Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (45 page)

know  it was not an actual attack on a tourist 0-  strolled past a  streetlight and into darker shadow. She looked over her shoulder  twice, but in the wrong direction, for we had noticed the gleam  of a pale face at another angle to her. She walked on, a bit faster  now, but still as she passed the alley, he had her. ‘Lestat’ drew  her to him, one hand over her mouth, and she fainted away.  Then perhaps there was a full minute of him feeding, the bite  and then lapping and sucking. There was red paint in abundance

over  her blouse. Then he let her go, limp, to the ground and  looked straight at us as though still hungry. While the group  reacted, he seemed to fade into nothingness. Perhaps there was a  swirl of sparkly mist before the last spot was extinguished.

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I appreciated this ‘Vampire’s New Orleans’ tour the same way a hougan appreciates a stop at the voodoo shop with a midnight trip to the swamps. Still, New Orleans was new to me, as was the American south; many evening tours had similar themes and I found the antics  of the aficionados amusing

enough.

I had successfully avoided the four single women and also the lonely older couple, and stuck with a younger version of them, recently married, for whom the tour was clearly a turn-on.  Their exchanged glances and their constant bodily contact were feeding from the mild perversity. They used me as distraction that further heightened their tension and I, as it were, basked in their glow.

Then we made a final stop, end of the line, in Jackson  Square. The daylight mimes had been gone long since, but one had lit her poses by torches of the sort made for patios in drizzly weather. In the intermittently revealing light she stood on a small platform draped in crimson satin, but she wore, of course, black.  A softly draped dress as  black as smoke. Her glorious hair spilled over it like liquid gold. She should have been too lovely too mime the vampire, but the effect was stunning. One saw the golden hair first, then the dark red mouth and the long incisors.

I realized belatedly that  she was part of the tour.

Her ‘fangs’ looked so real they must have been expensive prosthetics. Her long white arms came slowly, languorously, and reached out to our whole group, yet to each of us alone. Her eyes looked at no one, and so everyone. When coins were tossed, she sank into a crouch and pulled her lips back. The young husband next to me gasped half aloud in sheer pleasure.

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There are mimes that essentially clown and there are mimes that add reality. For the first time that night, even in this haunted city, she made the undead real.

Except for myself, which would not have been mime. Yet as  I watched her strike pose after voluptuous and feral pose, it was as though only the two of us knew, and all these others were ignorant.

By now our little group had drifted away; the younger and older couples headed for bed, the single women for the bars.  None had any interest in the mime beyond the momentary titillation. They tossed coins and a few bills and departed.  Others had gathered, however, principally  men by ones and twos, to whom she played as shamelessly as a stripper for the money they dropped into the collection box.

And yet she still was inside the role. I found it unsettling, and I waited at a small distance until she shook off the vampire and stepped down. She threw a short cloak over her shoulders and tied back her hair, then tipped the money into her bag.  Perhaps she had palmed the teeth; I couldn’t tell.

The change was enough that the last of the men sheered away. She cast one glance at me and, I saw with amusement, discounted as a threat. She walked briskly away towards Canal and, at a distance, I watched her enter a car drawn up there. The motor fired and the car drew away.

I continued walking but turned through the French Market towards Café du Monde, where I took the merest taste of chicory coffee and sugar powder, and I pondered what I had seen. Already I hoped she would appear again the next night.

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And myself? I am the man at the far end of the bar, back to the wall, watching the rest of you. In the dim lighting you notice only the well-cut leather jacket and my distinguished silver highlights. Or else I’m the lone wolf strolling down Bourbon  Street eyeing the passing parade but not entirely part of it.  Hands in my pockets, shoulders  relaxed, perhaps moving to the beats drifting out of clubs. Maybe you catch my eye and smile at me, and I smile back and walk on. Or maybe I stop and buy you a frozen daiquiri in a plastic cup and we walk deeper into the darkness, and in the morning you have a bruised throat or wrist, or elbow, exactly like when you gave blood. You hardly remember me and vow to drink less. I have made that vow also.

