Black Light (17 page)

It was two miles to Ali’s house. Not far, but the road wound precariously up Muscanth Mountain, and dusk fell early there. I knew the way by heart. My boots found smooth purchase between the stones and fallen branches covering the road, and the chill faded as I began to pant with the effort of climbing. Now and then I stopped, perching on one of the stone walls that bordered the road until I caught my breath. By the time I reached Ali’s driveway I could hear the Courthouse bell chiming faintly: six o’clock. I was at Foxhall.

The gravel drive spilled out onto the road. Behind it you could glimpse trees—birches mostly, Ali’s father had cut down everything else—their branches laced with light flowing down from the house. The stone walls were inset with two concrete pillars, one etched with
FOXHALL
, the other showing a stylized vulpine face, all pointed ears and sharp nose. I headed up the drive. A few minutes later I stood in front of the house, a dun-colored monstrosity that looked as though it had been constructed out of toilet paper tubes.

“Ali—it’s me—”

I went inside, shouting. From upstairs music pounded, Ali warbling along with “Gimme Shelter.” I stuck my head into the living room, a cavernous glass-walled space with built-in white furniture that made it look like a cross between a space capsule and a sepulchre. No sign of Ali’s father, save for an empty pitcher beading a glass coffee table with condensation.

“Lit!” Ali bellowed. “Get your ass
up
here—”

I went upstairs. Ali grabbed my arm and yanked me into her room, dancing over to turn down the stereo. There were Pre-Raphaelite posters on the walls alongside the Beardsley image of Tristan and Isolde; Polaroids of Ali and Hillary and Duncan and myself; a picture of Noddy Holder torn from
Circus
magazine. A cone of jasmine incense smoked on Ali’s desk, but I could still smell pot and tobacco smoke. “Where the hell you been? ’Cause I had this great idea—”

“Is it about food? Because
I’m
—”

“No—your hair, I’m going to henna your hair—” I scowled, but Ali ignored me. “I
know
I’ve got some henna left—”

“But I’m starving,
please,
Ali—”

She pushed by me and made for the bureau. “This’ll be great, you’ll look so fucking
great
—”

It took her a while, fumbling through drawers jammed with mascara wands and Biba lipgloss,
L’air du Temps
perfume and plastic envelopes of birth control pills, worn-out ballet shoes and innumerable black leotards.

“Hah! Here it is—” She held up an enameled metal tin decorated with hieroglyphs. “I was afraid I’d thrown it out.”

Resigned, I sank onto her bed. “Will it still be any good?”

“Definitely. This stuff lasts forever. Cleopatra probably used this same box—”

She pried it open and stuff like greenish smoke filled the air. Ali pinched some henna between her fingers, redolent of dried grass and incense.

“It looks like dirt,” I said.

“Oh, shut up and sit down. And put this over your shoulders. Just wait, Lit, you’ll be
beautiful
—”

She mixed henna and water in a cracked Wedgwood bowl, then carefully smoothed the greenish clay onto my hair. “Oh, man. At the party tonight they’ll be
crazy
for you. It’ll make you gorgeous.”

What it did was turn my hair flaming orange, the precise shade of a fox’s pelt in full winter growth. I shrieked when I looked into the mirror. Ali grinned.

“
Wow.
It looks great, Lit.” She dried my hair, leaving muddy streaks on the towel. “God, it looks
so great.
See, your hair should
always
have been this color. You just want to pet it—”

She touched it gingerly, that glowing mass that didn’t really belong to me. “Ooh, yeah.
Excellent.
”

I stood in front of the full-length mirror and glared. “God damn it, Ali. I oughta kill you—”

“One of these days your face is gonna stay like that,” Ali said, and tapped my nose.
“Smile.”

“I look like that thing at Jamie’s house.”

“What? The sitar?”

“No, you idiot. The gorgon. The Medusa.”

She went to the window, hoisted herself onto the sill and lit a cigarette. “I think it looks totally cool. Before your hair was so—well, it was just
beige.
This is much better. Here, hold this—”

She shoved the cigarette at me and hopped off the sill. “—
I’m
getting dressed.”

She slid out of her Danskin and pulled on a velveteen Norma Kamali minidress with heart-shaped cutouts in the bodice, fluffed her hair, and proceeded to spend forty-five minutes putting on mascara. I kicked off my boots and jeans and got into my dress.

