Soul Siren (10 page)

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Not at all. Steven sang the vocals anyway.”

I looked at him and burst out laughing. “How…?”

“
I
produced that song,” said Luther. “Maybe Carson’s bullshit works on other people, but I’m not going to have that asshole march into a studio and tell me how to put together a track.”

“Won’t he recognise…?”

“Uh-uh. I told him I’d get a sound-alike session vocalist. No contract involved, nothing legal, and I have sign-off authority under
my
contract for how the job’s done. This is all about publicity anyway. The label execs can act coy when they’re asked, and when the time is right, they’ll confirm it. There’s not much Easy can do now anyway. He went ahead and released the single, and there’s how many thousand units pressed and hitting the stores on Monday…? Tough luck, sucker. He’ll look like a fool if he wants it remixed for the album.”

Someone dimmed the lights, and the towers beyond the dark expanse of Central Park shone through the windows. Then the stereo cut out, and there was the unmistakable
squelch
and
ooooooo
of a microphone turned on for an amplifier. I hadn’t even noticed the DJ’s board and gear being set up in a corner. Luther and I politely turned to see our host’s entertainment.

Steven had everyone’s attention, Erica already hovering like a presidential wife off to the side. I noticed he’d changed, too. No more T-shirt with ripped sleeves, patched jeans and Nikes, now he was in what looked like Jean Paul Gaultier stuff, neon purple tie over crisp and very loud button-down purple shirt, a diamond ankh pin glinting in his lapel. Erica’s pretty white boy was a hell of an actor. Because I watched him walk like a panther in that suit over to whisper something in his bodyguard’s ear. A pat on the fellow’s arm, a nod that said:
Get it done.
Steven the boss. Then, as he picked up the microphone and began to speak, he fell right back into the nineteen-year-old’s head bob and tug at the collar, as if this was the teen dream’s first necktie.

“Hi, everyone, I’m Steven.” Nervous eyes down. You could almost hear him counting the pause—two, three, four, look up. “Hope everyone’s having a good time. And thanks for coming out to celebrate my second birthday of this year.” Laughs and applause, a couple of hooting whistles. “We thought since you’re all here, we’d make you our ‘victim test market.’ We’re releasing two versions of the ‘Skankin’ Around’ video next week, and we thought we’d show you the, uh, director’s cut.”

The tuxedo and designer dress crowd gave out a big frat-boy cheer.
“Whaaaa-heyyyyyyy!”

Steven coyly protested his innocence. “Don’t y’all be like that! I’m a decent guy. Ahem. Anyway, there are two versions. And we’re going to play the hot one for you tonight. A special video that’s only going to show in the clubs. Now I know you guys didn’t come out here to watch a screen. So I thought if I asked our choreographer, Luba Kauffmann, very nicely—naw, shit, I begged her—to round up some of the dancers, they could give us a live demonstration tonight!”

And the howling and clapping became thunderous.

“Give it up for Luba, people!” shouted Steven, pointing to a small skinny woman in black slacks and a zipped-up leather jacket. “She’s worked with and learned from the hottest ones in her trade, man—Marty Kudelka, Travis Payne. Send her some love, folks!”

Polite enthusiastic cheer for Luba, and you could just make out Steven shouting to kill the overheads. One of those enormous television projection screens for lectures came down, while all at once we saw a row of scantily clad dancers posed in the glow of red and blue spotlights.
Boom, bidda-boom-boom, boom-bidda-bidda-bidda
as the percussion for Steven’s new single roared out of the speakers, and the dancers snapped into action. If I had to describe Luba Kauffmann’s style of choreography, it had those impossible athletic moves that Justin Timberlake used in “Like I Love You,” only more sexed up, far more suggestive—

Steven was on the projector screen, nude on a king-size mattress with a brass rail headboard, fan blades spinning lazily overhead for the shot down as he sang out his angst. And, yes, a woman’s head obscuring his privates as she mimed fellatio. Clever boy that he was, he didn’t divide the attention of his audience, singing live in the shadows while people took in the raunchy image of him on the screen.

