The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Why, this will make me cry, she thought, blinking. And for what? Does an afternoon with the unicorn have any meaning for the ordinary days that come later? What has this passage with Weyland left me? Have I anything in my hands now besides the morning’s mail?

  What I have in my hands is my own strength, because I had to reach deep to find the strength to match him.

  She put down the letters, noticing how on the backs of her hands the veins stood, blue shadows, under the thin skin. How can these hands be strong? Time was beginning to wear them thin and bring up the fragile inner structure in clear relief. That was the meaning of the last parent’s death: that the child’s remaining time has a limit of its own.

  But not for Weyland. No graveyards of family dead lay behind him, no obvious and implacable ending of his own span threatened him. Time has to be different for a creature of an enchanted forest, as morality has to be different. He was a predator and a killer formed for a life of centuries, not decades; of secret singularity, not the busy hum of the herd. Yet his strength, suited to that nonhuman life, had revived her own strength. Her hands were slim, no longer youthful, but she saw now that they were strong enough.

  For what? She flexed her fingers, watching the tendons slide under the skin. Strong hands don’t have to clutch. They can simply open and let go.

  She dialed Lucille’s extension at the clinic.

  “Luce? Sorry to have missed your calls lately. Listen, I want to start making arrangements to transfer my practice for a while. You were right, I do need a break, just as all my friends have been telling me. Will you pass the word for me to the staff over there today? Good, thanks. Also, there’s the workshop coming up next month . . . . Yes. Are you kidding? They’d love to have you in my place. You’re not the only one who’s noticed that I’ve been falling apart, you know. It’s awfully soon—can you manage, do you think? Luce, you are a brick and a lifesaver and all that stuff that means I’m very, very grateful.”

  Not so terrible, she thought, but only a start. Everything else remained to be dealt with. The glow of euphoria couldn’t carry her for long. Already, looking down, she noticed jelly on her blouse, just like old times, and she didn’t even remember having breakfast. If you want to keep the strength you’ve found in all this, you’re going to have to get plenty of practice being strong. Try a tough one now.

  She phoned Deb. “Of course you slept late, so what? I did, too, so I’m glad you didn’t call and wake me up. Whenever you’re ready—if you need help moving uptown from the hotel, I can cancel here and come down . . . . Well, call if you change your mind. I’ve left a house key for you with my doorman.

  “And listen, hon, I’ve been thinking—how about all of us going up together to Nonnie’s over the weekend? Then when you feel like it, maybe you’d like to talk about what you’ll do next. Yes, I’ve already started setting up some free time for myself. Think about it, love. Talk to you later.”

  Kenny’s turn. “Kenny, I’ll come by during visiting hours this afternoon.”

  “Are you okay?” he squeaked.

  “I’m okay. But I’m not your mommy, Ken, and I’m not going to start trying to hold the big bad world off you again. I’ll expect you to be ready to settle down seriously and choose a new therapist for yourself. We’re going to get that done today once and for all. Have you got that?”

  After a short silence he answered in a desolate voice, “All right.”

  “Kenny, nobody grown up has a mommy around to take care of things for them and keep them safe—not even me. You just have to be tough enough and brave enough yourself. See you this afternoon.”

  How about Jane Fennerman? No, leave it for now, we are not Wonder Woman, we can’t handle that stress today as well.

  Too restless to settle down to paperwork before the day’s round of appointments began, she got up and fed the goldfish, then drifted to the window and looked out over the city. Same jammed-up traffic down there, same dusty summer park stretching away uptown—yet not the same city, because Weyland no longer hunted there. Nothing like him moved now in those deep, grumbling streets. She would never come upon anyone there as alien as he—and just as well. Let last night stand as the end, unique and inimitable, of their affair. She was glutted with strangeness and looked forward frankly to sharing again in Mort’s ordinary human appetite.

