I have been around for a long time. I saw museum walls before Mona Lisa smiles, saw Southern bayous long before trees raped open to show the thick white abalone of magnolias. There’s a kind of curiosity about old age, about what I’ve witnessed, what I know, what I could teach. Editors have asked me over glasses of expensive Chardonnay to write the story of my life. I can never accept, no matter their offers. Readers want to read pages typed in blood--not just the real heart blood of the writer, the proverbial sweat and tears of anguish over everything that happens in a life. But they want to hear what I, the most famous vampire mistress have to say.

It’s the same with every woman who knew the body of a saint, a dictator, an artist. How his knees bent in prayer, how his tongue darted at a nipple as if testing for poison. People read their stories to gain secrets about secrets. Readers want my stories offered like amateurish blood pacts made from trading droplets of blood pricked with safety pins. They want to know if centuries is long enough to heal a heartbreak, if vampires are like other men, how a man can love you once his mortal life has stopped.

The beat of a heart is not what gives a man sweet nothings, what makes all men like to peer down a woman’s blouse, just as neck begins to ricochet ever so softly into breasts. No, vampires still say “cara mia” as if they mean it, still lean above freezer cases to evaluate the developing décolletage of the high school girl scooping out ice cream at a town carnival.

Women, especially, ask me those questions. They want to know how a vampire changes over time. Of course what they mean is if the grease-covered immigrant worker downtown will be mayor, president, anything important. And if he will still be wild, make their legs blush open like a rose in gentle heat. The Chardonnay is cheaper for questions like this. But the looks are so earnest. Have I seen a man change? I don’t think they believe me when I say I’ve never tried. I’m destined to love only vampires, so I love vampires. I give them thousands of days, hundreds of years, and they are vampires and I am the vampire lover.

And what, everybody wants to know, about the olden days? This part I like to talk about. You only see scenes like this in jigsaw puzzles these days. Back then, there were still horses with cozy little carts behind. A tiny little room like a peep show for two. Snow would be outside, sometimes covering the tiny gas lamps hung high above the city pavement, snow so thick the boys couldn’t light the lamps even with their long poles. I would sit in the back with my lover--this time is was Somnus. We’d been out walking through the town. We had a dinner, or I did, and he had wine, and then we walked through paths that were cleared of snow. He held my hand beneath the velvet sleeve of his coat, and occasionally, as we passed by strangers, he would whisper to me. “Tangy,” he would say. “Chilled.” He liked to speculate on their blood, on the art of unfolding their limbs like a paper fan and digging deeply into them. Even in the icy monotone of his skin, I knew desire was building. In the cab on the way home, he would shove aside a triangle of my skirt, and my flesh would gleam for him. The dim light of the passenger cart of the cab did not seem to dull it. It was the promise of the leg, my leg, that only skin he could open again and again. The whole way home he would stare at it, leaning in close enough that I could hear all the pitches of desire that tinned their way through his head like ice-covered branches sweeping together.

And when we got home, well, it wouldn’t be ladylike to tell the whole story. But I can assemble a collage of the scents of all that awaited us. Rich circles of salt to keep away evil, though I’m not sure if he had those for irony or for luck. A tang of teeth and then a sense of my earlobe sighing. My blood trickled out, and he sucked it in so tightly I could feel that to him it was pure silver. Behind us was always a fugue of bone. I knew he had killed there before, and I knew there were shards of marrow underfoot, clavicles behind mirrors, femurs to frame doorways. In his cold body, you could never imagine the warmth of a tongue, how it could quicken and cool at once. When he unfurled his tongue onto me, desire burst through like a panic. I visualized shoots of irises thrusting through hard earth after a frost. There was the wetness of his tongue, all those brilliant nerve endings soaked in the wine of blood he’d drank before me, and I was, of course, intoxicated. The feel of a rug beneath us, and below that marble, marble as cold and white as my lover’s skin, marble that could be used to sculpt the likeness of a perfect man.

