Eighty Days Blue (13 page)

‘You have a bit of a tan, Summer – unusual for a winter in New York. Did you manage to get away?'

‘A few days in New Orleans . . . I must have been in the sun a bit too long on the riverboat . . .
The Creole Queen
.'

‘Did you go with anyone special?'

‘A friend. From London.'

‘Good. You'll be glad of the rest. We have a busy couple of months.'

‘No more holidays planned for a while, then.'

‘Oh, it's not so bad, is it? I wouldn't want to wear you out.'

The rehearsal space had emptied, the rest of the orchestra dissolved into the bowels of the night to take advantage of whatever was left of the evening. Even Baldo and Marija had grown accustomed to the extra time we spent chatting at the end of rehearsals and had left us to it.

Simón had moved closer to me, close enough to kiss.
The
smell of his cologne drifted around him like a cloud, a combination of musk and spices, so different from Dominik's plain, soapy scent. I had never seen Dominik apply any aftershave.

His hair was electric, even thicker than my own. It framed his face like a dark halo. For a moment, I thought that if we were to have children, they would surely have hair like poodles, but it was a ridiculous thought. I didn't even want to have children.

I moved my violin so that it covered the front of my body, blocking Simón's path if he had planned to make a move, and shifted forward, toward the exit. He picked up his own bag and walked with me to the door.

The blast of cold air outside burned the back of my throat. I rifled through my bag for my mittens.

‘Damn, no gloves,' I sighed. The rehearsal space was only a couple of blocks from my apartment. I would be there by the time that I managed to flag a taxi down.

Simón unwrapped his scarf from his neck, took my hands in his and wound the length of fabric round my wrists. It was still warm from the heat of his body.

‘Oh, no,' I protested, ‘you'll be frozen.'

‘I insist,' he said, giving my hands a squeeze through the wool. ‘Your hands are much more important than mine.'

‘Thank you,' I replied, in the politest, most professional tone that I could muster.

I took a small step backwards, increasing the space between us, and nodded a goodbye.

‘See you tomorrow,' he said, turning on the point of his snakeskin boots with the finesse of a dancer and disappearing into the night.

I pressed my hands, still wrapped tightly in his scarf,
against
my face to keep warm. His scent followed me all the way home, and, try as I might to forget it, I couldn't help but wonder what his bare skin would smell like. Perhaps it wasn't cologne; maybe Simón, naked, smelled of spices, cinnamon and nutmeg mixed with sweat.

That night, I dreamed of two men. Each time I conjured up Dominik, the sound of his voice, the complexity of his desires, the image in my mind would blur into Simón, the way I imagined his thick hair would feel in my fingers, the warmth of his hands, the rich caramel colour of his skin, so different from Dominik's pale English body. I wondered if he was hairy, like Baldo. I always liked hair on a man, associated it with heat and testosterone, manliness. Dominik had just a soft line of fuzz on his chest, fading to nothing on his stomach and then beginning again at his groin, like a dark arrow leading the way to his cock.

In the end, I gave up trying to separate them and imagined having them both at once, Dominik in my mouth, holding my face against his cock, Simón in my cunt.

Somehow, though, I didn't think that either of them was really the sharing type.

I had given up on any hope of advice on the subject from Marija. She hadn't met Dominik, but mistrusted him nonetheless. Her favour was firmly in Simón's court and she forever nagged me to flirt with him more.

‘You're crazy, girl. You could have the world at your feet with that man. Or the Lincoln Center, at least. And what does the English one do for you, eh?'

She had taken up Baldo's habit of wearing just her underwear around the house, with the heating turned up full throttle. She always wore matching cotton sets, in bright colours that covered every shade in the rainbow. No
lace
or satin for Marija. Thankfully, my share of the rent included bills, so they were picking up the tab for the extra heating. She had the long, thin legs of a wading bird, her thighs about the thickness of my upper arms, I reckoned, though she ate like a horse. Baldo was forever on a diet, but his thick body resolutely maintained its stoutness. ‘My chunky monkey,' Marija would call him, chuckling when he scowled at her.

