The Lure

by Felice Picano

  Fifteen guests passed out at one time or another. Fourteen were revived. The other, whom no one seemed to know or care to know, was declared a casualty. Everyone else who happened to get in through one of the five etched-glass doors eventually emerged outside again, and all seemed to spend the next three days on the telephone detailing everything that had occurred and declaring there would never be another party like it—until Window Wall reopened next year, of course.

  Although the disco began only at the witching hour, the club doors opened at nine for the dinner guests Eric had invited to Mirror City. Like the party later on, this group was a very mixed affair: ribbon clerks and truck drivers and florists by day hobnobbing with cinema idols, stand-up comics, billionaires—all such distinctions obliterated by the formal wear required by the invitation, which could be checked for lighter dance togs at the appropriate time.

  Expectation, excitement, and a sense of being one of the very elite ran like electrical charges through this early crowd as they arrived and were shot up to the third floor to the lounge area opposite Mirror City, overlooking the still-darkened main floor. Eric had rebuilt this lounge, tearing down the floor of offices between it and the roof and installing a dozen tinted-glass skylights to let in the night. A sixteen-piece jazz band played mellow reconstructions of the thirties and forties dance tunes, furthering the illusion of a roof-garden nightclub from that era.

  It was in a round-cornered black leather sofa in this lounge—almost deserted after dinner, and once the discotheque had been opened—that Alana finally got away from her friends and admirers and sat Noel down over double Hennesseys in balloon snifters for the “very important talk” she had written to ask him for earlier.

  The jazz band was in the middle of a Cole Porter medley. In the small bowls on every table, candles flickered dimly. Every frosted-glass light had been dimmed. A few couples were dancing slowly in the middle of the large room. Other, equally shadowy duos and trios sat in booths and darkened corners. The brandy fumes were heady after the three wines that had accompanied dinner, and the coke that had gone around each table between every course, and the tranquilizer Noel had unnecessarily taken at eight o’clock.

  He was completely relaxed: hunger sated, thirst quenched, tension gone. Everything smelled like brandy and lilies and perfume. Everything looked muted, candlelit, butter-smooth as the sofa, without sharpness, without edge. He had taken off his tie, opened a half dozen buttons of the frilled Sulka shirt Eric had given him to wear this evening. His legs were lifted onto an ottoman, just brushing Alana’s golden tan thighs where her skirt had been raised.

  They’d been more or less together all evening, ever since they’d left the town house with Eric in the Silver Cloud. But now that they were really alone, Noel wondered what she wanted to say that she hadn’t been able to say before.

  He glanced at her without wanting to be seen observing, once more ticking off her attractions: her soft dark eyes, her glowing skin, her slightly overripe lips, the fine planes and angles of her face, her long, thin, very European nose, her loose, heavy dark hair around her shoulders. His panic subsided into warmth.

  “Well?” he finally said, so quietly he barely heard himself.

  She heard it, though, looked at him. “I’ve been practicing all day. I still don’t know how to begin.”

  “The beginning,” he suggested.

  “That is most difficult. You’ve seen the photos.”

  “Dorrance showed them to me.”

  “Did you like them?”

  “You looked wonderful.”

  “So do you. It is about the photos I want to talk. To begin with,” she added hastily. She seemed very unsure of herself. So unexpectedly unsure that Noel wondered why. He said nothing.

  “The magazines came out last week. In Paris. Berlin, Rome, Milan. They were very stunning.” She immediately guessed it was the wrong word. She was nervous, wasn’t she? “Very surprising, I meant to say. Everyone in Europe wanted to know who you were.”

  “I’ll bet they did.”

  “Not because of me. There have already been many offers.”

  “What kind of offers?”

  “To pose. For art directors. For photographers. For designers. To do layouts, advertisements, fashion spreads.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “I’ve been serious about this from the beginning, Noel. It is you who have always made a joke about it. Now I’m telling you it is no joke. An income of at least one hundred thousand American dollars for the first two years, that is not to laugh at, yes? If you do well, you will earn more, of course.”

