The Elementals (7 page)

I hadn’t had a haircut since the summer. My mom used to cut my hair at home, in the bathroom with a towel over my shoulders and the smell of her so close to my face. But I didn’t want to think about her now. I reached up and flicked a tear away. If they noticed they didn’t say anything. My hair fluttered around me; it was down to my waist, even trimmed.

“Beautiful,” said Tania. “Now makeup!”

She wiped my face off with a cleansing pad and then applied a serum, lotion, an eye cream. After that I felt Perry’s hands, both thumbnails painted with grass-green polish, flicker over my face, so light it almost didn’t seem like he was touching me with anything at all. While he worked he commented on my eyes (“So big and green!”), my eyelashes (“Are they real?”) and my facial structure (“Nice bones.”). It wasn’t that I hadn’t been told I was pretty before but being pretty made me feel vulnerable, like Jeni, like someone who could be hurt. I usually wanted to seem as plain as possible, but not that night. They had turned me away from the mirror. Tania came toward me holding a dress.

“Perfect, baby!” Perry clapped his hands. “Exactly right!”

It was a long pale blue satin dress, cut on the bias, as Tania pointed out. It looked like the slip that went under a vintage gown. I was glad I’d shaved my legs that morning. Tania put her hands on my waist and gently pulled my T-shirt over my head. I let her. It was weird in contrast to how I usually felt; I wasn’t embarrassed at all. Part of me wanted her to see my breasts. She unhooked my bra, removed it and tossed it on the ground, then slipped the dress over my head.

“Shoes.” Perry was holding a pair of silver high-heeled sandals with an expression on his face somewhere between fetishist and shoe salesman. I stepped into them and he knelt and fastened the straps.

Then Tania opened a blue velvet jewelry box and took out a necklace of pale blue and white gemstones and freshwater pearls. It shone in the soft light, iridescent. She put it on me and it lay there, cool against my collarbone. She sprayed some perfume onto my neck. It smelled like the jasmine that grew in my mother’s garden, and like something else, like smoke and wind and what jewels would smell like ground up, pulverized into scent. Tania sprayed my right wrist, then paused at my left, fingering the beads that spelled Jeni’s name but not asking. After a moment she sprayed the perfume there as well.

“Now you’re ready,” she said.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I smiled shyly at the girl there.

“Sylph,” said Tania. “That’s your new name.”

“I’m starved!” said Perry. “And you are, too, I bet, Miss.” He gently circled my left wrist with his thumb and forefinger just below the bracelet. “Look at the size of that! We must fatten you.”

There was butternut squash soup in a silver tureen—the best I’d ever tasted. There was a wild rice dish made with almonds and cranberries, a green salad with beets and goat cheese, homemade bread and butter and more of the warm red brew that they’d served at the party. For dessert there was a caramel apple
tartin
with homemade vanilla-bean ice cream. I ate in a kind of stupor, consuming the food as if I’d never had taste buds before. While we ate they asked me questions about my life and I answered in between mouthfuls. I told them that I was from L.A., that both my parents were English teachers—that was why I was named after a character in a Shakespearean play—that my dad taught at the university, my mom at the high school where I used to go. I had grown up doing ballet, reading. I said that I was an English major, that I wanted to write someday, that I read the way other people ate chocolate. There wasn’t that much to tell about myself, I realized; I hadn’t had enough life experience to say anything interesting. That is, if I left out Jeni and my mom’s cancer, which I did. I had spent three months showing everyone Jeni’s picture, waiting for opportunities to talk about her. Now, even with the opportunity the bracelet provided and the fact that Tania had read or guessed about a loss from my past, I didn’t want to.

But it was a relief to talk about other things, to have people listen attentively, especially such glamorous, gorgeous ones, the kind who, in my real life, had never paid attention to me before. I forgot that I had ever felt any suspicion about John. They laughed and refilled my glass and they watched me—Perry and Tania—as if I were the most important person in the world.

“What sign are you, Sylph?” she asked. “Wait, don’t tell me.”

“She always gets it right,” Perry warned.

“I have to eliminate first.” She hardly paused. “You’re not a Taurus, Capricorn or Virgo.”

