Anne Rice - Violin

"I like doing such things," he said. The sadness flashed over him, knitted his brows before he could brush it away. "I thought you were mad. You're almost... what some people would call mad."

"Yet painfully sane," I said. "That's the problem."

I was now utterly enthralled. I couldn't stop studying all the details of him, his old coat, the wet dust that had made mud on his shoulders, the way his big dreamy eyes sharpened and then mellowed with his thoughts, the way his lips were moistened with his tongue now and then as if he were a human being.

Suddenly a thought came to me. It came crashingly clear.

"The dream! The dream I had of the-"

"Don't talk of it!" he said. He leaned forward, menacingly, so close now his wet hair fell down on the blanket right by my hands.

I pushed back against the headboard for leverage and then with the full strength of my right hand I slapped him. I slapped him twice before he could get his wits! I pus hed the covers back.

He rose and moved awkwardly away from me, looking down at me in pitiful bewilderment.

I reached out. He didn't flinch. I knotted my hand into a fist and struck him full in the chest. He moved back a few steps, no more concerned with such a weak blow than a human man might have been.

"The dream came from you!" I said. "That place I saw, the man with...

"I warn you, don't." He cursed, his finger flying out to point in my face even as he backed up and drew himself up like a great bird. "Silence on that. Or I'll wreak such havoc on your little physical corner of the world you'll curse the day you were ever born...." The voice faded out. "You think you know pain, you're so proud of your pain. .

.

He looked up and away from me. He drew the violin up to his chest and crossed his arms around it. He had said something that displeased himself. His eyes searched the room as if they could really see.

"I do see!" he said angrily.

"Ah, I meant as a mortal man, that's all I meant."

"And that is all I mean, too," he answered.

The rain outside slackened, grew soft and light, so that the various leaks and trickles gained in volume. We seemed in a wet world, wet but warm and safe, he and I.

I knew, knew as clearly as I knew he was there, I knew that I had seldom been so alive in my life as I was now, that the very sight of him, his being here, had brought me back to a fire in life I hadn't known in decades. Long, long ago, before so many defeats, when I'd been young and in love, perhaps I'd been this alive, when I'd wept over my failures and losses in those early energetic years, when everything had been so very bright and hot to touch, maybe then I'd been this alive.

In the maddest grief there was not this kind of vitality. It was more akin to joy, dance, the sheer penetrating and hypnotic power of music.

And there he stood, looking lost, and suddenly looking at me as if he would ask something, and then looking away, his dark brows knitted.

"Tell me what you want," I said. "You said you wanted to drive me mad? why?

For what reason?"

"Well, you see," he said quickly in response, though his words were slow, "I'm at a loss." He spoke frankly with raised eyebrows and a cool poised manner. "I don't know myself what it is I want now! Driving you mad." He shrugged. "Now that I know what you are, or how strong you are, I don't know what words to put it in. There's perhaps something better here than merely driving you out of your mind, assuming of course that I could have done it, and I see you feel Superior in this regard, having held so many deathbed hands and watched your lost young husband, Lev, dance on drugs with his friends while you merely sipped your wine, afraid to take the drugs, afraid of visions!

Visions like me! You amaze me.

"Vision?" I whispered.

I wrapped my left hand around the bedpost. My body was shaking. My heart did pound. All these symptoms of fear reminded me that there was indeed something here to fear, but then again, what in God's name could be worse than so much that had happened? Fear the supernatural? Fear the flicker of candles and the smiles of saints?

No, I think not.

Death is plenty to fear. Ghosts, what are ghosts?

"How did you cheat death?" I said.

"You flippant, cruel woman," he whispered. He spoke in a rush. "You look angelic. You, with your veil of dark hair, and your sweet face and huge eyes," he whispered. He was sincere. He was stung, and his head bent to the side. "I didn't cheat anything or anyone." He looked desperately to me. "You wanted me to come, you wanted-"

"You thought so? when you caught me thinking about the dead?

Is that what you thought? And you came to what? Console? Deepen my pain?

what happened?"

He shook his head, and took several steps backwards. He looked out the back window, and in so doing, let the light unveil the side of his face. He seemed tender.

He turned on me in an angry flash.

"So very pretty still," he said, "and at your age, and plump, even so. Your sisters hate you for your pretty face, you know it, don't yo u? Katrinka, the beautiful one with the shapely body and smart husband, and before him the string of lovers she cannot count. She thinks you have a prettiness that she can never earn or produce or paint or claim. And Faye, Faye loved you, yes, as Faye loved all, but Faye couldn't forgive you your prettiness either."

"What do you know of Faye?" I asked before I could stop myself. "Is my sister Faye still alive?" I tried to stop myself, but I couldn't. "where is Faye! And how can you speak for Katrinka, what do you know about Katrinka or any of my family?"

"I speak what you know," he said. "I see the dark passages of your mind, I know the cellars where you yourself have not been. I see there in those shadows that your father loved you too much because you resembled your mother. Same brown hair, brown eyes. And that your Sister Katrinka cheerfully bedded your young husband, Lev, one night."

"Stop this! what? Have you come here to be my personal Devil? Do I rate such a thing? I? And you tell me in the same breath that I'm not half so responsible as I seem to think for all those deaths. How are you going to drive me mad, I'd like to know? How?

You're not sure of yourself at all. Look at you. You quake and you're the ghost. what were you when you were alive? A young man? Maybe even kind by nature, and now all twisted out of-"

"Stop," he pleaded. "Your point is clear."

"Which is what?"

"That you see me clearly, as I see you," he answered coldly. "That memory and fear aren't going to make you waver. I was so very wrong about you. You seemed a child, an eternal orphan, you seemed so..."

"Say it. I seemed so weak?" I asked.

"You're bitter."

"Perhaps," I said. "It's not a word I favor. why do you want me to feel either pain or fear? For what? why! what did the dream mean? where was that sea?"

His face was blank with shock. He raised his eyebrows, and then again tried to speak but changed his mind, or couldn't find the words for it.

"You could be beautiful," he said softly. "You almost were. Is that why you fed on trash and beer and let your God-given shape go to waste? You were thin when you were a child, thin like Katrinka and Faye, thin by nature. But you covered yourself with a concealing bulk, didn't you? To hide from whom? Your own husband, Lev, as you handed him over to younger and more beguiling women? You pushed him into bed with Katrinka."

I didn't respond.

I felt an ever-increasing strength inside me. Even as I shuddered, I felt this strength, this grand excitement. It had been so long since any emotion such as this had visited me, and now I felt it, looking at him in his bewilderment.

"You are perhaps even a little beautiful," he whispered, smiling as if he meant quite deliberately to torment me. "But will you grow as large and shapeless as your sister Rosalind?"