Soul Siren

by Aisha Duquesne

  “No, I’m kidding. We had to settle for Elton’s ‘significant other.’ Or at least he claimed to be that guy, I can’t be sure. Don’t know how he heard about it. Couldn’t get him out the door fast enough. Fuuuuuck! Come on. You want something to eat? Sure?”

  Slaps on his back and handshakes as he guided me through. Pink bounded up and gave Steven a hug, offering me the quick finger-fold wave, and then she was off in the crowd of celebrators. There were at least two Ms. Js, the high legend arriving with her hair in ringlets, wearing Givenchy and a large entourage and sweeping in for a few minutes, and then the party hit a Lo, who poked her head in at the door and saw that the legend had possession of the field. She quickly left. Better than Mariah, who I was told wasn’t even allowed up. “Why should we let her in?” said one record executive. “She’s turned down our label too many times!”

  We passed a young star of Scrubs talking to someone about how he was setting up his own production company to develop scripts. Sitting on a pool table was a legend of Seventies R&B leading three session musicians in a game of “I Spy” with Sambuca shooters. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. Steven played good sport and downed an offered shot in a single gulp, arching his eyebrows and smiling at me as if he were the indulgent father of them all. We went down a hallway, and he opened the door next to a wall of frosted glass. “And we got a pool here…”

  Which hardly described it. There were two pools, both heated, according to Steven. A modest regular one, and then an oversized Jacuzzi, and the Jacuzzi was full, no one wearing suits. A chorus of “Hi, Steve!” and seven hands shot up to wave in greeting. My host made a poor joke about how MTV was due by later, but they probably wouldn’t be allowed in here. I saw a huddle of kneeling white and brown bodies on the wet stone, and in my ignorance, I actually thought someone might be having a heart attack. Steven cocked his chin for me to go and have a look—he wasn’t worried. I walked over.

  There was an Asian girl on her back, her head resting in the lap of a white man, and when she turned her face I could see she was a supporting star of a prime-time drama. Since there are very few Asian girls on network TV, you go ahead and guess which one. A black guy was pounding his dick into her, and he had one of the longest I’d ever seen, which figured because I was told later he really was a porno star. She’d taken him on a dare, and now she was screaming until her cries bounced off the echo chamber walls of the pool room. She couldn’t care less if anyone watched, her knees up, her small breasts jiggling. She had a nice little body.

  Steven caught my look.

  I pulled my eyes away and tried to be cool, but it’s one thing to read about star shenanigans and another to see them happen. “You get yourself a couple of Roman columns and pass out the white bedsheets for togas, and you’re all set.”

  He rolled his eyes and laughed. “Come on! It’s not that bad. It’s a party. You’re going to Yale, aren’t you? You telling me you never go to any wild parties off campus, Mish?”

  Mish. Only Erica and a few close friends ever called me that. The boy had done his homework.

  “I’m just kidding, Steven,” I answered. “I’m not a prude, really. Hey, when is Erica going to show?”

  “Tell you what, I’ll go phone the Easy Roller studio and check. We’ll see what we can do for you.” The way he patted my arm belonged to a flight attendant off to fetch an extra pillow. “Look, mingle, and I’ll catch up and let you know. Don’t worry.”

  I smiled politely and put some distance between me and the pool room. To hell with it, I could use another drink. Minutes kept passing, and I was hit on by three guys, each of whom started off the conversation by saying, “Hi, I’m Bill/Frank/Sean, I’m a vice-president…” When each one found out I was a mere college student, the guy would take it as his cue to rattle off the list of celebrities he knew. Who talked like this? The artists I met were on permanent scope, guy or girl, their heads bobbing neutrally to whatever I said while their eyes went tick-tick-tick around the room. I could say this for Steven Swann. He focussed his attention on you when you spoke with him.

