Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Page 2

  “Sooo,” Magreb would say, “I can tell you’re not a morning person.” Then she’d sit on the porch swing and rock with me, patting my hand.

  “What’s wrong, Clyde?”

  I shook my head. This was a new sadness, difficult to express. My bloodlust was undiminished but now the blood wouldn’t fix it.

  “It never fixed it,” Magreb reminded me, and I wished she would please stop talking.

  That cluster of years was a very confusing period. Mostly I felt grateful, aboveground feelings. I was in love. For a vampire, my life was very normal. Instead of stalking prostitutes, I went on long bicycle rides with Magreb. We visited botanical gardens and rowed in boats. In a short time, my face had gone from lithium white to the color of milky coffee. Yet sometimes, especially at high noon, I’d study Magreb’s face with a hot, illogical hatred, each pore opening up to swallow me. You’ve ruined my life, I’d think. To correct for her power over my mind I tried to fantasize about mortal women, their wild eyes and bare swan necks; I couldn’t do it, not anymore—an eternity of vague female smiles eclipsed by Magreb’s tiny razor fangs. Two gray tabs against her lower lip.

  But like I said, I was mostly happy. I was making a kind of progress.

  One night, children wearing necklaces of garlic bulbs arrived giggling at our door. It was Halloween; they were vampire hunters. The smell of garlic blasted through the mail slot, along with their voices: “Trick or treat!” In the old days, I would have cowered from these children. I would have run downstairs to barricade myself in my coffin. But that night, I pulled on an undershirt and opened the door. I stood in a square of green light in my boxer shorts hefting a bag of Tootsie Pops, a small victory over the old fear.

  “Mister, you okay?”

  I blinked down at a little blond child and then saw that my two hands were shaking violently, soundlessly, like old friends wishing not to burden me with their troubles. I dropped the candies into the children’s bags, thinking: You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories.

  WE WERE DOWNING strawberry velvet cocktails on the Seine when something inside me changed. Thirty years. Eleven thousand dawns. That’s how long it took for me to believe the sun wouldn’t kill me.

  “Want to go see a museum or something? We’re in Paris, after all.”

  “Okay.”

  We walked over a busy pedestrian bridge in a flood of light, and my heart was in my throat. Without any discussion, I understood that Magreb was my wife.

  Because I love her, my hunger pangs have gradually mellowed into a comfortable despair. Sometimes I think of us as two holes cleaved together, two twin hungers. Our bellies growl at each other like companionable dogs. I love the sound, assuring me we’re equals in our thirst. We bump our fangs and feel like we’re coming up against the same hard truth.

  Human marriages amuse me: the brevity of the commitment and all the ceremony that surrounds it, the calla lilies, the veiled mother-in-laws like lilac spiders, the tears and earnest toasts. Till death do us part! Easy. These mortal couples need only keep each other in sight for fifty, sixty years.

  Often I wonder to what extent a mortal’s love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I’ll never quite understand. And lately I’ve been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does.

  One day, without any preamble, Magreb flew up to the caves. She called over her furry, muscled shoulder that she just wanted to sleep for a while.

  “What? Wait! What’s wrong?”

  I’d caught her mid-shift, halfway between a wife and a bat.

  “Don’t be so sensitive, Clyde! I’m just tired of this century, so very tired, maybe it’s the heat? I think I need a little rest …”

  I assumed this was an experiment, like my cape, an old habit to which she was returning, and from the clumsy, ambivalent way she crashed around on the wind I understood I was supposed to follow her. Well, too bad. Magreb likes to say she freed me, disabused me of the old stories, but I gave up more than I intended: I can’t shudder myself out of this old man’s body. I can’t fly anymore.

  FILA AND I are alone. I press my dry lips together and shove dominoes around the table; they buckle like the cars of a tiny train.

  “More lemonade, nonno?” She smiles. She leans from her waist and boldly touches my right fang, a thin string of hanging drool. “Looks like you’re thirsty.”

  “Please,” I gesture at the bench. “Have a seat.”

  Fila is seventeen now and has known about me for some time. She’s toying with the idea of telling her boss, weighing the sentence within her like a bullet in a gun: There is a vampire in our grove.

