Interview With a Jewish Vampire Page 4

  “Maybe we could go dancing sometime,” I suggested. “I’m a good dancer too. I was once told I had ‘Jewish soul.’”

  “The kind of dancing they do today is not exactly my style,” Sheldon said disapprovingly, putting his hand to his chin as though he were looking for a beard to stroke. I could see the stern rabbi in that face. “But I’m willing to try it,” he then said with an impish smile. I could see the joyous Hasid he once had been in that grin.

  We sat through the rest of the show holding hands, and I saw Sheldon stomping his foot during some of the more raucous musical numbers. He stopped crying and started laughing and clapping again.

  After the show we went back to my apartment, where Sheldon just wanted me to hold him. Tonight was not the night for hot sex, but for tenderness. I felt so bad for the poor guy, he’d been ripped from his beloved shtetl, transported to an alien land where he was stuck with a bloodlust he couldn’t always control. Of course all the Jews had to leave their homelands but at least they could start over, Sheldon couldn’t. We lay down with our arms around each other until I fell asleep. When I woke up it was 4am and Sheldon was gone. I supposed he wanted to get home before sunrise.

  Chapter Five

  “Hi Charlene,” I said chirpily into the phone the next afternoon after checking the Caller ID. “Yes, he called. We went to see Fiddler on the Roof last night. He broke down and cried during the show because it reminded him of home. I got to comfort him. We really had an emotional moment, but he took off in the middle of the night without leaving a note and now I’m worried again that he won’t call. I was hoping you were him, but you’re not. But then it’s daytime so how could it be him? I don’t know why I’m so anxious—but I am. I’m falling in love with the guy and it’s giving me a panic attack. Why don’t we go for a little shop and schmooze? I need distraction.”

  “I just woke up. I can’t move,” she gasped. “I feel like I was vampirized during the night and all the blood was drained from my body.”

  “I’m the one who’s dating a vampire, not you. So why don’t you tell me all about him while we shop. I desperately need some new clothes for my trip to Florida and my next date with Sheldon. How about it?”

  “Retail therapy eh? I’m for that.”

  We met in the lobby and were greeted outside by a blast of freezing air. All male eyes swiveled to get a look at Charlene as we walked down 86th Street towards the subway. She ignored the attention, she was so used to it. Walking down the street with her was an exercise in invisibility. No one even saw me—no man that is. I loved her for her cleverness, warmth and original outlook on life and had managed over the years to accept her appearance as an act of God.

  Despite her looks, however, Charlene’s track record with men wasn’t much better than mine. Yes, she attracted them by the carload, but they never stuck around. Before my marriage I, on the other hand, had a hell of a time finding a boyfriend, but when I did, they tended to linger, often past their expiration dates. My ex-husband definitely took his time leaving me—waiting until my eggs were stale. My recent spate of one-night stands was an unfortunate new post-divorce pattern than I hoped Sheldon would break.

  “So tell,” I asked, as we glanced at the new brownstone across the street, which was twelve stories higher than any other building in the neighborhood. I wondered how they’d got a permit for that one. “Who drained your blood last night?”

  “Ooooh, I ran into this guy from the neighborhood.” She batted her eyelashes flirtatiously. “We’ve been giving each other the eye for years, every time we pass on the street. He’s tall, luscious and sinewy….you know, the catlike type who slinks along stalking his prey. I just couldn’t resist getting dragged into his lair,” she sighed, languorously. Charlene really had languorousness down to a science. While my movements tended to be rapid, jerky and frantic, her every gesture radiated slow-motion grace.

  “Charlene, tell me something,” I asked as we opened the door to Lane Bryant on Thirty Fourth Street and were happily enveloped by the warm air inside. “How is it you are always meeting men on the street who’ve been giving you the eye for years?”

  “I think it’s my dog. People always notice you if you have a dog. Why don’t you get a dog, Rhoda?”

