by Todd Grimson
“Why not?”
“Because … it’s not wise.” Frank wants to leave, to get out; at the same time he wants to stay, he wants her to hold him in her arms, he wants that sweet dangerous amnesiac high. On one level, he knows what she does to him. But he wants it anyway, those fangs, that feeling like magical forgiveness of all his sins.
“Let me get rid of her,” Frank says. “She’s far gone enough, you must be gettin’ the drift.”
‘What will you do with her?” Justine asks, after a while.
“I don’t know. Steal a car and put her in the trunk. I’m not sure.”
“You know how to fix these things.” Justine states this as a fact, and he’s proud. Sure, he knows how to fix these things. He’s shaken down pansy movie stars, beat the fuck out of their blackmailing boyfriends, set up city councilmen to be photographed in bed with nigger whores, leaned on them to plead health reasons to resign their seats or else the pictures come out, he’s framed commies for reefer or chicken out in the park. He’s framed spies and covered up evidence on guilty but connected wops. He’s done it all.
“I’ll get you a Filipino maid,” he says, and Justine doesn’t say thank you, doesn’t seem grateful, instead goes out to cop a few last looks at Gloria, in the plain unvarnished coffin up on a picnic tabletop to keep away some of the mice.
Frank decides not to wait. He goes out the front door to his car, backs up into the add-on garage. Before he can handle touching poor Gloria, he needs another drink.
Then, when he’s calm enough to gaze upon the vampire of his dreams studying the face of the purplish, greenish, livid corpse—Justine turns her eyes to him, and she comes in, and without saying a word she lifts his wrist to her mouth and gently, painlessly injects some of her serum. She looks at him almost with some sort of compassion—it isn’t compassion—the injected vampire saliva or whatever it is cuts through all of the bennies and coffee and alcohol and pure fear, he collects himself and does the awful job of somehow lifting the week-old corpse out of the coffin, carrying it wrapped in a blanket to the trunk of his car. It stinks, but he is immune for the moment to the horrid smell.
It’s a sucker play, and he knows it. Still, he has to do it. He drives into town at 3:00 A.M. and has some sort of half-developed plan now of planting the body in the bungalow of this religious sex freak named Reichardt, maybe do a real grandstand play and plug him for resisting arrest, set up some kind of sick scene there before calling it in. What’s fishy about this plan is that some guys on the Squad know about Frank and Gloria, that he used to take it out in trade. A lot of the guys in Vice used to fuck her, Frank wasn’t the only one. Back in 1945 or so, ‘46, she was hot stuff. The last couple of years she’s been fading fast.
Frank rolls to his apartment, meaning to run in and get a throw-down piece, only as he parks his car and gets out of the DeSoto some unfriendly Narco bulls come out of the shadows and brace him, one of them says, “Where’s that scag from the Epley scene?”
“Yeah, cut us in, Frank. You been acting strange.”
Epley is this hepcat trumpet player who caught an axe in the forehead, unsolved, Frank’s case, rumor has it some jigaboos from South Central followed him home.
“I don’t have any heroin,” Frank says. “Epley was clean. What’s the fucking skinny, you show up here at my pad?”
Lieutenant Davies says, “Let’s see what’s in your trunk.”
Something in Frank’s face maybe gives him away—when he makes a play for his gun, Randolph the ex-Marine grabs his arm and breaks it, snaps the elbow the wrong way and Frank falls to his knees, hat falling off his head into the street.
Davies says, “Check the trunk. It better be here.”
The pain is bearable, because of Justine’s bite. The funny thing is, Frank did cop the heroin. It’s hidden at his sister’s, he intended to lay it off through this pachuco he’s used before, Tommy Diaz. Maybe Diaz talked. These guys are pissed. They want their cut.
Their payoff for breaking his arm is they find Gloria. Other guys, he could tell them something, they could work it out. Davies here hates his guts. It’s just bad luck. Davies wants to see him fry in the electric chair, since they busted his arm there’s no going back.
‘Why’d you do it, man? The cooze just get into your head?”
