She closed her eyes in a nursing ecstasy. Sooner or later, she knew, she'd have to face the Elephant again. But not yet. Not tonight.
Nick was awakened a little after sunset by the bleat of a telephone, and wondered for a moment if he weren't still asleep. He was in a room furnished like a Swiss chalet, lit by a cozy yellow lamp; beside him in bed Betty Ruth nursed a cherubic Leon in the cradle of her arms; and when she turned her placid gaze upon Nick, the whites of her eyes were red as blood. It sure had all the elements of a dream.
It took him a minute to shake off the Quaalude haze. "I don't know," Betty was saying into the phone. "Nick just woke up. Let me ask him, and I'll call you right back." She hung up. "That was Selene," she explained to Nick, as if continuing a conversation. Then her face fell, the features forming a comic mask of dismay. "She wants to know if we're going to attend the ceremony tonight, and I just realized, I don't know how to call her back."
Leon's head lolled away from her nipple; one-handed, she tucked her breast back into her borrowed nightgown, flapped a hand towel over her shoulder to protect the flannel, then with both hands lifted Leon up into the air, lowered him for a kiss, and settled him over her shoulder.
A hearty burp was immediately forthcoming. Betty glanced over at Nick as triumphantly as if she had produced the belch herself, but to her surprise, tears were flooding his eyes, and there was nothing even faintly comic about the mask of dismay his features had assumed. "What is it, Nick? What's the matter?" she asked, genuinely puzzled.
"You're stoned," he replied.
"It seemed like a reasonable alternative to suicide," she said lightly. "Want some? There's the cutest little fridge built into—"
Nick shook his head miserably. "I'm so sorry, Betty. I'm so sorry I got you involved in this."
"I'm not sorry at all," she said. "In fact, I'm having the time of my life."
"Of course you are—you're high on blood. A drug that I turned you on to in the first place." He rolled onto his side, away from her. "I shouldn't be surprised," he went on, more to himself than to her. "It's like the perfect ending to the whole V.A. experiment—now everybody it's touched is either dead or drinking blood."
Betty sighed as she settled Leon into his trundle bed. "I think I'd better tell Selene we'll be staying for the ceremony tonight."
"How come?" Nick asked the opposite wall.
"Speaking as your therapist, I'd say you need the completion only a funeral can bring."
Perhaps it was the finality of the word funeral that finally released his anguished sobs—in any event, Betty knew better than to try and jolly him. Instead she pressed tight up against his back, threw her arms around him, and hugged him tightly until he was done, then released him and sat up, giving him time to compose himself.
He wasn't looking quite as dapper as usual when he finally rolled over to face her with his cheeks drained of color and his Magnum P.I. mustache matted with snot and tears. Betty swiped a Kleenex from the popup decorator box on the bedside table, and began dabbing him clean.
Her next move probably would have been to hold the tissue to his nose and say "Blow," but Nick recovered in time to spare himself that embarrassment. Sitting up in bed in his borrowed paisley pajamas, he took the Kleenex from her, turned his back, and blew and blew and blew, feeling a little foolish, but better for having cried. Somebody needed to cry for January.
When he was done, and had turned back to Betty, she reached for the sodden tissue. He almost handed it to her, then caught himself at the last second, wadded it up, and tossed it in the general direction of the waste-basket in the far corner of the room, next to the secretaire. A man might cry, and still be a man; a man might even let a woman blot his tears. But he had to blow his own nose, and he had to discard his own used tissues.
He also had to go after his own rebounds: Nick climbed out of bed, retrieved the Kleenex from under the secretaire, and slam-dunked it directly into the wastebasket. When he turned back to the bed, Betty was on her stomach, leaning over the side and dangling her fingers into the trundle bed, evidently to Leon's great amusement.
Nick lay down on his stomach next to her. Leon appeared to recognize him, and laughed so hard you could barely see his eyes. Baby Leon's eyes had turned brown over the past few weeks, brown as Nick's own, and it occurred to him that he didn't know what color Betty's eyes were. He glanced sideways to check them out just as she turned her head to look at him. Brown as well, but a lighter shade than his or Leon's.
