The Vampire Tapestry (29 page)

“Sloppy thinking. Also, she drinks. You can see the veins on her nose.”

She stared at him with a sort of dazzled bewilderment. “Sometimes you are positively inhuman, you know that?”

He held the door open for her. “A useful reputation to have,” he said, “however undeserved.”

* * *

After the colloquium Irv was waiting outside. His white sport shirt set off his swarthy skin. He was hairy—darkly furred arms and a black curl at the collar’s opening—though balding on top. His face, folded onto a faintly simian bone structure, expressed alert middle-aged perplexity.

“Poor Jennifer,” he said. “I was worried for a while that you weren’t going to back off and let her recover.”

Weyland shrugged. “I didn’t intend to make an enemy, only to uphold some standard of scholarship.”

“You do that so deftly and so entertainingly,” Irv said with frank admiration, “that nobody could mistake your intentions, or even resent it too much that you decided to use them as an example, even if you do cut pretty deep in the process. Everybody knows that being too hard on other people means you’re too hard on yourself, too. A lighter hand in both cases would be a relief to everyone.” His voice sounded gentle as always, dark-colored and faintly wooly in quality as if dense with thought. Weyland did not reply, and, as he had expected, Irv chose not to pursue the subject. Having offered as much of a reproach as he was going to, he asked whether Weyland was going home. Irv lived in the same neighborhood. Sometimes they walked to or from the university together. Weyland said, “I’m going over to the library.”

“Then I’ll walk you that far, though what you have to do over there that couldn’t wait till next week I can’t imagine. It’s Friday, haven’t you noticed? Alison says she doesn’t know how you keep going, working as hard as you do.”

“A roundabout way of complaining that I overload her?”

“Oh, no,” Irv said. “I get the impression that though she’s never found you exactly easy to work with, she definitely feels that the benefits outweigh the pains. It’s not my business, of course,” he added, “but people talk to me, they tell me things. And God knows being T.A. to a senior professor can be hard going in all sorts of ways.”

Weyland had no intention of permitting the conversation to continue on that course. Irv could be expected to spot any false note in Weyland’s remarks about the affair with Alison. As they walked through the campus in the fading light Weyland said, “Alison would be a valuable addition to your oral-history project this summer. The field work might do her good, too. She needs more self-confidence, a greater sense of independence and of her own strengths.”

“Yes—I’d hate to see her drop out of anthropology. She’s so discouraged about the future, scared she’ll end up with no choice but to work for some state highway department on archaeological salvage.”

“That would be a living,” Weyland said.

“Sure. But she wants to be a scholar. You know the hunger.”

Weyland glanced at him. “One must adjust one’s hungers to the times.”

Irv laughed. “How true, and for all of us, not just these youngsters. Next time somebody refers to the university as an ivory tower, I’ll send them to you for a good, hard commonsense knock on the head.

“Weren’t we lucky?” Irv sighed. “I mean, anthropologists of the last few decades. We’ve had the best of it, I think: field work in wild places before the wild places got paved with soda cans, cushy jobs while the universities were growing, an exciting young discipline busting with confidence and studded with stars...I feel guilty these days when I talk about my own professional experience to students because they know and I know that most of the good stuff is used up. What a future they have to settle for.”

They crossed the artificial hills around the university’s artificial duck pond. Weyland thought,
The short
trajectories of human lives predispose them to these anxious judgments, that opportunities are
insufficient, openings are unsatisfactory, the times are tragically lacking in this or that. If only I’d
been born earlier, they say, or later. Alison can’t wait a hundred years for some swing of events in
her favor...

He said, “People seem to manage.”

“Sure. But I worry about the ones I know. Don’t you?”

They stood outside the library. Irv looked up mildly from under his heavy brows at Weyland. “We all concern each other, after all. Though maybe you wouldn’t agree?”

Weyland considered. “We all keep watch on each other. I can agree to that.”

Irv said nothing for a moment. He looked suddenly downcast and anxious, quite unlike himself. Weyland observed him curiously.