  And Weyland—how would he do in that new and distant hunting ground he had found for himself? Her own balance had been changed. Suppose his once perfect, solitary equilibrium had been altered too? Perhaps he had spoiled it by involving himself too intimately with another being—herself. And then he had left her alive—a terrible risk. Was this a sign of his corruption at her hands?

  “Oh, no,” she whispered fiercely, focusing her vision on her reflection in the smudged window glass. Oh, no, I am not the temptress. I am not the deadly female out of legends whose touch defiles the hitherto unblemished being, her victim. If Weyland found some human likeness in himself, that had to be in him to begin with. Who said he was defiled anyway? Newly discovered capacities can be either strengths or weaknesses, depending on how you use them.

  Very pretty and reassuring, she thought grimly; but it’s pure cant. Am I going to retreat now into mechanical analysis to make myself feel better?

  She heaved open the window and admitted the sticky summer breath of the city into the office. There’s your enchanted forest, my dear, all nitty-gritty and not one flake of fairy dust. You’ve survived here, which means you can see straight when you have to. Well, you have to now.

  Has he been damaged? No telling yet, and you can’t stop living while you wait for the answers to come in. I don’t know all that was done between us, but I do know who did it: I did it, and he did it, and neither of us withdrew until it was done. We were joined in a rich complicity—he in the wakening of some flicker of humanity in himself, I in keeping and, yes, enjoying the secret of his implacable blood hunger. What that complicity means for each of us can only be discovered by getting on with living and watching for clues from moment to moment. His business is to continue from here, and mine is to do the same, without guilt and without resentment. Doug was right: the aim is individual responsibility. From that effort, not even the lady and the unicorn are exempt.

  Shaken by a fresh upwelling of tears, she thought bitterly, Moving on is easy enough for Weyland; he’s used to it, he’s had more practice. What about me? Yes, be selfish, woman—if you haven’t learned that, you’ve learned damn little.

  The Japanese say that in middle age you should leave the claims of family, friends, and work, and go ponder the meaning of the universe while you still have the chance. Maybe I’ll try just existing for a while, and letting grow in its own time my understanding of a universe that includes Weyland—and myself—among its possibilities.

  Is that looking out for myself? Or am I simply no longer fit for living with family, friends, and work? Have I been damaged by him—by my marvelous, murderous monster?

  Damn, she thought, I wish he were here; I wish we could talk about it. The light on her phone caught her eye; it was blinking the quick flashes that meant Hilda was signaling the imminent arrival of—not Weyland—the day’s first client.

  We’re each on our own now, she thought, shutting the window and turning on the air-conditioner.

  But think of me sometimes, Weyland, thinking of you.

  Part IV:

  A Musical Interlude

  In a carrel of the university library tower a student slept. Over him stood Dr. Weyland, respected new member of the faculty, pressed by hunger to feed.

  The air was warm despite the laboring of the cooling system. Quiet reigned; summer courses brought few students into the stacks. On his preliminary tour of this tower level, silent in crêpe-soled shoes, Weyland had noted the presence of only two: this sleeping youth and a young woman sitting on the floor reading in the geology section.

  In nervous haste Weyland moved: he rendered the sleeper unconscious by briefly pressing sh
ut an artery to the brain. Then, delicately tipping the lolling head to fully expose the throat, he leaned close and drank without a sound. When he was done, he patted his lips with his handkerchief and left as silently as he had come.

  The youth whose blood he had drunk breathed a gusty, complaining sigh across the page on which his pale cheek rested. He dreamed of being unprepared for a history exam.

  In the men’s room on the ground floor Weyland washed the scent of his victim from his hands. Damp-palmed, he smoothed back his vigorous iron-gray hair, which in this climate tended to stick up in wiry tufts. He frowned at his reflection, at the tension lines around his mouth and eyes.

