The Vampire Tapestry (28 page)

He recoiled violently from such possibilities; he wanted nothing more from them than that which he already, relentlessly, required: their blood.

The mountain ahead of him was, he saw, to be envied; it could be wounded by these human cattle, but never perturbed.

* * *

The morning tour drifted out onto the concrete deck at the rear of the opera house. The guide pointed west: “On clear nights when we leave the back of the stage open, the lights of Los Alamos...”

A heavyset man standing by the rampart glanced down at the road below. He leaned out, not believing what he saw, his breath gathering for a cry.

* * *

Elmo made a painting of dreamlike figures from the opera dancing on a sunny hilltop, towered over by a tall shaft of shadow like a wellfull of night. In memory of the young singer who had died the night of
Tosca
, Elmo called the painting
The Angel of Death
.

“Fat times in Academe are over.” Out of Irv’s open office doorway drifted Alison’s disconsolate voice. Weyland paused in the hallway to listen.

“Every sensible graduate student sees the handwriting on the wall,” Alison continued. “Ph.D. and all, I’ll wind up typing in an insurance office—which is probably no worse than spending my life diagramming kinship systems or arguing about how many languages are spoken in Nigeria.”

Weyland recognized with amusement his own recent summation of the state of anthropology.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Irv said. “That’s not the kind of work Ed Weyland has you doing.” His chair squeaked. When he talked, Irv habitually swiveled it for emphasis. Weyland could hardly avoid noticing: Irv’s office was almost directly across the hall from his own.

“Dr. Weyland is an original, Irv, everybody knows that,” Alison said. “He has this unique slant that makes his courses really exciting. But one mind like that does not a whole discipline make.”
Indeed it
does not
, thought Weyland, with a cold glance down the hall at the office doors. He did not think of himself as having much in common with those intellectual knitters. “This semester of work with him is ending, and I’m not capable of creating that kind of excitement for myself. I’m not an original. So it’s back to comparing bride prices for me, and frankly, I’d rather sell matches.”

Irv said, “Alison, we need people like you, good thinkers with good hearts, to save the discipline from the statisticians and the jargonmongers. Oh, I wish you’d been up in Tres Ritos with me yesterday listening to Carlos Hererra talk about Indian raids on his father’s farm. I know taking down oral history isn’t large conceptual work, Weyland’s style, but it’s not sterile scholasticism either. We can rescue human lives and cultures from oblivion. We can snatch history from the jaws of death.”

On the subject of his beloved oral-history project Irv waxed lyrical. He seemed fueled by animated conversation: his own, his informants’ in the project, the conversation of the students and faculty who sought him out. Weyland had never known him to turn away anyone who wanted to discuss, debate, or just listen. How did the man find time for all that talk and his scholarly obligations too? By slighting the work, no doubt. Irv was the sort of man in whom much would be excused by those who enjoyed his warmth.

Alison Beader was Weyland’s teaching assistant. He stepped into Irv’s office and said, “Alison, when you have a minute, we need to talk about making up the final examination.”

She looked up guiltily—because she had taken her complaints to Irv instead of him? The exact mix and weight of human reactions were often obscure. In fact, Weyland rejoiced that she had not chosen his shoulder to wail upon. He waved aside her promise to come at once to his office. “Take your time.”

Irv was leaning back, his arms folded behind his head, his dark, welcoming eyes turned to Weyland. Taped on the wall behind Irv was a poster of a cartoon cat sitting on a stool strumming a guitar and singing. The poster was a gift from a student last Christmas. People wanted to be close to Irv. Weyland did not. He had learned early that, because of a chronic health condition, Irv was always on medication. His blood was unfit to drink. However, Weyland took care to maintain a good-tempered relationship with him. To have treated Irv in the cool and autocratic manner that he treated most members of the department would have branded Weyland an obvious crank.

He said, “Have you persuaded Alison to spend the summer prospecting for the past in the sun-crazed brains of the aged? Irv is very seductive, Alison. He tried to recruit me, but when he showed me a parchment treasure map, I fled.”

