The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  "Well aren't you sweet!" She colored a little herself, though she already had high spots burning on each cheek from delivering her sermon: public speaking was not Betty's favorite part of the job. "Look, let me just say goodbye to a few people and run upstairs to change, then I'll be right back down to give you a hand with the door."

  A few minutes later, up in the parsonage, Betty Ruth found herself dithering over what to wear as if Nick were a prospective beau. Then it occurred to her that he was now, in a way.

  For Betty had awakened at two-thirty that same morning with her arms folded at her breast again, and a deep sense of loss, having felt the sense-memory of that tiny child in her arms, that tiny heart beating against hers, slipping away from her with the same inevitability as her chance of bearing a child.

  So she'd forced herself to run through what they called a "process" in New Age counseling, one of her own devising. She called it telescoping, and it involved starting with the immediate problem (her sense of loss) and telescoping that out into the next larger problem (her inability to find a suitable sperm donor), which in turn extended out into the larger problem of her own ambivalence about becoming a mother.

  She could have gone even further—into her fear of the pain of childbirth, her feelings about her own mother and her own mother's feelings about her mother, and so on—but suddenly, with what she could only describe as the reverse of an epiphany, some sort of glorious absence, she realized that the issues underlying her ambivalence were moot now: the ambivalence itself had been resolved.

  Once again, another New Age axiom had revealed itself as ancient wisdom: the solution to the problem lay in the nature of the problem itself. Of course she wanted to bear a child of her own—that's what this whole damn telescope was about in the first place. The rest was just fear, and fear, of course, was always, and in the end only, about itself.

  At that point, the deeper mystery having been solved, the rest of the telescope collapsed in clacking segments that resolved themselves one after the other until she reached the problem of the sperm donor. That's when Nick Santos' face had appeared to her mind's eye with all the discrete, sharp-edged clarity of an hallucination.

  Hence the dithering back in the parsonage after Sunday service over which T-shirt to wear: Betty Ruth might soon be asking Nick to father her child, and for that there was no chapter in Dress for Success.

  After all, she reasoned, she wasn't trying to seduce him, what with him being gay and her being at least situationally celibate. All things considered, she'd be just as happy with the turkey baster the lesbians preferred, or perhaps the direct-to-diaphragm approach currently in vogue among her straight, or not-quite-as-lesbian, friends.

  On the other hand, she didn't want to gross him out, either, so she finally settled on an old teal Henley shirt that had seen a painting job or two in its day and that, she hoped, would project just the right note of womanly self-reliance.

  When she got downstairs, he was already deeply engrossed in his work. Arrayed about him as he knelt before the open doors were an assortment of stains and putties and plastic wood and liquid wood in cans and tubes, and a collection of paintbrushes and putty knives that ranged in size and shape from housepainter to mascara, from trowel to dentist's pick, as well as a miniature blowtorch and a pink professional-model ConAir blowdrying gun.

  "Nick, I'm impressed!"

  He looked up, grinning. "I lived in the Castro during the seventies—antiquing was sort of a survival skill. As for the hairdryer, you'll want to stand back when I turn it on—it's got a wash like a Huey chopper."

  It was painstaking work, but they found themselves enjoying each other's company, and over the course of the afternoon they managed, with the practiced ease of experienced twelve-steppers, to exchange large slabs of their respective life stories: Betty's Dutch Reform upbringing in Williamsport, Pennsylvania; Nick's coming of age in Detroit, in Greek-town down by the river; Betty in divinity school, her conversion to Methodism, her missionary work, her first church and her last, the one she'd lost through drink; Nick at the Air Force Academy, intelligence work, hard duty (eating rats with the Montagnards) and easy duty (language school in Hawaii, monitoring Chinese radio transmissions from a base in Japan), his honorable, if heavily negotiated, discharge.

  She talked about the men in her life—the former men in her life—with more humor than bitterness. "The last was about two years ago. We met at—now don't you dare laugh out loud—at a Sex and Love Addicts meeting. I know, I know: how doomed can you get!"