  She looked away from him, cradling the balloon glass, and said in a lower voice, “But you must come to Europe. To live. To work. You must agree to give up what you are now doing. Your book…anything else you are doing. And one more thing: you must decide immediately.”

  Ever since Dorrance had showed him the magazines on Redfern’s terrace, Noel was prepared to hear these words from her: not the details, of course. The figures she mentioned seemed astronomically high just for standing in front of a camera, the terms exacting.

  “Where do you fit into this?” he asked. “As my agent?”

  “As your agent, yes. But then however you want me to fit.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I have Air France reservations for two. The six o’clock flight. Today. I am taking that flight. With you, or alone, Noel.”

  “Does Eric know all this?”

  “More or less.”

  “I thought you’d never leave him?”

  “I’ll see him. He’ll come to visit. It is time I began to live for myself, no?” she said, so pertly that he had to laugh.

  “I still don’t understand how you’ll fit into it,” he demanded, wanting her to declare herself.

  “Come away with me, tonight, Noel. Away from this stupid, this awful business. Live with me. Work with me. Be my friend, my brother, my lover, my husband, whatever you want to be.”

  Now that it was out, she seemed surprised. He was.

  “You want me to marry you?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Even with all that’s happened to me?”

  She lost her patience. “What has happened to you that is so special? Nothing! You went to bed and made love to a man. Maybe you’ll do so again. So what? No one cares about that. No one will care. It is not so important. It happens. Sometimes it means something. Sometimes not. Don’t listen to the voice of your father or grandfather or scoutmaster, listen to your own inner voice, Noel. I am offering you a life where it won’t matter to anyone if you make love to a man or a woman or…a potato. Is that so difficult to understand?”

  Before she finished, he reached over and cupped his hands over her own fluttery ones around the balloon glass.

  “Forgive me. It isn’t every day a beautiful woman proposes.”

  She smiled, looking fatigued, uncertain. He realized how much of her pride this little talk had cost her.

  “So you will come with me?”

  “Let’s dance,” he said.

  “Say it, Noel. Say you will come with me to Paris.”

  “Let me think about it a minute. Come on, we’ll dance.”

  She seemed uncertain, but followed him to the center of the dance floor, all but empty now that everyone had gone downstairs to the discotheque, allowing herself to be drawn into his arms.

  The skin on her arms and through the gauzelike material she wore was hot, dry, as though she were still nervous. Her scent was scarcely noticeable: rose attar. The same as she’d worn the first time he’d seen her and heard her voice. As they swayed, her hair brushed the back of his hand. She was easy, comfortable; she fit perfectly into his arms. Perfectly.

  All he had to do was say yes. He would go with her to Paris in less than a day. Possess her—Alana De Vijt, the world’s most-sought-after woman, compared to whom all women he’d ever known, even Monica, were selfish, foolish, tac
tless, clumsy, stupid. All he had to do was say yes. He would have an international career in modeling, be famous, be seen everywhere, make more money in a year than he had in six. Go to parties, dinners, galas, resorts, spas, nightclubs. See the way the rich and the beautiful, the spoiled and the unspoilable lived. All he had to do was say yes. He knew sex would be no problem with Alana. Even now he felt a warmth in his loins he had never felt for Mirella, for other women. He also knew that he would feel easier about men. That being with her he would feel free to find out what lay behind his attraction/repulsion to them, especially to Eric. She would be discreet, out of the way, back again when he needed her. They would grow old together. Perhaps have children. Never lack. Meet movie stars. Ride in big black cars. (Who had said that to him? Loomis, wasn’t it?) All he had to do was say yes. He deserved being pampered after these hellish six months. All he had to do… What was left to hold him back? Whisper? Hypocrisy! Tenure? Did he want it now? The book? Would he ever finish it? Nothing.

  But the instant he concluded that, he knew he would never go to Paris with Alana on the six o’clock flight, on any flight. Not because it wasn’t the best thing that would ever happen to him. It was. Not because there was anything to hold him here. There wasn’t. But for the simple but all-pervading reason that yesterday afternoon waiting for Priscilla Vega to show up, he’d made a resolution, the first in his life, the best in his life, to live that life, whatever it turned out to be, and not someone else’s idea of it: not even Alana’s.

