Vamparazzi Page 2

  I initially thought that playing a nineteenth-century spinster meant I’d be wearing something warm onstage when the play opened in late September in Greenwich Village’s drafty Robert Hamburg Theater. However, I realized during the initial costume fittings that the clothing in The Vampyre would be as sexed-up as I had already discovered the dialogue and the direction were. Thus it was that eight shows per week, my breasts were in perpetual danger of falling out of my Regency-era gown. Not because I’m so busty (I’m not), but because my extremely low neckline, combined with my diaphanous push-up corset, created a precarious situation. The delicate fabric of my gown also ensured that the shadowy outlines of my legs were often exposed to Lord Ruthven’s gaze, as well as to the rapt audiences watching him seduce and devour me.

  I did suggest to Fiona, the wardrobe mistress, that a sensible spinster from a respected family of that period would perhaps dress a tad more modestly. Rather than earning me a warmer costume, my suggestion merely ensured that Fiona, who fervently believed that actors should be seen and not heard, went from disliking me to openly loathing me. From then on, I was pretty much on my own with my costume problems—the difficulties included getting into and out of it, since it was authentic enough to fasten via lacing down the back. And woe betide me if I got the gown a little dirty before it was scheduled for cleaning.

  To my surprise, my parents had proposed coming to New York to see the show. They weren’t unsupportive of my acting career, but they’d also never been particularly interested in it. It just wasn’t something they understood. Even though I had by now been pursuing my profession in New York for over five years, they still vaguely thought of it as a phase I’d get over. So their threat to come all the way from our family home in Madison, Wisconsin, to see The Vampyre caught me completely off guard (and I privately harbored dark suspicions that my mother was a closet fan of Daemon Ravel). Fortunately, the show’s short run (eight weeks) made it pretty easy to talk them out of this plan. I was still recovering from my parents’ previous visit two years earlier, so I thought it was too soon for another one.

  I also felt uncomfortably self-conscious about the notion of performing this play in front of them. Although Polidori’s text refers to “sin,” “violent excitement,” and vampires enjoying “nocturnal orgies,” his story is very tame stuff by modern standards. The new stage adaptation, by contrast, sought to appeal more to contemporary tastes—and, in particular, to the tastes of Daemon Ravel’s fans, who were its target audience.

  Consequently, the whole show was a heavy-handed, two-act bout of erotic titillation. The dialogue was full of sexual innuendo and double entendres. Daemon’s delivery was relentlessly sultry and smoldering, and his scenes with me were smotheringly seductive. Miss Jane Aubrey, a respectable (though scantily clad) spinster and standard stereotype, was drawn to Lord Ruthven like a moth to a flame . . . and behaved just about as intelligently. There was also some semi-explicit touching and grabbing of my person in the scene where Ruthven convinced Jane to marry him, as well as in the sinister depiction of their wedding night, where the usual vampire metaphors of pleasure and pain, penetration and piercing, orgasm and death were all maxed out.

  None of this was stuff I particularly wanted to do in front of my parents.

  Moreover, since Daemon liked to “improvise,” the explicitness of his touching and grabbing was sometimes more than just semi. I’d had stern words with him about that a few times. I’d also spoken sharply to him the other night about his growing tendency to employ actual suction, occasionally with a grazing of teeth, when he was supposed to be pretending to bite me and drain my blood in the wedding-night scene.

  Daemon responded by assuring me he was a lover, not a killer, but claimed it was hard to control himself when he was so close to the throbbing pulse of a tempting woman’s hot blood, blah blah blah.

  Throughout rehearsals, as well as during the weeks we had been performing the show, Daemon steadfastly maintained the pretense that he was a real vampire and that he stuck strictly to playing vampire roles as a matter of ethnic pride, so to speak. He even kept little bottles of what he claimed was human blood inside a minifridge in his dressing room at the theater. He told fans (among whom he included his fellow actors) that his role as Ruthven was so spiritually demanding for him, he needed a restorative drink between shows when we did two performances back-to-back. (The rest of us usually had a restorative pizza on those nights.)