  I walked into what looked like a display kitchen of some kind, with two large serving islands in the middle, spotless gas burners and immaculate trays of silverware. This room, too, was wired for sound, and there was a guy in here alone with his back to me. He wasn’t listening to the Goo Goo Dolls playing in the main foyer, he had on this salsa jazz stuff. And he was playing along with the percussion. He was the percussion, more like it. He got sounds out of wooden spoons you wouldn’t believe. He made an entire orchestra out of the hanging pots and skillets. I must have watched him for a full minute.

  Thoroughly enjoying himself, he didn’t hear me come in and only stopped when he turned and saw me. Then he burst into a loud self-deprecating laugh.

  “I was bored,” he explained.

  “What are you? From Stomp?”

  “I used to be,” he said, and I saw that he wasn’t kidding. Yes, he was. He’d been with the American homegrown production of the show a long time ago. He thrust out his hand for me to shake. “I’m Luther Banks.”

  It was strange. Steven Swann and Luther were both about to become very important figures in my life, and they were poles apart in terms of physical looks and natural charisma. Steven had a model’s beautiful blankness, but Luther’s café au lait face was all about character. A half-moon scar, very faint, just above his right eyebrow, his black hair perfectly cut, a neatly trimmed goatee that framed a crooked smile. His eyes, people said, always looked a bit sleepy, half-lidded, but Erica would later remark they were bedroom eyes but not a pair that wanted you, more like they held an expression as if you’ve both just finished the dirty deed together. Those eyes took everything in. Steven Swann played on his fresh-faced delicacy. Luther had a masculine ruggedness to him that implied a natural quiet leadership. I liked him almost immediately.

  I shook hands with him and said, “Hi, I’m—”

  “Michelle Brown. Yeah, Erica said you were coming.”

  “Everyone’s expecting me, but no one can tell me when she’ll get here. Hey, how could you tell who I am?”

  “I don’t want to be rude, but you’re kind of dressed down, and not in an arch, designer ‘street’ way.”

  I was back with embarrassment as my theme of the afternoon. “I didn’t know I’d be coming to this. People keep asking me what I’m working on, and I have to say Jane Austen. English lit as a minor.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I put in two years at Juilliard, and I’m treated like a Martian. The new democracy in music! These days everybody wants to be a DJ, but they can’t play a note. They think they’ll just string something together with samples on a computer.”

  “Umm…Should I know who you are?”

  He laughed again. An endearing belly laugh, sincere and loud. “No! You mean am I in Steven’s league? Nooooo! My big mistake was giving away my best songs to other artists, so there was bugger all left for my first solo album. And Brown Skin Beats put it out more as a nice gesture and a thank-you. There was no marketing support at all. The CD makes a nice coaster, though. Hey, listen, we don’t have to talk about the music business just because you’re at this party.”

  “That’s a relief. It’s all a little intimidating. Like eating at the grown-ups’ table.”

  I stepped over to the window, where Central Park was a square of green in a forest of shiny needles. “This is my first day in New York,” I said, announcing it more to myself than to him.

  He flipped a ladle into the stainless steel sink and dusted his hands. “Then come on. You shouldn’t be cooped up in here. You’re a tourist, for fuck’s sake.” When I hesitated, he said, “This thing’s going to go on until three in the morning, trust me. Let’s get you some fresh and smelly, lung-choking New York air. What do you feel like doing? Anything you want. I live here, so you come up with the ideas.”

  I was concerned for two whole minutes about whether I was being picked up, but the conversation kept circling ar
ound to Erica. Erica’s career was going to Pluto. She was going to be huge, he assured me. She had great instincts, and the hooks she came up with for her tunes…Luther’s daily bread was his producing, in addition to his songwriting, and he had worked on or mastered five of the tracks for her second album in progress. He said he’d put in enough time that he knew how far she could go.

  “If, of course, she doesn’t fuck up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I leaned my face into the wind and tried to pick out Liberty Island. Not very original of me, wanting to go up the Empire State Building, but Luther was a good sport about it. “What do you mean if she doesn’t fuck up?”

