DSosnowski - Vamped
Page 36
“She’s had just about enough of us two,” Twit says.
“I noticed,” I say. “You’d think it washer wedding night.”
“No,” Twit corrects. “You’d think itwasn’t.”
“Good point,” I say, checking my pocket to make sure the ring is still there. I check my other pocket, too, to make sure of the other ring.
Check, and double check.
Robbie, meanwhile, is standing in the back of the almost empty church, smelling himself, though God only knows why. Vampires don’t perspire. But then again, Robbie hasn’t been a vampire for all that long, which is a good thing, I guess. Isuzu and he will be evenly matched.
“Are the doors locked?” I call back.
“Roger,” Robbie says, giving me the thumbs-up, but then turning and tugging on both handles before turning around again, all smiles, and both thumbs. “Roger that,” he repeats.
There are no blood dots on my eyes and no one can see them when they start rolling, though most can probably guess, I guess.
“Your son-in-law,” Twit says. “In T-minus…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, wondering if maybe I should just “misplace” one of the rings I’m holding.
And then, all of a sudden, Rose’s hand is on my shoulder.
“Show time, Daddio,” she says. “You, too, Lady Blue.” With a hand on each of our shoulders, she must look like a teeter-totter from behind as she leads us to our stations in the back of the church.
Up front, to the left of the altar, the door to the sacristy shudders, half opens, closes, half opens again. A black shoe emerges, followed by a black sock, a black pant leg that hooks around the door and kicks it back to reveal Father Jack, meeting the conditions I’ve set.
I suppose I could have had him tank off before the ceremony, as Rose did before meeting Isuzu for the first time. That would have been simple—less theatrical, less humiliating. I mentioned these “conditions” as a kind of joke between longtime friends. But Father Jack nodded and agreed.
“An ounce of prevention,” he said. He looked almost eager. Eager to be punished for his inclinations, perhaps. Or maybe he just liked the idea of being treated like a dangerous character for once in his bottle-fed life.
So Father Jack’s vestments for the occasion include a hockey goalie’s mouth protector and a straitjacket. In case you’re not sure what a goalie’s mouth protector looks like, just think of Anthony Hopkins inSilence of the Lambs, the scene where they wheel him out, wearing that mask with the fenced-off mouth hole. The straitjacket, by the way, has been dyed a more clerically correct black, and I’ve added a bucktoothed collar.
The door to the women’s room in the back of the church has opened. And for a moment, it’s almost as if there’s a crowd there with us, all whispering awed little whispers and sssshhhing each other at the same time. The whispering lasts for as long as it takes Isuzu to squeeze my mother’s hoop skirt through the bathroom door, after which it’s replaced by the softer, singular ssshhh of crinoline, spreading rumors across the slate-tiled floor.
“You look beautiful,” I mouth.
“Thank you,” she mouths back, folding her arm into my arm, squeezing my biceps for luck. Only Isuzu knows what I’ve got planned. I figured it was her night; I didn’t want to steal away the spotlight. But she loved the idea. “It’ll be like one of those Shakespeare comedies where everybody gets married in the end,” she said when I told her.
“Well, that’s better than a tragedy, I guess.”
“ ‘To be or not to be’?”
“Ah, there’s the rub—whateverthat means.”
Isuzu smiled and I smiled and we spent the rest of the time between then and now, enjoying Rose’s being just a little pissed at both of us, not knowing what we know.
Ahead of us, Rose takes Robbie’s arm in one hand and scoots Twit up ahead with the other. As Twit begins down the aisle, reaching her little hand into her little basket, sprinkling bloodred petals along the way, Rose pulls a remote control from her purse and aims it at the back of the church.
“Suzi picked it,” she says, turning, warning.
Isuzu shrugs, gives me a strained “I’m sorry” grin with her blunt teeth for maybe the last time.
The boom-box pops and hisses; whatever it is, it’s old. As in pre-CD,vinyl old.
“You are my sunshine,” it starts. “My only sunshine…”
“Fuck you,” I mouth to Isuzu, but sweetly. Sad—oh so very, very sad—but sweetly.
She smiles a smile that says she understands completely. “You’re welcome,” she mouths back.
Twit has to hold Father Jack’s copy of the service and Father Jack has to keep leaning down to make sure he gets the words right. You’d think after all these years, he’d have the thing memorized, but then again, I guess a lot of couples like to tinker with the language. God knows Isuzu and Robbie had to. The official service has already been changed to accommodate straight vampire-to-vampire unions, most notably, the deletion of the Till Death Do Us Part part, but it hasn’t been tailored to account for when the bride-to-be is also a vampire-to-be. So the task fell to Robbie and Isuzu, who sat in my kitchen till nearly dawn one night, trying to hammer out the right language.
The sticking point is the word “kiss.”That’s pivotal;that’s what is being changed. I think about mentioningmy first benevolent vamping—how kissing and vamping arenot mutually exclusive—but then decide to keep quiet. Let the kids figure it out for themselves. There are bound to be a few chuckles along the way, and who knows? Maybe they might get into an argument and call the whole thing off.
