Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [108]
And so she’s asked him. Tell me about the wolf hunts. The Thousand Candle Ball. The plague.
“I can’t remember,” he says, no matter what. “It’s too long ago. You can’t expect me to remember that.”
She is beginning to suspect that it’s because it’s true. He really can’t remember anything. He loses his car keys, he forgets to tell her that her mother called. She’s given up on her birthday. It’s coming up, and she knows he hasn’t a clue.
She finds herself scanning the books, not for the facts she needs, but for old engravings that look like him. Here’s a page in a book: soberly dressed men in lace collars all signing a document. The Civil Compact of 1635. Is he the one standing off to the side of the table, as if he’s proofreading their signatures? She’s seen that look on his face, keen and critical and mocking. Can she dig out the names of all the signers? That shouldn’t be hard. There are complete lists of them; another scholar’s already done that work.
She scans the list of the Compact signers. Now what? Does she try out each name on him in turn, like the poor queen with Rumpelstiltskin? Does she murmur in his ear all night, a roll call of dead politicos, until he starts up with a cry of “Present, my lord!”?
She checks the date on the picture. Damn: It’s an engraving of a commemorative painting done fifty years after the actual event. The artist would have been making up what everyone looked like, or working off old portraits, or something.
She peers closer at the engraved face and realizes it’s just a bunch of lines, anyway.
She misses him. First she unlocks her door, and then, as if he knows she did, he meets her outside the library and walks her home.
“Do you want dinner?” he asks. He always buys, probably from some centuries-old bank account that has multiplied like her papa always promised: “Just put a penny in, add to it every year, and when you’re all grown up you’ll be able to buy whatever you want!”
She doesn’t want dinner. She wants him. On the stairs to her room, she’s already tearing his clothes off. He has the nicest clothes. (Oh, that savings account!) He has the nicest body under them. A young man’s body, skin dense and firm. An invincible body, no matter how dissolute his character or degraded his memory.
Is he going to grow old with her? Or, rather, is he going to let her grow old with him? She doubts it. A lot. (“Practice on older men,” her grandmother used to say, “but marry a young one.” Oh, Granny!)
He doesn’t ask how her paper’s coming along.
They’re supposed to be going to her study partner’s birthday party. It’s not that far from her flat, but he’s insisted on going the long way round by the river, where it curves and they’ll have to cross the bridges twice. She knows he doesn’t really want to go at all. He hates parties; he hates her friends. She knows he thinks they’re stupid, even though they’re not. Really not: They were all the smartest kids in their graduating classes. He just doesn’t like listening to them talk about their lives. He doesn’t say so, but it depresses him. Her friends are mostly history and literature. He can barely sit still around them. He wants to be mean to them, to skewer them with his scorn for their youth and inexperience and dreams—but if he does, she’ll dump him. She’s made that clear.
He has to come with her, now, because she’s already been to too many parties without him, and missed too many others because of him. At first it was okay to say her busy older boyfriend was working all the time, but they’ve been together too long; it looks like there’s something funny if he never turns up, and the last thing she wants is people worrying about her. She got him to come along tonight by telling him that Theo will be there. Theo is Anna’s boyfriend, and he’s in physics. He adores talking physics with Theo.
Swallows