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Knowing that Lestat had read the book was more mortifying than Louis was prepared for. His little “odyssey of recollection” was more candid than he was used to being with anybody, even including the lies and misdirections Daniel hadn’t caught.
He might have steeled himself against Lestat’s reactions to the more divisive episodes in their lives, the parts Lestat saw with his own eyes. What he hadn’t expected was the barrage of questions over the parts of his life that Lestat had missed.
“Romania? You actually went all the way to Romania? And you couldn't have bided your time in the more picturesque part of the continent to wait out the global conflict, of course not, you had to go right to Romania.”
“Claudia was very impatient to discover more of us. She wouldn't wait for--”
“Impatience? YOU ARE IMMORTAL.” The bombastic quality of Lestat's voice was striking when he sang, but when he chose to yell, it really commanded attention. “A couple of years in a Santorini hostel would have killed you?” Louis was patiently enduring the barrage of questions and accusations that Lestat hurled at him. He knew Lestat well enough to distinguish when he wanted an answer and when he wanted to shout a bit. When his voice slowed and lost its timbre, then he would come to him and tend to his temper. For now, he let the man rant.
“Wandering the remains of front lines in a scarred continent like wastrels hoping to come across absolution. Really, Louis, did you think you lived in a Hemingway novel?”
“You hate Hemingway, Lestat.”
“Oh everybody hates Hemingway, that’s not the point- I just assumed that if you two were going to embark on your grand adventure, you would at least try to enjoy yourselves.”
Louis had always privately thought that Lestat’s “enjoy yourself” thesis on life was an oversimplification. There was more to him, a deeper longing for something, beyond just fun. But the years had shown that perhaps there was more to enjoying yourself than Louis had given him credit for. To Lestat, enjoying himself meant never being alone, under any circumstance. “We had each other,” Louis said. “It wasn’t entirely joyless.” Letstat let the sting show on his face for a moment. While they were busy having each other, he was alone eating rats. If they were both pricked by the thorn of knowledge that neither of them had Claudia now, it was nothing new.
“In your descriptions of Paris, you sound like you were rather enchanted.” Lestat made it sound like a criticism. “What a tourist.” He was never one for subtlety.
“Well, it was enchanting.” Louis replied, keeping his tone cold. Asking about Paris was like digging your fingers into either side of a closed wound and pulling, seeing if the stitches would hold. There had been a retreat in Lestat’s voice whenever he got too close to it. Louis thought this couldn’t be harder than discussing the New Orleans years in front of Armand. If he could do that, he could talk about Paris in front of Lestat.
In the months between reuniting and the book driving them back apart, he and Lestat had taken time to begin to forgive each other. They dwelt in Louis’ suite in an overpriced hotel while the rest of the city recovered from the hurricane. After Lestat changed of clothes and had a drink of blood from something hardier than a rat, days had passed in recollection, summarizing their decades apart. But when Paris came up, they pushed it back down. They’d approached each other cautiously, coaxingly, coyly. Then, the book hit shelves. And it was radio silence, or swatting at each other like cats. Louis supposed that Paris might be easier to speak of now that Lestat had read about it in detail.
So many details. Why had he admitted to hallucinating Lestat? The thought of him turning the page to a description of his own haunting made Louis want to crawl back in a coffin. That kind of vulnerability wasn’t in his blood, even on their best days in New Orleans. He remembered when Lestat confided in him about his childhood stutter - why had he told Daniel? - and Louis couldn’t meet his candor with his own childhood maladaptions. The seeing of things that weren’t there. The bullying of other children. Louis wondered how he would feel if those things had appeared in publication.
Louis tried to break out of his hand-wringing by continuing the little game of conversation with Lestat.
“You know I’ve always liked French flavor.” Lestat chuckled with that. “And there were plenty of bookstores to keep me busy.”
“Ah yes, the books.” Lestat let his filter of cruelty on, but Louis didn’t mind. If Lestat was teasing him, he wasn’t backing away. “Reading in the theater, ignoring the plays, I can imagine how popular you were. Well, you never read through any opera I took you to.” Always keeping score, his Lestat.
“I’d just seen the plays too many times,” Louis rolled his eyes. “And I would only go to support Claudia.”