  Then he realized that the crucial day had passed the day he was to have gone off, killed Eric.

  He also remembered that this probably meant that Loomis’s alternative plan would go now into action—the set-up drug bust illustrated on his message from Loomis. The catch! And he knew that because Eric was so much a part of his life now, his real life, that is, not the fantasy Alana had invented for him. Noel couldn’t allow the catch to happen.

  Trying to mask all he was feeling, he asked where Eric was.

  “Upstairs,” she answered dreamily, “in the office. Or in the DJ’s booth. He likes to watch from there.”

  “Let’s go find him.”

  She caught the urgency in his words. “Now?”

  “We’ll boogie a little. Don’t you want to?”

  “It’s so pleasant here. It will be crazy downstairs.”

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he urged. “I’d like to.”

  “You’d have to check your jacket. Even your shirt. You know how hot it will be.”

  She clearly didn’t want to go. Afraid he would decline her offer? Why?

  “I’ll leave my jacket here,” he said. They had stopped pretending to dance. He took off the jacket and threw it on the sofa. “Come on. You love to dance.”

  “We’ll never find him. Noel. There are thousands of people down there.”

  But Noel was beginning to break out into a sweat, even with his jacket off and his shirt open to his navel. He very gently pulled her behind him, to the solid glass doors that led to the nearest escalator, trying to hide the sudden intense fear that was rising inside him, unresolvable—until he saw Eric and knew that Eric was safe.

  12

  One-third of the way down the long, gently sloping, slowly descending escalator, the party hit Noel so hard he had to clutch the handrail.

  From this overhead view it seemed as though every inch of the place, dance floor, lounges, bars, doorways, was crowded with bodies, and every body was in twitching, jumping, swirling, almost Brownian motion as though a giant electric current had been forced through the outer walls. Four hundred sweeping, twirling, blinking, shooting, stroboscoping lights utterly destroyed the shape, solidity, essence of every object he looked at. Walls, mirrors, sculptures, doors, faces, bodies were fractured into bars, circles, ellipses, cones, stripes of light. Everything moving so quickly, then shifting rapidly to another shape, another density, another brightness, that when he tried to focus on the DJ’s booth—shoulder high over the dance floor—he could only make out and hold its general shape for a second before it, too, fragmented into a pointillist landscape: scallops of electric blue shoving against points of fuchsia, eradicated by slashes of red, then greens, then purples, pushed aside by dashes of orange and magenta into colors that he couldn’t even begin to name or describe, never having seen or even known of their existence before. Simultaneously, he was attacked on all sides by the sheer rush of sound.

  Beneath him, huge speakers ten feet tall erupted into staccatto thumping so deep he could feel its pulse in his arteries. Around him, suspended in the air, every few yards, tweeters shrieked, chattered, whined, aahed, beeped, sang, screamed. Suddenly two soprano voices in a shrill chorus were twittering at his left ear. Just under them, a dozen trumpets blared the same color red that streaked across his eyes from a reflection off a double-hinged mirror, then subsided into a punctuating throb. Beyond them, behind him, the multiple rhythms of tambourines and maracas suddenly began like chattering monkeys, like wild-eyed, screeching, tropical-colored birds of prey. Now a thin edge of stiletto-sharp silver also held the air, as the lead singer’s voice began the words. Between it, beneath it, all around it was the bedrock visceral, blood-pumping, heart-strumming, ear-buzzing bass which he fought as it reached out to grip his legs like a viscous, life-sucking force. But he couldn’t resist, and slid into it deeper and deeper, slid forward inexorably and was now off the rubber grip of the escalator steps and pushed far into the center of the dance floor, where he was suddenly still for a half second, like a frame from a film of a hydrogen bomb’s mushroom cloud, absolutely still for the instant, as the fatal atoms did their deadly shatter. Then everything was in motion again.