They looked down at their son again—Leon had seized Betty's forefinger in his fist, and howled with joy when she tugged at it gently. This was high slapstick for the kid, this was commedia dell'arte, Punch and Judy, and Moe, Larry and Curly all rolled into one. "You know what I was thinking before?" Betty mused. "When he was nursing, and you asleep so sweet beside me?"
"What?"
"That the one thing you and Whistler have managed to agree on, so far, you were both dead right about."
"And that was?" He was trying to remember if he and Whistler had agreed on anything lately.
"The cup. Leon's christening cup. Tolstoy was wrong—happy families aren't all alike."
Nick thought it over again. He dearly loved his Tolstoy: he'd read Anna Karenina (the Garnett translation, of course) on blood, in one thirty-six-hour sitting. "Maybe Tolstoy was just being ironic. He liked to do that, you know, fuck with his readers. He said one time that a story leaves a deeper impression when it's impossible to tell which side the author is on."
"Sometimes…" But Betty couldn't go on—she was laughing too hard—the bed shook with her laughter. Finally, with an effort, she managed to complete the thought: "Sometimes I feel the same way about Higher Power."
THREE
The ceremony began in the keeping room at midnight. Informal. Street clothes. The Coven and the Penang arrayed around the lower two tiers of cushions. Only Selene, sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the orgy pit, was in her robe, with her athame in her lap.
"The ceremony of the autumn equinox," she began, "is normally one of my favorites in the round. I mean, we're not supposed to have favorites, but without getting too specific, basically what happens in autumn is that the Corn King returns from the Underworld, only now he's the God of the Underworld, and he wants to carry his Goddess back with him."
Betty Ruth tightened her grip on Nick's hand. Neither of them was high on blood, Betty having abstained since her hair of the Elephant six or seven hours before, and Nick not having drunk at all since the previous night. On the other hand, nothing about the keeping room promoted a sense of reality: Betty, at least, was as stoned on adrenaline, disorientation, and anticipation as she used to get on a shot of Stoli, while Nick was adrift on a sea of anomie.
Lourdes, on the other side of Betty on the first tier of cushions, was riveted to the High Priestess's every word: she had decided recently to go on with her Wiccan studies, and perhaps someday become the first vampire High Priestess in the Coven's history.
Even with the strictures against married High Priestesses, it still seemed like a more attainable goal than becoming a prima ballerina at this late stage (though Whistler had offered to buy her a troupe). And now that she had attained all her other goals—a rich sexy husband whom she adored, and who adored her; financial security beyond even her dreams of avarice; a beautiful daughter; and, last but probably not least, all the blood she could drink—she knew she'd better have something else to shoot for: unlike pregnancy, motherhood alone definitely wasn't going to cut it as a cure for the weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable blues.
Whistler, on the other side of Lourdes, was also paying more attention to Selene than was customary for him. January's death had affected him more than he was letting on—more than Leon Stanton's death, certainly, though by any common reckoning that had been a cold-blooded murder, while the more recent death was unarguably justifiable homicide, if not outright self-defense. He supposed his current unease represented at least a measure of maturity, by
some twisted standard—deeper than that he did not wish to delve.
"But here's the part I like best," Selene continued. She'd been disturbed by January's death as well, particularly by the knowledge that she had, in effect, prayed for it—not directly, but by praying only for Whistler's and Nick's protection, knowing all the while that one of the three of them almost certainly owed the runes a death.
"The God pursues the Goddess, and pursues, and pursues, but however hard he pursues her, he can't catch her. The only way he catches her is to stop chasing—stop dead in his tracks and ask her to wait. And she always stops, and laughs, and says he could have saved a lot of trouble by just asking her that at the beginning."