  He discussed the only woman in his. "Marie and I were married for about ten minutes back in '69. I knew I wasn't straight, but I guess it seemed like a good career move at the time. Besides, since graduation I'd already raised my saber at the weddings of half the men I'd slept with at the Academy."

  There! It wasn't much of an opening, but Betty was through it in the blink of an eye. "So I don't suppose you had any children, you and Marie?" she called over the roar of the blowdryer—he was up on the ladder working on the top of the right-hand door.

  "WHAT?"

  "I DON'T SUPPOSE YOU HAVE ANY CHILDREN?"

  "NO!"

  "DID YOU EVER WANT TO?"

  "WHAT?"

  "HAVE CHILDREN?"

  "SURE, I—" He turned off the blowdryer and looked down thoughtfully at Betty. "I don't care whether you're a man or a woman, or straight or gay, or a housewife or a priest, when you hit forty without any children of your own, or even any prospects, you're bound to do a little soul-searching every now and then, come three in the morning."

  Now or never/I'm not ready, she thought—they say it's impossible to have two thoughts at the exact same instant, but Betty proved them wrong. "Two-thirty," she said to the door, only inches in front of her face.

  "Beg pardon?" No longer shouting.

  She looked up at him again. "I did my soul-searching at two-thirty this morning."

  Something in her voice brought him down from the ladder—he did not let go of it, though, even when he'd reached the ground. "And what did you decide, if anything?" Trying to keep it light.

  "That I wanted to have a child." She hoped he would keep asking questions—that would have been easier—but he just stood there holding on to that stupid ladder, waiting. Nothing to it but to do it. "That I was thinking about asking you to be… the sperm donor." She'd hoped that would sound a little less off-putting than "the father"—instead it rang stiffly in her ears. "I mean, if you could. If there weren't any… medical problems or anything." Going downhill fast—what a clumsy way to bring up the Big Question: his HIV status. I knew I wasn't ready. "There wouldn't be any responsibility involved, if you didn't want." By now there was a flat, trailing quality to her voice. Time to bail. "I guess it was a stupid idea, huh?"

  But to her surprise, the corners of his mustache had lifted slightly again. "Not entirely," he said thoughtfully. "Were you thinking of John Henry or the steam drill?"

  "Huh? Oh—turkey baster, most likely. Or direct-to-diaphragm."

  "But why me? Why someone you've just met?"

  "Because I've already rejected all my friends, but I don't want it to be a complete stranger."

  "Have you looked into sperm banks?"

  "Two hundred dollars for the initial screening, then two-fifty a pop."

  "So to speak." Nick couldn't resist.

  She laughed nervously. "So to speak." Then, after a moment, "Is this what they call a pregnant pause?"

  His turn to laugh. "Not yet."

  "Look, there's no hurry about all this. Why don't we take our time, think about all the questions we'll want to ask each other, maybe get to know each other a little better."

  Suddenly it occurred to him that that might be the real problem here. How the hell can I tell her about my being a vampire?. Even if he wanted to, he'd need the permission of the entire fellowship—it was written into their charter. On the other hand, how can I not tell her? But her eyes were studying his expression intently—to cover his conf
usion he turned his face away, took her hand, and led her down the walk. "C'mon, let's get a little perspective here."

  He let go of her hand at the gate, and they turned to face the church; side by side, they regarded their handiwork. "Not bad," he said after a moment.

  "Not bad? Good lord, Nick, those doors look like they should be hanging on a small cathedral from the Middle Ages." She noticed that they had somehow joined hands again.

  "A small but tasteful cathedral. We do good work, you and me."

  She understood that he was not just talking about the doors; without letting go of his hand, she turned to face him. "So you'll think about it?"

  He nodded solemnly. "Obsessively, if I know me."

  "Fair enough." She stood up on her tiptoes and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. All things considered, it had been a good afternoon's work.

  TWO

  At the eastern end of the Richmond-San Rafael bridge the Chevron refinery burns like a pit of hell; on the other side looms San Quentin. But if you roll down your windows when you reach the Marin County line, midway across, the bay smells clean, like the ocean, and you can all but hear the abandoned foghorns warning ghostly ships away from Red Rock.

