The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  They drove across town in Beverly's '61 Volvo—the model that resembled a cross between a Beetle and a '48 Plymouth—and met Catherine at the ivied entrance to the shrine of California Cuisine. Upstairs, Catherine and Sherman were greeted warmly by the host and shown to a table for three looking out past the sloping projection of the roof to the weirdly tiered branches of an araucaria tree.

  Beverly whistled when she opened her menu. "Your practice must be going pretty good, Sherm, to be able to hack prices like these. Eighteen ninety-five for hand-cut noodles with yellow-fin? That's tuna noodle casserole, for crying out loud."

  "Toshi said to order the duck. Said he'd fix it up special for us."

  She checked the menu again. "I don't know—a sorrel-burgundy sauce with shiitake mushrooms, and a cherry glaze? Sounds a little rich to me."

  Catherine shrugged. "It's up to you, honey," she said, as casually as she could manage. The truth was, it had sounded a little rich to her too. But she and Toshi had been experimenting for weeks, and there wasn't an ingredient in Canard a la Whistler that could be omitted: the burgundy was needed to disguise the salt-sweet taste of Catherine's own blood, and the funky sorrel was required to dispel the aftertaste, while the cherry glaze covered the telltale stickiness. It would have gone better with venison, Toshi had insisted, but Catherine had warned him that in her experience the only women who would eat Bambi would be wearing wool caps with earflaps.

  The question now was, could she get Bev to order Donald? Catherine reached around the bread basket and patted the other woman's hand. "Take it from a food service professional," she advised. "A: it's going to be delicious. And B: when an Oriental chef recommends a dish, it's usually best to order it—they tend to pee in the soup when their feelings get hurt."

  As the waiter cleared the entree, Sherman, who'd also dined on doctored duck, excused himself and slipped away to the men's room for a blast of Visine—they wanted Bev to figure out she was high all by herself.

  When he returned to the table by the window, dessert had arrived—a perfect orb of rose-geranium sorbet, drizzled with a tracery of raspberry sauce, afloat in a pond of mango syrup.

  "The color scheme God was trying for when he designed the sunset," Beverly remarked, spooning up a sliver of sorbet. After letting it dissolve slowly in her mouth, she dipped her forefinger into the mango syrup, licked the finger clean with lascivious enjoyment, then closed her eyes and repeated the entire sequence several times.

  By the time she opened them again, the whites had gone as red as the raspberry sauce; when she spoke, her tone was conversational. "It was in the duck, right?"

  Sherman tensed. "How long have you known?"

  She pointed at the shallow-rimmed dessert bowl in front of her. "Since that arrived."

  "What tipped you off? The color? The taste?"

  "I heard it melting."

  Later, over coffee and biscotti, Beverly asked them why they'd gone to so much trouble to dose her. "Why didn't you just tie me down and pour it in my mouth—the end result would have been the same, once I was high. Even in V.A. meetings, we always used to say that nobody could resist blood, on blood."

  Sherman answered. "Too crude, Whistler says. Says that just because V.A. used force, didn't mean we had to stoop to their level. And from a professional standpoint, I had to agree that force should always be a last resort. Besides, Whistler's picking up the tab anyway."

  They lingered over their coffee until Toshi had finished work, then, with Sherman and Catherine following in their car, Beverly drove Toshi to the West County Blood Bank in order to pick up a nightcap for the orgy that was almost sure to follow.

  Beverly opened the back door with her key and disabled the alarm; the others tiptoed in after her, waiting in the office while Beverly let herself into the refrigerated storage room. On her way out, carrying a fat plastic drip-bag full of blood that would pass its expiration date at midnight, she glanced at the clock on the wall, and nearly dropped the bag. "Oh shit."

  "What's wrong, Beverly?" Toshi asked.

  "It's almost midnight."

  "Are you going to turn into a pumpkin? If so, let one of us hold the blood."

  "No, but if I don't call Nick in the next five minutes, he's going to call the cops and tell them Sherman kidnapped me." She hurried into her office to pick up the phone, and Sherman hurried after her. When they returned a minute or so later, both were grinning.

