The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  Even when, a few weeks after, Vonderjan's luck began to turn like a sail, he bore her with him on his broad wings. He said nothing of his luck. He was too occupied wringing from her again and again the music of her lusts, forcing her arching body to contortions, paroxysms, screams, torturing her to willing death in blind-red afternoons, in candlelit darkness, so that by daybreak she could scarcely move, would lie there in a stupor in the bed, unable to rise, awaiting him like an invalid or a corpse, and hungry always for more.

  3

  Lucius paddles his boat to the jetty, lets it idle there, looking up.

  Another property of the flood vapour, the stars by night are vast, great liquid splashes of silver, ormolu.

  The light in Yse's loft bums contrastingly low.

  That sweet smell he noticed yesterday still comes wafting down, like thin veiling, on the breeze. Like night-blooming jasmine, perhaps a little sharper, almost like oleanders.

  She must have put in some plant. But up on her terrace, only the snake tree is visible, hooping over into the water.

  Lucius smokes half a roach slowly.

  Far away the shoreline glimmers, where some of the stars have fallen off the sky.

  "What you doing, Yse, Yse-do-as-she-please?"

  Once he'd thought he saw her moving, a moth shadow crossing through the stunned light, but maybe she is asleep, or writing.

  It would be simple enough to tie up and climb the short wet stair to the terrace, to knock on her glass doors. (How are you, Yse? Are you fine?) He had done that last night. The blinds were all down, the light low, as now. But through the side of the transparent loft he had beheld the other shadow standing there on her floor. The piano from the sea. No one answered.

  That flower she's planted, it is sweet as candy. He'd never known her do a thing like that. Her plants always died, killed, she said, by the electrical vibrations of her psyche when she worked.

  Somewhere out on the Sound a boat hoots mournfully.

  Lucius unships his paddles, and wends his craft away along the alleys of water, towards the cafes and the bigger lights.

  Whenever she writes about Per Laszd, which, over twenty-seven years, she has done a lot, the same feeling assails her: slight guilt. Only slight, of course, for he will never know. He is a man who never reads anything that has nothing to do with what he does. That was made clear in the beginning. She met him only twice, but has seen him, quite often, then and since, in newspapers, in news footage, and on network TV. She has been able therefore to watch him change, from an acidly, really too-beautiful young man, through his thirties and forties (when some of the silk of his beauty frayed, to reveal something leaner and more interesting, stronger and more attractive), to a latening middle age, where he has gained weight, but lost none of his masculine grace, nor his mane of hair which—only perhaps due to artifice—has no grey in it.

  She was in love with him, obviously, at the beginning. But it has changed, and become something else. He was never interested in her, even when she was young, slim, and appealing. She was not, she supposed, his "type."

  In addition, she rather admired what he did, and how he did it, with an actor's panache and tricks.

  People who caught her fancy she had always tended to put into her work. Inevitably Per Laszd was one of these. Sometimes he appeared as a remote figure, on the edge of the action of other lives. Sometimes he took the centre of the stage, acting out invented existences, with his perceived actor's skills.

  She had, she found though, a tendency to punish him in these roles. He must endure hardships and misfortunes, and often, in her work, he was dead by the end, and rarely of old age.

  Her guilt, naturally, had something to do with this—was she truly punishing him, not godlike, as with other characters, but from a petty personal annoyance that he had never noticed her, let alone had sex with her, or a single real conversation. (When she had met him, it had both times been in a crowd. He spoke generally, politely including her, no more than that. She was aware he had been arrogant enough, if he had wanted to, to have demandingly singled her out.)

  But really she felt guilty at the liberties she took of necessity, with him, on paper. How else could she write about him? It was absurd to do otherwise. But describing his conjectured nakedness, both physical and intellectual, even spiritual (even supposedly "in character"), her own temerity occasionally dismayed Yse. How dare she? But then, how dare ever to write anything, even about a being wholly invented.