  Daemon had reputedly started his career in the East Village by appearing as a vampire in a series of performance art pieces. This led to him being featured in a popular rock video, which increased the size of his cult following. Then he was cast in a series of national commercials and print ads as the vampire icon for Nocturne, a brand of blood-colored beverages. (His famous tag line was, “I don’t drink ... wine. I drink red wine coolers.”)

  Those Nocturne ads, which he was still doing, had elevated his standard of living to its current level. He inhabited a Soho loft whose windows he had paid a fortune to have replaced, in a highly publicized renovation, with heavily tinted glass that blocked the sun’s rays. He could also afford a chauffeur-driven limousine that transported him everywhere. When he had to go anywhere by day, he insisted on being shielded from the sun by a large black umbrella when making the “potentially terminal” transition between building and car.

  I envied him that car when I was wearily hauling a tote bag full of my stuff toward the subway station after the show each night, or calling for a cab when it was too late for the subway to be a wise choice for a woman alone. Because of the vampire theme of the show and the night-dwelling target audience, we added a second performance to our schedule every Friday and Saturday night, and it started at midnight. On those nights, I didn’t get out of the theater until three o’clock in the morning. So I had certainly been tempted, more than once, to accept Daemon’s occasional offers to give me a lift home—but I always declined. Walking to the subway or waiting for a cab inevitably seemed simpler than being alone with Daemon in the cozy backseat of his opaque-windowed car. He already took too many physical liberties with me when we were onstage; I didn’t want him feeling encouraged to take any more.

  Which is not to say that Daemon was interested in me. He wasn’t. The actor was already deeply, obsessively in love with someone else: himself. He was just eager to get others to share his passion.

  Daemon’s D-list celebrity status had led to him getting his own cable TV series in which he played a brooding, misunderstood vampire with a heart of gold. While solving deadly problems for the troubled mortals who kept stumbling into his life, he struggled nobly with his innate bloodlust, chastely wooed a plucky girl reporter, and played surrogate parent to a cocky kid whose widowed mother was eaten by Daemon’s wicked vampire arch-nemesis in the pilot episode.

  I watched part of one disc from the DVD set of the show, He of the Night, which Daemon gave me as a “welcome aboard” present after I was cast in The Vampyre. Mostly it left me with the impression that he would have been wise to heed to the age-old advice to actors to avoid working with children. He probably should have avoided working with bad scriptwriters, too.

  Daemon’s fanatically loyal fans weren’t numerous enough to boost the ratings for his inane series, and He of The Night was canceled halfway through its first season. The actor’s resolute and oft-repeated determination only to play his “own kind” limited his opportunities thereafter, much the way mine would be limited if I were only willing to play middle-class Jewish girls. And his persistent attention-seeking as a self-proclaimed vampire ensured that he wasn’t taken seriously in our profession. Go figure.

  However, as a gifted self-promoter, Daemon was able to convince a producer that featuring him in the limited run of a sexually charged adaptation of a neglected gothic classic would be profitable—and so this production of The Vampyre was mounted in time to open in late September, ensuring a handy seasonal theme for the show’s publicity in the weeks leading up to Halloween. We were
scheduled to run through mid-November and shut down before Thanksgiving week, when a show with a markedly differently target audience would move into the Hamburg Theater for the holiday shopping season.

  For Daemon, starring in The Vampyre was primarily a way to keep his profile high while reframing his image enough, he hoped, to secure a film deal. He was no longer just an advertising model whose lame cable series had flopped; now he was the star of a sold-out off-Broadway play, and an actor who had proved he could handle the demands of a period piece.

  Whatever.

  For my part, despite being cold and getting fondled and bitten in every performance, I was happy to be working, glad to add a high-profile off-Broadway production to my résumé, and pleased to be playing to packed houses.

