Yeah, I could go that route. Or:
“I sold some stuff on eBay,” I say, trying out the lie. “The FedEx guy is waiting.” I pick up my pace, grabbing knicks, stuffing knacks. “Gotta skedaddle.”
“ ‘Skedaddle’?” Isuzu says, cocking an eyebrow. “Since when do you use words like ‘skedaddle’?”
Since it started looking like I might get laid. Do you mind?
“It’s just a word,” I say. “Somebody used it at work. Thought I’d try it out, see if I could get a rise out of you.” Pause. “Seems to have worked.”
“Uh-huh.” Dubiousness, thy name is Isuzu.
“Oh,” like an afterthought, like this happens all the time, “I probably won’t be home tonight.”
Isuzu blinks. Shakes her teenage head. “What?”
“There’s this project at work. It’s looking like an all-nighter.”
“What are you gonna do, sleep in your cube all day?”
“I can,” I say. “Might have to.”
“What kind of—,” she begins, but I cut her off.
“Gotta go,” I say. “FedEx beckons.”
“Yeah, I know,” Isuzu says. “You gotta…‘skedaddle.’ ” She waits until I almost close the door before asking, “Does this all-nighter have a name?”
Which reminds me—I really need to find out what to call T other than Tombstone.
“Trust,” I say back. “Family is all abouttrust,” I add, avoiding Isuzu’s not terribly trusting eyes. “So, we’re good here, right?”
I don’t wait for an answer before pulling the door closed. The way I figure it, it’s my pet food, my rent, my rules. If she doesn’t like it, she can…Well, no, actually, shecan’t.
Kind of sweet the way that works out, I think, smiling all the way to the car.
21
The Sex Part
I’ve been running the car heater all evening. I point this out because modesty demands I ascribe T’s next comment to a thermostatically enhanced libido.
“I wanted to jump your bones the first time we met,” she says, the second I close the door, sealing in our privacy with a solid Europeanthunk. “Even before, you know, the gift that keeps on giving?” Her voice rises at the end, like a teenage girl whose life sentence is still a question, whose life, in general, is all about anticipation.
Not that I’m one to judge. After all, I’m the one who’s too damaged to date.I’m the one who hasn’t been laid in decades. And I’m the one who’s been driving around in a car with the heater blasting all night.
“I wanted to jump your bones till they creaked like a frozen oak in a windstorm.”
T smiles.
“Of course, the priorities were different then,” I say, changing subjects, playing hard to get. “I was in the avant-garde in a war of attrition and—”
“Blah, blah, blah,” T says, cutting through the words, and years, and excuses. “Been there. Done that.” She pauses, a woman whose body is still in its twenties, but whose mind has had decades to perfect its ideas about sexiness. “And now, sonny Jim,” she says, preparing to name me as beneficiary to all those years of research, “it’s about timeyou …did…me.”
In a different time, in a different place, after hearing a line like that, I’dstill expect her smile to include fangs. Not that that’s abad thing…
“All in good time,” I say, faking a brand of cool I don’t really possess. “But before we get into all that, can you do me a favor?”
T reaches for my zipper.
“Notthat,” I say, brushing her hand away.
“What, then?”
“Can you tell me your name?”
T flinches. Blinks.
It’s one of those “oh yeah” blinks. An “oh yeah” blink laced with a little “shit” and a pinch of “fuck me.”
“Rose,” she says. She places the flat of her palm to her heart. Blinks again. “Rose Thorne.”
It’s my turn to blink. “Not yourstage name,” I say. “Your real one.”
“Thatis my real name,” Rose says, folding her arms over her chest and the rattling thought of us having gotten this far without my knowing her name. I look at her profile, which is all she’s giving me to look at, as she stares straight out at the road ahead.
“Rose Thorne,” I say aloud, just to try it out, to feel the shape of it in my mouth.
“Yep,” Rose says, cinching her arms tighter. “That’s my name,” she adds, still talking to the windshield. “Don’t wear it out.”
In all honesty, I don’t think I could have picked a better name. It’s perfect. It sums her up as neat as can be. Beauty. Danger. Fangs. Blood red or ghost white. The all-purpose flower for weddings and funerals, love and death, Eros and Thanatos. And a little old-fashioned, too, like her way of talking.
I look at her, sitting there defiantly, making a show ofnot looking at me as the colored streetlights wash over her face and crossed arms.
Prickly. Not to be messed with.
Rose Thorne.
It’s even got her job in there, by way of Gypsy Rose Lee. That, and some loftier stuff, too. Like “rose,” as in the past tense for “rise.” Like in resurrection. Apotheosis. Redemption.
“I like it,” I say. “It’s very…you.”
