Vamparazzi (2 page)

“Oh,
I
find them acceptable,” the Lithuanian said dryly. “But do
you?
”

“Oh. Yes. Well, er . . .” Max cleared his throat. “Although agreeing to this treaty was seen as prudent when I explained what I had experienced here in His Majesty's eastern provinces . . .”

“Yes?”

“The treaty was also perceived as controversial and potentially a source of great embarrassment,” he concluded uncomfortably.

“Ah. I see. And thus if anything goes wrong . . .” Radvila waved one of the letters at his colleague. “You will be held responsible.”

“Yes. I will.” Max spoke with resolve as he added, “I accept that risk. I have seen too much to turn back now.”

Radvila extended his own hand to clasp Max's with warm approval. “I knew the night we met that you were a man with the courage to see this through. Indeed, I have often been amazed to find such wisdom in one so young.”

“Oh . . . I'm a little older than I look,” his companion replied. “Now, since you must depart soon, I suggest we proceed.”

“Of course.” Radvila added with a touch of concern, “And then I urge you to eat and get some rest. If I may speak candidly, you look terrible.”

“I have no doubt of it,” Max said wearily.

Radvila laid out upon the wooden table three copies of the treaty he had brought with him. Max reviewed the elegant text, acknowledged that the terms were exactly as they had discussed, and accepted the quill that Radvila handed him.

A few moments later, all three copies were signed.

The two men stood silently, looking down at their signatures, and recognized the significance of what they had wrought.

Then the Lithuanian smiled and slapped his companion on the back. “Your vampire hunting days are over, Maximillian.”

“Indeed,” Max said. “I pray that I have done the right thing.”

E
verything you think you know about vampires is wrong.

I learned this while being harassed by vampire fanatics, bitten eight times a week by a self-proclaimed creature of the night, and attacked by a real vampire. So I speak with some authority on the subject.

Much of my education about vampires came from my friend, Dr. Maximillian Zadok, a 350-year-old mage who protects New York City from Evil. You would think (I certainly did) that ridding the city of the bloodsucking undead would be included in that job description, but it turns out that confronting vampires is a little more complicated than a simple equation of Max versus Evil. Among those of the exsanguinating persuasion, there is a wide range of behavior, from “evil monster” all the way across the spectrum to “law-abiding and fully integrated member of society.”

Who knew?

Something else I learned is that vampires are exactly like vegetarians, in the sense that you can spend a lot of time with one and not have the faintest idea—until it's mealtime.

I speak from experience about that, too.

My name is Esther Diamond, and I'm an actress. My reluctant familiarity with vampires of all varieties—real, fictional, and pretend—began when I was cast in
The Vampyre,
a new stage play based on the nineteenth-century story by Dr. John Polidori. The author is mostly remembered in our time because he accompanied Lord Byron on a trip through Europe in 1816, serving as the mercurial poet's personal physician. Polidori was with Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley at the rented villa in Switzerland that summer where, in response to a challenge set by Byron that they should each write a ghost story, Mary started work on her famous novel
Frankenstein
.

Dr. Polidori was soon fired by Byron—who was reputedly the inspiration for Lord Ruthven, the title character in Polidori's “Vampyre;” Ruthven is an alluringly sinister aristocrat who uses and abuses others without compassion or conscience. Published in 1819, the story was a commercial success in its era, igniting the reading public's enduring love affair with vampires. It was the first vampire fiction written in English, and also the first characterization of a vampire as seductive and sophisticated. Although the work is little-known today, Polidori's vision of the vampire was innovative in its time, and it influenced other fiction writers of his century—including Bram Stoker, who came along several generations later and wholly eclipsed Polidori's tale with
Dracula,
which has dominated our image of vampires ever since.

Polidori died two years after the initial publication of his story, when he was only twenty-six years old—one year younger than I was when I was cast in the play.

I had never heard of “The Vampyre” (or Polidori) until I learned about this planned production. Since no copies of the brand-new stage adaptation were available, I read Polidori's story when preparing for the audition. And I immediately realized why its popularity these days is limited to ardent students of nineteenth-century gothic literature. Although mercifully short, its flowery language and flimsy characterization don't translate well to modern tastes.

