Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  “Does this mean that you accept me formally as a client?” he said.

  Comes right out and says what’s on his mind, she noted, no problem there. “Yes.”

  “Good. I too have a treatment goal in mind. I will need at some point a testimonial from you that my mental health is sound enough for me to resume work at Cayslin.”

  Floria shook her head. “I can’t guarantee that. I can commit myself to work toward it, of course, since your improved mental health is the aim of what we do here together.”

  “I suppose that answers the purpose for the time being,” he said. “We can discuss it again later on. Frankly, I find myself eager to continue our work today. I’ve been feeling very much better since I spoke with you, and I thought last night about what I might tell you today.”

  She had the distinct feeling of being steered by him; how important was it to him, she wondered, to feel in control? She said, “Edward, my own feeling is that we started out with a good deal of very useful verbal work, and that now is a time to try something a little different.”

  He said nothing. He watched her. When she asked whether he remembered his dreams he shook his head, no.

  She said, “I’d like you to try to do a dream for me now, a waking dream. Can you close your eyes and daydream, and tell me about it?”

  He closed his eyes. Strangely, he now struck her as less vulnerable rather than more, as if strengthened by increased vigilance.

  “How do you feel now?” she said.

  “Uneasy.” His eyelids fluttered. “I dislike closing my eyes. What I don’t see can hurt me.”

  “Who wants to hurt you?”

  “A vampire’s enemies, of course—mobs of screaming peasants with torches.”

  Translating into what, she wondered—young PhDs pouring out of the graduate schools panting for the jobs of older men like Weyland? “Peasants, these days?”

  “Whatever their daily work, there is still a majority of the stupid, the violent, and the credulous, putting their featherbrained faith in astrology, in this cult or that, in various branches of psychology.”

  His sneer at her was unmistakable. Considering her refusal to let him fill the hour his own way, this desire to take a swipe at her was healthy. But it required immediate and straightforward handling.

  “Edward, open your eyes and tell me what you see.”

  He obeyed. “I see a woman in her early forties,” he said, “clever-looking face, dark hair showing gray; flesh too thin for her bones, indicating either vanity or illness; wearing slacks and a rather creased batik blouse—describable, I think, by the term ‘peasant style’—with a food stain on the left side.”

  Damn! Don’t blush. “Does anything besides my blouse suggest a peasant to you?”

  “Nothing concrete, but with regard to me, my vampire self, a peasant with a torch is what you could easily become.”

  “I hear you saying that my task is to help you get rid of your delusion, though this process may be painful and frightening for you.”

  Something flashed in his expression—surprise, perhaps alarm, something she wanted to get in touch with before it could sink away out of reach again. Quickly she said, “How do you experience your face at this moment?”

  He frowned. “As being on the front of my head. Why?”

  With a rush of anger at herself she saw that she had chosen the wrong technique for reaching that hidden feeling: she had provoked hostility instead. She said, “Your face looked to me just now like a mask for concealing what you feel rather than an instrument of expression.”

  He moved restlessly in the chair, his whole physical attitude tense and guarded. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Will you let me touch you?” she said, rising.

  His hands tightened on the arms of his chair, which protested in a sharp creak. He snapped, “I thought this was a talking cure.”

  Strong resistance to body work—ease up. “If you won’t let me massage some of the tension out of your facial muscles, will you try to do it yourself?”

  “I don’t enjoy being made ridiculous,” he said, standing and heading for the door, which clapped smartly to behind him.

  She sagged back in her seat; she had mishandled him. Clearly her initial estimation of this as a relatively easy job had been wrong and had led her to move far too quickly with him. Certainly it was much too early to try body work. She should have developed a firmer level of trust first by letting him do more of what he did so easily and so well—talk.

  The door opened. Weyland came back in and shut it quietly. He did not sit again but paced about the room, coming to rest at the window.

  “Please excuse my rather childish behavior just now,” he said. “Playing these games of yours brought it on.”