An old vampire can dream, can’t he?
“Suck.”
That’s Robbie’s first offering. “Suck.”
Isuzu screws up her face. “Rhymes with ‘yuck,’ ” she says.
“Bite?”
“Like in, ‘me’?”
“Eat?”
“I won’t even dignify that with a ‘fuck you.’ ”
“Okay, ‘vamp,’ ” Robbie says. “That’s what we’re talking about, right?”
“Ye-ah,” Isuzu says, drawing it out, doubtfully, “but it’s still a little…I don’t know. Harsh? Blunt, maybe.”
“You mean like your teeth?”
“Watch it, Fang Boy.”
Robbie gives his neck a long, slow roundhouse turn, popping bones loudly. Isuzu, not to be outdone, knits her fingers together and then pushes out with both palms, letting the air rip with the bony flatulence of cracking knuckles.
And me, I just shake my head. If I wasn’t convinced before, I am now. They’re stuck with each other. They’re going to be together until the asteroids come or the nukes fry our shadows to the walls.
“Sip?” Robbie offers, and Isuzu does a sort of hmm-hmm thing with her head.
“Maybe,” she says.
Other words follow—drink, immortalize, eternalize, transfuse, imbue, imbibe, induct, partake, tipple, nibble, assimilate, mingle, supplement—followed by possible alternative phrases: Let us prey; Come and get it; Wet your whistle. And finally:
“Complement,” Isuzu suggests.
“Excuse me?”
“Complement,” Isuzu repeats. “ ‘You may now complement the bride.’ ”
“You mean, like, ‘Your hair’s so pretty’?” Robbie says. “That comes off as a little needy, if you ask me.”
“Not ‘compliment’ with anI,” Isuzu says. “ ‘Complement’ with anE. To complete, make whole.”
Robbie looks wounded in that grown-up-kid-actor way of his—that way which I’m starting to think may not be an act. He lets his head drop and then raises it slowly. “That’s ‘whole’ with aW, right?” he says. “Not with anA, like I just was.”
Isuzu doesn’t agree or disagree, she just leans forward and kisses her fiancé on the forehead.
Yep—they’re stuck with each other, all right. Till the asteroids come and the glaciers glide.
The service has just reached its official punch line—Robbie and Isuzu
have been pronounced a legally bound couple—and now all that remains is the new couple’s P.S. Father Jack leans forward, leans back, tilts his head to one side, suggesting Reaganesque confusion, and then leans forward again. He leans back, shrugs, and announces:
“Doesn’t the bride look lovely tonight?”
Rose looks at me with a question mark on her face.
Twit turns the service around and takes a blue-faced squint.
Me, I just cover my face with my hand and wonder about the quality of education being offered in seminaries.
Robbie, meanwhile, seems to be having trouble holding back a smile.
“You’re right about that, Padre,” the groom says, winking at me, his—oh my God!—father-in-law. “But…um…”
Isuzu snatches the script of the service from Twit, holds it in Father Jack’s hockey-masked face. Her fingernail scratches along the page. “You were supposed toread this,” she says. “Aloud. It’snot a stage direction.”
“Oh,” Father Jack says.
“Do-over,” he announces. He clears his throat. Cranks his head in a circle—first clockwise, then counterclockwise. “Ready?” he asks, turning toward Robbie, turning toward Isuzu. One nod, one set of angrily folded, lace-covered arms. The sssshhhh of agitated skirts.
“You may now complement the bride,” Father Jack says.
This is probably a good place to point out that there was a fair amount of debate about whether Isuzu’s vamping should be incorporated into the actual ceremony or be left as a private matter between the consenting adults themselves. I was conflicted, as usual. I’d always imagined it would be me—not in a creepy way, just…Well, I rescued her; I avenged her; I raised her; I protected her; and I’m the vampire who’s known her the longest. Why shouldn’tI introduce her to immortality? Or, for that matter, decide not to—a threat I apparently used a few too many times while raising her. Of course she got a backup plan. At least I didn’t raise her stupid.
The methods of vamping—by the way—are as various as vampires themselves. Yes, some of the methods have an erotic element—if you can bite it, you can vamp through it—but that is by no means a prerequisite. For example, when the Vatican stopped killing us and began its own, en masse, ceremonial vampings, only the most orally fixated could have found that erotic. Me, I’ve done it all sorts of ways—with a kiss, with a syringe, with a scalpel, with a different, more southward kiss, old-school Dracula-style, and anonymously via the blood products distribution bureaucracy—though that last one came with some mixed results.
Unfortunately, all my arguments for why it wouldn’t be creepy for me to do it were also arguments for Robbie’s doing it in public, as part of the ceremony.
In the end, it was Rose who talked some sense into me.
“Frankly,” she said, “one more word out of you, Cowboy, and I’m gonna be powerful troubled.” Pause. “And I can stay ‘troubled’ fer a powerful long time, pardner.”
