Night-Spinning Spider

Some nights, the city feels like a spider’s web — dark, tangled, and alive with hidden danger and strange beauty. This is one of those nights.

My favorite bar was a dive-y lounge near my house. On some nights, there was live jazz. It had started as a hangout for local theater folks and art professors and students from UCSD. Now hipsters came, too, in furs and cocktail gowns, dramatic makeup, drinking martinis. We looked bored, our own version of the lost generation—though we probably had way less fun. Maybe because we were copycats.

One night, at a corner table, I spotted two stunning boys and a girl. One boy had long pale blond hair and a very pale face—like a vampire Julian Sands in an old Merchant Ivory movie. They were eyeing us. Both boys looked sexually ambiguous. The girl was a little chubby, channeling Bettie Page. When I got up to “powder my nose,” someone grabbed my wrist and twisted my arm hard. The pain felt good. I looked into his eyes. It was the pale blond boy. “Hello goddess,” he said. “Why don’t you and your friend join us?” He let go.

A red mark bloomed on my wrist. It was incredibly erotic. I was marked. He’d marked his territory, his prey. When I returned, I was high. I knew what was coming. The night spinning spider had found allies—other creatures of the dark. We joined them. They ordered Manhattans. At first, we didn’t talk much—just eyeing, sizing up, trying on. Almost hostile. I tried not to look at the vampire boy, focusing instead on the snare drum of the jazz band.

Heat radiated from him and me, circling like a dance. Everyone else disappeared. Only his pale skinny hand with elegant spidery fingers, his beautiful girlish face with that arrogant pout. His fingers on me, inside me. What did we talk about? Somas—how hard they were to get now, even in Mexico. Proprioception—the odd sense of where your body parts are in time and space. Oscar Wilde, because I’d just gotten a book with Aubrey Beardsley illustrations and fancied myself an art deco character.

When the bar closed, we tumbled into a cab and drove to a house in La Jolla. Huge marble sculptures, Persian rugs, large chandeliers. The walls were dark red, luxurious. In a giant chrome and steel kitchen, we ate Caesar salad. First time I had anchovies. Then to the lounge chairs by the infinity pool, smoking opium from a little ornate pipe. It tasted sweet. I shared a chaise with the blond vampire. He asked if I wanted to see his stamp collection. We laughed.

We went to his bedroom, lay on a huge bed with incredible Frette sheets—white like mine but softer. It made me feel close to the boy, his taste in sheets. He put on The Verve. We did whippets. We listened to the melancholy music and kissed. White limbs in the moonlight and delicious pain. Drifting into forgetting.

I woke at around ten the next morning. I was still in the vampire’s bed. He was asleep—breath shallow but steady. His blonde hair tangled, looking young, maybe fourteen. Blue veins showed at his temples; his hair was delicate, like a child’s. His mask was gone. Now he was just a pretentious kid with a soft, vulnerable face, breathing evenly, alive. I could grab a pillow—or suck his breath like a greedy cat. I could snuff out his little light.

I wandered through the quiet house, past antiques and taxidermy. A Latina maid in a starched uniform made coffee in the kitchen. I said hello awkwardly. She just stared. Everyone was asleep. I asked where the phone was and called a cab.

“Night-spinning spider, dexterous, deliberate, she went on her way, drawing her thread relentlessly behind her, hanging it to the four corners of the night.”

— Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles