Soul Siren

by Aisha Duquesne

  Karen pushed back her long mane of lustrous black hair and said nonchalantly, “Hello, Erica. Congratulations on your success. Michelle, could you please hand me that towel?”

  I was still holding the Margaritas like an idiot, paralysed by my two worlds colliding. Erica picked up the towel and handed it to Karen, who wrapped it around her waist. Then Erica smoothly took both drinks, passing one to her former teacher and downing the other in one swallow.

  “These aren’t bad,” she pronounced. “You got more?”

  “In the blender,” I said in a deadpan voice.

  “I should get going,” said Karen. “There’s a show at the Frick I want to see—”

  Erica waved that away. “No, please, don’t go on my account. Stay, um, Miss—”

  “Karen.”

  “Stay, Karen, please. Hang out. I don’t have to be here. I could go to Luther’s or Morgan’s.” She laughed nervously. “If you two need—well, if you want the place to your—umm.” Erica turned to me to explain. “We got back early because BSB sprung for a flight. They want to add another night on the front end to Madison Square Garden, so the union boys on the crew put their foot down over the days off, and getting back early was the only way we could—oh, you guys don’t want to hear about all that. I’m sorry I barged in the way I did. Karen.”

  My lover smiled at her. “Not at all. You’ve got a lovely home.”

  Absolute pin drop stillness. All of us staring at each other.

  “I should get dressed,” said Karen.

  Erica and I both remembered our manners and left her to it. Making our way to the lounge, I hung my head as I mumbled, “I’m really sorry, Erica.”

  “No, no, sweetie. This place is your home, too. But…” She burst into a kind of whispering squeal. “Miss Ogis? You seduced our teacher?”

  “Other way around, actually—”

  “Whoa!”

  “Look, I can tell you all the gory details later, but she’s right next—”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Erica!”

  “Okay, okay.” She stepped forward to hug me. “As long as you’re happy, I guess. Didn’t you think you could trust me? I mean that you’re…Oh, shit, Mish, you hooked up with Odell so I figured…”

  “Odell was nothing,” I replied. “Odell was persistent. And he just ended up being my Saturday night dildo.”

  She laughed softly in surprise. “Wow, I guess some of me is rubbing off on you.”

  Karen knocked behind the closed bedroom door, giving a loud hint she wanted to join us in the living room.

  “Okay, ladies, I’ve brushed my hair and fussed with my makeup as long as I can. You two caught up? Is the coast clear now?”

  “Always was,” said Erica, and thrust out her hand for a proper handshake of greeting. “By the way, I still think you gave me a shitty mark on that Calculus final.”

  Pressure

  Erica did her best to play co-hostess and tag along with us on a couple of shopping excursions. She went along when Karen begged me to take her to The Producers, the bizarre musical they made out of the Mel Brooks film. I saw that movie for the first time on her DVD years ago in Toronto. Karen always was one for tasteless humour that skewered the sentimental. Erica was very quiet during our lunches and in the shops, and Karen assumed it was because the star wasn’t the centre of attention. I told her she was being harsh. “She’s trying her best, but it’s not as if you two have a lot in common.”

  “Okay,” she laughed. “I’ll try not to be such a bitch around her.”

  As it happened, Erica found work to do, and we saw less of her. Having my friend walk in on us made me give up the whole pretence for others—and for myself—that I was a straight. I took Karen to my office at Brown Skin Beats and introduced her as my “girlfriend,” which could have meant anything. But work colleagues spotted us holding hands in public, and people seemed to take modest pleasure in thinking they had pinned me down. I never knew I was such a cause for water cooler speculation. I didn’t call myself lesbian or gay. People stuck these labels on me in conversations at parties, and the bolder ones asked, “But you were with Odell. What was that all about?”

  No wonder Erica had kept a hermetic seal on her private life up until Steven. What I was, whatever I was, opened the gate for a few morons to make snide comments to my face, but I would have to deal with it. Instead of the wellworn “must be on your period” you were informed that you were being unfair to a marketing guy because “You do got a real problem with men, don’t you?”