Rose smiles a predatory smile in the rearview mirror. “Well, ain’t that a relief,” she says, still playing at being angry for a few seconds longer, before unfolding her arms like the petals of her namesake. She scooches around in her seat to face me. “The name was my dad’s idea,” she says. “Mom says if he would’ve lived, there’d’ve been no way, but then the prick up and dies just before I get born.” Pause. “Funny the things grief can make you do.”
“Grief,” I say, “or maybe love.”
“Well, duh,” Rose says. “The love part’s understood. I mean, if there’s no love, there’s no grief, right?”
Perhaps it’s the heat. Perhaps it’s our mutual horniness. Perhaps it’s the fact that neither of us plans on dying or being grieved. Ever. Whatever the reason, Rose’s last comment strikes us both as suddenly almost unbelievably funny. The laughing starts with a giggled fuse and then explodes into howls and barks. I pull off to the side of the road and park to avoid killing us both. Rose wipes her eyes; I can feel every rib in my rib cage. The laughter subsides, but then sputters back to life. If we could, we’d be peeing our pants. Our chests heave with it. We begin to wheeze.
And then…
And then we’re just kissing. Kissing to stop each other from laughing. And then kissing just to be kissing. Vampire tongues are porous, spongelike. Touch a finger to a vampire tongue and you can feel it sucking at the soft pad of skin like a hundred tiny mouths. And when a vampire kisses another vampire and their tongues get involved, it’s like pressing Velcro together. You connect. You become like Siamese twins, joined by this one vigorous muscle pulling, pushing, needing, and being needed, so completely, so perfectly and purely, you never want it to stop.
We do. Eventually. Of course.
Stop, that is.
Have to. What with the car parked and the engine running to keep the heater going, the gas can last only so long. So we stop. Detach. Decouple. Rip the Velcro apart. I pull the car back onto the road leading to my apartment, the sequel.
We experience detours along the way. Detours of our own making. And so we park, and kiss, and thank God my car’s not what you’d call a gas guzzler.
And then we laugh—mightily, fearlessly, immortally—at the irony of our fluid-driven lives.
Did you just dry clean this place?” Rose asks, covering her nose with the crook of her arm. What she means is the smell. It’s been building up ever since I left to get her, and shoves back at us like a pair of invisible hands the second I open the door—the factory-fresh stink of brand-new everything.
“My blood warmer,” I say, fumbling for the pieces of a good lie. “The thermostat goes nuts a couple of nights ago and…boom!”I underline the“boom!” by making five-fingered starbursts out o
f both hands. “It looked like Custer’s Last Stand in here.” Pause. “Just got done cleaning today.”
“Uh-huh,” Rose says, looking around the apartment at the other lie I’m trying to sell—the one spelled out in funky knickknacks on loan from myreal place. The illusion I’m going for is that someone has actually lived here for more than a few hours, the old things with personality strategically arranged to offset the glaring generic newness of everything else. That was the idea. But looking at the place now, all I can think of is a ransom note of awkwardly mixed type.
IKEA, IKEA, IKEA…
SS dagger from World War II.
Sharper Image, Sharper Image, Sharper Image…
My Bela Lugosi poster.
“I see,” Rose says, registering the old-new schizophrenia I’ve so carefully arranged. She pauses. Smiles. Frowns. Smiles again.
Finally: “Okay,” she says, accepting my explanation without really buying it. And then she just stands there, holding her purse with two hands—which is one more than strictly necessary. It’s a waiting gesture. A gesture of willful disarmament. The next move is mine and she’s letting me know with her body that she won’t fend it off.
I should kiss her. I should take her lower lip in my teeth and bite. Oh, now she’s looking around again. Away from me. Allowing the opportunity for a sneak attack. Displaying the full, incredible length of her white, white neck.
And still I hesitate. Why did it seem so much easier in the car?
“So,” I say, clapping my hands over the word, startling her.
Rose turns around. “What?” she says, the word heavy with expectation.
“Is this city grimy, or what?”
That’s what I say. That’s what I’ve come up with.
“Excuse me?” Rose says, giving me the look I deserve, given the obtuse nature of my invitation.
“Grimy,” I repeat. “Don’t you feel, you know,dirty ?” I mime washing my hands—a gesture that, looking back, may have come across as just a bit too Peter Lorre–ish.
Rose sets her eyes to drill.
“Listen,” she says, “if that’s supposed to be some crack about my job.”
“No,” I insist, shaking my head. “No, that’s not it. I…”
This is me. Drowning. Slowly.
“Yes?”Rose says.
“I was trying to be clever,” I say, suddenly fascinated by the workmanship that’s gone into my shoes. “You know. Subtle?”
“Obtuse?”