  A mental shrug. Alors… well, well. And yet…

  Making him Gregers Vonderjan, she felt, was perhaps her worst infringement. Now she depicted him (honestly) burly with weight and on-drawing age, although always hastening to add the caveat of his handsomeness, his power. Per himself, as she had seen, was capable of being majestic, yet also mercurial. She tried to be fair, to be at her most fair, when examining him most microscopically, or when condemning him to the worst fates. (But, now and then, did the pen slip?)

  Had he ever sensed those several dreadful falls, those calumnies, those deaths! Of course not. Well, well. There, there. And yet…

  How wonderful that vine smells tonight, Yse thinks, sitting up in the lamp dusk. Some neighbour must have planted it. What a penetrating scent, so clean and fresh, yet sweet.

  It was noticeable last night, too. Yse wonders what the flowers are that let out this aroma. And in the end, she stands up, leaving the pen to lie there, across Vonderjan and Antoinelle.

  Near her glass doors, Yse thinks the vine must be directly facing her, over the narrow waterway under the terrace, for here its perfume is strongest.

  But when she raises the blinds and opens the doors, the scent at once grows less. Somehow it has collected instead in the room. She gazes out at the other lofts, at a tower of shaped glass looking like ice in a tray. Are the hidden gardens there?

  The stars are impressive tonight. And she can see the hem of the star-spangled upper city.

  A faint sound comes.

  Yse knows it's not outside, but in her loft, just like the scent.

  She turns. Looks at the black piano.

  Since yesterday (when it was brought in), she hasn't paid it that much attention. (Has she?) She had initially stared at it, tried three or four times to raise its lids—without success. She had thought of rubbing it down, once the litter-chips absorbed the leaking water. But then she had not done this. Had not touched it very much.

  Coming to the doors, she has circled wide of the piano.

  Did a note sound, just now, under the forward lid? How odd, the two forelegs braced there, and the final leg at its end, more as if it balanced on a tail of some sort.

  Probably the keys and hammers and strings inside are settling after the wet, to the warmth of her room.

  She leaves one door open, which is not perhaps sensible. Rats have been known to climb the stair and gaze in at her under the night blinds, with their calm, clever eyes. Sometimes the criminal population of the island can be heard along the waterways, or out on the Sound, shouts and smashing bottles, cans thrown at brickwork or impervious, multiglazed windows.

  But the night's still as the stars.

  Yse goes by the piano, and through the perfume, and back to her desk, where Per Laszd lies helplessly awaiting her on the page.

  4. Bleumaneer

  Jeanjacques came to the Island in the stormy season. He was a mix of black and white, and found both peoples perplexing, as he found himself.

  The slave trade was by then defused, as much, perhaps, as it would ever be. He knew there were no slaves left on the Island; that is, only freed slaves remained. (His black half lived with frenzied anger, as his white half clove to sloth. Between the two halves, he was a split soul.)

  There had been sparks on the rigging of the ship, and all night a velour sky fraught with pink lightning. When they reached the bay next morning, it looked nearly colourless, the sombre palms were nearly grey, and the sky cindery, and the sea only transparent, the beaches white.

&
nbsp; The haughty black master spoke in French.

  "They call that place Blue View."

  "Why's that?"

  "Oh, it was for some vogue of wearing blue, before heads began to roll in Paris."

  Jeanjacques said, "What's he like?"

  "Vonderjan? A falling man."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Have you seen a man fall? The instants before he hits the ground, before he's hurt—the moment when he thinks he is still flying."

  "He's lost his money, they were saying at Sugarbar."

  "They say so."

  "And his wife's a girl, almost a child."

  "Two years he's been with her on his Island."

  "What's she like?"

  "White."

  "What else?"

  "To me, nothing. I can't tell them apart."

  There had been a small port, but now little was there, except a rotted hulk, some huts, and the ruins of a customs house, thatched with palm, in which birds lived.