The story's protagonist is an apple-cheeked young Englishman named Aubrey who is befriended by the dissipated Lord Ruthven. They travel together to Europe, where Aubrey falls in love with the ravishingly beautiful and innocent Ianthe—who happens to be obsessed with vampire folklore. Aubrey doesn't take her quaint fears seriously until after she's found dead, with telltale teeth marks on her neck. By the time he realizes that Lord Ruthven is the quaint fear that killed Ianthe, Aubrey has already made a sacred promise, sworn under duress, not to reveal what he knows. So, naturally, he can do nothing thereafter but wring his hands in helpless despair. Aubrey returns to England, where he soon falls ill, and he's incoherent with fever by the time he discovers that his beloved sister's new fiancé is none other than—yes!—Lord Ruthven. The young man dies without managing to warn his sister what a fine mess she's getting herself into. The aristocratic vampire slakes his thirst on his new bride (can you spot the metaphor?), then he disappears, leaving behind her corpse. The end.

Only the lucrative popularity of vampires in contemporary culture, I thought, could explain the resurrection of this storyline for an off-Broadway play.

Indeed, as I soon learned, the popularity of one
particular
vampire explained it: Daemon Ravel.

Though the atmospheric play was (to be candid) mediocre fare, Ruthven was an ideal role for this Byronic leading man who played only vampires—and who, indeed, claimed to
be
a vampire.
The Vampyre
was being produced as a showcase for him. I had never heard of Daemon Ravel, but I kept my happy ignorance to myself during the initial audition. During the callback, when Daemon was brought in to read opposite me, I pretended to know who he was and to be an admirer of his work, since I shrewdly sensed that admitting otherwise might cost me the job.

Sure, I have principles. But I also have bills to pay. Most of all, I have an ardent desire to work in my profession.

Anyhow, I got the job. No, not the job as the ravishingly beautiful Ianthe; that role went to a ravishingly beautiful actress. I was cast as Aubrey's sister. She has no name in Polidori's story, where the two female characters are little more than a means for Lord Ruthven to torment Aubrey. For the play, though, the sister was named Jane—Miss Jane Aubrey. In the story, she's a delicate ingenue, barely eighteen years old. In the play, to differentiate her from the young and innocent Ianthe, she became a twenty-four-year-old spinster, a doting older sister who had been managing Aubrey's household since their parents' deaths, and who was considered past praying for, in terms of marriage, until Lord Ruthven came along.

I initially thought that playing a nineteenth-century spinster meant I'd be wearing something warm onstage when the play opened in late September in Greenwich Village's drafty Robert Hamburg Theater. However, I realized during the initial costume fittings that the clothing in
The Vampyre
would be as sexed-up as I had already discovered the dialogue and the direction were. Thus it was that eight shows per week, my breasts were in perpetual danger of falling out of my Regency-era gown. Not because I'm so busty (I'm not), but because my extremely low neckline, combined with my diaphanous push-up corset, created a precarious situation. The delicate fabric of my gown also ensured that the shadowy outlines of my legs were often exposed to Lord Ruthven's gaze, as well as to the rapt audiences watching him seduce and devour me.

I did suggest to Fiona, the wardrobe mistress, that a sensible spinster from a respected family of that period would perhaps dress a tad more modestly. Rather than earning me a warmer costume, my suggestion merely ensured that Fiona, who fervently believed that actors should be seen and not heard, went from disliking me to openly loathing me. From then on, I was pretty much on my own with my costume problems—the difficulties included getting into and out of it, since it was authentic enough to fasten via lacing down the back. And woe betide me if I got the gown a little dirty before it was scheduled for cleaning.

