by Meghan Tifft
Lucinda can’t imagine either of those things being preferable, even though they would probably have been more appropriate.
“You know, I just didn’t know, if he’s Dracula—I didn’t want him to attack me or anything.”
Lucinda tries to notice her own expression. She tries to put on a look of sober appreciation. “No, that’s okay,” she says. She’s barely remembering her manners. “Thanks for your help. I don’t know what happened to me.”
“It’s because you’re not eating.” Lauren doesn’t seem to say this with concern so much as authority, like it’s a textbook fact she just knows.
Lucinda nods. She can’t decide if Lauren’s attitude toward her eating is presumptuous or invasive or just oddly blasé. Neither can she tell if Lauren is serious or only humoring her about the Dracula thing. There’s an elephant in the room but Lucinda can’t decide what it is. Lauren either knows something she won’t say or doesn’t know something she won’t ask. Same with Rory, meeting her eye right now, as if she’s in on his chuckling thoughts. Who are these two? How friendly are they? And by what design? Lucinda never asks this question soon enough.
“Hey,” Lauren asks, eyeing her. “Did you bring the shawl in from the car? You’re chattering.”
“Oops,” says Lucinda.
They pause to watch the puppet tumble into the pit of immolation and self-regard.
Tonight, and every night, the puppet is dancing its antics along the edge of their coffin. Her coffin, but it’s theirs too. It’s not only just Dracula’s anymore. Lucinda can’t tell if this makes her sorry or afraid.
“What are you doing after the opening show on Friday?” Lauren asks.
Lucinda scissors out a sigh. She is barely able to turn her thoughts over to this. “I have to go to my brother’s.” Warren is having his party on Friday. It’s the last thing she feels like doing.
“I didn’t know you had a brother.” Lauren makes a sympathetic face. “Too bad. I was going to ask you to come to a party with me.”
Lucinda opens her mouth, finds herself raked clean of words, and shuts it with a thin smile. Lauren winks. It must just be a coincidence.
For some reason, looking at the coffin, she feels like everyone is looking at her.
The Play
Dracula is walking to the pharmacy. He needs Tylenol, for his headache. He’s heard that’s what you take.
Lucinda is walking up ahead, because she can’t deal with him right now. Apparently.
They’d been having a fine enough dinner. At least somebody had been having dinner.
“How did we get here?” he asked at the restaurant. Somehow he felt like one of them was an invention of somebody else’s mind.
Lucinda cranked her upper lip. It was more of a quiver. “You came to the door and said you were hungry. You asked me,” she said.
Was it all over? “Ha. Like when we were dating.”
“Where are your keys by the way? Were you locked out?”
Dracula had seen the truck again, pulling out when he was coming in. When he got upstairs, for some reason he knocked.
Now he looks at her. She doesn’t look exactly happy. But she doesn’t look like she’s in the midst of betraying him.
“Have you ever looked into my coffin?”
“No, of course not. It creeps me out.”
Dracula remembers the first time she saw it in the closet. How Vlad went sniffing around it. How she kept pulling at his leash, embarrassed. “Vlad,” she said, “Vlad,” with uneasy admonishment. He didn’t like how it sounded.
Dracula thinks of how it was at first, when they were dating. It would always have to be something outside, with all three of them. The dog would be always with her. Waiting on the steps whenever he came, both of them like two trammeled daisies. The dog would wheeze as they climbed the path to the light rail. They would crumble biscuits into water while the trains whistled by. Lucinda had her newspaper out. We could do Kites at Night. Mead making. Laser light show. That’s what Dracula remembers. None of those options sounded appealing to him. Lucinda didn’t like to leave the dog tied up outside, so they would sit on the train one way, only to find out they couldn’t bring the dog with them and go the other way, only to get somewhere else right as it was over. Dracula got so he could hear the dog, all the time. Taking wet open breaths at his side. He never looked down. He could almost hear it right now.