This was Somnus. This was the olden days. I don’t think of answering the usual questions of worlds before telephones, before machinery and ultraviolet. I only know I remember no world before desire. Forgetting was a penance, but also a gift. The first day of my life as I know it was in Argentina, or whatever we called it then. A man clutched me by a cave, the hot sun colliding with the cold stone of the cave in the shadow. His long fingernails etched up and down my arms with such familiarity I thought they might be my veins. I could only look at him. The long tracings of his fingernails became knuckles, those hard parentheses of bone covered with flesh so cold I feared he was sick. Those cold hands wrapped around my wrist, pressed me to the rounded breast of the cave’s edge. He held me tight there, the scent of tobacco and Bourbon vanilla on him through and through. All my sight remembers is how he was both clean and dirty at once, and I loved and loathed that. He held me there and I felt the want of his manhood against me. It was so sharp and so vital I knew I would live or die trying. Any compromise had evaporated.

He nuzzled my face, pulling my dark curls down around my face with his teeth. He came closer, his mouth a study in expectancy as I thought he might never speak.

“I want you,” he finally said. For the first time the full weight that each of those words could carry came upon me. I did not yet understand the idea of want, much less how a person could be wanted, how a whole body could be desired, possessed. I could not answer. I did not know what to say.

He shifted, keeping both my wrists pinned with his left hand while his right hand tranced down my neck, opening my blouse. His cold fingers on my warm breast twisted me inside. Again I knew there would be no compromise: there would be this cold hand on a warm, lust-hardened nipple, or there would be nothing. At once I knew what to say.

“Will I live forever or will you destroy me?” I asked.

“For your touch, for your body, I will compromise,” he said. “I will take you now, and you will be all mine. But if you want to walk after I have known you, if you want to eat the food of the living, you will only know touch of my kindred.”

With those words he pressed harder into me, and I freed my hand enough to lift up my skirt. He pinned my arm back against the stone and thrust my skirt up higher, my untouched pinkness there. I was staring into his face, into that porcelain moon of skin that lacked wrinkles or evidence of blood, when he ripped into me. There was a shock and a sound of tearing like lace that longed to be destroyed. I bled on his manhood in puddles that might have been tears, had I not wanted him to fill me so well.

There was no name to scream. I did not know what to say. I think I forgot how to cry right then so I just held myself there, weak as water. When he reached his climax, I felt the cold perfume of his ink cleanse me. Then, and only then did he return, ever so gentlemanly, to the breast he had so recently exposed to the sun. He touched it gently as if pleading goodbye to its purity, and then slipped his teeth inside. The ecstasy begun by our coitus multiplied. Every sensation in me cried out for joy, for more, and I knew my body had made its choice. I would be loved only by vampires.

I don’t look for them. They find me. They have heard the stories. Apparently my sire is a legend among them, one who could choose to keep a woman both mortal and not, one endlessly drainable of blood and endlessly eager to be drained again, to be sought after and yearned for. Vampire courtesans rich, strange, and despairingly dull have courted me, have fashioned fainting couches to perfectly suit my body, have haunted vineyards for the perfect drink, have even stooped to such ridiculous artifice as fangs made of fire opals. What they all show is want, and how the only want a vampire can have stronger than the want of blood is the want of more blood. I have pouted for Dracula, lain spread-eagle for Countess Bathory as she tempted nubile victims to her lairs. I’ve donned habits, going undercover as a nun to sabotage holy water, to spit on the crucifix, to bring back particularly unruly Sisters for my lovers to devour. Never have I participated in these kills, but I have reaped the benefits of them. My drawers, so lined with blood stained negligees and strands of pearls, perhaps tell the story I claim to never write.

