Music of the Night (3 page)

And take pleasure in it
, she thought,
if they’re out hunting also—for acceptable male
companionship. Yet he said he’s never married. Explore where this is going.
“Only women?”

He gave her a sardonic glance, as if she were a slightly brighter student than he had at first assumed.

“Hunting women is liable to be time-consuming and expensive. The best hunting is in the part of Central Park they call the Ramble, where homosexual men seek encounters with others of their kind. I walk there too, at night.”

Floria caught a faint sound of conversation and laughter from the waiting room; her next client had probably arrived, she realized, looking reluctantly at the clock. “I’m sorry, Edward, but our time seems to be—”

“Only a moment more,” he said coldly. “You asked; permit me to finish my answer. In the Ramble I find someone who doesn’t reek of alcohol or drugs, who seems healthy, and who is not insistent on ‘hooking up’ right there among the bushes. I invite such a man to my hotel. He judges me safe, at least: older, weaker than he is, unlikely to turn out to be a dangerous maniac. So he comes to my room. I feed on his blood.

“Now, I think, our time is up.”

He walked out.

She sat torn between rejoicing at his admission of the delusion’s persistence and dismay that his condition was so much worse than she had first thought. Her hope of having an easy time with him vanished. His initial presentation had been just that—a performance, an act. Forced to abandon it, he had dumped on her this lump of material, too much—and too strange—to take in all at once. Her next client liked the padded chair, not the wooden one that Weyland had sat in during the first part of the hour. Floria started to move the wooden one back. The armrests came away in her hands. She remembered him starting up in protest against her proposal of touching him. The grip of his fingers had fractured the joints, and the shafts now lay in splinters on the floor.

* * *

Floria wandered into Lucille’s room at the clinic after the staff meeting. Lucille was lying on the couch with a wet cloth over her eyes.

“I thought you looked green around the gills today,” Floria said. “What’s wrong?”

“Big bash last night,” said Lucille in sepulchral tones. “I think I feel about the way you do after a session with Chubs. You haven’t gotten rid of him yet, have you?”

“No. I had him lined up to see Marty instead of me last week, but damned if he didn’t show up at my door at his usual time. It’s a lost cause. What I wanted to talk to you about was Dracula.”

“What about him?”

“He’s smarter, tougher, and sicker than I thought, and maybe I’m even less competent than I thought, too. He’s already walked out on me once—I almost lost him. I never took a course in treating monsters.”

Lucille groaned. “Some days they’re all monsters.” This from Lucille, who worked longer hours than anyone else at the clinic, to the despair of her husband. She lifted the cloth, refolded it, and placed it carefully across her forehead. “And if I had ten dollars for every client who’s walked out on me . . . Tell you what: I’ll trade you Madame X for him, how’s that? Remember Madame X, with the jangling bracelets and the parakeet eye makeup and the phobia about dogs? Now she’s phobic about things dropping on her out of the sky. Just wait—it’ll turn out that one day when she was three a dog trotted by and pissed on her leg just as an over-passing pigeon shat on her head. What are we doing in this business?”

“God knows.” Floria laughed. “But am I in this business these days—I mean, in the sense of practicing my so-called skills? Blocked with my group work, beating my brains out on a book that won’t go, and doing something—I’m not sure it’s therapy—with a vampire . . . You know, once I had this sort of natural choreographer inside myself that hardly let me put a foot wrong and always knew how to correct a mistake if I did. Now that’s gone. I feel as if I’m just going through a lot of mechanical motions. Whatever I had once that made me useful as a therapist, I’ve lost it.”

Ugh
, she thought, hearing the descent of her voice into a tone of gloomy self-pity.

“Well, don’t complain about Dracula,” Lucille said. “You were the one who insisted on taking him on. At least he’s got you concentrating on his problem instead of just wringing your hands. As long as you’ve started, stay with it—illumination may come. And now I’d better change the ribbon in my typewriter and get back to reviewing Silverman’s latest bestseller on self-shrinking while I’m feeling mean enough to do it justice.” She got up gingerly. “Stick around in case I faint and fall into the wastebasket.”

“Luce, this case is what I’d like to try to write about.”

