The Vampire Tapestry (32 page)

“I came twenty-two years ago to paint, if you please, the mystery of the desert.”

“And did you?”

“Hardly,” she laughed. At the windmill they turned onto a tarmac road. “But painting led to looking, and that’s led to—paying attention. I’ve paid attention to you, Dr. Weyland. In the lecture hall in January I tried to draw you with my eye, but I saw that you do not draw. You have a stylized, streamlined quality, as if you were already a drawing rather than a man.”

Weyland looked back. Irv and Letty had stopped at the end of the unpaved road and were squatting by the windmill, doodling with sticks in the dirt as they talked.

He felt betrayed by chance in broad daylight. How did this woman walking the blacktop at his side see him so well? His mind raced. He said, “The range of variations in the human form must be wider than you thought.”

“Apparently.” She flashed him a look of ironical approval. “The range of variations in the human form—that must be the explanation. But then, suppose it isn’t? I like a world with wonders in it. Mind you, just because you’ve noticed something doesn’t mean it’s yours to meddle with.” She stopped and looked back at Irv and Letty Burns. “I wouldn’t say anything to you now, except it rocked me, almost walking into Irv by the church, seeing all that hurt in his face—and there you were with him.

“But his trouble has nothing to do with you, does it? You’re not a part of that. You’re just made from a different mold.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “I don’t quite understand...”

“Something’s wrong, all right,” she said. “I’ll have to get him to talk about it.” She walked back toward the others. He followed a few paces behind her.

“...the last I heard,” Irv was saying wearily, settled on his haunches with lowered head. Letty stood up, arms crossed, looking past Dorothea at Weyland.

“You have family here, Professor?” she said.

Dorothea said mildly, “Leave the professor his secrets, Letty. Everyone’s entitled to their secrets.”

The drumming had stopped. Dancers, jingling and rattling in costume, could be seen trooping out of the plaza. Irv said that the dancing would start again after a break, but that he for one had seen enough dancing for today. Weyland swiftly echoed this, and they all walked toward the broad dirt lot in which visitors’ cars were parked.

What more would Dorothea say to Weyland, or of Weyland to the others? Possibly nothing. Possibly he had misunderstood, misread her, thrown off by these people’s strong feelings about each other. His best course, he knew—his only course—was patience.

Art. They spoke of art and of the dancing as an art form. Repetitious, Letty said, from set to set, from year to year even. No, Dorothea said; each season’s dance was a unique part of expressing over and over certain basic themes to insure continuity and regeneration. These themes could never be mined out, she said, they were so rich and full of power.

Then they were in the parking lot. Seeing Alison step out of Irv’s car to meet them, Weyland thought,
that at least has worked out as I hoped. She and I have had no quiet moments alone—of which
somehow there have been more than enough today with other people.
Introductions were made; they lingered at the car, talking, talking. Irv described an oral-history tape made that morning with an old woman of the pueblo. Suddenly Dorothea put her hand on his arm and said in the middle of his sentence, “Irv, I have a terrific idea. Come home with us tonight. We haven’t had a chance to just sit and gab away an evening in a long time. Bring Alison. You can show her the famous Libyan explorers’ message on the rock in the arroyo.” Her chuckling voice said this was a joke. Her face looked anxious.

“Thea, thanks, but the end of the term’s coming. I’ve got everything to do that I’ve managed to put off until now.”

“Forget all that,” Dorothea said. “You need a break, even just overnight. Come back with us.”

Letty said, “You do look beat, Irv. Come on, cut loose for a little.”

Alison looked at Weyland. She said, “I ought to ride back to Albuquerque with you, Dr. Weyland. We still need to discuss those exam questions.”
Single-minded Alison
, he thought darkly,
closing in for a
private talk he had been avoiding all day.
What overbearing arrogance they had about the importance of their cursed feelings!

Irv put his hand over Dorothea’s and said, “Honestly, I can’t. I’m expecting a phone call at home tonight or maybe tomorrow night. It’s important. Suppose I come up in a few weeks.”