  “You don’t believe me, Signore Alberti?” she’ll say, before taking him by the wrist and leading him to this bench, and I’ll choose that moment to rise up and bite him in his hog-thick neck. “Right through his stupid tie!” she says with a grin.

  But this is just idle fantasy, she assures me. Fila is content to let me alone. “You remind me of my nonno,” she says approvingly, “you look very Italian.”

  In fact, she wants to help me hide here. It gives her a warm feeling to do so, like helping her own fierce nonno do up the small buttons of his trousers, now too intricate a maneuver for his palsied hands. She worries about me, too. And she should: lately I’ve gotten sloppy, incontinent about my secrets. I’ve stopped polishing my shoes; I let the tip of one fang hang over my pink lip. “You must be more careful,” she reprimands. “There are tourists everywhere.”

  I study her neck as she says this, her head rolling with the natural expressiveness of a girl. She checks to see if I am watching her collarbone, and I let her see that I am. I feel like a threat again.

  LAST NIGHT I went on a rampage. On my seventh lemon I found with a sort of drowsy despair that I couldn’t stop. I crawled around on all fours looking for the last bianchettis in the dewy grass: soft with rot, mildewed, sun-shriveled, blackened. Lemon skin bulging with tiny cellophane-green worms. Dirt smells, rain smells, all swirled through with the tart sting of decay.

  In the morning, Magreb steps around the wreckage and doesn’t say a word.

  “I came up with a new name,” I say, hoping to distract her. “Brandolino. What do you think?”

  I have spent the last several years trying to choose an Italian name, and every day that I remain Clyde feels like a defeat. Our names are relics of the places we’ve been. “Clyde” is a souvenir from the California Gold Rush. I was callow and blood-crazed back then, and I saw my echo in the freckly youths panning along the Sacramento River. I used the name as a kind of bait. “Clyde” sounded innocuous, like someone a boy might get a malt beer with or follow into the woods.

  Magreb chose her name in the Atlas Mountains for its etymology, the root word ghuroob, which means “to set” or “to be hidden.” “That’s what we’re looking for,” she tells me. “The setting place. Some final answer.” She won’t change her name until we find it.

  She takes a lemon from her mouth, slides it down the length of her fangs, and places its shriveled core on the picnic table. When she finally speaks, her voice is so low the words are almost unintelligible.

  “The lemons aren’t working, Clyde.”

  But the lemons have never worked. At best, they give us eight hours of peace. We aren’t talking about the lemons.

  “How long?”

  “Longer than I’ve let on. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, maybe it’s this crop. Those Alberti boys haven’t been fertilizing properly, maybe the primofiore will turn out better.”

  Magreb fixes me with one fish-bright eye. “Clyde, I think it’s time for us to go.”

  Wind blows the leaves apart. Lemons wink like a firmament of yellow stars, slowly ripening, and I can see the other, truer night behind them.

  “Go where?” Our marriage, as I conceive it, is a commitment to starve together.

  “We’ve been resting here
for decades. I think it’s time … what is that thing?”

  I have been preparing a present for Magreb, for our anniversary, a “cave” of scavenged materials—newspaper and bottle glass and wooden beams from the lemon tree supports—so that she can sleep down here with me. I’ve smashed dozens of bottles of fruity beer to make stalactites. Looking at it now, though, I see the cave is very small. It looks like an umbrella mauled by a dog.

  “That thing?” I say. “That’s nothing. I think it’s part of the hot dog machine.”

  “Jesus. Did it catch on fire?”

  “Yes. The girl threw it out yesterday.”

  “Clyde.” Magreb shakes her head. “We never meant to stay here forever, did we? That was never the plan.”

  “I didn’t know we had a plan,” I snap. “What if we’ve outlived our food supply? What if there’s nothing left for us to find?”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Why can’t you just be grateful? Why can’t you be happy and admit defeat? Look at what we’ve found here!” I grab a lemon and wave it in her face.

  “Good night, Clyde.”

