Immortal Beloved

  “It used to be a Quaker meetinghouse,” River explained, heading upstairs. I could feel that there were other people in the building, but it felt calm and peaceful. “In the eighteen hundreds, about forty Friends lived here, working a farm. I’ve owned it, in various guises, since 1904.” The various guises meant that she, like all of us, had assumed different personas to explain her continuing existence. She started off as one person, then pretended to die, then showed up again as that person’s long-lost daughter to inherit the house, and so on. I think there was a Star Trek episode that dealt with this.

  “What is it now?”

  River led me along the wide hallway, then took a right, which led to another long hallway with windows on one side and regularly spaced doors on the other. She gave a slight grin that made her look younger. “It’s a home for wayward immortals, of course.”

  “What do the locals think it is?” I asked.

  “A small, family-owned organic farm, where people come to learn organic farming techniques. Which is true also.” She stopped in front of a door that was just opposite a window. Amber autumn sunlight slanted across the door, and River opened it.

  I looked inside. “Like, organic farming for monks?”

  River laughed.

  The room was small, plain, and basically empty except for a narrow bed, a tiny wardrobe, a wooden desk, and a chair. The last time I was away from my flat in London, I had stayed at the George V in Paris. The time before that, at the St. Regis in New York. I tend to go with extreme, over-the-top comfort.

  “No, not for monks,” River said, going into the room. “Just for people, immortals, who want to focus on other things at this point in their lives. But you’re welcome to put your own belongings around, make it homier.”

  I thought about my typical home furnishings of discarded clothes, empty liquor bottles, overflowing ashtrays, books, magazines, and pizza boxes and thought, Maybe not.

  “So there are more of us here?” I asked, sitting on the bed experimentally. It did not have a comfort pillow top.

  “Right now we have four teachers and eight students,” River said. She closed the door and leaned back on it, her face serious. “You can take a week to decide if you want to stay, Nastasya. I hope you do. I think you’ll get a lot out of it and that you’ll be able to find happiness here if you’re open to it. But just to be clear, this isn’t a spa or a hotel. It’s sort of a combination kibbutz and rehab. There’s work to be done, and we all do it. There’s stuff, hard and painful, that you’ll have to learn. Over the years we’ve come up with systems that work for us, and we’re not interested in someone coming here and insisting our rules don’t apply to them.”

  “Uh-huh.” Maybe I would stay for a few days, figure out Plan B, and head off again.

  River smiled and seemed so genuinely warm and welcoming that I wished I could be a better subject for her. But already that seemed impossible. “If this doesn’t work for you, no one will force you to stay. No one’s going to convince you to save your own life. If you’re not a big girl after—what, two hundred years?”

  “Four hundred,” I said. “Four hundred and fifty-nine.”

  Surprise flickered in her eyes, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that it was my behavior rather than my looks that had made her think I was younger. “Okay, four hundred and fifty-nine. But if you’re not a big girl by now, we have no interest in dragging you there. We’ll help you as much as we can, in any way we can, as long as you’re doing your share. If you want to skate through, this place isn’t for you.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  River laughed, and then she came over and hugged me, leaning down to where I sat on the bed. She felt warm, solid, and comforting. I couldn’t remember the last time a hug had felt like that. Awkwardly, I hugged her back, patting a little with one hand.

  “I don’t mean to scare you off,” she said. “I want you to stay. But I don’t want you to work out immature bullshit here, either. You know?”

  I nodded. “Uh-huh.” No scintillating words were popping into my brain. Now, more than ever, I had no idea what I was doing here. Maybe I had been overreacting to everything. This had all been a laughable mistake. At least, I was sure I would laugh about it someday. Decades from now. The time I tried to escape, ha ha ha. I mean, maybe I wasn’t so bad, after all. Then I remembered the cabbie, his face starkly outlined by the streetlight, and how I had just walked away, and something inside me crumpled.

  “How old are you?” I asked, without meaning to.

  She paused in the doorway. “Well, older than you,” she said ruefully, brushing some strands of hair off her face.