I nodded. “How’d you—”

She held up her hand. “Not Aries, Leo or Sagittarius. And you’re not Pisces.” She and Perry rolled their eyes at each other. “Or Scorpio or Cancer, although you’re in your shell a little, like a Cancer.”

I tensed reflexively at the word.

Tania went on. “I’d say, either Libra, Gemini or Aquarius. Am I right?”

I nodded again and took another sip of my drink. “Libra,” said Tania.

“How’d you know?”

“Air, you’re all air.”

“And what about you guys?”

“We’re easy as pie to read.” Perry grinned. His features were modelesque but also the definition of impish. “I’m Capricorn, goat boy. I always know what’s right for you. Tania’s the big mean lioness Leo. And John’s a …

“Pisces, that bastard,” they said together and laughed.

“Pisces is the oldest sign,” Tania explained. Sort of explained. I didn’t know much about astrology except for the horoscopes Jeni and I read in magazines; she was a Sagittarius who loved animals and travel. “With a Scorpio moon!” Tania added. “Thinks he knows everything.”

“As opposed to me, who actually does.” Perry winked.

“You’re perfect for us,” Tania said.

“What about you?” I said, finally, flushed and a little breathless. “Besides the astrology. Who are you all anyway?” Then we all started to laugh.

It seemed funny at the time but I can’t understand it now except to say I was drunk, but we laughed and kept laughing, doubled over and clutching our abdomens.

“I have no idea,” said Perry with a last snort. He blotted his tearing eyes with his linen napkin.

“Seriously.”

“Like what about us? Our racial background? Our jobs?”

“All of the above?”

“We’re racial mutts. Between the three of us I think we cover all of Europe, most of Asia and part of South America and Africa.”

“Smart, rather useless mutts,” Tania said. “Johnny’s an English major like you. Almost has his PhD except for that pesky dissertation.”

I pointed at Perry and he lifted his palm and lowered his head in mock reverence. “Classics. I like any culture that worships creatures with furry haunches and girls that change into trees.”

Tania leaned forward on her elbows so that her bare arms shone in the light. “I’m in psych, actually.” Her voice was soft, confiding. “After the dysfunctional shit I went through as a kid I have a lot of experience. Now I like to use my roommates as subjects.”

I had a vision of her sitting across from me in a leather therapist’s chair, looking like she had on Telegraph, at the tarot table, except wearing a button-down silk blouse and glasses.

The front door opened, I heard footsteps, and followed Tania’s gaze to the man standing at the threshold of the room. “Speak of the devil,” she said.

“Sorry.” John was wearing a suit like Perry’s, elegant but old-looking. “I got caught up with some work.” My face heated up as he looked at me. “Hi, Ariel.”

I nodded. I couldn’t get a single word out. My throat had shut.

“Like
The Tempest,
” Tania said, staring at him, but his eyes were still on me. “Let’s get more comfortable,” she went on. “Johnny, bring your food.”

We went into the dimly lit front room, the “parlor” they called it. There was a fire burning in the grate and the air smelled of wood smoke and eucalyptus. In spite of the cold night, the room was very hot.

Perry lit a joint and handed it to me.

“This is what you need. It’ll help dissolve all that tension.”

I’d never smoked before so I tried not to inhale too vigorously but it went in smoothly. My whole body relaxed into the shimmer of the atmosphere.

“Time for some magics!” Tania said. She stood and went to the front of the room. A silk cord I hadn’t noticed before hung from the ceiling and she reached up and pulled it. Two pale blue silk curtains seemed to appear out of nowhere, hiding her from view. After a moment she pulled them apart. She was now wearing a black top hat and standing behind a small table covered with a cloth and a tall candle. Then Tania closed her eyes.

“Fire!” she said and the word filled the whole room as if it were filling the world.

She began to rub her left thumb and forefinger together, harder and harder. For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off of her hand, even then. As she rubbed, thin wisps of smoke emanated from the tips of her fingers. My breath caught in a gasp of wonderment.

She picked up a silver lighter and flicked a flame to life, then put it out by stroking it slowly, much too slowly, with her fingers.

She folded up a piece of paper, lit it on fire and then opened her palm. The flame went out; there was only a small coin there.

She lit a string, which burned up to the top and then extinguished into a shower of sparks, turning to a scarf of ruby silk.

