Bliss (4 page)

“You like?” Eva stepped closer to the open sliding glass, where the sun would show off her highlights. “Got a perm and a little color-Cherry Cordial, it’s called—about … a week ago.”

“Just take the compliment. Leave some shit to the imagination.” Ron pulled off his shirt and walked into the bathroom. Water sprayed, and then hit tiles in a steady rhythm.

Through the open doors, Eva heard him pee. As his body split the strum of the shower, she heard him groan. Eva raised one nostril high.

It was difficult for Eva to get her arms around Ron. He ate skirt steak and vodka sauce and fried veal chops and brulées, but he worked out all the time, so lots of him, even though he was stout, wasn’t soft. Eva’d gone out with Ron, on and off, for almost six years.
Theory was fact in the record business, and the prevailing theory was that Ron had $4 or $5 million, mostly cash. For eight years, he’d managed a respected, increasingly platinum trio from East New York. The relationship had ended in a fireball of lawsuits and threats of blackballing and bodily harm. But Ron bounced to a label job, and also became a not-so-silent partner in a consulting firm that coached companies through what was being called the “urban” marketplace. His company acted as interpreter, translating “inner-city” trends. The business plan mentioned the “articulation of ethnic style points” in boldface.

When
Rolling Stone
asked Ron why he didn’t “retire,” play golf with Tiger Woods, and travel the world, Ron, thirty-five, said that he already played golf with Michael Jordan, and that he’d been around the world so many times, he was tired of looking at it. Ron had been to many capitals, but Eva knew that most of what he’d seen were small, ugly hotel rooms and big, beautiful ones. Ragged two-bit venues and fabulous forums. Eva and Ron had a broad-yet-blind world-view in common. Eva believed that on their best nights, she and Ron learned important things from each other.

They rarely talked about Roadshow, or the label where Ron worked, and Eva didn’t miss it. Really, they were competitors. Sunny and her younger brother, D’Artagnan, had self-produced a folksy, bluesy song that had become a local hit in San Diego in 1995. By the time stations in L.A. started playing it, four labels were bidding for Sunny, including Ron’s. At the last moment, Sunny went with Roadshow. To Ron, making records had little to do with the labels or the conglomerates. He understood spreadsheets and profit-and-loss statements, but according to Ron, the record business was a business of personalities, and even paid as he was, it bothered him that his hadn’t won Sunny over.

Eva poured herself a glass of warm champagne. It still had bubbles.
If I’m pregnant
, she thought,
it’s got to be better for me than rum
.

Eva figured the record business to be like fencing—choreographed but bloody, and bound by archaic rules. She wasn’t always the fastest, but Eva’d had her share of laughing last. When she won Sunny, Eva’s
saber had been sharp, no button on the tip of her blade. As soon as the signing was announced, people whispered, loudly, that Eva had boned D’Artagnan.

She’s a slut. Only reason she got This is ‘cause she did That
.

I feel sorry for Eva. It’s just how she is
.

That bitch fights for shit like a man
.

Shit, she fucks like a man
.

Messengers Eva wanted to murder brought her bits of these bites, and they scratched a bare part of her. When Eva was still smoking,
You fight like a man
made her flick ashes in slow motion, hold the cig for a long minute with her thumb on the filter. The comments caused her to stretch her inhale.

But she always had something for the judgmental assholes who called her out. Later, after the mesh masks had been put away.

It was how her father did business, how he lived his life. Eva’d learned a lot from her dad. He’d told her many times that men could get thrown off by sex, or even the prospect of it. Told Eva one afternoon, when she was with her parents for the summer, and glowering over the end of a romance with a deejay, that she needed to realize some things early. “Every boy,” he said, “ain’t your boyfriend.”

