Pretty Dead

by Francesca Lia Block

  At last there is the sound of his key in the door.

  The man I share my life with sits beside me. He has started referring to himself as William again, thinks it’s more “twenty-first century.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “You look like shit.”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I say. “Everywhere I go with you, something horrible happens.”

  “I know. It’s as if I attract it. Maybe you bring it out in me. It’s gotten a little out of control now, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s like we’re stuck in hell together.”

  “We are, my darling. We are. But what’s the alternative? Being in hell alone?”

  I get up from the couch. Suddenly a rush of anger infuses me with energy. I go into the bedroom and find the Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. I pack it with as many of my vintage clothes as it will hold. (Later I will pay two men to come when William is not there and take the rest.) And then I leave.

  Willam just reclines on the sofa, watching me go. He thinks I will be back in no time.

  He is wrong.

  Los Angeles, 2001–2007

  In no time I meet a wealthy gentleman who worships me and gives me everything I desire. All I have to do is accompany him to his premieres and parties and let him fuck me once in a while. I know it sounds bad, but remember, I am a monster. At least I treat him kindly and never drink his blood or the blood of his friends or employees. To be honest, none of their blood smells good to me anyway. I spend my days shopping for treasures. When he dies, he leaves me everything.

  The one thing I do not have for all these years is a friend, a companion, someone to share my riches with, someone who is not afraid of the strange girl in the palace of beautiful things. Someone intelligent and beautiful and sweet. Until Emily comes into my life.

  I never hear from William Eliot again, but I can also never shake the sensation that someday he will return.

  William Stone

  It was Halloween, the night after Jared’s questions on the beach.

  I thought it was another trick-or-treater, and I opened the door. The dry-ice mist rising from the bucket on my porch and the strings of orange jack-o’-lantern lights made the man glow. He wore a hideous mask from one of those disgusting slasher movies and carried some kind of ugly plastic sword.

  “Trick or treat,” he said. “Or should I say, dark trick, dark treat?”

  “You should say nothing,” I replied. “You should go away and never come back.”

  A group of little goblins with pillowcases full of candy were coming up the path. William stepped back into the shadows while I placated them with sweets and watched them hop off into the night.

  Before I could close the door, I felt William’s hand on my wrist. His grip was firm and steady. I thought of Jared, with his gentle touch, his tender kisses. I thought of Jared shaking on my red velvet couch. Jared, who would die like all the rest, leaving me alone.

  But William would not die. He would be here when the sun burned the earth to a crisp through that growing hole in the sky. We would be in hell together forever.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered.

  And then I let him lead me into my house.

  Or perhaps I led him.

  He took off the horror-show mask. He tossed away the sword and dropped to his knees on my Oriental carpet. His hands held my hipbones.

  “Forgive me,” he said again. “I’m sorry I appeared like that, so suddenly, and startled you. I’ve been searching for so long. When I saw you I experienced all the same sensations I had at the moment of your making.”

  I turned my back to him and he rose.

  “What? Didn’t you feel it, too?”

  I tensed as he touched my shoulder, touched the hair that fell down my back. Wrapped a lock around the middle of his hand, turned it, wrapped it, tugged so gently but enough that my head went back a tiny bit toward him.

  “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  “At first I came to take you back.”

  “Take me back?” I said, turning to face him. My scalp pulled as my hair slipped from his hand. “You will never take me back!”

  “But then I changed my mind,” he continued. “I have released you. I have given you what you always wanted.”

  I stepped closer to him, my heart thumping with anger. “What can you give me? The first time you gave me what you thought I wanted, you ruined my life.”

  I was pounding his chest with my fists, pounding and pounding with the fury of almost a century. And he caught my wrists in his hands and held me steady, held me the way you hold a child out of control with anger until finally they surrender, melting into their sorrow.

  “You wanted it, Charlotte. You came to my room in Rome and asked to be changed. You wanted anything that would take away your pain.”

  “But you did it. You knew that I would suffer more. I was only a girl. You didn’t tell me how it would be.”

  “It is different for us all. And you never asked.”

  Why had I never asked William Stone Eliot about what it would be like, about how he became what he was? I thought of Jared asking me so many questions, one after another, as if he wanted to crawl inside me. So curious. But I never wanted to know about William. I was terrified to know.

  Now, gripped again by his lifeless white arms but no longer blinded as I had been for so long, I saw visions of who he really was.

  I see a boy huddled in the corner of a room, watching a woman who is lying on a bed. Her neck is swollen and her limbs are black. I see the boy in a dark, dirty orphanage, where the cries of children echo through the halls.

  In a hospital ward, many of the children are dying.

  I see a young man wandering through the streets, thin, gaunt, bearded. I see him sitting on a cot in a garret, woolen socks with the toes cut off worn over his hands like gloves, hands trembling as he scribbles words on paper and then, when he runs out of paper, scribbles the words all over the walls of the room. I see him in a room like a cage, shaking the bars, begging for something with which to write, clawing at himself to get blood from his own body to write with. I see him cast back out onto the street with no money, nowhere to go.

