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.
“I’m too busy to get involved these days,” he explained in a weary voice.
“You are so full of shit!” I laughed.
“What? You think a guy can’t be too busy for sex or not want it sometimes?”
“Not at all,” I said. “You’re not too busy. You’re waiting.”
Cautious now. “Waiting? What am I waiting for, Michelle?”
“For her,” and I tilted my head over at Erica talking with Ginuwine.
He folded his arms, and it was difficult to tell if he was annoyed or impressed with me for being so perceptive. “Now how did you suss that out?”
I shrugged at him. I couldn’t very well tell him that I had made a life, hell, I had even started a career out of waiting for her.
They were friends, according to Erica. It was good for a change to have a male friend. She didn’t think she had had one before. Morgan could have been one, but her relationship with Morgan was…complicated. And it would get even more complicated when…Well, I’ll get to that. Luther had shepherded Erica around Brown Skin Beats. Before she hooked up with Steven, it was Luther who was her guide to the next rung in the business. At three in the morning, he would ring her up and say, “Yeah, I know it’s late, but you’ve got to hear this!” Senegalese music. Or a piece of hot demo from Jamaica. Or what if the bridge to the track they were working on went with this chord? And Erica would cuss him out, it’s three in the morning, for God’s sake. Then: “Let me get my headset.” I would stagger bleary-eyed into the living room to find Erica in her robe, sitting at the desk and listening to him as she scribbled out a chart.
“Do you think Luther’s for real?” she asked me once. “You don’t think maybe he’s being nice because he’s like, you know, the company’s babysitter for me, do you?”
I was flabbergasted. It had never occurred to me to have this suspicion, and I went with my first impulse. “Erica, no! No, Luther’s all right.”
Luther loaned her books. He always said here, I want to loan you this, but he never asked for it back. A coffee table book on Moroccan art, a paperback called The Holographic Universe about how reality isn’t what we think it is, a novel by Salman Rushdie. She would thank him warmly and ask what made you think of me for this one? And his reply was usually something like “You can get inspiration from all kinds of places.” When we visited his apartment, I discovered well-thumbed copies in his bedroom of the same titles. You sly dog, I thought. You didn’t see the book and think of her. You think of her all the time, and it makes you want to go out and buy her these gifts.
I couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to influence her thinking or—well, no, I think he actually wanted to share these things with her. He had the happy expectation that she would respond to a volume or a CD the way he had, or better still, her sentiments would flow from her fingertips to the ivory keys, creating something new and dazzling. Because of him.
In those early days, I can think of only one occasion when they allowed the natural chemistry between them to boil to a froth. He had phoned her up with an idea, always needing to communicate to her immediately, and once again I was a half-asleep witness staring down the long hallway at the two of them sitting side by side on the bench at her baby grand. Erica not even bothering to change, having buzzed him up still in her robe. I heard her murmur, “Shit, Luther, at four in the morning, I’m dead, man.”
And he said, “Okay, put your hands on mine. You’ll remember the pattern later.” An obvious ploy, really, just to get her to touch him. And so she rested her hands gently on his as they played the notes.
When he finished his piece of composition, I heard the note resonate for a couple of seconds in the cavernous living room, and in that moment, they looked at each other.
“We ought to stop,” said Erica. “We’ll wake Mish up.”
He nodded, cleared his throat nervously. “There’s, um, something I’ve been meaning to give you—”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, of course I don’t have to,” he interjected, laughing gently. “I want to. You know, Erica, I would have loved to be there when you first arrived. Watched it all come together for you. I would have liked to have taken you out somewhere to the Brooklyn Bridge or something and say, ‘It’s all going to happen.’ And you shaking your head, saying, I don’t know. But then, I guess you’d never do that. You were always sure, weren’t you?”
She didn’t answer. She merely stroked his arm affectionately. Down the hallway, I understood what he meant. It would have been nice if she had needed somebody for that kind of reassurance. She never did.
He fished out of his pocket a gold wristwatch. “My granddad worked as a barber in Woolworth’s for twenty-five years, and when he retired, they gave him a gold watch. He said to them, look, this is great, but I’ve never had much money to give my wife anything nice. Can you trade this in for a lady’s watch? They said sure, and my grandmother wore it until the day she died. I never had a sister, so my parents gave this to me. And when I was really down and out, I had to sell it at a pawnshop. The Japanese were supposed to be scooping up things like this back when they were flush with cash. And I felt sick as soon as I’d done it. I mean, shit, I’m not going to be broke forever, and instead of eating soup for a week, I’d given away a little piece of my family. I stewed on that for quite a while, and then I got a couple of songs published, made a bit of money, and I actually tracked this damn thing down to another pawnshop up in Rochester. Bought it back.”
He held it out for her. “I want you to have it.”