Eva’s father was a tidy man with ice-white teeth, a crane’s neck, and graying hair dyed black as licorice. They were on a ferry from Cape May, New Jersey, to Delaware for his mother-in-law’s funeral. He leaned over the railing, watched the stern slice bay water. “You’re a good-looking girl. This isn’t coming from your father right now, it’s coming from a man. Save yourself the bullshit.” Eva’s father turned to face her. “Love can be done without. More easily than people think.” Eva was seventeen, and already done with her first year of college. Her stepmother was belowdecks, weepy and eating. “It’s a whitewash, this love madness. A beautiful whitewash, but a whitewash just the same.”

On deck with the dog people and first-timers and cigarette smokers, in a cold summer breeze, Eva’s dad said, “You better know who you are. What you have to offer.” He smoothed blowing hair from her face. “I have
never
seen you look this ugly. You’re not going to be
falling out over every man you sleep with.” He swept his palms against each other. “I
know
that. I’m not saying some men won’t be more important to you than others. What I’m saying is—there’s nothing wrong with a little pussy between friends.”

He stood straight, looked at her with a mix of pity and affection, and with irritation. His only daughter was wasting time. “Over some pissant,” he said to Eva, chastely rubbing her back. “Men’ll cry over
you
. Maybe this is good, though, how you feel. It’ll get your mind right.”

T
hat’s not what you said earlier
.

Before the showcase…

…Eva finished half a bottle of champagne. Baked in the Bahamian beams. She laughed in her head as Ron moaned about having forgot his mango-mint shaving cream.

“You like hot bubbly?” he said. “Come get in the bed.”

“Don’t have time for all this.” Eva walked in the room. Stepped from her glittering sandals. Ron sat on the unmade bed, naked. On his right pec, there was an angry skull with an idea bulb bright yellow above. On his right bicep, a Chinese symbol for “peace.” Around his left forearm, the words FOR LOVE IS WAR AND THERE IS HATRED IN IT were raised in a bleeding, calligraphic scar.

“Quiet with the bullshit.” He waved at her bathing suit. “Off. Beautiful.”

She liked to hear it like that. “That’s what you want?” She untied the top of her suit and the back of it.

“Sit on my lap.”

His belly came out far enough that there wasn’t much lap to sit on. She stood in front of him and he pulled down the brief bottom of her bikini. Held her by her hips and kissed her stomach admiringly. Slow, mute kisses. Took a breast in each hand, pulled them down to his
mouth. Sucked for a long time, until Eva’s knees locked. He wasn’t handling them roughly, but he was still hurting her breasts with his teeth, with the sucking and wringing. He was gorging himself.
As usual
. Eva was wobbly and wet. He knew how to do it.

Ron took a breath. Ran his palms up and down her torso. “This here keeps me coming back.”

He took a nipple between each thumb and index finger. Pulled her like that, toward him. He had done it before, and Eva had pulled away from him, to lengthen the tug. But this time the pain had too fine an edge, like paper cutting into her flesh. Eva yelped, fell forward on him, and they both fell back on the bed. Ron laughed from his gut as he slapped around for a condom, then searched around for his dick, and then put it into her.

“You’re my baby,” Eva said.

“Say it for me again.”

“You heard me,” she said, stretching into him. “You’re my baby.”

Ron made it last. He could from his back. They both knew that.

Ron slept loudly. Eva put on her suit. It felt grimy, damp, and used. She tied her skirt around her in a plain knot. On the terrace for her beach bag, Eva smelled rum getting warm with the day. It was noon. With a last searching glance at the floor and other spare surfaces of the room, Eva was gone and back in her own room, a wing and three floors away. Room-service trays still stood in her corridor.

While in her bath, Eva watched the clock. Though Sunny was on the resort’s premises, Eva heard and ignored her room’s phone. She dried and lotioned and perfumed herself, then slipped into a white silk jersey dress, the best one in her bag. Eva didn’t know where the afternoon had gone. Time had lost its usual texture. The clock flipped minutes and hours, but Eva was counting weeks. Counting the steps between herself and the pregnancy test in her nightstand drawer. Eva applied pale gold eyeliner to her lids and shimmery powder to her shoulders and three coats of mascara. It was soundcheck time for Showcase Savoir Faire.

But first she listened to her hotel voice mail.

When she opened the door to leave, Eva startled a bellman. He stood there with a big basket of booze and sweets. “The gentleman says to mention he created it especially for you,” the uniformed man said, looking past her. He set the gift on Eva’s vanity, as flustered by Eva’s glowy appearance as if she’d appeared in nothing but panties. “The gentleman wanted that fact impressed.” Eva tipped the bellman $10 as he left. Right before she walked out the door herself, Eva smoothed a stray hair back into her tight chignon. She glanced at the packed basket, and then looked a final time in the mirror. Eva was glittery.

Yes
, she thought, untangling the frayed bracelets at her wrist, and noting the gleam of the karat-and-a-half diamond studs she never removed from her ears.
I look very natural
.

D
J Victorious and MC Swansong performed and they were faux thuggy and terrible, but Eva didn’t see them. She left as the duo was getting started, and she was far from the only one. The after-parties had already started, and people farthest from the stage had been filtering out since Sunny started talking about lilies. Eva paced the grounds of the hotel, which suddenly seemed devoid of bathrooms. Eva really, really had to pee.

Plus, she knew the routine. Swan and Vic would perform badly, but folks would gas Sunny up and drive her to the top again, eventually lure her to their chitlin’ circuit towns for Summer Jam concerts and Quiet Storm Extravaganzas. They’d also have the pleasure of watching Sun’s new duo embarrass themselves. The radio-industry people would feel virtuous about blowing Sun up while at the same time tee-heeing because the sideshow was so amusing. This was the fun house Eva lived in. Support was iffy. Compliments were strategic. Competition was cutthroat. Emotions were product. Cliques were combustible. Jewelry was language. Generations grated. And friendships lasted as long as the mutual back-scratch. Friendships were futile, Eva thought, a vestige from the actual world, and existed in the music industry only to give it some infrastructure aside from levels of stardom and corporate job titles.

Numb from Sun’s power move, Eva finally saw a well-lit hut. On the door was a triangle with a circle on top—so Eva heaved it open, hitched up her dress, and finally sat down. She felt guilty generally, but
on the toilet in the bleachy bathroom she felt criminal, like she was flushing data, proof of probable life, down the toilet. Then, in the hut’s bright mirror, Eva gave slight shifts or tugs to her bra straps, hem, ankle straps, and bangs.

I should go to my room, have a Scotch, drink three glasses of water, take the damn test, bathe, and fall asleep relieved, or stay up all night knowing my fate
.

But I’m not
.

She walked to an after-party at an economy room in the Coral Towers where neophytes—resourceful singers and MCs and producers, raring assistants, road managers, and radio jocks with overnight slots—stood hooded and high. MCs mumbled rhymes between dry finger snaps, trumpeted affiliations—towns, neighborhoods, record labels, crews—or adamantly, mostly misleadingly told each other (and told probable sex partners) who they were, what they did, and, like verbal caterpillars, murmured about what would happen when they emerged, monarchlike, from the Studio. Neophytes said the Studio in the clubby yet reverential way sous chefs say the Kitchen.

I’ma bring it like you never heard
. It was the theme phrase of all music studios, everywhere. Those pungent electrical places Eva loved with the rows of black levers and blue lights and hoop games on pause. The roti or the
pernil
or the pizzas get ravaged and crews egg on the one under the mike, each frantically happy to have landed in the Studio, but listening fearfully lest they hear genius, hear something real or perfect or daringly conventional enough to be a hit—because if they did hear it, what would they be but a sideman, hype-guy, the one on TV years later talking about monies never paid, about other shit stains on the dream. Eva had fallen in lust many times in the Studio—with MCs mostly, but with singers, too. Had fallen in love with herself and her job again during lulls in production schedules, during dips in her confidence.