The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “What would you have done if I’d brought somebody with me?” she said unsteadily. “Changed yourself into a bat and flown away?”

  “Two things I must have from you,” he said. “One is the bill of health that we spoke of when we began, though not, after all, for Cayslin College. I’ve made other plans. The story of my disappearance has of course filtered out along the academic grapevine so that even two thousand miles from here people will want evidence of my mental soundness. Your evidence. I would type it myself and forge your signature, but I want your authentic tone and language. Please prepare a letter to the desired effect, addressed to these people.”

  He drew something white from an inside pocket and held it out. She advanced and took the envelope from his extended hand. It was from the Western anthropology department that Doug had mentioned at lunch.

  “Why not Cayslin?” she said. “They want you there.”

  “Have you forgotten your own suggestion that I find another job? That was a good idea after all. Your reference will serve me best out there—with a copy for my personnel file at Cayslin, naturally.”

  She put her purse down on the seat of a chair and crossed her arms. She felt reckless—the effect of stress and weariness, she thought, but it was an exciting feeling.

  “The receptionist at the office does this sort of thing for me,” she said.

  He pointed. “I’ve been in your study. You have a typewriter there, you have stationery with your letterhead, you have carbon paper.”

  “What was the second thing you wanted?”

  “Your notes on my case.”

  “Also at the—”

  “You know that I’ve already searched both your work places, and the very circumspect jottings in your file on me are not what I mean. Others must exist: more detailed.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “How could you resist?” He mocked her. “You have encountered nothing like me in your entire professional life, and never shall again. Perhaps you hope to produce an article someday, even a book—a memoir of something impossible that happened to you one summer. You’re an ambitious woman, Dr. Landauer.”

  Floria squeezed her crossed arms tighter against herself to quell her shivering. “This is all just supposition,” she said.

  He took folded papers from his pocket: some of her thrown-aside notes on him, salvaged from the wastebasket. “I found these. I think there must be more. Whatever there is, give it to me, please.”

  “And if I refuse, what will you do? Beat me up the way you beat up Kenny?”

  Weyland said calmly, “I told you he should stop following me. This is serious now. There are pursuers who intend me ill—my former captors, of whom I told you. Who do you think I keep watch for? No records concerning me must fall into their hands. Don’t bother protesting to me your devotion to confidentiality. There is a man named Alan Reese who would take what he wants and be damned to your professional ethics. So I must destroy all evidence you have about me before I leave the city.”

  Floria turned away and sat down by the coffee table, trying to think beyond her fear. She breathed deeply against the fright trembling in her chest.

  “I see,” he said dryly, “that you won’t give me the notes; you don’t trust me to take them and go. You see some danger.”

  “All right, a bargain,” she said. “I’ll give you whatever I have on your case if in return you promise to go straight out to your new job and keep away from Kenny and my offices and anybody connected with me—”

  He was smiling slightly as he rose from the seat and stepped soft-footed toward her over the rug. “Bargains, promises, negotiations—all foolish, Dr. Landauer. I want what I came for.”

  She looked up at him. “But then how can I trust you at all? As soon as I give you what you want—”

  “What is it that makes you afraid—that you can’t render me harmless to you? What a curious concern you show suddenly for your own life and the lives of those around you! You are the one who led me to take chances in our work together—to explore the frightful risks of self-revelation. Didn’t you see in the air between us the brilliant shimmer of those hazards? I thought your business was not smoothing the world over but adventuring into it, discovering its true nature, and closing valiantly with everything jagged, cruel, and deadly.”

  In the midst of her terror the inner choreographer awoke and stretched. Floria rose to face the vampire.

  “All right, Weyland, no bargains. I’ll give you freely what you want.” Of course she couldn’t make herself safe from him—or make Kenny or Lucille or Deb or Doug safe—any more than she could protect Jane Fennerman from the common dangers of life. Like Weyland, some dangers were too strong to bind or banish. “My notes are in the workroom—come on, I’ll show you. As for the letter you need, I’ll type it right now and you can take it away with you.”

