by Paula Guran
Her most notable vampire fiction is the novel, Desmodus (1995), in which isolated matriarchal vampire clans consider the males of their kind as nearly useless. Her otherwise humanoid vampires are also unusual in that they possess wings and other characteristics of bats.
To say the vampire in “The Better Half” is nothing at all like those in Desmodus is probably an understatement…
Kelly opened the door before I’d even come close to her house. The opening and closing of the red door in the white house startled me, like a mouth baring teeth. I stopped where I was, halfway down the block. Kelly was wearing a yellow dress and something white around her shoulders. She stepped farther out onto the porch and shaded her eyes against the high July sun.
For some reason, I didn’t want her to see me just yet. I stepped behind a thick lilac bush dotted with the nubs of spent flowers. A small brown dog in the yard across the street yapped twice at me, then gave it up and went back to its spot in the shade.
I hadn’t seen Kelly in fifteen years. I’d thought I’d forgotten her, but I’d have known her anywhere. In college we’d been very close for a while. Now that I was older and more careful, I’d have expected not to understand the ardor I’d felt for her then; it distressed me that I understood it perfectly, even felt a pulse of it again, like hot blood. Watching her from a distance and through the purple and green filtering of the lilac bush, I found myself a little afraid of her.
Later I learned that it was not Kelly I had reason to fear. But my father had died in the spring, and I was afraid of everything. Afraid of loving. Afraid of not loving. Afraid of coming home or rounding a corner and discovering something terrible that I, by my presence, could have stopped. I cowered behind the lilac bush and wished I could make myself invisible. I wondered why she’d called. I wondered savagely why I’d come. I thought about retreating along the hot bright sidewalk away from her house. I could hardly keep myself from rushing headlong to her.
Slowly I approached her. It was obvious that she still hadn’t seen me; she was looking the other way. Looking for me. I was, purposely, a few minutes late. Then she turned, and I knew with a chill that something was terribly wrong.
It wasn’t just that she looked alien, although she was elegantly dressed on a Saturday morning in a neighborhood where a business suit on a weekday was an oddity. It wasn’t just that I felt invaded, although her house was around the corner from the diner where Daddy and I had often had breakfast, the park where we’d walked sometimes, the apartment where we’d lived. It was more than that. There was something wrong with her. I stopped again and stared.
It was mid-July and high noon. Hot green light through the porch awning flooded her face, the same heavy brows, high cheekbones, slightly aquiline nose. She looked sick. The spots of color high on her cheeks could have been paint or fever. She was breathing hard. Even from here I could see that she was shivering violently. And around her shoulders, in the noonday summer heat, was a white fur jacket.
I have told myself that at that point I nearly left, but I don’t think that’s true. I stood there looking at her across the neat green of the Kentucky bluegrass in her north Denver lawn. Sprinklers were on, making rainbows. I was drawn to her as I’d always been. Something was wrong, and I was about to be drenched in it, too.
She saw me and smiled, a weak and heart-wrenching grimace. I wished desperately that I’d never come but the impulse toward self-preservation, like others throughout my life, came too late.
“Brenda! Hello!”
I opened the waist-high, filigreed, wrought-iron gate, turned to latch it carefully behind me, turned again to walk between even rows of pin-wheel petunias. “Kelly,” I said, with an effort holding out my hand. “It’s good to see you.”
Her hand was icy cold. I still vividly recall the shock of touching it, the momentary disorientation of having to remind myself that the temperature was nearly a hundred degrees. She leaned toward me over the porch railing, and a tiny hot breeze stirred the half-dozen wind chimes that hung from the eave, making a sweet cacophony. Healthy plants hung thick around her, almost obscuring her face. I could smell both her honeysuckle perfume and the faint sickly odor of her breath. She was smiling cordially; her lips were pale pink, almost colorless, against the yellow-white of her teeth. There were dark circles under her eyes. For a moment I had the terrifying fantasy that she would tumble off the porch into my arms, and that when she hit she would weigh no more than the truncated melodies from the sway of the chimes.
