The Vampire Tapestry

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  If he didn’t hold on to his temper, he would snap the damned shank of the damned key off in his damned office lock. Who had been tampering here, jamming the mechanism like this?

  Alison came out of Irv’s room across the hall. “Oh, Dr. Weyland, come in and join us. I’ve been cheering Irv up. I have those questions for you.”

  He pocketed his keys and went to sit in the overstuffed chair in the corner of Irv’s office. Irv was at his desk, bowed forward on his elbows over a steaming Styrofoam cup. He seemed extraordinarily glum, for Irv. He said, “This isn’t coffee; it’s what drains out of the lab sinks downstairs.”

  Alison said, “The trouble with living in the sunny Southwest is that a little rainy weather throws everybody into despair.”

  Weyland scanned the page of questions she handed him. “These are good, except that I don’t want two questions on social roles in subsistence-economy cultures. I realize that this was the topic of the lectures you gave the class, but too much emphasis on it in the exam will bring the students marching on my office—with justification.”

  Alison blushed. “Oh, sure, of course, I’ll make up a replacement for one of those. We’ve been talking about my joining Irv’s summer project. I can’t hold out any longer, not after watching him yesterday morning with that lovely old woman at the pueblo. If I could get to be that easy and good with people doing work like his . . .”

  Weyland said, “This is excellent news.” Had she spent the night with Irv? Weyland hoped so. His temper was restored. He felt ready now to ask about the two women from Taos, but not in Alison’s presence. “I don’t like to interrupt, but I think you have office hours now, Alison?”

  “Oh, yes—a couple of students are coming in for notes on lectures they missed. I’d better go. Lunch, Irv?”

  “We’ll see,” Irv said. His eyes were sad and kind.

  “You look tired,” Weyland said when Alison had gone.

  “So do you,” Irv replied with a wan grin. “Anybody’d think we were dancing all day at the pueblo yesterday, not watching.” He hesitated. “Alison . . .”

  Weyland said, “Alison looks happier than she has in weeks. I’d like to ask you about Dorothea Winslow. I thought her very . . . intriguing.”

  “Ah, Dorothea. I’m glad you had a chance to talk with her. People will tell you that Dorothea Winslow is birdsy,” Irv said fondly. “And they’ll give you evidence to prove it. For instance, she once badgered the department into sending somebody out to her place up near Taos to look at a rock inscription that she thought might be in an ancient script—a sign of pre-Columbian contact, that sort of thing. Those fringe theories fascinate her. People don’t notice, though, that while she’ll pepper you with wild questions out of wide-open curiosity, she’s damned rigorous about what she’ll accept from you as a satisfactory answer.”

  “And how do you come to know her?”

  Irv grinned. “I was the one the department sent.”

  “You didn’t find her . . . ‘birdsy’?”

  “I found myself with two new friends,” Irv said. “Those women are a remarkable pair. They’ve lived in Taos together for about fourteen years in an old museum of a place: fortress walls, carved beams, hulking Spanish furniture which Dorothea hates but keeps. She says it came with the place, so what the hell.”

  “Fourteen years,” Weyland mused. “I can’t imagine tolerating anyone’s company for so long.”

  “No?” Irv looked sad again. He seemed to rouse himself to continue. “Dorothea was a painter—a good one—and Letty is a published poet. They’re part of the established art community up there.” He paused to wash down some pills with the remains of his coffee. “And then, they’re just what you’re thinking, of course; they wouldn’t dream of pretending otherwise.”

  Weyland realized that he meant the two women were lovers. Whether a person slept with partners of one sex or the other was one of those distinctions humans invented and then treated as a tablet of the law. In this case, his own purposes were served. These women lived too eccentric a life to threaten him, no matter what they might know or guess about his own—eccentricities.

  “Mind you,” Irv added, “they don’t cling. Letty gets itchy sometimes. She ups and goes, walking all over the country, hitchhiking. She writes cookbooks when she’s home, good ones. I think when she needs cash on the road she takes jobs in restaurants.”