Once I had a family of sorts among the living, who knew me and were not afraid, but that was long since. Once I was not alone in my rambles, but he too, my Aubrey-analogue, is gone. I have come here as people shop for a retirement home or relocation with movable employment. I walk around thinking, is this a place for me? I was undecided before I saw the vampire mime.

The next night I was early enough to watch her arrive and set up. The torches were already in place and the platform and collection box. Perhaps the tour provided them. But she spread the silken drape, removed her cloak and dropped some money into the box. I walked around the square. There was no car waiting yet. Likely it would return. As I turned back I saw her staring into the darkness I passed through. Her body language changed as she stared, no longer firm and purposeful, but sinuous and sinister. Was it possible, I wondered, that she was

vampire?

As she began, I made my way through the tour group to drop a bill into the collection. I could smell her perfume, a rich,

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spicy odour, and her sweat. She was alive. She was superb. Each  pose she held perfectly as a statue, without visible muscle  tension, then shifted at the reward of money. But none of it was  mechanical or false. If she learned not from experience and  certainly not from most films, might she have learned from  –  a  mentor, say?

People  came, saw, paid and left. She had to have noticed me but she gave no sign at all, and I left before she was done, to prowl restlessly through the warm night among the still crowded streets. I fed at last from one so totally inebriated that any memory would seem by morning fantastic. Lying down for the day, it was her face, gold-framed, that filled my mind. I wanted her. Wanted her in my life. She was young and interesting. If she did not have a mentor  –  might she want one?

The living talk of more than  one life in the same body, a concept I never understood until I had been . . . ‘turned’, I believe the current parlance. But my existence now is like that.  There was my young life before, and my mature life, and then my lives after: my wild early years among Boston immigrants; my sober Massachusetts years in which I much identified with the region’s historical persona of guilt and bloodlust; my family years in Chicago with significant others, living and not; the companion years of making my grand tour. Now  there were years alone and wandering with the impersonal intimacy of feeding and the illusion, sometimes, of friendship that  is  in fact passing acquaintance. How many more lives will I live in this body? I wonder. Is this a new one beginning?

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I walked  slowly from my large hotel (evening room service upon request) to Jackson Square in a light, misting rain. She was unlikely to pose in it. I sought out the Pirate’s Alley bookshop, still open to sell Faulkner, Chopin and even Rice. I handled one of her novels, wondering if this had been a source book for the mime. Faulkner I’ve never been able to read, but if I lived in  New Orleans, perhaps I would come to understand him. I met  Hawthorne, who’s more to my taste, and once discussed original sin with him. Nothing in the concept explains my state. No snakes involved, no fall from grace. I was not even precisely murdered, nor  –  at least once I understood my condition  –  have I often done more than steal blood. But then, I had a mentor.

The rain had stopped and the sky partly cleared. I saw at a distance the mime approaching. Her hair was covered by the hood of her cape and a man walked with her, carrying the stage and the torches. He too, I saw as they neared me, was alive, his skin as dark as sky. He set up the  platform and lit the torches. I followed when he left, but he led me only to the same sedan that had picked her up before. He drove away before I could locate a taxi, but I could arrange for one by the time she left.

Tonight, walking across the square towards the back, I perceived her audience. As on the other nights, men and a few couples had gathered. I stopped in the shadows behind her and watched their faces. Lust, as I had expected, and perverse thrill.  Even the women present, who perhaps wanted to be  her, wanted the vampire lover too. Only one face among them did not shine with desire. One nondescript man, brown hair, pale face, unremarkable clothing, watched with predatory anticipation. I thought he had been there the first night too, but I was not sure.

He was not vampire either. Light reflected off his sweating face and, as I came nearer, alcohol breathed off him. I joined the small group and looked up at her, and her pose was off slightly, stiffened and just a bit forced. She too had noticed him and he worried her. And worried as I was also, I felt  elation. Better than

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anyone else, better than her driver (or friend, partner, lover), I

could protect her from this.

