"who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley-
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
1930's German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam-
whistles,"
"Howl"
Allen Ginsberg
1954
So Emmett frightened you, did he? I don't intend to laugh at your discomfort but if you only knew him as I do you'd understand my amusement. His wife is actually the one you should be afraid of. I'm not trying to tell you not to be afraid. But when you do get hurt, Emmett won't be the one doing it. And you will get hurt if you stick around to see how this story ends, it's only fair to warn you. This is a story that can't be told without someone, maybe everyone getting hurt. But I have to tell you, if you'll give me the chance.
You can go now, before I "seal the deal", as they say these days. I prefer "alea acta est"; the die is cast. It appeals to my intellectual pretensions. You can walk out now and I promise I won't follow you.
If you're not going to leave I should give you something to reward you. How about I tell you about the first time I met Edward?
It was only a few days after I awoke in the Cullen's apartment in New York. Esme had convinced me to stay, I don't know how: I was profoundly out of my depth. I met Emmett; you saw what he's like, a friendly, enormous man. Like a big child. His wife Rosalie is as cold as he is warm and she was even more beautiful. She barely spoke two words to me and she only said those because Esme and Carlisle insisted. Esme and Carlisle were their parents, of sorts. Esme and Carlisle, Rosalie and Emmett. Two gorgeous couples, madly in love, preternaturally quiet and graceful, all with those odd yellow eyes. I am a suspicious person by nature and I knew that there was something peculiar about my hosts.
But I ate meals and listened to records and read books in the elegant apartment of these two pairs of physically, energetically loving couples. The apartment was thick with affection to the point of discomfort for me. Imagine what it felt like for that fifth wheel, the other son?
I met Edward on the 7th of October, 1954. I was in the living room with Carlisle and Esme when he appeared in the doorway.
He was as tall as you and slender but he could easily pass for a teenager. I couldn't guess his age, his face was that timelessly beautiful, and like Carlisle, his eyes were so old. He was handsome, aloof and clearly furious that I was there. I would be too, I guess. I was a common prostitute that his loving, naive parents had taken in. For all they knew I was going to steal the silverware to buy dope. I supposed that I hated him back for his arrogance, his furious beauty and his judgment of me, as reasonable as I knew it was.
He greeted me coldly, like Rosalie had, staying in the doorway and holding himself stiffly. I resented his dislike of me more than Rosalie's, though. Maybe because he was beautiful; maybe because he was a man. I was used to manipulating men, using their baser desires. He left as fast as he had appeared. He did that again and again in the next week; coming a little closer each time like a timid animal tempted by a meal, creeping closer and closer each time but turning away before reaching it's destination.
How accurate I was in this impression, in retrospect.
Esme and I would sit in the living room, me reading something from Carlisle's library, her knitting. Carlisle or Rose would come in and talk with us, discuss poetry or music or the news. Emmett and Rose might play cards, teasing each other, Rose slipping me sidelong glances. Edward would edge his way into the room, sit down in a corner, and it was as if all the air were sucked out of the room. I would try to continue what I had been doing but it would be a puppet show, a pantomime. I couldn't comprehend the words I was reading; they were blurry, nonsensical.
I felt the need to control him, to rattle him, to wreck him. I hated his silent, chilly judgment of me, the fact that he seemed to not even want to breathe the air we shared. He would pick up books I had just put down and inspect them, as if afraid that I had torn it or written in the margins of a first edition. He made me feel shameful and powerlessness. I despised him. I was fascinated by him.
And then, one night, traitorously, the Cullens left me alone with him. I had no idea he was there, actually. The place was big and he could move through it so quietly that I would no sooner look up that he would be there. I took a bath and was getting ready to go to bed when the phone rang. I had taken the phone out of my room a few days earlier when I had decided that it wouldn't be necessary to call the police to rescue me and it's ringing had woken me up. I had to wrap a robe around myself and run into the living room to answer the phone. It was Esme, letting me know that they would be late. As I spoke to her I realized that he was standing in the doorway.
For the first time since I had met him I could decipher the look on his face. He looked at my exposed legs and shoulders. The one thing I could understand and control was physical desire. Edward wanted me. I could see it plainly on his face. It must have been devastating for him to desire someone he hated so much. I knew then how to defeat him, how to control him, how to destroy his perfect facade.
I changed into the most revealing thing I could find, a slip or nightgown of some sort and went to his room. I had never been inside it and the door was always closed. I let myself in. He was sitting on his bed reading a book, his long legs stretched out almost the entire length of the bed. His feet were bare. He froze as I entered his room. His face didn't show surprise, it revealed nothing, actually.
I slipped of my robe and dropped it on the floor. I watched his face carefully. He didn't seem to be breathing.
"You know what I am, Edward, don't you?" I moved towards him slowly and when I could reach out a hand to touch his bare foot I did. I slid my hand slowly up from his foot to trace lightly along the top of his calf as I stalked closer to him. "You know that I know how to please men." I thought I saw a flicker of an expression on his face but his eyes remained fixed on mine.
"I can make you feel things you can't imagine." I had reached his knee and I paused. "Do you want that?" I started moving again, slipping my hand up his thigh.
Suddenly he jerked away from me so fast, I had no idea how he could move that quickly. He was crouched at the head of the bed, eyes black, hissing at me: "Get out!"
I hesitated, thinking surely he was just scared. I knew that he was inexperienced. As I opened my mouth to speak again he said again, louder, his face blazing at me frighteningly: "Bella, get out now!"
Terrified, humiliated, defeated, I rushed out of the room. I threw on some clothes and fled the apartment. Within twenty minutes I had hitched a ride back to the Village and was looking for a fix, a drink, anything to kill the pain.
The streets of the Lower East Side weren't a deep enough abyss for me after that night. I despised myself and I despised him. That angel-faced virgin judge who rejected the only gift I had to give, who resisted the only power I had.
A virgin? Yes, as it turns out he was. But I didn't find that out until many years later. It shocked and horrified me. I had done Edward a bigger disservice than I thought. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I went to the Bowery. It was as low as I could think of to go. For the first time in my career as a whore I took the first trick I could find. I took the money and bought some dope, not bothering to haggle or even care about quality. I fixed, killed the memory of his horrified rejection and Esme's disappointed face, woke up and repeated the cycle. I don't know how long. A couple of tricks knocked me around and I laughed. I was robbed and I smiled. It couldn't have been more than a few weeks before I was dead again. This time for good.
I've been promising you ghosts, haven't I? The tricks I turned back then, my friends on the streets, my dealers and even the earnest young men I fucked in high school, they're mostly dead.
But me? Well I had the luck to attract the attention of the Cullen's and they saved me. Saved me by making me like them. A vampire.
a/n: part 1: "ghosts" is done; next up: part 2: "phantoms". The incomparable EverlastingMuse betas this and Liz3615 prereads it and then holds my hand so that I have the courage to post it. As far as I know none of us owns Twilight or it's associated characters.