  He wants to tell a story. He believes he is an artist; he has stories to tell, but no one will listen to him. No one understands the words he screams in his cell, although to him they are a great epic poem, an aria.

  A dark alley. Rats scurrying. A woman in the shadows. She is small, with dark ringlets under her hood, a sweet young face. You would think she would be afraid of him. Instead, as she approaches, he draws back, terrified. She smiles gently, beatific, but her eyes are the eyes of something unspeakable.

  “Do not be afraid, William. Have you never seen an angel before?”

  “Angel of darkness! I see them all the time in my vile dreams since my mother died! Get away from me.”

  “Oh, William, do not fear. I can save you from diseases like the one that killed your mother. I have the answers. You are an artist, William. No one understands you. They think you are mad, but you are only a little lost. An artist must learn to feed off the world. That is the only way he can survive. That is the only way he can stop feeding off himself, eating himself alive from within. I can show you how.”

  I did not believe that this was true. The opposite was true. By becoming artists we monsters can sometimes be redeemed. We can give instead of devouring.

  I pulled away from William.

  “Get out of here!” I screamed. “I am through with you. Even if I have to live in eternity alone.”

  I waited for him to protest, but he only smiled, turned, and walked out the door.

  A V in Love

  After William left, I scrubbed myself in the shower and climbed into bed. I felt dirty, diseased, my skin crawling with the memory of his touch. Why had I let him in at all?

  I remembered the way Jared had touched me, the salty taste of his skin, the warm, sweet smell under his arms, the smoothness of his chest and
how his back felt undulating over me.

  I should never have let William come into my house. All I could think of was Jared. I knew I needed to see him. Maybe if he touched me again I could forget that William had come back.

  I texted Jared: i wnt to c u 2nite

  He wrote back: 7 pm pik me up

  Now that William had come to my door, I no longer felt safer in my house. And being with Jared made me bold.

  First we went to a sushi restaurant on Main Street. I spoke Japanese to the sushi chef, bowed and called him tatsujin, so he gave us all kinds of special dishes, decorated with leaves and orchids.

  “Where’d you learn Japanese?” Jared asked me.

  “In the forties, in Japan,” I said. And then I stopped eating, thinking of the sickening flash, the cloud mushrooming in the sky.

  Tatsujin. William was my master then.

  “What’s wrong?” Jared asked me. “Are you okay? You look pale.”

  “We all look pale, remember?” I joked, to change the subject. “There are thousands of teenagers all over the world who try to make themselves pale and dress in black so that they pass for one of us.”

  “No,” Jared said, “you’re not always so pale anymore, goth girl.” He leaned in closer. “The other night, when I touched you, you lit up.”

  “Maybe that’s what happens when a human loves us,” I said. Then I wished I hadn’t. But Jared put down his chopsticks. He turned to me and looked into my eyes like he was staring through an entranceway.

  “What happens when one of your kind loves one of us, then?” he asked. “Do they make us into one of you?”

  “No. If we really love someone, we don’t do that. No matter how much we want to.”

  He went back to eating again. I could tell he was upset.

  “We also do this when we are in love,” I said. I lifted a piece of tako with my chopsticks; the white octopus flesh rimmed with purple suction cups quivered in the air between us, and then I held it to his lips. “We feed,” I said.

  After dinner, I drove us to the club where Emily and I had danced together. The bouncer led us up to the front of the line after one glance at my gold Dolce & Gabbana minidress and gladiator platforms. I took Jared’s hand as we walked inside.

  “I came here with Emily,” I said into his ear.

  He nodded, looking around the room as if he were searching for her in the crowd.

  “I keep thinking I’m going to see her,” he shouted at me over the music.

  “I know. Me, too.”

  I led him to a corner, where we could hear each other better. We stood close together, almost touching but not quite. His eyes looked haunted. I wanted to be her for him, take away the sorrow.

  “You miss her a lot, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But when I think about it I feel guilty, because if she were here I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Say it.”

  “I think I’m falling in love with you, too.”

  We looked at each other for a moment. The lights of the club scattered us with rainbows.

  “This is something else we do when we are in love,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We dance. We remember what it felt like to be human and dance.”

  I took his hand. Jared’s body moved gracefully next to mine. His eyes never strayed from my face. He put his hand on my lower back and I felt my knees weaken, a dampness between my legs. I leaned in close.

  “There is another thing we remember,” I said into his ear, loud enough that he could hear above the pounding music. I put his hand on my taut thigh. It was so dark and we were so close that I could ease his hand up to my hip and across my lower belly with no one noticing, dip him into me for a second so his fingers felt the warmth, the downy wetness and then the parting.

