Eve shook her head. She just wanted to see Tom, who she’d imagined had met with an accident and whom she’d mourned for years in a bitter, misshapen way. She came closer to the bed and put out a hand to test the temperature of Bad’s cheek. It was cool and clammy.
“I didn’t bite him,” Dawn said. “He’s only hungover.”
Eve gave her sister a sharp look and went out.
Dawn was shaking Bad. He tried to push her away, but she persisted. He made an effort to wake up enough to tell her to leave him alone. That was hard; it was like climbing a giant sand dune.
Dawn was saying that she had to leave him. They were all going to Avignon, and she had to feed herself and Ila tonight if she’d be traveling most of the following night. Eve had agreed to meet Tom Hilxen in Avignon. Eve needed to learn what Tom knew about Martine’s death.
Dawn said, “Bad, before we drag you off to Avignon, and involve you, there’s something you should know. About Tom Hilxen.”
Dawn told Bad that when she’d first met him in Le Lien Vert she’d been with Tom and that she and Tom had quarreled.
Tom had asked Dawn to a party. She’d understood him. Had understood what he meant by “party.” There were things she and Tom did together of which Martine and Ila would not approve. Tom thought it false to have changed and yet find himself living by the same rules he’d been obliged to follow in his former life. Obliged by the practical rules of kindness and civil behavior. Tom argued that he’d been armed with a performance-enhancing drug and he should be allowed to enjoy it. To Tom, enjoying it meant making conquests, having a variety of bodies in ecstasy under him. It was simply a matter of taste, he said, how one treated one’s donors. He liked each donor’s astonishment better than their subsequent slavish anticipation.
Dawn had gathered from things her sister said that Tom was perhaps a little disappointing as a lover. That what Tom had was all up front—so to speak. He was attractive and seductive but not sensitive or imaginative. Tom’s bite more than made up for the discrepancy between his image and performance, but his habits as a lover had already hardened, and it was his habit to view the desire of others as a demand, an imposition.
Tom began to hold “parties.” He’d pick up whole groups of young vacationers and would throw money about—Eve’s money. He liked to have Dawn present to bite him, to jack him up. At first Dawn enjoyed the parties. They were more comfortable and leisurely than her nightclub hunting yet hadn’t any of the complications of an attachment to one person.
“There always were people I’d return to, people I’d toy with taking and keeping. People I’d idly size up—proto-candidates, really. I wanted to fall in love, so would leave them reluctantly. I’d endanger their health, then feel bad about it.”
Tom’s parties had helped for a time. At the parties Dawn hadn’t imagined she’d fall in love, yet they weren’t like the nightclubs, the homeless men—bleak, purely hungry encounters. Tom’s parties were happy and nutritious.
Tom helped Dawn see certain things. He liked to call Martine a “virtual flagellant.” He said that Martine wanted to deny them all their simple sovereign pleasures. Martine was teaching Ila to mortify his flesh, Tom said, when it was clear from Ila’s stories—when Ila had enough blood in him to tell them—that Ila and Martine had once been lovers. “Remember how he told us that he’d hide under the dry earth in the olive groves waiting for Martine to bring soldiers she’d lured, as many as they could manage. In ’45 and after the war but before demobilization. Remember him talking about Martine, her body, like an idol covered in libations, moonlight glistening on the sticky rivulets of whiskey on her throat.” It was clear, Tom said, that Ila had loved Martine with a passion and that he’d now joined her in a mutual pact of self-denial. Martine had rejected Ila, had found him and herself horrible, so that he, too, had rejected himself and his natural needs, and was being mummified alive by self-starvation.
It was all true, Dawn told Bad. Everything Tom said was true. But his rejection of Martine’s way gave him too much license. If Martine hated herself, she did, nevertheless, love others. Tom loved himself and never really cared for others. Before he’d changed he was a charming and ambitious man—people, those who were somehow useful to him, were part of the inner landscape of his ego. People never ceased to surprise him, because he seldom bothered to find out what they were thinking.
Bad asked Dawn what Tom did, what happened. How did Tom finally show himself?