“Are you okay?” Lucinda follows his gaze while he looks around.
He’s eating a pork belly BLT. A man in a kimono serves them.
Dracula lets his tongue out like a tide. He stares off into the distance.
“The play is tomorrow,” Lucinda says. “You don’t have to come. I mean, I don’t expect you to come.”
Dracula feels his stomach lurch, and then somehow senses a repeated refrain. Is this something she’s said before?
“I—why—” he clears his throat.
“It’s not like—” Lucinda cuts herself off.
Why is there a geyser of hot lava stinging the inside of Dracula? Does this actually terrify him? He hasn’t been able to say so to her. It seems like such a brash and sacrificial entrapment. Anything could go wrong in a play. The actors and the audience all stuck there like so many flies. What if somebody bombs? Dracula at least wants his art to be over and done with before he observes it. “No, that’s silly,” he says, clinging to the table’s edge. “Of course I’m coming. I’ll come.”
“I don’t want you to come.”
Dracula rolls a raw sample of air across his palate. Is this a test? Is it because of what happened?
“But, what if I want to?” He stumbles over the right thrust of insistence. Relief, he notices, is flooding through him.
“No,” she says.
How long should he keep up the protest?
“Are you done?” she says. He’s not sure if she means with the meal or the act.
That’s when Dracula senses the waiter’s hand, floating surreptitiously into view. The man seems to query Dracula with a smile. Dracula looks down at his plate. He is not sure if he is done. He feels like he hasn’t even begun. The waiter defers with a murmur.
“I think we should stop seeing each other,” Lucinda says. Dracula is not entirely sure that he isn’t dreaming this.
“I think I need something.” He reaches down somewhere. He unfolds his napkin.
“I’m going home,” Lucinda says, standing. A dog barks. It’s warm for a winter night but still the patio is chilly.
“Wait,” says Dracula. He is now aware of a squinting sensation in his heart. “Is there anything you should tell me?” he asks.
Lucinda subsides into a look of grim scrutiny.
“Are you dating someone else? Did you?”
“What?”
“You want to leave the apartment,” Dracula says.
Lucinda screws her brow. “We are leaving the apartment. Next Monday. We’ve been evicted.” There’s a billow of silence between them, like a sheet hovering in air. “And I didn’t do it,” she says, as if maybe that’s what he’s still trying to talk about. “The damage I mean.”
“No,” says Dracula. He can’t figure out what he really wants to say to her. His words feel ruffled up inside him like cloth.
“What’s your play about anyway?” He’s thinking about the coffin.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s hard to explain.”
“I think I need a bathroom,” Dracula says. “I’m going to throw up.”
When he comes out of the bathroom, Lucinda is unsurprisingly no longer there. “Did you see her?” he asks the waiter.
The waiter looks around.
“Maybe she went to the bathroom. Is there more than one?”
“More than one bathroom? Yes,” he says, and he nods with his chin where Dracula just came from.
Dracula lowers himself into the chair. For some reason he can barely recall his own recent digression in the bathroom.
“I couldn’t help overhearing,�
�� the waiter says, in an undertone. “You were talking about The Play. Are you involved?”
“Oh.” Dracula tries to pry open his throat. “My girlfriend is. She’s in a play.” With his coffin.
The waiter’s head faintly tilts. The gas heater hisses behind them. “So,” the waiter hesitates, “you mean… it’s called…?”
“It’s called,” Dracula studies the waffle weave of the table. “Something, I can’t remember.”
“The Play?”
“Yes, the play.” Dracula’s getting a little turned around by the reverb.
“Is it now?” The man holds his neck stiffly. “I hear it’s very experimental.”
“Now?” says Dracula, wanting to check a watch he doesn’t have. “No.”
“The Play? It isn’t tonight?”
“Her play,” says Dracula, squinting. His head is starting to throb. “It’s tomorrow.”
“Her Play?” The man looks perplexed.
“Wait. Are you saying that’s what the play is called?”