  “I mean your friend has a slight case of John Lennon disease.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “She’s bursting to tell the world all these things she wants to say, and she’s going to be raw about it. She’s cynical about the issues, and that’ll sell, sure. Beautiful young artist pointing out ugly shit going on in the world? It’ll play big. But she’s also cynical about people. They say Lennon was the same way. He’d go off on rants when he was younger. Shit-scared that his ambition and talent made him a phoney, so he projected all that out to other people. Now, your friend doesn’t harangue folks. She’s found more creative ways to use people just to prove shit to herself.”

  It was the most interesting way I’d heard yet for calling Erica Jones a slut.

  “The trouble is,” Luther went on, “eventually artists like Erica run into smooth talkers who will know exactly what buttons to push and what they want to hear. And she’ll get snared. It’s good that you came down to visit, Michelle. Honest. People starting out in this biz, they need friends from their old lives to ground them.”

  “She’s doing well,” I argued. “She’s already famous. Is there any reason to worry?”

  He nodded.

  “You sound bitter and burned,” I suggested.

  “Oh, I am,” he admitted, nodding. “I’ve been burned. But I’m not so spiteful that I watch others poke their toes into the fire. They’ve got all kinds of ways so that you never realise there’s smoke coming from your head—until it’s too late.”

  He laughed ruefully and said, “You know how I ended up producing? Didn’t have much of a choice. I signed my deal with my music publisher, thinking I was the cleverest S.O.B., and then I took a second look at my submissions quota—so many tunes to create and turn in per quarter. And it was ridiculous, no way I could crank ’em out. Fine, said my publisher. I breach my contract, they feel justified in cutting off my advances on stuff turned in already.”

  “Bastards,” I said politely.

  “Oh, but it gets better. If you don’t read the fine print, you may find out—like me—that you, the writer, are responsible for getting the cuts.”

  “Cuts?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s biz lingo for getting an artist to record and release your song. Well, lo and behold! Your publisher has turned you, through the magic of a signed contract, into their salesman. They’re supposed to be the ones securing the artists, and unless you’re a hot producer with a thick Rolodex, the water’s going to get a bit deep. I got good at producing for the sake of survival. When my publisher came back to me one day bitching over my submissions quota, I said go ahead and cut me off. Fuck you. I just made more off my work for Busta than you pay me for three quarters.”

  “I’m sure Erica’s situation is different.”

  “It is. And it isn’t. Know what I’m saying?”

  I gave him a noncommittal nod, my eyes on the Manhattan skyline.

  Even up here on the 86th floor, you could hear the traffic and the symphony of car horns. Sure, I know the history—how New Yorkers built up because they had limits on building out. But you still couldn’t resist the psychological effect and marvel at how shrewd those original architects were. To get up here or up any of those sparkling towers made you feel differently about your lot in life, made you think of possibilities. It made you ambitious to keep the view. In Toronto, you’ve got to take a ferry out to Centre Island or at least stand at Harbourfront to get a sweeping view of the tall buildings. In London, as a tourist, I couldn’t get a half-decent view of the capital unless I stood on one of the bridges of the Thames. In both cases, though, you’re on the ground. You’re forced to tilt your head respectfully up instead of enjoying the temporary illusion that you can dominate it all, take it all in from a high vantage point.

  Erica must love it here.

  “We should get back,” said Luther.

  “Do we have to?” I bleated like a little kid.

  He laughed. “Erica’s going to turn up and worry about you.” With a groan, he added, “And I’ve got to put in a few more social hours.”

  “If you’re not having a good time…”

  “You can tell you’re not in the music business,” he said. “A certain amount of shmoozing is required. Doesn’t matter whether you like folks or not, it’s business. These parties are where folks can scout out the hottest video director. They take a barometer reading of who’s still got clout. They pick up stock tips. Whatever.”

  “Wow, you just gave me a whole lecture about Erica’s cynicism. I didn’t see that much wheeling and dealing. People were getting wild back there. The booze is flowing. And in the pool—”

  “Sure, sure, a lot of ’em play hard,” said Luther. “But the ones fooling around and making asses of themselves have shown up for the entertainment. They don’t have an agenda. Didn’t you notice it was either the old stars who’ve made it, or young up-and-comers who think it’s their turn in the candy store? The young ones are playing, Michelle, but their managers are on the clock. Read The Hollywood Reporter and daily Variety over the next couple of weeks, and I’ll bet you see five deals where you can trace all the players back to this party.”