After Tom’s parties, Dawn said, there was often someone a little too cold and blue about the mouth. She would tell Tom, “We must be more careful!” Tom would say yes, but it was probably just a matter of practice, of experience. He joked—perhaps they should conduct a physical on each potential partygoer. Perhaps he should invest in a stethoscope.
That day, July ’92, in the cave, near the exit to the Pilgrim’s Way, Tom had a party, to which Dawn went along. The other partygoers were speeding, drunk, off their heads, and happy. But Dawn saw Tom go out after a time, and she followed him to make sure he was all right and to see that he didn’t take a wrong turning and get lost—Tom didn’t know the cave system as well as she did. She saw him purging, sticking his fingers down his throat in order to vomit. Then she watched him go back to a young woman to whom he was paying particular attention. Tom sometimes used Valium derivatives as well as venom—“for different results” he’d say, “and to practice for when I’m infectious and will have to.” The woman to whom he was being particularly attentive was drunk, dazed, and compliant. He had bitten her, so she was amorous, too, but unable to please herself efficiently or to follow the action. Tom had a cannula in her, and after he’d purged he returned to her and his drinking straw. Dawn saw that Tom had made these arrangements in order to get far enough from her body to watch her face as the blood left her.
Tom liked to watch the life leaving people, Dawn realized. “I simply reacted,” Dawn said. “In disgust. I didn’t want to hear him put up an argument. I picked up a fist-sized stone and shoved it in his mouth. I was stronger than him then, as he was still very young. I dislocated his jaw and the stone stuck there. The partygoers took off, uphill luckily, and I fled. I ran till I was sure I’d lost him. I found what I thought would be another way out—through the caverns with waterfalls. I wanted to get to Ila first to explain—as if he were our parent. As if Tom and I were squabbling siblings. But, as it was, I didn’t have to explain, because Tom disappeared. Ila and Martine thought he’d been caught out and was dead. I kept insisting that we’d see him again—because only I knew he’d had reason to leave.”
“And reason to hate you,” Bad said.
“Yes. Tom’s dangerous. You should know that before you go to meet him.”
Chapter 16
AVIGNON
Bad slept through most of the train journey. Sometimes he woke because the train made a noise like a carbide lamp lighting, a soft g’dunk. He’d open his eyes expecting a cave’s walls, somewhere familiar, Nettlebed or Profanity or The Birthday Series. Instead he’d see, through the carriage window, a plowed field, with big geometrical clods of glossy red earth; and, after St. Raphael, a great reddish escarpment, long, layered, tilted, a mountain going down into the flat countryside like a ship sinking, stern up.
Once Bad woke as color came through his closed lids. The cave of his skull filled with yellow. He opened his eyes and looked at the field of sunflowers.
Beside him Eve said, “If you stay with Dawn you’ll be giving that up.”
• • •
When they reached Avignon and got out of the train Bad asked Eve what was the date? The day?
She told him.
It was the second week of July and he was in Avignon, in the lull before the festival, as his girlfriend had planned. He and Gabrielle had a room booked at a two-star hotel.
Bad steered Eve toward the city gates. “I’m sure it’s near the station. Le Magnan.”
“It’ll be on the street beyond this gate,” Eve said. “Portal Mag
nanen.”
“I’m going to take my room. I won’t lose my deposit. That’s a first, on this trip.”
Eve tucked her arm in his and went along with him. Bad knew she was worried about him and cheered by signs of decision and forward thinking.
Le Magnan was on the corner of two streets, wide and narrow. Eve took a room on the quiet side, overlooking its central courtyard, where breakfast was long cleared away and plastic chairs were tilted against plastic tables, between two fig trees and a pink oleander.
Bad’s room was one floor above the narrow street and the cacophonous reverberations of a scooter, another scooter, then a group of young men shouting at one another in Arabic. Bad’s bathroom was poorly ventilated, the shower stall slow to drain. Bad took a long shower, finished it standing up to his ankles in water. When he moved, water slopped on the floor. He realized that he’d showered in the dark—so put on the light to shave. He got into bed. His mattress was covered in plastic, upon which the sheets had an unreliable purchase. Before long Bad had bulldozed the sheet, ripple by ripple, across the bed and onto the floor. He got out and lay on the nylon bedcover, which stayed still by virtue of its weight. He slept for eight hours. Dawn woke him by licking him, then lying on him, her body heavy and greasy, her hands and mouth impatient and avid. She had come from the street, through the open window.
