"Maria was very lovely-regal-looking, rich blond hair and white, round, soft shoulders. She must have been a hundred years old when I came into her house, and she looked perhaps thirty. She would not tell me who made her-it was a terrible secret. Also she would not tell me where her money came from, since she had never, in anyone's memory, been married.

"Georgie"-he said it in the French manner, all Zh's-"Georgie was like a beautiful witch. She was tall, tall for those days anyway, taller than I was, and very thin, like a wraith. She had wonderful eyes-black and sharp and always rolling like this." Ricari threw back his head and dramatically rolled his eyes around in the sockets like an indignant Valley Girl. We laughed. "She wore red too. Always red and white. She was the Pole, I remember now. She had a voracious appetite for women. Sometimes she brought home two or three, when Maria wasn't home, and the women would" roll around in her bed, naked, groaning so loud I couldn't sleep. I slept in the servant's room outside the bedroom so that I could run in and warm their bed in winter."

"Did you sleep with them ever?"

That swell of color stained his cheeks again, and he smiled like a schoolboy caught picking a daisy for his girl. "I was Georgina's lover," he said. "Maria did not like men at all. Georgie said I was hardly like a man, my skin was so soft. We were like brooms in a closet, the two of us, so thin."

"Did you love them?"

"I did... love them. Yes."

"And yet you can't forgive them," I reminded him.

"No. I cannot. I am angry at them, for doing this to me. That's the problem with vampires. They don't think. They forget that they aren't humans, and that their decisions will last so long as to be nearly permanent. Your momentary whims-your lonelinesses-they don't mean the same. You have to be serious, and compassionate, not just to your own needs, but to the needs of humankind."

"That's impossible," I said.

"It is not impossible. I do it."

"How old were you when you were made?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I was raised on a farm where birthdays are not important. I was... twenty-two or twenty-three, I think."

"Come lie down with me," I said again.

"I heard you the first time."

"Don't you want me at all?"

"I need you, Ariane, that is all."

I laid my head on the arm of the chaise and put out the stub of my joint. Ricari lit a new candle, turning it this way and that, studying the flame until he tired of it too, and stabbed it into the pin at the center of one of the candlesticks. "Shit," I said.

"You're stoned," he said.

"Mmm. Yep."

"I remember that. Nice sensation."

"You've been stoned?"

"I've taken blood from many of the stoned. Not so much now. Seems to be passing out of vogue."

"Actually it's coming back in again."

"It's very late," he said, "or early, as the case may be."

"Happy New Year," I said.

"Why aren't you out with other people? Drinking and carousing?" Even nine floors up we'd heard the great roar when the clock struck twelve; the din had died down a long time ago.

"Not interested. New Year's boring. All the idiots feel like they have a real reason to celebrate. Being alive one more year, I guess. I don't buy it." Ricari's sleek dark form passed in and out of focus, blurred with the uneven light of the candles. His presence, though, was palpably strong, and in my leaden state it throbbed through my temples like a headache. "Anyway, there are a lot of drunk drivers out, and it's dangerous to drive."

"Why did you come then?"

"You know that," I said.

"I suppose," he said.

"You've been called beautiful before," I went on, "even when you were a little Italian love slave, haven't you? And even now that you're a monster as you so enjoy calling yourself? Haven't enough people told you that you're beautiful that you don't need to wonder why I came?" I opened my eyes; he stood very still, hands in his pockets. "I thought you might be lonely. Holiday season's hard for people alone. New Year's might be especially for you."

"I don't like 'em," he admitted. "Closest thing to a birthday I have."

"More'n two hundred candles on your birthday cake." An image of it crept into my mind-a fourteen-inch grocery-store party cake, being lit with a flamethrower.

"Quite a cake," he said acidly.

I sat up dreamily to take off my cardigan, but without realizing it at first, I continued shedding clothes until I sat on the chaise in my black cotton exercise bra and blue silk panties. My skin at the thighs was so pale it inspired me. I could see the green vein tracing up into the twirl of reddish hairs slipping from the bunched elastic of the panties, the vein John had rather liked to run his finger along just before licking my labia and my clitoris, before jumping on me with boyish embraces. I meant to explain that perhaps I had undressed because of the excessive warmth of the room, that I hadn't meant to take off all my clothes, I wasn't coming onto Ricari like a horny high school nerd, hoping to wow him with the sight of my unshaven armpits or the appendix scar on my side; but all I managed to say was "Warm."

He looked at me, and sniffed a faint laugh. "You are lovely," he said.

"I didn't..." I shook my head.

"Come on, get into my bed, you'll get cold like that."

I stood up and went through to his dark bedroom and sank into the clean soft cotton sheets. Ricari followed after me with a candle, setting it onto the night table next to the scalpel and a heap of crumpled credit-card receipts. He sat next to me on the bed. "I have no idea what you think of me," I said. "I don't know why you don't kill me."

"I think that would please you too much," he said, still smiling. He moved the covers aside and touched the skin of my belly with his fingertips. I reached up and took his wrist, rubbing my thumb along its underside, like the tummy of a dolphin, and he arched his back, his fingers slipping down till they met the wisp of hair that came out of my panties to rest on my stomach.

"Kiss me," I pleaded.

He moved; hesitated; moved; then finally sat back and shook his head. "No. Go to sleep."

"Aw... you suck."