Irv grinned. “You ought to come with me once, Ed, just for relief from books, journals, and the almighty printed word.”

“My summer plans, thank God, are made,” Weyland said. He meant to stay in Albuquerque, write, and hunt among the hordes of tourists. “Try again next year. For the moment, the printed word commands me.” He tapped the handful of mail he had picked up at the main office. Irv grimaced at the lesser heap of letters in the wooden tray on his own desk. “I’d trade mail with you, but would you want to take on the informant family I worked with in Ceylon? They write that they pray every day that I’ll finance their third kid through college.”

“I would answer as a god of wrath,” Weyland replied.

Irv laughed. “I was afraid of that. Okay, no trades.”

Weyland left them to finish their conversation.

This late on a Friday everyone else was gone. Without fear of being seen he slipped the latch of Arnold

“Map” Oblonsky’s door with a credit card and entered to search out a geologic map he wanted. Just as missing library books were generally found piled up in the sumptuous office of Eleanor Hellstrum, the department’s emeritus, maps were hoarded by Map Oblonsky—ostensibly to protect them from being mishandled, stolen, or lost by other less loving borrowers. Weyland enjoyed recalling the exalted guest lecturer who, not recognizing the nickname as heard in conversation, had cordially greeted the map-miser as “Professor Mapoblonsky.”

Taking the map he wanted, Weyland returned to his own office, where he too had begun an impressive hoard. Monopolizing materials was a sign of power, and power in the hierarchies of human beings was useful to him.

Foul stinks from the basement lab pervaded the building—doubtless somebody in a comparative-anatomy class cooking the flesh from an animal skeleton. Weyland opened his windows. Then, spreading the map on the small drafting table he had set up in one corner, he studied a spot in the Sandia foothills that seemed promising for cave exploration tomorrow. He would look for a meal on the drive up. Spring had brought out the hitchhikers with their packs and guitars. Random travelers, when not rank with dope or disease, made excellent prey. He had developed several strategies to bring about physical contact with such passengers. He heard Alison’s rueful laughter from Irv’s office. The situation with her required action. He did not want his relationship with Alison to go so far that people remarked on how peaked she looked, as they had remarked about his previous T.A. Now that spring provided the bounty of the roads, he need no longer depend so heavily on regulars like Alison for food. Wintering here in Albuquerque, he had constructed a network to supply him when hunting was poor: colleagues, students, and social companions—those whom he could approach without causing suspicion—made good victims at short notice. But there was always risk in repetition.

Alison was the most accessible, the most regular of the regulars, because of the personal relationship he had built on the working one. Now, happily, that connection could be ended. After several months, being her lover had become a strain.

He riffled through his mail: Please review this book that should never have been published; please reply to this furious reply to your previous hostile review; would you be interested in contributing to our forthcoming issue on real and synthetic languages; an invitation to a craft show opening (more pots) inscribed in the curly hand of the Anthro Department head’s wife; a request for a reference from a young woman whom he would consent to endorse, since she was brilliant and hard-driving and had gathered several illustrious names to back her.

Weyland had made his own name estimable enough so that others were eager to borrow its luster. Yet he gave them no sympathy. They hustled along trundling their little lives before them, panting and sweating to get ahead of others just like themselves with a pull from those who trundled still further ahead...Here was something welcome, a practical query from the printer about Weyland’s monograph, due out next month, on transformations of the self in dreams; an invitation to a conference in Australia next year—five days of soporific meetings and an overnight jaunt by kangaroo into the outback; a reminder of that outside lecture he was to give at the Indian School next week...He must demand more secretarial help—another mark of status. The barrage of paper and the demands on his time were impossible.

He packed up his briefcase.

Alison came in and shut the door. She stood there in the bright print jumper that seemed to bring out the shadows in her face, and she said in a quavering voice, “You may have noticed, Dr. Weyland, that I’ve been avoiding you lately.”

Warily, he nodded.

She stared at him. “My God,” she said. “I’ve spent a good number of nights in your bed this past winter, and I still call you by your title and surname. What have I been doing?”