People came and went. Not much money tonight. The hunter approached her too closely,  offering a folded bill as he might to a lap dancer. She went to attack pose, admirable fangs bared, nails clawing. He laughed, but stepped back, and I closed with him, a sharp point pressed to his side.

“Come with me,” I whispered, and pulled him away.

Again she broke her pose enough to watch us pass into a shadowy street. Once away he turned to grapple with me and I bit him quickly, taking enough blood to render him unconscious.  I took his wallet for good measure.

By the time I had cleaned my face and  hands and covered my shirt front, she was gone. Stand empty, torches out, as though she’d never been there at all. The familiar isolation washed over me.

Letitia Condit, aged twenty-two, was making her move.  Actually, her first move had been to go to college, even though her family, who didn’t have a nickel, couldn’t see the point.  During the year she’d majored in theatre and gotten by on scholarships and part-time work, and during the summers, on top of a full-time job, she’d gone to what its students  called the  ‘University of Silence’, the mime school.

Her mama had thought maybe she could do a cute little routine at the fair, at least until she had kids, or maybe be a clown for kiddie birthday parties. Her daddy had never had a clue what she was doing. Now she had graduated, it was time for the next step, which was professional experience. She’d

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always seen that her best choice was character parts, but they  were more limited for women mimes. She’d avoided the sexy  part like Lady Godiva (but you have the hair for it, her teacher  said) or any other role that wasn’t dignified.

She had made a perfect Virgin Queen as her final project, performing it three times, once at the school and twice in the  Quarter. Payment produced regal gestures and a cynical smile, and no actress had ever done them better. But through the persona trance she’d heard the audience, what there was of it, wondering who she was supposed to be and making wrong guesses, or half-assed ones: ‘Maybe she’s that Queen  – Elizabeth? Or was that Anne Boleyn?’ One had actually said,  ‘Naw, I think it’s the Pope’.

A sexier character, but not about sex per se, was required and so she had studied the Quarter and its hordes. And come up with the vampire. The sexual implication was there, but the power was hers, and she liked that balance. And the tour company had bought it as closure for their jaunt. They didn’t care if she went on longer, after their group had broken up. They even supplied the torches and the platform, and she called Kip on her cell phone when she was ready to leave. Kip was a tour guide, and too religious to approve of her persona, but he was reliable back-up.

He was what made it possible, in fact, to face down the skankier or drunker men, and feel safe walking away with up to  100 dollars a night, on top of what the tour paid her. She was making a living with her art, and this satisfied her more than anything she’d ever done.  Never mind that Kevin, the jerk, had broken up with her over it. What had she ever seen in Kevin?  Well, he had been good in bed. But she performed better with her bed empty anyway, even if she was lonely afterwards, back in her tiny apartment.

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Some nights she was too restless to sleep afterwards, and some of those nights she concocted plans, because this was a summer gig. When the rains came, she needed another move altogether. It was possible to move the act into a bar, but that felt too close to other acts. She’d talked to a manager at one of the likelier places, but even he had suggested removing some clothing along the way.

Some nights she went for a walk into the Garden District.  She always walked to ST Charles and by Anne Rice’s house as a kind of talisman, sympathy for the vampire. Loners, they were, outcasts, some of whom hadn’t chosen their lot. All of it went into her performance. And that was where she’d first seen the guy, the one she thought of as ‘the Count’.

He had drifted out of the tree shadow into streetlight and moonlight as effortlessly as a ghost. For a second she thought she had seen a ghost  – Lafayette Cemetery was only blocks away. She drew back into a shadow herself, though she’d been convinced he knew she was there, even though he never looked her way. He’d been staring at the Rice house as though taking a personal picture. He stood there motionless while the usual carload of drunken kids piled out and struck what they thought were vamp poses while taking cell-phone pictures of each other and laughing hysterically. Then he seemed to be done, wheeled round and walked towards the trolley line in a brisk, human