  She sat at the typewriter arranging paper, carbon sheets, and white-out, and feeling the force of his presence. Only a few feet away, just at the margin of the light from the gooseneck lamp by which she worked, he leaned against the edge of the long table that was twin to the table in her office. Open in his large hands was the notebook she had given him from the table drawer. When he moved his head over the notebook’s pages, his glasses glinted.

  She typed the heading and the date. How surprising, she thought, to find that she had regained her nerve here, and now. When you dance as the inner choreographer directs, you act without thinking, not in command of events but in harmony with them. You yield control, accepting the chance that a mistake might be part of the design. The inner choreographer is always right but often dangerous: giving up control means accepting the possibility of death. What I feared I have pursued right here to this moment in this room.

  A sheet of paper fell out of the notebook. Weyland stooped and caught it up, glanced at it. “You had training in art?” Must be a sketch.

  “I thought once I might be an artist,” she said.

  “What you chose to do instead is better,” he said. “This making of pictures, plays, all art, is pathetic. The world teems with creation, most of it unnoticed by your kind just as most of the deaths are unnoticed. What can be the point of adding yet another tiny gesture? Even you, these notes—for what, a moment’s celebrity?”

  “You tried it yourself,” Floria said. “The book you edited, Notes on a Vanished People.” She typed: “ . . . temporary dislocation resulting from a severe personal shock . . .”

  “That was professional necessity, not creation,” he said in the tone of a lecturer irritated by a question from the audience. With disdain he tossed the drawing on the table. “Remember, I don’t share your impulse toward artistic gesture—your absurd frills—”

  She looked up sharply. “The ballet, Weyland. Don’t lie.” She typed: “ . . . exhibits a powerful drive toward inner balance and wholeness in a difficult life situation. The steadying influence of an extraordinary basic integrity . . .”

  He set the notebook aside. “My feeling for ballet is clearly some sort of aberration. Do you sigh to hear a cow calling in a pasture?”

  “There are those who have wept to hear whales singing in the ocean.”

  He was silent, his eyes averted.

  “This is finished,” she said. “Do you want to read it?”

  He took the letter. “Good,” he said at length. “Sign it, please. And type an envelope for it.” He stood closer, but out of arm’s reach, while she complied. “You seem less frightened.”

  “I’m terrified but not paralyzed,” she said and laughed, but the laugh came out a gasp.

  “Fear is useful. It has kept you at your best throughout our association. Have you a stamp?”

  Then there was nothing to do but take a deep breath, turn off the gooseneck lamp, and follow him back into the living room. “What now, Weyland?” she said softly. “A carefully arranged suicide so that I have no chance to retract what’s in that letter or to reconstruct my notes?”

  At
the window again, always on watch at the window, he said, “Your doorman was sleeping in the lobby. He didn’t see me enter the building. Once inside, I used the stairs, of course. The suicide rate among therapists is notoriously high. I looked it up.”

  “You have everything all planned?”

  The window was open. He reached out and touched the metal grille that guarded it. One end of the grille swung creaking outward into the night air, like a gate opening. She visualized him sitting there waiting for her to come home, his powerful fingers patiently working the bolts at that side of the grille loose from the brick-and-mortar window frame. The hair lifted on the back of her neck.

  He turned toward her again. She could see the end of the letter she had given him sticking palely out of his jacket pocket.

  “Floria,” he said meditatively. “An unusual name—is it after the heroine of Sardou’s Tosca. At the end, doesn’t she throw herself to her death from a high castle wall? People are careless about the names they give their children. I will not drink from you—I hunted today, and I fed. Still, to leave you living . . . is too dangerous.”

