She opened the wallet and surveyed the library of plastic within. ‘That’ll do nicely,’ she said.
‘Get a good suit, some cashmere, some decent handbags. Don’t bother with the West Side – stenos shop there. Walk when you can. If you get lost, or hit a bad barrio, just keep moving; the neighbourhoods change every ten blocks.’ He sniggered. ‘Or six months, thanks to the yuppies. The Bronx is up and its batteries are down. Don’t come back till you’ve spent a year’s wages. Now kiss me. Chastely. Come back before dinner and I’ll take you out.’
‘The Rainbow Room?’
‘What? Art deco and cigarette girls and the assembled media of the Western world watching us? Act your age, girl, not your dress size. No, somewhere dark. We’ll see a bit of local colour. You love local colour, don’t you?’ He laughed and patted her hair. ‘Run along now.’
She went into her bedroom, pulled on some Barely Black Lycra tights, some plain black Emma Hope heels and a charcoal wool Joseph button-through. She looked at herself in the mirror as she dabbed a little Amazone cologne – the Designer Dyke scent, a predictable present from Zero (‘Duty free. The story of my life’) – at the base of her throat. The pulse there was jumping.
Local colour. Tobias Pope wasn’t interested in local colour – at least not when it was vertical. Tobias Pope said that all local colour was Nicespeak for foreign poor people, and foreign poor people, pigmentation apart, were all the same from the Bronx to Bombay, Bologna to Birmingham; they conned you out of money and sold you salmonella. He was interested in one aspect of local colour. And that was the horizontal hold.
Never mind. It was expecting too much to think he’d brought her here for the sole purpose of shopping. Never mind; come on down, little Susan Street from Nowhere-on-Sea, into the city that never sleeps or says sorry, armed with a collection of cards that say more about you than money ever could – that you’re whoring for the boss, for a start. She laughed at her own lyricism and stepped out on to the street, ready to shop till she dropped.
On Madison Avenue, at the soft-tech, Italo-Japanese, black-beige Armani shop, she bought black label, and at Krizia she bought sportswear that would have had a nervous breakdown if one did anything more rigorous than hail a cab in it. She avoided Walter Steiger but did succumb to a pair of pewter, lace and plastic Vittorio Riccis for Zero. She snapped up a brace of six-hundred-dollar sweaters at Sonia Rykiel and half a dozen pairs of cashmere tights at $178 a throw at Fogal, thinking of their less extortionate cousins that David Weiss had wiped his velvet cosh on that night over the dustbins behind the Kremlin Club. She wondered what he was doing, then stopped. It hurt too much. She found Ylang Ylang to be Butler and Wilson by another name and didn’t see why she should transport across continents what she could pick up in her lunchtime, but at Helen Woodhull she bought an armload of jewellery that could have been handed down from the Mrs Pope who came over on the Mayflower. She bought forty-dollar earrings that looked as though they cost four thousand at Gale Grant’s and four-thousand-dollar earrings that looked as though they’d cost forty at Back In Black.
On Fifth Avenue she ignored Gucci as a matter of principle, bought lots of Micheal Kors black at Bergdorf’s and Donna Karan cashmere and a Rifat Ozbek tuxedo dress for under four hundred dollars at Sak’s. On East 57th Street she bought a Chanel suit, against her better judgement, for just over two thousand dollars, a three-thousand-dollar handbag at Prada and, after browsing in La Marca for two minutes, understood completely why it was Cher’s favourite shop, made her excuses and left.
On Park Avenue she went to Martha, where all first ladies hope to go when they die, and flicked through the Bill Blass, Galanos, David Cameron and Carolina Herrera before deciding she didn’t want to look like any First Lady, living or dead, and ignoring Pope’s advice she took a cab to West 56th Street where she bought a Norma Kamali dress as blue-black as a bruise and tighter than Nancy Reagan’s smile. She self-consciously ordered a Manhattan at the Four Seasons and caught a cab down to Wall Street past the new, beautiful, terrifying skyscrapers: the AT & T, CitiCorp, the Woolworth Gothic and the CBS Black Rock. Then she made her way to the penthouse on the East River, to a man more violent than all the drug dealers in Alphabet City and more vicious than all the art hags in TriBeCa, wondering what was on the menu this evening.
