The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  * * *

  The execution squad fired. Cavaradossi flung himself backward into the air, slapping a little plastic bag of stage blood against his chest. Red drops spattered on musicians in the pit below.

  * * *

  At the crack of the guns the tall man grunted, and the woman in snakeskin saw that his eyes had flicked open. He stared about for a moment, then shut them again.

  For God’s sake, the wretched philistine had been sleeping!

  * * *

  The opera was over, the singers took their bows. Rosemary, high on triumph, wanted no one to miss out. Fumbling for Marwitz’s fingers in the fall of lace at his cuff, she said, “Where’s Jerry Tremain? Isn’t he going to take his bow?”

  Amid a barrage of applause they all walked forward together on the stage, joined hands upraised. There were many curtain calls. Tremain did not come. No one knew where he was.

  * * *

  The ticket gate was jammed with slowly moving people still chattering excitedly or, like Elmo who made his way among them silently with Jean, trying to hang on to memories of the music.

  Dr. Weyland was outside already, waiting by the ticket office.

  He looked sort of rumpled. Elmo spotted a clutch of burrs stuck to the professor’s trouser leg and a long scrape across the back of his hand. He heard Jean’s quick intake of breath as she noticed, too.

  “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously. “It looks as if you’ve hurt yourself.”

  Dr. Weyland put his injured hand into his pocket. “I walked a little beyond the lights during intermission,” he admitted. “I tripped in the dark.”

  “You should have come and told me,” Jean said. “I could have run you back into Santa Fe.”

  “It’s only a scrape.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry—I hope this hasn’t spoiled your enjoyment of the opera. It was such a wonderful performance tonight.” Her dismay made Elmo want to hug her.

  Dr. Weyland cleared his throat. “I assure you, I found the opera very impressive.”

  Elmo caught an undertone of strain in the professor’s voice. He was relieved, glad that he himself was not the only man to have been moved by the experience.

  Maybe being moved was good; maybe some paintings would come out of it.

  * * *

  While waiting for the parking lot to clear they picnicked on fruit and cheese laid out on the trunk of Jean’s car.

  “This is what opera old-timers do,” McGrath said. He passed around cups of wine. “Here’s a drink to get us started; I’ve lined up something special for us—a big party in town. Lots of Santa Fe people and some of the opera singers will be there. Jean, you just follow that blue Porsche over there—that’s our ride, Elmo and me—and drop the professor off at the party with us. We’ll find him someplace to bunk for tonight and bring him back down to Albuquerque with us tomorrow.”

  “No, thank you,” said Dr. Weyland, turning away the wine in favor of water. “I’m tired. I understand Miss Gray is returning to Albuquerque immediately, and I’d prefer to go with her.”

  McGrath said heartily, “But people are waiting to meet you! I already told everybody I was bringing a famous Eastern professor with me. We don’t want to disappoint folks.”

  Dr. Weyland drank. “Another time,” he said.

  “There won’t be another time,” McGrath insisted. “Not like this party. You don’t want to turn your back on old-fashioned Western hospitality.”

  Dr. Weyland deposited his empty cup in the garbage bag. He said, “Good night, Mr. McGrath,” and he got into the passenger seat of the car and shut the door.

  “Well, up yours too, fella,” said McGrath, throwing his own cup under the car. He wheeled toward the blue Porsche, snapping over his shoulder, “Come on, Elmo, folks are waiting!”

  * * *

  Driving down, Jean found her memory playing over and over the final thunderous chords after Tosca’s suicide. They were from Cavaradossi’s farewell aria in Act Three, the melody of “O dolci baci, o languide carezze.” Sweet kisses, languid caresses. Puccini’s closing musical comment, perhaps, on the destructiveness of outsized passions.

  In fact, Scarpia himself had remarked in Act Two that great love brings great misery. That was just before his paean to the superior joys of selfish appetite. Yet he had been destroyed by his lust for Tosca, surely a passion in itself? How to distinguish appetite from passion? Or did art raise appetite to the level of passion, so that they became indistinguishable?

