Pretty Dead (5 page)

I
woke late the next morning, my body drugged with sensation. Jared gazed at me with heavy-lidded eyes. He was so naked under my soft white sheets. I could smell the fragrant mix of our bodies, creating their own perfume. I’d read that perfume has three layers—the top notes that you smell first, the heart notes and the base notes. In Jared’s arms I became the evanescent sweetness of lilies. Jared was the heart—sandalwood and cedar. Together we were the animalic musk base. I ran my hands over my body and smelled my fingers. I had a scent again. I would
no longer need to imitate the smell of a woman with musk and civet.

I wanted to say to Jared, “I’m alive,” but I couldn’t speak about it. It was all too much. I now knew what Emily must have felt when she said meeting him had saved her life. But it hadn’t ultimately, had it?

Jared had a faraway look in his cat eyes. I remembered the framed picture of Emily on my night table. Part of me wished I had moved it while we made love.

“Are you thinking about her?” I asked, pressing my face into his armpit.

“Why would she do that to herself, Char? I thought she was happy.”

“She was happy. She loved you so much. You made her happy.”

“But then why?”

“Did she ever tell you what happened? With her mother’s boyfriend?”

He nodded and shut his eyes for a moment, as if he
were trying to keep the images out.

Suddenly the room felt too small to hold us—claustrophobic, like a coffin. I couldn’t breathe, surrounded by all these old things. The dust motes jumped in a beam of sunlight.

“Jared,” I said, “we need to get outside, out of this house.”

He heard my urgency; maybe he felt it himself. We didn’t stop to shower or eat. He put on the black T-shirt and jeans he’d worn the night before. I wore a white button-down shirt and blue-jean cutoffs with old black cowboy boots decorated with blue and white moons, stars and roses. The pockets of the jeans stuck out beneath the bottom of my shorts. I put my hair in two braids under a straw cowboy hat. We still smelled of each other. I took his hand, and we ran out to my Porsche, got in, and drove along the coast. The winds had died down for a moment, but you could still smell the fires. I didn’t care if my house and all my treasures burned while we were gone.

We went east toward Hollywood, away from the burned smell in the air. We went to the flea market in the parking lot at Fairfax and Melrose, where kids were shopping for Halloween costumes. We found Jared a pair of beat-up cowboy boots like mine and laughed at the boys and girls in capes and plastic fangs. We stopped at Johnny Rockets diner and had hamburgers, fries and milk shakes at the shiny chrome counter. I glimpsed our reflections in a shop window. We were a good-looking couple, tall, with our contrasting hair, our big hands, our high cheekbones. For a moment I thought of Charles. If he were here now, he would have dressed like Jared. He would have walked like him, too. I flashed on Jared’s naked body from the night before. His broad shoulders, long torso, long legs, lean, hard musculature. Charles had been only two years younger than Jared was now when he died so long ago.

Jared and I walked on Hollywood Boulevard. We saw
Across the Universe
and shared a popcorn and a
Coke. I used my cell phone to take photographs of him standing on Marilyn Monroe’s star and James Dean’s star.

Jared asked softly, “Can I photograph you? I mean…will it work?” and I laughed out loud.

“You mean you didn’t check me out in the yearbook or online?”

Then he was embarrassed, and I kissed his cheek. He turned to face me and caught my wrists. He held the camera up above us and snapped it while his lips were on mine. In the picture we just looked like light.

“See?” he said. “You can’t photograph. Not because of anything sinister. Because you’re too magical to be captured that way.”

I said, “No, it’s your light. You blinded the camera with all that light coming off you.”

“Light?” he said. “No way. I’m a dark soul. But what I really want to know is, who are you?”

T
hat night Jared and I drove to the beach. We spread out towels and sat on the sand, looking out at the horizon as the sun fell slowly into the sea.

“What were you like when you were human?”

“A girl.”

“How old are you?”

“Never ask a lady her age. It’s rude.”

“Sorry.”

“Accepted.”

