Soul Siren

by Aisha Duquesne

  He looked hard at me. Waiting for me to defend her, to explain.

  I tried bluffing my way out. What else could I do? Sure, I was surprised. There were ways of erasing the no-name fellows Erica slept with, but I had somehow never considered the prospect of Morgan being an embarrassment to her. Morgan was inside. And for Erica and Morgan, sex was just sex. He was one of the most unsentimental creatures you could ever meet, and so long as he didn’t have to meet Steven Swann, he couldn’t have cared less that Erica was with him. I had never looked at the coin flipped over. I never thought I would have to cover up for Erica and lie to her boyfriend in addition to the press.

  “Steven, what are you expecting me to tell you?” I asked. “You’re going to take Odell’s word for it? A guy who wants to get back at you?”

  “If I took what he said, I wouldn’t want us to talk.”

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Jesus, Steven! We’re doing it in front of each other out west, and now you’re getting worked up over her maybe screwing another guy?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” he said. He was damn calm about all this. Perhaps he didn’t want to show the pain or anger in front of me.

  “It’s not a big leap,” I countered.

  “So Odell’s telling the truth.”

  I didn’t answer. My face said: consider your source. But I wasn’t making a strong denial.

  “He gave me a name for the guy and an address, told me the jazz bars where he plays. You might as well tell me, Michelle.”

  His personal assistant was calling across the room that somebody was on line two.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. I was talking too fast, part of me sincere, part of me acting. Because I was glad he had found out. I just couldn’t show it. So I was the great lady of the theatre the same way I had to perform for dozens of executives or producers or lovers who wanted Erica’s time. Time that cut into my portions with her.

  “This isn’t the way you should have—no, sorry, that’s a stupid thing to say. What I mean is, I don’t think she ever intended to hurt you. This thing with Morgan she’s got, it’s almost as if she fucks him out of gratitude, I don’t know, she always says sex is like food or wine, but I think she’s putting on a guy’s attitude because—”

  “Michelle,” he interjected. Then the boyish smile again, the one he thought could smooth everything over. “It’s okay. I wanted to know, but…I forgive her.”

  “You do?” I said in mild astonishment. What I wanted to ask was why?

  Not even a tight-lipped expression of hurt on his face, no sharp intake of angry breath, nothing. And not because he already knew. There should be some betrayal of what he was feeling, even an infinitesimal one. The most I could hear was the soft clicking of tumblers, the calculation of angles. Was he past cold hate, planning a humiliation for her because of her cheating? Mild panic in me for all of two seconds. No. That wasn’t it either.

  “I forgive her,” he repeated.

  Line two was still beeping away.

  “Sorry, I got to take this,” he said.

  I don’t know why he’d asked me over instead of confronting her with this. And to the best of my knowledge, he never did bring it up with Erica.

  He said he forgave her. You say that about somebody, you imply the sin is done and in the past, not to be repeated. But if he wasn’t going to talk to her about it then Erica could go on seeing Morgan. Here was the golden boy offering me no sign of how he could prevent this. He must have known their casual trysts would continue. I walked out the door not having a clue what was on his mind. If I had, perhaps things would have turned out differently.

  Two weeks later, Erica had me type up a press release announcing her engagement to Steven Swann.

  Now you’re dressed in black, when I left you were dressed in white. Can you fill me in?… Craig David’s voice floating out of my computer speakers as Luther’s latest email popped up on the screen, complete with a little webcam movie attached. Luther in London, putting himself in self-imposed exile. He told me he made one last-ditch attempt to persuade Erica that Steven wasn’t good enough for her. She said Steven must be good enough for him, what with his paycheck for producing Steven’s Slummin’ album.

  “You did Drum out of fear, didn’t you?” he asked her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You did—”

  “You’re full of it, Luther—”

  “Oh, yes, you did, Erica. You know damn well that hooking up with Steven means you’re not going to do important work anymore, you’re going to churn out fluffy pop tunes because you’ll be surrounded by it every goddamn day! It’s Steven, Erica. The guy asks to put a song together the way you write up a balance sheet.”