  A fire engine tore past below, siren screaming. When it had gone Floria said, “Listen, Weyland, you said it yourself: I can’t make myself safe from you—I’m not strong enough to shove you out the window instead of being shoved out myself. Must you make yourself safe from me? Let me say this to you, without promises, demands, or pleadings: I will not go back on what I wrote in that letter. I will not try to re-create my notes. I mean it. Be content with that.”

  “You tempt me to it,” he murmured after a moment, “to go from here with you still alive behind me for the remainder of your little life—to leave woven into Dr. Landauer’s quick mind those threads of my own life that I pulled for her . . . I want to be able sometimes to think of you thinking of me. But the risk is very great.”

  “Sometimes it’s right to let the dangers live, to give them their place,” she urged. “Didn’t you tell me yourself a little while ago how risk makes us more heroic?”

  He looked amused. “Are you instructing me in the virtues of danger? You are brave enough to know something, perhaps, about that, but I have studied danger all my life.”

  “A long, long life with more to come,” she said, desperate to make him understand and believe her. “Not mine to jeopardize. There’s no torch-brandishing peasant here; we left that behind long ago. Remember when you spoke for me? You said, ‘For love of wonder.’ That was true.”

  He leaned to turn off the lamp near the window. She thought that he had made up his mind, and that when he straightened it would be to spring.

  But instead of terror locking her limbs, from the inward choreographer came a rush of warmth and energy into her muscles and an impulse to turn toward him. Out of a harmony of desires she said swiftly, “Weyland, come to bed with me.”

  She saw his shoulders stiffen against the dim square of the window, his head lift in scorn. “You know I can’t be bribed that way,” he said contemptuously. “What are you up to? Are you one of those who come into heat at the sight of an upraised fist?”

  “My life hasn’t twisted me that badly, thank God,” she retorted. “And if you’ve known all along how scared I’ve been, you must have sensed my attraction to you too, so you know it goes back to—very early in our work. But we’re not at work now, and I’ve given up being ‘up to’ anything. My feeling is real—not a bribe, or a ploy, or a kink. No ‘love me now, kill me later,’ nothing like that. Understand me, Weyland: if death is your answer, then let’s get right to it—come ahead and try.”

  Her mouth was dry as paper. He said nothing and made no move; she pressed on. “But if you can let me go, if we can simply part company here, then this is how I would like to mark the ending of our time together. This is the completion I want. Surely you feel something, too—curiosity at least?”

  “Granted, your emphasis on the expressiveness of the body has instructed me,” he admitted, and then he added lightly, “Isn’t it extremely unprofessional to proposition a client?”

  “Extremely, and I never do; but this, now, feels right. For you to indulge in courtship that doesn’t end in a meal would be unprofessional, too, but how would it feel to indulge anyway—this once? Since we started, you’ve pushed me light-years beyond my profession. Now I want to travel all the way with you, Weyland. Let’s be unprofessional together.”

  She turned and went into the bedroom, leaving the lights off. There was a reflected light, cool and diffuse, from the glowing night air of the great city. She sat down on the bed and kicked off her shoes. When she looked up, he was in the doorway.

  Hesitantly, he halted a few feet from her in the dimness, then came and sat beside her. He would have lain down in his clothes, but she said quietly, “You can undress. The front door’s locked and there isn’t anyone here but us. You won’t have to leap up and flee for your life.”

  He stood again and began to take off his clothes, which he draped neatly over a chair. He said, “Suppose I am fertile with you; could you conceive?”

  By her own choice any such possibility had been closed off after Deb. She said, “No,” and that seemed to satisfy him.

  She tossed her own clothes onto the dresser.

  He sat down next to her again, his body silvery in the reflected light and smooth, lean as a whippet and as roped with muscle. His cool thigh pressed against her own fuller, warmer one as he leaned across her and carefully deposited his glasses on the bed table. Then he turned toward her, and she could just make out two puckerings of tissue on his skin: bullet scars, she thought, shivering.

  He said, “But why do I wish to do this?”

