Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

tucked. She reminded me of Edvard Eriksen's famous sculpture of the Little Mermaid, rendered not in bronze but coaxed from milk-white moonstone, heated by living yellow electricity called down from a black sky, and warmed by warm Arctic eyes — the warmest blue that exists in our world.

'You mean April didn't mind getting that porn star rap laid on her… literally?'

I could see her sadness being blotted away by acid bitterness. 'The people in porn have it easier. The thuds out there in Bozo-land know in their tiny little hearts that porn queens fuck for jobs. Whereas cover girls or legit models who rarely do buff or full-frontal are suspect.'

'You can't deny the public their imaginary intrigues.'

'What it always boils down to is, 'Climb off it, bitch — who did you really blow to get that last Vogue cover?' They feed off you. They achieve gratification in a far dirtier way, by wanting you and resenting you at the same time. By hating your success enough to keep all the tabloids in business. It's a draining thing, all taking and no giving, like…'

'Psychic vampirism?' It was so easy for someone in her position to sense that her public loved her only in the way a tumor loves its host. But a blacker part of my mind tasted a subtle tang of revenge. She'd left me to go chase what she wanted… and when she'd finally sunk in her teeth, she'd gotten the flavor of bile and chalk and ashes. I suppose I should have been ashamed of myself for embracing that hateful satisfaction so readily. And from the hurt neutrality on her face, she might have been reading the thoughts in my head. She watched her cocoa instead of drinking it — always a bad sign.

Just as much as I never said no, I never apologized. Not for anything.

After a cool silence, she said, 'You're saying to yourself, 'She's got it made, for christsake. What right does she have to be dissatisfied with anything?' Right?'

'Maybe a tiny bit, yeah.' She let me take her hand regardless. She needed the contact. The missing ten years settled between us to fog the issue. I was resentful, yes. Did I want to help her? Same answer. When I guiltily tried to pull back my hand she kept ahold of it. It made me feel forgiven; absolved, almost.

'In science class, in eighth grade, they taught us that when you smell something, your nose is actually drawing in tiny molecular bits of whatever it is you're smelling. Particles.'

'Which means you clamped both hands over your mouth and nose whenever you passed a dog turd on the sidewalk after school, am I right?' My prescription for sticky emotional situations is rigid: Always — always joke your way out.

Her smile came and went. 'The idea stuck in my head. If you smelled something long enough, it would run out of molecules and poof — it wouldn't exist anymore.'

'Uh-huh, if you stood around sniffing for a couple of eons.' Fortunately, I'd forgotten most of the junk with which school had tried to clog my head. About hard science I knew squat, like math. But I did know that there were billions or trillions of molecules in any given object.

'My point is that each one of us only has so much to give.' She cleared her throat, almost as though it hurt her, and pressed valiantly onward. 'What if you were to run out of pieces all of a sudden?'

'Happens all the time,' I said airily. 'That's what a nervous breakdown is. Entertainers who can't give their audiences an ounce more collapse onstage. Corporate guys get physically ill and can't go near a meeting room. People exceed their operational limits… and you're in one of the most high-pressure professions there is.'

'No.' She was shaking her head to prevent me from clouding her train of thought. 'I mean run out of pieces literally. Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film — another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is never satiated. And when someone is fully consumed — vampirized — they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That's why they're called consumers.'

I looked up from the muddy lees in my cup just in time to see the passing lighthouse beam blank the ghost of her reflection from the windowpanes. Just like her smile, it came and went.

Her voice had downshifted into the husky and quavering register of confession. Now I was really uncomfortable. 'I know there are celebrities who've had their picture taken two million more times than I have. But maybe they can afford it.' She stretched across the bed to place her head on my thigh and hug my waist, connecting herself. 'Maybe some of us don't have so many pieces…'

I held her while the storm rallied for a renewed assault. My modest but brave beam of lamplight chopped through it. She did not grimace, or redden, or sob; her tears just began spilling out, coursing down in perfect wet lines to darken my pantleg.

Did I want to help her?

She feared that consumers wanted so much of her that pretty soon there would be nothing left to consume. And Claudia Katz no longer existed, except in my head. I'd fallen in love with her, become addicted to her… and now she was clinging to me because Tasha Vode was almost used up, and after that, if there was not Claudia, there was nothing. She had not brought her exhaustion home to my stoop to prove she could still jerk my leash after ten years. She had done it because the so-called friends who had gorged themselves on her personality were now nodding and clucking about celebrity lifestyles and answering their machines and juggling in new appointments to replace her as the undertow dragged her away to oblivion.

I stroked her hair until it was all out of her face. The tears dried while the seastorm churned. She snoozed, curled up, her face at peace, and I gently disengaged. Then, with a zealot's devotion toward proving her fears were all in her imagination, I went downstairs to load up one of my Nikons.

I asked her how she felt the next morning. When she said terrific, I spilled the beans.

'You what — ?'

'I repeat for clarity: I took pictures of you while you were asleep. Over a hundred exposures of you wound up in my dark blue sheets, sleeping through a gale. And guess what — you're still among the living this morning.' I refilled her coffee cup and used my tongs to pluck croissants out of the warmer.

She cut loose a capacious sigh, but put her protests on hold. 'Don't do that again. Or you'll lose me.'

I wasn't sure whether she meant she'd fade to nothingness on the spot, or stomp out if I defied her superstitions a second time. 'You slept like a stone, love. Barely changed position all night.' My ego was begging to be told that our mattress gymnastics had put her under, but when I saw the care she took to lift her coffee cup with both hands, I knew better.

'Look at this shit,' she said with disgust. 'I can barely hold up my head, let alone my coffee. I'm slouching. Models aren't supposed to slouch, for christsake.' She forced her sitting posture straight and smiled weakly. Her voice was a bit hoarse this morning, almost clogged.

'Hey lady — slouch away.' Worry stabbed at my insides while I tried to sound expansive and confident. 'Do what thou wilt Sleep all day if that's your pleasure. Just wait till you discover what I've learned to cook in the last ten years. Real salads. Stuff you have to saute. Food with wine in it. I can artistically dish up all the squares you require. Loaf on the beach. Read my library. I have said it; it is good.' I watched a glint of caution try to burn away the happiness in her eyes. She did so want to believe me. 'And no more photographs. Promise. Anybody who tries has gotta shoot through yours truly.'

She brightened at that. I'd gotten the reaction I wanted from her. It was the challenge-and-reward game. And god-damned if that tiny acid-drop of doubt didn't settle into my brain, sizzling — what if what if what if.

What if I was playing it safe because she might be right?

'I don't want to see those pictures,' she said. 'Don't even develop them.'

'I'll toss 'em in the woodstove right now, if that's what you'd like.' I'd made my point.

She gave a theatrical shudder. 'Don't burn them. That's too much like a horror story I read once. I might shuffle off the coil along with my own pictures.'

The rolls of film were lined up on my miscellaneous shelf downstairs, in the darkroom, the room with the red lightbulbs. Expose the film to anything but that mellow, crimson glow and it blanked into silver nitrate nothingness. The rolls could stay down there, sealed into their little black plastic vials. Forever, if that's what she wanted.

She kept watch on the sea while we destroyed our Continental breakfast. 'I thought maybe we could brave the overcast later, and drive down past Point Pitt for dinner,' I said. 'Steaks, salads and a bottle or two of Cabernet. If anybody asks whether you're Tasha Vode, just blink and say, 'Who?''