Fantastic Stories Presents: Fantasy Super Pack #1. Fritz Leiber
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took my glass from my hand and drained that as well before she spoke again. “At least you do not look like a banker,” she said, appraising me. “Too many of these Surrealists and Dadaists look like bankers.”
“Magritte certainly looks like a banker,” I agreed.
“He is Belgian, he can’t help but look respectable,” Duchamp said, having overheard us. “It isn’t his fault. Come on Adam, you cannot monopolize the lady of the hour. And you haven’t seen my latest yet.” I let Marcel steer me away toward his assemblage, a suitcase with sixty-four miniature reproductions of his earlier work. Ah, Marcel, if only you hadn’t stopped painting. Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds are good people, and they are not so pretentious as most of their peers. Still, while I understand that it is sometimes necessary to break down meaning to break through it, I cannot find meaning itself entirely unnecessary. Dada in some form is adolescent, and Duchamp is so much better than that.
At the end of the evening I went to find Frida, to say good night, to ask where she was staying and if she might like to go for a drink some time, but she was already gone. “She went home early with Mary,” Duchamp told me. “Do you think I should worry? Frida likes women as well as men.”
“Ah, but does Mary?” I rejoined, and was rewarded with Duchamp’s smile. His mistress may not be entirely conventional, but he has no reason to doubt her loyalty. “She is staying with you and Mary, then?”
“For a month at least,” he told me.
“Well, I shall come and take her off your hands some time, then,” I said lightly. We both laughed, Marcel because he was still just a little drunk and me because I had not lost her.
Over the next two nights I wrote my column, combing the words, reworking the phrasing. I wanted to impress the artist as she had impressed me. I wanted to show her the depth of my appreciation, and to explain to the sophisticated of Paris that she was nothing of a Surrealist no matter what Breton might say. Surrealism is an intellectual pursuit and Frida’s paintings came from the fusion of heart and mind and faith altogether, something the world had lost since the death of Fra Angelico.
Over the period of two nights that I wrote I did not hunt, nor was I aware of any hunger. The art had been richer than any meal, than any night of blood, and so it was not until I had finished and sent the article to my editor that I realized it had been many days since I had last taken physical sustenance.
And so I hunted. It was not half so satisfying as looking at a truly good picture, but the body has its own demands. I took what I needed from a dark-haired girl in the Metro, staggering home after an evening of too much wine and too many cigarettes. If she noticed anything the next morning, she would ascribe it all to the late night and brilliant company.
On Friday, the magazine with my article appeared and its full printing, all four hundred copies, were gone before I even woke to the twilight. My own copy, delivered with the mail, lay on the table in the front hall. I phoned Duchamp, and he and Mary and Frida were just dressing to go to dinner with some American novelist whose name I have forgotten. Frida agreed to meet me later at a decently late hour, not that Americans care for such niceties. When I put down the receiver I felt like I had when I was still young and mortal and nervous and in love.
I showed Frida the city that night, my city, the secret Paris that breathes in the hours after midnight. We went down to the Quai d’Orsey when the moon had set and the Seine flowed like ink, lapping the stone and echoing under the arched bridges. I told her of the morning that river had turned red, choked with the bodies of a thousand wedding guests who had been massacred by their King four hundred years before my birth. We went to Montmartre and climbed the hundred white steps in the starlight, then turned to look at the city lying asleep before us.
“Have you always lived in Paris?” she asked, and I could see in her face that she understood that ‘always’ was far longer in my case.
“No. I was born in Germany and worked in Rome when it was the center of all things. Some day Paris will no longer be the center, it will be New York or Mexico City and I will move again.”
She nodded, and was for a brief moment sad.
I did not see her for many nights. There were rumors that La Baker had become her lover, for which I was merely envious, though I did not know of which of them. She dined with Picasso and he said that she painted as well as he did, and he published that, too. But Pablo has too high an opinion of himself to mean that, and besides, he has sex with every attractive woman he can find. Much like Frida’s Diego, in fact. Kandinsky possibly did not sleep with her, but still admired her work.
When I saw her next I took her to my apartment near Avenue St. Germaine-du-Pres. The building is old, with high ceilings and plumbing that rattles. She studied the paintings on my wall with attention and finally pointed to one small piece in a corner. “That is yours,” she said. She did not ask, she knew. The she looked more carefully, and I wondered how she, a master of pink and yellow and fevered hues, would find my soft shades and delicate interplay of light. That is what critiques praised most about my work when I had been alive, the light, and the fact that I did not follow the Mannerist style of emotionalism that bordered on sentimentality.
“What is your real name?” she asked after she examined the miniature.
“Adam,” I told her, which was the truth. “You would not have heard of me, few of the contemporaries have. Adam Elsheimer.”
She nodded, never taking her eyes from the painting. “And when were you born?”
She knew. She knew what kind of thing I was, though I had said nothing. She knew, and yet she had come here with me.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said, and she laughed loudly. “I liked older men. My mother was so angry when I married Diego, he is twenty-five years older than me. And Trotsky.”
“You married Trotsky?” I knew she hadn’t, but it seemed like the right thing to ask.
“No,” she replied when she regained her breath. “No, but he was my lover. Breton didn’t tell you?”
It was my turn to smile. “Breton alluded to it. To lose a woman he desired as much as he desires you was quite a blow for him, but he felt he could not compete with Trotsky.”
“And you?” she demanded.
“I would not try to compete with Trotsky,” I agreed. “But Trotsky is not here.”
“No, Trotsky is not here,” she said, and sighed. Then she drank the tequila I had bought for her, and took my hand and let me to my own bedroom in my own apartment.
She knew what I was and she invited, teased, dared me. I tasted her in passion, with my fangs deep in her flesh, her blood as brilliant as the flowers in her hair. The nourishment of her blood was rich and heady, more viscerally alive than any I had had in four hundred years. All of Creation was within her, the fruits and vines and birds in her veins, the flowers in her hair, the fragility and the fear, as well, subtle and piquant. I drank the livingness inside her, and the death as well, for the one lives within the other.
She knew what kind of a thing I was, but she did not truly know what that meant. I did not tell her until weeks later, after she became terribly ill with a kidney infection, and Mary and Marcel were afraid and called me.
She lay in a hospital bed with tubes and bandages like one of her paintings, her face whiter than mine and pinched with pain. When I tried to hush her and speak she waved her hand and tried to smile bravely.
“This is terrible,” I said softly. “That you should become so sick while you are here.”
She laughed, loudly even though she did not have the energy for it. “I have been sick or injured every other place I have ever been. Why not Paris? Perhaps I wouldn’t even know I had been here if I had been healthy all the time.”
The pain flared through her, and through her paintings. I could see it, taste it, and remember my own and feel ashamed. For I had never been so sick in my few years of life. I had never known