  “Charlene,” I replied, exasperated. “I could walk down the street with a panther on a leash and after a while people might start saying hello to the panther but ten to one they’d all be little old ladies who wanted to tell me their problems. Sometimes I think I have ‘tell me your troubles’ stamped on my forehead. Men who need either a therapist or a mother or both are irresistibly attracted to me, except for Sheldon and he’s from a century when weighing 200 pounds was fashionable. Outside of vampires I seem to have allure only for little old ladies and the terminally psychotic.” I headed for the nearest “clearance” rack.

  “It would help, Rhoda, if you’d take off a few pounds and put on some makeup. Can’t you at least buy another pair of pants? The jeans you always wear look like they’ve been through the Boer War.” Charlene helped me look through the size-22 petites, although she shopped on the second floor, in the tall section of Lane Bryant. Petite was one of the euphemisms clothes designers used to make us short, fat babes feel better. No way I was ever petite.

  “A few pounds would do me absolutely no good. I’d have to lose at least fifty to even tentatively qualify as pleasantly plump. And I refuse to buy a new pair of jeans when I have at least five pairs that would fit me perfectly if I could only lose fifteen pounds but I can’t lose even ten pounds so there you are.” I was out of breath.

  Three days later I was on a plane to Florida. I hate airplanes. The seats are too small and I get dirty looks from fellow passengers who have to sit next to me. Then I have to deal with the pain of descent when my ears explode. Gum does no good. By the time I hit the ground I’m deaf for a week. Finally, my bag is always the last one to come through the baggage carousel.

  On this flight all I could think about was Sheldon. There was the usual alta cocker trying to make a pass at me to see if I’d be open to a little post-flight dalliance but I didn’t bother to respond to his compliments. The flight attendant came around with a snack pack that actually looked appetizing but I turned it down. I asked for a vodka martini instead although I never drank on flights. What I really needed was a tranquilizer.

  After our theatre date, Sheldon still hadn’t and I was so desperate to hear from him, I‘d started checking my cell every five minutes, but that little message icon was just sitting there not jumping up and down. I couldn’t call him because he hadn’t left his number and when I looked at my Caller ID list all I saw was “unknown caller” at the times he’d called me. It was incredibly frustrating. I couldn’t exactly Google him—I only knew his first name. I couldn’t stop thinking about his eyes, his smile, that hard body. Maybe a little too hard, but at least he didn’t have to work out every day to get that way. I replayed our night at Fiddler in my head over and over. Why would he have cried on my shoulder and opened up with me like that if he was planning on taking off? Actually maybe that was the reason—he figured he wasn’t going to see me again so he could tell me the truth. I could go around in circles endlessly with this kind of reasoning.

  If I hadn’t recorded our interview, I would have started doubting my own senses. What did I really know about him? Could he really be a vampire? Was I imagining the white skin, the lack of reflection in the mirror, the pointy incisors? Could he have just been trying to impress me? Vampires are so trendy these days. Maybe he was angling for a reality series, filmed at night of course. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. I resolved when I got back to find out if there were other vampires, maybe a vampire family who would agree to having cameras set up in their lair, wherever that was. I started imagining crumbling Victorian mansions in New Orleans, and then I remembered that Sheldon was a Jewish vampire who lived among the Hasidim in Crown Heights. OK, a brownstone would do. We could film local color during the day and Jewish vampir
es at night.

  My fantasy was to break into TV one way or another, maybe produce a reality series. It was a long shot, but I had very little going for me work-wise these days. I was tired of working for Bottom Line and had burned out on magazine work. Too many prima donna editors who assigned a piece, then kept changing their minds, then killed whatever I had spent months writing, paying me a mere twenty-five-percent kill fee if they paid me at all. The print industry was dying anyway. The Internet was taking over, but there were so many wannabe writers out there that websites could easily get free articles. Besides Bottom Line, I more or less depended on infusions of cash from Mom who was doling out my inheritance before she died so she could control how I spent it. If she kept a tight enough rein on my shopaholic habits, I might actually be able to afford an apartment where I could eat in a different room than I slept in. Or I might buy a car and put it in a garage so I could escape the City on weekends. Or I might go someplace other than Florida on vacation. Maybe Sheldon would rescue me from poverty and spirit me away to Transylvania or wherever he came from. Did Sheldon fly? If so, could he fly across the Atlantic? What did he do with his luggage on long flights?