Her voice was much as I remembered it: husky, controlled, well-modulated. But I thought I’d heard it break, as though the two words she’d spoken had been almost too much for her. She took a deep breath, encircled my wrist with the thin icy fingers of her other hand, and said, “Come in.”
I had last seen Kelly at her wedding. I’d watched the ceremony from a gauzy distance, wondering how she could bring herself to do such a thing and whether I’d ever get the chance; my father had already been sick and my mother, of course, long gone. Then I had passed through a long reception line to have her press my hand and kiss my cheek as though she’d never seen me before. Or never would again.
Ron, her new husband, had bent to kiss me, too, and I’d made a point to cough at the silly musk of his aftershave. He was tall and very fair, with baby-soft stubble on his cheeks and upper lip. His big pawlike hands cupped my shoulders as he gazed earnestly down at me. “I love her, Brenda.” He could have been reciting the Boy Scout pledge. “Already she’s my better half.”
Later I repeated that comment to my friends; we all laughed and rolled our eyes. Ron was always terribly sincere. He could be making an offhand remark about the weather or the cafeteria food, and from his tone and delivery you’d think he was issuing a proclamation to limit worldwide nuclear arms proliferation.
Ron was simple. Often you could tell he’d missed the punchline of a joke, especially if it was off-color; he’d chuckle good-naturedly anyway. He had a hard time keeping up with our rapid Eastern chatter, but he’d look from one speaker to the next like an alert puppy, as if he were following right along. He was such an easy target that few of us resisted the temptation to make fun of him.
Kelly, who was brilliant, got him through school. At first she literally wrote his papers for him; he was a poli-sci major and she took languages, so it meant double studying for her, but she didn’t seem to pull any more all-nighters than the rest of us. Gradually he learned to write first drafts, which she then edited meticulously; you’d see them huddled at a table in the library, Kelly looking grim, Ron looking earnest and genial and bewildered.
She taught him everything. How to write a simple sentence. How to study for an exam. How to read a paragraph from beginning to end and catch the drift. How to eat without grossing everybody out. How to behave during fraternity rush. At a time when the entire Greek system was the object of much derision on our liberal little campus, Ron became a proud and busy Delt; senior year he was elected president, and Kelly, demure in gold chiffon, clung to his arm.
We gossiped that she taught him everything he knew about sex, too. That first year, before the mores and the rules loosened to allow men and women in each other’s rooms, everybody made out in the courtyard of the freshman women’s dorm. Because Kelly said they had too much work to do, they weren’t there as often as some of the rest of us; for a while that winter and spring, I spent most of my waking hours, and a few asleep, in the courtyard with a handsome and knowledgeable young man from New Jersey named Jan.
But Ron and Kelly were there often enough for us to observe them and comment on their form. His back would be hard against the wall and his arms stiffly down around her waist. She’d be stretched up to nuzzle in his neck—or, we speculated unkindly, to whisper instructions. At first, if you said hello on your way past—and we would, just to be perverse—Ron’s innate politeness would have him nodding and passing the time of day. Kelly didn’t acknowledge anything but Ron; she was totally absorbed in him. Before long, he
had also learned to ignore us, or to seem to.
Kelly was moody, intense, determined. Absolutely focused. I knew her before she met Ron; they assigned us as roommates freshman year. There was something about her—besides our age, the sense that we were standing on a frontier—that made me tell her things I hadn’t told anybody, hadn’t even thought of before. And made me listen to her self-revelations with bated breath, as though I were witness to the birth of fine music or ferreting out the inkling of a mystery.
In those days Kelly was already fascinated by women who had died for something they believed in, like Joan of Arc about whom she read in lyrical French, or for something they were and couldn’t help, like Anne Frank whose diary she read in deceptively robust German. I didn’t understand the words—I was a sociology major—but I knew the stories, and I loved the way Kelly looked and sounded when she read. When she stopped, there would be a rapturous silence, and then one or both of us would breathe, “Oh, that was beautiful!”
