nazi. Daniel wasn't a Nazi either, he despises government of any kind, and his father was a Jew and was killed by those bastards; but Daniel liked to prey on Nazis as well as their victims. He stayed. I went to England and holed up in a university tower with the books. After the war, Daniel tried to follow me, but I found out about him coming there, and I fled again, this time to China, where I knew he would not find me."
"Is he still alive?"
Ricari pursed his lips in thought, then looked up at me and nodded.
"Really? Where is he? Still in England?"
"I don't know," Ricari said.
He was lying. Like so many moral people who rarely lie, his lies were transparent; I saw the vein at his temple flutter and his eyes dilated. So like a human being in so many ways, yet still possessed of those fingers, those odd claws, those four pointy teeth that flashed when he laughed out loud. I
loved him completely too. And he had done it once.
I felt a little weird. A twinge went through my side and came out my back, then cycled back through as intense pain. A cramp. I dropped my spoon.
"Are you all right?" Ricari asked.
"Yeah, I'll be OK." I fumbled in my satchel for a bottle of aspirin and swallowed two, washing them down with green tea. Ricari watched me with steel-eyed interest. Had he given me the cramp to distract me from his lie? I did not put it past him.
The waiter disappeared with Ricari's credit card, and I cracked open my fortune cookie. Good fortune awaits you. "You never even wanted to make another?" I asked.
"Not since then."
"Why not before? You were a hundred years old when this happened, if I'm not mistaken."
"I often had others around me before," he said. "I had been without other vampires for twenty years. Before then, I had Georgie and Maria, and later, some others."
"Who?"
"Later, child."
He came back with me to my place afterward, to listen to Prokofiev. I put on Bessie Smith first, though. "You like this music?" I challenged him. "American music?"
"Interesting," he said.
"I like it. I like the crackle and hiss of the recording coming through digitally." I stared at the disc whirling rainbows under its plastic cowl. "My lover gave me this a long time ago."
"Where is your lover now?"
"England," I said. "Cambridge. Physicist." I shrugged. "I'll probably never see him again… and I'm not sure that I care."
I sat down on the couch. My back really hurt now. Ricari was at my side, gently rubbing my shoulder, then my lower back. He lay his cool cheek against mine, and when I turned my head to kiss him, he didn't move away. I tasted his lips for a moment, sweetly, then moved away, not wishing to press it further for fear all would be taken away. He tangled my hair in his fingers and kissed my chin, drawing me close to him, brushing his lips against the hastily licked dampness of my own.
He and I pulled off my clothes. I was nearly paralyzed with excitement, stiffened with intermittent spasms of pain. I watched him the whole time; his face was completely blank, calm, bloodless, as if he were somewhere else. He unbuttoned the pristine white drapery of his satin shirt and dropped it onto the floor beside us.
I was naked from the waist down, half under him. He began kissing my belly, exposed under the white rim of my T-shirt, so much more exposed than if I were completely nude; I had no innocence in which to clothe myself. My nipples hurt under the tight cotton of my bra. Ricari's chest was smooth against my thighs, the demure twists of silvery hair under his arms brushing against my hipbones. I opened myself to him.
I could smell the blood.
Dazed, astonished, I glanced down at him wiping the smear of new blood from between my thighs and licking it off his forefinger, then going for more, touching me, then penetrating me, gathering thick droplets under his fingernail. "Oh, please," I whispered, "Oh, God."
It was not at all like the first time. Now he licked, suckled, lapped at the flow that his sucking increased. He had time now, he had no need of urgency; I was not going to save his life, nor was he going to take mine. I could not know what he thought or felt. I was hot all over, regretting taking aspirin rather than ibuprofen; the blood was flowing out of me as if I were a spigot. He sipped the uneven rich flow like a snake tasting the air. I grabbed one of his hands and slipped it under my shirt, to one of my breasts, and he felt it, ran his thumbnail over the nipple.
For hours this continued. At some point I got up and put on the Prokofiev disk; at some point we got up and moved to my bed; at some point the rest of my clothes came off and I lay there under him helpless and naked, while his dark tousled head weaved between my legs with a drowsy rhythm. At some point I came; and he helped me, I know he did; he increased the frequency of the strokes of his tongue, their insistency, until I moaned and twisted and my toes curled like ferns; then he slowed, breathed, pointed his tongue to catch the blood loosed by my spasms. He was still licking hypnotically when I fell asleep.
"When are you going to kill me?"
His face was a confrontational mask. I glanced up at him, then back at my Goldschlager cocktail. "Eventually," I said.
"You promised."