  “Like, how old?” I don’t know why I cared—maybe I didn’t want someone younger than me acting like she had it all together.

  Her eyes met mine. “I was born in 718 in Genoa, in the kingdom of Italy.” She smiled. “It hasn’t changed all that much.”

  “Oh.” I nodded, and then she smiled one last time and left, closing the door behind her. I was glad I hadn’t blurted out my first reaction, which was, “Goddamn, you’re old.”

  I fell back on my bed, incredibly tired. I so didn’t belong here. This place radiated calm, peace, patterns of life and change and sameness, all at once. I was a whirling Japanese throwing star, careening through the world. I was trouble. An icy despair seemed to seize my chest—this had been such a laughably ridiculous plan, and yet it was the only thing I could think of. Oh, God, I was so screwed.

  My room was warm. There was a small metal radiator against one wall, and it was working. I pulled off my worn leather jacket and my heavy motorcycle boots, feeling free and weightless and so comfortable. I was wearing a man’s velour pullover, and I tucked it around my neck, reflexively making sure my neck was covered, very cozy.

  My eyes were drifting heavily shut when there was a tap on the door.

  “It’s open,” I said, thinking longingly of room service. I’d already noticed that none of the doors had locks. How quaint.

  The door opened, and the Viking god stood there. I peered at his face from beneath lowered lashes, searching, again troubled by a dim recognition that faded as soon as I tried to pin it down. In one hand he carried my suitcase, which easily weighed more than I did. He set it down in my room. “Here.”

  “I was going to get it in a minute.” I sat up, feeling self-conscious, knowing what I looked like. There have been times in my life when I’ve been truly beautiful. I have symmetrical features, pretty eyes, a full mouth, high cheekbones, and so on. On the occasions when I have my act together, I know I can look really good. I just hadn’t had my act together, looks-wise, in about forty years. Or so. Now I was acutely, painfully aware that I was junkie-skinny, with rats’-nest hair dyed a garish, fake-looking black. I probably looked as if I’d been embalmed, or had just recovered from cholera. My clothes were whatever items I’d found that didn’t actually have stuff caked on them. In short, I couldn’t have looked much worse.

  Viking God Person was so striking, with glowy golden skin, and short, perfectly mussed tawny hair, and golden eyes the color of a sherry wine that I’d tasted once in Georgia (again, the country, not the state). He was tall but not pointlessly tall, strong and muscular without it looking like compensation for something else, with masculine features neither too rough nor too pretty. His nose had a slight bump and was a tiny bit crooked, as if it had been broken once, and of course that completed his perfection, in the Japanese wabi sabi view of perfection. Where had I seen his face before? But whatever—he took my breath away.

  He looked like he just couldn’t be bothered with helping me, which, sadly, only increased his appeal.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, trying to look unrattled.

  “Reyn.”

  Rain? Reign? Rane? “I’m Nastasya.”

  “I know.”

  He was unfriendly, unwelcoming. I wondered why he was here. Was everyone here a lost cause, like me? Was anyone else in hiding? I wanted to know this guy’s story. Wit
h any luck, it would be worse than my own.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said shortly, unnerved by his attitude.

  “River asked me to tell you that dinner is at seven.”

  He stepped backward and almost silently closed my door. I wanted to ask where one ate dinner but figured he’d probably just tell me to follow my nose.

  I fell back on the bed, wide-awake again. My heart constricted as I accepted that this wasn’t going to work out. If I’d needed further proof, which I hadn’t, this Reyn guy had provided it. These people were probably all about good works and making the most of their endless lives. I was just trying to escape the darkness that was oozing over everything I touched. I was trying to hide—from Incy, from myself, from my past and my present and even my future.

  Incy. I shivered again and rubbed my arms up and down my fuzzy sleeves. By now he would be wondering where I was. We rarely went a day without seeing each other, talking to each other. Was he worried? What was everyone thinking? Would they try to find me?

  I couldn’t go back. That much I felt sure about. And I couldn’t stay here. Okay. A couple of meals, a couple of nights’ sleep, and I’d be gone, baby, gone. It wasn’t like there was that much left of me to save, anyway.