  Had Dr. Weyland been more accessible, she would have loved to discuss this with him on the way home. She wondered whether he was lonely behind his façade.

  * * *

  Moon-flooded countryside flowed past. On either hand the rolling plateau was adrift with blunt constructions that dawn would show as mountains. Weyland did not miss his old car now, his whispering Mercedes. He was tired and glad not to be driving under that immense, glossy sky; better to be free to look out. The scenery was silver with reflected moonlight. The cool wind brought fresh night smells of earth, water, brush, cattle drowsing at the fences.

  The woman spoke, breaking his mood. She said hesitantly, “Dr. Weyland, I wonder if you realize you’ve made an enemy tonight. McGrath wanted to show you off at that party. He’ll take your refusal as a spit in the eye of his beloved Western hospitality.”

  Weyland shrugged.

  “I suppose you can afford to be offhand about it,” she said, sounding resentful. “Not all of us can. Elmo will bear the brunt of McGrath’s bruised feelings tonight. My turn will come tomorrow when they get back. McGrath can’t hurt you, so he’ll hit out at anyone within his reach. You haven’t made things any easier for me.”

  His voice crackled with irritation: “Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you, Miss Gray, that I’m not interested in your problems. My own are sufficient.”

  * * *

  Marwitz and Rosemary lay curled close, too tired for sex, too happy for sleep. They dozed on and off while shadows of moonlight inched across the flagstones outside the French doors.

  She murmured, “When the water pitcher fell I was sure Act Two would end in disaster.”

  “I would wish many more such disasters for us both,” he said. Silence fell. Too soon the season would end and they would go their separate ways.

  At length he said, “I wonder what happened to young Tremain. How unlike him, to miss his bow and a party after.”

  Rosemary yawned and wiggled closer against his warm middle. “Maybe he came later, after we left.”

  “Which we did indecently early.” He nuzzled her ear. “Surely everyone noticed.”

  Rosemary guffawed. “Anybody who hasn’t noticed by now has got to be as stupid as a clam!”

  Marwitz sat up. “Come, we have wine left—let’s go out and drink in the moonlight.”

  They wrapped themselves in the bedspread and padded outside, arguing amiably about just how stupid a clam might accurately be said to be.

  * * *

  Weyland got out of the car. He said, “Thank you for bringing me back. I regret my ill temper.” He didn’t, but neither did he care to make another unnecessary enemy.

  The woman smiled a tired smile. “Don’t give it a thought,” she said. The car with WALKING RIVER GALLERY stenciled on its side pulled away.

  When it was out of sight, Weyland walked. The pavement was lit by the late-risen moon. No dogs were left out at night on this street, so he could stroll in peace. He needed the exercise; his muscles were stiff from exertion followed by long immobility. A walk would help, and then perhaps a hot soak in his host’s old-fashioned tub.

  Walking eastward on a hill-climbing street, he watched a mountain rise ahead of him like a harshly eroded wall. Its ruggedness pleased him—an angular outline stark against the night and unmuted by vegetation. He could feel the centuries lying thick over this country—perhaps a factor contributing, along with his physical indisposition, to that headlong tumble tonight through his own personal timescape.

&n
bsp; The kill itself had been good—a purging of anxiety and weakness. Catharsis, he supposed; wasn’t that the intended effect of art?

  But the tension leading up to the kill—memory made him shudder. The opera had broken his moorings to the present and launched him into something akin to madness. Human music, human drama, vibrant human voices passionately raised, had impelled him to fly from among his despised victims as they sat listening. He feared and resented that these kine on whom he fed could stir him so deeply, all unaware of what they did; that their art could strike depths in him untouched in them.

  Where did it come from, this perilous new pattern of recognizing aspects of himself in the creations of his human livestock? Such mirrorings were obviously unintentional. His basic likeness to humanity was the explanation—a necessary likeness, since without being similar to them he could not hope to hunt them. But was he growing more like them, that their works had begun to reach him and shake him? Had he been somehow irrevocably opened to the power of their art?