“Don’t you
dare
put your hair up,” Ali yelled when I started tugging my damp curls into a braid. “Just
leave
it. Look”— She stood behind me, close enough that I could catch the smoky smell of her skin, sweat and tobacco and jasmine. —“see how pretty it is now?” She thrust her fingers into it. “Medusa. Is that the one who started the Trojan War?”

“No, Ali. Medusa is the one who turned everybody to stone.”

She laughed. “So
you
can be the one who
gets
everybody
stoned.
Ha!”

I put my boots back on and we went downstairs. Despite the chill, Constantine, Ali’s father, was sitting out on the back deck overlooking the woods, a pitcher of screwdrivers on the table beside him. He was a slight man, with dark hair and Ali’s golden eyes, his sharp features starting to go slack from too much drink.

“Charlotte!” he said. “What happened to your face?”

“My face?” I clapped my hands to my cheeks in dismay.

He pointed at my dress. “It’s the only part of you that’s not orange.”

“C’mon, Dad, leave her alone.” Ali peered at a sheaf of blueprints stretched across the table. “What’s that?”

“Just some sketches I’m putting together for Axel’s opera.”

“I thought Ralph Casson was doing design for that,” Ali said innocently. She plucked an ice cube from the pitcher and ran it across her cheeks. “I mean, that’s what I heard.”

Constantine looked annoyed. He refilled his glass, took a long swallow, and said, “Well, he’s not. Ralph Casson is
building
the sets.
I’m
designing them. And I don’t want you trashing the plans, okay?” He replaced his drink and reached for one of the designs, but Ali grabbed his hand.

“Oh,
please,
Daddy—can we see?” Ali leaned over the table. “Hey, this is pretty cool. Check it out, Lit.”

She poked her finger at the blueprint, tracing something that looked vaguely like a chambered nautilus. “Dad? What is this? A pyramid?”

He shook his head. “It’s supposed to be a labyrinth—see, it’s kind of a cutaway view, so from the audience you’re looking inside it. These are all just preliminary sketches”— He picked up his drink. —“it’s actually a bitch to get the sightlines right. I have no idea how it’s going to work.”

I stood beside Ali and looked at each design as she flipped through them. All showed the Miniver Amphitheater, a small open-air theater on the Bolerium estate that dated back to Acherley Darnell’s time. Actually, calling it a “theater” was stretching a point. Despite the Kamensic Village Preservation Society’s continuing (and unsuccessful) efforts to have it declared a National Historic Site, the amphitheater was little more than a natural declivity on the mountainside, with stone and wooden benches set into the surrounding slope. Over the decades, the granite slabs had gradually sunk into the earth; their mossy tops now thrust at odd angles from the grass, like the remains of an ancient barrow. In Acherley Darnell’s time, the writer and his cronies often staged plays there, for their own amusement and the entertainment of the villagers.

Since then the amphitheater had fallen into decay. I dimly recalled attending a child’s birthday there when I was six or seven, and every few years the Preservation Society hosted a garden tea with Mrs. Langford officiating. But the staging area was small. More than sixty or seventy people would crowd the hillside.

“Isn’t it kind of dinky?” I asked. “I mean, for an opera?”

“Yup. But
Ariadne
isn’t
Aida
—it’s just one act and a prologue, small cast, no elaborate sets. In fact, Axel is actually dropping the prologue”— Constantine tapped a finger alongside his nose. —“and
this
is where it gets kind of neat. He’s gotten his hands on a fragment of a lost play by Euripides called
Theseus at Knossos,
and he’s going to stage it as the prelude to
Ariadne auf Naxos.”

“Wow.” Ali yawned. “Don’t want to miss
that
.”

Her father ignored her. “The amphitheater would actually be a very nice place to mount it, pretty alfresco setting, all that. I think he’s going for some sort of modern staging—you know, kind of Beckett, kind of
Godspell
…”

He crunched an ice cube, then sighed. “Actually, I’m not sure exactly
what
the hell he’s up to. I think he’s doing this for the backers, trying to get the money to mount a full-scale version next fall. Or this could be just another one of his vanity productions. Who the hell knows. It’s a goddam job, that’s all I care about.”

Ali nodded absently, and I scrutinized the plans strewn across the table: sketches of crude, boxy mazes and prisonlike edifices of stone, elaborate topiary labyrinths and pop art meanders and designs like the rose windows of a cathedral.