  “It’s frustrating, playing games that are unfamiliar and that you can’t control,” she said. As he made no reply, she went on in a conciliatory tone, “I’m not trying to belittle you, Edward. I just need to get us off whatever track you were taking us down so briskly. My feeling is that you’re trying hard to regain your old stability.

  “But that’s the goal, not the starting point. The only way to reach your goal is through the process, and you don’t drive the therapy process like a train. You can only help the process happen, as though you were helping a tree grow.”

  “These games are part of the process?”

  “Yes.”

  “And neither you nor I control the games?”

  “That’s right.”

  He considered. “Suppose I agree to try this process of yours; what would you want of me?”

  Observing him carefully, she no longer saw the anxious scholar bravely struggling back from madness. Here was a different sort of man—armored, calculating. She didn’t know just what the change signaled, but she felt her own excitement stirring, and that meant she was on the track of—something.

  “I have a hunch,” she said slowly, “that this vampirism extends further back into your past than you’ve told me and possibly right up into the present as well. I think it’s still with you. My style of therapy stresses dealing with the now at least as much as the then; if the vampirism is part of the present, dealing with it on that basis is crucial.”

  Silence.

  “Can you talk about being a vampire: being one now?”

  “You won’t like knowing,” he said.

  “Edward, try.”

  He said, “I hunt.”

  “Where? How? What sort of victims?”

  He folded his arms and leaned his back against the window frame. “Very well, since you insist. There are a number of possibilities here in the city in summer. Those too poor to own air-conditioners sleep out on rooftops and fire escapes. But often, I’ve found, their blood is sour with drugs or liquor. The same is true of prostitutes. Bars are full of accessible people but also full of smoke and noise, and there too the blood is fouled. I must choose my hunting grounds carefully. Often I go to openings of galleries or evening museum shows or department stores on their late nights—places where women may be approached.”

  And take pleasure in it, she thought, if they’re out hunting also—for acceptable male companionship. Yet he said he’s never married. Explore where this is going. “Only women?”

  He gave her a sardonic glance, as if she were a slightly brighter student than he had at first assumed.

  “Hunting women is liable to be time-consuming and expensive. The best hunting is in the part of Central Park they call the Ramble, where homosexual men seek encounters with others of their kind. I walk there too, at night.”

  Floria caught a faint sound of conversation and laughter from the waiting room; her next client had probably arrived, she realized, looking reluctantly at the clock. “I’m sorry, Edward, but our time seems to be—”

  “Only a moment more,” he said coldly. “You asked; permit me to finish my answer. In the Ramble I find someone who doesn’t reek of alcohol or drugs, who seems healthy, and who is not insistent on �
�hooking up’ right there among the bushes. I invite such a man to my hotel. He judges me safe, at least: older, weaker than he is, unlikely to turn out to be a dangerous maniac. So he comes to my room. I feed on his blood.

  “Now, I think, our time is up.”

  He walked out.

  She sat torn between rejoicing at his admission of the delusion’s persistence and dismay that his condition was so much worse than she had first thought. Her hope of having an easy time with him vanished. His initial presentation had been just that—a performance, an act. Forced to abandon it, he had dumped on her this lump of material, too much—and too strange—to take in all at once.

  Her next client liked the padded chair, not the wooden one that Weyland had sat in during the first part of the hour. Floria started to move the wooden one back. The armrests came away in her hands.

  She remembered him starting up in protest against her proposal of touching him. The grip of his fingers had fractured the joints, and the shafts now lay in splinters on the floor.

  Floria wandered into Lucille’s room at the clinic after the staff meeting. Lucille was lying on the couch with a wet cloth over her eyes.

  “I thought you looked green around the gills today,” Floria said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Big bash last night,” said Lucille in sepulchral tones. “I think I feel about the way you do after a session with Chubs. You haven’t gotten rid of him yet, have you?”