  He recoiled violently from such possibilities; he wanted nothing more from them than that which he already, relentlessly, required: their blood.

  The mountain ahead of him was, he saw, to be envied; it could be wounded by these human cattle, but never perturbed.

  * * *

  The morning tour drifted out onto the concrete deck at the rear of the opera house. The guide pointed west: “On clear nights when we leave the back of the stage open, the lights of Los Alamos . . .”

  A heavyset man standing by the rampart glanced down at the road below. He leaned out, not believing what he saw, his breath gathering for a cry.

  * * *

  Elmo made a painting of dreamlike figures from the opera dancing on a sunny hilltop, towered over by a tall shaft of shadow like a wellfull of night. In memory of the young singer who had died the night of Tosca, Elmo called the painting The Angel of Death.

  Part V:

  The Last of Dr. Weyland

  “Fat times in Academe are over.” Out of Irv’s open office doorway drifted Alison’s disconsolate voice. Weyland paused in the hallway to listen.

  “Every sensible graduate student sees the handwriting on the wall,” Alison continued. “Ph.D. and all, I’ll wind up typing in an insurance office—which is probably no worse than spending my life diagramming kinship systems or arguing about how many languages are spoken in Nigeria.”

  Weyland recognized with amusement his own recent summation of the state of anthropology.

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” Irv said. “That’s not the kind of work Ed Weyland has you doing.” His chair squeaked. When he talked, Irv habitually swiveled it for emphasis. Weyland could hardly avoid noticing: Irv’s office was almost directly across the hall from his own.

  “Dr. Weyland is an original, Irv, everybody knows that,” Alison said. “He has this unique slant that makes his courses really exciting. But one mind like that does not a whole discipline make.” Indeed it does not, thought Weyland, with a cold glance down the hall at the office doors. He did not think of himself as having much in common with those intellectual knitters. “This semester of work with him is ending, and I’m not capable of creating that kind of excitement for myself. I’m not an original. So it’s back to comparing bride prices for me, and frankly, I’d rather sell matches.”

  Irv said, “Alison, we need people like you, good thinkers with good hearts, to save the discipline from the statisticians and the jargonmongers. Oh, I wish you’d been up in Tres Ritos with me yesterday listening to Carlos Hererra talk about Indian raids on his father’s farm. I know taking down oral history isn’t large conceptual work, Weyland’s style, but it’s not sterile scholasticism either. We can rescue human lives and cultures from oblivion. We can snatch history from the jaws of death.”

  On the subject of his beloved oral-history project Irv waxed lyrical. He seemed fueled by animated conversation: his own, his informants’ in the project, the conversation of the students and faculty who sought him out. Weyland had never known him to turn away anyone who wanted to discuss, debate, or just listen. How did the man find time for all that talk and his scholarly obligations too? By slighting the work, no doubt. Irv was the sort of man in whom much would be excused by those who enjoyed his warmth.

  Alison Beader was Weyland’s teaching assistant. He stepped into Irv’s office and said, “Alison, when you have a minute, we need to talk about making up the final examination.”

  She looked up guiltily—because she had taken her complaints to Irv instead of him? The exact mix and weight of human reactions were often obscure. In fact, Weyland rejoiced that she had not chosen his shoulder to wail upon. He waved aside her promise to come at once to his office. “Take your time.”

  Irv was leaning back, his arms folded behind his head, his dark, welcoming eyes turned to Weyland. Taped on the wall behind Irv was a poster of a cartoon cat sitting on a stool strumming a guitar and singing. The poster was a gift from a student last Christmas. People wanted to be close to Irv.

  Weyland did not. He had learned early that, because of a chronic health condition, Irv was always on medication. His blood was unfit to drink. However, Weyland took care to maintain a good-tempered relationship with him. To have treated Irv in the cool and autocratic manner that he treated most members of the department would have branded Weyland an obvious crank.

  He said, “Have you persuaded Alison to spend the summer prospecting for the past in the sun-crazed brains of the aged? Irv is very seductive, Alison. He tried to recruit me, but when he showed me a parchment treasure map, I fled.”

