While Elizabeth and Caleb take the place of Alison and Rafe at the altar, Alison tearfully tells Rafe why she can’t marry him. She explains that since the photo in the locket is the same as the photo of her unknown sibling’s mother, Rafe could be her half-brother. Although Rafe insists that Alison trust her faith in their heavenly ordained love for each other, her fears that she and Rafe are siblings will not be laid to rest.
After Rafe informs her that he has seen Stephen Clay’s fangs and knows that Caleb, posing as Stephen, has turned her mother into a vampire, Alison sorrowfully realizes that her hopes for a “normal” mother/daughter bond, like her dreams of a happy wedding, have been destroyed. She finally believes what Rafe has to say about Caleb’s manipulative impact, acknowledges the possibility that Caleb is intentionally trying to destroy their romance, yet still cannot dismiss her fear that she and Rafe might actually be brother and sister. Hysterical, torn between her love for Rafe and her despair over her shattered dreams, she screams that she and Rafe should “just get it over with.” Although she recoils at the thought of their possibly incestuous relationship, her fatalistic desperation and sense of doom drive her to seek comfort in Rafe’s embrace. They make love, dread and regret shadowing their union.
Back at the apartment, Caleb and Elizabeth also make love. Their ecstasy, however, like Alison and Rafe’s, is merged with a sense of desolation. As Caleb carries Elizabeth, his desire-drugged devotee, into his bedroom, she gazes at him with eyes of feverish adulation. She worships him, craves him, and he, possessed by the fierce need to forget Livvie and to lose himself, surrenders to her worship. Their passion is consuming, mutually devouring.
This scene, beautifully choreographed in sensual, entrancing slow-motion, reminds me of a predatory ballet, with predator and prey continually merging and shifting. She straddles him, a female mantis, a maenad ready to tear apart the flesh merging with hers, and he, beneath her, digs into her back with his fingernails, clawing and rending. Entangled in each other, they change positions, he on top, a tiger upon a transfixed deer, then shift back again. We see tantalizing glimpses of silken hair and skin as she pulls at his belt and it slithers like snaking paint across the satiny black-purple sheets. The scene is intoxicating, a decadently seductive dream of sensory abandon. |