  “No. I had him lined up to see Marty instead of me last week, but damned if he didn’t show up at my door at his usual time. It’s a lost cause. What I wanted to talk to you about was Dracula.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s smarter, tougher, and sicker than I thought, and maybe I’m even less competent than I thought, too. He’s already walked out on me once—I almost lost him. I never took a course in treating monsters.”

  Lucille groaned. “Some days they’re all monsters.” This from Lucille, who worked longer hours than anyone else at the clinic, to the despair of her husband. She lifted the cloth, refolded it, and placed it carefully across her forehead. “And if I had ten dollars for every client who’s walked out on me … Tell you what: I’ll trade you Madame X for him, how’s that? Remember Madame X, with the jangling bracelets and the parakeet eye makeup and the phobia about dogs? Now she’s phobic about things dropping on her out of the sky. Just wait—it’ll turn out that one day when she was three a dog trotted by and pissed on her leg just as an over-passing pigeon shat on her head. What are we doing in this business?”

  “God knows.” Floria laughed. “But am I in this business these days—I mean, in the sense of practicing my so-called skills? Blocked with my group work, beating my brains out on a book that won’t go, and doing something—I’m not sure it’s therapy—with a vampire … You know, once I had this sort of natural choreographer inside myself that hardly let me put a foot wrong and always knew how to correct a mistake if I did. Now that’s gone. I feel as if I’m just going through a lot of mechanical motions. Whatever I had once that made me useful as a therapist, I’ve lost it.”

  Ugh, she thought, hearing the descent of her voice into a tone of gloomy self-pity.

  “Well, don’t complain about Dracula,” Lucille said. “You were the one who insisted on taking him on. At least he’s got you concentrating on his problem instead of just wringing your hands. As long as you’ve started, stay with it—illumination may come. And now I’d better change the ribbon in my typewriter and get back to reviewing Silverman’s latest bestseller on self-shrinking while I’m feeling mean enough to do it justice.” She got up gingerly. “Stick around in case I faint and fall into the wastebasket.”

  “Luce, this case is what I’d like to try to write about.”

  “Dracula?” Lucille pawed through a desk drawer full of paper clips, pens, rubber bands, and old lipsticks.

  “Dracula. A monograph …”

  “Oh, I know that game: you scribble down everything you can and then read what you wrote to find out what’s going on with the client, and with luck you end up publishing. Great! But if you are going to publish, don’t piddle this away on a dinky paper. Do a book. Here’s your subject, instead of those depressing statistics you’ve been killing yourself over. This one is really exciting—a case study to put on the shelf next to Freud’s own wolf-man, have you thought of that?”

  Floria liked it. “What a book that could be—fame if not fortune. Notoriety, most likely. How in the world could I convince our colleagues that it’s legit? There’s a lot of vampire stuff around right now—plays on Broadway and TV, books all over the place, movies. They’ll say I’m just trying to ride the coattails of a fad.”

  “No, no, what you do is show how this guy’s delusion is related to the fad. Fascinating.” Lucille, having found a ribbon, prodded doubtfully at the exposed innards of her typewriter.

  “Suppose I fictionalize it,” Floria said, “under a pseudonym. Why not ride the popular wave and be free in what I can say?”

  “Listen, you’ve never written a word of fiction in your life, have you?” Lucille fixed her with a bloodshot gaze. “There’s no evidence that you could turn out a bestselling novel. On the other hand, by this time you have a trained memory for accurately reporting therapeutic transactions. That’s a strength you’d be foolish to waste. A solid professional book would be terrific—and a feather in the cap of every woman in the field. Just make sure you get good legal advice on disguising your Dracula’s identity well enough to avoid libel.”

  The cane-seated chair wasn’t worth repairing, so she got its twin out of the bedroom to put in the office in its place. Puzzling: by his history Weyland was fifty-two, and by his appearance no muscle man. She should have asked Doug—but how, exactly? “By the way, Doug, was Weyland ever a circus strong man? or a blacksmith? Does he secretly pump iron?” Ask the client himself—but not yet.