  Noel suddenly remembered what Eric had said to him at the town house about atomizing the air of the entire Window Wall with LSD. Everyone was tripping on it. He, too, was tripping on it.

  A face sailed past him, multicolored, young, perspiring, glimmering in different colors, ecstatic. Another face caught him from another side, darker, sweat-beaded, eyes staring up, mouth opened in a complete and delighted grin. A glimpse of Alana, her head thrown back, eyes closed as though in orgasm, lips open to smile as though in on some secret, the lights metamorphosing her into sheer delight. She must be tripping, too. Everyone was. And Noel had never done it before!

  But he was moving, too, because unaware that his mind was unable to come to terms with it, his body had instinctively taken off on the rhythm around him; instinctively knowing that the only way not to fall, to keep afloat, was to keep moving rhythmically in tune; the only way to avoid the dance, to progress, was to stay vibrating, to become the dance itself.

  Alana’s hands reached out in the colored, fractured, light-growing air between them, gliding smooth and buttery soft, evoking sudden images of dancing girls’ arms in harems, of the arms of Hindu statues, of Balinese dancers’ arms making strange, enigmatic symbols before his eyes. They came together behind him, around his neck and shoulders, and she glided closer to his body, and his own arms suddenly appeared in the air before him, looking odd and unnatural, but slightly familiar, and they, too, began to dance, and finally snaked around her body, changing shape and proportions with every second-long change of light or color or detail of the sound around them.

  Noel couldn’t take the barrage on his optic nerve anymore and closed his eyes. But that made no difference in the lights or shapes, except that now there was no point of reference anymore. The sounds continued, deeper, louder, closer to his skin it seemed, invading him. So he opened his eyes and felt terror and nausea sweep up through his body into his mouth and ears and eyes, and out of him. Then it began again, from within, only he stopped it from emerging, and it shot back inside this time, detonating every individual cell, until he could see their tiny nuclei individually shatter, and the blackness that had threatened to suck him below engorged him and he was sucked into the blackness, darker than any imaginable, until he almost thought, then he was sure, then was absolutely convinced, it wasn’
t blackness at all but the white, white, white of nothingness forever white…

  When he opened his eyes, he was whole again, Noel Cummings, as was everything else—the lights, the music, Alana, the club, the people, the dancing were there, too, a minute later. Paradox. No. Joke. First whole, then a million individual cells. There, yet not there, black becoming white, death seeming to give instant birth. Big joke. Still dancing, too. Alana turning around slowly in front of him, decomposing into billions of cells, each little cell winking on and off, moving, proving itself alive. Then all of the cells joining together to form bone, flesh, skin, muscle: Alana—with a wonderful smile. She’d known the joke all the while, of course, while he, a child, hadn’t. Eric had known all the while, too. Eric. What Noel must do to find Eric. To include him. This trinity that they were.

  But he could not move, as another wave of sights, sounds, smells, too, tastes, feelings—first inside, then outside, then inside again—began to form around him, intensifying, building to a crest within. This time he did not fight it but allowed himself to slide right into the blackness that became so spectacularly white…

  He came back in time to know that something had changed around his physical body while he’d been off tripping into the white. Everyone in the huge room was suddenly roaring what sounded like approval, pleasure, around him. Noel opened his eyes, saw Alana, her face shifting every second he looked at her, saw her gesturing for him to follow her gaze. Everyone else’s, too. Then above them, floating only a few feet over their heads, though far off across the dance floor so that he could clearly make it out, was a giant, octagonal silver balloon, which like everything, everybody around him, kept changing its shape. No. It wasn’t a balloon. Its surface was hard, reflective, all mirrors. It was an octagon, holding that shape even as it began to change, the top of it separating, until he could now see that it was one of the mirrored rooms Eric had shown him in the sketch. (Eric. Where was Eric? Why wasn’t he here, sharing this, where he belonged, with Noel and Alana, their trinity?) It was actually opening up, its paneled sides dropping slowly as it revolved, like a giant flower opening in the heat of the sun to reveal some exotic secret within.