Part III
RAGNAR?K
IN THE
CAPITAL OF THE
WORLD
20
Rose
In the Topless Towers of Midtown
HE WAS IRRESISTIBLE. Rose had been listening to him for hours. She could have listened forever to his faintly sonorous voice. Viktor too had been listening, standing quietly by the open kitchen door. Viktor in his jeans and white polo shirt with that loving smile playing on his lips distracted her by his sheer presence. She wanted to be in his arms again, alone, soon, in the bedroom down the hall.
But right now she was listening to Louis.
Louis shied away from bright electric lights, a soul of the nineteenth century, he confessed, preferring these old-fashioned candles and especially here in this high glass apartment with the brightness of Midtown all around them providing all the nighttime illumination that they might ever need.
Indeed, the sky was never black above the great sharp gleaming silver point of the art deco Chrysler Building, and the countless towers crowding it, in this safe weald of myriad lighted windows that seemed to hold them here more securely in space than the steel girders of this skyscraper whose elevators had brought them to this carpeted haven on the sixty-third floor.
Guards in the next-door apartment. Guards in the marble lobby downstairs, guards out on the narrow pavements of Fifty-Seventh Street. Guards in the apartment above and in the apartment below.
And Thorne here, the red-haired blood drinker, the Viking blood drinker, in a gray wool coat, standing like a sentinel beside the entrance to the hallway, his arms folded, staring out at the night. If he heard what they were saying to one another, he gave no sign of it. He’d been motionless since he’d arrived.
They sat across from one another—Louis and Rose—at a small round glass table with modern black-enameled Queen Anne chairs. He wore a long sweater of black wool that curled at the neck. His hair was as black as the sweater but it was glossy, and his eyes were shining like the emerald ring he wore on his hand.
His face was so bright, it made her think of something D. H. Lawrence had written, a line from Sons and Lovers, about a man’s face in his youth having been “the flower of his body.” For the first time Rose sensed she knew now what Lawrence had meant.
Louis was saying in his patient tender voice,
“You think you know, but you can’t know. Who wouldn’t be blinded by the offer of eternal life?” He’d been there for hours, patiently answering Rose’s questions, explaining things about his own point of view. “We don’t have eternal life firmly within our grasp. We have to work at it to remain ‘immortal.’ All around us we see other blood drinkers perish—because they don’t have the spiritual stamina for this, because they never transcend the first few years of shocks and revelations, or because they’re killed by others, ripped right out of life by violence. We’re only immortal in the sense that we don’t age, that illness can’t take us down, in that we have the potential to live forever, but most of us live very short lives indeed.”
She nodded. “What you’re trying to tell me is that it’s a completely final decision,” she said. “But I don’t know if you can possibly understand how total my obsession with it has become.”
He sighed. There was a sadness about him even in his brightest moments when he’d been talking of Lestat and Lestat’s ebullience and refusal to accept defeat. He’d smiled then and it had been rare sunshine, that smile. But his charm was obviously wrapped up in melancholy and unshakable gloom.
Viktor came forward and for the first time in an hour took a chair between them. Faint scent of that Acqua di Giò that was now all over her pillow and her sheets, and all over her dreams.
“What Louis is saying,” he said to Rose, “is that once we do pass that barrier we’ll know things that we’ll never be able to change or forget. Sure, we are obsessed now. We want it. How can we not want it? From our point of view, it’s not discussable. But he’s trying to warn us: once we cross we’ll be obsessed by something totally different and that obsessive awareness—that we’re not alive anymore, not human—that’s never going to be undone. That’s never going to go away. You follow me? What we’re obsessed with now, that may go away.”
“I understand,” said Rose. “Believe me, I do.”
Louis shook his head. He drew up his shoulders and then slowly relaxed again laying his right hand idly on the table. He was looking at the table but he was looking at his thoughts.
“When Lestat comes, it will be his decision, of course.”
“I’m not so sure why that should be,” said Viktor. “I’m not sure at all why I can’t make the decision with the agreement of Fareed or Seth. Fareed brought me into this world, really. Not Lestat.”
“But nobody’s going to make the decision except Uncle Lestan,” said Rose. “That’s clear enough. No one is willing to make it. And frankly, well, this evening we’ve had a chance to speak our hearts about this, and I’m grateful. We’ve had a chance to say out loud what we want.”
