Love in Vein

by Poppy Z. Brite

  He pulled his skinny hairless legs protectively up to his thin chest and stared at her over his knees, his face all eyes and hair. “Look,” he finally stammered. “Can’t we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “Go,” she said coldly. She was newly glad of her preference for delicate, small-boned boys, the opposite of strapping bruisers like her father. She had an inch of height on him and maybe twenty pounds, little of it fat, and felt confident she could eject him physically if she had to. “Get. Out. Now.”

  They locked eyes for a long moment, and then he looked away. Sliding over to the side of the bed, he found his clothes and began dressing, keeping his back to her and muttering to himself. She stared at the ceiling and tried not to hear him. It’s probably not wise to end on this note, she thought. Supposing, God forbid, she was pregnant, making him pay for the abortion would be less difficult if they were still speaking to each other. For now, however, she couldn’t form any words. It was easier to keep quiet and let him leave. In another minute, he did.

  “Jesus,” she said to the ceiling. “Jesus fucking Christ. It’s girls from now on.”

  Chris had been bisexual since her senior year in high school, and in the five years since then her relationships with other women had generally been the more satisfying ones, although not by much. Despite her man problems, she’d never let herself become exclusively lesbian. For one thing, she hated cliches, and the idea of being driven into the arms of her own gender by what her father had done to her when she was little was more than she could stand. If she went out with someone, it was because she liked that person, not because daddy had soured her on anybody with a dick. She wasn’t going to give him that much power over her.

  Who are you kidding, she thought. You were dreaming about him when Joey stuck it in you. “Fuck it,” she said out loud. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. When she rubbed her eyes, she found them wet.

  The rest of the week was a depressed haze. It was bad enough, worrying that she might be pregnant, but shame and anger at what Joey had done gnawed at her like a canker. And Jesus, to think she’d just lain there, not caring, waiting for him to finish. But then again, she’d just lain there for a lot of men, pretty, long-haired boys who used her, or expected her to be their mommy, who stole from her and mooched off her and treated her like furniture. Fuck them all, but fuck her for settling for them.

  Such feelings might be easier to deal with if she were still employed, but the educational workbook company she’d been with for the last year had recently hired a very expensive vice president away from their major competitor, and consequently cut expenses by laying off all their associate editors. She hadn’t liked the job very much; the blueline proofs drove her allergies crazy and the bosses were a pair of annoyingly perky ex-grade school teachers, the sort of women who set her teeth on edge. Still, it had kept her occupied during the day. Fortunately, she qualified for unemployment, and the benefits would cover her rent and basic groceries for a couple of months. The problem was, that made it so much easier to lie around the apartment and mope.

  Mostly, she slept. She had several more dreams about her father, which were unpleasant but not unexpected, for she always suffered those dreams in times of stress. But she also dreamed about Joey, and that, if possible, bothered her even more. He wasn’t worth it; the little bastard hadn’t been that big a part of her life. Hell, they’d only been going out for four months. Was her life really so empty that she needed to obsess on him?

  By Thursday, she still didn’t feel like looking for a new job, but she decided she was tired of the stereo and the TV and her limited selection of movies on cassette. She wanted sunlight, and people around her. She still lived a couple of blocks away from the UNCG campus, and it would be nice to just sit under a tree and read, the way she used to when she was a student. None of her books looked appealing, but she decided to go to the bookstore and spring for the new Anne Rice in hardcover, limited finances or no. By God, she’d come out of this funk if it killed her.

  Chris had to look up to meet the gaze of the gorgeous brunette behind the counter at News ‘N’ Novels, not a familiar sensation when it came to other women. Big green eyes, high cheekbones, pale triangular face framed by a shaggy bob of shiny black hair, a good two inches taller than Chris’s five-eleven and slender where Chris was zaftig; it was hard for Chris not to drool, much less stare. Instead, she put The Tale of the Body Thief on the counter and got out her checkbook.

  The tall brunette looked at her purchase. “You’ve heard the news about Tom Cruise playing Lestat?” Her voice was very deep, another point in her favor.

