Sleep…
I’m following Eve, only it’s not Eve, it’s Serena Van der Ebb, my role model in real life, or what’s left of my real life because since James quit playing Romeo he’s devoted himself to helping me find new roles, get noticed, stay focused, and if I really want to nail the vampire audition I’m up for, I’ve got to stand out, or I’ll wind up making all the tiresome choices all the other actors make…I’ll only have one shot, and that means I’ve got to study Serena. Why? Because she’s a vampire? Because she’s the Queen Bee of the Upper East Side? Because she has a brother who is handsome and popular and rich? James—why don’t you just admit that you’re in love with Phil and want to walk hand in hand with him to all the really exclusive parties on Park Avenue.
We’re walking down Madison Avenue…I’m studying her every move, the way an actor prepares; because that’s the girl my brother wants me to be. That’s the character I need to become if I want to play a convincing vampire. Rich people…generation after generation of them…holding on to their money…their taboo bonds…The way she lays her credit card down on the counter at Bergdorf’s. Says “blow” and “blow job” as casually as she calls a waiter. Or tells me there must be parts for girls with big noses (as if she’d ever stoop to be something as lowly as an actress). I’m listening, taking it all in, following her every move, because that’s what James wants, to get into all the parties and deb balls on the Upper East Side.
The letter arrives…he’s so happy he cries. He touches the gold-embossed lettering. That cardstock and watermark positively scream old money…Van der Ebb. I whisper the name in his ear…Van…der…Ebb.
Coming-out party? That’s the invitation. So Phil and Serena are inviting him to announce he’s gay? The things rich people do…I’ve got a bad feeling about these people. It’s a trick. The kind of trick rich people play when they run out of things to do with their money. Coming out? He’s gay, who cares? Who can blame him? He’s a broken toy. Our mother’s boy toy. So maybe Phil is inviting him out to the family’s big estate in East Hampton. And they’ll make an announcement for all the world to hear. Coming out. But this is New York City. We’re in the theater. Who cares?
You mean a deb ball?—for that pig, Serena? Coming out as in a bow in my hair? A ballroom at the plaza? A customary dance at the Metropolitan? And then what? Let’s all pile into our yacht in East Hampton and go for that unforgettable ride to— wake-the-fuck-up-we-don’t-have-any-money-and-aren’t-like-these-people…Wake the fuck up, James, these two rich pigs are up to something. I’ve got a bad feeling. Serena’s a vampire. And vampires don’t play nice. What does he see in her? Aristocratic ankles. I know what he sees when he looks at Phil. The boy he always wanted to be…We’ve got pedigree in our blood. It’s in those genealogies he secretly pores over with Nina. Why does he keep those dusty tomes from me? I thought we don’t have secrets. He doesn’t listen. I do as he says. He needs a boy to practice with, not the boys in the Brambles.
He’s got bruises on his face and tells me it’s nothing. If it’s nothing, why are you crying on your bed? Where were you? He was in the Brambles. Central Park—the place where gay men go for sex. He got into a fight. Why? Tell me or I won’t speak to you again. We fight. But we don’t know how to fight. When you come from a fucked-up family, you make a promise never to fight, so you love… but you love weirdly. Star-crossed. He’s a Capulet. I’m a Montague. You play the games other kids play, but only with broken toys. You hide your secrets in plain sight…on stage for the entire world to see. They laugh. They cry…and that sound of applause, like a summer shower. They love you so long as you never leave the stage.
He passes me in the hallway with that crimson sweater I got him—the one that makes him look like a Ralph Lauren model. He’s smarter than Phil—and as good-looking. They’re going to make a perfect couple. He’s scared. Why? I go for a hug. He shrugs, gives me that limp, martyred, Jesus face I’m sick of. I slap him. Hard. Across the mouth. Tell him to quit being a prick…find a boyfriend. We go down in a furious tumble. Two cats, who don’t know how to fight right…tooth and nail. Cease & Desist. It’s an elixir, but it doesn’t seesaw the way it did in the beginning. He wants me to hurt him. He wants to show the battle scars that will make him a man. We go down again, come up for air. I tell him he needs a practice lover so he can put all the right moves on Phil. He needs experience in bed, and I’ll do whatever it takes. We play the game. I go to gay bars, pick up boys, tell them I’ve got a shy brother at home. No, not just shy. Deposed. James de Menich is royalty, from a long line of French aristocrats—deposed, but royalty nonetheless. The boys come and go. I make myself scarce, go to my room. When I come back, he’s got this strange look and the boys are ready to throw in the towel.