Dorothea said, “We’re not going to wait that long. I’ll be in touch.” She held his hands and gave him a peck on the cheek. For Alison she had a brief, abstracted goodbye; for Weyland, a searching look and then a nod, a gesture of what he felt to be simultaneous acknowledgment and dismissal. She walked away kicking quick spurts of dust from under her sandals, Letty stalking alongside. Alison did not press the suggestion of riding back with Weyland. Having made her bid, she had apparently lost her nerve again. She ducked into the passenger seat of Irv’s car. Leaning against the fender, his forehead furrowed above his dark, frank eyes in his usual expression of hopeful concern, Irv said, “Would you rather Alison went back with you?”

“She lives closer to you.” Weyland was watching the two women’s figures receding toward the far corner of the parking lot.

* * *

The anthro building still stank the next morning. There had been rain showers during the night. Weyland knew his windows would be swollen tight, assuming he could get inside to try to move them. For some reason his key would not turn in the lock of his office door.

He had been up all night listening to the rain and thinking:
Had he been exposed? Had he somehow
escaped exposure? What exactly did Dorothea know or suspect?
Near dawn he had hunted, without finesse, in a motel he knew of that had particularly flimsy door latches. His first victim’s blood had been spoiled with barbiturates, so he had run the risk of approaching another. Driving to the office in a light rain, he had nearly run out of fuel and had yet again been outraged by the astronomical price of gas. At times like these he speculated gloomily that on his next waking he might well find the world reduced to muscle, wind, and water power, if not actually to postnuclear devastation. He was no longer sure that he had achieved the prime requirement of a successfully specialized predator: choice of an equally successful prey. He chafed at the thought of his own existence dependent on the feeble and undisciplined will of humankind.

If he didn’t hold on to his temper, he would snap the damned shank of the damned key off in his damned office lock.
Who had been tampering here, jamming the mechanism like this?

Alison came out of Irv’s room across the hall. “Oh, Dr. Weyland, come in and join us. I’ve been cheering Irv up. I have those questions for you.”

He pocketed his keys and went to sit in the overstuffed chair in the corner of Irv’s office. Irv was at his desk, bowed forward on his elbows over a steaming Styrofoam cup. He seemed extraordinarily glum, for Irv. He said, “This isn’t coffee; it’s what drains out of the lab sinks downstairs.”

Alison said, “The trouble with living in the sunny Southwest is that a little rainy weather throws everybody into despair.”

Weyland scanned the page of questions she handed him. “These are good, except that I don’t want two questions on social roles in subsistence-economy cultures. I realize that this was the topic of the lectures you gave the class, but too much emphasis on it in the exam will bring the students marching on my office—with justification.”

Alison blushed. “Oh, sure, of course, I’ll make up a replacement for one of those. We’ve been talking about my joining Irv’s summer project. I can’t hold out any longer, not after watching him yesterday morning with that lovely old woman at the pueblo. If I could get to be that easy and good with people doing work like his...”

Weyland said, “This is excellent news.” Had she spent the night with Irv? Weyland hoped so. His temper was restored. He felt ready now to ask about the two women from Taos, but not in Alison’s presence. “I don’t like to interrupt, but I think you have office hours now, Alison?”

“Oh, yes—a couple of students are coming in for notes on lectures they missed. I’d better go. Lunch, Irv?”

“We’ll see,” Irv said. His eyes were sad and kind.

“You look tired,” Weyland said when Alison had gone.

“So do you,” Irv replied with a wan grin. “Anybody’d think we were dancing all day at the pueblo yesterday, not watching.” He hesitated. “Alison...”

Weyland said, “Alison looks happier than she has in weeks. I’d like to ask you about Dorothea Winslow. I thought her very...intriguing.”

“Ah, Dorothea. I’m glad you had a chance to talk with her. People will tell you that Dorothea Winslow is birdsy,” Irv said fondly. “And they’ll give you evidence to prove it. For instance, she once badgered the department into sending somebody out to her place up near Taos to look at a rock inscription that she thought might be in an ancient script—a sign of pre-Columbian contact, that sort of thing. Those fringe theories fascinate her. People don’t notice, though, that while she’ll pepper you with wild questions out of wide-open curiosity, she’s damned rigorous about what she’ll accept from you as a satisfactory answer.”

“And how do you come to know her?”

Irv grinned. “I was the one the department sent.”

“You didn’t find her...‘birdsy’?”