You’re just skankin’ around—

Image upon image upon image, no attempt at narrative, the director doing a couple of tribute shots to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” with guys wrestling in a downpour and Steven walking over to a blonde girl bathed in blinding white light on luminescent sheets. And then no-name actors were penetrating the girls in quite graphic displays. Back to Steven, walking away from the camera nude, girls in the audience squealing over his little ass as he went into a washroom and acted out shaving.

On the beat, the female dancers tore away crotch patches on their male partners—doing a Super Bowl Janet. Every one of the guys a hung horse. Back to the main theme as our live Steven marched into view at last only five feet from the impromptu circle of guests, his necktie gone, shirt unbuttoned to his navel.
Just skankin’ around…
And I have to admit there was something sexy about that white, immature flat chest with low pecs, his physique almost androgynous.

People couldn’t believe the spectacle. They stared open-mouthed. The girl dancers were shedding more clothes until they were completely naked, and the guys mimed stroking their pussies. On the screen, we were already into soft-core territory. Steven danced out of the spotlight, now in shadows but still identifiable as the naked dancers moved from the Timberlake staccato poses to more fluid, almost Spanish-style movements, bodies dipping and arching, writhing and breaking apart only to come together again.

It was a club video, so I knew it was going to go on this way for about ten minutes.

I took a walk.

I found a small area that looked like a “green room” with a couple of plush chairs and a television. This one was set up with a multiple DVD player, and there was a bookshelf stacked with videos and movie boxes instead of bound volumes. I found the remote and clicked on a video of Mya doing her little striptease and tap dance show.

I hope—you have—an appetiiiiiiite,
she sang.
So baby, will you come and spend the night!

Odell found me.

“If you’re the lead dancer for the tour, why aren’t you out there?” I asked.

“That one’s a little too rude for me,” he said. “I get to do a much more toned-down version when we hit the road.”

I smiled. “Lucky you.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Thinking,” I answered.

“Oh? ’Bout what?”

“How Brown Skin Beats and Steven wasted good money. Because that video director doesn’t have a clue what sexy is.” I pointed the remote at Mya on the screen. “This—this is sexy. There are some classic videos that are sexy as hell, and they beat anything going on out there.”

Odell came over and sat down on the arm of the chair. “Well, a few in the crowd seem to agree with you. Luther split.”

“He did? But I thought Luther and Steven were friends. Luther’s done some producing and writing for him, hasn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call them friends, but they get along all right. Hey, I’m probably giving you the wrong impression. Luther split because…It’s not that he didn’t like the show. He just ain’t crazy about how much
Erica
likes the show.”

“Ahhhhhh.”

I found it amusing that Luther felt thwarted by a display of Erica’s more than healthy libido. I liked Luther, liked him immediately, but he better get used to how Erica was.

Odell wanted attention. He was rubbing my shoulder, leaning in to me and saying, “Go on. You show me out of these what you think is sexy.”

So I flicked through the videos and gave a shout of victory as I discovered En Vogue’s anthem:
Whatta man, whatta man, whatta man, whatta mighty good man!
And like the amateur film critic I was, I tried to explain how those girls looked sexy as hell during the verses, all the while Odell keeping up his painfully obvious and relentless seduction.

“Can I sit down?”

I smiled. “Perfectly good chair over there.”

“
Or
you could sit in my lap.”

Oh, what the hell. He wasn’t Karen, but he was here. He had a nice angular face with his shaved head and smooth dark skin, and he struck me as gentle. I hadn’t been with anyone else since Karen, still wondering if my bad experiences with guys meant I hadn’t found the
right
guy, or if Nature had sent me those jerks to drive the message home. I gave up the chair and sat down on Odell’s knees. He linked his arms around my waist, and I ignored this, clicking the remote onto George Michael’s “Freedom.”

“Shit, who put this collection together?” he complained. “Some VH1 fool over fifty years old?”

“You’re telling me you don’t like Naomi Campbell up there?”

“I’m not saying that, no. Sure, this is sexy. I wouldn’t think you’d find it sexy.”