She didn’t bite him. But she asked him to put his tongue out and touched its tip with the tip of her own tongue, pushed tip to tip in time with his pulsing. But Bad was exhausted and couldn’t stay hard, so Dawn positioned herself near him, groin to groin and not quite touching, till he grew toward the sustaining moisture and was rewarded. They slid over each other. He could see her, skin glistening, sex wholly wet in the diffuse streetlight that came through the open window.
Later a thunderstorm arrived and rolled across the city. There were sharp cracks over the roofs of the nearby streets. The hairs in Bad’s nostrils prickled. Then it rained; drops trickled, then splattered, then roared. After five minutes it was over; the eaves dripped onto the reverberating street with a sound like people standing below Bad’s window and clapping out of sync.
Bad slept fitfully and woke finally, fully, feeling as though he were coasting into recovery from the fever of a flu. He was tired but not groggy. For two nights now Dawn had abstained from biting him.
Bad felt better but found that, overnight, he had adhered to the bed. His lower legs were on the bare plastic mattress protector but were less gluey than the rest of him.
Dawn was hot and damp, her arms plaited with his. He untangled himself, bare skin parting with the sound a piece of bread makes when picked up after falling honey-side-down on a smooth floor. The nylon cover was stuck to Bad, and the tacky agent had dried. Bad parted from the bedding with a rasping sound. His body hair pricked and stirred. The shutters were closed and Bad switched on the light to get dressed. He saw the patches of watery blood dried on the bedcover and on his body, wiped and troweled into a textured wash by Dawn’s touches. Bloody fingerprints circled his nipples, and when he drew a sharp breath they cracked, crazed, and flaked, so that he felt her touch again, a residual caress.
Bad put on the bedside lamp and saw that his lover’s chest was covered in joined pinpricks of sweat, droplets of blood-tinged moisture. Her eyes sat shallow in their sockets, fine lines wholly smoothed away. Her lips were fat, their skin as fine as the membrane formed on warmed milk. Dawn lay with her face turned from the fastened shutters. Bad pinched the lobe of her exposed ear, tested it for ripeness. It was rosy and jutting, and he could feel her pulse moving it, making it shrink and tumesce infinitesimally with each beat of her heart.
This was Dawn gorged. Gorged and giving, for her throat was encircled with a lacy necklace of bloody perforations. She had been enjoyed by Ila, in an intimate, unbusinesslike way, and Bad knew that when she came in the night before and coupled with him and made him come and come without biting him, her sweat as thick and oily as the slick of clay, she was jacked up on Ila’s mouth, on his hundred-proof, contaminating venom.
Bad went and showered, stood shivering in the warm water, his head resting against the wall of the stall.
Eve had left a note for Bad at the desk. He collected it as he went past and left his key.
I didn’t really expect to see you at breakfast, but we must get together this afternoon to “walk the course,” so to speak, before the event. Ila and Dawn won’t have time to find bolt-holes before the meeting. Tom has been very careful not to allow for that, so we must cover for them. I’ll be in again at two, and will expect to see you. Eve.
Bad had a late breakfast, or an early lunch, and dragged himself about the sights. He was too tired to take much in or had lost the use of the senses on which the tourist most depends in order to know which way to point his camera. Bad wasn’t carrying his camera. He had forgotten he owned one, forgotten he meant to collect memories—photos and souvenirs—reminders, proof.
It was hot, and Bad kept clear of the terraced piazza before the Palace of the Popes. The piazza was paved with halved oval stones, all of a similar size, and these brown cobbles gave out more heat than the sandstone of the side streets, some of which had surfaces so polished by foot traffic they were like indoor flooring.
Bad wandered over the remaining arches of the bridge, an audio guide pressed to one ear. He peered into the Chapel of St. Nicolas and tried to find a sinker—something seriously impressive—to carry his attention to the depths of the day. Everything was foreign—of course—and the antiquities before which he paused, shoulders rounded and upper back bowed and trembling, didn’t bring him to his senses, to themselves. Everything was foreign; even the English in his ear was a well-modulated nonsense. Wind skimmed along that stretch of the Rhône and idly tried to sweep all the tourists off the bridge. Children shrieked, their voices vibrating like fluttering ribbons.