  I watch my wife fly up into the watery dawn, and again I feel the awful tension. In the flats of my feet, in my knobbed spine. Love has infected me with a muscular superstition that one body can do the work of another.

  I consider taking the funicular, the ultimate degradation—worse than the dominoes, worse than an eternity of sucking cut lemons. All day I watch the cars ascend, and I’m reminded of those American fools who accompany their wives to the beach but refuse to wear bathing suits. I’ve seen them by the harbor, sulking in their trousers, panting through menthol cigarettes and pacing the dock while the women sea-bathe. They pretend they don’t mind when sweat darkens the armpits of their suits. When their wives swim out and leave them. When their wives are just a splash in the distance.

  Tickets for the funicular are twenty lire. I sit at the bench and count as the cars go by.

  THAT EVENING, I take Magreb on a date. I haven’t left the lemon grove in upward of two years, and blood roars in my ears as I stand and clutch at her like an old man. We’re going to the Thursday night show at an antique theater in a castle in the center of town. I want her to see that I’m happy to travel with her, so long as our destination is within walking distance.

  A teenage usher in a vintage red jacket with puffed sleeves escorts us to our seats, his biceps manacled in clouds, threads loosening from the badge on his chest. I am jealous of the name there: GUGLIELMO.

  The movie’s title is already scrolling across the black screen: SOMETHING CLANDESTINE IS HAPPENING IN THE CORN!

  Magreb snorts. “That’s a pretty lousy name for a horror movie. It sounds like a student film.”

  “Here’s your ticket,” I say. “I didn’t make the title up.”

  It’s a vampire movie set in the Dust Bowl. Magreb expects a comedy, but the Dracula actor fills me with the sadness of an old photo album. An Okie has unwittingly fallen in love with the monster, whom she’s mistaken for a rich European creditor eager to pay off the mortgage on her family’s farm.

  “That Okie,” says Magreb, “is an idiot.”

  I turn my head miserably and there’s Fila, sitting two rows in front of us with a greasy young man. Benny Alberti. Her white neck is bent to the left, Benny’s lips affixed to it as she impassively sips a soda.

  “Poor thing,” Magreb whispers, indicating the pigtailed actress. “She thinks he’s going to save her.”

  Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. “Help!” she screams to a sky full of crows. “He’s not actually from Europe!”

  There is no music, only the girl’s breath and the fwap-fwap-fwap of the off-screen fan blades. Dracula’s mouth hangs wide as a sewer grate. His cape is curiously still.

  The movie picture is frozen. The fwapping is emanating from the projection booth; it rises to a grinding r-r-r, followed by lyrical Italian cussing and silence and finally a tidal sigh. Magreb shifts in her seat.

  “Let’s wait,” I say, seized with empathy for these two still figures on the screen, mutely pleading for repair. “They’ll fix it.”

  People begin to file out of the theater, first in twos and threes and then in droves. “I’m tired, Clyde.”

  “Don’t you want to know what happens?” My voice is more frantic than I intend.

  “I already know what happens.”

  “Don’t you leave now, Magreb. I’m telling you, they’re going to fix it. If you leave now, that’s it for us, I’ll never …”

  Her voice is beautiful, like gravel underfoot: “I’m going to the caves.”

  I’M ALONE in the theater. When I turn to exit, the picture is still frozen, the Okie’s blue dress floating over windless corn, Dracula’s mouth a hole in his white greasepaint.

  Outside I see Fila standing in a clot of her friends, lit by the marquee. These kids wear too much makeup and clothes that move like colored oils. They all look rained on. I scowl at them and they scowl back, and then Fila crosses to me.

  “Hey, you,” she says, grinning, breathless, so very close to my face. “Are you stalking somebody?”

  My throat tightens.

  “Guys!” Her eyes gleam. “Guys, come over and meet the vampire.”

  But the kids are gone.

  “Well! Some friends,” she says, then winks. “Leaving me alone, defenseless …”

  “You want the old vampire to bite you, eh?” I hiss. “You want a story for your friends?”

  Fila laughs. Her horror is a round, genuine thing, bouncing in both her black eyes. She smells like hard water and glycerin. The hum of her young life all around me makes it difficult to think. A bat filters my thoughts, opens its trembling lampshade wings.