“Dracula?” Lucille pawed through a desk drawer full of paper clips, pens, rubber bands, and old lipsticks.

“Dracula. A monograph . . .”

“Oh, I know that game: you scribble down everything you can and then read what you wrote to find out what’s going on with the client, and with luck you end up publishing. Great! But if you are going to publish, don’t piddle this away on a dinky paper. Do a book. Here’s your subject, instead of those depressing statistics you’ve been killing yourself over. This one is really exciting—a case study to put on the shelf next to Freud’s own wolf-man, have you thought of that?”

Floria liked it. “What a book that could be—fame if not fortune. Notoriety, most likely. How in the world could I convince our colleagues that it’s legit? There’s a lot of vampire stuff around right now—plays on Broadway and TV, books all over the place, movies. They’ll say I’m just trying to ride the coattails of a fad.”

“No, no, what you do is show how this guy’s delusion is related to the fad. Fascinating.” Lucille, having found a ribbon, prodded doubtfully at the exposed innards of her typewriter.

“Suppose I fictionalize it,” Floria said, “under a pseudonym. Why not ride the popular wave and be free in what I can say?”

“Listen, you’ve never written a word of fiction in your life, have you?” Lucille fixed her with a bloodshot gaze. “There’s no evidence that you could turn out a bestselling novel. On the other hand, by this time you have a trained memory for accurately reporting therapeutic transactions. That’s a strength you’d be foolish to waste. A solid professional book would be terrific—and a feather in the cap of every woman in the field. Just make sure you get good legal advice on disguising your Dracula’s identity well enough to avoid libel.”

The cane-seated chair wasn’t worth repairing, so she got its twin out of the bedroom to put in the office in its place. Puzzling: by his history Weyland was fifty-two, and by his appearance no muscle man. She should have asked Doug—but how, exactly? “By the way, Doug, was Weyland ever a circus strong man or a blacksmith? Does he secretly pump iron?” Ask the client himself—but not yet.

* * *

She invited some of the younger staff from the clinic over for a small party with a few of her outside friends. It was a good evening; they were not a heavy-drinking crowd, which meant the conversation stayed intelligent. The guests drifted about the long living room or stood in twos and threes at the windows looking down on West End Avenue as they talked.

Mort came, warming the room. Fresh from a session with some amateur chamber-music friends, he still glowed with the pleasure of making his cello sing. His own voice was unexpectedly light for so large a man. Sometimes Floria thought that the deep throb of the cello was his true voice. He stood beside her talking with some others. There was no need to lean against his comfortable bulk or to have him put his arm around her waist. Their intimacy was long-standing, an effortless pleasure in each other that required neither demonstration nor concealment.

He was easily diverted from music to his next favorite topic, the strengths and skills of athletes.

“Here’s a question for a paper I’m thinking of writing,” Floria said. “Could a tall, lean man be exceptionally strong?”

Mort rambled on in his thoughtful way. His answer seemed to be no.

“But what about chimpanzees?” put in a young clinician. “I went with a guy once who was an animal handler for TV, and he said a three-month-old chimp could demolish a strong man.”

“It’s all physical conditioning,” somebody else said. “Modern people are soft.”

Mort nodded. “Human beings in general are weakly made compared to other animals. It’s a question of muscle insertions—the angles of how the muscles are attached to the bones. Some angles give better leverage than others. That’s how a leopard can bring down a much bigger animal than itself. It has a muscular structure that gives it tremendous strength for its streamlined build.”

Floria said, “If a man were built with muscle insertions like a leopard’s, he’d look pretty odd, wouldn’t he?”

“Not to an untrained eye,” Mort said, sounding bemused by an inner vision. “And my God, what an athlete he’d make—can you imagine a guy in the decathlon who’s as strong as a leopard?”

When everyone else had gone Mort stayed, as he often did. Jokes about insertions, muscular and otherwise, soon led to sounds more expressive and more animal, but afterward Floria didn’t feel like resting snuggled together with Mort and talking. When her body stopped racing, her mind turned to her new client. She didn’t want to discuss him with Mort, so she ushered Mort out as gently as she could and sat down by herself at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice. How to approach the reintegration of Weyland the eminent, gray-haired academic with the rebellious vampire-self that had smashed his life out of shape?