The venue for the menu was a small, unmarked club on the despised Upper West Side, and the proprietress was a woman with the profile of Nefertiti and the figure of Jane Russell – back in the days when men had physiques and women had figures instead of everyone being a body. Tobias Pope left Susan in her hands with a laugh and a leer. ‘Maria, Susie. Susie, Maria.’
‘What’s happening?’ she whispered.
‘Well, my dear, you’ve had the shopping – now for the fucking. Don’t worry – it’s the safest sort of sex there is.’ He looked into her eyes, laughed again and disappeared into a long, bare room furnished only with a chair and a long window which covered all of one wall.
The window corresponded with a mirrored wall, Susan calculated as she followed Maria into the bar proper. As a bar it was nothing to write home about – unless your sisters were raving dykes. Because every patron of the bar was a woman.
And hanging from the ceiling was a naked girl, suspended by the wrists and ankles as if in a swallow dive, her long blonde hair hiding her face. She had a strange dark mark on her left thigh, a miniature pineapple, and her small breasts, pointed with sharp pink nipples, were the lowest part of her.
As Susan stared, a middle-aged woman in leather reached up casually with a riding crop and flicked them, never missing a beat of her conversation with a cool, business-suited redhead. ‘Oh yeah, Julian’s definitely lost it now. He should never have left Mary . . .’
Maria turned to Susan and smiled a smile that could have kept the Titanic out of trouble. ‘Like what you see?’
‘Very nice.’ She kept cool. ‘Could I have a drink, do you think?’
‘Sure.’ A consensual path cleared as Maria walked to the bar, not quite a swagger, with her arm around Susan’s waist. ‘What’ll you have?’
‘A vodka martini, straight.’ Straight, that’s a laugh. About the only thing in this bar that is.
‘Set ’em up, Joanna,’ said Maria to the bartender. ‘My usual.’ She was given a glass of milk with an olive on a stick, which she ate, gesturing vaguely. ‘See anything you especially like?’
Susan kept her eyes rigidly from the human mobile. ‘I love your banquettes.’
‘Well, let’s go and utilize one, shall we?’ They took their drinks and sat down. ‘So, you work for Tobias?’
‘Yes. In London.’
‘Right.’ Maria nodded thoughtfully. As an after-thought she added, ‘Do you like to eat pussy?’
‘Who, me?’ Feeling naive, Susan recovered herself with an effort, though goodness knew what she had been expecting. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes in the past.’
‘Didn’t we all, in our wild youth? Before we discovered the masochistic appeal of men, and made life complicated for ourselves?’ Maria laughed easily, her expensive teeth flashing ultra-violet in the stage-managed dark. ‘And are you still living in your wild youth, Susie?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes on weekends.’
‘I thought so. Strip.’
‘What?’
‘Strip. Just leave your clothes with me and I’ll guard them as if they were my own.’ She twinkled. ‘Which, as a fellow protégée, they are in a way. Take off every stitch – jewellery, the lot.’
‘Are you crazy?’ But even as she said it, she feared that Maria was an all too sane mistress of the situation.
Maria smiled without irritation and gestured at the long mirror. ‘OK. Tobias says strip.’
She sat and thought for a moment, hearing her heart beat. She thought about what she’d been through, and then she thought about where she was going. Then she reached up, her eyes closed, and unwound her dress from her neck, her breasts, her hips. It came off like a black bandag
e on a dry wound. Which was just what she was. She sat there in her shoes, tights and Back In Black earrings, thinking.
‘All off,’ said Maria, looking at her watch.
‘Don’t rush me,’ said Susan slowly. People were looking. Madonna Ciccone was singing ‘Dress You Up’, which was obviously someone’s idea of a joke.
Maria sighed. ‘Susie, I’m not trying to get into your pants. I’m trying to do a job, which is to get you out of them. Now strip.’