"I will," I said. "I'm not ready yet. Neither are you. You still have more to tell."
"What more do you need to know? I had a blueberry tart and Turkish coffee on the day that I died! Coleridge's breath stank! I have killed over seven thousand human beings! What else is there?"
"I want to know where Daniel is," I said coolly.
"I told you, I don't know."
"You do know. I thought Christians didn't lie."
"Damn you." In the red light reflecting off the booths he looked satanic. He genuinely hadn't had any blood in a very long time, save mine; I kept him functioning, but I couldn't keep him from looking deathly white, thin as a mantis, terrifyingly static in repose and jittery in movement like an old film. Anywhere else we might have gotten stares, but he had the whole staff of the cafe-bar so thoroughly hypnotized that he could have killed the bartender and poured his blood into a wine . glass, and not gotten anything but the check. Ricari showed the strain in other ways too—like a fasting human, he was easily irritated.
"Yes," I said, "damn me."
"Stop acting so superior."
"I am superior, Orfeo Giuseppe Vittorio Ricari, 'cause I have the power to kill you, but you refuse the power to kill me."
"I have refused it. I may rescind this agreement."
"Really?"
"If you love me so, why do you not give me what I want? Why don't you do as I say?"
"I don't know." I was wearing the dress he gave me again; it helped keep the staff hypnotized; if things were as they had been before, the mundanity of the whole situation was assured. I put my face in my hands. I hadn't eaten this time, deciding to go straight for the liquor. I knew he was going to ask me about death again tonight—we had had too many weeks of conversation, sweetness, my blood freely given and his kisses unshy. "I need more answers, Ricari. Please. Like why won't you let me sleep with you? Why don't you want me?"
"I do want you, Ariane."
"Then why—"
"Have you never loved a moral man before? I will not violate your body in this way, or let you violate mine. I have sinned enough in that way long ago—I don't want it anymore. It only leads to trouble—heartbreak—lies and broken promises, and death. I don't want to have this kind of relationship. I don't see you as a cheap woman, who gives away her womb to the first man who knows where it is."
"But you still—"
"I don't want to talk about that."
"I just want to, you know, take a nap with you."
"Don't be absurd. I know what you really mean."
"You infuriate me, Ricari."
"And you me!" Ricari slammed his hand down onto the table hard enough to crack the varnish. The other patrons looked at us in panic, but the staff continued on merrily as if they had heard nothing. The patrons went reluctantly back to their drinks, figuring we were some rich VIPs, perhaps the owners.
"I hate you," I said in a little voice. "I'm sick of doing things your way."
"Look," he said through his gleaming teeth, "I'm older than you. I know better."
"It's not your world anymore," I spat back. "You're a relic. Your morals are a relic."
"You sound like that damned Daniel."
"Well, maybe he's right, have you ever considered that?"
"You are sick in the head if you think that I would ever make you into anything like him," Ricari said. His white cheeks were stained with crimson, as if someone had dashed him inexpertly with rouge. "The last thing you need is power. More power. All you would do would be to persecute and repress. Let me be myself! Let me worship God and walk a moral path! Why does this inconvenience you so much?"
"Because I love you," I said, disappointed with how it sounded already. "I want you."
"As you're so fond of saying," I said, "you're not a person."
I expected a horrible row—perhaps blows—but I didn't for a million years guess what he was going to do next. Ricari burst into tears and buried his head in the creche of satin formed by his crossed arms on the table. "Stop it!" he sobbed. "Stop this attack!"
I was aghast. I put my arms around his shoulders and murmured to him, "I'm sorry," covering his delicate ears with kisses. He lifted his head and stared with enormously reddened, flowing eyes.
"I'm sorry," I said again. "I'm not worthy of you by any stretch of the imagination—"
"Let's go," he said miserably.
We drove about for a long time, crossing the Golden Gate into Marin County, coasting along the highway that wound around immeasurable secret towns, towns that existed on no maps and that tore down signs that directed motorists to them; along ochre cliffs that sparkled in the moonlight, and rain-soaked phosphorescent beaches. Ricari cried for a while, and I didn't speak, mortified at how I'd spoken against him. He was so delicate! I could not stand the idea that I had been cruel to him. At length he finished with his sobs, and leaned back, spent, while a few stray tears marked his pallid cheeks.
I stopped the car on the side of the road. I took his icy hands in between mine and gazed at him. "Orfeo," I said,' "Orfeo, please, please forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive," he said. "You are absolutely right."
"I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I'm an idiot. I hate to hurt you!"
"You don't," he scoffed, but his tone was lighter.
We looked at each other.
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