“Luther, honey, I can’t—I can’t possibly accept this—”
“Course you can,” he replied. “Don’t you understand? It’s done its trick for me. I don’t need it anymore because then I’m just holding on to it, it’s just a possession. It should go to somebody who can look at it and give it a new meaning. If you ever lose everything, babe, you can get it back. You know it, don’t you?”
“Oh, Luther…”
He understood her better than she thought, because she did worry about losing it all. Wouldn’t anyone? When you get all the way to the top, you have to ask: how long can I go on? How can I re-invent myself again and again to keep them interested? Erica had an ultraviolet sense of humour sometimes, and she once joked: Fame is like cancer, man—how long have I got? Instead of it eating from the inside, it eats you from the skin to your bone. Here was Luther, who knew he couldn’t give her the grand gesture of a night on the bridge to say all this is going to be yours one day. It already was. She didn’t need him to introduce her to influential people. Her name could open those doors now. So he went the other way. He went small. And with that modest
grandmother’s watch, he told her: when it all gets too much, think of me.
As she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek, her left breast fell out of the panel of her robe. She laughed and was about to cover herself up when his hand cupped her flesh in one smooth, confident gesture. She watched him as he watched her, his fingers exploring that full ripeness, his thumb moving to stroke and tease a large, puckering nipple, the areola swollen. She could see he was hard, his cock straining the crotch of his trousers, and she darted her hand forward to unzip his fly. In only a second, she had popped him loose. From my hiding place down the hall, I gasped and almost gave myself away. God, he was big. A light brown pillar of flesh blue in the semi-darkness, and Erica licked her middle finger and touched the side as if she were moving to pet a delicate bird. His cock stiffened in a spasm of desire. Both of them were leaning anxiously forward, Luther massaging her tit for minutes on end, her brown nipple like a teardrop clinging, Erica driving him wild with one finger barely touching his girth. It was practically a duel.
Then it was spoiled. He asked her, his voice raw with need, “What…what are we going to do about Steven?”
She squeezed her fist around him for the first time, and he groaned.
“Don’t worry about Steven.”
“Erica…I want you all to myself.”
“Luther, aren’t we friends?”
“Good friends,” he said, and took his hand away. She didn’t bother to cover herself up. “I want to be more than that.”
“We can be,” she answered.
“You mean like you’re friends with Steven?” He was irritable now. He stood up and pulled away from her, adjusting himself and zipping up his trousers.
“Luther, I care about you, I do,” she assured him. “I think I love Steven—”
“Then what is this?” he demanded, his voice climbing an octave with his hurt.
She shushed him, still thinking I was asleep down the hall. “This?” she echoed in a whisper. “This is sex. You telling me it’s okay when a guy really loves a girl and plays around, but if a girl does it, it’s wrong?”
“Hey, that’s not me, I think it’s wrong for both,” he told her.
“You’ve done it in the past, though, haven’t you?” she said, smiling, trying to lighten the mood.
“And I was wrong about it then, too,” he said.
She chuckled and softly closed the lid on the piano. “That’s pretty damn convenient after you’ve had your fun! Don’t be so serious. Look, you’re here. Come to bed.”
She went to kiss him, and for a moment, he was nearly swayed. Then he retreated again, pushing her gently from his body. He was still hard, though. “I’m going home. I still want you to have the watch, Erica.”
She thanked him. They traded good nights, and I heard her exasperated sigh as I stole back to my bedroom. I know he hadn’t given up on her, but for now, he was leaving the field wide open for Steven Swann, who would be happy to take her.
Steven. At first, Erica’s involvement with her new man was worth only a gossipy line in the press. Steven Swann was “seen with” Erica Jones at such-and-such a gala. She didn’t want to go to any premieres where they’d suffer Death by Flash Bulb on the red carpet. It was her choice, a reflection of her ongoing policy of keeping her private life private. You can know my politics, sure. My sex life is none of your damn business. But Steven…Oh, that boy was clever. He had a whole stealth campaign in mind like a corporate takeover, and it was a long while before I understood his agenda. If she would be discreet over public appearances, he would cool things right down when it came to the physical.
It was as if circumstances conspired to keep them from sleeping with each other. The two of them getting hot and heavy backstage when Steven did a guest appearance on one of those Unplugged shows, and there’s my cue, babe, got to run. Steven in Erica’s apartment, both of them down the hall in her bedroom, and she told me that she was stripped to her waist, his white hands fondling her tits, rubbing them in circles over her nipples as he smelled her hair and kissed the nape of her neck. And then I had to be the villain, not that I wanted to be that time. I took a call long-distance from New Mexico mentioning a family emergency, the relative tracking Steven down to Erica’s place. Days later, he told us it was all a false alarm—
Keeping her waiting. Keeping her off balance.
