Soul Siren (18 page)

I
showered in his washroom, and he stood in the doorway, naked, watching me through the clear glass sliding door. He sat down on the toilet, and I was busy lathering my legs, barely noticing that his hand was suddenly full of sticky lube. He was masturbating, his cock reddening as his fist shot up and down with an urgent rhythm. I stopped what I was doing for a moment to watch, pressing my tits and my pubic mound up against the glass, fascinated because he needed to come again. He shot a ribbon of milky spunk across his hairless white chest and sagged against the toilet cabinet. Strange. He hadn’t wanted to come into the shower with me. He didn’t ask me to come out and fool around again. He had made himself come in seconds just from watching me.

“Now tell me. Why’d you do it?”

Naked and sticky, his eyes half-lidded in that peculiar drunken afterglow of masturbation, he looked at me and seemed to be taking my measure. The man-child with the MBA who could give the Wall Street sharks a run for their money. Then his face brightened, and he was gracious in victory, quite willing to be candid now that the deed was done. His voice dropped all its feeling. Like shedding a skin. Fucking reptile.

“Do you know how many albums
both
of us sold the week that Erica broke the news of our engagement?”

Jesus.

“You know how much play
Drum
got on MTV Base that week? No, no—better point. You know how much play they gave
Slummin’
on MTV Base? They’ve put it in the Hip-Hop category for the charts as well as Pop.”

The water was still running. I stood behind the glass door in his shower. I was like an outsider in a rainstorm looking through the window of an exclusive restaurant. Only there was nothing palatable in there. Cascades of lather were still rolling down my belly, and there were suds over my hands as I unconsciously squeezed the bar of soap. Steven was hard again. Horny as hell. Horny and oversexed even as he explained his nifty little plan that exploited my friend and employer. A flood of images played in my head as I stared at him, trying to imagine how Erica would handle this confrontation. My beautiful friend could be so much stronger yet occasionally so much more vulnerable than me. I thought of the way she played Easy like a keyboard in his nightclub. I soaped up my breasts. Steven was jerking himself off again.

“You wouldn’t just do this for album sales,” I argued.

For a moment, he wasn’t with me, his eyes closed, his cock hard and thick as his left hand cupped his balls. “No…” Then eyes open, not looking at my face but at my lathered nipples. “No…But the cred I got.”

“Credibility?”

Bastard.

“You got to be shitting me,” I said, half to myself. “Why didn’t you just
write
something that talked about the same stuff she does? Or just sing one of Luther’s songs?”

“Guilt by…association, baby.” Laughter mixed with a grunt of pleasure. “Who is gonna believe a white kid from nice upscale suburban Santa Fe is sincere when he sings about the poor of Brooklyn, huh? You look at me, you think I can pull the Springsteen? All that aching social conscience shit? I keep my mouth shut, and I must care because
I’m with her
.”

“And now you’re not.”

He came again, gentler this time, his cum oozing down his penis, and I saw the endorphin rush snap him to attention.

“And now I’m not,” he echoed. “But it’s all good. The numbers don’t lie. And neither did I, Michelle. Not once.”

I turned the taps off and slid back the glass panel.

“You fuck with me on this, you’ll lose, Michelle,” he warned. “It’s not too difficult to leak the word about her skankin’ around.”

“Please don’t quote your songs, Ste—”

“Michelle, I
know
you paid them or hired them or made them go away. Her guys. Her casual flings. I’ll just put in a higher bid to bring ’em all back.”

“Wasn’t thinking of it,” I answered, towelling myself off. “I just wanted to know why you’re doing this. Erica made her own bed with you, and she’ll have to lie in it. Where’s that blouse you promised me?”

I let the damp towel fall to the floor of the bathroom, and damn if he didn’t get hard again. I walked out, crossing back to the main lounge, where my panties and my skirt still lay on the floor. As I finished zipping up the skirt, Steven came out and handed me a red top. Sure enough, it was Erica’s, one she’d bought while shopping with me at Bloomingdale’s. I put it on, not caring that my nipples poked through the thin blouse and cast dark shadows under the fabric. He’d made shreds of my bra, so I’d have to go without. As I squeezed my feet into my shoes and slung my purse over my shoulder, he called out to me.