“I found myself with two new friends,” Irv said. “Those women are a remarkable pair. They’ve lived in Taos together for about fourteen years in an old museum of a place: fortress walls, carved beams, hulking Spanish furniture which Dorothea hates but keeps. She says it came with the place, so what the hell.”

“Fourteen years,” Weyland mused. “I can’t imagine tolerating anyone’s company for so long.”

“No?” Irv looked sad again. He seemed to rouse himself to continue. “Dorothea was a painter—a good one—and Letty is a published poet. They’re part of the established art community up there.” He paused to wash down some pills with the remains of his coffee. “And then, they’re just what you’re thinking, of course; they wouldn’t dream of pretending otherwise.”

Weyland realized that he meant the two women were lovers. Whether a person slept with partners of one sex or the other was one of those distinctions humans invented and then treated as a tablet of the law. In this case, his own purposes were served. These women lived too eccentric a life to threaten him, no matter what they might know or guess about his own—eccentricities.

“Mind you,” Irv added, “they don’t cling. Letty gets itchy sometimes. She ups and goes, walking all over the country, hitchhiking. She writes cookbooks when she’s home, good ones. I think when she needs cash on the road she takes jobs in restaurants.”

Weyland was frantically searching his memory for any trace of that angular figure stepping into his car. Finding none, he breathed again.

Wistfully Irv said, “I wouldn’t mind being able to just get up and go when things start closing in.” He leaned forward again, his blue-shadowed jaw propped in his palms. “But it’s not my style. The few people I’ve known who could melt away and leave everything were like Letty—long, lean, always a little detached somehow, your quintessential drifters; rootless, in-turned, melancholy, aloof, often brilliant but seldom happy, I think. Whatever ‘happy’ is—”

Suddenly he flushed a deep crimson right to the roots of his hair. “My God, Ed, I’m sorry. Of course I’ve heard something about your...your trouble back East; we all have. I wouldn’t for the world want you to think that I—that—”

“That you feel sorry for me?” Weyland said, composed again. He was pleased with Irv’s word picture of the sort of person whom he indeed attempted to embody, more pleased still that Irv found him convincing enough to be classed in Letty’s tribe of wanderers.

“Irv,” he said, “I’m not sensitive about that episode, or about my less than sociable nature. Don’t apologize, you haven’t hurt my feelings. Let me reply in these terms: Letty seemed to me, admittedly on the briefest of acquaintance, to be quite at ease, not melancholy, not aloof.”

Irv studied him for several moments, the color receding from his face. He got up and paced the office, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “That’s because, for one thing, Letty’s an artist as well as a drifter. She makes art of what she sees out on the margins of society. If you can do that, you’re not so horrendously isolated and cooped up in yourself. Letty’s poetry is lone and cold enough to freeze the tears in your eyes, but it’s addressed outward, it connects.

“And Letty always comes back home. She’s lucky enough to have Dorothea, a human lifeline. Everyone needs a lifeline, drifters most of all.”

“Why?” said Weyland, his interest thoroughly engaged. “They may simply be chilly souls who choose solitude and distance out of a preference for their own company.”

“I don’t think anyone chooses that kind of life,” Irv said. “I think they’re driven to it. We’re social animals, Ed. It’s too cold and lonesome for us out beyond the edges of the human herd.”

Not for a lynx
, Weyland thought;
that is his place.
He said, “What you began with was your own style. You speak as a man of the center, a warm man who thrives on close companionship. I think this distorts and darkens your viewpoint of life out here where I sit—or drift.” He held up his hand to forestall Irv’s demur. “A drifter’s life doesn’t seem nearly as bleak to me as it does to you from deep in the, ah, heart of the herd.”

Irv stood at his desk, head lowered, jingling the change in his pocket. Finally he slung himself into his chair, stretching his arms above his head. “You’re a remarkable man; and you’re probably right. There’s an element of sour grapes in my attitude, too, I think.

“The thing is, Ed, I’ve worked myself so deep into the herd that I wouldn’t know how to move out again, even if some kind of wandering away alone was the healthiest thing I could do. Other people are just too important to me—friends, colleagues, students, especially students. They’re some of my links with the future, I’m one of their links with the past. Connections like that make me know I’m alive, make me know how my life fits in with other lives.