  The Artist Is a V Word

  Look at van Gogh. Look at Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton. Virginia Woolf. Diane Arbus. They are the ones I admire. But what is the theme here? These artists, like all artists, being true to their natures, fed off the world. They wanted to suck it dry. Instead, they killed themselves. Now look at Picasso. He fed off the world, whole chunks of it broken off and stuck on canvas, but he felt no guilt. He survived. It is not that much different with us. Some of us, like William Stone Eliot, feed happily off the world. Others of us suffer for our needs.

  What kind of monster would you be?

  What kind of artist might I become?

  And if I became an artist now, might I realize that art is really nothing like vampirism? It gives as much as it takes. It might ultimately be the way I could survive.

  I used to paint and draw, play the violin and the piano. I used to sing. That was when I was a living girl. I used to record my thoughts in a journal. I wanted to tell stories about myself and Charles and share them with the world. I wanted to consume the beauty, but then it became too much for me to contain inside my body.

  When I was changed, I had no stories I wanted to tell. I stopped for many years. I grew impetuous and fiendish. After I left William, I thought it would get better, but I was even more empty. I no longer even had the dark story of my master, only my own loneliness. What became important was studying the groups of children at the high school, how they distinguished themselves with their clothes and their hair, how they sat together in packs the way animals do. I came to high school because I was bored, frankly. I would travel again someday, but it felt too tiring to do so now.

  Now there were boys to look at. I could tell what they would grow up into. Most would became better-looking; a few, perhaps the early bloomers, the popular ones, worse. I was interested in the patterns of their acne, especially the really bad cases. I sniffed the air as they walked by, under the weight of their backpacks, hooked up to their iPods, their cell phones. I could distinguish sweat, mildewy socks and jerseys, marijuana, French fries, cologne. Occasionally I found one interesting enough to wonder what he would be like immortalized that way, with his lips still in that sensual, jutting stage, his pimples and his loping stride. Though the pimples would no doubt vanish, and how happy he would be with immortality and flawless skin! At least at first.

  I studied shoes in magazines and online, fascinated by each trend, though I had seen most of it before. Platforms with carved wedges. Two-toned satin sandals. High-heeled lace-up oxfords. Dove-gray pointed-toe miniboots. I bought them all. I downloaded songs. And finally, after Emily’s death, I began writing again, just as I did when I was human. These words you see before you. I wrote more after Jared held me in his arms. At least this is something. At least this is a way to get back a little to who I once was.

  The Girl in the Red Dress

  All I wanted to do was to forget about William, but it was not so easy.

  Jared and I went to the Los Angeles County Museum to look at the Rodin sculptures. The air smelled of tar from the pits of inky black stuff bubbling up from the lawn. We held hands and wandered along the winding paths, among the statues of prehistoric animals. The day was overcast but warm, and I wore a silk Pucci sundress and Christian Louboutin sandals. Jared had on his usual jeans and was carrying his sketchbook. He said he liked to sketch from sculptures because the forms were so clear and solid.

  In the museum the Danaïd lay on her side, with her bony back and her hair covering her face as if she were grieving, transforming into water, the marble liquid as a river. Saint John the Baptist’s severed head. A pianist’s hand. The female faun kneeling, her face long and animalic. The old woman who had once been a great beauty. The man on his knees before his naked idol. I told Jared that I had seen these sculptures in the museum in Paris—the Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had rented space to work. It was a mansion with tall glass windows and bright rooms surrounded by the now carefully landscaped, once wild, gardens where Rodin had entertained his guests. I told Jared about Rodin’s young mistress and model, the blue-eyed sculptor Camille Claudel, and how she had gone mad and died in an asy
lum. We talked about the way artists had suffered and changed their pain into beauty. How it saved some but not others. Jared sat on a bench and sketched the Danaïd while I wandered through the museum, imagining how someday he would exhibit his paintings of me at galleries all around the world. I only hoped I would fade with him before the paintings did.

  The next day we looked at crumbling marble antiquities at the Getty Villa on a hill above the Pacific Ocean.

  “This reminds me of your house,” Jared said, as we walked along the Corinthian colonnade beside a mural of garlands and trompe l’oeil architecture.

  “I knew you were just spending time with me because of my house.”

  He stopped and looked at me. The sun was shining off the rectangular pool. The blackened bronze sculptures with their eerie inlaid white eyes glowed as if they were lit from within. I had taken off my sun hat; the light didn’t make me feel afraid.

  “I’d be with you if you lived in a one-room apartment,” he said.

  In a tiny, darkened hallway full of small, erotic drawings and sculptures—a priapic centaur chasing a nymph, a faun copulating with a she-goat—he ran his hand along the back waistband of my jeans and I shivered so that tiny bumps rose up.

  On other mornings we sat on the outdoor patio at the Urth Caffé in Santa Monica, and Jared sketched and I wrote. We ate poached eggs and spinach wrapped in salmon on brioches and blackout chocolate cake, and drank green-tea lattes the color of milky jade. I had stopped calling Tolstoy entirely. I no longer drank the blood he sold; it made me vomit now. For the following few days and nights, though, I still preferred my meat rare.