Something else was bothering Selene: she was not unaware that the entire tragedy might perhaps have been averted if she'd forsworn her vengeance on Nick in the first place. It wasn't your garden-variety guilt: Selene knew too much about fate for that—or rather, knew better than most how little she knew about fate. Still, she'd been thinking about resigning as High Priestess. She'd polled the runes about it that morning—the results were inconclusive.
Even so, she knew this might be her last sabbat, which gave it more resonance and poignance for her than it already carried, even doubling as a funeral: Wiccans weren't real big on mourning. After all, the way down was the only way up. Old Heraclitus again. Clever fellow.
"Now the Coven will be enacting the Legend around four A.M., witches only, and I can't tell you others much about that. But those of you not in the Coven have some idea of what's involved from the ceremony we used to do with the Penang, which involved a striptease with the seven veils of existence, and a Goddess willing to let herself be chained up and scourged by the God, and the Hierophant, and then lastly by Death. It's the only time everybody wants to be Death, because of course he gets to make love to her."
She looked up at the witches and vampires—several of them were smiling, and Catherine Bailey had blushed to the roots of her orange hair. The last time they'd performed the ritual with the Penang, before the V.A. days, she had played the Goddess, and turned the Dance of the Seven Veils into a voluptuous belly dance, to the recorded music of Evelyn "Champagne" King. And Death that year had been an absolute teddy bear of a man, who ravished her tenderly all night long.
"But tonight, I think," Selene went on, "nobody really wants to mock Death—or to be ravished by him, either. Because we've just been paid a visit by the genuine article, and we're still a little shaken. So all I want to do at this point is just remind everybody how the rest of the round goes."
Selene caught Sherman's eye—he was on the far left of the upper tier—and beginning with him, she made eye contact with every person in the keeping room, left to right across the second tier, then right to left across the lowest, until she reached Cheese Louise, whose own eyes were brimming with tears.
"How it goes is, the Goddess descends to the Underworld, but does not die. Nor does she fear Death. Instead she loves him with all her heart, and they rule as equals until Candlemas. Then he gives her back the necklace of rebirth, and the earth is reborn in the springtime."
She turned back to the middle of the first tier for the next part—Whistler and Lourdes, Betty and Nick. "What we here on earth have to bear in mind is that there would have been no spring had it not been for the sacrifice of the Goddess in the autumn. We don't know exactly how it works—that's why we have our rituals—but what we do know for certain is that there is no birth without death, and what we hope is that there is no death without birth, and that's all I have to say for now. Jamey?"
She had turned away suddenly, her thin shoulders shaking under the forest green robe. Whistler raised an arm languidly. "Vampires, drink 'em if you got 'em. If you don't got 'em, see me. We meet on the front lawn in thirty minutes."
There were tiki torches flaring on the lawn, next to a chest-high stack of sod that to Betty Ruth resembled a mossy green cairn. The good Reverend was stoned again, on her first taste of live blood: Catherine had presented herself to Betty immediately after Whistler's recess, and the two women had fallen into each other's arms laughing—turned out they'd been in Codependents Anonymous together for years, until the Baileys had moved to Marin.
And as one good codependent, Catherine had been obliged to offer her blood (as a postrecovery pothead, she was already stoned herself), and as another good co, Betty had been obliged to accept.
Falling into line beside Nick, Betty joined the procession, took three squares of sod from the pile, and—carrying them out in front of her so as not to soil the overalls that had magically reappeared at the door of the bungalow that evening, washed and pressed—followed the procession down the lawn, turning right just before the beach and entering the path that meandered through the woods towards the bungalow.
The path had been strung with Japanese lanterns. On blood, they cast the most beautiful light Betty had ever seen—they were like little colored moons come to earth. Halfway to the bungalow, the aisle of lanterns turned left, into the woods, toward the lake. And in the densest part of the woods, there was a clearing of newly-turned earth six feet wide and six feet long—and presumably six feet deep, though no one mentioned that.
In fact, no one mentioned anything until each of the twelve vampires had laid his or her three squares of sod neatly in place, forming a bright green patch in the lantern light in the depth of the wood. Then Whistler cleared his throat—too loudly for the little clearing: it sounded like a bark.