  “Oh, great, so I have to meet a higher standard than you set for yourself!” she told him. “How can you say that when you’re his producer? Are you a hack then, too?”

  “Don’t confuse work with life, Erica. I do his albums then I go home to my own place. They got a saying in Hollywood: even shit has its own integrity. And when I compose my work, I don’t hear Steven Swann’s crap coming out of my music. You don’t have to do this. You going to play wife for him? What about all the things you believe in? You think you can write another Pariah after you marry a white—”

  “Oh, here it comes,” she said. “That’s what this is about—”

  “No,” he insisted, “no, it’s not. But you think Steven Swann cares about anything past himself and what NASDAQ closed at on Tuesday? You’re going to pass around your talent the way you—” He stopped himself abruptly.

  “The way I what?” she demanded. “Go ahead and say it, Luther! The way I pass around my body?”

  “I wasn’t going to—”

  “Yes, you were!”

  And he was. But he didn’t want to say it because he knew it wasn’t fair. Luther told me this later, that guys these days, well, at least, any enlightened guy doesn’t think of women as “sluts.” He knows it’s a double standard, even though he may seethe about how a woman carries on—mostly because she’s not carrying on with him. Funny how girls will still call you a slut to your face.

  “Say it, Luther! You pick on the music ’cause it’s an easy target. I am so tired of you thinking you’re going to rescue me. You come on like a Jehovah’s Witness at my door, man!”

  So much anger and frustration and sexual electricity between them, and they didn’t know what to do with themselves, how to resolve it. He rushed forward to kiss her, to tell her sorry. Taking her face in his hands and then putting an arm around her waist to hold her in, but she pushed away from him, hard.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t be with him!” he cried. “Be with me!”

  When he moved forward to kiss her again, she grasped him tightly as if she had to breathe him in, as if she were flying up out of the depths of a deep pool where she couldn’t hear sound, let alone music. Tongues searching each other, his hands running over her breasts—

  A tortured “No!” She broke away, declaring angrily, “I decide! You hear me! You come on like you want me to be better, get higher, but you’re just telling me what to do! I don’t need controlling shit like that from—”

  “No, I’m n—”

  “What is it between us?” she snapped. “You say ‘Be with me’? Okay, let’s get it on now!” She was tugging her blouse out of her skirt, still raging.

  “Why are you going to marry him then if you can be like this?”

  She stared at him, unable to answer. She said she loved Steven. She’d told me as much. When it came down to it, Erica thought love was someone letting you have so much independence that he “checked in” on you every now and then. That was how Luther put it when we talked about it later. In Erica’s version, she “just froze. We’re yelling at each other, and it’s spontaneous and hurtful but you’re speaking what’s in your head, and then he asks me that. Oh, God, Mish, somebody asks you why you’re marrying a guy, you don’t stand like a deer in the woods
! What if he’s right? Maybe I’ve been full of it all this time, talking big when I’ve sold out?”

  So Luther flew away. Erica and I had a night of videos, ice cream and soul-searching, but Luther was gone. What did it matter how she felt about him if he was out of the picture? Erica threw herself into parties and gigs, evenings of lovemaking in Morgan’s loft, as if to persuade herself that life didn’t have to drastically change after marrying Steven.

  Luther’s emails came to me like notes in bottles bobbing along the Net. In one MPEG, there he is—webcam held by a new friend—drumming a couple of Rubbermaid pails in Leicester Square. Two London policemen walked up and demanded if he had a busker’s permit. “Who says I want money?” demanded Luther. “Do you see a hat on the ground with coins in it?” The cops looked mildly embarrassed over this commonsense logic, and one turned to say right, you there, stop filming this. Cut to Luther, smiling in bitter amusement, “Do you know, Mish, this is the country with the biggest amount of CCTV surveillance in the world? No shit! Here, you got to see this…”

  His emails to me were full of gossip about Damage and Artful Dodger, the nuances of pecking order in the DJ scene and how the white artists in the label offices walked around with attitude, talking like they had an entourage when there’d be no one in step behind them. “Goddamn hilarious, Michelle,” he wrote. These performers had an incredible chip on their shoulder regarding American airplay and markets. We don’t need them, but of course, they desperately did. The hottest black artists had a “we’re-all-in-this-together” view, going in with the assumption it was going to be a bitch of a climb up anyway. He liked London, Luther said. Wouldn’t want to live there, however.

