Scarlet Ribbons

Suzy McKee Charnas

Part III

So there I was with my major problems solved: this story, the third tale of my vampire, was now firmly underpinned by my understanding of a psychotherapeutic system that was common-sensical, clear, and entertaining enough for readers (and for the author) to play with and enjoy; and I had my vampire's opening strategy for the upcoming battle with his unknowing therapist.

But the story wouldn't go. I couldn't get beyond that first scene that had so pleasantly surprised me, the intake interview in the therapist's office. I knew where we were going: Weyland would be drawn closer and closer to Floria by the thrill of at last telling all his secrets to an intelligent, attractive, trained listener, all the while kept safe by the fact that she was sure he was describing a delusion — until evidence arrives that convinces her that he's been telling her the truth. Then, despite his developing fondness for her, he would have to kill her to protect himself.

Well, it was so obvious, so cliched, and so depressing, that it hardly seemed worth writing, which is maybe why I was having so much trouble writing it. People forget: if you can't entertain yourself first with what you are writing, you're not likely to entertain anybody else. For one thing, in that case the writing becomes sheer drudgery if it is possible to do it at all.

In this case, it wasn't. I was stuck.

And then one night I had a dream: Weyland, a gaunt figure in white shirt and black pants, was trapped in a cave in a cliffside high above a sparkling blue sea. The rocks piled in the cave's entrance had him sealed in. I stood on the narrow dirt path outside the cave, trying to figure out how to get him out of there. Suddenly I saw that there was a ship down below on the water, a sailing vessel with two tall masts. Somehow we (don't ask me who else was involved, I don't know) brought the ship straight up into the air alongside the cliff's face, so that the tip of the taller mast could be jammed in among the boulders and used to pry them apart. Weyland stepped out into the sunlight and padded quickly away up the path.

I woke up laughing: that would teach me to sneer at Freud! It could hardly have been plainer: mast = penis; cave = vagina.

Moron, the story isn't really about death at all; it's about sex. It's even about — love.

The poor bastard falls in love. He doesn't kill her in the end (even though he ought to, of course) because now that she is the one human being in the world who actually knows almost as much about him as he knows himself, he can't bring himself to wipe out that awareness, that Other's gaze that sees him truly.

Once I knew where the story really wanted to go, it took off: I wrote very fast, and soon I had a rough run-through of the third chapter, "Unicorn Tapestry," and was already thinking about the rest of Weyland's saga. I had found out a good deal of what went on in Weyland's head and some notion of his perceptions of his past (out of his own mouth, in session with the therapist). I had only to write a sort of pivot designed to allow me to slip delicately inside my vampire's point of view without the reader being jarred by the shift; then on to the final chapter (in which I thought he would probably have a showdown with the horrible Reese).

These were chapters now, not stories, and I saw that they would add up to a novel in the end.

The next step was taking form: I had already conceived a wish to bring Weyland out of the northeast and into the aged, rugged landscape of the west, where I live — in particular, Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, home of the cliff dwellings and stone structures of the Anasazi people and a fitting setting for a being whom I now suspected to be prehistoric in origin. This urge to bring my ancient creature into an ancient landscape had come to me very strongly while my husband and I were standing on the rim of Canyon de Chelly, looking down at Spider Rock ("Wow, what a view! What would Weyland think of this if he were standing here instead of me?").

So that's what the back of my mind went to work on while I spent weeks arranging and re-arranging the sections of "Unicorn Tapestry" that are made up of Floria Landauer's personal notes on the progress of therapy with Edward Weyland. I actually cut her paragraphs into slips of paper and Steve and I moved them around into the several positions for such material that I'd worked out in the body of the story, to see what went where — looking for the best natural flow, the best build-up, the best rhythm of therapeutic action/reaction and her reflections on same, the best inter-connection with other things going on in her life.

And then there was the sex scene. No way out of it, nor did I want one — these two beings were on an erotic collision course (that's what charges their encounters so highly), and the reader had the right to witness the resolution of it.

I knew perfectly well that I was working in a particularly powerful field here, one that comes with that kind of charge, even exists because of that kind of charge — the monster-and-the-lady field. It has its rules, and one of them is that some kind of sex is damn well going to happen; and I chose the consummated kind, for reasons explored a bit further on.

But first, a technical point: there is always in such scenes a question of of how much to show (the spectrum comprises "they lay down together — cut to next morning" vs. "He inserted tab A into slot B" and juices, moans, squeals, etc. etc. ensued in more or less vivid detail) and what kind of vocabulary to use. Is this a dick/cunt fest, for raw shock value and a suggestion of a very basic and brutal milieu? Or maybe a throbbing manhood/burning flower-of-desire conjunction, a la romance novels for a softer-porn effect; or a tasteful remove to a higher plane entirely where there are no organs as such, just lots of lush language and oceanic orgasms only tenuously attached to fleshly contact? There are many solutions, none of them The Solution since context (as with sex in everyday reality) is crucial.