He noticed that he was standing like a preacher before the grave, with his feet apart and his hands clasped in front of him—quickly he thrust one hand into the pocket of his Italian sports jacket. "My attorney has advised me not to be too specific. So in general, all I want to say is—and I include myself; first and foremost I include myself—vampires, let's try to take better care of one another, all year round. Because if we don't, who will?"
He looked around at the circle of vampires surrounding the new grave, which bore no headstone, nor ever would. "To that end, let me add that I've met briefly with the eminent psychologist Dr. Bailey, along with the eminent therapist and clergywoman Dr. Shoemaker." The latter title had been bestowed by Whistler without Betty's approval—she had never finished her doctoral studies—but she let it pass. Perhaps now she would. Anything seemed possible to her, at the moment. Might even be fun, cramming on blood. "And together with the eminent barrister, Dr. Fetterman, and the eminent everything else, Dr. Santos, we will be meeting over the course of the next month or so, to discuss the formation of a foundation dedicated to that end.
"We don't know much about it yet—whether it will be centered here at the Manor, or at the Church of the Higher Power, or on an island somewhere where we have a chance to legitimize the drinking of blood entirely, and thus remove some of the other societal pressures which complicate our lives. At any rate, we'll be discussing the details over the course of the next few months.
"What we do know is that we want it to be available on equal terms to those of us who wish to pursue the Dream of the Occasional User—" with a nod to Nick "—or who, for reasons still quite mystifying to me personally, might want to avoid blood entirely, as well as to those of us—the vast majority, I suspect—who want to drink our fill as often as practicable and still lead 'manageable' lives.
"The only other thing we've agreed upon so far is the name—we're going to call it the Winters' Night Foundation, after January." He looked down at the brilliant patch of green sod. "It ain't a headstone, m'dear, but it'll have to do."
Nick and Betty turned back to look at the grave when they reached the path again—the lanterns were so pretty, and the square patch of new sod so sweetly green, but the servants were already taking the former down, and trampling the latter so it wouldn't buckle overnight.
The other vampires were turning to the right, heading back to their rooms in the Manor, where they and the witches would pair up into Gods and Goddesses (though not strictly by sex, of course) and rule the Underworld
jointly for a night.
Nick and Betty waved goodbye and started in the other direction, towards the bungalow, but suddenly Betty stopped Nick with a hand on his arm. "I just want to run up to the nursery and check on Leon."
"I'm sure he's fine, Betty."
"I'd feel better."
"Whatever. But as long as you're there, why don't you drop by the cellar and pick us out a bag of blood for the night?"
"Sure. Anything I should know in advance? I've never picked out blood before."
"Doesn't matter," said Whistler, startling them—they hadn't heard him approaching through the woods. " 'The pedigree of honey/ Does not concern the bee;/ A clover, any time, to him/ Is aristocracy.' " He bowed to Betty. "Emily Dickinson. But if you'll allow me, I'd be happy to help you select a vintage."
"Thank you, Emily," Betty said flirtatiously, and took his arm. A few yards up the trail, she turned back, the lantern directly over her head casting raspberry-colored streaks across her graying dark hair. "If I'm not back in fifteen minutes," she informed Nick, "start without me."
But she was back in ten. Leon had been fast asleep in the girls' playpen, Cora and Plum Rose snoring above him in their cribs, and Whistler—under the rather severe urging of the Creature, which had been banned from its own perfect Underworld for the past five months—was obviously chafing to return to his Goddess.
Nevertheless, he did escort Betty to the cellar, which was newly scrubbed and painted, though the smell of blood still lingered. Then the impeccably mannered, impeccably dressed vampire had accompanied her to the front door of Whistler Manor and pressed upon her a few Quaaludes, as well as a small canvas tote-bag he had retrieved from a cabinet in the keeping room. "You might want this later," he told her, as with a hug he bade her a warm good night.
The World on Blood Page 40