  Karen told me that when men gave her a hard time, she went home, ran herself a bubble bath, opened a bottle of gin and put on her DVD copy of The Last Seduction. God, I had missed her. She was dropping not-so-subtle hints that she was considering taking a sabbatical in Vancouver, that sure, house prices were through the roof, but she had a family connection through the Indian community out there for a cheap short-term apartment lease. There’d be room enough for two if I wanted to return to school and do a year at the University of British Columbia. Rocky Mountains and Pacific Ocean—think of it, honey. And I’d say Empire State Building and Broadway, streets where Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes and Billie Holiday walked…

  “You could write out there, sweetheart. You used to write.”

  I told her I’d collected enough publishers’ rejection letters to paper my walls. She wisely didn’t press me on the issue.

  It was around this time that I got an early hint of what trouble I was going to have with Morgan.

  I was having dinner with Karen in Greenwich Village when I got a call on my mobile. I didn’t recognise the number, but it was the manager of Clint’s, a basement jazz bar on Avenue A. He explained he was trying to get hold of Erica, really, but maybe I could help. Is Morgan still playing there? I wondered. Morgan was playing tonight, said the manager. He was the problem. I said I’d get there as quick as I could. Karen insisted on coming along since it was an emergency, and I spent the whole cab ride apologising to her, saying I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  We made our way down the steps to Clint’s and opened the door to a fog of strong cigarette smoke. Hardwood chairs and little round tables, the joint didn’t offer much to look at—except for the spectacle of a piano player with caramel skin and a salt-and-pepper beard, a fallen soufflé of a face etched with character lines brooding over the keys and playing perfectly. His playing wasn’t the problem. You could tell from the menacing gleam in his eye and the curl in his lip that he’d been drinking. The manager said he’d grown abusive with the folks sitting in the tables close to the stage. The bass player and the drummer didn’t know him well enough to indulge him, and they had walked out before the second set.

  “I don’t want to tell him to get off,” explained the manager. “If Clint was here, he’d shut the damn lights off the stage and tell him get the hell out. I can’t do that to him, Michelle. It’s Morgan, you know?”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I don’t know what his problem is, but…Look, you’re here, can you calm him down for me?”

  At the moment, Morgan was playing Vince Guaraldi’s signature theme to the Peanuts cartoon, which inspired mixed applause from the sparse crowd. “Don’t fucking applaud when I’m in the middle!” he growled. “This ain’t a football stadium. See, you idiots don’t know Dexter Gordon, but you know this shit.”

  Jesus.

  Karen watched me watching Morgan, not having a clue about the back history of all the principals involved in this little drama, or why I should be saving this guy from making an ass of himself, why I was here instead of Erica. I could have told her this is what I do, sweetheart. I clean up the messes of others. And Erica Jones can’t be seen trying to talk her lover down from 30,000 feet after so many Scotches, not that she wouldn’t try if the manager had reached her. Better that I was here. So, no, I didn’t explain to her in that moment. If she needed me to later, sure, but first things first.

  Mo
rgan spotted me by the bar. He gave me a sloppy grin and interrupted his own playing, putting on a lounge act voice as he announced, “Here, folks, since we have a special guest in the audience—I won’t say who—we’ll play you one of my own tunes.”

  And he started the first bars of “Hurt Me Again.” What the hell was he talking about, his own tune? It was Erica’s third song on the Drum album.

  “You’ll hear it soon enough everywhere,” he told the crowd as he played. “It’s nice to hear your music at airports or in stores, even if the fuckers rip you off—”

  He laughed boisterously, leaning back too far, and he fell right off the bench. I don’t understand how you can play music that well but not be able to keep your balance. Didn’t matter, the show was over. Karen, the manager and I were all rushing to help him, the manager saying, “That’s it. This is too embarrassing…”

  As we grabbed Morgan under his arms, pulling him up, he said, “Hello, Mish, who’s your guest?”