  For a day he climbed with the escorting party up into the interior of the Island. Inside the forest it was grey-green-black, and the trees gave off sweat, pearling the banana leaves and plantains. Then they walked through the wild fields of cane, and the coffee trees. Dark figures still worked there, tending the kayar. But they did this for themselves. What had been owned had become the garden of those who remained, to do with as they wanted.

  The black master had elaborated, telling Jeanjacques how Vonderjan had at first sent for niceties for his house, for china and Venetian glass, cases of books and wine. Even a piano had been ordered for his child-wife, although this, it seemed, had never arrived.

  The Island was large and overgrown, but there was nothing, they said, very dangerous on it.

  Bleumaneer, Blue View, the house for which the Island had come to be called, appeared on the next morning, down a dusty track hedged by rhododendrons of prehistoric girth.

  It was white-walled, with several open courts, balconies. Orange trees grew along a columned gallery, and there was a Spanish fountain (dry) on the paved space before the steps. But it was a medley of all kinds of style.

  "Make an itinerary and let me see it. We'll talk it over, what can be sold."

  Jeanjacques thought that Vonderjan reminded him most of a lion, but a lion crossed with a golden bull. Then again, there was a wolflike element, cunning and lithe, which slipped through the grasslands of their talk.

  Vonderjan did not treat Jeanjacques as what he was, a valuer's clerk. Nor was there any resentment or chagrin. Vonderjan seemed indifferent to the fix he was in. Did he even care that such and such would be sorted out and taken from him—that glowing canvas in the salon, for example, or the rose-mahogany cabinets, and all for a third of their value, or less, paid in banknotes that probably would not last out another year. Here was a man, surely, playing at life, at living. Convinced of it and of his fate, certainly, but only as the actor is, within his part.

  Jeanjacques drank cloudy orjat, tasting its bitter orange-flowers. Vonderjan drank nothing, was sufficient, even in this, to himself.

  "Well. What do you think?"

  "I'll work on, and work tonight, present you with a summary in the morning."

  "Why waste the night?" said Vonderjan.

  "I must be ready to leave in another week, sir, when the ship returns."

  "Another few months," said Vonderjan consideringly, "and maybe no ship will come here. Suppose you missed your boat?"

  He seemed to be watching Jeanjacques through a telescope, closely, yet far, far away. He might have been drunk, but there was no smell of alcohol to him. Some drug of the Island, perhaps?

  Jeanjacques said, "I'd have to swim for it."

  A man came up from the yard below. He was a white servant, shabby but respectable. He spoke to Vonderjan in some European gabble.

  "My horse is sick," said Vonderjan to Jeanjacques. "I think I shall have to shoot it. I've lost most of them here. Some insect, which bites."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Yes." Then, lightheartedly, "But none of us escape, do we?"

  Later, in the slow heat of the afternoon, Jeanjacques heard the shot crack out, and shuddered. It was more than the plight of the unfortunate horse. Something seemed to have hunted Vonderjan to his Island and now picked off from him all the scales of his world, his money, his horses, his possessions.

  The clerk worked at his tally until the sun began to wester about four in the evening. Then he went up to wash and dress, because Vonderjan had said he should dine in the salon with his family. Jeanjacques had no idea what he would find. He was curious, a little, about the young wife—she must by now be seventeen or eighteen. Had there been any children? It was always likely, but then again, likely, too, they had not survived.

  At five, the sky was like brass, the palms that lined the edges of all vistas like blackened brass columns, bent out of shape, with brazen leaves that rattled against each other when any breath blew up from the bay. From the roof of the house it was possible also to make out a cove, and the sea. But it looked much more than a day's journey off. Unless you jumped and the wind blew you.

  Another storm mumbled over the Island as Jeanjacques entered the salon. The long windows stood wide, and the dying light flickered fitfully like the disturbed candles.

  No one took much notice of the clerk, and Vonderjan behaved as if Jeanjacques had been there a year, some acquaintance with no particular purpose in the house, neither welcome nor un.

  The "family," Jeanjacques saw, consisted of Vonderjan, his wife, a housekeeper, and a young black woman, apparently Vrouw Vonderjan's companion.