“Mish! Catch.”

Tossing me a set of keys. I caught them out of reflex, staring at him from the door. He stood naked in the living room, his cock still half-erect, wearing that naughty teen hunk smirk of his.

“You were right,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “You’re a
fantastic
fuck. Let’s party again sometime.”

I slammed the door behind me.

I
went for a welcome-home drink that night with Luther, and he told me stories about his stay in London. He said that after a few weeks, just before he got his major producing gigs for the British artists, he checked out of his hotel and went to stay with a new friend up in Hackney, sleeping on the floor of a spare bedroom with a borrowed duvet. He said it was as if he were going into hard training for a sport event of his own creation. He had to let life there permeate him, let go of tourist urges and old habits and breathe in curry smells, diesel, stale beer and brick. He said he could sense new textures in the music he wanted to write. He wanted to work on a big canvas, not another
Drum,
but, sure, his own landmark album in a way. He couldn’t stop smiling, his face aglow with the enthusiasm of the convert.

“Luther, you talk about it like you’re a UNICEF worker in the Third World!” I kidded him.

“But it is in a way, and they don’t see it!” he laughed. “They got these, um, what do they call ’em? Council taxes. Say you rent a place. You’re paying this council for your street upkeep, your trash collection, you know, the whole infrastructure thing. It’s not just folks who own houses or property, and I got friends there telling me how you might rent a flat and pay more in council tax than a guy with a mortgage!”

“So this is Socialism?” I asked. Okay, I was ignorant. And naïve.

“Don’t you get it, Mish? They’re not putting everyone on an even level, they’re sticking it to the down-and-outs in a back alley way! The poor dumb bastards rioted against what they called a Poll Tax years ago, and this is just the same thing with a different name. It just kills me when they get self-righteous about the rich and poor in America. I say, look at yourselves, man. Look at these row houses with not a stitch of green grass out front. Do you know you got to pay a
fee
to own your television there? You believe that shit? They say it’s to support the BBC. And I tell ’em yeah, but I don’t watch BBC1, man, ’cause it’s shit. What do I want to
pay
to watch snooker or ten-year-old movies from over here for? They don’t care. There’s a
meanness
to the place.”

“The way you talk about, it sounds like you didn’t have a good time at all,” I said, a bit confused.

“Are you kidding?” he answered. “I had a blast! No, this is the thing. It took me out of myself. It gives you perspective. You go over to Europe, some other country, and you try to write music about it, but you can’t escape yourself. And so you end up creating something unique but still
American,
you know what I’m saying?”

He shrugged and gave a shy half-smile, embarrassed that he had slipped into a lecture. “And you, umm—” Quick cough to clear his throat. “You discover what’s important to you.”

He speared the pecan pie with his fork and took a bite, waving to me as if to ask what did I think?

I said, “You haven’t asked about Erica.” I paused then went for it. He’d find out eventually anyway. “Steven’s broken off their engagement.”

He looked shocked. “He did?”

I nodded. “It hasn’t hit the media yet. I think Steven’s waiting for the press to notice they’re not showing up together at places, and then he’ll make a statement.”

“And Erica?”

“She doesn’t want to make a public comment. Well…I talked her out of it.”

Luther frowned for a moment, his expression betraying a chivalrous flare of anger over how Swann must have hurt her, and then his face was calm, unreadable. He didn’t look on Steven’s exit as an opportunity for him.

“I had a lot of time to think about Erica. Get some distance and turn it all over in my head. I think I understand a little more about what drives her.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to share?” I prodded.

Luther was cryptic. “Not now. We’ll see if I’m right. Best thing I can do for Erica is leave her alone. We’re attracted to each other, but…I’ll keep it professional. Otherwise we’ll just give ourselves a world of pain.”