She thought of the broken chair, of Weyland’s big hands crushing the wood. Old wood and dried-out glue, of course, or he never could have done that. He was a man, after all, not a leopard.

* * *

The day before the third session Weyland phoned and left a message with Hilda: he would not be coming to the office tomorrow for his appointment, but if Dr. Landauer were agreeable she would find him at their usual hour at the Central Park Zoo.

Am I going to let him move me around from here to there?
she thought.
I shouldn’t—but why fight
it? Give him some leeway, see what opens up in a different setting.
Besides, it was a beautiful day, probably the last of the sweet May weather before the summer stickiness descended. She gladly cut Kenny short so that she would have time to walk over to the zoo.

There was a fair crowd there for a weekday. Well-groomed young matrons pushed clean, floppy babies in strollers. Weyland she spotted at once.

He was leaning against the railing that enclosed the seals’ shelter and their murky green pool. His jacket, slung over his shoulder, draped elegantly down his long back. Floria thought him rather dashing and faintly foreign-looking. Women who passed him, she noticed, tended to glance back. He looked at everyone. She had the impression that he knew quite well that she was walking up behind him.

“Outdoors makes a nice change from the office, Edward,” she said, coming to the rail beside him. “But there must be more to this than a longing for fresh air.” A fat seal lay in sculptural grace on the concrete, eyes blissfully shut, fur drying in the sun to a translucent water-color umber. Weyland straightened from the rail. They walked. He did not look at the animals; his eyes moved continually over the crowd. He said, “Someone has been watching for me at your office building.”

“Who?”

“There are several possibilities. Pah, what a stench—though humans caged in similar circumstances smell as bad.” He sidestepped a couple of shrieking children who were fighting over a balloon and headed out of the zoo under the musical clock.

They walked the uphill path northward through the park. By extending her own stride a little Floria found that she could comfortably keep pace with him.

“Is it peasants with torches?” she said. “Following you?”

He said, “What a childish idea.”

All right, try another tack, then:
“You were telling me last time about hunting in the Ramble. Can we return to that?”

“If you wish.” He sounded bored—a defense? Surely—she was certain this must be the right reading—surely his problem was a transmutation into “vampire” fantasy of an unacceptable aspect of himself. For men of his generation the confrontation with homosexual drives could be devastating.

“When you pick up someone in the Ramble, is it a paid encounter?”

“Usually.”

“How do you feel about having to pay?” She expected resentment.

He gave a faint shrug. “Why not? Others work to earn their bread. I work, too, very hard, in fact. Why shouldn’t I use my earnings to pay for my sustenance?”

Why did he never play the expected card? Baffled, she paused to drink from a fountain. They walked on.

“Once you’ve got your quarry, how do you . . .” She fumbled for a word.

“Attack?” he supplied, unperturbed. “There’s a place on the neck, here, where pressure can interrupt the blood flow to the brain and cause unconsciousness. Getting close enough to apply that pressure isn’t difficult.”

“You do this before, or after any sexual activity?”

“Before, if possible,” he said aridly, “and instead of.” He turned aside to stalk up a slope to a granite outcrop that overlooked the path they had been following. There he settled on his haunches, looking back the way they had come. Floria, glad she’d worn slacks today, sat down near him. He didn’t seem devastated—anything but.
Press him, don’t let him get by on cool.
“Do you often prey on men in preference to women?”

“Certainly. I take what is easiest. Men have always been more accessible because women have been walled away like prizes or so physically impoverished by repeated childbearing as to be unhealthy prey for me. All this has begun to change recently, but gay men are still the simplest quarry.” While she was recovering from her surprise at his unforeseen and weirdly skewed awareness of female history, he added suavely, “How carefully you control your expression, Dr. Landauer—no trace of disapproval.”

She did disapprove, she realized. She would prefer him not to be committed sexually to men.
Oh, hell.
He went on, “Yet no doubt you see me as one who victimizes the already victimized. This is the world’s way. A wolf brings down the stragglers at the edges of the herd. Gay men are denied the full protection of the human herd and are at the same time emboldened to make themselves known and available.