Viktor looked at Louis. “You say wait. You say ‘take your time.’ But what if we die while we’re waiting? What then? What would you think? Would you regret our having waited? I don’t know the point anymore of waiting.”
“You die to become this,” said Louis. “You can’t grasp it. You die. You can’t become what we are unless you die. I suppose finally I’m saying this. You think you are making what the world calls an informed decision, but you’re not. You can’t. You can’t know what this is like, to be both alive and dead.”
Viktor didn’t answer. He didn’t even seem overly concerned. He was so excited that they were here, so excited that they’d come this far. He was full of anticipation.
Rose looked away and then back at the pensive face of Louis, at his dark green eyes, and the set of his mouth. A handsome man of twenty-four maybe when he’d been brought over, and what a scathing portrait he’d given the world of Uncle Lestan, his maker, Lestat. But that didn’t matter now, did it? No, not at all.
She thought of the others whom she’d glimpsed last night, coming into the rooftop ballroom of the huge house called Trinity Gate. She had become used to the preternatural glow of Fareed, even of the powerful Seth, who always stood away from the bright electric lamps when he’d come to her, who spoke from the shadows in a low secretive voice as if he were afraid of its volume, its vibrato. But nothing had prepared her for seeing them all in that huge ballroom at the top of the long flight of marble stairs.
Fareed had been uneasy with her being brought there. She knew it. Could feel it. It was Seth who’d made the decision for her and for Viktor, Seth who had said, “Why keep them locked away?”
As far as Rose could see, Seth’s mind was made up.
Gilded tables and chairs had been scattered on the periphery all along both sides of the dance floor, against walls of French doors paneled in mirrored glass. Drowsy green palms and blue and pink and red flowers in bronze pots were placed every few feet in tasteful groupings.
And at the end stood the grand piano and the cluster of musicians and singers, blood drinkers all, who’d enchanted her with their physical beauty as well as the sounds they made—violinists, harpists, singers making a symphony of sorts that filled the immense glass-ceilinged room.
There had been bright unnatural faces everywhere under the three crystal chandeliers in the dreamy gloom. The names had passed her in a steady numbing current as she was introduced—Pandora, Arjun, Gregory, Zenobia, Davis, Avicus, Everard.… She couldn’t remember them all, couldn’t recall at will all the remarkable visages, the particularities that had enthralled her as she was brought from table to table across the dark polished floor.
And then the striking otherworldly musicians, the tall, baldheaded, and smiling Notker who bowed to her, and his violinists from the mountains and the young boys and women who’d been singing with such brilliant and throbbing soprano voices, and then Antoine, Antoine who looked like the impersonation of Paganini with his violin, and Sybelle, Sybelle in long black chiffon, her neck positively wrapped in diamonds, rising from the piano bench to take her hand.
Out of the pages she’d read, out of the fictions that had permeated her dreams, they’d come alive around her, along with a multitude of strangers, and she had found herself seeking desperately to engrave every moment on her quivering heart.
Viktor had been so very much more prepared for it, a human child brought up amongst blood drinkers, easily clasping hands and nodding and answering questions, though he had stayed right at Rose’s side. He’d picked the long white silk dress for her out of her closet, and worn a black velvet jacket with a boiled shirt for the occasion, beaming down at her again and again as if he were proud to have her hand on his arm.
She’d felt certain the blood drinkers were all concealing their curiosity and amazement at seeing them, which was so funny because she was so very shocked at seeing all of them.
Marius had embraced her, the only one to do it, and whispered poetry to her: “ ‘Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! / It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / Like a rich jewel …’ ”
He’d kissed Viktor also. “Such a gift you are for your father,” he had said. And Viktor had smiled.
She had known Viktor was on the edge of tears that Lestat had not come yet. But Lestat was on his way. That was now certain. He’d gone south on an errand to the Amazon that could not wait. But he was coming, most definitely coming. Seth assured them of this himself. He claimed to have heard it from an unimpeachable source, Lestat’s own mother.
And Rose had been on the edge of breaking down at that news. But all this had made the suspense not only endurable but engulfing. Surely, Seth wouldn’t have revealed the full depth of their world to her if Uncle Lestan—if Lestat was not to give both of them the Dark Gift.
“The Dark Gift.” She liked to whisper those words.
There had come a moment last night when it seemed the entire company was on the dance floor, and some of the blood drinkers were singing softly with the musicians and the entire ballroom was wrapped in a cloud of golden light.