To my surprise, my parents had proposed coming to New York to see the show. They weren't unsupportive of my acting career, but they'd also never been particularly interested in it. It just wasn't something they understood. Even though I had by now been pursuing my profession in New York for over five years, they still vaguely thought of it as a phase I'd get over. So their threat to come all the way from our family home in Madison, Wisconsin, to see
The Vampyre
caught me completely off guard (and I privately harbored dark suspicions that my mother was a closet fan of Daemon Ravel). Fortunately, the show's short run (eight weeks) made it pretty easy to talk them out of this plan. I was still recovering from my parents' previous visit two years earlier, so I thought it was too soon for another one.

I also felt uncomfortably self-conscious about the notion of performing this play in front of them. Although Polidori's text refers to “sin,” “violent excitement,” and vampires enjoying “nocturnal orgies,” his story is very tame stuff by modern standards. The new stage adaptation, by contrast, sought to appeal more to contemporary tastes—and, in particular, to the tastes of Daemon Ravel's fans, who were its target audience.

Consequently, the whole show was a heavy-handed, two-act bout of erotic titillation. The dialogue was full of sexual innuendo and double entendres. Daemon's delivery was relentlessly sultry and smoldering, and his scenes with me were smotheringly seductive. Miss Jane Aubrey, a respectable (though scantily clad) spinster and standard stereotype, was drawn to Lord Ruthven like a moth to a flame . . . and behaved just about as intelligently. There was also some semi-explicit touching and grabbing of my person in the scene where Ruthven convinced Jane to marry him, as well as in the sinister depiction of their wedding night, where the usual vampire metaphors of pleasure and pain, penetration and piercing, orgasm and death were all maxed out.

None of this was stuff I particularly wanted to do in front of my parents.

Moreover, since Daemon liked to “improvise,” the explicitness of his touching and grabbing was sometimes more than just semi. I'd had stern words with him about that a few times. I'd also spoken sharply to him the other night about his growing tendency to employ actual suction, occasionally with a grazing of teeth, when he was supposed to be
pretending
to bite me and drain my blood in the wedding-night scene.

Daemon responded by assuring me he was a lover, not a killer, but claimed it was hard to control himself when he was so close to the throbbing pulse of a tempting woman's hot blood, blah blah blah.

Throughout rehearsals, as well as during the weeks we had been performing the show, Daemon steadfastly maintained the pretense that he was a real vampire and that he stuck strictly to playing vampire roles as a matter of ethnic pride, so to speak. He even kept little bottles of what he claimed was human blood inside a minifridge in his dressing room at the theater. He told fans (among whom he included his fellow actors) that his role as Ruthven was so spiritually demanding for him, he needed a restorative drink between shows when we did two performances back-to-back. (The rest of us usually had a restorative pizza on those nights.)

Daemon had reputedly started his career in the East Village by appearing as a vampire in a series of performance art pieces. This led to him being featured in a popular rock video, which increased the size of his cult following. Then he was cast in a series of national commercials and print ads as the vampire icon for Nocturne, a brand of blood-colored beverages. (His famous tag line was, “I don't drink ... wine. I drink red wine coolers.”)

Those Nocturne ads, which he was still doing, had elevated his standard of living to its current level. He inhabited a Soho loft whose windows he had paid a fortune to have replaced, in a highly publicized renovation, with heavily tinted glass that blocked the sun's rays. He could also afford a chauffeur-driven limousine that transported him everywhere. When he had to go anywhere by day, he insisted on being shielded from the sun by a large black umbrella when making the “potentially terminal” transition between building and car.

I envied him that car when I was wearily hauling a tote bag full of my stuff toward the subway station after the show each night, or calling for a cab when it was too late for the subway to be a wise choice for a woman alone. Because of the vampire theme of the show and the night-dwelling target audience, we added a second performance to our schedule every Friday and Saturday night, and it started at midnight. On those nights, I didn't get out of the theater until three o'clock in the morning. So I had certainly been tempted, more than once, to accept Daemon's occasional offers to give me a lift home—but I always declined. Walking to the subway or waiting for a cab inevitably seemed simpler than being alone with Daemon in the cozy backseat of his opaque-windowed car. He already took too many physical liberties with me when we were onstage; I didn't want him feeling encouraged to take any more.