  This wasn’t like him. This wasn’t like him at all. We were going to bundle him into a cab when he straightened up and held his balance for an impressive moment, no stagger, no swaying. He turned to the manager and declared, “If you’re going to cheat me out of my pay for the gig then don’t give me this false courtesy shit that I can have a ride home—”

  “You are so out of line!” said the manager, losing his patience.

  “You cheat me out of my mon—”

  “Take him home, Michelle!”

  “Come on, Morgan,” I said, trying to hustle him out the door and up the stairs. As the autumn bite in the New York air made us all wide awake, I said, “What are you doing, Morgan? You shouldn’t go around saying Erica’s songs are yours.”

  “They are mine,” he insisted.

  I studied him. He said it with such matter-of-fact directness, I couldn’t dismiss the claim as wild talk on a drunken tear. Erica had never said anything about co-writing the tunes on the album with him. The only time she had ever collaborated with anyone was with Steven, and that was to write some backing vocals for his Slummin’ album—unless you counted her Dad helping a sixteen-year-old Erica at MacDonald High write her first unpolished tunes.

  “Do you want a cab or not, Morgan?” I asked sharply.

  “No. Thank you, no.”

  “Good night then.”

  I was irritable. I didn’t know why I had bothered coming out for him and what I had accomplished. And he had just dropped this bombshell that I sensed he was quite willing to repeat while sober. I kept cursing under my breath because cabs wouldn’t stop for us. Karen said, “Look, let’s forget about the ferry ride tonight. We had a nice dinner, that’s something. Let’s just go back to the hotel—”

  “No, hon, I promised you Staten Island, and—”

  “Mish, it’s okay. It’s getting a bit late for that, and it’ll be cold.”

  “Fine,” I snapped. “You want the hotel, we’ll go to the hotel.”

  On the subway, she sat staring ahead and furrowing her brow. “There’s no truth to what he was saying, is there? That he wrote those tunes, and she stole them.”

  “Of course not.”

  She didn’t say anything else on the subject. But I could see she was still wondering about it. And I was wondering how big a problem this would be.

  I called Morgan the next day, thanking him sarcastically for ruining my evening. He was unrepentant. “I didn’t invite you to the bar, darlin’,” he laughed.

  “You embarrassed the hell out of me,” I said.

  “What? Your cute friend never saw a drunken musician before?”

  “What you said: about Erica’s songs. Don’t go saying things like that—”

  “I’m perfectly entitled,” he rode over me, “when they’re true. And now that you bring it up, Michelle, you’re with the label. I think you should have a little talk with your BSB friends about adequate compensation.”

  “You got paid for the arrangements, Morgan.”

  “But not for the compositions.”

  “Erica wrote those songs, Morgan.”

  “The hell she did. We were messing around with those tunes since she took her Greyhound down here. They’re mine as much as hers. A joke’s a joke, and I know this is her time now in the spotlight. I’m not asking for any credit in liner notes, but I do want the money.”

  “You weren’t as drunk last night as we thought, were you?” I asked.

  The pause on the line was all the confirmation I needed. Damn it. Maybe he got drunk enough to build up the nerve for his stunt, maybe he knew Erica would be unavailable. He wanted to show me…Show me how it could get very, very embarrassing.

  “Why are you coming to me with this, Morgan? Why don’t you take it up with Erica?”

  “I think you can figure that one out,” he replied. “We’re all fond of Erica, Mish, but this is business. I thought that’s why she and Luther came to me for the arrangements in the first place, because they’re our songs, and I’d give my own babies tender loving care. You handle all the damage control, Mish, you can handle this.”

  “I can’t go to the label and tell them you wrote those songs!”

  “Oh? Because…?”

  “Because of the fucking obvious, you know that. You said yourself, this is her time.”

  “Then get it another way.”

  “And we pay you on the basis of what proof, Morgan? Your word?”

