The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,251

sense of humor he had. It was as if the whole world were a joke to him, and there was never the slightest bitterness in it. I’ll tell you a very private thing about him. He made love to me just as if I were a woman. If you don’t know what I mean, there’s no use explaining it. And that voice he had, that French accent. I tell you when he started talking in my ear …

“And he would tell me the funniest stories about his antics with his other lovers, about how they fooled everyone, and indeed, one of his boys, Aleister by name, used to dress up as a woman and go to the opera with Julien and no one ever had the slightest suspicion about it. Julien tried to persuade me to do that, but I told him I could never carry it off, never! He understood. He was extremely good-natured. In fact, it was impossible to involve him in a quarrel. He said he was done with all that, and besides he had a horrible temper, and couldn’t bear to lose it. It exhausted him.

“The one time I was unfaithful and came back after two days, fully expecting a terrible argument, he treated me with what would you call it? Bemused cordiality. It turned out he knew everything that I had done and with whom, and in the most pleasant and sincere way he asked me why I had been such a fool. It was positively eerie. At last I burst into tears and confessed that I had meant to show my independence. After all he was such an overwhelming man. But I was then ready to do anything to get back into his good graces. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d thrown me out!

“He accepted this with a smile. He patted my shoulder and said not to worry. I’ll tell you it cured me of wandering out forever! It was no fun at all to feel so dreadful and have him so calm and so accepting. Taught me a few things, it really did.

“And then he went into all that about being a reader of minds, and of being able to see what was going on in other places. He talked a lot about that. I could never tell whether or not he meant it, or if it was just another one of his jokes. He had the prettiest eyes. He was a very handsome old man, really. And there was a flare to the way he dressed. I suppose you might say he was something of a dandy. When he was dressed up in a fine white linen suit with a yellow silk waistcoat and a white Panama hat, he looked splendid.

“I think I imitate him to this day. Isn’t that sad? I go about trying to look like Julien Mayfair.

“Oh, but that reminds me, I’ll tell you, he did the strangest thing to frighten me once! And to this day I don’t really know what happened. We had been talking the night before about what Julien looked like when he was young, how handsome he appeared in all the photographs, and you know it was like going through a veritable history of photography to study all that. The first pictures of him were daguerreotypes, and then came the tintypes and the later genuine photographs in sepia on cardboard, and finally the sort of black-and-white pictures we have today. Anyway, he had shown me a batch of them and I had said, ‘Oh, I wish I’d known you when you were young, I imagine you were truly beautiful.’ Then I’d stopped. I was so ashamed. I thought perhaps I’d hurt him. But there be was, merely smiling at me. I shall never forget it. He was seated at the far end of his leather couch, legs crossed, just looking at me through the smoke from his pipe, and he said, ‘Well, Richard, if you’d like to know how I was then, maybe I’ll show you. I’ll surprise you.’

“That night, I was downtown. I don’t remember why I went out. I had to get out perhaps. You know sometimes that house could be so oppressive! It was full of children and old people, and Mary Beth Mayfair was always about, and she was such a presence, to put it politely. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Mary Beth, everybody liked Mary Beth. And I liked her a great deal, until