‘It's not about what either of them do for me,' I sighed.

‘Don't be silly. Of course it is. At least, if you're going to be a fool and date the Englishman, keep it quiet. The conductor will stop giving you favours if he loses all hope of getting into your pants.'

‘And here I was thinking that she was with me for love,' Baldo piped up.

‘I'm just with you for your body,' she replied, draping her arms over him and nuzzling her face into his neck.

I took my bag and hurried through the door, eager to escape before their display of affection grew more amorous.

I had a date with Cherry tonight. She was performing a burlesque act at a bar in Alphabet City as part of a cabaret. It was a good gig, and she was one of the headliners. The show started at eight and she wasn't on until eleven, so we had a few hours to sit together and chat.

She was already inside when I arrived. Even under the club's low lighting, her bright-pink hair shone like a beacon. She spotted me coming in the door, waved me over to the table and handed me a cosmopolitan.

‘I haven't had one of these for years,' I said.

‘Not since
Sex and the City
was on the TV?'

‘Yeah, something like that,' I laughed.

‘You need to catch up. This is my second. The trick with performing, you see, is to find that fine line between drunk and too drunk, then ride it all the way home.'

‘Doesn't seem to work that way in an orchestra,' I mused. ‘One beer and the conductor would throw me out the door.'

‘You should play rock music instead.'

‘Too late for that now, I think. Vivaldi pays the bills.'

‘How was New Year in New Orleans? Your man came over to visit?'

‘It was great. I need a holiday to recover, though. He wore me out.'

‘You should consider yourself lucky. Both of my boyfriends are away at the moment, working.'

‘Hang on. “Both” of your boyfriends?'

Cherry grinned from ear to ear. ‘Yup. I'm a lucky girl, huh? I have two.'

‘And they know about each other?'

‘Sure do. Pete has another girlfriend. He's away visiting her at the moment. Tony is touring with his band. He just sees me, but he does get quite a bit of interest from his groupies. He's a busy boy.'

I stared at her. ‘Don't you get jealous?'

She sighed. ‘That's the first thing everybody says.'

‘Well, it's a reasonable question. Don't you?'

‘Occasionally. I think everybody does. But I've been seeing Pete for five years. We make it work. Tony is sort of like my bit on the side. I don't think I could cope with just having one guy. I get bored.'

‘Whose idea was it? Yours or his?'

‘Mine, I suppose. We started by going to a few swingers' clubs, just as a way to spice things up. It grew from there.
How
about you? What's your story? Are you serious with this English guy?' She held her drink up to the light. ‘They never put enough Cointreau in these things. Remind me to tell the bartender.'

Her fake eyelashes glittered in the reflection from the glass. The end of each lash was decorated with a tiny crystal, like the legs of a spider that's just run through snow.

‘Well, we sort of see other people.'

‘What do you mean, sort of? You either do or you don't. Any kind of “sort of” is dangerous territory. Have you actually talked about it? Worked out what's OK and what isn't?'

‘It's complicated.'

‘Now, that's where you're going wrong. It's not complicated. It's very simple. Or at least it ought to be.'

‘He might be moving over here soon. He's applied for a job in New York.'

‘Well, you had better work it out in a hurry, then.' She drained her glass. ‘One more?' She checked her watch. It was as big as a golf ball resting on her wrist, a diamanté-encrusted orb, like a disco ball, that flipped open with a digital display inside.

‘Why not. Still got a couple of hours.'

I slipped off my stool and lined up at the bar. The lights dimmed as the first act appeared on stage to the tune of Shirley Bassey's ‘Goldfinger'. The dancer was tall, slim and clad in a 1950s-style high-waisted leopard-print bikini, with astronomically high matching heels. She was mixed-race, with bronze skin and thick, dark hair teased into an afro. She sang as well as danced her routine, and she owned the stage with the confidence of a young lion that's just knocked out 170 pounds of gazelle for dinner.