  CHAPTER 4

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 1967

  C ome on, I want a picture of me and you,”Jennifer said, tugging on the sleeve of my caftan.

  I flicked my long honey-blonde hair over my shoulder. “Of course you do.”

  Together, Jennifer and I posed on the wide staircase and smiled at Roger’s Polaroid camera. In the sunken living room below, people were shrieking with laughter. “Eight Miles High” was playing on the expensive turntable. There were candles and incense burning, and the new light machine was casting psychedelic patterns on the walls.

  I looked incredible, I knew: my heavily lined Egyptian- look eyes, the palest lipstick, the silk, Nehru-collared caftan I’d gotten in India covered with rioting swirls of bright color. To be safe, I had a Peter Max silk scarf knotted around my throat. I was loving the sixties. The forties had been so depressing, everything gray and drab and self-sacrificing. And I’d hated the fifties, when everyone was buying into the anally rigid American dream and rocket-fender automobiles the size of elephants.

  But the sixties were perfect for us immortals, my friends and me. Anything went, everyone was crazy, anyone who didn’t agree or approve was dismissed as an uptight square. And the parties. The last time I’d been immersed in such a pervasive party atmosphere had been on Long Island, New York, right before the big crash of 1929.

  “Hope!” Someone pressed a glass of champagne in my hand and kissed both cheeks. Then he was gone again, his purple velvet jacket weaving through the crowd.

  “Hmm.” I took a long sip of champagne as Roger’s camera continued to flash. At one point he changed the flash bar, throwing the used one over his shoulder. It landed in the fountain trickling in the foyer, and we laughed.

  “Hope.”

  “Hi, Max,” I said, grinning. I was feeling bubbly and floaty and beautiful and delicious.

  “Are you old enough to be drinking that?” There was almost, almost a serious intent behind his words. Max produced movies in Los Angeles—he was a big star. Not immortal. There were only a couple of us at this party.

  “Afraid of a cop raid, busted for serving alcohol to minors?” I asked cheekily. I blinked, feeling my eyelids suddenly become very heavy. In the next moment, this situation became the funniest thing I’d ever experienced, hysterically funny, so, so, so funny, and I was the happiest person in the world. This was the best party ever.

  “Something like that,” Max said, adjusting his glasses on his face, looking down at me.

  “Oh, gosh,” I breathed, looking at the champagne bubbles floating very, very slowly to the top of the golden wine. “Gosh, I can see every bubble. It’s beautiful.” Had Max said something that I needed to answer? I didn’t know. Right now it was vitally important that I watch every bubble of champagne until it burst on the surface. If I could truly, totally immerse myself in that, it would unlock the secrets of the universe. Of this I was certain.

  “Oh, damn it,” Max muttered. “Roger? Rog! Did someone lace the champagne?”

  Roger giggled, snatching my attention away from the champagne. He continued to click away on his camera, which kept spitting white-framed gray squares out to litter the floor. The gray squares slowly assumed faces and smiles and colors. It was magic. “Yeah, man!” Roger said. “Some of Berkeley’s finest!”

  Max groaned. He took my champagne away, making me panic.

  “No!” I shouted. “I need to watch the bubbles!” My world would collapse if I didn’t perform my bubble mission. “Give it back!”

  Max held the glass above my head. “Hope, no. You’re too young for this. You shouldn’t even be here. Jesus, if we get busted—”

  “Give it back!” I said, trying to lunge for it but instead swaying like a willow in a hurricane. “Oh. Oh. Look, I can see all my hands.” When I moved my hand, it left shadow images of hands behind, as if it had been filmed in slow motion. I was amazing.

  “Hope, you’re amazing,” Jennifer said, suddenly next to me again, putting her arm around my waist.

  “I know!” I said. “Look at my hands!”

  “Hope! Hope! Over here!” Someone waved to me from the orange suede sectional sofa. My shoes were too much for me to deal with, so I kicked them off and wiggled my toes in the white alpaca rug.