I decided that I needed a combination of clear, rather minimalist language to suggest Weyland's own distanced and slightly disgusted attitude; and something powerful and sweet, for Floria's victory over herself and her fears.

I wanted it brief, too, both for power (the longer you string sex out in words on the page the more tension and impact you lose, in my opinion). Also I wanted to back up my sense and assertion that this moment of intimate physical contact does not outweigh or obliterate but in fact expresses all of the psychological intimacy these two have built between them over the months of "therapy" (I just wrote "validates and expresses," and cut "validates" because that intimacy needs no validating; it happened, and was real on its own terms, nothing more required).

I also wanted this little passage to be hot, very hot, as well as brief: a laser blast, not a long evening in front of the wood-burning stove.

The words of those few paragraphs were chosen with tremendous care to create all these effects. This is called work. It took some time, and for me the result is what I aimed for. For others — well, it varies. The writer is only in control of what goes down onto the page, not of what the reader reconstructs in her own mind from print. One reader told me (admiringly, it must be said) that he found the sex scene "almost pornographic." I think he meant "pornographic, no almost about it," but was afraid I would be offended. Far from it, I was damned glad to hear it. It meant that for some readers, at least, the "hot" requirement had been met, and that heat is necessary. Without great heat, no moltenness, no structural change; and I wanted these characters changed by their encounter.

There was also a delicate political question to deal with.

No matter how I wrote it, there was still an appearance of the female victim offering the monster sex to stop him killing her, and then getting off on it — essentially inviting her own rape and enjoying it. This is a trope of fiction that I particularly loath . I hate too this evil notion that all women are always in seduction mode, so that men are never responsible for their own sexual actions — they are just responding to the provocation of those darned females being — well, you know — female. According to this formulation, Floria might be seen to set out from the start to seduce Weyland and at last succeed (and some readers do see her as a predator too, by the way — resentful survivors of bad psychoanalysis, perhaps).

But what a paltry victory that would be, and what a betrayal of Floria's character! I wanted much more from her. I demanded more, on the reader's behalf; after all, I'm "the reader" too.

So here's Weyland threatening Floria with death; and here's Floria inviting him to make love with her instead. Why, if not just to buy him off and save her own life?

To heal herself, and to open him to greater potentialities in himself than he has previously dared to imagined.

All along she has been struggling not only with him and his fears of his latent humanity, but with her own fears of plain old human death. That fear is what's been paralyzing her practice; that's what her colleague identifies as a pervasive problem rooted in an unwillingness to mourn properly for her dead mother; and that's what Weyland comes to represent for Floria. She has learned the power and reach of her own courage in working with a deadly monster. In taking him to bed she is facing her embodied fear by embracing it, literally.

Courage conquers fear. The therapy — hers — has been successful. With her new-found strength and tested courage she can go on with her life despite the certainty of death in the end, and although it will be a much altered life because of the laws she has broken to find this lesson.

That, at any rate, was what I meant to do. I may not have been a good enough writer to achieve it for a majority of the book's readers. It may be also that I didn't have it thought out fully myself and so my intentions were compromised from the start. Or, in that odd way that sometimes happens, the characters themselves may have had other meanings in mind that ran counter to my intentions and that came through in the writing (that is, maybe somewhere in the depths of my own personality I believed something different from what I believed in my fully conscious mind about how women's psychology works).

Some readers' responses suggest that they have taken from this scene precisely the story of the seduction of the innocent monster by the cunning vixen which Floria herself rejects. Others have thought that Floria is "in love" with Weyland, which is not really true — she has worked him so close with her skills and her nerve that she takes the risk of being changed, herself, by a fusion with him, as heroes and heroines are changed by contact with supernatural figures (or, sometimes, aliens — see Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End) in myths and folk tales.

To my mind "love" (as we commonly use the word) is far too romantic, and too simplistic, a label for what transpires between them.

She will not pine for him when he has gone although their encounter has changed her life, and the way she views the world, forever. He does not pine either — as his notes to himself, in the final chapter, show — although he does remember. In a way, I deliberately tried to do something anti-romantic, something bigger than romance; still, many readers take from it only a romantic meaning. Different strokes. As it were.

Well, all that aside: the story succeeds for most readers, perhaps despite me and my intentions, perhaps not the way I wished it to, but on its own terms and in a number of ways. It was too long for Omni Magazine, but I had read from it at several science fiction conventions while it was in progress and an editor friend who heard a reading suggested that I submit the story for an anthology being prepared at his publisher's. "Unicorn Tapestry" came out in a collection called New Voices and won me a Nebula Award for best SF novella of 1980.

And the editor, David Hartwell, wanted to see the completed mss. of Weyland's story when I finished it. He had read the first part, "Ancient Mind," and told me he knew already that he wanted to buy the book.

Continued

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Copyright © 2001 by Suzy McKee Charnas