He brings her home.
Her name’s Sherry or Cherise. She’s a total pig. And I hate that she’s in our home. The only place outside the stage where our secrets are safe. She’s drunk, too. He’s enjoying my dismay, watching my anger grow…his eyes telling me I’ve got to learn to shape it, compress it into a hard gem-like flame…It will land me the role. Make me an unforgettable vampire.
He puts her in the Chippendale chair I usually sit in when we run lines.
My character. What a vampire feels when it’s forced to watch one of its own make love to an outsider. And she’s in my chair, playing my role. Trying to tempt my brother with all the lies girls tell. She has a cheap dye job, a knockoff Prada bag, and flips her hair with two fingers that make her look like one of those working girls trying to stop a bus on lower Broadway. I tell her she’s a tramp. She’s drunk and ignores me, puts her hand on his thigh. Goes in for a kiss. He laughs in vindictive frissons. I take her downstairs via the delivery entrance…There’s blood on my hands when I get back into the apartment. A bloody nose, that’s all, from the freezing wind off the East River. I never laid a hand on her.
But she’s missing, and you were the last one to see her….feel the cold and whiteness of the freezing night.
We fight. He loses his Jesus face, starts to cry. I’m leaving. I have to go and play a vampire. We don’t know how to say goodbye. I give him a going-away present. Old-fashioned razor kit. I swish the foam in a bowl furiously with the old-fashioned brush, hoping with enough strokes the pain will disappear. Hairs on his upper lip I eye with trepidation…all we have to do is get rid of that hair and we can return to paradise, or at least to me hanging onto his waist in whatever theater would take us…the razor on the glass shelf beneath the mirror, his chest in the water; those chestnut-colored hairs that have appeared on the rim of his aureole…quiet sentries that will soon become an army…the scar on his inner thigh from where our mother accidentally shot him with that arrow, that purple gash that rises through the dirty water, a gash that warns me that beneath all that armor the knight who’d saved my life and taught me the secrets to becoming famous was human and tender and could be hurt. I wrap my arms around his neck and cry—James, please, please come back to me. Please come back to me, rising from the murky depths.
The whiteness of his face…a rope around his neck.
“Miss Cease. Miss Cease. Can you hear me?”
I wake to a freezing draft of air from the open car door. “Yousef? What are you doing? Who’s driving the car?” No one, apparently. We’re stopped. The backdoor’s open. He’s shaking me. We’ve made it through the Lincoln Tunnel, but we’re stopped beside a parking lot on the corner of…somewhere in the West Village.
“You fell asleep. I shake you. You don’t wake up. You’re concussionless. I take you to hospit—”
“It’s unconscious. And no—I was not unconscious.” I feel the bump on the back of my head. It hurts, but it isn’t any worse than the war wounds I get almost every day.
“You have concussion from fight. You’re talking, too—shouting bad things at people. Bad things. I take you to…”
“No. I’m just tired. Take me home, now.”
“Do you know who you are? How many fingers
I hold up?”
“Jeez. Two fingers, a peace sign. I’m Jeanne d’Arc. I’m going to be…” and then I remember Francis’ sinister face. I’m not Jeanne anymore. I’m just some girl with a dream who’s been cast back into the sea of wannabes.
“Take me home, now.”
A doorman I’ve never seen before is on duty as I stumble through the lobby. My hands are shaking so much I can’t make the key turn in the lock. Nina opens the door and lets out a cry.
“Oh, mon dieu.”
“Eve attacked me. My character told me not to fight back.” Nina cocks her head as if I’d made the wrong choice.