  In his second week in New Mexico, he was still feeling upset from his recent experiences in the East. Yet now he must behave with calm and self-confidence. He could not afford mistakes. No odd rumors or needless animosity must attach themselves to him here. All modern cities seemed so large to him that he had miscalculated about this one: Albuquerque was smaller than he had expected. He missed the anonymity of New York. No wonder he couldn’t shake this nervousness. Walking back through the somnolent afternoon for a nap in his temporary quarters, the home of an assistant professor, would relax him. Then he could sleep, as his digestion obliged him to, on the meal he had just taken in the library.

  As part of the department head’s efforts to settle him comfortably in his new surroundings, social arrangements had been made in advance for him. Tonight he was to attend the opera in Santa Fe with some friends of the department head’s wife, people who ran an art gallery here in Albuquerque. Weyland hoped the evening would contribute to his image as an austere but approachable scholar. The strain of sociability would be supportable, given the all-important nap.

  He walked out into the brilliant summer sunlight.

  * * *

  The tourists ambled through the opera house. From the ridge on which the building lay they could look south toward Santa Fe, east and west toward mountains. Even on hot days breezes cooled the opera hill. The deep, concrete-enclosed spaces of the house were wells of shadow. The house manager, who was guiding the tour, led the visitors through the wings and down an open stair. They emerged onto a sunny concrete deck that backed the entire building—stage area in the middle and flanking work areas—in a north-south sweep.

  Raising his voice above hammering sounds and a whine of power tools, the guide said, “Most of the technical work gets done here on the deck level.” He pointed out the paint and electrical shops and, just behind and below the stage, the big scenery lift between the two open staircases.

  The group drifted onto the shaded southern end of the deck, which became a roofed veranda adjoining the wig and costume shop. They stood like passengers at the rail of a cruise ship, looking westward. Someone asked about the chain-link fence that ran behind the opera house near the base of the hill.

  The house manager said, “The fence marks off the property of the opera itself from the land that the founder, John Crosby, had the foresight to buy as a buffer against growth from Santa Fe. Nobody will ever be able to build close enough to give us problems with noise or light, or wreck our acoustical backdrop—that hillside facing us across the arroyo at the bottom of our hill.”

  The tourists chatted, lingering on the shady veranda; even with a breeze, it was hot out on the exposed deck. Cameras clicked.

  Looking down, a man in a safari suit asked disapprovingly, “What’s all that trash down there?”

  The others moved to look. On the deck they stood perhaps thirty feet above a paved road that ran below the back of the opera house along the west face of the hill. Beneath them the road gave access to a doorway and a garage entry, on either side of which huge piles of lumber and canvas were heaped high against the stucco wall.

  “That’s discarded sets,” the guide said. “We have only so much storage space. Old productions get dumped there until we either cannibalize them for new sets or haul them away.”

  A woman, looking back the way they had come, said, “This building is really a fantastic labyrinth. How does everyone keep track of where they’re supposed to be and what they should be doing during a performance?”

  The guide said, “By the music. You remember the stage manager’s console in the right wings with the phones and the mic and the TV monitors? The whole show is run from right there by the numbers in a marked copy of the score. Our stage manager, Renée Spiegel, watches the conductor’s beat on the monitor, and according to that she gives everybody their cues. So the music structures everything that happens.

  “Now, when we want to shut out the view of the mountains, for an indoor scene, say, we use movable back walls . . .”

  * * *

  “Dr. Weyland? I’m Jean Gray, from the Walking River Gallery. Albert McGrath, my partner, had to go to Santa Fe earlier today, so we’ll meet him at the opera. You just sit back and enjoy the scenery while I drive us up there.”

  He folded his height into the front passenger seat without speaking or offering his hand. What’s this, Jean wondered, doesn’t the great man believe in hobnobbing with the common folk? Her friend the department head’s wife had impressed upon her in no uncertain terms that this was indeed a great man. He fitted the part: a dark, well-tailored jacket and fawn slacks, gray hair, strong face—large, intense eyes brooding down a majestic prow of a nose, a morose set to the mouth and the long, stubborn jaw.