  "All done?" asked Toshi, sitting at the receptionist's desk with his feet up. Catherine was sitting on the desk itself.

  "All done." Beverly sashayed across the office, her narrow hips swinging.

  "How'd he take it?"

  "He was devastated." She kissed Toshi on the top of his head, then leaned over him to kiss Catherine full on the lips. "Absolutely devastated."

  "What did you tell him?" asked Catherine, after a respectful pause. She was still a little surprised by the vehemence with which Beverly had turned on her dear friend Nick, although Sherman had predicted it. "Basic psychology," he had informed his wife the night before. "The same elements of her psychological makeup that made her the most rabid of the reformers will now make her an equally rabid backslider."

  And apparently he'd been right on the money. "I told Mr. Nick Santos exactly what Whistler told your husband to tell me to tell him," Beverly replied blithely, as she dropped the bag of blood into her oversized patent-leather purse. "I informed Mr. Santos that he was now the last recovering vampire on earth."

  FOUR

  Aluka. Asasabonsam. Lampir. Langsuyar…

  By late March the Reverend Betty Ruth Shoemaker had researched vampire myths and legends from every culture on earth, from the flying Aswang of the Philippine Islands to the Zaloznye Pokojniki of the Russian steppes, from Elizabeth of Bathory in the early sixteenth century to the Highgate Vampire in the late twentieth, and had found an undeniable correspondence between vampire lore and vampire reality as she had recently come to understand it.

  It all fit—the avoidance of daylight and the superhuman powers of the Nosferatu; the progressive madness of the historical Carpathians; the intense eroticism of the literary vampires; the baby-craving of the Malaysian Penangglan—all dovetailing nicely with Nick's story.

  Betty Ruth had even taken it a step further: on a hunch she'd borrowed a new book about Jack the Ripper from the Richmond library. "Just the facts, ma'am," she mused aloud—ministerial perks again. It was a little past midnight; dressed in her bedtime sweatshirt and sweatpants, she was lying in her living room with her feet up on a garage-sale sofa that had once passed for Louis Quinze but was now more like Louis Wept. "One: All of the Ripper's victims were exsanguinated—drained of blood. Two: the experts always blame that on the disembowelments, but there was never as much blood on the scene as they would have expected to find. Three: The mystery of how he managed his escapes…"

  Three was a corker: by the last few murders, there were cops all over Whitechapel, almost literally on every corner, but no one had ever caught so much as a glimpse of the killer. One of the bodies was even discovered within minutes, maybe seconds. "And the only way out of that particular alley was either right past a Bobby, or straight up and over a fourteen-foot wall."

  Betty couldn't stop herself—she climbed off the couch slowly, feeling somewhat ponderous due to her recent weight gain, and walked over to the living room window, which was framed with silver tape from the security system. She glanced down to the ground a few feet below, then craned her head up towards the ceiling to measure the distance from the ground to the nursery windows directly overhead. Looked to be about fourteen feet, she estimated—maybe even a foot or two lower.

  She was halfway up the stairs on her way to bed when the phone rang, but as she had the machine set to kick in after four rings, and was carrying a mug of chamomile tea, she decided to take her time. She could hear her ancient answering machine groaning through its tired repertory of clicks and whirrs; then, from the top of the stairs, a man's indecipherable voice
through the crackling speaker.

  When she reached the bedroom Betty set her tea on the dresser and picked up the phone by the bedside table. "Hello?"

  "Thank for picking up. I know I'm the last person on earth you want to talk to, but I was getting pretty desp—"

  "I didn't know it was you, Nick." She hung up, then rewound the message he'd been leaving without listening to it. A moment later the phone rang again. Betty turned off the machine before it could answer, then shut off the ringer on the phone and climbed into bed with an Annie Lamott novel and her tea, muttering to herself that she'd had quite enough of vampires for one night, " ' thank you very much, Mr. Santos. Or is it San Georgiou?' That's what I should have said."