  Lourdes couldn't resist firing up a joint as she and Whistler rolled along in the silver Jag an hour or so after sunset on Sunday night. It was another measure of Whistler's apparent wealth that he didn't mind her rolling fat joints out of fine green bud that was going for sixty bucks an eighth on the street, when you could find it. "You still haven't told me where we're going," she reminded him, handing him the joint.

  He checked the Jaguar's rearview mirror, then took a hit. "Back to the sixties, m'dear," he hissed between clenched teeth, holding in the smoke. "Over the mountain and back to the sixties."

  Only one road leads to the town of Bolinas, in western Marin. Three or four days a year a new road sign marks the turnoff from Route 1; the rest of the year it is unmarked, the townspeople being of the opinion that if you're meant to find the place, you'll find it, and if you need a sign, you weren't meant to.

  The Jaguar glided through Stinson Beach, then along the edge of the lagoon; they slowed, and Whistler pointed to a bare signpost on the left. "There. That's the turnoff. Getting sloppy nowadays—in my day we used to break the post off at the ground."

  As the woods closed around them, Lourdes edged over and stuck her head out the window. "I miss this in the city," she said.

  "Which?"

  "You know, the woods—driving through the woods at night."

  "Best pull your head in now—this wood is about to get considerably closer." He swung the Jag wide left to line up a right turn onto a narrow dirt driveway; branches scraped the roof.

  "Your beautiful shiny car," moaned Lourdes.

  Whistler didn't seem concerned. "In the sixties it was part of our security system—cops hated getting their cars scratched as much as they hated walking."

  The driveway ran for another quarter mile; at the end of it the headlights picked out a tiny woman in a billowing nightgown standing in the doorway of a weathered A-frame. "Who's that?" Lourdes asked.

  "That's Selene."

  "Is she a vampire?"

  "Of course not. She's a witch."

  "Oh."

  They parked next to an Eisenhower-era jeep, and Lourdes followed Whistler up a trail of flagstones lined with whitewashed rocks, and flowers and herbs in pots, that climbed the slope to become a railed set of wooden steps. She waited in the doorway while Whistler and the little woman hugged—and hugged, and hugged. She would have been jealous, but her own hug, when it came, was equally prolonged and enveloping: Lourdes found herself humming blissfully into the woman's long dark gray-streaked hair.

  Whistler introduced them afterward, which seemed somewhat irrelevant. "I'm so glad to meet you," chimed Selene. "It's been years since Jamey's brought anyone with him."

  "You call him Jamey?" Lourdes sidled up against Whistler and rubbed her shoulder against his arm like a cat. "Can I call you Jamey, too?" she purred.

  "If you'd like," replied Whistler amiably.

  The A-frame was one big room with a sleeping loft at the apex. Selene picked up a hurricane lamp and led them straight through and out the back door to a redwood deck with a sunken round redwood hot tub burbling in the middle. "Whoops—forgot the towels," she announced, setting the lantern down. "I'll be right back."

  Lourdes took off her leather jacket—actually it was his jacket, a glove-soft bottle green Italian number she'd found in his hall closet. He'd quite forgotten about it, as he didn't wear green anymore: green did not suit his pallor. "Is it her blood we're gonna drink?" she whispered.

  "Yes." Whistler began unbuttoning his shirt.

  "Do you pay her?"

  He looked up, annoyed. "I pay hookers. Selene, I cherish."

  She unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, balancing first on one foot, then the other. "What's the street price on cherish?" she asked, a trifle meanly—she hadn't liked his tone of voice.

  "Well, I do own this house, this land. If she ever needs anything, she calls me." Whistler hung his shirt over the deck railing, then turned back to Lourdes. "But it's not the way it sounds."

  "It sounds like a combination of a mistress and the goose that lays the golden eggs."

  An owl hooted somewhere up the hill, and a lizard or a squirrel or something skittered under the deck. When Whistler finally spoke again there was only a trace of his customary archness. "I've never given much thought to how things sound. My relationship with Selene is perhaps the least mercenary I've ever been involved in."

  "And if Selene decided to stop laying golden eggs?"