  They also said he’d been ill back East; give a guy a break. Jean nosed the car out past striped sawhorses and piled rubble, exclaiming cheerfully, “Look at this mess!”

  In precise and bitter tones Dr. Weyland replied, “Better to look at it than to listen to it being made. All afternoon I had to endure the bone-shattering thunder of heavy machinery.” He added in grudging apology, “Excuse me. I customarily sleep after eating. Today a nap was impossible. I am not entirely myself.”

  “Would you like a Rolaid? I have some in my purse.”

  “No, thank you.” He turned and put his coat on the back seat.

  “I hope you have a scarf or sweater as well as your raincoat. Santa Fe’s only sixty miles north of Albuquerque, but it’s two thousand feet higher. The opera is open-air, so because of the lighting nothing starts till after sunset, about nine o’clock. Performances run late, and the nights can get chilly.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “I keep a blanket in the trunk just in case. At least the sky’s nice and clear; we’re not likely to be rained out. It’s a good night for Tosca. You know that marvelous aria in the third act where Cavaradossi sings about how the stars shone above the cottage where he and Tosca used to meet—”

  “The opera tonight is Tosca?”

  “That’s right. Do you know it well?”

  After a moment he said distantly, “I knew someone in the East who was named after Floria Tosca, the heroine of the story. But I’ve never seen this opera.”

  * * *

  After last night’s performance of Gonzago, a dissonant modern opera on a bloody Renaissance theme, the Tosca lighting sequence had to be set up for tonight. Having worked backward through Acts Three and Two, the crew broke for dinner, then began to complete the reversed sequence so that when they finished at eight o’clock the lights and the stage would be set for the start of Act One.

  Everyone was pleased to abandon the dreadful Gonzago, this season’s expression of the Santa Fe Opera’s commitment to modern works, in favor of a dependable old warhorse like Puccini’s Tosca. Headsets at the stage manager’s console, in the lighting booth, in the patch room and at the other stations around the house, hummed with brisk instructions, numbers, comments.

  Renée Spiegel, the stage manager, pored over her carefully marked score. She hoped people hadn’t forgotten too many cues since Tosca last week, what with doing three other operas since. She hoped everything would run nice and tight tonight, orderly and by the numbers.

  * * *

  Jeremy Tremain gargled, spat, and stared in the mirror at the inside of his throat.
It looked a healthy pink.

  Nevertheless he sat down discontentedly to his ritual pre-performance bowl of chicken broth. Tonight he was to sing Angelotti, a part which ended in the first act. By the opera’s end the audience would remember the character, but who would recall having heard Tremain sing? He preferred a house that did calls after each act; you could do your part, take your bows, and go home.

  The part he coveted was that of the baritone villain, Scarpia. Tremain was beginning to be bored with the roles open to him as a young bass—ponderous priests and monarchs and the fathers of tenor heroes. He had recently acquired a new singing teacher who he hoped could help him enlarge the top of his range, transforming him into a bass baritone capable of parts like Scarpia. He was sure he possessed the dark, libidinous depths the role demanded.

  He got up and went in his bathrobe to the mirror again, turning for a three-quarter view. You wanted a blocky look for Scarpia. If only he had more jaw.

  * * *

  Weyland stared balefully out the car window. His library meal weighed in his midsection like wet sand. Being deprived of rest after eating upset his system. Now in addition he’d been cooped up for an hour in this flashy new car with an abominably timid driver. At least she had stopped trying to make conversation.

  They overtook the cattle truck behind which they had been dawdling, then settled back to the same maddeningly slow pace.

  He said irritably, “Why do you slow down again?”

  “The police watch this road on Friday nights.”

  He could hardly demand to take over the driving; he must be patient, he must be courteous. He thought longingly of the swift gray Mercedes he had cherished in the East.

  They took a stop-light-ridden bypass around Santa Fe itself and continued north. At length Jean Gray pointed out the opera house, tantalizingly visible beyond a crawling line of cars that snaked ahead of them past miles of construction barriers.