She thought about Pope behind the mirror, laughing at her reserve, relishing her past, weighing up her future. She was fucked if she’d buck at this fence. She wriggled out of her tights, kicked off her heels.
‘Earrings off.’
She took them off one by one, laid them gently on the table. Then she looked into Maria’s eyes. The nearness and beauty of the strange woman made her realize with a jolt that she was aroused and ready to fuck.
The sensual side of Susan Street was as strong as ever and at that moment she wanted nothing more – well, maybe the editorship – than for this woman, Maria, to push her down on the dog-ended floor and take her by hand or mouth or dildo. But that part of Maria had died a long time ago, assassinated by necessity, and she merely looked at Susan approvingly as if at a child that has eaten its greens.
‘Good girl.’ She tipped the vodka martini into the milk and drained it in one. ‘Same again, please.’
Susan stood up and smoothed down her hair nervously; Maria pulled a tiny comb from her breast pocket and, incredibly, began to fluff up Susan’s pubic hair maternally. ‘There you go,’ she said after a moment. ‘Perfect.’
Susan walked out from behind the table and padded down the three steps from the banquette to the bar. The room was very quiet. Madonna had stopped singing. The whole club, more than thirty women, was looking at her.
Thirty women and one man . . .
The crowd parted a little, but not for long. As she reached the bar, the black glass cold against her stomach, they closed around her. One hand explored the contours of her behind. Another hand came around and tightened possessively on her right breast. A knee was thrust between her thighs from behind. And then a hand slid in straight to the meat of the matter.
‘A vodka martini, please. And a glass of milk.’
Joanna was a pretty girl, a lot like Beatrice Dalle everywhere but her upper lip, where she bore a distinct resemblance to Charlie Chaplin. She pouted reflexively. ‘Vodkatini, milk. Right.’ She filled the glasses expertly and before Susan could move or protest, picked them up and flung them, milk first, at her bare breasts.
At this signal the crowd moved as one. She was pushed down on to her back; someone sat on her face, though whether for kicks or to obscure her view of the participants she couldn’t decide. She couldn’t see or speak or hear; her senses were all in her body as mouths sucked at her breasts, different mouths taking turns and being wrenched urgently away to be replaced by other, rougher mouths. Talk about fast food. When it seemed the whole bar had had their hors d’oeuvres, they went for the main attraction, taking her with their hands and mouths till she lost count. Then she was ridden by half a dozen women wearing the longest, hardest dildoes imaginable; two seemed filed to a point, and one spurted something warm and thick into her.
She also lost count of the times she came. When one of the women on the other end of the dildoes tried to withdraw, Susan cried out and gripped her by the hips, pulling her back in. The whole bar cheered as one, triumphantly yet good-naturedly, their applause ringing in her ears as she blacked out.
When she came to she was being hoisted up into the air by her wrists and ankles. Her dark hair fell over her face as she hung in a suspended swallow dive, her nipples the lowest point of her.
She opened her eyes and looked at the new girl on the floor, the girl who had been hanging from the ceiling when she came in. The insatiable dominatrixes were swarming over her like flies on a Danish pastry. Susan looked at the straight blonde hair, the ski tan, the slight cast in one eye and the sweet, insecure, ecstatic smile in the split-second before the beautiful, cruel-looking Chinese girl who had been sitting on her face took her position once more, bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘I’ll sit this one out’.
And she knew, in that split-second, that she was looking at the double life of Michèle Levin.
THIRTEEN
Not only had Rupert Grey been ready for the world, but a good part of its population aged between twelve and twenty had been ready and waiting for him. With the decline of the first wave of gender benders, a whole generation of troubled young things in love with their best friends had been left up the creek without an icon. Rupert Grey was the answer to both their prayers and the glaring space on their bedroom walls. His voice, though small, was sweet and true – and his video did him no harm at all. Rupert lying in bed, naked to the waist and covered with a black silk sheet, smoking Sobranies sultrily. Rupert in his shower, swallowing and spitting out shower spray in achingly slow motion. Rupert eating a banana for breakfast and mooching around an expensively spartan waterfront loft (‘Can’t keep away from the docks, can he?’ sniggered Zero when she saw it) miming ‘Too Young’.