“What were your parents like?”

“Refined, intellectual, creative, a bit remote.”

“What happened to them?”

“They died. In an accident. A long time ago. Fortunately, long enough not to understand what had happened to me.”

“Do you miss being human?”

“Yes. Terribly. And yet I fear it after so long.”

“How can you live in the light?”

“That is a myth.”

“Mirrors?”

“A myth. I have a reflection. But I dislike mirrors.”

“Why?”

“The mythology is powerful. It makes me tense. I’m always surprised when I see anything there at all.”

“But do you like what you see?”

“No. It doesn’t feel like me.”

“What would?”

“I suppose a girl with duller skin and hair who looks like she is about to turn eighteen. My eyes look a hundred years old.”

“So you still eat human food?”

“I still eat the food I ate when I was like you. Blood tastes good, or it did, but is not the only way to survive.”

“Crosses?”

“They give me a queer feeling, but they can’t hurt me. I think some of them are pretty. I’d like to wear one as a necklace—a big one, ornate—but that seems like taunting fate.”

“Stakes?”

“I don’t know. I am not brave enough to find out.”

“Who made you?”

“William.”

“Why did he do it?”

“He loved me. As much as one of us can love, but maybe that isn’t the right word for it.”

“Did you love him?”

“I believed I did. I needed him, I thought. I was grief-stricken.”

“Why?”

“I had lost my twin brother.”

Jared hesitated, then covered my hand with his. “Oh, I’m so sorry. How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

I lowered my head. Why did I still feel it after so long? Suddenly I felt it more than I had since it had happened. Jared’s voice was lower when he spoke again.

“What was his name?”

“Charles.”

“What was he like?”

“Like me before I was changed, but sweeter and taller, with black hair.”

“How did he die?”

“Rheumatic fever.”

“What did you do?”

“I wept. I wept until I was as dry as an old woman. Then I let William Eliot find me.”

“Eliot?
Mr.
Eliot?”

“Yes. You are a quick study.”

“That’s why he’s here? For you?”

“I don’t know why he is here.”

“That’s why you left school?”

“Yes.”

“Will he change me?”

“Don’t even speak of it. Stay away from him, Jared.”

“I can’t. I’m in his English class.”

“Stay away!”

“You didn’t.”

“I do now. And I was vulnerable because of my…”

He moved his hand away. “What? Your grief? Unlike me, that is! What about my grief? What about Emily?”

“It is not the solution, believe me. Then you have to live without her forever. It’s much worse.”

“But do you feel loss the same way? After the change, did you feel loss the same?”

“Oh, no, darling boy. I felt loss more than ever
before. I feel an eternity of loss from which I cannot escape or relieve with tears, because we cannot cry.”

“But you’re crying now. Your face is wet.”

I put my fingers to my cheeks. He was right. They were damp with tears. I had not cried since my change. How could this be?

The sun had disappeared by now. Even the glow along the horizon was gone. For the first time in almost a century, I regretted, with a bittersweet melancholy, the loss of the day. I knew, at that moment, how much I must be transforming. Not only was I weeping, but I felt a stirring in my throat and chest and deep in my belly. It was a sensation I had felt only once in all these years. And only before I was changed.

I did not understand how or why this was happening, but now I believed that it was. Was the quickening of my pulse fear or the thrill of possibility?

“Charlotte, one last thing.”

“Yes?”

“It sounds stupid, but…”

“Just ask.”

“Can you feel, you know, love?”

“I thought I could. But now I realize that it was not really love but a fierce desire.”

Jared put his arms around me from behind, and I leaned back on his chest. I could feel his heartbeat against my spine.

“Will you tell me where you have been all these years since you were made?” he asked. “What you learned? What you saw?”

“Someday. I will write it for you. I will write it down,” I said, as the best day came to an end and the sweet night began.

Rome, 1925

We sit beside the Trevi Fountain in our white suits and sun hats. The sea nymphs frolic. The sun glints off the water as only the Mediterranean sun does—a dazzle of gold like a handful of tossed coins. The fountain is full of coins, full of wishes.