Irv said, “Never mind, I’m hardly fit to talk to lately. Too much on my mind, a mistake I made—several mistakes. Just now you reminded me of someone I knew—not your fault, it was the cautious way you said that. Keeping watch isn’t enough, you know. You can watch things go wrong right next to you and never know why.”

Weyland glanced about. In the dusk students were walking and biking over the mellow brick pavement. Feeling isolated with Irv in an unwanted intimacy, he said, “I’ve always found my work to be a good antidote to anxiety. How is your research coming?”

Irv was saying softly, “And when the crisis happens to someone you care about, you can really get torn up. I don’t know what I’d do now without the oral-history project. Those marvelous transcripts—I get caught up in the vividness of all those voices, Ed, the actual stuff of history, our own connectedness with our forebears and their lives, a living past...”

His hands sculpted the air as he spoke, his eyes shone. “I’d like to talk with you about that sometime,”

Weyland said quickly. “I may venture into your territory from a different direction. My new book will be about predator-prey relations among human populations, and how those relationships influence human attitudes toward animal predators and prey. You’re dealing, I suppose, with a frontier situation shared by groups as diverse as the Spanish, the Indians, the Anglos, and of course the once great animal predators of the West—grizzly bears, timber wolves, and the like. That should hold some interesting material for me.”

A student on a bike halted beside them, nodded shyly at Weyland and turned to Irv. “Can I talk to you for a few minutes, Irv? I’m having a lot of problems with the reading for your class, and I thought—”

“Ed, excuse me a minute, will you?” Irv said to the student, “Do you have some time right now? Go on over to the Union, pick up a couple of cups of coffee, and I’ll join you, all right?”

“Oh, great,” the boy said on a sigh of relief. “Thanks.” He pedaled away. Irv said to Weyland, “Tell you what, let me think a little about the transcripts. I’ll bet there’s plenty of good stuff you could use. Might take me a few days to get to it, though—I’m feeling the end-of-term crunch as it is, and now I’ve been invited to join the folk-sing here on the mall tomorrow night, which will screw up my schedule royally.

“It’ll do me good, though, to get out, leave books and trouble home, go shake the wrinkles out of the vocal chords, get the old blood moving, you know? When you live alone as I do, you have to make yourself be social. How about you coming, too?”

Weyland looked into Irv’s friendly, expectant face. Their need for approval, for each other’s presence, for endless conversation, seemed to drive them almost as hard as Weyland’s hunger drove him. Yet what in them was actually fed?

He expressed regret that he was otherwise engaged tomorrow evening.

“Too bad,” Irv said. “But you’re going to the Indian dances at the pueblo on Sunday, aren’t you?” That was better. Weyland had been meaning to reconnoiter the nearby Indian villages as potential hunting areas. He said he would certainly attend the dances at this village on Sunday. “Terrific.” Irv smiled. “I’ve got to check some details with an informant first, so I’m leaving pretty early. I’ll see you up there later on.

“Oh, and here’s something I wish you’d think about: I’d like you to be an informant in a new project I’m setting up on academic origins—the backgrounds of people who wind up in anthropology, people of the older ranks compared with some of the younger crew. Are you interested?”

His look, his voice, his stance all said,
I am interested; I am interested in you
. Weyland resisted the pressure. “No, I’m afraid that sort of thing isn’t for me. I’m a private kind of person.”

“I know, and I don’t mean to intrude,” Irv said gently, “but give it some more thought, will you? Privacy can be a burden that people set down with enormous relief—for a little while, anyway. Besides,” and suddenly he grinned his self-mocking grin, “what’ll I do if the major characteristic of all the academics I want to talk to turns out to be their love of privacy? See you at the dances.”

Irv headed for the Student Union with his quick, athletic stride.

At the library desk Weyland paused to pick up a book they were holding for him, a description of a New Guinean group who were supposed to be able to synthesize supplementary proteins from intestinal flora. Dietary wonders like this fascinated him, hinting at an enlightening link with his own situation. In the Southwest Room of the library he requested some of the oral-history transcripts to see if they might really be useful to the new book. Only then, for the sake of finding shortcuts through the huge mass of Irv’s material, would he invite more of the man’s insistent friendliness. Weyland’s new book promised some popular success. Its subjects, spectacularly diverse, ranged from Vikings to multinational corporations, and he knew that human beings loved to read about the worst in themselves. An appeal to local readership through a chapter on the American frontier would do Weyland no harm here at the university.