“What? Because I’m a girl? You’ve got a very narrow mind. Okay, yeah, they’re all models, but look at the details, the way the water beads on Cindy Crawford’s skin, how gorgeous that chick is when she pulls the sweater over her head—”

“You like that, huh?”

His fingertips on my leg, just brushing under the hem of the skirt. He was nuzzling my neck, trying to kiss me. I shook my head in a slow, gentle manner, and as his chest lifted for an exasperated huff, my hand covered his and moved his fingers farther up the inside of my thigh. His face betrayed its confused surprise, and he thought I was teasing him. He tried to kiss me again, and once again, I averted my head.

“I don’t understand you,” he whispered.

“You don’t have to,” I replied. “Just let this be enough for now…. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I guided his fingers to my pussy, feeling the tips of them through the layer of my cotton panties.

“Any other videos you like?”

“Mmmm,” I moaned, and struggled to fast-forward to Kelly Rowland in her red cap singing “Can’t Nobody.” I could feel Odell’s erection on my hip like an iron bar through his trousers, but it was his hand, his hand—

Trying to be nonchalant. “Check this out,” I said. “See, the way I figure, they were trying to go for the sexy kitten side of her with that video where she’s on the beach, but I think she’s drop-dead beautiful in that white number in the alley by the fire escape. Look how she bends her knees and sinks like that—”

See I’m the only one that can love you, babe, you’re not that big a foooool.

Kelly Rowland. And he was inside my panties now, whispering a joke about how he never knew videos could be like porn, two fingers burrowing inside me, and I gasped and then leaned back against him, saying Come on, it’s not porn, Snoop Dogg is porn, this is erotica. Ashanti now, riding her elephant, and Odell thought I was getting off on the shots of the poster-boy type walking in barefoot and shirtless to tickle Ashanti’s toes. I couldn’t tell him it was that lovely girl in the sun and the sea.
Aw baby when you come to me, I’ll make it so you’ll never leave
…Fingers slipping out of my vagina to play with my clit, then pushing inside me again, his other hand fondling my tits through the silk, and he was caught up in it now, in the minimalist arousal, a brief glimpse of bare skin, both of us watching intently, keep watching, keep watching…

And then Erica’s video came on for “Late Night Promises,” and I hadn’t seen it in a while. Erica singing, Odell doing things to me, and I couldn’t confide that I touched myself this way when I played my very own copy of it back in the dorm. “Lyrics.”

Erica in perhaps the only overtly sexy video she ever made, her first and last surrender to how she would be depicted. One of those too-handsome brothers from Central Casting played the boyfriend in this one. He gripped the tails of a white dress shirt she had on and knotted them under her breasts, leaving her midriff bare. Odell’s fingers moving faster, but keeping a steady rhythm, me panting as Erica sang: “Lyrics—” Keening now as I pressed the rewind button to get that achingly beautiful shot of her stomach again, the swell of one of her breasts, and it didn’t matter that I had seen my good friend naked before, changing clothes in gym or in her family bedroom, she was there on the screen, only two buttons done up on the dress shirt, and, oh, cut to a shot of Erica raising her lovely leg as she slips on pantyhose and, ohhh, cut to Erica after school years ago when I saw her date Alex Hardy unbutton a shirt just like this one and slip his hand in to feel her tit, the way she kissed him, her full lips like tiny red pillows, and
I knew
what I felt for her, what I had to avoid telling myself. Cut to the video with the “boyfriend” turning down Erica’s collar. A gesture with such a sexy, casual intimacy about it, then soft dissolve to her close-up for the bridge, and I looked down at my bush of tight pubic curls and the strong brown pad of flesh that extended from Odell’s thumb, his fingers inside me, wracked with sobs and shudders, coming against Odell’s hand as Erica tortured me with her voice on the screen….