“I can make your every wish come true,” William whispers. He has my wrists caught in one hand. His mouth is near my neck. He smells of the gardenia in his buttonhole and nothing else.

Every wish. But he does not know that there is only one wish and that it can never come true. Charles is gone forever.

“Darling,” William says, “I have chosen you because I need a companion. And not just any girl could hold my interest for eternity. It will be a difficult task. The world is full of disasters and terrible beauty. But you, my dear, I’m sure you can meet the challenge.”

Paris, 1925

We walk along the Rive Gauche. Behind us is the Eiffel Tower, lit up with a sign that reads “Citroen.” In front of us is the little crystal tower made by the jeweler and sculptor Lalique, encrusted with 140 tiny figures. The water spilling off the tower glitters in the night. We have visited the Galeries Lafayette studios, all of marble with a sunburst design at the entrance. Everything is soft shades of rose against hard silver and black.

It as if we have entered a fairyland of neon lights,
steel chevrons, bronze sculptures, stone archways, strange gardens. I can’t tell if the magic is the place or from the way my vision has changed since William made me.

We are at the
Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoatifs et Industriels Modernes,
witnessing the formal birth of Art Deco, wth its sleek metallic lines, its jewellike faceted surfaces. It is a style of opulence after the austerity of the war, but soon it will become outmoded, considered ostentatious decoration and replaced by purity and function.

I am wearing a dress by Paul Poiret, a celery-green silk crepe sheath beaded with geometric gold and silver, a cloche hat and a gray coat with a fox-fur collar. Poiret, the emperor of fashion, has provided three decorative barges for the exposition, but after this he will fall into financial ruin. No more embellishments—roses everywhere, silver curlicues and swirls, crystal bottles with petal-shaped stoppers. His perfume line, Rosine, named after his daughter, with
fragrances called La Rose de Rosine, Pierrot, Fan Fan La Tulipe, Le Fruit Defendu and Nuit de Chine, will disappear from the market. He will die penniless in 1944, as out of fashion as the charming buildings all around us.

William and I will never go out of fashion. He will teach me. I will learn to adapt, to be always relevant. It is part of our trick.

William holds my kid-gloved hand in his. He seems aware of every slight gesture I make, inquiring whether I need refreshment or rest. I am his little fledgling, relying totally on him for all my needs now.

A boy passes us, a tall boy with black hair, wearing a pale coat.

William’s glance flickers across my face.

“Are you all right?”

He knows I am thinking of Charles. But I feel so different now. I feel strangely light in a lovely way, but also empty. Too empty, perhaps. I touch my cheeks. They are dry of tears. Before I changed, my
skin was not this smooth, this poreless—white china. Sometimes it broke out in small red spots. My eyes were not this dry. But luckily we are in Paris. The city glitters around me like a huge jewelry box, like a thousand candlelit perfume bottles on black velvet, and I pretend the shine is due to the reflection of my imaginary tears.

“Yes,” I say. “I am all right, William, although I hardly know the meaning of the words.” All right for whom? For what?

A few days later, we receive a telegram.

I stare at the paper in my hand.

Regret to inform you. Stop. Carl and Christine Elizabeth Emerson. Stop. Death in automobile crash. Stop. Return at once. Stop. Condolences. Stop.

Stop stop stop.

I look at William. He is watching me closely. The paper in my hands does not tremble.

“We will go immediately,” he says.

When William and I return home for the funeral, I wear a black veil over my face, not to hide the tears but to hide the fact that there are none.

I think of how, before Charles died, my father would let me come up the tower to watch the stars. He told me all the names of the planets and constellations.

He said, “The ancient gods haven’t left us. They are just waiting up there, waiting to return when they are most needed.”

“Will I ever see them return?” I asked when I was six. “I want to meet Venus!”