  "You don't understand—it's not by my choice. I like mercenary relationships. But with Selene, everything she does for me, everything I do for her is completely voluntary—on both sides. If she thought for a moment there was any quid pro quo involved, she's the one who'd be gone, pfffft, puff of smoke. We were lovers for twenty years before she took her vow of celibacy four years ago, and that hasn't made a bit of difference."

  Lourdes hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her peach-colored panties, and as she slid them down she thought of a line from The Wizard of Oz. "Is she a good witch or a bad witch?"

  "A very good witch indeed," said a voice behind her—Lourdes wheeled around to see Selene coming through the back door with an armload of towels.

  "Sorry. Didn't know you were there."

  "Not a problem—it's not a dark secret, dearie, it's a religion. Wicca. It means wisdom." Selene dumped the towels next to the lantern, pulled her nightgown over her head, and slipped into the tub. She was even tinier than she'd seemed clothed, round-shouldered and slightly pouch-bellied, with stick-thin arms and legs, more than a sprinkling of moles, and a nasty raggedy scar along the left side of her neck, just above where the collarbone joins the shoulder. Not your classic siren, yet Lourdes, who was strictly heterosexual up to a certain point, that point being the right amount and combination of drugs—or blood, always blood—was briefly stirred. Maybe she is a real witch after all, she thought.

  Whistler followed Selene into the tub; steam drifted up into the dark fir trees surrounding the deck. "Delightful," he said, lowering himself to the redwood bench that rimmed the tub, eighteen inches below the waterline.

  Lourdes was last. She sank down to her neck and let her head float back into the water; looking up, she saw a circle of black autumn sky dusted with crisp stars, and heard herself humming again. Suddenly something struck her. "Jamey?" Trying out the sound of it.

  "Yes?"

  "I know this is probably a dumb question, but how come we just can't drink each other's blood, and leave out the middleman?"

  "Would that we could. Why, if we could get off from drinking each other's blood, m'dear, V.A. would be a dating service. But we can't—in fact, that's the surest test for one of us. If you drink someone's blood and nothing happens, then you've found another vampire."

  "Speaking of dr
awing blood…" Selene stood up and waded into the center of the tub. She held out her hands; they formed a circle and closed their eyes.

  "To the Mystery," intoned Selene.

  "To the Mystery," repeated Whistler and Lourdes. Selene turned to her. "I'll need a few minutes to get into my trance, dearie—try not to say anything, or move around too much."

  "Then what?"

  "Jamey knows. He ought to—we've been doing this for a quarter of a century."

  Neither of them had a watch, and if Selene had signaled, Lourdes missed it, but somehow Whistler knew when the time came. He crossed the tub to the shadowy end where Selene sat upright with her eyes closed. He rested his palm over her heart—she crossed her hands over the back of his, then slid forward, slowly, into the water.

  Whistler motioned to Lourdes, who put her arms under Selene; they cradled the floating witch between them, her long hair fanning out in the water like a middle-aged Ophelia. Selene was barely breathing, and her pulse had slowed; suddenly she opened one eye and peeked up at Whistler. "The scalpel—it's somewhere over by my nightgown," she said, then slipped smoothly back into her trance.

  Lourdes supported Selene by herself while Whistler reached a hand out of the tub and felt around on the deck—it took him a few seconds to come up with the velvet fountain-pen box. He snapped it open and pulled out a scalpel, holding it up to the flickering lantern light for a moment to approve the edge: it glinted handsomely. God, I love my life, thought Lourdes.

  He beckoned to her—she gently floated Selene across the tub to him, closer to the light, with one hand spread wide under the witch's back and the other under her thighs.

  The rest happened quickly. Whistler stepped forward with the scalpel in his right hand; the only sounds were the wind in the firs and the burbling water. With his left hand he reached across Selene's body and rotated her left leg a few degrees outward, locating a small blue vein where thigh met groin—a familiar vein, hatched with tiny white hair's-breadth scars. The scalpel flashed, swiftly he nicked the vein—Lourdes saw only a thin red ribbon of blood before his mouth covered the wound. Soft sucking movements sent the water rippling.