Pretty Dead by Francesca Lia Block

some but not others. Jared sat on a bench and sketched the Danaïd while I wandered through the museum, imagining how someday he would exhibit his paintings of me at galleries all around the world. I only hoped I would fade with him before the paintings did.
    The next day we looked at crumbling marble antiquities at the Getty Villa on a hill above the Pacific Ocean.
    “This reminds me of your house,” Jared said, as we walked along the Corinthian colonnade beside a mural of garlands and trompe l’oeil architecture.
    “I knew you were just spending time with me because of my house.”
    He stopped and looked at me. The sun was shining off the rectangular pool. The blackened bronze sculptures with their eerie inlaid white eyes glowed as if they were lit from within. I had taken off my sun hat; the light didn’t make me feel afraid.
    “I’d be with you if you lived in a one-room apartment,” he said.
    In a tiny, darkened hallway full of small, erotic drawings and sculptures—a priapic centaur chasing a nymph, a faun copulating with a she-goat—he ran his hand along the back waistband of my jeans and I shivered so that tiny bumps rose up.
    On other mornings we sat on the outdoor patio at the Urth Caffé in Santa Monica, and Jared sketched and I wrote. We ate poached eggs and spinach wrapped in salmon on brioches and blackout chocolate cake, and drank green-tea lattes the color of milky jade. I had stopped calling Tolstoy entirely. I no longer drank the blood he sold; it made me vomit now. For the following few days and nights, though, I still preferred my meat rare.
    Jared and I got takeout food and ate it out of the containers with our fingers by my pool. We made each other CDs and lit hundreds of candles and made love for hours. I dressed up for him in my costumesof various eras and pretended to be Camille Claudel, Coco Chanel, Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedgwick, Madonna, Gisele, Kate Moss.
    “I like you as you the most,” he said, taking off my platinum-blond wig and slowly unlacing the black leather corset that pushed my breasts up over the top.
     
    One night he didn’t come. The candles were burning down to nothing, the ice in the champagne bucket had melted and I had listened to the same old Bowie CD over and over again. I called him and texted, but he didn’t respond. Something felt wrong in my bones. That was when I got in my car and drove to the house in Venice. The house William and I had abandoned years before, when we moved to the Northeast.
    I don’t know why I felt I had to go there that night, but I did. It was almost as if the car was driving itself.
     
    When I walked into the room with the red walls, adrenaline-infused blood engorged my veins. Would I fight or flee? And if I fought, what dark power was I up against? I saw Jared reclining on a black leather couch. He looked like Jesus in a Pietà, draped languidly there. His head, with the small growth of beard, was thrown back, and one arm was draped over the top of the sofa as if it were a woman. His long legs were crossed at the ankle. Candles burned around him. Thick white wax in sconces, dripping rivulets.
    I stood in the doorway like a stunned beast as I watched William approach from the other side of the room. He wore a black suit and a white shirt. His hands and face glowed in the darkness with that preternatural pallor. He turned his head slowly to look at me.
    “Char. You’ve come to our party? I wasn’t expecting you.” So calm. His mouth was curved into an almost-smile. Dark eyes. They feed you with their eyes. Like black milk.
    “Jared,” I said, “I want you to get up now. Come with me.”
    Jared moved his head, but the rest of his body stayed reclined, perfectly motionless, like the statue he resembled. He blinked at me, and I took that as a good sign, that blink. He was still in there.
    “Jared, I want you to come with me.” I tried to make it sound light. “We have a date, remember? It’s going to be all right.”
    On the