  Weyland was frantically searching his memory for any trace of that angular figure stepping into his car. Finding none, he breathed again.

  Wistfully Irv said, “I wouldn’t mind being able to just get up and go when things start closing in.” He leaned forward again, his blue-shadowed jaw propped in his palms. “But it’s not my style. The few people I’ve known who could melt away and leave everything were like Letty—long, lean, always a little detached somehow, your quintessential drifters; rootless, in-turned, melancholy, aloof, often brilliant but seldom happy, I think. Whatever ‘happy’ is—”

  Suddenly he flushed a deep crimson right to the roots of his hair. “My God, Ed, I’m sorry. Of course I’ve heard something about your . . . your trouble back East; we all have. I wouldn’t for the world want you to think that I—that—”

  “That you feel sorry for me?” Weyland said, composed again. He was pleased with Irv’s word picture of the sort of person whom he indeed attempted to embody, more pleased still that Irv found him convincing enough to be classed in Letty’s tribe of wanderers.

  “Irv,” he said, “I’m not sensitive about that episode, or about my less than sociable nature. Don’t apologize, you haven’t hurt my feelings. Let me reply in these terms: Letty seemed to me, admittedly on the briefest of acquaintance, to be quite at ease, not melancholy, not aloof.”

  Irv studied him for several moments, the color receding from his face. He got up and paced the office, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “That’s because, for one thing, Letty’s an artist as well as a drifter. She makes art of what she sees out on the margins of society. If you can do that, you’re not so horrendously isolated and cooped up in yourself. Letty’s poetry is lone and cold enough to freeze the tears in your eyes, but it’s addressed outward, it connects.

  “And Letty always comes back home. She’s lucky enough to have Dorothea, a human lifeline. Everyone needs a lifeline, drifters most of all.”

  “Why?” said Weyland, his interest thoroughly engaged. “They may simply be chilly souls who choose solitude and distance out of a preference for their own company.”

  “I don’t think anyone chooses that kind of life,” Irv said. “I think they’re driven to it. We’re social animals, Ed. It’s too cold and lonesome for us out beyond the edges of the human herd.”

  Not for a lynx, Weyland thought; that is his place. He said, “What you began with was your own style. You speak as a man of the center, a warm man who thrives on close companionship. I think this distorts and darkens your viewpoint of life out here where I sit—or drift.” He held up his hand to forestall Irv’s demur. “A drifter’s life doesn’t seem nearly as bleak to me as it does to you from deep in the, ah, heart of the herd.”

  Irv stood at his desk, head lowered, jingling the change in his pocket. Finally he slung himself into his chair, stretching his arms above his head. “You’re a remarkable man; and you’re probably right. There’s an element of sour grapes in my attitude, too, I think.

  “The thing is, Ed, I’ve worked myself so deep into the herd that I wouldn’t know how to move out again, even if some kind of wandering away alone was the healthiest thing I could do. Other people are just too important to me—friends, colleagues, students, especially students. They’re some of my links with the future, I’m one of their links with the past. Connections like that make me know I’m alive, make me know how my life fits in with other lives.

  “If you really don’t need that kind of contact, I guess I envy you. The emotional heat in the herd can burn you up, and when I feel myself getting blistered, I can’t just cut and run. I’m af
raid I’d lose my place in the center—”

  The door opened and a student looked in. Irv glanced at the wall clock and jumped up. “Can you come back after lunch?” he called to the student, who said yes and withdrew. “Damn! I have a committee meeting in two minutes. Listen, Ed, please come talk again. We still have those transcripts to go over, and I won’t drop any more gloom on you, I promise. Dorothea phoned to say she’s stopping by today before heading home to Taos. She’s a tonic for my self-pitying moods.”

  Late that afternoon walking back toward the office after a seminar session in the Fine Arts Library, Weyland recognized Irv and Dorothea down by the duck pond. He paused by a dark pine grove to watch.