  He sent maybe seven emails a week to me. During his entire trip, he sent about two to Erica. When I asked her what he had to say in them, she informed me in a distant voice, “Oh, he’s landed a couple of producing gigs over there. He says he’s writing a lot.”

  He had told me the same thing in an email, that he was writing music. Hearing songs in his head and getting them down. He didn’t ask at all about Erica’s wedding in seven weeks.

  Luther had London. Erica had her engagement parties around town, thrown by the label and friends. And I had my own little celebration…

  Karen wore this bewildered, delighted smile at LaGuardia as I came to pick her up. She’d never been to New York before. As we recognised each other across the distance of the terminal, there was so much immediately communicated in a millisecond, such a quiet trade of feeling. We hadn’t seen each other in ages, trying to make up for it with emails and occasional phone calls, but they were poor compensation. She wore this little calf-coloured fringed suede bolero jacket over a white T-shirt and one of her long denim skirts, and I took in the sight of her lovely golden skin and the curve of her hips, that mane of midnight hair down her back (I made her promise me she’d never cut it). I felt something I hadn’t experienced in months: complete unmitigated lust.

  The torch I carried for Erica could have a roaring flame or quiet embers depending on the star’s genius, her occasional tantrum and her manipulations of guys. Odell had been just me fooling myself. And I hadn’t tried at all to check out New York’s thriving lesbian scene. Karen…This will be simple and pure, I told myself. Karen was here, and she was here for me.

  We exchanged quick “Hi’s” and goofy, euphoric gazes into each other’s eyes, missing each other so much, and then I didn’t care that the driver of the Brown Skin Beats car was five yards away, I held my lovely older woman tight and opened my mouth to hers, muttering, “God, I want you so badly. It’s been so long.” And our tongues met and remembered their feverish play.

  Our driver kept glancing at us in the rearview mirror so much I thought we would have an accident. Karen and I were stroking each other in the back, murmuring to each other and laughing, catching up. Karen telling me scraps of news about the silly politics up in Canada that only we would care about, what was happening back at her school. I pointed out Big Apple landmarks, and as she craned her lovely neck up, I saw the girlish wonder in her eyes, and the way she looked at me with a new respect…and something else.

  “Boy, you must really know your way around,” she said.

  I knew I was showing off a little. I used to defer to her so much when we were home, but now I was guide and host. I gave her hand a squeeze. “I can’t believe you never took a trip down here. There’s so much!”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” she said, touching my cheek. She arched her eyebrows at the Chrysler Building and said, “I don’t know. The relatives were always bugging me to come visit them in London or India. Just never had a good enough reason. Until now.”

  We kissed.

  “How is this going to work?” she asked me gently.

  “What do you mean?” I whispered, one eye on the driver to see if he was eavesdropping.

  “I mean you’re living with Erica, right?” She saw a spark of mild hurt in my eyes, but she raised a hand, indicating she didn’t mean it as a reproach. She knew there was nothing sexual going on between her two former students, that I was simply the personal assistant. “Am I her guest as well? Where am I staying, honey?” A nervous laugh here. “I didn’t even try to book a hotel.”

  I could have put her up that night at the apartment. Erica was in Chicago, doing a couple of benefit gigs, and she wasn’t due back until later in the week. But—

  “I didn’t think you’d want to be her guest,” I replied. “I thought maybe it would be awkward…It’s not as if she’s your favourite person.”