  “Yeah. That sucks, but I can’t get too worked up about it. I’m not the real vampire junkie I was during my first two years in college.” Chris twirled a copper bang and surprised herself by laughing, not something she’d been doing much of lately. “I dyed my hair black, slapped makeup over the freckles, listened to Bauhaus, smoked clove cigarettes, all that Goth stuff. I’m mainly buying this out of nostalgia. Now that I’ve been in the real world a while, I’m pining for my youth.”

  The other woman laughed, too. “Come on, you can’t be more than twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-three and feeling like fifty. It’s not been a good week.” Chris handed her the check, wondering if she’d be impressed by the artwork reproduced on it.

  The brunette woman looked at it for a long moment. “Münch’s The Scream. God, that’s certainly how I feel each time I write a check. I’d love to have these when I’m paying my bills.”

  Chris was glad she’d seen the ad in Spy and ordered the special checks. The admiring grin on this goddess’s face was worth the twenty bucks. The tall clerk initialed the check and put it in the cash register. “Christabel Annette Brown. Christabel’s a pretty name.”

  Chris surprised herself by blushing. “My mom was an English teacher. It’s from something by Coleridge.”

  “I know the poem. By a funny coincidence, my name’s Geraldine.”

  Chris didn’t immediately get the reference, though she felt as if she should. “Pleased to meet you, Geraldine. What coincidence?”

  “You know, in the poem. It’s all very allusive and mysterious, but Lady Geraldine seems to be some sort of vampire or lamia. She bewitches Christabel, then her father.”

  Chris remembered, vaguely. “You’re welcome to my father.”

  Geraldine’s face was unreadable. “It’s not him I’m interested in,” she said softly.

  This can’t be happening, thought Chris, it can’t be this easy. Gee, God, are you trying to make up for what Joey did last Saturday? She made no move to pick her book up off the counter. Fortunately, there was nobody in line behind her, or even in sight, much less earshot. Geraldine’s eyes were very green. Well, ask her out, stupid.

  “The Hunger is on cable tonight. I’d rather not watch it alone.” That sounded cheesy, but she didn’t care.

  Geraldine grinned and shook her head. “Lesbians have got to find another first date movie, don’t you think? Or aren’t you sick of that one yet?”

  For the first time since before she met Joey, Chris found herself laughing hard and loud. “Well, there’s Fried Green Tomatoes, but while Mary Stuart Masterson is a doll, Mary-Louise Parker bugs me, the way she curls her lip and rolls her eyes around, and the stuff with Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy just gets in the way. You got any suggestions?”

  Geraldine wrote something on a Post-it note. “Why don’t we have dinner and talk about it then? I get off at six. Here’s my number.” She stuck the Post-it on Chris’s book. “Would you like a bag with that, ma’am?”

  “No, this is fine. I’ll call you tonight.”

  “Please do.”

  On the way out, she felt Geraldine’s eyes on her back, but repressed the urge to turn around. Before going home, she decided to stop by the library and check out the collected Coleridge.

  It had been a long time since Chris had read “Christabel,” despite her late mother’s alleged fondness for the heroine’s nam
e. What the Hell was that bit at the end about the “little child, a limber elf/Singing, dancing to itself”? What happened with Christabel, her father, and Lady Geraldine? Was it supposed to be unfinished, like “Kubla Khan”? All in all, she much preferred Keats.

  The doorbell rang. Chris paused to look at herself in a mirror. She was wearing her newest jeans and a Tori Amos T-shirt, her red hair tied back with a ribbon. Not fancy, but Geraldine had told her not to dress up. “I’m bringing the dinner,” she’d said; “it will be good but messy. I hope you like seafood.” Chris loved seafood, but she wondered why Geraldine had wanted to go to the trouble of bringing it here, rather than cooking it at her place. Did she live with someone? Oh well, this was too early in any prospective relationship to be asking why.

  Chris opened the door, Geraldine stood there, looking taller than ever, holding a covered wok. She wore a similar ensemble of jeans and black T-shirt, and two bottles of red wine stuck out of her matching black shoulder bag. “You’ve got to invite me over the threshold before I can enter,” she said with a grin.

  Chris returned the grin, hands on hips. “Oh, really?”

  “No.” Geraldine stepped forward and kissed her full on the mouth. “Where’s your kitchen?”