  “I can show you my original charts, Michelle, if you like. I can go and pull my old demos. But I think you know I’m not lying. I created for that girl. Now you can be creative for me. Find the money, darling.”

  He hung up. I didn’t know this man anymore.

  That was Headache Number One of the week. Headache Number Two would turn into a full-blown migraine.

  I was with Karen in the Jacuzzi of her room at the Library Hotel. The water bubbling away with lavender soap, hot enough to melt both of us, and my lover flashed a smile and went, “Eeeeeep! Whose idea was it to make it this hot?”

  “Yours.”

  She rose into a crouch with a short pant over the temperature, and I was mesmerised for a second by the vision of her body. “Don’t move. Just don’t…move!”

  “Why?”

  I told her to look at her arms. In the confines of the washroom and the bubbling lavender froth, steam rose in elaborate curlicues from her limbs, wisps of it rising from her thighs as if her lovely golden body had been taken out of a forge. Look at the steam, I said. Ribbons of it, flowing away from her skin and dissipating into nothingness, steam from her skin. Her breasts and her stomach were glowing, burnished by the water from our private hot spring. It made me nostalgic. I asked her, you remember the first time we made love? Oh, yes, she said. We kissed tenderly, a bead of water from the bath falling from her chin onto my leg…

  “I remember,” she whispered. “You still excite me so much.” And she turned my face so I could look at myself in the bath’s mirror. “This is what turned me on. I couldn’t help myself.”

  In the glass, I saw myself, nude. I didn’t recognise the girl that had captivated her back home. I only saw a young woman with light brown skin and shoulder-length black hair, breasts that were firm but small and thighs that still needed toning. I made a mental note to myself to increase my workouts. I personally think my mouth is a little too wide, my forehead a little too low, and people have told me my eyes were my best feature. I know I’m not beautiful, and I’ve never liked looking at myself naked. Karen was beautiful. She could have had anyone, and I always thought she overlooked the physical when she loved me.

  “Look at that beautiful woman,” she said now, pointing to my reflection. “You never see it. Sometimes it’s so charming that you don’t, but sometimes it’s like you wish you could erase yourself completely.”

  I took her hand and brought it to my lips. “But you do when you fall in love. You lose yourself in the other person.”

  She kissed my head and wrapped her arms around my neck. She sm
iled. “I’ve never wanted you to run away from yourself completely. That’s not love, honey.”

  I was about to answer her when my mobile rang, bleeping away from its resting place on the sink.

  “Don’t answer it,” groaned Karen.

  “I have to,” I said, sloshing water as I reached for the phone. “Technically, I’m supposed to be at work.”

  That was the whole point of being a star’s PA, being constantly available.

  “Let ’em leave a message,” said Karen.

  I rolled my eyes at her and clicked on the phone. The caller ID already told me ERICA. Yes, I had to take it.

  “Mish…”

  She was upset. Luther had flown home to New York, had emerged from Kennedy Airport that morning, and she was all worked up about his return. They had spoken briefly on the phone, their conversation strained, and she realised she had so many unresolved issues, and, damn it, she was supposed to get married in a few weeks! Could I see her? No, not at the apartment, why don’t we get coffee at Edgar’s on West 84th?

  “Okay, I’ll see you soon,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”

  Karen rose from the bath, her golden skin dripping and getting the floor all wet as she snatched a towel and padded out of the washroom. I shut off the Jacuzzi so we could hear each other, pulled the plug and grabbed a towel.

  “Okay, you’re pissed,” I called to her. “She is my boss.”

  “Do what you have to do,” she told me. “It was a nice moment.”

  “Karen, I won’t be long.”

  “Just do me a favour and ask for her itinerary for the rest of the day. No, never mind, I’ll be at the Met. I can spend hours in that place—”

  “I said I won’t be long.”

  Naked, she snatched up her brush from the night table and let down her long curtain of black hair, vigorously brushing away, clinging beads of water on her thighs and down the small of her back.