He read reminiscences of a public hanging at which the victim was too tall to be suspended from the only available tree limb, so the spectators had to climb onto his body and weigh him down to complete the job; of a family under siege watching its horses killed, one by one, by Indians; of a bear hunt ended abruptly, in the bear’s favor, by a flash flood. The concrete details of these accounts produced an effect of remarkable immediacy. No wonder Irv was fascinated. People must mourn the loss of such history in the same way that Weyland sometimes felt robbed of his own past lives. Yet he was not at ease with these narratives. He kept interrupting his reading to look about him at the shelves of books, the catalog cabinets, the tree shadows on the illuminated lawn outside. After the experience at the opera last summer, he felt threatened by these vivid accounts. The madness that inflamed him that night of Tosca had not struck him since, nor did he expect anything like it again. He was settled in, accustomed to this new part of the world and his place in it, and he took care not to subject himself again to such intense stimulation.

Nevertheless, he was uncomfortable now with these transcripts. Even without music and stage illusion these distinctly personal voices, slowed and muted in print, disturbed him; they evoked the taste and feel of the past so strongly.

Here was an anecdote from a Spanish witch near Mora telling how he had transformed himself into a coyote to follow an enemy and trotted along a wagon track in the wild dark, ears pricked to the creak of wheels and slap of reins up ahead...

Weyland pushed aside the transcripts and got up. He had other work to do in the library tonight, dry work, safely grounded in the modern world.

* * *

As usual, he walked home from the university circuitously, enjoying the crisp air and the quiet of the night. The only troublesome dog in the neighborhood, a nervous Doberman, he had attended to early the previous autumn. The animal had not been replaced.

Now whose car was this, parked around the corner from his own street? He did not recall having seen the VW hatchback around here before at night, and he tried to keep track of this sort of thing. Dark blue, a scrape along the rear fender, New Jersey plate—hadn’t this very car roared past his own last week on Second Street? He paused to note down the license number on an index card. A black-and-white cat trotted quickly across the street ahead of him, head down, no catch. Albuquerque had prettier streets, tree-lined and attended by gardeners. Weyland liked this block and its relatively old and established area east of and somewhat higher than the university. He enjoyed the unobstructed view of the mountains still farther east.

His house, sublet in September for a year, was a neat frame-stucco cube dressed up with a Mediterranean-style roof of red tile, dark foundation plantings, and a back yard bounded by a fence of warped wooden palings. His immediate neighbors were a pretentious adobe-style “ranch” enclosed in a high wall, and a brick house that looked as if it had been lifted, grounds and all, out of some Connecticut suburb.

Early and clearly he had impressed his preference for solitude upon his neighbors. Only Mrs. Sayers, across the street, continued her determined pitch for him; a fresh stack of used paperbacks from her, neatly tied up with string, awaited him by his front door. He tucked them under his arm and drew out his keys.

No one had laid an unfamiliar hand on his door. No faint shine of oil from a nervous palm’s pressure gleamed on the door panel, no heel-ruck rumpled the loose rug on the living-room floor. He set down the books, turned on the lamp beside the living-room couch, and moved unhurriedly through the house savoring the quiet for what it divulged: soft hum of the electric clock, occasional whish of a car passing outside, faintest whisper of music from the pianist’s house one street over. In the kitchen the refrigerator began to grind its motor as he opened the door to get ice. He kept a basic food supply for guests and for appearances’ sake—peanut butter, relish, pickled artichoke hearts, an egg carton, cheese, bottles of Bitter Lemon. One of his women visitors liked Bitter Lemon—the same one who had brought him, last week, that casserole wrapped in aluminum foil and these oranges going soft in the vegetable bin. Once, in order to excuse the refrigerator’s sparsely filled shelves, he had told her that he ate out a lot at McDonald’s. She had begun bringing him bags full of food, with the emphasis on fruits and vegetables.