He went to number one in Britain, Greece and Germany and top ten in France, Italy and Israel. He flew around Europe miming on TV shows, bought a lot of new clothes in South Molton Street, drank pink champagne until he was sick of it and refused all interviews, on Gary Pride’s advice.
‘The Garbo approach,’ said Gary Pride confidingly to Susan as they sat in the Groucho, having met by accident, she waiting for Zero and he for one of the long line of record producers he was engaged in auditioning for Rupert’s next record. Since Rupert’s success Gary’s attitude to her had changed considerably, and he greeted her like an old friend every time they ran into each other. Just how old he didn’t seem to have remembered, for which she was fervently grateful.
‘More like Rin Tin Tin,’ she laughed.
He laughed too, slyly, looking around mischievously. ‘Steady, gel. Don’t bite the bender that feeds me. I like your frock. Don’t let Rupee see it, he’ll want one.’
‘Thanks.’ She was wearing a tight, short-skirted pillarbox-red suit by Myrene de Prémonville. ‘I liked your Face interview.’
He nodded, pleased. ‘Yeah, it’s best if I handle the verbals. Rupe’s a cute kid, bless him, but the man upstairs was taking a tea-break when they put the reckoning gear in.’ The vow of silence he had thrust upon Rupert fitted in nicely with Gary Pride’s plans to be the Mediavelli of the Nineties, a big-time manipulator who aimed to be both more famous and more enduring than his stars.
‘What’s the next record, then? Another cover? “My Boy Lollipop”, “Bend It”, “Where The Boys Are”?’
Gary’s face darkened. ‘He wants to do his own stuff.’
‘Oh, no.’ Susan was genuinely disappointed. This moment was the one every manager, record company and genuine pop fan alike dreaded; the first stirrings of creativity in their young charges like some malign tumour coming to fruition.
‘Happens to all of them,’ Gary said sagely. ‘Though this one’s going to have a fucking fight on his hands with me, I can tell you. He’ll be back on the game before you can say AIDS if he plays up. Look, there’s your mate.’ He looked critically at Zero, who was peering short-sightedly into the club, absent-mindedly twisting her tail around her finger. He liked bleached blondes in tight dresses. ‘She’s a smart tart. What a waste of talent. What’s that bit of old rope she’s got stuck on her bum?’
‘It’s her tail,’ said Susan defensively.
He looked at her and laughed, holding his hands up in front of him.
‘OK, OK, I’m sorry. I only asked. When’s the wedding?’
‘Zere! Over here!’
Zero saw them, and pretended she had been peering around merely in the interests of networking. She stopped at three sofas on the way to whisper in the ears of various sharp-suited women and complete the illusion. Finally she got to their tabl
e. ‘Hello, bach. Hello, Mr Prince. How’s it hanging?’
‘Going up with a bullet every time I look at you, Zero.’
‘Yeah, but what goes up must come down, isn’t that so? And in your case I’ve heard it’s fast forward.’
He laughed. ‘You got great legs, gel. Legs are a girl’s best friend, aren’t they? But even best friends have to part some time.’
Zero looked at Susan. ‘Did you bring this in on the heel of your shoe?’
‘Don’t worry, I’m going. I see my dinner. KEITH!’ Gary Pride stood up and waved at an anonymous face whose way with a control panel had made him a household sound. ‘Be right over! Bye, girls. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’
‘What, think?’
He laughed and left.
Zero stood looking after him. ‘I don’t know how you can stand to be seen with that. He’s got tackiest rep in this town.’
‘You shouldn’t be late, then. What’s wrong?’
‘Oh, nothing. He dropped Donna when Rupert Grey took off, and she pissed off back to Paris. I was having a bit of a thing with her. I think I could have liked her, you know?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Forget it.’ She looked at Susan and smirked. ‘I’ll tell you one thing. Don’t open your mouth too wide.’
‘Why not?’
‘Someone might stick a letter in it!’ Zero cracked up.
‘Very funny.’
Ambition Page 18