“Shut up, Oscar. Who gives a shit why he went off. He’s been walking on razors for years. Now he got cut. He’s gonna bleed all the way to the chair.”
Frank McKenna keeps his mouth shut. At the station, they try to sweat him, ignoring his broken arm. His story is that he found her dead, went mad with grief and the combination of not having slept for three days: he’ll take a lie detector test on whether he snuffed her or not, nothing else. Inadvertently, yes, he tampered with a crime scene. The chief comes in to see him, says he can be on inactive duty till he gets his twenty in another few months. Then he will resign. This whore-killing is buried, kiboshed.
“Lieutenant Davies shouldn’t have let his men come on so strong.”
Days later, arm in a cast, Frank has a pal drive him up into the Hollywood hills. Check the house. Nothing doing. Justine is gone. He never sees her again.
He gets a job as head of security at one of the studios. He puts on weight, takes up with an ex-starlet-turned-agent named Roxanne. His right arm is never the same. You might say he’s haunted. Every single night, he remembers. Even on vacation in Havana, playing blackjack, watching a sex show, he never forgets. All the alcohol in the world.
He’s lost his edge. Roxanne leaves him. He’s fired from his job. “New blood,” they say they want. He’s a drunk. They start showing Dracula on late night TV and he tells people he used to know a vampire. Nobody’s interested. It’s 1956.
EIGHTEEN
“Do you ever … does it ever feel like, through the blood, that you really experience the life, or the mind, of this stranger you’re preying upon?”
“I try to seal myself off,” Justine answers.
“Then there is something. Some communication … outside the normal channels.”
“I don’t know what I’d call it,” Justine says.
They are in darkness, in Keith’s bedroom. He is hesitant to touch her, because of the bullet holes. He doesn’t want to be indelicate.
“I just wondered,” he says, “if you ever felt … like all these people—were contained in you, somehow. And then, beyond that, I wondered … if there is some kind of collective memory, something like that, some element that continues, that endures. Or if the blood is just like food, with nothing to say.”
“It says something,” she replies, slowly. “But I am not a worthy vessel. I am not sensitive enough to understand.”
“Oh, I think you’re sensitive.”
Justine looks at him anew; he can feel the movement of her eyes. She seems to be concentrating. A long silence ensues.
“I have never loved,” she says, after a long time. “Not like you loved your Renata. You still love her, even now.”
“You’re wrong. I hate her. She was crazy, and we collided, it was a collision, I hate her for what happened to me. I should never have told you about her.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“No. I hate her. I’ve hated her for a long time. If what happened was random, bad luck, I hate her like you’d hate a wasp that stings you in the eye. If it wasn’t random, if you want to say she was my fate … then she is my enemy, and that’s worse. I want to totally forget about her, to be indifferent…. The heroin used to help me with that.”
“You think about her,” Justine says, with some confusion, “you see her. She’s alive to you.”
“No.”
Justine waits. He can see her face in the moonlight now.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, the first time he’s ever thought this, or maybe the first time she has looked like this to him. “You have the face of an angel.”
The words trouble her, judging by her expression. He doesn’t care.
“Why do you want to die
?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know that if you want to, I will make you like me. Many people,” she moves to push her hair out of her face, “want this very much. I’ve known them. As soon as they find out what I am, they want to be one too. They don’t want to die, not in the ordinary way.”
”I’m afraid of dying,” he says. “I’m not brave. But one’s life … only has shape when it has an end. People die constantly, all over the world. It can’t be so hard. What would I accomplish if I hung around, hiding out and drinking blood? What would be the point?”
“Yes,” Justine says, and she’s smiling in such a way that he’s not sure whether she’s offended or not. She feels something. He cannot tell what.
She may kill him now, to call his bluff. He stares at what he cannot see in the darkness and is ready, he dares her, he is sincere.
NINETEEN
“My stepfather gave me the first orgasm I ever had,” Renata said, as she and Keith lay, half-entangled in the sheets. This was four years earlier, in her apartment, Upper East Side in New York.
“Didn’t you know how to masturbate?” Keith asked, rather coolly, unwilling to make a show out of being provoked by such provocative material.
