Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [86]
“ ‘But they didn’t bury you down there in that cemetery, did they?’ I asked her. We were the best of friends.
“ ‘No,’ she answered in a soft sweet voice as she came on and sat beside me on the steps. She wore a pair of black-and-white cameo earrings dangling from her pierced lobes, and they shivered with the subtle motion of her head as she smiled.
“ ‘And you’re as handsome as everybody said,’ she told me. ‘You’re a man already. Why are you so worried?’—so gentle—‘You need a pretty girl like me to show you what you can do?’
“ ‘But who told you I was worried?’ I asked her.
“She was just gorgeous, or so it seemed to me, and she wasn’t just endowed by nature with an admirable face and large eyes, she had a pertness to her, a freshness, a quick refinement. Surely there was a corset shaping her little waist, and the ruffles of her blouse were stiffly ironed and flawless. Her taffeta skirt was a rich chocolate brown color that glinted in the sunlight, and she had tiny feet in fancy lace-up boots.
“ ‘I just know you’ve been worried,’ she answered. ‘I know lots of things. You might say I know everything that goes on. Things don’t really go in a straight line the way living people think. Everything is always happening all the time.’ She reached over and clasped my right hand with both of hers, and I felt the shock again, electric, dangerous, and delicious chills ran all over me, and I bent forward and I went to kiss her lips.
“Teasingly, she drew back just a little, and then, with her breast pressed against my arm, she said, ‘But let’s go inside. I want you to light the lamps.’
“That made perfect sense. I hated the long shadows of the afternoon. Light the lamps. Light the world.
“ ‘I hate the shadows too,’ she said.
“We rose together, though I was faintly dizzy and I didn’t want her to know it. We went inside the cool and silence of the house. I could just barely hear the sound of running water in the kitchen. Four p.m. Dinner not for another two hours, and how curious the house looked! What a curious fragrance it had—of leather and crushed flowers, of moth balls and wax.
“The living room was full of different couches and chairs with frames that were somber and black and shiny, real Victorian furniture, I thought, and there stood another antique piano, far older than the one that had been there before. It was a square grand. The draperies were a heavy midnight blue velvet, and the lace panels were full of gracefully drawn peacocks. The windows were open. How pretty, the breeze against the lace peacocks. How perfect, I thought.
“A thrilling ecstasy took hold of me, a certainty of the pure beauty of what I saw and the irrelevance of all else.
“When I looked over at the dining room I realized that it too was altered, that the draperies were a peach silk with gold fringe on them, and that the table was oval, with a vase of flowers in the center. Fresh roses, natural garden roses on short stems, petals lying on the waxed table. Not cold magnificent florist roses. Just roses that could make your hands bleed. Drops of water on the round vase.
“ ‘Oh, but it’s delightful, isn’t it?’ she said to me. ‘I picked that fabric for the draperies myself. I’ve done so many things. Small things. Big things. I cut those roses from the back garden. I laid out the rose garden. There was no rose garden before I came. You want to see the rose garden?’
“A faint protest voiced itself in my mind that there was no rose garden on Blackwood Farm, that the rose garden was long gone for the swimming pool, but this seemed incomprehensible and unimportant, and to have mentioned such a thing seemed rude.
“I turned to tell her I couldn’t hold off of kissing her, and I bent down and closed my mouth over hers. Ah. I never in my dreams felt that. I never tasted that. I never knew that. I felt the heat of her body through her clothes. It was so intense, I almost came. I put my arms around her and lifted her, and I put my knee against her skirts and pushed against her sex, and I put my tongue into her mouth.
“When she drew back, it took all my