"Why then do you love me?" he said, cocking his head. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again he was gone.

He came back before morning, smelling of secondhand alcohol, very disheveled. I had slept a little, slept a little of the marijuana off, and I bolted upright in bed to see him. The dawn was just beginning to violate the darkness between the slats of the blinds, and he was wearing a black shirt and ducked behind the screen, but I got a glimpse of his chin, streaked with a dark, definable substance.

"Ricari! What have you done?"

"None of your business," he said from behind the screen.

"Did you just kill people?"

"No."

"What then?"

"Nothing! Leave me be!"

I got up and went over to the screen. He knocked the screen over with his hand and stood there, shirtless, glowering, his face bright red. "You must leave now," he said crisply, authoritative, little sleek fellow with hard pink nipples, to me, mostly naked, shivering, barefoot on the parquet floor.

"Why?"

"I need my sleep, you little fool! Now go away." His speech was slurred.

"You've been boozing up," I said, and began to laugh.

"Not my fault. Out!"

"Why can't I stay? I won't molest you. I promise. I'll be a good kid."

"That is the least of my worries." He sighed heavily. "Please. Go quietly. I don't want to get angry with you. You are so annoying sometimes. Go. Don't come again until I call you."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Please," he said. The color in his face was subsiding, but he looked exhausted, his flat muscled belly rounded like a fed kitten's. His voice sounded very young, and deep, and tired.

I went and put on my clothes, gathered up my various things, and looked back into the room. He was swaddled in the gray robe again, lying his head upon the pillow. "I won't come until you call," I told him.

He did not respond. He seemed to be asleep already.

"You wanted to see me, Ariane?" Helen Troutman, the chair of the Department of Biology, let me into her office and closed the door. "You want a cup of coffee? I just made some."

"Oh, no, that's OK." I stood in the center of the room, hands in pockets.

"What's up?"

"I know this is really late notice, but... I, um... think I want to take the semester off. Emergency leave."

"What? Why? What's the matter?"

I was so close to just dissolving, so tired and bottled up, that I thought I was going to explode all over the modern carpets and the white bookshelves, but I just ran my fingers across my head. "I'm... I..."

"Jesus, sit down. What's the matter? Is it John?"

"No... well partially... I just think it's really time I took some time off. I've never even had a summer off in twelve years... I'm starting to... I'm showing the strain. I'm afraid I might get burnt out. I don't have any more ideas about my rats, I don't have any decent lesson plans, I just can't... face... another semester of lectures and labs. I just can't."

She rubbed her cheek with her palm, and took a solid gulp of coffee. "Sometimes I wonder what's the matter with you driven types," she said. "You go like blazes until you finally crack. I for some reason thought-we all thought-you were going to keep up this insane pace forever. You are too hard on yourself, Ariane." Helen smiled at me. "It's your decision, of course. We can't force you to do anything. I for one think you should have taken some time off a long time ago. It's kind of bad timing, but we do have more than enough TAs to smooth over the cracks."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Enough apologizing. It's OK. We don't want to lose you. Your kids will miss you."

"Yeah, I know."

"Take some time off. You can always come back. Keep in touch, OK? You all right for money?"

"I've got plenty. Thanks."

"Jesus Christ, take care of yourself. You're incredibly pale. And you've lost weight. Don't worry about it." She got up and put her arms around my shoulders briefly, in a strained, professorial intimacy. "I'll pass it along. OK? You should probably talk to Carole, you'll have to fill out some leave forms, but it shouldn't take too long."

I stumbled out of the office gratefully, spent the rest of the afternoon filling out forms. In the space where applicants were to fill out their reason(s) for leaving, I wrote in big letters, "GENERAL BURNOUT."

Ricari had me meet him in a trendy cafe south of Market. He was sitting patiently at the espresso bar with a humhle cup of Americano in front of him, sketching on a napkin with a black felt-tipped pen, and he looked up at me as I came in and shook the rain off my hat.

I sat on a stool next to him. "Well," I said, "I did it."

"Did what?"

"Quit my job," I said.

"Why?" His voice broke it into two parts-one plainly interrogative, the other quizzical.

"Because," I said.

There was a long silence between us.

"I wanted to be with you as much as possible," I appended. "Before we die."

"We?" The same two-part voice.

"I don't think I can keep living without you," I said. "Knowing I killed you."

"You plan to kill yourself?"

"No," I said, "just stop living."

He did not quite laugh. "Don't say that," he said. "It is quite impossible to do. Don't commit suicide. Your soul is God's; only he has the power to take it away."

"Or you do, if you choose."

"What is your implication?"

I glanced up at the countergirl, her whitened skin and spiked dog collar, her fresh, delectable young face and rows of hoop earrings. In a mumble I ordered a double mocha, short on the milk. I knew it would make me sick, for I hadn't eaten all day. When she had turned to the steaming machine, I looked back at Orfeo and told him, "I want us to go away together. Make a new life. Make me a new life."

He scoffed. "Preposterous."

"Really? You're so consumed by loneliness-I need you as badly-I-this is my chance to become something else. I'm tired of my soul as you persist in calling it. I don't believe in souls. I only believe in life-life forms-"

"Too much Star Trek."

"No, shut up, listen."

"I will not listen. I thought you may have come to your senses in the interim. Instead I find you gibbering like a crackhead-"

"You may not love you, but I do!"