‘Thanks,' said Cherry, as I handed her a cosmopolitan, heavy on the Cointreau. ‘You'd never know she was a man, would you?' she whispered to me, nodding her head toward the stage.

I took another look at the dancer. Yes, she had a distinctive bulge tucked tightly between her legs, but her movements were exquisitely feminine, with a definite hint of the feline. Even in a relaxed pose she looked as though she was ready to pounce on something. Me, I hoped, though that seemed unlikely.

The next act was dull in comparison, a fairly pretty girl doing a strip routine dressed as a man. She didn't quite have the bravado for it and tripped awkwardly over the costume that she was carrying as she left the stage. I felt a little sorry for her.

‘Right. That's me. After the next turn, I better go and put my gear on.'

Cherry disappeared through a door to the side of the stage. She was carrying a bag so large she looked as though she might live in it, like a tortoise carrying its shell around.

I barely recognised her when she appeared on stage, following one further strip act, though this time a man dressed as a bear dressed as a man, who stripped down to his bear suit in an act that managed to be absurd and comic in all the right places.

Cherry was dressed entirely in pink, in a floor-length satin gown with a chiffon fishtail, and was carrying a pair of enormous pink feathered fans, each of them almost bigger than she was. She wore towering stiletto heels, bigger than any I had seen before, also bright pink, and covered with tiny crystals that glimmered with each step she took. Besides
her
stiletto-clad feet, her body was entirely hidden from view by the fans.

I had expected her act to be much like the previous one, another femme fatale slow-stripping song in the background as she elegantly danced down to her smalls, but Cherry's routine was much racier, and performed to the tune of Rick James's ‘Super Freak'.

The audience applauded wildly as she shimmied out of her gown and swung her heavy breasts so the nipple tassles went round and round like windmills. She finished the act on her back on the floor, with her legs over her head, demonstrating that she could lick herself out if she chose to.

‘Wow,' I said to her, when she returned to her seat. ‘That was pretty impressive. I can see why you have two boyfriends.'

She giggled. ‘You should come over sometime. I'll show you some moves.'

Her lips were still coated with vivid pink lipstick, which she had enhanced further by adding a layer of glitter and a coat of gloss.

I walked her to the subway. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,' she said, rummaging around in her enormous handbag for an age. ‘I got you something.'

‘It's not my birthday.'

She pulled out a length of rope, about four feet long, and handed it to me. ‘So you can practise. Just make sure that if you tie yourself to a table leg, you either have a pair of scissors handy or you leave the knots loose enough so that you can get out in a hurry if the house catches on fire. Now, that would be embarrassing to explain to emergency services.'

‘Thanks,' I replied, stuffing the rope into my purse, ‘but you know I'm not really the tying type. I prefer to be on the receiving end.'

‘You should learn how to do it anyway. Then you'll appreciate how much work it is for the person who ties you up.'

When I arrived home and glanced in the mirror, I noticed that I had a line of glitter smeared across one of my cheeks, though I didn't recollect kissing her goodnight.

The rest of the week rushed past in a blur. My days had been reduced to rehearsing, eating and sleeping, and that was basically it. I hadn't heard a peep from Dominik yet.

‘You look tired,' Simón said to me when I returned his scarf.

‘Thanks,' I replied bitterly.

‘You should relax more. When I first started here, you played with your whole body. Now you play with your mind. You need to let go again. When was the last time that you left the house, other than to rehearse?'

‘Last week. I went to a burlesque show.'

‘It's not enough. You can't play with the world in your music if you don't get out and see the world.'

I was too exhausted to argue. I just nodded my head in agreement and picked up my case to leave.

‘I have two tickets to the bull-riding at Madison Square Garden on Friday. Want to come? I was supposed to be taking my dad, but he's had to delay his visit, so I have one going spare.'

‘Bull-riding?' That wasn't what I expected.

‘Don't look like that. It's bull-riding, not bull-fighting. It's not quite how we do it in Venezuela, but as close as
you'll
get in Manhattan. It starts at four. I'll take you to dinner afterwards, as a reward for sitting through two hours of sport.'