Those are the moments I treasure. There are many I do not. How I envy Lady Macbeth, to see blood on her very own hand even in the midst of a sleepwalk! How I envy young ladies in lacy panties and miniskirts I see at cocktail bars, knowing the flavor of any mortal could be available to her. When I am in a painfully mortal place, there is nothing to do but watch the moon and crave the scent of blood on a lover’s lips. Sometimes I arrange to bump into strangers just to feel a body near mine. The warmth of their skin shocks me. I feel nauseated and cold. Often, after giving a simple handshake, I have had to beg leave of a gathering to go vomit behind a building. Something about the touch of the living dries me so quickly, like a wilted peach.

During these times, when I am alone, I lie in the endless emptiness of my bed. I spread my arms above my head, just the way my Argentine lover had me do so many years ago. I imagine his fingertips, his knuckles, then his whole hands. As excitement carries me away, hands become fangs. The cotton sheets beneath me sharpen into claws, and I think of soaking them with the thick amber of my desire. The nights are long and wet. Sated and complacent, I still catch myself mesmerized by the windowpane, looking for a scrap of black dress, a quiver of white skin to show that a lover is on the way.

It embarrasses me to say this. I haven’t been touched in a year. Me, whose body was copied and pinned up on the walls of nocturnes everywhere for centuries. I had a lover, Centurion. He had a dark sense of humor, and a weakness for military blood. He used to joke that it would all taste the same. I moved with him to a house near an army base, a place where he could feed and feed, and we could have our lust. For a while there was ecstasy, so much so that I feared I couldn’t take it. I imagined myself vampiric with joy, so blissful that I drained redness from rose petals.

But he didn’t come back. If only I could elaborate the ending of him beyond that anti-climax. I never saw him, his shadow, the ghost of blood on his lips that I would taste so gingerly. Sometimes I think I would speak to God if I could make love to Centurion one more time. I troll the streets of this town, take in the stink of peach blossoms. Sometimes I talk to army wives. They already speak quietly as widows. They talk about praying for a safe return, for a lack of bloodshed. I say nothing. I understand loss, I loathe it. But blood is loss, and blood is desire, and blood is a hand on my leg in the back of a carriage, and I can’t deny this. I cannot deny my thirst to be thirsted after, feasted upon, devoured, renewed.

I have been praying that a man who has heard of Centurion will come back to this town. I still curl my hair and dress in all the dresses I used to wear. If I meet another man like him, I want the night to be perfect. I have spent so many lonely nights wishing that I could. In the twilight hours, my body has taught itself to walk, to stroll, to pace, to patrol. To search every corner of the town on foot, to listen for signs of a struggle that quicken my pulse. My senses have become sharpened after so many passionate nights with vampires. The nights that may hold boring city scents of ozone, car exhaust, local factories for some hold different promise or disappointment.

Tonight the lilt of blood carries far, sharp and profound enough that I can tell it belongs to a woman. Inhaling the musky leak of women’s blood puts a flush in my cheeks as it dampens my thighs, for it means a vampire is nearby knowing a woman’s body, and perhaps his desire will not be slaked by the one kill. My pulse quickens. I have spent many nights fantasizing about this with my hand the only mortal touch I’m allowed, a pale placebo for the lover I crave. The blood calls to me like a siren from near the river as hemoglobin and plasma interlock with the barge sweat. I follow it in careful steps, measured and ladylike. I want to hurry into this moment, but I must keep up my form. I imagine my lover owning my stride, measuring the paces of a walk I am allowed, even in the swift desire to meet him.

I follow blood’s scent to the strip of land by the river, the place where people walk by day. I step into the tableau beneath trees whose razor cut shadows hold strong and fast. I can see a girl’s glimmer of hair, the pale openness of her throat. Swallowing hard, I stare into it and watch the back of the body that is feeding upon her, taking her in delightfully. I sit on a park bench and watch as he continues to drink her, breaking up all the pockets of her body like inkwells to take in the delicious salt of life.