I was still staring, huddled up like a child only half-wanting to be awakened from a dream, when the curtain closed. When it opened again Tania was beside me, smiling. I rubbed my eyes. John and Perry applauded but I was too stunned to move.

“How’d you read my cards the other night?” I asked.

She looked suddenly sober. “I’ve been studying tarot divination as part of my thesis. Parapsychology. I suppose it’s part chance and part intuition. You look so sad. But also there is something hopeful when I look at you.”

“And the fire?”

Her smile returned. “I can’t divulge all my secrets, can I?”

Perry changed the music to something with an intense beat that woke my shocked-to-stillness limbs. The song was in a language I didn’t recognize and the sound was thrilling; my body didn’t want to keep still, the way I’d felt when I was a kid. But even high, I told myself, I didn’t dance anymore. Ever.

Tania started, her arms in the air, her hands like birds, her head back and her throat exposed. She shook her hips and undulated her spine. Once again, as if her fingers were still on fire, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Perry joined in, moving his pelvis close to hers. His hands reached out and slid down her bare back. The music thumped louder.

“New friend?” Perry scolded. “What are you doing, girl?”

I sat by the fire, watching them. Sweat was trickling down the back of my neck.

“Come on, princess, don’t be shy.”

I took another sip of the drink I’d brought with me, scared Perry would pull me up.

But he didn’t; he was too busy dancing with Tania. John Graves did. He took off his glasses and then his dinner jacket, rolled up his sleeves. I noticed the strange black letters and the thick veins at his wrists. His skin was pale and the veins looked very blue in contrast. Perry handed him the joint.

“You’re not going to let us make fools of ourselves alone, are you?” He had a hit of smoke, then reached out and took my hand. I flashed back to the night at the concert, how he had led me through the crowd. I had never been touched by someone like him before that. I was afraid I’d faint.

But he supported me, his hand on my back as we started to dance to the pulse of the song. I could feel the fluidity of muscles through his thin shirt. I could smell him—a musky dampness that I wanted to bury my face in. We danced for a long time, moving around the room, sometimes touching, sometimes not, intersecting with Perry and Tania. John was so graceful, spinning effortlessly, spine and shoulders rippling, hands carving out images in the air. My feet hurt but I kept dancing. I had a flash of memory of a fairy tale I’d been told as a child, where the woman danced until her toes were gone. Jeni and I took ballet lessons when we were little girls. We loved to dance together, for hours at a time, all around the living room, taking turns choosing the songs. Since she was gone I hadn’t danced at all.

Then the music slowed and John drew me nearer. The smell of him grew stronger and the muscles of his back tensed under my fingers. I parted my lips and tipped my head back. This would be the moment, I thought. Finally.

And then I felt more hands on me and they were all surrounding me, dancing with me, swaying. I was caught in the middle of them, burning up with heat. I smelled Tania’s warm gold skin like smoke and roses, the smoke of roses. I saw, through my fluttering eyelids—it was hard to keep my eyes open, suddenly—Perry’s grin with the gap between his front teeth. And I heard John’s voice softly saying my name.

I let my eyes close altogether now, waiting.

But then I heard John’s voice again. “It’s late. I think maybe you should leave now? Ariel?” I opened my eyes to see the strange, tense silence. “I can drive you.”

They all released me with their arms but their eyes stayed fastened like jewels to my forehead and throat and my skin suddenly bumped with cold. Then John handed me the bag with my clothes and shoes.

“I’ll give you back the dress.” I was already fumbling with the clasp of the necklace. The weight of it in my hand felt almost sexual. I put it on the fireplace mantel.

“Keep the dress,” said Tania. “We have more than enough. It’s good on you.”

“Let me drive you home,” John said again but I said no.

I took off the sandals and jammed my bare feet into the sneakers, my head lowered in shame. Why had I believed they would want someone like me at all? Had I done something to make them dismiss me so suddenly?

“Be safe,” he said.

As I sprinted home with tears I wasn’t sure how to explain pouring down my face, I thought of something. If Jeni had not vanished, we would be spending this night together. But she had disappeared and I had not found out what happened to her. Instead of searching I was dining with beauties. I had failed.