“No,” she said, rolling over, onto her back. “Not until he showed me how.” She sighed, and he watched her face closely, she had such a repertoire of expressions, modeling does this … it’s like silent-film acting. “It sounds bad, I know,” she said, staring up at the skylight, “but it wasn’t as sordid… it didn’t seem sordid at the time. It was like …” she moved again, “he was a man of the world, and he was teaching me these secrets, he was initiating me. Like,” she said, “Babylonian fathers used to initiate their daughters, in Babylon. That’s what he told me.” Renata laughed, briefly, and Keith continued squeezing her hand, perhaps he squeezed it harder for a moment—he regarded her warily, not really knowing how to respond. Already he withheld judgment, as she had once or twice been proven, circumstantially, to have told him some melodramatic untruths. So the sympathy he extended for what struck him as this revelation of terrible pain … the sympathy was tentative and restrained, not wanting one thing or the other, waiting to really understand.
“My stepfather was very charismatic and strong willed, and charming. He said that I was a natural-born nymphet, I was irresistible, if I learned to use this I would have a wonderful career. He liked to be naked, he liked all of us to be naked. My mother … couldn’t keep up with his Dionysian side, she wouldn’t let go”
There was bitterness toward the mother here. Keith asked, “Did she know?”
“I think so,” Renata said. “They had big arguments … behind closed doors. My mother was jealous of me.”
A tear made its way out of Keith’s right eye. He knew the mother had died of breast cancer. He wanted to ask about Renata’s younger sister, but he did not, remembering that Renata had said they did not get along. The sister was three years younger, a student at Sarah Lawrence.
“I’m sorry about telling you all this,” Renata said, tracing Keith’s tear with her finger, wetting her index finger in it, as another followed, slowly. “It’s a mess.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Keith said.
“Don’t worry,” she said, lightly kissing him on the cheek. “I love you. It’s all in the past.”
Renata’s “beauty” meant nothing to him then. It was unlucky. She was way inside there, far far away from her flesh, her perfect skin. He wasn’t a doctor, he couldn’t fix her, and he didn’t want her to feel like her past, her problems, hung there between them like a living ball of hell. He didn’t want her to feel that he was expecting something, so that if she did not behave in therapeutic fashion, do “x” or “y,” that therefore she was letting him down. He didn’t want her to have any possibility of thinking she’d failed, or that he was disappointed in her.
“Anything you do,” he said, “is all right with me. I mean forever. If you sometime want to stab me through the heart, I mean it will hurt, I’ll die … but I forgive you in advance. I just wish we could be happy together somewhere, just ordinary, maybe live together in Switzerland or something and forget everything else. Take the cows out into the field and bring them back at night. Like that.”
Renata smiled, really smiled, and they lay close together, gazing into each other’s faces. That was the extent of the landscape they knew, for a while they didn’t know anything else.
Oh, and they walked outside into a big park, it was different, the world had changed and when they came out it was all new: It turned out that Renata’s room was on the second story of a Japanese-style little building, there were shops on the ground floor, they were in the midst of a park that stretched out for miles and miles in every direction. There were no cars, no paved streets, just untrampled green lawns, people walking everywhere, everything clean, everyone friendly and smiling, strolling about hand in hand. Renata and Keith walked over a hill with their friends and down to more small buildings and large tents. A procession of large puppets, led by harlequin-clad jugglers, the music of tambourines and drums and big bells. It was not New York. Maybe someplace in California. Such a gigantic green park! The sun shining down on the colors and faces and wonderful skin. It was paradise. Renata cut her finger, and it bled. It’s nothing, she said. Keith’s same finger bled in the same exact place. The pain was okay. They smiled at each other. The pain was just fine.
No, that part was just a dream.
TWENTY
Renata, at twenty-two, could look world-weary, jaded, as though she understood sorrow beyond her years; at the same time she was young and heartbreakingly innocent. She could go from complicated interest mingled with contempt to a nine-year-old who’d been early corrupted, yet now had been saved and was lost in the moment, lost in a moment of pure joy, the child’s perception, awake and alive to the unselfconsciousness of pure fun.