  She opened the book to her place and read the same page two or three times with an absolute lack of comprehension before curiosity got the better of her. She reached over and pushed playback on her answering machine. Betty? It's Nick Santos. Sorry to call you so late, but I really have to speak with you. So please could you pick up the phone? Betty? Betty Ruth? Please? I'm begging you, Betty, it's a matter of life and death. Literally. In the name of God, Betty, you're a minister. Please pick up the ph—

  "And at this point," she remarked to herself, "Mother Teresa here picked up the phone and slammed it down in the desperate man's ear."

  "SHIT!" She didn't even have to persuade herself to let out her anger.

  "SHIT, SHIT, SHIT, SHIT, SHIT," at the top of her lungs all the way down to the kitchen, decreasing in volume but not vehemence. Only her Rolodex wasn't next to the kitchen phone, she realized when she got there: it was down in the office.

  She took a chance and dialed 411—they had a listing, but only for his business line: she tried that, and reached his machine. "I'm sorry I hung up on you, Nick. I'm here—call me back."

  On her way back up to bed, Betty Ruth tried to remember something called the Forgiveness Process that had been popular in the eighties. She remembered that it took a whole week to do, and that every day you forgave somebody—your parents one day, people who'd hurt you as a child the next, and so on until on the last day you forgave yourself.

  And it occurred to her as she climbed back into bed that perhaps her anger at Nick was only a reflection of her anger at herself—she'd been the one who'd been in such a damn hurry here. "Wait forty-two years to decide to become a mother, and about forty-two minutes to decide on the father. Who had already told you he was recovering from practically every addiction known to mankind. Smooth move, Ex-lax."

  She had turned the switch under the phone to the ring position and picked up her novel again when she heard someone banging on the kitchen door directly beneath the bedroom window and calling her name. She knelt up on her bed and threw open the sash. "Nick?" she called softly, leaning out.

  "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But I have to—"

  "I'll be right down."

  The next time the phone rang, it was the man from ADT calling because Nick's banging had set off the silent alarm. "No, everything's fine… My password? Let me th—I remember: Psalms 121:8… No, thank you." She hung up.

  "What's Psalms 121:8?" Nick asked her from across the kitchen table.

  " 'The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth.' "

  "How appropriate."

  "A divinity degree ought to be good for something. Listen, Nick, I'm sorry I hung up on you before. All I can say in my defense is that I did call back and leave a message on your machine after I'd listened to your—"

  He interrupted her. "I'm the one who should be apologizing to you. After all I've put you through, to call you in the middle of the night like this. But I was pretty desperate."

  "So I gathered. Would you like some tea?"

  "It won't take that long. I just have to know if… Well, you know—if it… if you…" He blew out a long breath. "Oh shit. Are you pregnant, and am I the father?"

  "You said it's a matter of life and death?"

  He looked into her eyes and nodded.

  "Why?"

  "I'll tell you, I promise. But it's important you answer me first."

  She looked down at the table, then deliberately raised her eyes. "Yes I am. And yes you are. Now tell me why it's a matter of life and death."

  But to her surprise he broke down before her eyes—she caught a glimpse of his handsome face distorting with anguish before he buried it in his hands. Betty walked around the table, leaned over him, and hugged him from behind while his shoulders heaved against her with unvoiced sobs. "You don't have to tell me," she whispered.

  "I—I want to," he managed after a few false starts. It had occurred to him that there was no one else left to tell the story to.

  "… so for the past—" Nick glanced at his watch: 3 a.m. "—three hours or so, I have officially been the last recovering vampire on earth. I spent the first hour of that trying to think of just one good reason to go on living. If your answer had been no, I was on my way to the bridge."

  She nodded: having lived in the Bay Area for nearly twenty years, she had no need to ask him which bridge, or why. "Has it occurred to you that that's exactly what Whistler's hoping you'll do?"

  He shook his head. They were in the living room, Betty in the armchair and Nick on the yellow sofa; in the angle between them stood a three-legged wooden end table supporting a fringed lamp, a box of Kleenex, two mugs, a scattering of crumbs, and an empty box of Pirn's Orange cookies. "He's already won—I don't think he cares what I do next."