  I was lost in dreams of travel to exotic places with Sheldon when the plane bounced on the ground. My ears felt OK this time. I couldn’t wait to get off the plane and check my cell. My heart sank when I saw there were no messages.

  I saw Mom waving frantically from the behind the barrier they set up to keep potential terrorists away from the planes. Most of the greeters were over eighty and unlikely to be stashing bombs under their brightly colored attire, but security these days seemed to involve torturing little old ladies. Mom looked smaller than she had the last time I saw her six months ago. She’d been plump her whole life, which suited her, but now she looked thin and frail. I hugged her and felt her bones under the pretty Indian flowered dress she put on for the occasion.

  “Aw Mom, are you OK? You don’t look so good. You lost a lot of weight.”

  “I think I look great. It’s the first time I’ve been a size ten since I was in high school.”

  She tactfully avoided mentioning my weight, which involved one more X in the plus size department. I’d trained her years ago to shut up about it by threatening never to speak to her again if she told me one more time that I needed to go on a diet. She now knew her place. I was feeling good about my weight this visit because Sheldon was so enamored of my size. But what if he didn’t call? Would I have to find another refugee from the nineteenth century to be accepted the way I was?

  My favorite part of the trip was leaving the airport and taking my first breath of tropical air. The airport looked like it could have been in any city anywhere, but even though Fort Lauderdale looked like a wasteland of gas stations, big box stores and condo complexes, the air smelled better and the sky looked bluer than it ever did in New York City. No one wore black or rushed anywhere. At least not among the retirees. When you got closer to the ocean the landscape actually started looking tropical. I guess they had to preserve some part of nature to bring in business. I felt sad because if Sheldon and I got serious I’d never be able to go snorkeling with him—my favorite sport. Maybe we could go night diving—or to those lagoons where you could see the phosphorescent fish at night. Actually, I hadn’t asked Sheldon what he did during the day. For all I knew he wouldn’t burst into flames during daylight, like they do in tacky vampire movies. Maybe he’d just sparkle like the vamps in Twilight. In Florida no one would notice sparkling. All the girls, and boys dressed as girls, wore glitter. I wished I could call him and find out.

  Mom lived in Century Village in Deerfield Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale. She and my dad had moved there from Jersey when he got Alzheimer’s so if he wandered someone would find him and send him home. There were some advantages to gated communities—outsiders couldn’t get in, but also the demented couldn’t get out. Century was one of the oldest condos in Florida, which didn’t give it any old world charm. It just looked more like an Army base than a setting for gracious living. The houses were condo complexes, low, gray concrete buildings with balconies. Trees and bushes had grown since Mom and my dad had moved in, so at least it didn’t look like a settlement on the moon anymore. After being there for a while I forgot how ugly it was, and appreciated being able to swim in a pool outside my door and sit on a patio overlooking a faux lagoon—which was actually a repository for water runoff. Alligators were rumored to live in the lagoons, so you weren’t supposed to get too close to them, but I suspected the alligator rumors were exaggerated. No one had actually seen one but everyone had heard of a little boy who got his arm chomped off. I wasn’t taking chances. I kept away from the lagoons.

  Even though Mom’s apartment in Century was spacious, it felt cramped because she followed me around hectoring me about my sloppy ways. I had never been in an apartment in Century that wasn’t immaculate. Most of them were furnished with white, squishy upholstered furniture and thick beige rugs. Mom’s apartment, however, was a spectacular exception to the standard décor. My father had been an architect and they were both obsessed with modern furniture and design. They collected classic pieces and took them to Florida, including a huge white pedestal table, bentwood chairs and a graceful glass kidney-shaped coffee table that my father had designed. The couches were long, low-slung slabs of covered foam on spare wood frames. They were elegant but incredibly hard and uncomfortable. The entire room was stunning but it was mostly for show; there was no place to curl up and read a book. I couldn’t imagine bringing Sheldon here to meet my mother; I saw him more in a shtetl with mud huts just like in Fiddler. He’d had 150 years to adjust to modern décor, but vampires and Bauhaus just didn’t compute. I wasn’t fond of 1950s modern myself. I much preferred country casual, with comfy couches you could sink into.