Feeling me watch him, he turns back to me, his face streaked in her offerings. I don’t recognize the vampire. He must be a young one, looking somehow more modern than others. For a moment, he simply watches me as I sit, breathing hard and musky from watching him feed.

“Is it you?” He asks, finally.

I nod solemnly. I can see a shiver pass through him. “I’ve wanted to touch you for so long,” he says.

I undo the top button of my dress, an invitation for him to come closer.

“All the vampires talk about you in their diaries,” he says. “Do you know what a woman you are?”

I stare back at him. On his knees, he crawls toward the bench where I am sitting and looks at me, the stilled corpse of the young girl behind him. We stare at one another for a moment, the full flush of desire between us. In a moment, he unbuckles his belt and opens his pants, coming closer to me. First there is the friction of movement, the cloth of his pants against my dress as he parts my legs. With a quick gesture, he does away with my undergarments and leans in close. He pushes himself into me. I am expecting the rush of joy, the incredulous pleasure that comes when an ageless craving is satisfied.

Instead, I immediately choke. I am violently ill, throwing up all over the front of my dress. The vomit lodges in my mouth as he continues to press hard into me. I am unable to speak to tell him to stop as the sickness continues. Taking a great gasp of breath between his long strokes that penetrate my body, I manage to put my arms out to attempt to hold him back.

“Stop,” I say.

“Is it too much for you?” He asks, but does not stop. With every deep swell into me, I feel the lie, the warm blood inside of his body.

“You’re a mortal,” I say.

“That’s right.”

“You lied. To trap me here,” I say.

“It worked. I have you,”

“Let me go. Remove yourself from me. You knew this would make me sick,” I plead.

“I’ll let you go if you take me there. Take me to them.”

“To whom?”

“The vampires. I’ll keep you safe if you take me to the vampires. I want to be one of them, a real one. Then you’ll have another lover too, one who won’t leave you in so much pain,” he said, wiping some of the vomit from my lips.

“I don’t know where any of them are,” I say.

“You? The courtesan for eternal gentlemen? Surely you can help me in exchange for your freedom,” he says.

“I can’t. I don’t know. Please,” I say, staring at him. I plead with the humanity in him to see the humanity in me, but I can tell it is that humanity he longs to leave behind, to shed inside my thighs. He quickens his pace of thrusts inside of me. His eyes get big and roll back as he wheezes and grunts. I feel the warm sickness of his semen coat me and spit up again, this time over him as well as myself. He is taken aback by the violence of my sickness as it tinges his ejaculation. When he looks down, stunned for a moment, I use the chance to shove him aside. I get up and leap over the body of the girl, the girl whose blood he drank not out of hunger but out of gluttony. I run, leaving my shoes behind there at the river.

I run, zigzagging through the groves near the river. Finally, I am at a safe distance where the river swells into a wide clearing. I stop there to catch my breath. My dress, so ragged with sickness and blood and the seed of the mortal, is surely detectable to even the most unsophisticated nose. I remove my dress and all my undergarments. I do not want to see them again. I drop them into the river, scooping up some water to wash my face.

I lie down there on a bed of pine needles, feeling the ground’s pain unto the nakedness of my body. I lie there beneath the pines, breathing in the scent of the night, of my violation there by the river. As I do, the aspersions he gave between my legs continue to sink in. Not having been with a fertile man before, I only recognize what comes next because it’s one of a very small number of things I have not felt before. My body and the mortal’s body have combined, and my body is now beginning to host another body in its womb. I can feel the tightening of my muscles, the twisting of all the genetic matter that forms a child. What might be a child in any other womb, but I cannot harbor a mortal within the space of my body. I must leave the way everyone I’ve ever loved has left. A long pine branch lies on the earth like a bayonet.

I grip the branch hard, aiming it at the level of my heart. It will be long and slow, unlike slaying a demon, but I must do it. Perhaps there in the shade of pine, later on this moonful night, my body will finally call a real vampire back to it one last time.