  Sure, the audiences only came to see Daemon, and I doubted they’d care (or necessarily even notice) if I were replaced halfway through a performance by an animated stalk of broccoli. But I still enjoyed playing to full houses so deeply absorbed in the play that no one ever coughed, rustled candy wrappings, or answered a cell phone during a performance. They also invariably gasped, sighed, and clapped in all the right places; and they never raced to the exits the moment the play ended, too rude to stay for the curtain call.

  I had to admit, Daemon’s fans were a great audience.

  Which is not to say that they were always wellbehaved. In fact, one of his ardent followers had given me the black eye I was sporting this evening.

  The show was in the sixth week of its run when Halloween weekend arrived, and the size and hysteria of the crowds surrounding the theater had increased noticeably in the past few days. On Thursday, Halloween night itself, we’d added an additional midnight performance to the weekly schedule. Even so, the street outside the theater that night was full of frustrated fans who couldn’t get a ticket to a performance. Many of them had seen the show already (indeed, some of them had seen it multiple times), but the burning desire to watch their favorite vampire performing live on All Hallows’ Eve clouded their judgment, such as it was. So when the scalpers ran out of exorbitantly priced tickets, a miniriot started.

  Consequently, last night the police cordoned off the street that the Hamburg Theater was on, assigned extra patrolmen to keep the crowd under control, and made some arrests when fans got too rowdy. To my annoyance however, they did not arrest the woman who attacked me.

  I told the cops to arrest her. But did anybody listen to me? No, of course not. I was only the victim. I was only the actress lying on the filthy cement ground outside the stage door with a throbbing eye at three o’clock in the morning because some lunatic girl had just slipped past a distracted patrolman, flung herself at me, and started pummeling me while screaming, “You bitch! Stay away from him! He doesn’t want you!”

  I assumed she was referring to Daemon. I might have been willing to tell her that, despite the high-voltage sexual tension between our characters onstage, Daemon and I hardly knew each other—and, in fact, I made a point of staying away from him.

  But she didn’t give me a chance to say so. No, she just spat in my face, punched me, and wrestled me to the ground.

  And did she get locked up for assault, as she damn well deserved? No. Since I wasn’t “too badly hurt,” the cops on the scene, though they spoke sternly to her, suggested that I let bygones be bygones. I think the police were tired of the whole circus and just wanted everyone to go away and leave them alone.

  Cops.

  Fuming about this as I studied the damage in my bathroom mirror at home before leaving for the theater the following evening, I resolutely did not let myself think about one particular cop. One who had not been at the theater. One whom I hadn’t seen in more than two months. Not since that stormy August night in Harlem when I had realized that, despite how I felt about him, we couldn’t see each other again. Because I’d nearly gotten him killed. Twice.

  There wasn’t going to be a third time.

  No, I ordered my battered reflection in the mirror over my bathroom sink. Don’t think about Lopez. Just don’t.

  It was something I’d had to remind myself at least once a day since that dark, terrifying night in Harlem when we had both nearly died. Thinking about Lopez was a bad habit. But it was one I’d have to break, since seeing him again was out of the question.

  He called me a few times after that night, even though I had told him not to do so. The first time he left a message for me, it was pretty clear he didn’t really think I’d meant it. It had been a wild and strange night, I was frightened and upset, and he obviously assumed I’d feel differently once things had calmed down. He also obviously assumed I would call him back. I didn’t.

  The second time he left a message, he sounded hesitant. He hadn’t heard from me since we’d parted company in the middle of a citywide blackout, he said, and he was a little worried. Realizing that he wouldn’t let it rest until he was sure I had arrived home safely and was all right, I called back that time—and was relieved to get his voice mail. I left a quick message saying I was fine, and I was glad he was fine, too, good-bye.

  He left me one more message, saying he’d like to see me and talk. I must have picked up the phone twenty times during the following week, but I put it back down every time. In the end, I stuck to my resolution and didn’t call him. And he left me alone after that.

  It was the right thing. If not precisely what I wanted, it was nonetheless the way I knew things had to be. So I was glad he had accepted my decision. I didn’t want him to keep trying to see me. It was good that he hadn’t called again since then. Not even once.