  Irv grinned. “You ought to come with me once, Ed, just for relief from books, journals, and the almighty printed word.”

  “My summer plans, thank God, are made,” Weyland said. He meant to stay in Albuquerque, write, and hunt among the hordes of tourists. “Try again next year. For the moment, the printed word commands me.” He tapped the handful of mail he had picked up at the main office.

  Irv grimaced at the lesser heap of letters in the wooden tray on his own desk. “I’d trade mail with you, but would you want to take on the informant family I worked with in Ceylon? They write that they pray every day that I’ll finance their third kid through college.”

  “I would answer as a god of wrath,” Weyland replied.

  Irv laughed. “I was afraid of that. Okay, no trades.”

  Weyland left them to finish their conversation.

  This late on a Friday everyone else was gone. Without fear of being seen he slipped the latch of Arnold “Map” Oblonsky’s door with a credit card and entered to search out a geologic map he wanted. Just as missing library books were generally found piled up in the sumptuous office of Eleanor Hellstrum, the department’s emeritus, maps were hoarded by Map Oblonsky—ostensibly to protect them from being mishandled, stolen, or lost by other less loving borrowers. Weyland enjoyed recalling the exalted guest lecturer who, not recognizing the nickname as heard in conversation, had cordially greeted the map-miser as “Professor Mapoblonsky.”

  Taking the map he wanted, Weyland returned to his own office, where he too had begun an impressive hoard. Monopolizing materials was a sign of power, and power in the hierarchies of human beings was useful to him.

  Foul stinks from the basement lab pervaded the building—doubtless somebody in a comparative-anatomy class cooking the flesh from an animal skeleton. Weyland opened his windows. Then, spreading the map on the small drafting table he had set up in one corner, he studied a spot in the Sandia foothills that seemed promising for cave exploration tomorrow.

  He would look for a meal on the drive up. Spring had brought out the hitchhikers with their packs and guitars. Random travelers, when not rank with dope or disease, made excellent prey. He had developed several strategies to bring about physical contact with such passengers.

  He heard Alison’s rueful laughter from Irv’s office. The situation with her required action. He did not want his relationship with Alison to go so far that people remarked
on how peaked she looked, as they had remarked about his previous T.A. Now that spring provided the bounty of the roads, he need no longer depend so heavily on regulars like Alison for food. Wintering here in Albuquerque, he had constructed a network to supply him when hunting was poor: colleagues, students, and social companions—those whom he could approach without causing suspicion—made good victims at short notice. But there was always risk in repetition.

  Alison was the most accessible, the most regular of the regulars, because of the personal relationship he had built on the working one. Now, happily, that connection could be ended. After several months, being her lover had become a strain.

  He riffled through his mail: Please review this book that should never have been published; please reply to this furious reply to your previous hostile review; would you be interested in contributing to our forthcoming issue on real and synthetic languages; an invitation to a craft show opening (more pots) inscribed in the curly hand of the Anthro Department head’s wife; a request for a reference from a young woman whom he would consent to endorse, since she was brilliant and hard-driving and had gathered several illustrious names to back her.

  Weyland had made his own name estimable enough so that others were eager to borrow its luster. Yet he gave them no sympathy. They hustled along trundling their little lives before them, panting and sweating to get ahead of others just like themselves with a pull from those who trundled still further ahead . . .

  Here was something welcome, a practical query from the printer about Weyland’s monograph, due out next month, on transformations of the self in dreams; an invitation to a conference in Australia next year—five days of soporific meetings and an overnight jaunt by kangaroo into the outback; a reminder of that outside lecture he was to give at the Indian School next week . . .

  He must demand more secretarial help—another mark of status. The barrage of paper and the demands on his time were impossible.

  He packed up his briefcase.

  Alison came in and shut the door. She stood there in the bright print jumper that seemed to bring out the shadows in her face, and she said in a quavering voice, “You may have noticed, Dr. Weyland, that I’ve been avoiding you lately.”