Bling Bling

W
hat was supposed
to be three weeks of sightseeing and shopping and decompression in New York was rapidly turning into my internship in the pop music industry. Erica and I took in a few local wonders, The Met and a quick pop into Grand Central Station and Chinatown. And Erica’s new celebrity opened a couple of unusual doors for me as a tourist. I don’t think I could have afforded lunch at Gotham Bar & Grill if Brown Skin Beats hadn’t picked up the tab and Luther hadn’t invited me along—more “wooing” of the star to their side. My peek at Rockefeller Plaza included standing on the sidelines
on the inside
of the NBC studio while Erica was interviewed for the morning show. My friend. And all during these weeks, I helped dig through her apartment for lost sheet music or scribbled lyric notes. Mish, can you check my appointment book over on the desk? What did I do with that blue top? Shit, been looking for this for
ages
—thanks, Mish. They’re letting me have final say on these photos. Mish, don’t you think they’re a bit too sexy? My Dad’s gonna freak. (Erica nude but lying on her stomach, looking over her shoulder back at you somewhat imperiously, like the viewer had just intruded.) What do you think?
I trust you.

When the three weeks were nearly up, she said to me, “Listen, I’ll pay for the extension on your ticket. Just stay a few more days, will you, sweetie? It’s been so good having you here.”

“Erica, I’m over my budget. Hell, I’m broke. I keep this up, I’ll be dipping into my stash for next year’s course fees!”

“Girl, I’ll pick up the tab, don’t worry.”

“Look, I know you’re getting royalties, but you can’t be making that much.”

She offered a reassuring smile, celebrating her own private Christmas. “I’m playing tonight at Brownies, and I’m getting a nice fat wad of money for it. We’re good for a month—more than that, even. And the way that label is chasing us, I don’t think I’m going to have to pick up a check in a restaurant for days!”

Us.
I don’t think she meant it in an egomaniacal “royal we” sense, she was already beginning to think of me as part of her personal team. After two days of settling in, I was the one who woke up first in the guest bedroom and shuffled my way into the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker. My friend was putting me up, so I paid her back through little things. I wrapped a scarf over my “morning hair,” threw on some clothes and took a quick elevator ride down to hit the shop on the corner. It was a combination newsvendor and café with great apricot-cinnamon croissants and a supply of Erica’s morning reading:
The Times, Newsday, Daily Variety
and, on Thursdays,
The Village Voice
.

Before the star greeted the day, I found myself munching on scones and reading the papers myself. I marked things I knew she’d be interested in, a review of one of her concerts, or how Roc-A-Fella Records was doing in a business sense. I was her amateur press clipping service. I had her clothes for the day hung up and ready for her in the walk-in closet. Consciously, I told myself I was a good friend. Unconsciously? Maybe I wanted to be indispensable.

Erica was a sleeper who didn’t like to rise until “the crack of noon,” but I could usually roust her a bit beforehand. I remember stepping into her room one of those early days, and there she lay, the sheets and duvet pushed aside like crumpled clouds. I listened to her breathing for a moment. I took in the sight of her. The large eyes were closed, the sensual thick lips slightly open. I marvelled at her body, how it captivated me in ways that Karen’s didn’t. Karen’s petite frame and exotic glow were so different from this luscious girl lying here, all her features so full and ripe. Her dark heavy breasts spilled to the side, and the nipples were erect, making me wonder if she was aroused by a dream. I admired the curve of her waist leading to the slope of her beautiful bum, and as she stirred with a moan, her legs shifted. I could have reached out a finger. I could have teased that glorious clit in one stroke. I was tempted. I was terrified.

I did nothing. I patted her arm. Like a friend. And I said, “Hey, it’s 11:30.”

Never self-conscious about her body around me, she groaned and muttered a recital of desperately needed items like a doctor from an
ER
episode. “Nescafé in an IV push, 10 ccs of orange juice plus ten minutes of CNN…”

I socked her over the head with a pillow. “Oh, get up. You look too damn good for a rock ’n’ roll suicide.”