“Okay,” I agree. “Obtuse.”
“What were you being obtuse about?”
The trouble with being immortal is the not-being-able-to-die part in situations like these.
“Nice shoes,” Rose says, looking at where I’m looking. She places two fingers under my chin and pushes up. “Yes?” she repeats.
And so I just blurt it out. “The shower,” I say. “I was being obtuse about the conditions under which one would feel compelled to…” And then I make the mistake of listening to myself. “…take a shower,” I whisper, running out of steam.
“Huh,” Rose says.
She chucks up my chin again, smiling one of those predatory smiles. And then she turns. On one heel—like a ballerina. Like my luck, finally.
She guesses at the direction, and starts walking toward it.
Her purse is the first thing to hit the floor. Followed by the petals of her clothing, falling like autumn leaves, shed like snakeskin. And then the hands come out, pressed together forever back there, blue-green against all that white, white skin.
This is where the sex part comes in. And if this were a movie from when I was a kid, this is where the camera would lose interest in the people it’s been watching, going blurry just as they’re angling in for that first serious kiss. This is where they’d cut to the train, or a waterfall, or fireworks, leaving the rest up to us, alone in the dark with our overheated imaginations.
I always hated it when the camera did that.
But I understand it now. Faced with the prospect of writing a detailed account of what happened next between Rose and me, sorry, I’m afraid I’ll have to pass. Some things just don’t sound right when you write about them with an “I.” They come across as creepy, or bragging, or both. Plus, if you don’t know how sex works by now, this is no way to find out. And if you do, then you do, and there’s not a lot new I can tell you. So:
[Insert fireworks here.]
22
32-B
Martin Joseph Kowalski,”Isuzu says the second I step through the door, looking like something the bat dragged in. A day and part of another night have gone by since I last crossed this threshold, during which time I’ve apparently become the child, while Isuzu has become the parent.
“Forget how the phone works?” she asks, her arms folded over her almost chest. “Or did you maybe misplace the address?” she adds, tapping her foot, pissed, pissed, and—oh yeah—pissed.
Bitch.
I’ve raised a bitch.
And I wasn’t even trying.
“Oh, hey, Marty,” I say, loosening my already loose tie. “Thanks for working all night to put—now what was that again? oh yeah!—foodon the table.” I suddenly remember the likelihood of lipstick, and cinch my tie back up. “And paying the rent, too! Like wow! You are, like, thebest, man…”
Isuzu glares. I glare back.
“You smell like perfume,” she says.“Cheap perfume.”
“Go to your room,” I snap.
“What?”
“You heard me. Quiz show’s over. Time for bed.”
“But…”
“Skat,” I say.
“Don’t you mean ‘skedaddle’?”
“Izzy,” I say, crossing my own arms, “this isn’t a discussion.Git.”
And she does. To my utter amazement, she gits. She turns on her heel and stomps off, slamming the bedroom door behind her.
And then everything gets quiet, and it’s just me.
Just me, feeling hated, feeling evil for punishing my little pet human for my own indiscretion. Feeling evil for staying out so long, having so much fun, not calling.
Feeling evil, finally, forfeeling evil and still having to smile about it.
When I hum—which I find myself doing—it’s an evil hum. A hum of pure wickedness. And when I loosen my tie and my shirt falls open—thanks to the buttons that went missing last night—my first thought is not, I’m going to need to fix that, but, I need a mirror. And there it is, the bloodred gloss of pure evil smudging my skin, bringing back the feel of Rose’s mouth, her bite, the click of her teeth meeting. Standing there in the bathroom, looking at my evil face in the mirror, all I can think of is all the evil Rose and I have yet to commit.
And there’s that smile again, smiling away like one of those yellow buttons popular a few years back—the ones with two dots for eyes, that simple curve of a mouth, and the two little triangles, for fangs.
After a week and a half of nearly nightly vigorous evil, I confess.
To Isuzu. Not Rose.
“I’ve met someone,” I announce. This is in response to why it is that after nearly eight years of wearing the same thing, I’ve suddenly replaced everything in my closet.
“Well, duh,” she says.
“That obvious, huh?”
Isuzu runs her nose across my shoulder and up my neck like a bloodhound. “Just a little,” she says.
“I’m hoping you might get to meet her some night.”
Isuzu says she didn’t know they made suits of armor for girls her size.
“She doesn’t know about you yet,” I say. “I’m still feeling her out.”
Isuzu rolls her eyes. “Don’t you mean ‘up’?”
Thank God vampires aren’t big on blushing without a little thermostatic assistance.
“That was uncalled for,” I say, even though the smile in my voice suggests otherwise.
“So, are you gonna, like,marry her or something?”
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