  Mom was a neat freak, while I was constitutionally incapable of neatness. If I left a dish in the sink overnight I heard about it.

  “Rhoda, if you leave anything out we’ll have ants,” she chided me the morning after I arrived. “No orange peels on the counter please.”

  “Jeez, Mom, I left the orange peels in the sink.”

  “Why didn’t you turn on the garbage disposal?”

  “That thing is too goddamned noisy.”

  We could have kept on bickering but the phone rang. The phone rang constantly at Mom’s. She was a regular social butterfly, one of the most popular girls, or “goils” as they called themselves in Century. She had three close friends and many aspirants for the position of one of the goils. The gang consisted of Mom, Judy, an acerbic heavyset pushy type who did not censor her sarcastic opinions, Ellen, a sweet former social worker who listened to everyone’s problems, and Miriam, my favorite, an oddball closet intellectual who often expressed her irreverent opinions in a deceptively soft, genteel tone of voice. Judy was on the other end of the phone this time. I could only hear Mom’s side of the conversation.

  “She’s fine. She’s very happy. She’s madly in love.” Long pause. “With a vampire,” Mom said with an embarrassed laugh. Another long pause.

  “No, I don’t think she’s lost her mind,” she said into the phone, sounding defensive. “Maybe she’s just desperate. There aren’t a lot of available single men in New York for fortyish women.”

  “Well, she’s my daughter and I’ll stick by her even if she’s a little delusional. We can’t all be as sensible as you,” she said sarcastically.

  My poor mom was stuck defending my love affair with a vampire. That was harder than defending my marriage to a philanderer.

  “Yes, I’ll pick you up at five. How about the China Palace?”

  The girls ate out together every night and Mom always drove. She was the only one who could still drive at night. They liked to dress for dinner as well. My mother was the most fashionable of the girls. Her walk-in closet was the envy of Century Village; unlike her friends who wore mostly pastel or beige polyester, Mom loved natural fabrics and interesting patterns. Her Indian cot
ton dresses and silk blouses were organized by color and type. If she was wearing purple pants, guaranteed she would have a blouse with purple in it, and a scarf and sweater to match. Her feet were still a size six and she could still wear high heels, which I never could tolerate because of my big flat feet. It was sad that her beautiful clothes were now too big for her. Most of them were size fourteen’s. It was even sadder that they didn’t fit me because I was in the XX’s.

  My visits were a big deal to the ‘goils’, who looked forward to hanging out with me. They were in their eighties and at forty-one, I was the voice of “young people” to them, even though in New York, where the happening crowd was in their twenties, I was already a dinosaur. Women my age lived in the ‘burbs or Park Slope with their first husbands and kids. My first husband didn’t stick around for the kids. But I liked being treated like a kid again by Mom’s friends--being fussed over and catered to.

  I suppose most New York women my age would have dreaded keeping company with a bunch of eighty-year-olds in a Florida condo, but I loved spending time with the girls. They were funny, irreverent, and had a great time doing just about anything. Mostly we went out to lunch somewhere nice, since lunches were cheap, then to a museum, or shopping, then home for a nap, then to dinner before six, never missing the early bird. After dinner we’d take a stroll on the beach. Deerfield was famous for its scenic non-commercialized beach, and long pier that stretched out into the Atlantic. Mom and I had scattered my dad’s ashes off that pier. I said Kaddish and we cried and cried. Then we went for ice cream, Mom’s favorite indulgence. Hanging out with the girls was easier than being with my own fellow journalists, who made me feel inadequate because I didn’t work on a TV show or at the New York Times. They also made me feel fat and frumpy, since they worked out obsessively and dressed in the latest boho fashions. There were no expectations with Mom’s friends except that I be sociable and amusing, which was easy.