  Dazed but pleased, Chris pointed. “Through there. Don’t let Roscoe wind around your feet and trip you.” Roscoe was her sixteen-pound neutered tomcat, an affectionate but inordinately stupid animal who thought anyone going into the kitchen intended to feed him. Shutting the door, she followed Geraldine.

  Geraldine put the wok down on the stove. When she uncovered it, Chris saw that it was full of blue-black shellfish. “Live freshwater mussels,” said Geraldine. “They’re $3.99 for a two-pound bag at Kroger’s.”

  Chris was impressed. “I love oysters and clams but I’ve never had mussels. How do you cook them?”

  Geraldine put her shoulder bag on the counter and took out the wine and a small Tupperware container that held a stick of butter and a jar of minced garlic. “You scrub the mussels with an old toothbrush, pull their beards off, and run cold water over them. Any open ones that don’t close up, you throw away. I’ve already done all that. Then, you take a bottle of cheap red wine and pour it over them.” She took a corkscrew out of her bag and attacked one of the bottles. “Trakia Bull’s Blood, $4.99 at Kroger’s.” Opening it, she poured it over the mussels. “You also throw in a stick of butter and as much minced garlic as you can stand. Then you turn the heat up, cover the wok or bowl, and let everything simmer until the mussels open up. Eight minutes, maybe.”

  “Wow.”

  Geraldine put the lid on the wok and turned back toward her. “The best thing is, you have to eat them by candlelight, sitting on the floor and using your fingers to get them out of the shell. It’s very sensuous. Or do I mean sensual?”

  “Sensuous, I think.” Chris stepped closer and kissed her.

  Geraldine returned it for a long moment, then pulled away. “Later. If we get distracted, the mussels will turn to rubber. You want to give me the grand tour of your apartment?”

  Chris showed her around while the smell of garlic and red wine wafted in the from the kitchen. Geraldine expressed proper appreciation for the hardwood floors, the Klimt prints, and the Persian rug that once belonged to her grandmother. She even said polite things about the much-abused sofa and armchairs, and pretended not to notice the claw marks and the cat hair. Surprisingly, Roscoe himself did not appear to wrap himself around their feet while making the crying baby sound that was the only sign of his Siamese ancestry. He usually liked women, although he tended to hide from strange men, unless they were really sweaty or otherwise enticingly smelly. He’d loved Joey’s Doc Martens.

  The mussels were soon ready, and Geraldine ladled them out into Chris’s largest bowl. They did indeed eat by candlelight, sitting on the living room floor and sipping the other wine Geraldine had brought, a Black Opal Chardonnay, from a matched pair of “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs” Far Side mugs. “Presents from two separate people on two separate birthdays,” explained Chris. “I used to be a heavy smoker.”

  Geraldine showed her how to eat the mussels, picking them up and using her fingers to pluck out the dark purplish morsels, then discarding the shells in an empty coffee tin. They were delicious, somewhere between oysters and wild mushrooms, heavy with the taste of garlic and red wine. Geraldine had forgotten to bring bread, but Chris had half a baguette from the discount shelf at Harris Teeter, which she warmed in the oven and they dipped in the savory purple liquor at the bottom of the bowl.

  For a tall, lanky girl, Geraldine was as graceful as a cat, rather more graceful than the absent Roscoe, as she folded herself upon the bare floor and took mussels from the bowl with pale swooping hands, her eyes focused all the time on Chris, her face an alabaster mask framed by the darkness of her hair and shirt. Chris had deliberately restrained the urge to put on one of her favorite CDs, since she didn’t own anything instrumental and wanted to facilitate conversation. Instead, she’d selected the local NPR channel, explaining it was easier to talk over when Geraldine asked her if she was a big classical music fan.

  Despite this, they didn’t do much talking, just stared at each other, and sipped wine and ate mussels and licked the juice off their fingers, then off each other’s fingers, until Geraldine sidled closer, a sudden flowing movement that should have been a crablike scuttle, and they were actively sucking each other’s fingers, nuzzling each other’s wrists and hands, tasting the food they’d just eaten and the salt of each other’s arousal. Then they were kissing, licking the last of the supper off each other’s faces, joining mouths and tongues, fumbling with buttons. At some point, Roscoe emerged from where he’d been hiding and stalked in a tense circle around them, huge eyes locked on Geraldine and his tail big around as Chris’s upper arm, but she had no attention to spare for his strange behavior.