I settled for that answer for now. I had my own suspicions. I think Luther was a lot deeper than your average guy whose big revelation for his woman would be:
Oh, we’re mirrors, we’re the same.
I don’t think he had her completely figured out. But he had found a piece of her psyche on his adventure in London. Sleeping on the floors of friends’ apartments, watching the football yobs march through the street like so many over-aged teenage boys, feeling the waves of quiet resentment over being black, being American, being
there,
he was alive, awake in a way that pulled him out of his streetwise complacency with Manhattan’s roughest shocks.

And Erica: auditioning lovers and settling on Steven to escape the mundane prevalence of ordinary living. Because if you can create something beautiful it’s a high that surpasses all others, that convinces you that
you matter
. She’d had crap jobs waiting on tables or working a telemarketing phone for all of five minutes after high school. No more anticipation of success—she was successful. She’d made it. But we still crave anticipation, we need it, and we will go looking for our personal suspense in lovers, art, work, anything to shock us out of our wide-eyed sleep.

I know he was still in love with her. It was all there in how he talked about her, however briefly, and his own work. He had defined his own restlessness and taken the cure. She was with him in London without knowing it, touching him in everything he did when he sat down at a keyboard or walked into a studio. But she—and I—didn’t know yet if he had left her there.

“You told me you wrote a whole bunch of music,” I reminded him politely. “You going to play me any of it? We going to hear some of it soon?”

He shook his head and gave me a sad smile. “No.”

T
hree days later, I changed my life irrevocably when I went back to visit Steven. I can recall actually sitting hours beforehand at a table in the Dean & Deluca café on Prince Street and fingering the spare set of keys he’d given me. A special security key plus one Yale key for the top lock. I considered changing my plan. There had to be alternatives, but I couldn’t see any, and time was an important factor. It wouldn’t take long for the media to get a whiff of blood in the air, their intuition kicking in that something had happened. If I were going to pull this off and save her, I would need to do it soon.

And so I put the keys back in my purse. I intended to use them.

When my own personal “zero hour” hit, I used one of the last semi-clean Bell payphones you can find in the Big Apple. I called Steven’s townhouse to make sure he was home—I didn’t dare use my mobile in case of any permanent trace record later. He answered frostily, and just from his tone, I knew he must be in his home studio. Steven always liked the option of re-recording his vocals in his own time in his own space, no pressure from engineers or producers or anyone else when he was at home. This would be perfect. I hung up without saying a word and looked for the nearest subway station for the journey from SoHo to the Upper East Side.

It was clear he wasn’t paying attention to his security monitors as I let myself in, and I mentally patted myself on the back again for my good luck. I wouldn’t need to chit-chat now or make up an excuse. I could cross the living room to his desk, and I won a bet I had with myself that Steven would be careless. Yes, indeed. The drawer with the gun was unlocked.

But no gun.

Shit.

Come on, I thought, my heart pounding. Where would he leave it? Knowing his huge ego and casual sense of in-vulnerability, it would probably be in plain view. From where I stood, I could see the little red bulb he’d had installed that meant he was recording, a warning for any house guests staying over. His studio had all the bells and whistles, right down to professional soundproofing, not just the layers of cork board Easy Carson had stapled up in the back room of his nightclub. Come on, I told myself, you don’t have forever.

Where the hell was it?

I looked to the designer coffee table, each of its legs a gaudy replica of a Fabergé egg, the top a sheet of thick glass with a small trick chamber for a pen—no kidding!—that had a diamond stylus. Celebrities he liked could autograph his coffee table. I looked to the bookshelves. A copy of
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,
a copy of Shelby Foote’s three-volume set on the American Civil War, still in its shrink-wrap and probably a gift. Damn it. Where…? Then I spotted it resting on the stereo cabinet.

It looked different from the last time I’d seen it, but from its size and weight, it had to be the .45. You would think I’d know, having been intimate with the damn thing. As I checked the magazine and shoved it back home, there was a metallic
clack
that never penetrated the studio, and then I snapped a round into the chamber. I tossed the gun into my handbag and took a deep breath.
Just don’t be an idiot,
I warned myself. When you pull it out, make sure you release the safety. Do it quick. Do it without hesitation.