The wind was in the town, too, making clangs and thrums in the scaffolding of stages. The trees were letting go, and some doorways looked like old graves stuffed full of brown blown leaves. Nothing showed signs of last night’s rain.
It occurred to Bad that this was the mistral in which he had once been so interested. It occurred to Bad that his legs ached and had begun to tremble.
He went back to his hotel.
It was 1:00 P.M. The desk was empty but for a cat, which saw Bad coming and flipped over, to snake its head crown-down along the counter. Bad made kissing noises and scratched its chin. The hotel proprietor heard him and darted out from behind a curtain. The man seemed pleased to see Bad. He had some good news. Bad concentrated to follow him. He was told that his girlfriend had arrived—as planned—and had checked in. The proprietor had given her Bad’s room key, so Bad should—and the man balled his fist and rapped eagerly on the air.
Bad was baffled. He went up to his room, left the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. The sun was on the balcony above the enclosed courtyard. The carpet on the balcony was soggy where someone had watered the begonias in a hanging pot. The sunlight coming under the eaves was knee-high on the door, and the door was unlocked. Bad cracked it open quickly and slipped inside. Dawn would be hammered to her bed by the sun. Bad didn’t turn on the light. He wanted to touch her without having to see her varnished, blood-plump body. He crossed the few feet between the door and bed, put his hand down, and found Dawn. The air in the room smelled meaty, ferrous, of animal fermentation. There was another smell underlying Dawn’s red perspiration, something fresh and familiar to Bad. And he wondered whether Ila had found his way into the room somehow, despite the daylight.
Bad moved around the bed, his hands following Dawn’s curves—she gave a growling sigh—and his feet encountered another fleshy solidity. He stooped and touched. Someone was lying on the floor beside the bed.
As Bad bent over the person he identified her, recognized the soft, solid body, and the scent, as belonging to Gabrielle.
Bad recoiled. He blundered back across the room and turned on the light.
Gabrielle was pale and limp. She lay with her knees splayed, her dress open to the waist, and her head forced back and jammed to the eyebrows under the sill of a bedside cabinet.
Bad crawled across the room, put her ankles together, and pulled her free. She had a deep pink crease on her forehead, and she had a patch of dark perforations at the top of one big, soft breast, marks as discrete and black as the holes in a salt-shaker. The skin was bruised there, too, from the speedy force of Dawn’s penetration.
Gabrielle’s breath caught and her palate vibrated. She snored and moaned. Bad jumped over her and straddled Dawn. He slapped her, shouted in her face. She whined. Her arms were sluggish in assuming a guarding position, forearms and fists together, but were at once powerfully locked in place. Bad rolled off her and wrestled Gabrielle up and walked her into the bathroom. She went down on her knees, so he clamped her chin onto the edge of the basin and turned on a tap. He splashed cold water on her face.
Then Dawn was in the bathroom doorway, droopy, shambolic, dull-eyed. She said that the woman had disturbed her. The woman had stood in the doorway with sunlight pushing in behind her and had said something. Had said, “Brian?”
Dawn bit her, bled her, put her down.
“You can’t do this!” Bad yelled at Dawn.
Gabrielle snorted, and her limp arms twitched, then rose vaguely to fumble at Bad and at herself.
“What do you mean I can’t do this?” Dawn said, irritated. “You’ve been with me for weeks. Which side of the line do you think you’re on now?”
Gabrielle whimpered. Her eyes were open but rolled back. Bad eased her down onto the bathroom floor. He got up and faced Dawn and told her to get out.
“I can’t get out,” she said—but her “out” was more of an “ow,” since her spines had risen and were pressing on her tongue.
Bad exploded. He shoved Dawn and shouted, called her all the standard names enraged antipodean men used, and each time he struck her he felt her body, hot and heavy and drowsy, until she stopped him, fell forward with an arm raised, a bar across his throat. She fell onto him and carried him to the floor so that his head was pillowed on Gabrielle’s hip.
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