“No, Charlotte. I believe it will be many lifetimes from now, when our planet is in great danger. In our lifetime the planet will still be safe.”

He had no idea that his only daughter might live to see the planet in such danger, in such need of divine intervention from Mars and Venus, Jupiter and Neptune.

My mother dressed me up as Venus once. She made
me a wreath of purple Jacob’s ladder and mountain laurel. She sewed me a robe of purple velvet. Charles was young enough then to let her dress him up as Mars, in a toga and laurel wreath. He liked the cutout bow and arrow our mother made him. She played her harp, and I danced, and Charles ran through the house sounding his war cries.

I think about the fact that I left her when she could hardly rise from her bed, hardly feed herself, so that I could go to Europe and become a monster.

There is only one consolation. I am a little relieved, standing in the cemetery in my veil in the rain, that my mother and father did not have to live to experience the loss of both their children. Although I am here in body, I realize that the Charlotte they birthed and raised and loved is gone. A pretty monster—who would have frightened her parents because she never aged past seventeen, a creature who has no tears for them, for anyone—stands in her place.

Manbattan, 1925

After my parents’ funeral, William takes me to New York City. I am wearing the latest fashions from Paris—a Chanel cardigan that William bought for me, Chanel No. 5 perfume to cover up my uncanny scentlessness. We stay at the Plaza Hotel, a building designed after a huge French chateau, with a statue of Pomona, Roman goddess of the orchards, in the fountain. Our suite is decorated in white and gold. The bathroom floor is inlaid with mosaic tile. Baccarat crystal chandeliers light the lobby. We dine at the Palm Court on damask-covered chairs, under a stained-glass ceiling, at white linen and crystal covered tables.

Sometimes I sit at a table with a candle burning before me and try to write the way I did before William came. I want Charles to come back to me through the words, but he never does. It is as if my ability to create has been spirited away with this new life. I go to my room and look at myself in the gold-
framed mirror. The flawlessness and perfect pallor of my skin still fascinates me. I still check my undergarments for blood every few weeks, but I have ceased to bleed. The implications of this have not fully dawned on me yet, or perhaps I am too young still to really care. I had never thought of having children before. I didn’t want to be tied down like that. I had imagined some prolonged childhood, scampering unfettered through meadows with my brother at my side.

Now the only blood I see will be the blood William brings me to drink, disguised as wine.

At first he hid it from me. How he got this blood. And I never asked; I didn’t want to know. But slowly, in those first months of my change, he began to use me to help him procure the thing we needed.

Unsuspecting young men and women visit museums with us in the day, ride with us in carriages through the park at night, dine with us in glittering rooms, and, drunk on our wine, fall asleep like babies with their heads on our pillows.

We will live like this for years to come, and every time I balk, every time I tell him I have had enough, he takes me in his arms and kisses me, gives me jewels and flowers, shoes and perfume.

“I regret this part, too, Charlotte. But there is no other way. We must make the best of it. We must love our victims, honor and respect them. We give them meaning. We give them value. By dying this way, their lives have purpose.”

He makes me believe that we are only being true to our natures, nothing more.

San Francisco, 1939

Fourteen years have passed since William made me. I’ve been his creature almost as long as I was human, and in no time I’ll have left my young human self far behind. Not just chronologically; I am less and less like the girl I was. I don’t think about my parents much, or even Charles, except in those moments when someone who resembles him crosses my path. I am a
devoted partner to William, and my concerns revolve around keeping him happy as well as experiencing all the cultural riches he offers me. But I am already growing restless.

William was here in San Francisco in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. He has told me about the Tower of Jewels, 435 feet covered in 100,000 glass gems lighting up the night. The Tower of Jewels was temporary, but the Palace of Fine Arts is still there, with its dome, its colonnade, its frieze of weeping women reflected in the water that surrounds it. Swans float on the still surface, and the sky is soft and gray, with very little threat of sun. To brighten things dangerously, I wear a shocking-pink Elsa Schiaparelli dress with silver tambourine buttons.