O
ne month turned into two. I went back for four days to Toronto to see my parents and have a passionate reunion with Karen, and then I was back in the Upper East Side, saying hello again to clothes and my hair curler left behind—like I lived there, not in a dorm in Connecticut. I don’t know exactly when the turning point was for her, but the clincher came when Erica, Luther and I were just hanging in her apartment one afternoon, finishing up lunch, and she tossed me the cordless phone. “Mish!” she hissed at me, as if the person could hear her right through the Caller ID display. I had to play palace guard to fend off Easy Carson.

She had been slowly starving him of his casual sex “video nights” in the nightclub, perhaps because the first album had taken off so much that she was getting a lot of media attention. And Steven Swann was an unlikely candidate for her to fool around with in front of that two-way glass. Easy, however, was holding on for dear life to Erica in a business sense—just as Luther predicted.

“Look, Michelle, I
need
her here, understand? Five days of rounding up the press and the TV guys, and I got my whole starting line-up for this appearance, you know? We got Trevor Nelson from England over here, man!”

Erica, listening in on the extension, vigorously shook her head:
No way.
But she already knew I understood. To put in an appearance with the other Easy Roller artists would now make her look small-time. Carson had Erica and one other R&B artist on the label, which meant most of his “line-up” would be his rappers who couldn’t break the charts. Luther muttered how he had his doubts Carson could bag Nelson anyway, let alone if the guy was in town.

“Easy,” I said in a calm voice, “if you got your whole crew, you won’t need Erica there.”

“Yes, I do! Come on, Michelle, she’s the top-seller for the whole fucking label—”

“Well, then, you didn’t plan this very well, now did you?” I argued. “You get all the media out, and you don’t check her schedule for—”

“
Fuck
that. What is this diva shit? All my artists promote
each other,
girl, you understand me? You don’t pick and choose what fucking publicity engagements we set up—”

“Where is that in her contract, Easy? You’re telling me she’s at your beck and call?”

That made him really lose his temper. “What am I talking to you for,
bitch
? You’re her fucking house guest! Put Erica on the line. Now.”

“Why don’t you stop calling me names and listen for a moment,” I said, doing my best to keep cool. “I can’t pass you over to Erica because she’s not h—”

“Well, where the fuck is she?”

“If you wait a minute,” I went on, “I’ll tell you. Erica took a flight back to Toronto. She wasn’t feeling well—her guts have been bugging her. We’re guessing maybe it’s her appendix or some—”

“Why didn’t she just check into a hospital here?”

“Oh, right! Like she can afford the health insurance you got in the land of the brave and the free and the incredibly poor? She’s Canadian, Easy! We got a
proper
national health system where we’re from, and instead of spending a few thousand bucks for an overnight stay, she can go home on her flyer points and talk to her GP
for free
.”

In the background, Luther and Erica’s expressions went from surprise to silently cheering me on.

“Okay, then gimme the number for her place in Canada,” he demanded.

“Get real, Easy!” I told him, beginning to enjoy myself. “I don’t have the number of every goddamn hospital in Toronto! She said she’d get back to me.”

“She’s not answering her mobile,” snapped Carson.

“They don’t allow you to have your mobile phone on in a hospital.”

“This is
bullshit
!” said Easy. “This is bullshit. You have her call me when you hear from her.” And he hung up.

Luther and Erica were both still looking at me in amazement and were now free to burst out laughing.

“You do know,” said Erica, “in case you ever get sick down here, you can just show doctors your Ontario Health Insurance card, right?”

“Yeah, but I bet Easy doesn’t know that.”

“Clever girl.”

In truth, I’d learned from the master. That whole business with Jamal Knight’s busy hands and Erica’s idea of the real estate swap opened my eyes quite a bit.

“She’s good,” said Luther. “She’s damn good.”

“Good enough to bring her on board?” she asked him.

This was like Mom and Dad talking about you at the dinner table when you’re seven. “Hey, what is all this?”

Luther shrugged at Erica and said, “Your friend, your idea.”

So I looked to Erica.

“Sweetie, what you going to do when you get back to Yale?” she asked me.

I laughed in mild confusion and disbelief. “Go to my courses, try to get an apartment for myself and live off campus. What? What are you two getting at?”