The man shakes his head. Whether he’s confused now or withholding, Dracula can’t tell.
“It’s not called Her Play,” Dracula says, for extra clarification. “Or The Play. It’s something else.”
“Something Else?”
It seems like Lucinda has been gone for a while. Dracula drums his fingers on the metal, then he gets up to give the waiter room and wanders out the back patio gate and leans under a tree. She did say tomorrow. He looks up at the rectangle at the back of the restaurant where he’s imagined she has vanished. It seems like a long time has already passed. It seems like Lucinda is not coming back through that corridor of mist.
“I’m exhausted,” Lucinda says. She is right by his side.
“Did you just break up with me?” he asks.
“When? I was paying the bill.”
“When you said that about not seeing each other.”
“What?” she says. She is looking at the receipt.
What was her reason for them to stop seeing each other? Did she really mean that? Those are the questions he should ask now. “I need some pills,” he says. She nods. “I have a headache.” They are way beyond not seeing each other. It seems that phrasing would have belonged better to those nights on the train. I think we should stop seeing each other. No more round-trip rides to nowhere.
Lucinda starts walking. “I’m going home,” she says.
As Dracula walks, he thinks he can hear other people’s murmurs perforating the night nearby, and his nausea, like bubbles popping in rank puddles, festers and subsides. Lucinda has outpaced him. That’s how it mostly seems to him. The pharmacy is on the other side of the street, and Dracula detours in that direction. He looks absently for any sign of her.
He has barely stepped up onto the curb when a single yelp of a car horn warns him. “Oops,” he says. He waves, veering into the parking lot.
Another bleat and a sudden light revolves in the dash of the car. It’s a cop, pulling him over.
“What?” says Dracula, looking at the unmarked car.
The cop leans closer to the side window. “Okay. Yep,” he says.
Dracula looks down at himself.
“Come on. Let’s go,” says the cop, getting out.
“Go where? For what?” Dracula wants to be sure he isn’t misunderstanding. When he sees the divot in the chin, his eyes roll to heaven. “I should have known,” he says.
“Jaywalking,” says his neighbor.
“Excuse me? I was just looking for my girlfriend.”
“Your girlfriend was the woman who ran up to my patrol car just now?”
Dracula looks around, disoriented. He is especially disoriented now.
“What happened to your shirt?”
Dracula looks down at his shirt. “I threw up,” he says, holding the bundle out. “It was making me cold.”
The man is squinting at his shirt. Then he looks down pointedly at his pad. “Are you intoxicated?”
“Am I intoxicated?”
The man has been standing by the driver’s-side door and now he steps pertly up on the curb. He seems about to pluck at Dracula like loose trash.
“What happened?”
“I’m just going to the drugstore,” Dracula says wearily, watching the officer work his pen over the pad.
“That doesn’t answer my question.” The officer stabs a look up.
“I hit my head.” Dracula holds his head. It’s still pounding. Did he really?
The officer isn’t looking again. “We’ve found more of your bird genocide around town.”
“I didn’t do that. I told you.”
His neighbor sneers. “Of course you didn’t.”
For some reason, Dracula feels a stab of wrath at this.
“You know, I could have arrested you with probable cause that day, but I let you off,” says the officer. After a moment he rips a paper and flutters it at him. “I’m assuming it was just an innocent mistake.”
Dracula takes the citation, utterly flummoxed. What was an innocent mistake?
“I just did you a second favor. Now,” says the officer. He seems to be savoring this pause, in a showy way that Dracula is supposed to tolerate. “Under the circumstances I have to give you a ride home.” He taps his head with grim censure.
“What? But—” Dracula squints, swiveling his head to take in the drugstore. “I need—”
“You need what?”
“I’m—my—”
The officer puffs a dissatisfied breath. “Your girlfriend isn’t here. Come on. Let’s go.” He flicks his fingers as if he can’t stand the chitchat.