  “Do you?” She had to hold herself back from touching him.

  “Yes.” He stared at her. “How did you grow so real? The more I spoke to you of myself, the more real you became.”

  “No more speaking, Weyland,” she said gently. “This is body work.”

  He lay back on the bed.

  She wasn’t afraid to take the lead. At the very least she could do for him as well as he did for himself, and at the most, much better. Her own skin was darker than his, a shadowy contrast where she browsed over his body with her hands. Along the contours of his ribs she felt knotted places, hollows—old healings, the tracks of time. The tension of his muscles under her touch and the sharp sound of his breathing stirred her. She lived the fantasy of sex with an utter stranger; there was no one in the world so much a stranger as he. Yet there was no one who knew him as well as she did, either. If he was unique, so was she, and so was their confluence here.

  The vividness of the moment inflamed her. His body responded. His penis stirred, warmed, and thickened in her hand. He turned on his hip so that they lay facing each other, he on his right side, she on her left. When she moved to kiss him he swiftly averted his face: of course—to him, the mouth was for feeding. She touched her fingers to his lips, signifying her comprehension.

  He offered no caresses but closed his arms around her, his hands cradling the back of her head and neck. His shadowed face, deep-hollowed under brow and cheekbone, was very close to hers. From between the parted lips that she must not kiss his quick breath came, roughened by groans of pleasure. At length he pressed his head against hers, inhaling deeply; taking her scent, she thought, from her hair and skin.

  He entered her, hesitant at first, probing slowly and tentatively. She found this searching motion intensely sensuous, and clinging to him all along his sinewy length she rocked with him through two long, swelling waves of sweetness. Still half submerged, she felt him strain tight against her, she heard him gasp through his clenched teeth.

  Panting, they subsided and lay loosely interlocked. His head was tilted back; his eyes were closed. She had no desire to stroke him or to speak with him, only to rest spent against his body and absorb the sounds of his breathing, her breathing.

  He did not lie long to hold or be held. Without a word he disengaged his body from hers and got up. He moved
quietly about the bedroom, gathering his clothing, his shoes, the drawings, the notes from the workroom. He dressed without lights. She listened in silence from the center of a deep repose.

  There was no leave-taking. His tall figure passed and repassed the dark rectangle of the doorway, and then he was gone. The latch on the front door clicked shut.

  Floria thought of getting up to secure the deadbolt. Instead she turned on her stomach and slept.

  * * *

  She woke as she remembered coming out of sleep as a youngster—peppy and clearheaded.

  “Hilda, let’s give the police a call about that break-in. If anything ever does come of it, I want to be on record as having reported it. You can tell them we don’t have any idea who did it or why. And please make a photocopy of this letter carbon to send to Doug Sharpe up at Cayslin. Then you can put the carbon into Weyland’s file and close it.”

  Hilda sighed. “Well, he was too old anyway.”

  He wasn’t, my dear, but never mind.

  In her office Floria picked up the morning’s mail from her table. Her glance strayed to the window where Weyland had so often stood. God, she was going to miss him; and God, how good it was to be restored to plain working days.

  Only not yet. Don’t let the phone ring, don’t let the world push in here now. She needed to sit alone for a little and let her mind sort through the images left from . . . from the pas de deux with Weyland. It’s the notorious morning after, old dear, she told herself; just where have I been dancing, anyway?

  In a clearing in the enchanted forest with the unicorn, of course, but not the way the old legends have it. According to them, hunters set a virgin to attract the unicorn by her chastity so they can catch and kill him. My unicorn was the chaste one, come to think of it, and this lady meant no treachery. No, Weyland and I met hidden from the hunt, to celebrate a private mystery of our own . . . .

  Your mind grappled with my mind, my dark leg over your silver one, unlike closing with unlike across whatever likeness may be found: your memory pressing on my thoughts, my words drawing out your words in which you may recognize your life, my smooth palm gliding down your smooth flank . . .