Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,102

different.”

He said nothing. He watched her. When she asked whether he remembered his dreams he shook his head, no.

She said, “I’d like you to try to do a dream for me now, a waking dream. Can you close your eyes and daydream, and tell me about it?”

He closed his eyes. Strangely, he now struck her as less vulnerable rather than more, as if strengthened by increased vigilance.

“How do you feel now?” she said.

“Uneasy.” His eyelids fluttered. “I dislike closing my eyes. What I don’t see can hurt me.”

“Who wants to hurt you?”

“A vampire’s enemies, of course—mobs of screaming peasants with torches.”

Translating into what, she wondered—young PhDs pouring out of the graduate schools panting for the jobs of older men like Weyland? “Peasants, these days?”

“Whatever their daily work, there is still a majority of the stupid, the violent, and the credulous, putting their featherbrained faith in astrology, in this cult or that, in various branches of psychology.”

His sneer at her was unmistakable. Considering her refusal to let him fill the hour his own way, this desire to take a swipe at her was healthy. But it required immediate and straightforward handling.

“Edward, open your eyes and tell me what you see.”

He obeyed. “I see a woman in her early forties,” he said, “clever-looking face, dark hair showing gray; flesh too thin for her bones, indicating either vanity or illness; wearing slacks and a rather creased batik blouse—describable, I think, by the term ‘peasant style’—with a food stain on the left side.”

Damn! Don’t blush. “Does anything besides my blouse suggest a peasant to you?”

“Nothing concrete, but with regard to me, my vampire self, a peasant with a torch is what you could easily become.”

“I hear you saying that my task is to help you get rid of your delusion, though this process may be painful and frightening for you.”

Something flashed in his expression—surprise, perhaps alarm, something she wanted to get in touch with before it could sink away out of reach again. Quickly she said, “How do you experience your face at this moment?”

He frowned. “As being on the front of my head. Why?”

With a rush of anger at herself she saw that she had chosen the wrong technique for reaching that hidden feeling: she had provoked hostility instead. She said, “Your face looked to me just now like a mask for concealing what you feel rather than an instrument of expression.”

He moved restlessly in the chair, his whole physical attitude tense and guarded. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Will you let me touch you?” she said, rising.

His hands tightened on the arms of his chair, which protested in a sharp creak. He snapped, “I thought this was a talking cure.”

Strong resistance to body work—ease up. “If you won’t let me massage some of the tension out of your facial muscles, will you try to do it yourself?”

“I don’t enjoy being made ridiculous,” he said, standing and heading for the door, which clapped smartly to behind him.

She sagged back in her seat; she had mishandled him. Clearly her initial estimation of this as a relatively easy job had been wrong and had led her to move far too quickly with him. Certainly it was much too early to try body work. She should have developed a firmer level of trust first by letting him do more of what he did so easily and so well—talk.

The door opened. Weyland came back in and shut it quietly. He did not sit again but paced about the room, coming to rest at the window.

“Please excuse my rather childish behavior just now,” he said. “Playing these games of yours brought it on.”

“It’s frustrating, playing games that are unfamiliar and that you can’t control,” she said. As he made no reply, she went on in a conciliatory tone, “I’m not trying to belittle you, Edward. I just need to get us off whatever track you were taking us down so briskly. My feeling is that you’re trying hard to regain your old stability.

“But that’s the goal, not the starting point. The only way to reach your goal is through the process, and you don’t drive the therapy process like a train. You can only help the process happen, as though you were helping a tree grow.”

“These games are part of the process?”

“Yes.”

“And neither you nor I control the games?”

“That’s right.”

He considered. “Suppose I agree to try this process of yours; what would you want of me?”

Observing him carefully, she no longer saw the anxious scholar bravely struggling back