  "I do, Nick."

  "Do what?"

  "Care what you do next. Care what happens to you."

  He waved off her concern. "It's all right, Betty, I'm not planning to kill myself anymore, if I ever really was."

  "Good. Because I'm going to need all the help I can get with this baby." At what point she'd arrived at this decision, she could not have said. And how much of it was impelled by her sense of guilt at having turned her back on him professionally—either of her professions—and how much by the financial panic that had been a constant companion of hers since losing the prayed-for V.A. income, she could not have said either.

  But Nick assumed a third—and fourth—possibility that had not occurred to her. "I didn't come here for that, Betty. If you let me into your life now, it would be out of pity or charity, and I don't want either of those."

  The fatigue of the long night caught up to Betty all at once; she pushed herself up from the armchair—not an easy feat—and began clearing off the end table. "Pity, charity, self-interest, fear—those aren't things that bring people together, Nick. People just get together—life brings them together, or fate or Higher Power or something."

  She brushed the crumbs into one of the empty cups; when she returned from the kitchen Nick was still sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched forward with his hands between his knees. She sat down beside him on the sofa, nudging him with her hip to make him slide over. "Did you ever watch The Honeymooners, Nick?"

  He nodded, surprised.

  "Well, it's like Ralph Kramden always used to say: 'This thing is bigger than the both of us.' And it's certainly bigger than either of us alone. Me, I'm three and a half months pregnant with no medical coverage and no savings. You, you're trying to fight the most horrible addiction known to man—or woman. And we're both trying to do it alone. You tell me, Nick: what's wrong with this picture?"

  After a minute or so he raised his head. Even at three in the morning, so wept out that his mustache was soggy, it occurred to her that he was still an awfully good looking man. "Actually, I think it was Arnold Stang who used to say that. But if you want Ralph Kramden, I'll give you Ralph Kramden." He brandished his fist weakly in the air. "One of these days, Alice, one of these days: pow, right in the kisser."

  She laughed. "Oh yeah? Well, one of these days, Ralph, one of these days—" She grabbed his fist with both hands, and brought it to her lips. "Kiss! Right in the power."

  Chapter 5

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  ONE

>   Although Whistler's and Nick's paths did not cross for the next few months, their lives were running on curiously parallel tracks. Each was living a life of unaccustomed domesticity, and each, despite having learned a great deal more about the process of human gestation than he might have preferred to know, seemed to be thriving on it.

  Of course, that said, it must be admitted that their respective circumstances could not have been more different. Nick and Betty maintained their separate residences and lives, getting together a few afternoons a week for therapy (for which Nick paid full retail price, thus conveniently solving the most pressing problems of both simultaneously) and once or twice a week for dinner and a movie—he'd donated one of his old VCRs to the Church of the Higher Power, and taken a nice deduction for it, as well.

  All very comfy-cozy, of course—no sexual component that either of them would have acknowledged—but even without that, it was still more of a relationship than either Betty or Nick might have reasonably expected of each other back in December.

  Whistler and Lourdes's domesticity was of a more conventional nature, insofar as anything having to do with those two might be described as conventional: they had spent the bulk of her second trimester at his villa in Greece while renovations were under way at Whistler Manor, and returned to Tahoe in time for high spring in the Sierras.

  And there, almost every evening, Lourdes would awaken at sunset in vanilla satin pajamas, between vanilla satin sheets, and look around at the Impressionist paintings hanging on the textured cream-colored walls of her bedroom, and then out at the lake, an Impressionist masterpiece in its own right, framed by the thick brown beams of her bedroom window, hoarding the last few blurry ribbons of sunset gold in its turquoise blue depths.

  Then she would ring a little enamel bell on the bedside table, Nanny Parish would bring her a thimbleful of blood (a thimbleful an hour—no more, no less—was the time-tested Luzan ration for pregnant vampires), and Lourdes would sip from a bejewelled silver thimble (a relic of sorts, reputed to have been the very thimble Nanny Eames had used while carrying Prescott) as the western sky turned a pink-edged charcoal gray above the darkening rim of mountains.