  They walked slowly along the edge of the water below, clearly deep in discussion. Irv had opened his collar and rolled up his sleeves. He kept reaching one hand up to smooth back his thinning hair. Dorothea, in jeans and a knitted poncho, stayed close to him. Now and then she touched him, tapping home her words. They walked past the gliding, honking ducks and the young people crossing the fresh, long-shadowed grass. Irv sat down on a bench near the water. Bent over, elbows on thighs, hands dangling between his knees, he talked; Weyland could tell by the way Dorothea held her head cocked slightly, gazing out across the water. She put her hand down on Irv’s slumped shoulder. They stayed that way a while, and once Irv lowered his head and rubbed at his face with both hands. Perhaps he was weeping.

  There was no one else in the park now. They got up. Irv, glancing in Weyland’s direction, said something that made Dorothea look also. Both their faces were turned toward Weyland. He thought they would come over the grass to him, and he considered moving on first. But Dorothea took Irv walking again, away from the pond, talking still, out of sight.

  Feeling oddly empty but not hungry enough to hunt, Weyland drove home to do some work.

  * * *

  Returning on foot at a late hour, he approached the anthro building over the grass, keeping to the shadows. Judging by the undisturbed condition of his desk and the jammed lock on his office door this morning, whoever had attempted entry there had failed. Perhaps they would try again tonight. He was not averse to the idea of prey coming here to him.

  But why was Irv’s old Pontiac still in the parking lot, the only car? The library was closed, so he couldn’t be working over there. His window was not lit.

  Weyland let himself into the building, intending to wait in his own office for whoever might come. Across the hallway, the door was open to Irv’s dark room. On impulse, Weyland entered.

  His eyes adjusted at once to the darkness and the glow from the corridor. Irv was sitting with his swivel chair turned away from the desk so that he leaned on the sill of the open window, his head down on his folded arms. He made no sound of breathing. Weyland approached, leaned nearer, closer than he would ever have come to the man in life unless for blood. Irv’s outreaching energy, which Weyland had felt as intrusive pressure, no longer held him off.

  He looked into Irv’s face. The face was vacant, eyes shut mouth loose, cheeks slack and sunken.

  In the wastebasket among the crumpled plastic cups was a small medicine bottle. Weyland did not touch it. He could see that the label had been scraped off. Irv had made sure that no one, coming upon him too soon, could telephone the Poison Control Center for an antidote, and he had sat dying in the dark to avoid so late a light attracting the campus police.

  Weyland stood over him, hands in pockets to keep from inadvertently touching anything. On the blotter lay a stack of evaluation forms under a typed note that ran: “There will be no final exam in Ethnography 206. These evaluations are based on each student’s entire output of class work, tests, and assignments so far during the term.”

  Beside this pile was a yellow legal pad. Weyland’s name was written across the top of the first page in Irv’s quick, strong script, followed by two sentences: “Try starting with these—the asterisks indicate materials on Indians and Spanish raiding each other for slaves. Hope this points in the direction of what you’re looking for.” Then came a column of some fifteen numbers, identifying transcripts in the oral-history series, and his signature. Below this, Irv had added a single line: “I am very tired of being strong.”

  Weyland sat down in the corner chair. He looked across the room at Irv’s motionless torso in the rectangle of the window frame. Here was Irv at his last resort, despite his students’ needs, despite Alison’s cheer, despite Dorothea. Each little life had disasters in corresponding scale waiting to erupt from its secret depths.

  No deep wisdom was required for Weyland to guess that Irv was dead as a consequence of his intensely emotional life at the center of the herd. He had died true to the logic of his nature, pressed past bearing by the strength of his own feelings—though what the feelings had been about might never be known. Was it what they called a “broken heart”? In any case, this life and death seemed proper for Irv and the very archetype of the brief, incandescent human span.

  My inept picklock may arrive, Weyland thought, and if he finds me here I’ll be mired in endless complications and explanations.