Erica hadn’t felt so teased since she first took up with Morgan, only Morgan had come off as aloof, detached. With Steven, she knew there was interest there. “If he doesn’t make some time for me soon, I am going to rape that boy!” she joked. And all that anticipation, that pent-up hunger for him did the trick of motivating a public possessiveness in her. She flew down to perform a couple of duets with him for the Florida leg of his mini-tour. She was his date for the runway show of the latest Anna Sui designs. The “seen with” references in People graduated to the first big lies about Erica in the tabloids. A chauffeur claimed the pair got frisky in the back of a limo. I was surprised by how Erica treated the story with good humour. “Mish, I know it wasn’t me because it’s so damn tame. If they knew what I really got up to!”
But they didn’t. They never did. The dancer she took during that instrumental break in the concert got fired, rehired on my say. The studio vocalist she made time with in Seattle discovered his bookings would dry up if he breathed a word. The chiropractor she liked for a while and then tired of was introduced to a new flame. Gratitude, favours, threats—we used them all. Sometimes Erica picked up the phone, and as time went on, she left the cleanup more to me. Never let ’em be able to talk about it, she had told me that night we reminisced about high school. Ever, ever, ever.
But here was Erica now, gushing about Steven to E! “He’s utterly amazing. He brings such intensity to his work and to everything. And when he looks at you, you just want to melt into a puddle.” Erica, whose lyrics had been called “excoriating” for her songs about the environment and Third World debt, reduced to clichés you could read in Seventeen.
“So you’re saying he’s off the market?” laughed the interviewer.
“Definitely off the market,” replied Erica, giggling. “Hands off, girls. Back away from the prize.”
And perhaps most peculiar of all, I know for a fact that Erica still hadn’t slept with him when she was making these comments.
Of course, he finally did “make time for her.” He took her back to his place that wasn’t very far from her own. Steven had bought up two of the massive stable spaces at Park and East 66th Street, the kind that had been purchased a while back and converted into trendy art galleries. He’d converted his into a sprawling six-bedroom townhouse. The son of successful painters in artsy Santa Fe, Steven could discuss home decoration and furnishings in a manner that prompted Erica to joke once, “Do you know how gay you sound when you talk like that, honey?”
I liked Steven at first. I found him more physically attractive than most men, especially white men. And when he dropped his guard, you could talk to him about all kinds of things on the news, and he was informed. His whole inarticulate, talented shy-boy act seemed a natural post–Timberlake progression in the pop world—the new improved image for teenage girl consumption. But the image grated on you after you had drinks with Steven and were reminded how bright he was. He’d tell you how The Atlantic Monthly did a great piece on the forgotten Balkans. “Get a load of this bullshit France is pulling with their airlines,” he’d say, his wide screen tuned to Bloomberg more often than it ever was to MTV. Teenage girls don’t like their poster boys brainy. I asked him once if he thought he would have ended up a corporate lawyer if he hadn’t been spotted for his first band.
“Fuck, no, Michelle,” he laughed. “You know what I wanted to be? I was going into politics. My high school in New Mexico had this big campaign over desert wildlife preservation, and I actually wanted to be a senator. You believe that?”
When it came to sex, I know he wanted Erica. He approached her as he approached everything else,
plotting his moves, leaving little to chance, but his appetite was as raw as hers. On the night he invited her over, he was kissing her at the door, and they didn’t stop kissing and fondling each other until he had backed up all the way into his bedroom.
“I want this to be special,” he told her. He jumped on top of a footstool and hit a button on a strange box that had been specially attached to his ceiling with drill screws. “I couldn’t believe that shit when he hit that compartment,” Erica confided to me later. “I mean he was like some villain out of a James Bond picture or something!” Because she had discovered that her gorgeous white boy was into kink. Nothing heavy, pretty mild stuff, but perhaps when you go to bed with dozens of girls and can pick and choose, your attention turns to method, not frequency. I suppose I’m not the person to ask. And Erica always said that black men in her experience didn’t stray too far from regular lovemaking. “It’s always the WASPs who go in for the leather and bondage stuff, isn’t it?”
I told her I didn’t know.
Steven wasn’t into leather. What he pulled out of that special compartment was a set of solid gold manacles. By now, Erica’s jaw had dropped. It wasn’t just the escape artist’s expensive jewellery, either. Her boyfriend had a whole elaborate rig set up. Along with the handcuffs, he had pulled down a kind of swing suspended from heavy ropes. Erica told me she didn’t know whether to laugh or run for the door.
“And who do you expect to hold prisoner in that thing?” she demanded quietly. “Me?”
“Nope,” he said, flashing his patented naughty boy grin. He handed her a gold skeleton key.
She watched him unbutton his shirt and toss it in a ball in the corner. Then he clicked shut the first cuff around his left wrist, stretching out his right arm for her to help him do the rest.
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