After she met Ron, things between Kelly and me changed. At first all she talked about was him, and I understood that; I talked about Jan a lot, too. But gradually she quit talking to me at all, and when she listened it was politely, her pen poised over the essay whose editing I had interrupted.
Ron seemed as open and expansive and featureless as the prairies of his native Nebraska. I was convinced she was wasting her life. He wasn’t good enough for her. I could not imagine what she saw in him.
Unless it was the unlimited opportunity to play puppeteer, sculptor, inventor. I said that to her one night when we were both lying awake, trying not to be disturbed by the party down the hall. She was my best friend, and I thought I owed it to her to tell her what I thought.
“What is it between you and Ron anyway?” I demanded, somewhat abruptly. We’d been complaining desultorily to each other about the noise and making derogatory comments about some people’s study habits, and in my own ears I sounded suddenly angry and hurt, which was not what I’d intended. But I went on anyway. “What is this, a role-reversed Pygmalion, or what?”
She was silent for such a long time that I thought either she’d fallen asleep or she was completely ignoring me this time I was just about to pose my challenge again, maybe even get out of bed and cross the room and shake her by the shoulders until she paid attention to me, when she answered calmly. “There are worse things.”
“Kelly, you’re beautiful and brilliant. You could have any man on this campus. Ron is just so ordinary.”
“Ron is good for me, Brenda. I don’t expect you to understand.” But then she assuaged my hurt feelings by trying to explain. “He takes me out of myself.”
That was the last time Kelly and I talked about anything important. It was practically the last time we talked at all. For the rest of freshman year I might have had a single room, except for intimate, hurtful evidence of her—stockings hung like empty skin on the closet doorknob to dry, bottles of perfume and makeup like a string of amulets across her nightstand—all of it carefully on her side of the room. The next year she roomed with a sorority sister, somebody whom I didn’t know and whom I didn’t think Kelly knew very well, either.
I was surprised and a little offended to get a wedding invitation. I told myself I had no obligation to go. I went anyway, and cried, and pressed her hand. To this day I’m not sure she knew who I was when I went through the reception line. I spent most of the reception making conversation with Kelly’s parents, a gaunt pale woman who looked very much like Kelly and a tall fair robust man. They were proud of their daughter; Ron was a fine young man who would go far in this world. Her father was jocular and verbose; he danced with all the young women, several times with me. Her mother barely said a word, seldom got out of her chair; her smile was like the winter sun.
At the time I didn’t know that I’d noticed all that about Kelly’s parents. I hadn’t thought about them in years, probably had never thought about them directly. But the impressions were all there, ready for the taking. If I’d just paid attention, I might have been warned. And then I don’t know what I would have done.
Since college, Kelly and I had barely kept in touch. For a while I had kept approximate track of her through mutual friends and the alumni newsletter. I moved out West because the dry climate might be better for Daddy’s health, got a graduate degree in planning and a job with the Aurora city government. Left Daddy alone too much, then hired a stranger to nurse him so I could live my own life. As if there was such a thing.
From sporadic Christmas cards, I knew that Kelly and her family had lived in various parts of Europe; Ron was an attorney specializing in international law and a high-ranking officer in the military, and his job had something to do with intelligence, maybe the CIA. I knew that they had two sons. In every communication, no matter how brief, Kelly mentioned that she had never worked a day outside the home, that when Ron was away she sometimes went for days without talking to an adult, that her languages were getting rusty except for the language of the country she happened to be living in at the time. It seemed to me that even her English was awkward, childlike, although it was hard to tell from the few sentences she wrote.
Last year I’d received a copy of a form Christmas letter on pale green paper with wreaths along the margin, ostensibly composed by Ron. It was so eloquent and interesting and grammatically sophisticated that at first I was a little shocked. Then I decided—with distaste, but also with a measure of relief that should have been a clue if I’d been paying attention—that Kelly must still be ghostwriting.