“What? Would you rather I fucked Brad for the entire world to see?” I sink into the couch next to her as she rummages through the freezer for ice. I don’t start remembering until I feel her hands kneading my shoulders. Then I start to cry, long sobs that don’t stop until she puts me in the bath. I bury my forehead against my knees. I feel my ribs ache with the unending sobs. I weep until I feel the loofah on my back. Nina’s by my side; she’s always been by my side after every disaster, with her brownies and faith.
“The director’s an imbecile,” she mutters. She kisses me on the head and makes slow circles on my aching back. A single drop of water rolls down my long, white thigh. I take her hand from my shoulder and hold it in my pruney fingers. She gives me an anxious, helpless look that says she wishes the phone would ring and I’d get another early-morning call to be on the set; another knock on the door would bring a new scene with the promise of me being the last girl standing—because we both know no matter how stupid this reality show was, it kept us from the secrets we’ve been running away from since my brother’s funeral. I put a washcloth on my face and remember eavesdropping on Nina in her old apartment uptown… the hushed whispers, my ears burning, my head pressed against the heating grate—listening to James and Nina talk about what he’d found in those genealogies—this so-called gift that I’d inherited. James was my best friend in the whole world. What secret was so dark he couldn’t share it with me? Make-believe is all we have to keep us from the secrets of our past.
“Esme called again,” Nina says. A jolt in my chest shoots through all my wounds. I let out a cry. I remember the email I got from Esme and how I tried to dismiss it as something a character in a drama might write. But Esme’s not a character from the past or future. Esme’s a social worker who wrote me about that missing girl. Tight bun. Metal clipboard. Nina pulls the belt of her robe in that worried-sick way and fishes in her quilted pocket for a cough drop.
“We have to get our story straight,” Nina says, ominously.
“She sent me an email about some girl who’s missing,” I say. I reach back and grab the loofah and wait for her to come around and face me. I pull the plug, feel the fateful tug as the water drains. I look down at my feet and wish all those time-travel portals Francis had created were real and Nina and I could go back to that cottage she’d rented in Narragansett. She could arrange the old furniture and we’d be a theatrical family again; there’d be no talk of fame or the bright lights of the city.
“I’ll talk to the social worker. There isn’t any girl who’s missing. At least not because of anything James and I did. It was all just some publicity stunt that Francis cooked up to get ratings. Now that I’m off, I’m sure she’ll turn up ok.”
Sherry…Cherise..That knockoff Prada bag. The only reason he brought her home was to help me nail my character in Vampire Grrls. Lesson learned.
“It sounds like make-believe is becoming pretty real to you, young lady.”
I don’t want to get into the young lady routine right now. “James invited a girl over here when you were at the church meetings on the West Side. I needed to prepare for a big scene in Vampire Grrls and he knew just how to help me.” I level an angry gaze at Nina. She tries to stare me down. She blinks.
“You didn’t do anything to her?”
“No.”
“Then why is she missing?”
“I’ve no idea. But think about it, Nina. This all happened over four months ago, and now it’s being reported? It’s obvious Francis cooked the whole thing up to make me look bad.” Nina looks satisfied. She turns and searches the vanity for toothpaste.
“Is that the way God works?” I ask. I’m trying to understand the look on Francis’ face when he said goodbye—it was as if God was already on the lookout for a better cut of meat. “I bet Jeanne wasn’t even a virgin, anyway,” I say defiantly, trying to change the subject—as if a fight would be better than having to confess the real story of how we played the game. “I feel Brad and I are ready to make love,” I say in my sophisticated Serena voice, “but it looks like he dumped me for a girl with more experience. I guess that’s the way boys work. I was hoping for a big beaver logjam on the set because that’s what most people want to see. Not this stupid search for pure love that doesn’t even exist. At least, not in our world—maybe in hers.”
“No. That’s only the way Hollywood works. First they want you to become a boy, next they want you to grow a dick.”
I just can’t laugh at that line again. The ringing in my ears is gone, but that bolt of grief feels as if it’s spreading an infection. I put a rag around my swollen ankle.
I look down at my feet and decide this is a good place to confess—here, in this old tub Nina took with her when we moved down from East End Avenue, the tub with its Sphinx-like claws—naked, nursing my wounds, because we in the House of de Menich keep our darkest secrets hidden in plain sight. I take another long breath and try to think of a way to begin…
“Hey Nina, do you know why vampires need blood? Why they’re so popular with teenagers?”