“Of course, proper stage mom, nevermind the tactless comedy they made her the star of. Notre fille n'est pas un spectacle.” Of all the things the coven did to Claudia, it was almost refreshing that Lestat objected to the Lulu performance. Louis had found it distasteful too. There were shades of blue he still saw in his nightmares, and the comical projected fall to concrete had made him nauseous, thinking of Paul in ways he’d tried not to for decades
“You would have absolutely hated it,” Louis said softly, “like I hated it.”
“At least tell me it wasn’t as gauche as Dan described it,” Lestat had a tone of actual disgust in his voice, “I mean, A BOUNCING BALL?! Was this the Théâtre des Vampires or fucking High School Musical?”
Despite himself, Louis laughed a little. It had been so long since the performances, and he had so much rage revolving around it, that he had almost forgotten how he felt about the performance originally. It had been an indignity. The two of them hadn’t dressed Claudia that childishly even when she had been a child. But he remembered trying to be positive about it at the time. Telling Claudia her voice sounded lovely, that the audience was having fun. He should have told her they could just leave.
“There was a bouncing ball. Insult to injury.” Lestat swallowed his commentary. Apparently this was, in fact, too much. And 75 years was still too soon. Claudia would keep haunting them another day. He tried to change the subject.
“And in your free time,” Lestat began, “you took photos?” He idly toyed with the straw on his drink, AB negative from the farm, rather than meeting Louis’ eyes.
“Yeah, I took some pictures. Just for fun. Most weren't any good.”
“Yes, the little pocketbook goes out of its way to say you were an amateur, untalented poser. Was that a Malloy contribution or your own account?” Louis laughed but bristled a little. Amidst the pool of talents in Paris, he carried his own shame at how uninspired his attempts at art had been. A better eye than hand, he'd said at plenty of dinner parties selling to collectors. A born buyer.
“Just - the photos were nothing special.”
“Well, I'll be the judge of that.”
Louis firmed his gaze on Lestat and came just short of rolling his eyes. The photos seemed so insignificant to him now. He’d kept them of course, like he always stored his keepsakes. Each time he and Armand moved, they brought little. Some clothes, some books, always the magnolia cutting. Louis had his box - it occurred to him that the thing was antique now - containing the calling card Lestat gave them the day they met, a watch that had belonged to his father, Claudia’s diaries, her yellow dress, the letter Lestat wrote in the event of his death, and of course the photos from Paris. Compared to the rest of the collection, they felt inconsequential. His brief belief in his potential as a lover rather than a seller of beauty.
“There’s nothing to see, just whatever caught my eye, forget about it” Louis said, brushing him off.
“Louis, you can’t write a book telling the world I wore slippers to sleep and then get squeamish about showing me your photography.”
“Blame Daniel for that! He was too focused on the imagery-”
“Louis.” It wasn't necessarily command in his voice , too playful for that, but it was suggesting that he set the rules for the game.
With some grumbling and snapping and longsuffering sighing, Lestat pulled willingness from Louis like a magician pulling ribbons from a sleeve. Louis went to his desk - largely ornamental since he had people handle most of the minutiae of his business - and pulled out the folder of pictures. He plopped them down on the coffee table before Lestat. He somewhat wished he’d thought to drop them a little too close to Lestat’s glass of blood, spill over them before they could embarrass him again. For some reason, it hadn’t been so terrible showing Armand the pictures. He hadn’t worried so much what he’d think. Showing Daniel had made him tense, sure, but Lestat had really known the beauty of the city across multiple centuries, and would know how insufficient the pictures were. Lestat bent forward to have his look.
Embarrassment in his whole body, reticence rising in him, and suppressing the urge to just close the folder and throw the pictures in the sea, Louis turned around and pretended to be surveying the skyline. There's really nothing special about the skyline. One replaceable American city, copy and pasted from another. But Louis would stare until the sun rose rather than see his photos evaluated again. Especially by Lestat, who had all the power and reason to hurt him with a biting comment.
After infinite seconds, maybe 35, Louis heard a bemused chuckle. Without thinking, he turned around and started to say “don't laugh,” but there was Lestat, smiling at the portfolio. Louis had expected a tease, a witticism from Harlequin, but what he saw in Lestat’s face was an unmasked fondness.
Each picture appeared to delight him more than the one before. He seemed eager to look at each one.