She had been dancing with Viktor, and he had bent and kissed her lips.
“I love you, Rose,” he had said. And she’d dug deep down into her soul at that moment and asked herself could they turn away from this, actually turn away from it, and go to some other place, some safe place where their natural love for each other would be enough to dim the memories of this? She and Viktor had known surely the most tantalizing intimacy, the sweetest affection, the purest lovemaking she had ever imagined. It had erased for her all the ugliness and horror of what had happened with Gardner, all the shame and the crushing disappointment. By day when blood drinkers slept and their mysteries were gone along with them, she’d held Viktor against her heart and he’d held her, and that had been its own miracle, its own sacrament, its own gift.
She shuddered.
She realized now that Louis was looking at her and so was Viktor. Louis very likely had been reading her thoughts. Had he seen those images of her with Viktor, together? She blushed.
“I think Seth has made the decision,” said Louis, speaking to her very thoughts. “Otherwise he would have never brought you to Trinity Gate last night. No. He’s only waiting for Lestat to ratify it. He’s made up his mind.”
Rose smiled, but felt the sting of tears in her eyes.
“He’ll come tonight, I know he will,” said Louis.
“Fareed places a high value on human life, human experience,” said Viktor. “Maybe my father does too. I think that Seth cares nothing for human experience much at all.”
Rose knew that Viktor was right. She remembered too vividly the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Seth. It had been in the small hours, and she’d been in pain. Needles, tape, monitors all around her. Viktor wasn’t coming back until morning, and Dr. Gilman could not be found.
Seth had come to her, a dark-eyed man in the ubiquitous white scrubs of the hospital, who stood at a remove from her bed, talking to her in a low voice.
He’d told her the pain would vanish if she would listen to him, just follow his words, and sure enough as he talked to her about the pain, as he asked her to describe it in colors, and to picture it, and to say what and where she felt it, the pain had melted away.
She’d cried. She’d told him about Uncle Lestan and how he’d wanted her to be a happy healthy young woman and how she’d ruined it again and again. Maybe she’d never been good enough, she’d said, for life.
A soft cold laugh had come from Seth. He’d explained with great authority that she had ruined nothing, that life was in charge of life, that pain was everywhere, that it was as much a part of the process of life as birth and death. “But joy, the joy you’ve known, the love you’ve known, that is what matters, and we, the conscious ones, the ones who can grieve, only we can know joy.”
It had been a strange meeting. And she hadn’t seen him again till she was much better, and she’d been certain then that he was no more human than Uncle Lestan was human, and she’d known by then too that Fareed wasn’t human and Dr. Gilman wasn’t human either, and that Viktor knew all this with a far greater understanding than she could possibly have. She’d been wrestling with it, pacing the floor of her room in the desert hospital, interrogating her own senses, her own sense of normality, and Seth had appeared and said: “Don’t let us drive you mad.” He’d moved out of the shadows and taken her hands in his. “I am just what you think and what you fear,” he’d told her. “Why shouldn’t you know? Why shouldn’t you understand?”
The effect of those nighttime conversations had been incalculable, and the first time that she and Viktor had been intimate, she’d said in his ear, “Don’t be afraid for me. I do know what they are. I know all about it. I understand.”
“Thank Heaven,” Viktor had replied. They had snuggled together spoon fashion and he had kissed her hair. “Because I can’t lie about it anymore. I can keep secrets. But I can’t tell lies.”
She looked at him now, looked at the manner in which he sat there in the chair, looking at the far glass wall and the vibrant cityscape beyond it. And she felt such love for him, such love and trust.
She looked at Louis, Louis who was watching her again as if reading her thoughts.
“You’ve been more than kind,” she said, “but if we’re cast out of all this, if that’s what ultimately happens, I don’t know what future there can be for us.”
She looked at Viktor. His expression told her nothing, except that he loved her, and that he had a patience with this that she didn’t have.
She tried to imagine it, them together, married, with children, their very own rosy-cheeked children, little children, drifting through the world on the magic carpet of the wealth bequeathed to them by beings of a secret and unknown realm. She couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t.
But surely somehow it would never come to that. This would not all be consigned to miraculous memory meant to fade with every passing year.
She looked at Louis.
And he gave her one of those rare bright smiles. He seemed warm and human suddenly and too grand to be mortal all at the same time.
“It really is a gift, isn’t it?” asked Rose.