William likes to travel to see the world’s marvels, to appreciate the beauty of man’s artistic achievements. He says they inspire him.

Now we are on Treasure Island for the new
exhibition, held boldly in the wake of the Great Depression. Two bridges have been built, and an exposition is being held defiantly, as if to say, “This city is immune from such calamity.” Just as the 1915 world’s fair was held only a few years after an earthquake that nearly ruined San Francisco forever.

In this way, the bold but foggy city reminds me of myself and William. Laughing in the face of danger. Challenged by it to grow bigger, more powerful, more immune.

William has things to show me. The Court of Flowers. The Elephant Tower. The Peru Building. The Tower of the Sun.

“Look! Look!” he says. “Aren’t humans endearing? I can hardly remember what it was like to be one anymore. They make magical little structures to boast about how ingenious they are. They make a whole temporary city just to boast.”

“At least they make something,” I say.

I am angry at William today. I used to be so
creative; perhaps I could have been a painter or a writer. He took that away. I am tired of his incessant talk, his cold eyes. Last night I had to lure a young couple to him again. He made me watch but I refused to eat. I went hungry. Now I am weak.

“I make things, too,” William says haughtily. He stops and takes my face in his hands. “I made the prettiest thing of all. And she isn’t going to be destroyed by earthquakes or wars. She’ll eat all her dinner tonight like a good girl. She is going to live forever.”

When you become only art and not the artist, the girl in the shocking-pink dress, what becomes of your soul?

London, 1940

Now I only wear a brown gabardine suit. In Paris, in defiance, the women are wearing high heels, full skirts, and even fur coats. They say the enemy will have less fabric if they use more.

When the bombing started, most everyone went underground, but William, impervious, takes my hand and leads me up to a high balcony where we can survey a large portion of the city.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he murmurs.

I must look horrified, because he puts his arm around my waist. “Oh, I know, it’s evil personified, but you can’t deny that it is beautiful, too. And I hate to say it, but bloodshed fosters the creative spirit. They are connected.”

There are too many fires to count. The horizon is aflame, like a hundred suns flaring before they set. But these suns do not set. They keep raging, consuming the city in red flashes and, above that, billows of pink smoke. The buzzing sound of the planes’ motors seemed to emanate from the fires themselves, as if the flames are made up of thousands of burning bees. From where we stand we can see the Thames and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, both glowing surreally. This is the first time in my life, as a human or
something else, that I contemplate an apocalypse.

“What will we do if the world ends?” I ask William, as all around us the city burns to ash beneath a sky of terrible roses.

“We will wander the ruins together,” he tells me.

Then we put on the tin hats he’s made for us and takes my hand. We run down, down, down the staircases to cavort and dance in hell.

Hiroshima, 1945

When we arrive, it hasn’t happened yet.

The city fills a valley between hills and sea. Later I will find out that this was one reason it was chosen. To focus the destruction in one area. I don’t know why he wanted to come.

“Why?” I asked when he mentioned it. “The war is on. I’ve had enough.”

“I know,” he said. “But remember that wars feed…”

“Culture and creativity. I know, you’ve told me.”

“And?”

“I don’t see that at all. They just bring death.”

But I came with him anyway. Maybe part of me believed that seeing the horrors might wake me up again, in some way bring back my humanity.

I was wrong. The horror hadn’t even really begun. That much horror can kill even the soul of a soulless being.

We are staying at a traditional
ryokan,
or hotel, in the outskirts. We sit on tatami mats; eat fish and rice; wear kimonos covered with peonies, pine trees, cranes. It is possible to pretend the world is peaceful. Until that day.

From the
ryokan
we see the flash of light, the sky with its mushroom cloud. A death’s-head in the sky. Black smoke. A whole city vanishing in a moment. If we were human we would have lost our hair later, developed tumors, died from the radiation. But our immortality saves us again.

They say that light patterns on clothing protected one’s skin and black patterns were imprinted onto the skin from the flash.