“Oh, Louis,” he said, “I've so often wanted to see the world through your eyes. Now I do.” He chuckled again, “what fondness you have for this place.” Despite himself, Louis preened. The photos had never received a compliment. This reaction didn't change the truth. He'd collected and evaluated and assigned market value to enough artworks to know amateur, untrained, overenthusiastic pieces when he saw them. But it had been Paris through his eyes, and here was Lestat, seeing him as always.
“The lighting was always the worst part… I was stuck with the streetlights, or the moon…” Louis leaned back on his old complaint of the lighting. Photographers that weren’t undead could have the luxury of a golden hour. Maybe in 400 years when he could walk in the sun again, he’d give photography another go, but the thought exhausted him.
But Lestat apparently saw no insufficiency. He looked up at Louis incredulously. Their earlier sniping had melted from him, and he was clearly enjoying himself. He’d always wished to push Louis into his own artistry. Where Lestat had played music at the Azalea, sketched faces from time to time, composed, memorized poetry, Louis had always been a consumer rather than a creator. The only times Lestat managed to bring him out into the fun was with dance, and then he’d only dance with Lestat.
But here was the evidence that Louis had a beating heart of his own for beauty. Louis found it embarrassing. Lestat found it sublime.
“This one is perfect.” Lestat held up a picture of the Louvre, frozen in time and barely lit. Louis had tried to photograph a corner of the building rather than a face, hoping to be original. “Passing it by rather than going in, like a native rather than a visitor.”
Lestat might have meant to keep the game going, keep teasing and poking at instead of stabbing at the gaps in their time together. But he couldn’t keep the affection out of his eyes. This wasn’t Paris as he had seen it, dirty and bloody and full of ghosts. For years, he had found it impossible to picture Paris without the sound of violin in the background, growing louder and more erratic. And then by the time the music faded, the city stank to him of ashes and burning bulbs in spotlights. It was an irredeemable place.
But here in black and white was Paris as he’d imagined it when he’d yearned for it in Auvergne. Cosmopolitan, constantly moving, charming. Louis could always do that. Revitalize a place, see it through different eyes, immortal and affectionate. To Lestat, New Orleans had seemed damp at first, just a city with one too many coats of paint and too much smoke to see it clearly. Then Louis made it like a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious though unconscious collective will. He had done the same to Paris, depicted it always in motion, only under moonlight, only as a vampire yearning for home could. Louis finally acquiesced to the compliments, leaning down to see the pictures with new eyes. Perhaps they weren’t so bad after all. Just spoiled by time and knowing better.
Lestat stopped short, his smile falling. Louis drew in on the couch next to him to look together at his favorite photo, the one success.
“... she looks so mature here,” Lestat said reverently.
“Mhm” Louis responded. “The street lights and smoke agreed with her. And she was the one subject I didn't have to catch in passing.”
Where everyone and everything else was in a perpetual state of moving on in these photos, this portrait of Claudia was perfectly still. She wasn't going anywhere.
Lestat lifted the picture so they could look at it straight on. Claudia, hair styled like a chic woman of the 1940s. “How old would she have been here?” Lestat asked, keeping eye contact with the stationary, still alive picture of Claudia.
“Maybe 38, I can’t be sure. But this is a good bit before.” Before. “... You should get it framed. We have so few pictures of her.” There had been some sketches from the early days. She had a hard time sitting still for them; she had been a child full of laughter. Stop giggling! Lestat had chided her, but he had a laugh of his own in his voice. She’d been infectious that way.
It was odd, really. Claudia had always thought of herself as stuck in time, frozen at 14, but in her eyes, there was something of her true age to her. Her fathers had thought they’d always see her grow up in manner if not time. But now she had been frozen in death, furious and far away.
Neither of them supposed that an outsider would look at this photo and see a little girl. A youth, yes, but not an innocent. A young lady with uncanny knowing in her eyes. “... Truly, you have depicted her as she was,” Lestat whispered. Louis nodded roughly and silently in thanks for this, the truest compliment he could ever receive on his work. They looked through the rest of the photos slowly, hunting for how it must have felt not to know how it would end. Lestat left before he was in danger of the sun rising. Louis knew he wouldn’t stay. He hadn’t asked him to. But he offered to have a copy of the portrait made, so he knew he would come back for it.