“They’re great,” I said. I glanced over to see Constantine giving me a bleary smile. “Really beautiful. Is that what he’s going to do? Build a maze in the amphitheater?”

Constantine shrugged. “Who knows? He’s got some wacko conception about archetypal images or some such shit, the labyrinth of the mind. That kind of thing. There sure as hell isn’t a maze in the opera, though I guess the part about Theseus has a Minotaur in the labyrinth.”

He downed the rest of his drink, gently moved me aside, and started gathering his prints. “I better get these back together. You girls about ready? Okay—give me a couple minutes to change. I’ll meet you at the car.”

Constantine’s car was a vintage red Triumph convertible, the only vehicle in Kamensic that was even less reliable than Hillary’s Dodge Dart. Ali and I scrunched into the minuscule backseat, our legs tangled, as the car inched up the mountain toward Bolerium. It was nearly full dark now, and cold. I huddled against Ali’s small form, warming my hands beneath her velvet cape.

“You want us to push?” she shouted, as the Triumph crept almost to a halt.

“NO!”
bellowed Constantine. He’d changed into a blue blazer and white shirt, boat shoes, no socks, with a red-white-and-blue Hermès ascot tucked under his chin. He looked (and drove) like a demented Cary Grant.

“Dad! It’s not going to—”

“NO
PUSHING
.”

“But—” I closed my eyes while they argued. My hair was still damp; I knotted my fingers about it, breathing in the henna’s sweet scent of grass drying in the sun, and hoped I didn’t look too ridiculous. The bizarre things I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, now seemed very far away. It was difficult to believe in antlered men or ghosts with Constantine Fox singing Judy Henske songs off-key in the front of a red convertible. I’d had a hit off a joint with Ali back in her room, and felt a pleasant anticipatory buzz about the party. My parents would be there, which wasn’t so great. Neither was the prospect of watching everyone in town suck up to Axel Kern. But I shivered at the thought of seeing Jamie Casson again, his languid mouth and bruised eyes and insolent voice…

“Hey, Lit—” Ali nudged me, hard.

“Ow! What?”

“Get out. We’re pushing.”

I groaned, clambering out as Ali squirmed by me. Constantine got out as well, and the three of us pushed until the car gave a low rumble.

“Get in!” yelled Constantine. Ali leaped in beside him, laughing hysterically, and I flung myself onto her lap, the door hanging open as we barreled up the hill.

“Very important to make a good entrance!” shouted Constantine.

“Yeah, like the circus,” Ali hollered back.

We puttered up the last few hundred yards, the road weaving among the great old-growth forest: hemlock, poplar, beech, white oak, all slashed with crimson and yellow and glowing in the headlights. Up here the cold wind ripped across the mountaintop and the trees creaked like a ship under full sail. Other than that there was no other sound. No music, no party voices. No other cars making their way up the mountain; nothing to suggest that anything lay behind those sentinel trees but wilderness.

But then the Triumph bounced over a rut. The chassis scraped against stone. Ali shrieked; Constantine swore. I sat up too fast, blinking and feeling slightly vertiginous, as though I’d just stepped onshore after days at sea.

“Hey! Dad, watch out!”

“Hold your horses, for chrissakes let me park…”

A few feet ahead of us a sawhorse had been set up as a roadblock. In front of it a spare figure in white shirt and black vest and trousers was directing traffic. Constantine snorted in annoyance and pulled the Triumph into a long row of cars parked at the side of the road. “I guess we walk from here.”

Ali hopped out before he could cut the engine. I followed, turned to see Constantine perched on the edge of the driver’s seat. The rolled-up blueprints lay across his knees. His hands curled around them protectively as he stared up the road to where guests milled around, laughing as they made their way toward the main entrance to Bolerium. Constantine’s bronze cheeks glistened faintly in the twilight, and even from where I stood I could see his dark eyes, at once tired and expectant.

“Thanks, Mr. Fox,” I said.

“Hmm? Oh, Lit—sure, sure.” He smiled and got out of the car, pausing to pat my shoulder. “You girls behave, now.”

I watched him walk unsteadily toward the others, who greeted him with more laughter and raucous cheers. In the darkness I could just make out Ali’s white face as she rushed to hug Duncan Forrester. I was heading toward her when a voice rang out.

“You left the door open. Hey! You left your
door
—”