  She invited some of the younger staff from the clinic over for a small party with a few of her outside friends. It was a good evening; they were not a heavy-drinking crowd, which meant the conversation stayed intelligent. The guests drifted about the long living room or stood in twos and threes at the windows looking down on West End Avenue as they talked.

  Mort came, warming the room. Fresh from a session with some amateur chamber-music friends, he still glowed with the pleasure of making his cello sing. His own voice was unexpectedly light for so large a man. Sometimes Floria thought that the deep throb of the cello was his true voice.

  He stood beside her talking with some others. There was no need to lean against his comfortable bulk or to have him put his arm around her waist. Their intimacy was long-standing, an effortless pleasure in each other that required neither demonstration nor concealment.

  He was easily diverted from music to his next favorite topic, the strengths and skills of athletes.

  “Here’s a question for a paper I’m thinking of writing,” Floria said. “Could a tall, lean man be exceptionally strong?”

  Mort rambled on in his thoughtful way. His answer seemed to be no.

  “But what about chimpanzees?” put in a young clinician. “I went with a guy once who was an animal handler for TV, and he said a three-month-old chimp could demolish a strong man.”

  “It’s all physical conditioning,” somebody else said. “Modern people are soft.”

  Mort nodded. “Human beings in general are weakly made compared to other animals. It’s a question of muscle insertions—the angles of how the muscles are attached to the bones. Some angles give better leverage than others. That’s how a leopard can bring down a much bigger animal than itself. It has a muscular structure that gives it tremendous strength for its streamlined build.”

  Floria said, “If a man were built with muscle insertions like a leopard’s, he’d look pretty odd, wouldn’t he?”

  “Not to an untrained eye,” Mort said, sounding bemused by an inner vision. “And my God, what an athlete he’d make—can you imagine a guy in the decat
hlon who’s as strong as a leopard?”

  When everyone else had gone Mort stayed, as he often did. Jokes about insertions, muscular and otherwise, soon led to sounds more expressive and more animal, but afterward Floria didn’t feel like resting snuggled together with Mort and talking. When her body stopped racing, her mind turned to her new client. She didn’t want to discuss him with Mort, so she ushered Mort out as gently as she could and sat down by herself at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice.

  How to approach the reintegration of Weyland the eminent, gray-haired academic with the rebellious vampire-self that had smashed his life out of shape?

  She thought of the broken chair, of Weyland’s big hands crushing the wood. Old wood and dried-out glue, of course, or he never could have done that. He was a man, after all, not a leopard.

  The day before the third session Weyland phoned and left a message with Hilda: he would not be coming to the office tomorrow for his appointment, but if Dr. Landauer were agreeable she would find him at their usual hour at the Central Park Zoo.

  Am I going to let him move me around from here to there? she thought. I shouldn’t—but why fight it? Give him some leeway, see what opens up in a different setting. Besides, it was a beautiful day, probably the last of the sweet May weather before the summer stickiness descended. She gladly cut Kenny short so that she would have time to walk over to the zoo.

  There was a fair crowd there for a weekday. Well-groomed young matrons pushed clean, floppy babies in strollers. Weyland she spotted at once.

  He was leaning against the railing that enclosed the seals’ shelter and their murky green pool. His jacket, slung over his shoulder, draped elegantly down his long back. Floria thought him rather dashing and faintly foreign-looking. Women who passed him, she noticed, tended to glance back.

  He looked at everyone. She had the impression that he knew quite well that she was walking up behind him.

  “Outdoors makes a nice change from the office, Edward,” she said, coming to the rail beside him. “But there must be more to this than a longing for fresh air.” A fat seal lay in sculptural grace on the concrete, eyes blissfully shut, fur drying in the sun to a translucent watercolor umber.