“What about after you graduate?” Erica pressed on. “You’re taking English, Michelle. I mean, what are you going to do with that?”

“You’re doing a great imitation of my mother, Erica, but what is all this?”

“Dummy. I’m saying you don’t
have
to go back. Why don’t you stay and work for me?”

I was flabbergasted. I truly was. Like I said, on an unconscious level, perhaps I was creating a job for myself, but I don’t know. When the offer came, I was sincerely surprised.

“Doing what?” I asked her. “Erica, I don’t know anything about the music business! What am I going to do?”

“What you’re doing now as my friend. You’re handling phone calls, getting my wardrobe set, helping me with stuff, keeping the idiots off my back. Mish, I’ll pay you to do it. As a matter of fact, Luther thinks we can actually get Brown Skin Beats to spring for your salary as part of the contract. You’ll get an office of
your very own
right downtown so that you can deal with all the suits, the marketing and the publicity guys. You divide your hours between here and there.”

“How can I stay? I’m a Canadian—”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Erica. “BSB has an office in London. On paper, you’re going to work there for a couple of months and then get transferred to New York, personally assigned to me.” She arched her eyebrows at me as she laughed and said, “I’ll be your boss! And, hey, I’ll be a great boss. Who else is going to pay you to go shopping?”

And that was how I stayed.

I
t was a case of Strange Days as we made the transition from Easy Roller Records over to Brown Skin Beats. The second album,
Pariah,
was supposed to be Easy’s coup, but Erica was merely running out her time on the clock with him. Luther produced it, and he worked often for BSB. One of the singles released from the album featured Steven without credit, a BSB-signed artist. And Easy’s tight fist on his wallet made BSB’s promotional team leap on another contractual loophole.

“Easy was never obliged to promote his artists,” explained Taurian Shaw, who fled the label to become a presenter on
The Cherry,
the weekend hip-hop chart show on the BET cable network. “I tell you, Easy Carson’s idea of promotion was to say, ‘Well, you can have a couple of gigs at the club.’
His
club. So he got you coming and going. You wanted to do a tour, he’d say, ‘You go find money for a tour, man. It’s your album.’ When Erica slipped away from him, I just told him you got what you fucking deserved, man, always thinking small-time.”

So just as I could tell Carson off, saying that Erica wasn’t obliged to show up for his grand event, so, too, he could opt out of backing a tour for the second album. But with Erica hitting it big, he was scrambling like mad to organise a tour. Too late. Brown Skin Beats did it already. They couldn’t use the name of the album in newspaper advertisements and posters, or play clips on television and radio commercials, but it didn’t matter. They pushed
Erica Jones
in name. Once Erica got up on the stage, she could sing whatever the hell she liked. They were her songs. And the thinking at Brown Skin Beats was, fine, let Carson rake in his cut from the tour for
Pariah
. We’re pushing our girl who has already signed with us for her next three albums.

And in the background was Luther, always. Tall and charming and with an energy to him, a vibration, like the kind she brought into a room. Those sleepy eyes and that somewhat crooked smile in his
café au lait
face. His powerfully toned arms doing his little
Stomp
percussion thing at the hotel party. Funny how Luther and Steven both dressed sharp, but had their different approaches. Steven didn’t mind being a clothes horse for the big designers, but he still picked his wardrobe off the rack. Luther said he got enormous satisfaction picking out a fabric from a bolt of cloth and having it tailored to him. And it showed. He always looked crisp and sharp, and despite his rat-a-tat drumming when bored, he sat down in a chair with a panther’s grace. I’ve seen other girls look at him across a room. A woman would swallow hard. She’d scope the joint, checking to see if he was alone then move in—

And get nowhere. I inevitably drifted over to him at these parties. “Luther, I’m a wallflower because that’s me. What’s your excuse? I saw that girl. She’s gorgeous!”

“You have her then, Michelle.”

“Maybe I will.”

I don’t know why, but in those days, I often made sly references like this in front of him. I felt safe. I sensed that Luther wouldn’t have behaved weird around me had I come out of the closet, and when I eventually did, he proved me right.