  The touch of the wool was much too intense on the bottoms of my feet. “No, I need my shoes,” I decided out loud. I sat down to put my shoes on again, apparently pulling Jennifer down with me. Then we were lying on the white rug, smiling at the ceiling together.

  “Hope, you’re so beautiful,” Jennifer said.

  “Hope, why are you on the ground? You’re so silly.” Incy smiled down at me, then lay on the rug on my other side. The three of us stared at Max’s crystal chandelier overhead.

  “Hi, Michael,” I said, proud I’d remembered his current name.

  “Hope is so beautiful,” Jennifer told him. Incy grinned, and Jennifer looked mesmerized, drawing in a breath.

  “Hope? How about I give you and some of the others a ride home,” Max said. His eyes were kind behind his horn-rimmed glasses, but he still looked uptight and establishment, with his maroon turtleneck sweater and straight-legged suit pants. “Okay? It was stupid of Roger to invite you. Maybe in a couple years, huh?”

  “Hope always has to come!” Jennifer insisted. “There’s no party without Hope!”

  I smiled up at Max. It was like looking up a long, long tunnel. “There’s no party without me,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah!” said Incy. “We need Hope!”

  Someone a few feet away heard this and repeated it, as if it was her newest mantra. In another minute, everyone in the whole downstairs of Max’s huge home on the hill was chanting: “We need Hope! We need Hope!”

  The fact that they were talking about me, the double meaning the chant had, how beautiful I felt, how loved, how in demand, how popular—it was so fun, so happy, so lovely. I wanted it to last—forever.

  “It’s all right, Max,” I said dreamily. “I’m four hundred and…”—I did the math fuzzily—“and sixteen. Per-fectly legal.”

  Incy cracked up next to me, Jennifer grinned in cheerful confusion, and Max sighed and rolled his eyes.

  I don’t remember how I got home from that party.

  Max died two years ago; I saw it on the news. He’d been seventy-four years old.

  I still look seventeen.

  And, yeah, come to think of it, that was probably the last time I felt happy.

  A bell clanging in the distance made me open my eyes. I half expected to see the young Max leaning over me with concern, expected to feel thin Indian silk gliding across my body, was already starting to wonder whose party I would go to tonight.

  Instead, I saw a plain white ceiling with a thin, spide
ry crack starting in one corner. I was chilly, lying on a hard, narrow bed.

  Oh, God. It was fifty years later. I was at River’s Edge. Still here. And the bell clanging must be the dinner notice.

  I rolled over on my side, tucking my velour shirt around me. I couldn’t deal with dinner. My stomach gave a fierce, hungry growl then, disagreeing with me and telling me to get my ass in gear. I hadn’t eaten since the coffee and Chips Ahoy! this morning.

  I got creakily to my feet and picked up one of my heavy motorcycle boots. I glanced at the unlocked door and listened but heard nothing out in the hallway, no one walking nearby. Quickly, I slid a thin metal pin out of the boot’s tongue and inserted it into an almost invisible hole in the heel. Then I held the heel in my hand and pushed, glancing again at the door. The top swung sideways, revealing a cavity. Heavy, ancient gold gleamed dimly at me. Unable to help myself, I drew a finger across its surface, feeling the runes, the other symbols that I didn’t know the names of, the purpose of.

  I snapped the heel shut again and slid the pin back into the leather. I shoved my feet into the boots and stood up. It was still safe, still hidden—my amulet. Half of it, anyway. The only half I had, the half that matched the burn on the back of my neck.

  Out in the hall, I couldn’t remember which way I’d come in, so I started off, circled back, and then found some stairs. A food smell wafted up from below, and my stomach growled again.

  My memory of San Francisco had been so cheering. I’d gone down a wide wooden staircase, not too unlike this one. But the silk caftan and gold sandals were a glaring contrast to the man’s pullover, raggedy black pants, and heavy boots I wore now.

  Sniffing like a truffle pig, I followed the warm scent of food until I reached the dining room: a long, plain room with a wood floor; a really long wooden table that could have seated twenty; high, uncurtained windows showing blackness outside; a big, old, gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace; and twelve people looking at me with surprise, curiosity, and, on River’s face, welcome.