  Magreb. She’ll want to hear about this. How ridiculous, at my age, to find myself down this alley with a young girl: Fila powdering her neck, doing her hair up with little temptress pins, yanking me behind this Dumpster. “Can you imagine”—Magreb will laugh—“a teenager goading you to attack her! You’re still a menace, Clyde.”

  I stare vacantly at a pale mole above the girl’s collarbone. Magreb, I think again, and I smile, and the smile feels like a muzzle stretched taut against my teeth. It seems my hand has tightened on the girl’s wrist, and I realize with surprise, as if from a great distance, that she is twisting away.

  “Hey, nonno, come on now, what are you—”

  THE GIRL’S HEAD lolls against my shoulder like a sleepy child’s, then swings forward in a rag-doll circle. The starlight is white mercury compared to her blotted-out eyes. There’s a dark stain on my periwinkle shirt, and one suspender has snapped. I sit Fila’s body against the alley wall, watch it dim and stiffen. Spidery graffiti weaves over the brick behind her, and I scan for some answer contained there: GIOVANNA & FABIANO. VAFFANCULO! VAI IN CULO.

  A scabby-furred creature, our only witness, arches its orange back against the Dumpster. If not for the lock I would ease the girl inside. I would climb in with her and let the red stench fill my nostrils, let the flies crawl into the red corners of my eyes. I am a monster again.

  I ransack Fila’s pockets and find the key to the funicular office, careful not to look at her face. Then I’m walking, running for the lemon grove. I jimmy my way into the control room and turn the silver key, relieved to hear the engine roar to life. Locked, locked, every funicular car is locked, but then I find one with thick tape in Xs over a busted door. I dash after it and pull myself onto the cushion, quickly, because the cars are already moving. Even now, after what I’ve done, I am still unable to fly, still imprisoned in my wretched nonno’s body, reduced to using the mortals’ machinery to carry me up to find my wife. The box jounces and trembles. The chain pulls me into the heavens link by link.

  My lips are soon chapped; I stare through a crack in the glass window. The box swings wildly in the wind. The sky is a deep blue vacuum. I can still smell the girl in the folds of
my clothes.

  THE CAVE SYSTEM at the top of the cliffs is vaster than I expected; and with their grandfather faces tucked away, the bats are anonymous as stones.

  I walk beneath a chandelier of furry bodies, heartbeats wrapped in wings the color of rose petals or corn silk. Breath ripples through each of them, a tiny life in its translucent envelope.

  “Magreb?”

  Is she up here?

  Has she left me?

  (I will never find another vampire.)

  I double back to the moonlit entrance that leads to the open air of the cliffs, the funicular cars. When I find Magreb, I’ll beg her to tell me what she dreams up here. I’ll tell her my waking dreams in the lemon grove: The mortal men and women floating serenely by in balloons freighted with the ballast of their deaths. Millions of balloons ride over a wide ocean, lives darkening the sky. Death is a dense powder cinched inside tiny sandbags, and in the dream I am given to understand that instead of a sandbag I have Magreb.

  I make the bats’ descent in a cable car with no wings to spread, knocked around by the wind with a force that feels personal. I struggle to hold the door shut and look for the green speck of our grove.

  The box is plunging now, far too quickly. It swings wide, and the igneous surface of the mountain fills the left window. The tufa shines like water, like a black, heat-bubbled river. For a dizzying instant I expect the rock to seep through the glass.

  Each swing takes me higher than the last, a grinding pendulum that approaches a full revolution around the cable. I’m on my hands and knees on the car floor, seasick in the high air, pressing my face against the floor grate. I can see stars or boats burning there, and also a ribbon of white, a widening fissure. Air gushes through the cracks in the glass box. With a lurch of surprise, I realize that I could die.

  WHAT DOES MAGREB SEE, if she is watching? Is she waking from a nightmare to see the line snap, the glass box plummet? From her inverted vantage, dangling from the roof of the cave, does the car seem to be sucked upward, rushing not toward the sea but into another sort of sky? To a black mouth open and foaming with stars?