For some reason, I’d kept that letter, though as far as I could remember I hadn’t answered it. After Kelly’s call, I’d pulled it out and re-read it. The letter described the family’s travels in the Alps; though it read like a travel brochure, the prose was competent and there were vivid images. It outlined the boys’ many activities and commented, “Without Kelly, of course, none of this would be possible.” It mentioned that Kelly had been ill lately, tired: “The gray wet winters of northern Europe really don’t agree with her. We’re hoping that some of her sparkle will return when we move back home.”
I’d thought there was nothing significant in that slick, chatty, green-edged letter. I’d been wrong.
Kelly’s house was very orderly and close and clean. She led me down a short hallway lined with murky photographs of people I didn’t think I knew, into a living room where a fire crackled in a plain brick fireplace and not a speck of ash marred the dappled marble surface of the hearth. Heavy maroon drapes were pulled shut floor to ceiling, and all the lights were on; the room was stifling.
Startled and confused, I paused in the arched doorway while Kelly went on ahead of me. I saw her pull the white fur jacket closer around her, as if she were cold.
“We haven’t lived here very long,” she said over her shoulder. She was apologizing, but I didn’t know what for.
“It’s nice,” I said, and followed her into the nightlike, winterlike room.
She gestured toward a rocker-recliner. “Make yourself at home.”
I sat down. Though the chair was across the room, the part of my body which faced the fire grew hot in a matter of seconds, and I had started to sweat. Kelly pulled an ottoman nearly onto the hearth and huddled onto it, hugging her knees.
I was quickly discomfited by the silence between us, through which I could hear her labored breathing and the spitting of the fire. “How long have you lived here?” I asked, to have something to say.
“Just a few months. Since the first of April.” So she was aware it was summer.
“How long will you be here?” I knew it was sounding like an interrogation, but I desperately needed to ground myself in time and space. That was not a new impulse, though I hadn’t been so acutely aware of it before. I was shaking, and the heat was making my head swim. It seemed to me that I had been floating for a long time.
I understand now, of course, how misguided it was to look to Kelly for ballast. She had almost no weight herself by th
at time, no substance of her own, so she couldn’t have held anybody down.
Abruptly, as often happened to me when I was invaded by even a hint of strong emotion—fear, pleasure, grief—I could feel the slight weight of my father’s body in my arms, the web of his baby-fine hair across my lips. I closed my eyes against the pain and curled my arms into my chest as though to keep from dropping him.
Almost tonelessly Kelly asked, “What’s wrong, Brenda?” and I realized I’d covered my face with my empty hands.
“You remind me of somebody,” I said. That surprised me. I wasn’t even sure what it meant. Self-stimulating like an autistic child, I was rocking furiously in the cumbersome chair. I forced myself to press my palms flat against its nubby arms, stopping the motion. “Somebody else who left me,” I added.
She didn’t ask me what I meant. She didn’t defend against my interpretation of what had happened between us. She just cocked her head in a quizzical gesture so familiar to me that I caught my breath, although I wouldn’t have guessed that I remembered anything significant about her.
Absently she picked two bits of lint off the brown carpet, which had looked spotless to me, and deposited them into her other palm, closing her fingers protectively. I noticed her silver-pink nails. I noticed that her mauve stockings were opaque, thicker than standard nylons, and that the stylish high-heeled boots she wore were fur-lined. I wanted to go sit beside her, have her hug me to warm us both. I was sweating profusely.
I think I was on the verge of telling her about my father. I think I might have said things to her that I hadn’t yet said to myself. I’m still haunted by the suspicion that, if I’d spoken up at that moment, subsequent events might have turned out very differently. The thought makes my blood run cold.
But I didn’t say anything, for at that moment Kelly’s sons came home. I flinched as I heard a screen door slam, heard children’s voices laughing and squabbling. It was as if their liveliness tore at something.