  Karen said nothing. Eventually, the questions would come. Had I put my feelings for Erica aside? How could I have when I had dropped out of school and begun a whole new career path that depended completely on my friend’s indulgence and references? Karen never ever got openly cross, her anger and resentment always on a slow simmer when it came to our few squabbles. But she wasn’t about to spoil our reunion this soon. I half-wondered if she would bring up the issue during her visit. She always claimed that she could be patient. I know you’ll change, she once said to me, but Erica never will.

  “I got you a hotel,” I went on. “I pulled a few strings to get you a corporate suite the label puts out for.”

  “Look at you, the smooth operator!” she laughed.

  “No, that’s a friend of mine, Luther. He’s the angel who helped. You’re going to love this place, sweetheart, it’s like it was made for you.”

  And for Karen, the Library Hotel was perfect. The car pulled up at the corner of Madison and 41st Street in front of the brick and terra-cotta restored building, and I grabbed her bag and walked arm in arm with her into the mahogany-panelled lobby. The place has more of a feel of a private club than a hotel, with a “Writer’s Den,” a “Poetry Garden” and reading rooms. I had told a white lie in the car. Yes, Luther had got me the corporate suite, but he also helped me arrange to get her the hotel’s “Erotica Package.” We took the elevator up to the “Love Room,” where Karen clapped her hands and burst into giggles at all the cliché fuss: champagne on ice waiting, a dozen roses, strawberries in low-fat Cool Whip.

  “Yes, I know,” I said with a mock groan. “Your copy of the Kama Sutra is in the original Indian! But, hey, you get to keep the robe.”

  “Oh, God, come here, baby,” she said, rushing over to me. “All of it’s so…kitsch!” And she burst out laughing and kissed me quickly.

  I was tugging her T-shirt up in a frantic rush, my hands eagerly pawing her breasts, ducking my head down to gently bite the nipples puckering hard out of her bra cups. She was unbuckling my pants, and it became a race of hands, hers reaching between my legs as I kept massaging her nipples. Such golden skin, and the way her silky soft black hair fell like it belonged on an exotic dark animal. So incredibly, astonishingly, delicately feminine with her petite physique, yet having such confidence in her touch.

  I sat down on a chair, wanting her to sit in my lap, straddle me, but she knelt at my feet, her hand still
exploring my vagina with my legs rudely open, working me so that I convulsed and gripped the seat to steady myself, my teacher, my lover, like an idol, like a doll on her knees, and my eyes strayed to the way she overlapped her feet behind her as she knelt, the smallness of her toes and even beauty in the arch of her foot, the way her breasts were flushed and full, awaiting my hand. As I started to come, I half-jumped, half-collapsed out of the chair to the rug, my body wracked with spasms of overwhelming ecstasy, Karen’s mouth covering my own, my eyes losing all sight of the room under that shroud of midnight hair. “I got to have your pussy,” I rasped. “I’ve got to taste you!” Too long, far too long since I had quenched my thirst from between her legs. We were both crying as I went down on her, the rise of her rib cage as her back arched, as sweat glistened on that luminescent skin, made me swear love eternal to my Kamala, made such a damn liar out of me.

  You can’t see the park from here, but we’re close enough to walk,” I yelled apologetically from the kitchen.

  “Are you kidding?” she called back. “This place is amazing!”

  Back in the apartment. Karen and I making love again in my bed, making it special and memorable in a way that no hotel suite ever could.

  I heard a noise out in the living room but didn’t think anything of it, went back to firing up the blender. I squealed because I had to quickly shut it off. Fool. Forgot to put the lid back and nearly made a mess out of my Destiny’s Child concert T-shirt, the only thing I had on at the moment. Margaritas done, I sipped my own home-made brew and smacked my lips on a finger. God, I’m good, I said, and I headed to my bedroom with a glass in each hand. “You tell me if this is the way you like ’em!” I called out.

  I walked in just in time to see Erica and Karen, frozen like they were caught in a snapshot. Erica was three feet in the doorway, jaw almost on the floor, staring at Karen completely nude and rubbing lotion on her leg. We were suddenly back in high school as Erica blurted out, “Miss Ogis…” Because she hadn’t known her as anything else.