She shakes her head.
“Well, it’s a teenage standin for sex. But it goes deeper than that.”
“It always does,” she says, knowing this was how we in the House of de Menich prepare to share our secrets—by making them a part of some epic drama, or at least a vampire film.
Nina takes a step into a shaft of crystallized light as I look out the window to the window of another apartment. I close my eyes, see my brother’s bruised face and that dejected look he wore like some lost Romantic poet.
“James saved my life and taught me everything I needed to get where I am now, and I was going to do everything I could to help him.”
“So where exactly are you now, young lady?” I know when Nina starts with the young lady that I’m in for more hand-wringing. I grope for the words and realize talking about vampires is the only way she’s going to get what I’m trying to explain.
“Nina. You remember the night he went to the coming-out party,” I say accusingly. “You got him a driver for the ride out to Long Island because he didn’t want to show up at a big estate in the Hamptons in a taxi from the train station. I kissed James goodbye with all the odd trepidation I tried to dismiss as envy.
“And you know what happened after that, Nina.” After the coming-out party, Phil invited him over to his place on Park Avenue, said he wanted James in his little club of boyfriends, only there was an initiation. James had to make out with another boy. Phil secretly filmed the whole thing and sent it to James’ classmates at Dayton.
“Ever since we got here James said I had to be tough to survive in this business, and I couldn’t stand to see him like that—weak, or at least weaker than I’d ever seen him—”
“It was that game—it made you stronger, but him weaker,” Nina, says. She turns her back to me, faces the window.
“Well, I told him I was going to make things right, but he just gave me his Jesus face—that’s what I used to call that stupid, lost, martyred look that told me the world could beat him as badly as Jeanne had been beaten and it wouldn’t matter. That’s when I slapped James. Hard. Across the mouth and called him a selfish prick.”
Nina holds her hands to her ears and says, “Enough.” But I have to tell her everything.
“Do you remember how I called every night to read him the revisio
ns over the phone when I was in Century City?”
“Yes.” Nina looks angry.
I’m naked in the tub. “The night before my big scene in Vampire Grrls, I called him.” Another deep breath. “The distance apart had given us the freedom to talk about all those things we both were afraid of. I asked him why he quit. What our real mother had been like. What he thought was in store for me.” I can’t read my Nina’s look as I say this. It’s hopeless, loving, caring…but demanding, too. I can’t lie to her, and I can’t change the subject anymore. I open my mouth before I can think…
“James said there was a curse in our family that was more real than anything I could ever play as a vampire. I knew he wasn’t making it up, but when I confronted him he changed the subject, asked me if I wanted to stand out as a vampire. Of course he knew the answer, and I never got him to explain…” I place my hands on my stomach and stare Nina down. She turns and fumbles through the vanity. “James said, ‘You remember that girl I brought back to the apartment?’ and then he burst out laughing. ‘You should’ve seen the look on your face, sis’—and then I understood. Cherise was an outsider—like a human who had intruded into our vampire world—and the cold, furious hurt I felt was exactly what my character needed to come alive. So while the other vampires devoured their boys and emoted their lines—I slowly sucked mine dry as if he were a cool drink. It was all a lie—pretending to be a rich girl—and I knew it, but James didn’t.”
I step into the soft, crystallized shadows and take the big towel Nina holds out, her legs out wide and that wounded look on her face like a trainer who’s calling a fight. I bow my head and know, at least for now, she’s in my corner and my confession has gone far enough.
“It’s time you found out about some of the other strong girls who shared your gift,” Nina says, in a way I try to dismiss as solemn and cryptic but which comes out so matter-of-fact it gives me goosebumps. The grandfather clock strikes the hour. The smell of shaving cream rises through the crystallized sparkle of the bathroom, but Nina and I don’t shave. Memory is weird—a sight or sound can send you back a minute or ten years, and feel so real…I was trained to collect memories at Juilliard. To peel back their layers, distill them into senses—so I could laugh more convincingly. So I could cry on cue.
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