  Yet he sat looking at Irv’s corpse, and he put a riddle in his mind to the dead man: Now that you do not seek after me, why do I stay for you?

  A fly buzzed in the room. Weyland left.

  * * *

  In the anthro parking lot next day he recognized the tall woman sitting in the pickup truck as Letty, so he was not entirely surprised to find Dorothea Winslow waiting for him at his office.

  “Miss Winslow, may I—”

  “I want to talk to you,” she said. She entered behind him and left the door wide open.

  He said, “May I express my sympathy—I know Irv was a close friend of yours.”

  “But not of yours?” She stood across the room from him.

  “We were colleagues, little more.”

  “People say you two sometimes walked to work together.”

  “Yes, sometimes,” he said.

  “He talked to you.”

  Weyland was tired. Class today had proven more strenuous than he had foreseen. This on top of a harrowing session of questions with the police in the morning had worn his temper thin. He said irritably, “He talked to everyone.”

  “He must have said something to you,” she persisted.

  “You mean about killing himself? If he had, I would naturally have taken some action, Miss Winslow—I’d have telephoned you, for instance.” He wanted to sit, but the woman had so clearly gathered herself for confrontation that he felt more secure facing her on his feet. Why was she angry with him? “Irv and I had a professional relationship, amiable but not close. He had, as you know, many good friends, many demands on his personal time, and I am myself a busy man.”

  She pointed out the open doorway. “His office is right there, right across the hall. You saw him every day, he saw you.”

  He set down the books he was carrying and spread his hands on the surface of the desk, bracing himself across from her. “Miss Winslow, what do you want?”

  “I want to know why it happened, how he came to do such a desperate thing.”

  He shook his head. “We had no intimate conversation. If he confided in anyone, it was in people like yourself, people he was fond of.”

  She turned away from him slightly, her hot gaze fixed on empty space. “To people like me, he said that he had some bad trouble but that it would pass, he would handle it, he had the problem under some kind of control.” Again the flashing glare at him, this time from reddened eyes. “He was used to us coming to him for comfort and encouragement, not the other way around. He turned to you.”

  “No,” he said. She blames me, he thought, because she thinks Irv said something that should have warned me of what he intended. He wished she would go away.

  “Damn it,” she said with open rage and pain, “he wrote his suicide note to you! Nothing to anyone else, not a word, not a call, except to you. That line about being strong—I saw it; the police showed m
e the note when they talked to me.”

  He thought, She’s jealous. “Please, Miss Winslow—sit down, listen to me. I can’t help you. If you saw the note, you know that it was actually about business, some source materials we’d been discussing. The rest—I don’t know why he added that sentence.”

  “He added it because he had warm feelings for you,” she said. “He turned to you for the support one man should be able to give another. But you’re not a man, and you gave nothing. You were no goddamn good to him.”

  The hallway was empty. He could stride over and slam the door shut, and then—

  No, not her death on top of another death, and with her friend waiting for her outside! Ignore what she said. Keep calm. Give her something, divert her, placate her. He said, “Irv did make overtures of friendship to me. I’m afraid I wasn’t very responsive. He told me no secrets, I assure you.”

  “You wouldn’t know if he had,” she retorted. “But I might, if I knew what he said to you. Tell me about your last conversation with him. Tell me what he said.”

  She would not be fobbed off with a two-sentence summary, repeated in endless variations, as the police had been. Irv standing with lowered head, furrowed brow, lower lip thrust out as he thought, came clearly to mind, but his words were gone, hidden in a blank mental silence. Weyland felt threatened, somehow, by his own inability to remember.

  “So many questions have already been asked,” he said. “I’m worn out with questions, Miss Winslow; my powers of recall are exhausted. The man is dead. What good—”

  “Tell me!”

  He straightened up. “This is very painful and quite useless. I must ask you to leave now. Perhaps another time, when the shock has diminished—”