A response seemed called for. He said, “Sharing your warmth and companionship with me.” So she had begun to separate from him; how agreeable. He turned a chair toward her invitingly. She looked shaky on her feet. He was thinking of a time when he had been harsh in just such a situation and had been forced, in consequence, to deal with hysteria. It paid, he had found, to go gently sometimes.

“Companionship was what I was looking for. I’ve never taken our liaison for more—how could I, a man more than twice your age?—and I hope you never did, either.”

“What does age have to do with anything?” she said. She sat down. “Claire,” she said, naming his former T.A., “was younger than I am.”

“Yes.” He seated himself behind the desk.

She looked confused, red-eyed. “I mean—doesn’t that make it awfully easy for you? You get close to a girl and then whenever you feel like it you just—you can turn her off by telling her you’re too old for her.”

She seemed quite upset. He hoped Irv had gone home. “But it’s you, Alison, who have come to do the turning off. And as for pursuing the young, I look for satisfaction where I have some chance of achieving it. You know how difficult it is for me, even with a youthful, attractive woman like yourself.”

She sat back, frowning. “Difficult? You mean sex? Half the time we just drift off to sleep. I don’t think you give a damn for sex, you know that? I guess when an older man pursues young women, he really wants them to keep him feeling young. And,” she added bitterly, “there’s no mystery in why a young woman falls for an older man, either.”

He had understood his attraction for her and had used it. But he could not imagine what she felt like, seeking a lost parent, or how a man would feel in pursuit of his own vanished youth. The inward sensations of such compulsions were closed to him. He kept silent, hoping she would move on to some other subject.

“The point is, it’s all over between us. I think it’s been over for a while now. That’s really a good thing—the timing, I mean, not too near the end of the semester, so it doesn’t look as if we had some kind of lay-for-a-term arrangement. I don’t want to get that kind of reputation. I did not start sleeping with you just to earn a boost up the professional ladder. I’m not like that.”

“Nevertheless, I will of course do whatever I can for you,” he said, “as discreetly as possible.”

“Don’t strain yourself,” she said resentfully and blushed. “Sorry.”

Ah
; he saw that he should have shown some flinching of masculine pride. Too late. Suddenly the tears spilled from her eyes. Weyland shook out a clean handkerchief and handed it to her.

“God damn it,” she gulped from behind the bunched and dampened cloth, “this would be a lot easier if you weren’t—you have the face of everybody’s dream-father, you know that? All rugged and worn and wise, and then there’s this distance—it’s irresistible, I can’t explain it. But next time somebody says they climb mountains because they’re there, I’ll have some idea what they mean.”

She took a deep breath and settled herself in the chair as if beginning over. “Anyway, it looks as if we’re a pair of complementary neuroses that met, grappled, and are about to pass in the night. So I want to say goodbye on that score. I hope you won’t hold it against me that I did this before you decided to do it yourself.”

“On the contrary,” he said gravely. “I’m grateful for your sensitivity and realism.”

A “farewell fuck,” to use Oblonsky’s terminology, would be appropriate here if they were within reach of a bedroom instead of at the office.
Thank God for small mercies.
Sex, which Weyland had always found complicated, was a positive chore with Alison because of her recurrent desire to kiss and mouth him, practices which he detested. But he was willing to try now and again with her to keep up her hope that she would eventually “cure” him of his “difficulty” completely. How else could he keep her coming back? He had needed her for those other evenings, the ones that mattered—the evenings when, caressing her warm skin, with a pressure at the throat he put her straight to sleep and drank her clean, sweet blood. The thought stirred his ever-present hunger.

Blinking, on the verge of renewed tears, she said, “I can’t believe I’ve done it.”

But you have, so let’s not go over everything again.
He got up. “Jennifer Chadwick is reading at Couche Hall—a paper on devil figures as instruments of social control. Would you like to attend?”

Alison shook her head slowly. “Poor Jennifer. You’re planning some politely murderous questions for her, aren’t you? All very courtly, but right for the jugular. What have you got against her?”