And so now here we are—the last few ticks of my little girl’s mortality. And Father Jack was right. Sheis lovely. Incandescent. And not just because of how my vampire eyes take in light. No matter how neurotically she may have gotten here, she’s found her perfection. Her neck’s a sunflower stem—fragile and tough at the same time, and just long enough to call attention to itself. Her lips are full—bee-stung—and will only look better with her new fangs. And her eyes…
Her eyes never were part of a heart smart diet, not when they could break one just by blinking. I can only imagine what they’ll do when they go all black, upping their mystery, their inscrutability, their flagrant disregard for all matters cardiopulmonary. Perhaps she’ll have to wear sunglasses, just as a public courtesy.
My mother’s old wedding dress has cleaned up nicely, too, just so much frosting, meringue, a cloud buoying her up like a pillowed, precious gift from heaven or some such place.
Robbie, the clod—the lucky, lucky clod—stands there for the sake of comparison. Beast, beauty; beauty, beast. He’s smiling, showing fangs, and I try not to think about the half-moons scarring that perfect body up there. I turn, look. Twit and Rose are both smiling, wistfully mournful, forced Mona Lisas, polite, respectful, resigned.
Twit reaches a blue hand into her pocket, pulls out an ancient crumpled tube of topical anesthetic Father Jack gave me. She offers the tube to the groom. Holding Isuzu’s wrist, he works the ointment in with slow, gentle circles. His eyes flicker up to meet hers—to apologize in advance, to reassure—and then return to the job at hand.
Father Jack, his mouth caged, his arms crossed over his heart and bound, looks on, past the people, toward the back of the church and the double doors, locked. He is a man of the Scotchgarded cloth, its useful life chemically extended indefinitely, spillproof, resilient, colorfast. I imagine him imagining himself as Christ on the cross, looking up toward heaven, looking down at his fickle apostles as they discreetly check their watches for the time.
The suddenness with which Robbie attaches himself to Isuzu’s wrist unnerves me and my foot takes an involuntary step forward. I press down on it, freeze it in place, force down roots. I grit my teeth, a perfect reflection of Isuzu’s own grimace. Her throat quivers, swallows hard; her chest rises and falls fitfully, her heart tugging, bashing, struggling. But she’s a tough kid. She’ll kick the ass of any asshole who says she isn’t. She breathes through her nose, the breaths coming out short, sharp, and fast, chugging, whistling slightly, The Little Train That Could.
Might.
Isn’t So Sure at the Moment.
The Little Train Who’d Like to Maybe Sit Down in a Support Group and Discuss Its Traumatic Railroad Experiences with Other Little Trains.
Soon—too soon—her breathing grows shallow and I stop watching her. I watch Robbie instead. This is the tricky part; this is the part that makes doing this thing in front of witnesses a good idea. This is the part that bottle-fed vampires might not be so good at controlling.
And all of a sudden, I reconsider Isuzu’s scars. The Twit affair was for Isuzu’s benefit, little lessons in what it felt like, little lessons in how and when to say,“When.” But Robbie—that was a different kind of training. That was Isuzu teaching her future husband the self-control necessary to get this last time right.
Smart, smart girl—I think, only wishing I could take the credit.
Robbie lets go, disengages, decouples, undocks with an audiblepop! He’s done a very neat job, no spillage, no splatter. The holes in her wrist look like two puckered dents in a lump of cold dough. It takes Isuzu two or three hard, forced breaths to get them bleeding—just a drop out of each, one a little ahead of the other, racing down her translucent skin toward the lace bunched up around her elbow.
Robbie’s doing some hard breathing of his own. The vein squiggling down his temple pulses. His lips move silently.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three…
His chin jerks down, and then back; he grabs where his stomach used to be; his lips stop, tighten, his cheeks puff out. He presses his lips—no teeth, no fangs—to Isuzu’s wrist and holds them there, as his cheeks slowly deflate, go flat, cave in.
Isuzu’s head—hanging on her chest like a junky on the nod—stirs. Her eyes open blackly, forcing her head back like a shotgun blast. She blinks several times, frantically, accepts a pair of sunglasses Twit presses into her hand.
“Thanks,” she says—her first word as a vampire.
“No prob,” Twit says.
Safe again behind dark lenses, Isuzu looks out at the (less painfully) beaming faces of her assembled loved ones. She smiles her old, blunt smile, but that’ll change in a couple of nights. She’ll have to learn a new smile then, one that doesn’t inadvertently bite itself, one that makes room for fangs. But the old one’s good enough for now—says what doesn’t need words to be said.
We smile back, welcoming our little newcomer to forever.
Well, that’s that,” Father Jack says, anticlimactically. “Can someone help me out here?”
“Thanks, Marty,” Father Jack says, patting me on the back, his empty sleeve flopping over my shoulder like the fluke of some strange and somber fish. “Wish ’em luck for me. Him, especially.”
He turns. Begins to leave.
I finger the other ring in my other pocket.
“Father Jack,” I call out. “There’s just one more thing.”