Often, in many of the photos, one wanted to protect her, to cheer her up, to show her that the world was not so bad.
She had an innate grace. She held and moved her body gracefully, fluidly—the photographers all loved the way she walked, the way she stood or sat at rest. She could turn on a knowledge of sexiness, a smoldering gaze and a new tilt to her pelvis, subde but real, she could turn it on and off.
Once she came to have power as a model, she sometimes threw tantrums, or burst into tears, say, when she was bored and they couldn’t get the reflectors the way they wanted them, but it wasn’t personal, the storm passed in a moment, it was easy to get her to laugh. Renata wasn’t a bitch in the sense of fucking with those lower on the totem pole, she wasn’t stuck up at all with underlings and technicians, she might not necessarily go out of her way to learn their names but she would talk to them with genuine friendliness, and recognized repeat faces from one shoot to the next. She was a pro. Everyone got tired and out of sorts now and then.
Renata wore a black Calvin Klein jacket in washed silk crepe, along with matching trousers and three different complex silver bracelets on the left wrist, two on the right. Hands in her pants pockets. No top on under the jacket. No necklace or earrings, other than, in the visible right lobe, one plain pearl stud.
Renata wore a lace evening gown, form-fitting, at first glance lingerie. Her expression was unreadable, hint of a secret smile.
A gray jacket with a man’s silk tie, hair blown by a wind from her left. Renata’s lips, her as-if-Russian, nineteenth-century gaze.
In a composition that was blown up bigger than life-size to appear in an exhibition by the au courant art-porn photographer Cesar Sutherland (who is gay, and black) Renata reclined with her hair tied back, holding a clarinet across her hips, a jeweled choker around her neck, otherwise naked but for ritual black nylon stockings and garter belt, spiked heels, a tiny black g-string tightly hugging her vulva—a weird, strangely excited but also perhaps embarrassed, excited-by-shame smile there in her lips and glittering eyes.
In anothe
r one she just stood naked, sullen really, hair messy and sweaty, lips puffy, her left hand’s fingers touching her semi-shaven sex. Byzantine-style antique bracelets and an elaborate earring in the exposed left ear. In black and white. Really, sort of a typical, “arty,” quasi-pornographic pose. Renata never had too much modesty about her breasts. She was fond of them. They’d been augmented when she was seventeen, and they were perfect, not too big, perfectly shaped. The nipples were not very sensitive, however, since the surgery. They came erect at temperature changes and at being rubbed but she really didn’t feel much, in an erotic sense, anymore. These breasts also were not as soft as others Keith had known. They were problematic.
Renata called up Keith one night and told him, low-key and subdued, so low-key as to seem pharmaceutical tranquilized, that she was all right, not to think about it, she was going to have an abortion in the morning and she thought he ought to know. “I’m just informing you of a fait accompli” He hadn’t known she was pregnant. He said, “Wait. Let’s talk about this.” He didn’t know what he wanted, there wasn’t enough time. He was in New York with the band. Renata was calling him from Copenhagen. He wanted her to wait.
They had gone together, in France, to the nude beach. All he could remember was the blue water, and this hushed feeling, like sound didn’t carry very far. The violent contrast of the sand, all of this white sand, and the soft (or not-so-soft) oiled, raw skin. The sun cooking them slowly into a stupor, one’s normal social consciousness melting into this elemental, light- and heat-drunk daze. The sensuous here and now. Complicated and complicating, even as they spoke to each other in low voices, imagining they were talking, that they could speak and the other would hear.
After the abortion, when he put it in too far she said it hurt. Keith didn’t believe it, or thought she was exaggerating, or that she should see another gynecologist, but she didn’t want to. He thought this phase would pass. He held her, hugged her, whispered to her, and kissed away her tears. And so, there wasn’t that much fucking going on. But they were in love. They were a couple. If they had to be in two separate places on earth, because of career, they ran up big long-distance bills. They talked every day. “Where were you?” the other would ask if one missed.