  Sometime later they lay in Chris’s bed, where she was very grateful she’d just changed her sheets to the black silk ones she’d found on sale at Cocoon, the candle from the living room flickering in the breeze from the open window, Nina Simone whispering and growling from the box atop the bookcase. It was there that they finally talked, or rather that Chris talked and Geraldine listened. She told her about important things and trivial things; about the job she’d been laid off from and the books she liked to read; about Joey and what he’d done to her; about David Pugh, whom she’d beat up in the fifth grade, and Josephine Hoffman, whom she’d french-kissed in the twelfth; about being six years old and not understanding why her mother wouldn’t be coming back from Duke hospital; about growing up in a town of soldiers and red-light districts and pawnshops; about passions like Snickers bars and E. Nesbit and Tori Amos and Cyd Charisse and Stamey’s barbecue and Neil Gaiman; about the morose iguana she’d owned when she was fourteen, whose favorite food was Domino’s pizza; about the bad relationships, the users, men and women both, the long nights staring at the ceiling; about playing pool in a redneck bar; about the red fox she’d seen behind her apartment building last week; about how she loved the idea of islands, any islands, Nags Head or Mykonos or the Hebrides, and wanted to live surrounded by water; a host of unrelated things, a murmuring flow that left her drained but content, entwined with the taller woman as a breeze lifted her frayed curtains and the candle guttered out. She did not, however, mention her father, although she meant to; it was always the next thing she was going to talk about. Maybe that’s why, later, when they drowsed in each other’s arms, she dreamed about him.

  She seemed very small, though she couldn’t have been that young; surely he didn’t start this before her mother died, yet in the dream he was huge, a colossus looming in his armchair over the plain of the living room carpet like a symbolist painting she’d once seen, Resistance: the Black Idol. “Come on, sweetheart,” his voice boomed, trying to be soothing, “crawl to daddy,” and so she did, creeping like a soldier through enemy country, then sidling up the khaki columns of his legs, ove
r the hill of his knees, toward his waiting penis, a pink-and-lilac minaret, thrusting up from the folds of his open pants and the sweaty thatch of coppery red pubic hair. Her mouth seemed tiny and his organ very big, but she got the former round the latter, after licking it the way he’d taught her, and she sucked and sucked, until he spasmed, and she would have pulled away, but big rough hands were clasped behind her head, holding her face down until she swallowed.

  She woke up with a lurch, gasping for air and shaking. Geraldine stirred beside her and held her tight without a word, and after a minute she could no longer hear her own heart pounding.

  “My father,” she said finally, forcing herself to speak slowly and softy. “After my mom died, before I left home when I was seventeen, he…” She caught herself, not wanting to say he sexually abused her, thinking that sounded clinical, so clichéd. “He made me go down on him. He taught me how when I was seven. For the next ten years, I did it maybe twice a month, maybe not that often. Never anything else, just clumsy fellatio, though sometimes he’d talk about putting it in me when I was old enough, whatever ‘old enough’ meant.”

  Geraldine hugged her tighter. Those long white arms, corded with muscle beneath the soft skin, felt stronger than any man’s arms she’d ever lain in, so strong she thought of the time she’d held the python at the Natural Science Center. “Most of the time, it didn’t even bother me that much. Not then, I mean. It was just something unpleasant I had to do, like cleaning my room or mowing the lawn.”

  Geraldine stroked her head, long fingers gentle in her hair. Chris never thought that having her head stroked could feel so good, could understand Roscoe’s look of imbecilic pleasure when she did it to him. “This isn’t something I’ve remembered under hypnosis, or any of that crap. There’s a lot of bullshit about sexual abuse going around; it’s practically trendy these days to say you were diddled by daddy. But this is no neurotic fantasy; it isn’t something I ever repressed; it was just another unpleasant part of growing up, like high school, only a little more degrading. Most of the time, I don’t think about it, except when I’m stressed out. I guess what Joey did messed me up more than I thought, not just at the end, but the whole fucked-up relationship itself. That, and worrying about whether or not I’m pregnant. Jesus, I can’t afford an abortion.”