It’s just as well. On the way home Dracula shuts his eyes. He doesn’t know how the night slid away from him like this. It occurs to him that he’s not used to being a passenger in a car. The cold upholstery smell and the rocking motions are forcing his breath into queasy spurts. He remembers the last time he was in one of these cars was with Warren. It was someone else’s car and Warren was borrowing it. Wasn’t that tonight? They were on their way to dig up the dog.
“It’s not my fault,” he says. He remembers jarringly that he’s in a cop car.
“What’d you do?” says the officer.
“Nothing.” Dracula cuts the confession short.
The officer breathes an idle whistle, like one you might give in response to an unwanted overture. After a while, Dracula remembers something. “Did you ever get a visit from that Kent Wallaby? Knife salesman?”
“Listen,” says the cop. “Right now I am not your neighbor. I never have been and never will be your friend.”
Dracula feels a little like laughing at this. It’s more of a bothersome feeling than a bracing one. “Okay,” he says, going for flip. “Fine by me.”
For a while, they don’t speak. Dracula notices it slowly creeping up on him, the sound, like a slight break in atmosphere. Is it crying? Just like that time he was waking up. When Lucinda was outside his door. But Lucinda isn’t here. Perhaps she never was. Dracula has no idea how many nights he’s spent with some facsimile of what he thought was her, what he thought was real. He looks out the window, headlights smearing past in slow motion. Coronas of buzzing neon and brash spotlights in a sudden stretch of construction.
There’s a big hole in the ground that he knows wasn’t there two days ago. He wonders, when he gets home, if he’ll be there before Lucinda.
The Note
Sometimes somebody is there that you don’t see. Vlad told her that. Just as much, and at the same time, sometimes somebody you see is not there.
As a child, Lucinda had a lot of nightmares. The one she remembers most was about a man putting on brick-red lipstick in a bathroom mirror and then smiling at his reflection. It was a devious smile. It was imprinted on her from a scene in a television show she saw passing through her living room one night. In the show, the man left the bathroom and walked with sinister bearing across a crowded lobby, took an elevator down three floors, stepped off into a dim
corridor, lifted aside a grate in the ceiling and climbed up into the ductwork and disappeared. That’s all she remembers.
She wonders occasionally now what he was doing. She doesn’t want to pursue it. It would have been better had she not seen the inexplicable sequence. In the same way, she thinks it would be better to avoid seeing this new infringement—this one upon her established reality. The security footage. Anything that might instill the depravities of daily life into her unsteady equilibrium is best avoided. She knows she has a right to see the security footage, she knows the apartment manager is legally obligated to avail her of it, but she doesn’t want to test his willingness. She knows she didn’t do the damage. She’s allowed to carry things up and down the stairs. But it doesn’t matter. Either way it will feel like seeing a shudder of her own wickedness, a glitch in her own personal being, playing out before her. It’s always been this way. When people do inexplicable things she feels inexplicably involved, sliding in on them from some enigmatic lie that gets uttered just beyond her. What’s to say she isn’t doing more damage than she thinks? The only thing she can do is not watch. And not watch is what she will do. When she was a child, she didn’t know she had that control. She probably did watch the rest of the show. She knows she did. But it’s impossible to remember now.
Lucinda thinks of this as she stands outside her apartment door. The cameras take their slow underwater gulps. She imagines how she must look, undisturbed, private as a koi pond, with a light gray mist hanging above her. That’s not how she feels. They’re just on their way out and a shout has stopped them. Lucinda is stuck on profound pause, seized and struck dumb by the manager’s voice.
In the corner of her eye, the coffin still seesaws on Rory’s shoulder.
“Excuse me!” he says again.
They both turn.
“I’m going to have to take that.”
Lucinda glances back. What? When she looks again, the apartment manager’s lip is curled in a feisty snag.
“Who are you?” says Rory, bloating.
“I manage these apartments.” The manager’s nimbus of hair has grown to a fertile fungus. He has sprouted a short goatee.