  She was slender and fine, the black woman, and sat there as if a slave trade had never existed, either to crucify or enrage her. Her dress was of excellent muslin, ladyishly low cut for the evening, and she had ruby eardrops. (She spoke at least three languages that Jeanjacques heard, including the patois of the Island, or house, which she exchanged now and then with the old housekeeper.)

  But Vonderjan's wife was another matter altogether.

  The moment he looked at her, Jeanjacque's blood seemed to shift slightly, all along his bones. And at the base of his skull, where his hair was neatly tied back by a ribbon, the roots stretched themselves, prickling.

  She was not at all pretty, but violently beautiful, in a way far too large for the long room, or for any room, whether spacious or enormous. So pale she was, she made her black attendant seem like a shadow cast by a flame. Satiny coils and trickles of hair fell all round her in a deluge of gilded rain. Thunder was the colour of her eyes, a dark that was not dark, some shade that could not be described visually but only in other ways. All of her was a little like that. To touch her limpid skin would be like tasting ice cream. To catch her fragrance like small bells heard inside the ears in fever.

  When her dress brushed by him as she first crossed the room, Jeanjacques inadvertantly recoiled inside his skin. He was feeling, although he did not know it, exactly as Justus had felt in the northern garden. Though Justus had not known it, either. But what terrified these two men was the very thing which drew other men, especially such men as Gregers Vonderjan. So much was plain.

  The dinner was over, and the women got up to withdraw. As she passed by his chair, Vonderjan, who had scarecely spoken to her throughout the meal (or to anyone), lightly took hold of his wife's hand. And she looked down at once into his eyes.

  Such a look it was. Oh God, Jeanjacques experienced now all his muscles go to liquid, and sinking, and his belly sinking down into his bowels, which themselves turned over heavily as a serpent. But his penis rose very quickly, and pushed hard as a rod against his thigh.

  For it was a look of such explicit sex, trembling so colossally it had grown still, and out of such an agony of suspense, that he was well aware these two lived in a constant of the condition, and would need only to press together the length of their bodies to ignite like matches in a galvanic convulsion.

  He had seen once or twice similar looks, perha
ps. Among couples kept strictly, on their marriage night. But no, not even then.

  They said nothing to each other. Needed nothing to say. It had been said.

  The girl and her black companion passed from the room, and after them the housekeeper, carrying a branch of the candles, whose flames flattened as she went through the doors on to the terrace. (Notes: This will happen again later.)

  Out there, the night was now very black. Everything beyond the house had vanished in it, but for the vague differential between the sky and the tops of the forest below. There were no stars to be seen, and thunder still moved restlessly. The life went from Jeanjacques's genitals as if it might never come back.

  "Brandy," said Vonderjan, passing the decanter. "What do you think of her?"

  "Of whom, sir?"

  "My Anna." (Playful; who else?)

  Jeanjacques visualized, in a sudden unexpected flash, certain objects used as amulets, and crossing himself in church.

  "An exquisite lady, sir."

  "Yes," said Vonderjan. He had drunk a lot during dinner, but in an easy way. It was evidently habit, not need. Now he said again, "Yes."

  Jeanjacques wondered what would be next. But of course nothing was to be next. Vonderjan finished his cigar, and drank down his glass. He rose, and nodded to Jeanjacques. "Bon nuit."

  How could he even have forced himself to linger so long? Vonderjan demonstrably must be a human of vast self-control.

  Jeanjacques imagined the blond man going up the stairs of the house to the wide upper storey. An open window, drifted with a gauze curtain, hot, airless night. Jeanjacques imagined Antoinelle, called Anna, lying on her back in the bed, its nets pushed careless away, for what bit Vonderjan's horses to death naturally could not essay his wife.

  "No, I shan't have a good night," Jeanjacques said to Vonderjan in his head. He went to his room, and sharpened his pen for work.

  In the darkness, he heard her. He was sure that he had. It was almost four in the morning by his pocket watch, and the sun would rise in less than an hour.