  Jerk.

  I glanced irritably at the silent cell phone lying on the broad rim of the old porcelain sink.

  And Lopez wasn’t the only man who hadn’t called me lately. I’d left several messages this week for my agent, Thackeray Shackleton, and I still hadn’t heard back from him.

  Men.

  I took a calming breath, ejected Thack and Lopez from my thoughts with grim determination, and started applying makeup to cover up my black eye.

  In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t bother doing this, since I was going to put on stage makeup for the performance as soon as I got to the theater. Then again, in normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have been spat on, punched in the face, and knocked down by a crazed fan outside the stage door.

  There had been a few dozen of Daemon’s fans (and also some of his detractors) hanging around the theater every night since we’d begun our run in September. But in recent days, their numbers had swelled to hundreds. It was by now a challenge just for me to get into and out of the theater each night. The heightened lunacy surrounding the show this weekend also ensured that paparazzi were hanging around out there nightly, too, snapping photos of anything they found interesting. Daemon loved the attention and actively courted it. He lived by the philosophy that no matter what was said about him, being talked about was better than not being talked about. I, on the other hand, didn’t want my black eye featured in some cheesy tabloid, so I was concealing it before leaving the safety of my apartment this evening.

  We were doing two shows again tonight—for the third night in a row. Every audience deserves an actor’s best work no matter when they see a play, so I wanted to remain centered and sharp all the way through the end of the second show tonight. Therefore, I was trying to conserve my energy and my focus when I was offstage.

  Which is why it was probably a good thing that no one told me until after the second show that night that I was being stalked by a murderous vampire.

  2

  I was still in my bathroom, applying makeup to my black eye, when my buzzer rang.

  I went to my front door and pressed the button that would let my visitor into the building. I didn’t bother to use the intercom, since I knew who my guest was. I opened my door so he could let himself into my apartment.

  I was back in front of the bathroom mirror when Leischneudel Drysdale came bounding up the stairs of my building, paused to knock courteous
ly on my open door, then entered the apartment in response to my invitation—which he could hear easily, since my bathroom was only about four feet away from my front door.

  “Hi, Esther. How’s your eye?” Leischneudel stuck his head into the open bathroom door and took a good look at me. “Hey, I can hardly see the bruise.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s the idea. Want something to drink before we go?”

  “I’ll help myself,” he said genially. “You finish what you’re doing.”

  He went to search my refrigerator, having become comfortable in my modest home during the weeks we’d been working together. Leischneudel, who came from a small town in Pennsylvania, had evidently doted on his grandfather; having inherited the old man’s name, he had decided not to change it upon becoming an actor and moving to New York.

  He was well-cast as the apple-cheeked and perpetually helpless Aubrey in The Vampyre. A blond, blueeyed, prettily handsome young man, Leischneudel was only a couple of inches taller than my 5 foot 6. Although as fair-skinned as he, I’m brown-haired and brown-eyed, and we really didn’t look like siblings. Nonetheless, the casting seemed to work well onstage. Perhaps because offstage, I had quickly developed an older-sister sort of relationship with him.

  Although he was a good actor who’d gotten some work in the two years he’d been in the Big Apple, Leischneudel was unprepared for all the attention The Vampyre was getting, and he felt overwhelmed by it. He was intimidated by the volatile fans outside the theater. Inside the theater, he was also intimidated by our cranky wardrobe mistress, our bipolar stage manager, and our melodramatic fellow actors.

  For the past few days, he had insisted on escorting me to and from work each night because of how unpredictable the crowds outside the theater had become—though, given the frightened way he clung to me, I thought it was questionable who was escorting whom. However, I had appreciated his company last night, shaken as I was after being mauled by one of Daemon’s crazed fans. Leischneudel had accompanied me home, stayed with me while I iced my sore eye, and chatted with me until I had felt calm enough to bid him good night and then go straight to sleep.