  “So what’s your agenda for being there?”

  “Me?” He tried to laugh away the question. “Oh, I’m one of the fun-seekers.”

  “Beating up pots and pans?”

  “Party kicked off about noon. Quarter to one, I played a demo tape of a song I wrote for somebody connected to Black Eyed Peas. By two, somebody was asking my advice about World Music, and if I can track down these Azerbaijani horn players I know, I’ve got another album job.”

  “So you’re working the room, but you’re warning me how if Erica’s not careful, your colleagues will eat her alive?”

  “I never said don’t swim in the deep end. I said she has to be careful. If money talks when bullshit walks, then flattery sings. There’s a reason why they have the expression ‘music to my ears.’ ”

  Distractions

  We beat Erica to the party by half an hour. A swarm of people hovered near the door for the newest bright young thing, ensuring that I wouldn’t get a chance to greet her for about fifteen minutes. Lots of hugs, lots of kisses on both cheeks. Then Erica gave a big squeal as she spotted me, and we hugged.

  “You’re here!” she yelled. “You’re finally here! Oh, girl, we are going to have so much fun! Look at you!”

  “Look at me? Look at you! You’re the one in the Chanel suit.”

  “Borrowing it,” she lied. As I stayed on, so the suit stayed in its place on the rack of her walk-in closet. But this was an Erica who still felt slightly embarrassed by new wealth. She tugged on my arm and whispered in my ear, “Can you believe this shit?”

  “Hey, it’s your ball, Cinderella.”

  “I don’t know if all this is…necessary.”

  “Your friend Luther was telling me how a lot of deals get cut at parties like this.”

  “Luther,” groaned Erica, but she had this smile on her face, which I came eventually to understand was reserved just for him. Interest? Affection? Definitely something going on between them. “Luther’s paranoid about the business. He talks about the deals ’cause that’s all he sees.”

  “I don’t know,” I offered. “He didn’t sound like—like a salesman or anything.”


  “Oh, no, he’s not that at all!” she said quickly. “He’s a fantastic producer. He’s great, really. But he bitches a lot about the labels, and he’s always trying to warn me. I say, ‘Luther, I can get a lawyer, man.’ I think he’s a little burned out if you ask me. Listen, honey, I don’t want to talk about him. You meet Steven yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what do you think? Come on, tell me, tell me, tell me—”

  “This the one you phoned about?”

  She nodded vigorously, still with an ear-to-ear grin. The way Luther had talked about Erica, you would think he was involved with her. Wrong. Funny thing was, the way Erica talked about Steven, you’d think they were an item. Wrong again. I think at best, she and Steven had a vibe going, and that was about it. It must have been obvious to Brown Skin Beats management, because they were pushing Steven her way, with Luther thrown in as a bonus. The message seemed to be here’s what you can have if you cross the street to us: hot talent to collaborate with, hot producers and whatever else you want. But keep in mind, when I came down, Erica was still doing her peep show routine for Easy with his two-way mirror, and that whole sordid business with gangsta Jamal Knight was about a month in the future.

  “He’s smart, and he’s funny, and, thank God, he’s talented, and he’s already there, Mish,” she was saying. “He’s made it. It’s awkward with anyone else now, you know? Ever since the first album took off, I’ve had a couple of dates, and guys just look at you strange. They’re either scared puppies, or they’re horny as hell to nail a pop star, or they think you’re going to ramp them up to the six-figures. They must be dreaming if they think I’ve made that much money!”

  “You will,” I offered.

  She didn’t hear me. Still holding my arm, eager to gush about the new love of her life. “But Steven knows what’s going to come my way. He’s been through all that bullshit with the negotiations and the marketing idiots. He’s been so helpful, and he’s really caring. He’s got genuine charisma. Don’t you think so?”