The Ground Beneath Her Feet (62 page)

Why does she sing only Ormus’s songs?

Why doesn’t she lend her voice to the artistic vision of today’s women? Why doesn’t she write her own material?

Can she be free if she’s just the instrument of one man’s art?

Such debate—passionate, informed, ideologue—is also a part of the turbulent spirit of the age. Vina ignores her critics and sails on, a great galleon in search of fabled treasure. She is the
Argo
, and Ormus sails in her. Music itself is the Golden Fleece they seek.

Breaking their own rule about not seeing each other outside work, simultaneously overcome by need, on a whim they drive to the Nevada desert and use the four-wheel drive to write their names in the sand, so big, Vina tells Ormus, that they’ll be able to identify us
from the moon, like the Wall of China. After that they start calling themselves the Chinese Wall. When Vina explains to a journalist back in New York what the joke means, it backfires, they are accused of arrogance, even of attacking religion, because being Vina she adds that they wrote their names over an area bigger than any church.
You can’t see no churches from the moon
. That remark, added to the Black Power salutes she’s been giving lately and the perceived anti-establishment contents of Ormus’s lyrics, is enough. The long-delayed assault against them is launched. Vina’s an American citizen, born in the U.S.A., so she gets unprovoked police visits in the middle of the night, when she is “invited” down to the precinct house to be grilled about her political associations with Yippies, Panthers, assorted unionists and leftists, and Amos Voight’s crowd of weirdo undesirables. She gets drug raids (all unsuccessful; she’s not that stupid), and the IRS turns her finances over as if they were rocks beneath which all sorts of poisonous snakes must lurk. Ormus, a foreigner, gets the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In March 1973 he is ordered by an immigration judge to leave the country within sixty days. The reason given is that he was once involved in a fatal car accident and though he was not the driver samples of his blood taken at the time revealed the presence in his veins of an illegal narcotic substance. When this is announced in court, Ormus understands he’s up against power on a scale he’s never encountered before, a power so great it can undo the good work of Mull Standish and Yul Singh and make public what has lain hidden for six long years.

(I say again: back then certain battles had not been won. It was still possible for the future to lose to the past, for pleasure and beauty to be defeated by piety and iron. One war ends, another begins. The human race is never really at peace.)

Nevertheless, discovering the tip of what will prove to be a broad stubborn streak, Ormus appeals.
America is a place to live in
, he tells the press in a rare news conference on the steps of the court. I
don’t want to just scoot in and then duck out with the loot
.

There’s not much chance of his scooting anywhere, to tell the truth. He’s with three bulging, glitter-toothed lawyers, and Mull Standish, pushing sixty but still sleek, still looking like a contender, and Vina, who has chosen today to wear a molded golden breastplate over black T-shirt and leggings, putting Ormus, the classicist’s son, in mind of Pallas
Athene girded for battle, a Pallas Athene with knuckle-duster rings and movie-star shades. They’re surrounded by seven identically sunglassed Singhs, then by a second circle, of the NYPD’s finest, who with linked arms and many menaces hold back not only the press corps but also the thrashing, ululating New Quakers, at whose extreme fringes lurk hairy charismatics with much the same psychiatric profiles as the self-impalers at the heart of Shiite Muharram processions: denizens of the psychotropics of Capricorn, the lands of the sacrificed goat.

Why don’t you marry him, a reporter asks Vina, in her face, straight out. (This is New York.) If you marry him, it’s over. He’ll at once have the right to stay.

He should have that right, anyway, Vina answers, by reason of the gift he brings. He improved this town just by showing up.

Why don’t
you
marry
her
, the same reporter then asks Ormus, as if Vina hasn’t spoken. Hey, why take the long road when there’s a short cut, right.

We have a bargain, Ormus answers, meaning the ten-year oath. There are disbelieving titters from the press corps when he spells it out for them. Ormus scowls, clams up.
I gave my word
.

Standish responds swiftly to the darkening mood; raps his cane on the step. (The British formality of his dress imposes itself on the crowd: against the three-piece Savile Row suit, the Jermyn Street shirt, the mother-of-pearl buttons, the tailored shoes, the Aquascutum loden coat, what chance do jeans and sneakers really have?) Okay, that’s it, ladies and gents. Show’s over for today. Thank you for your interest and attention. Officer, can we get some help here, let’s move it to the limo right now.

Getting Standish back into full managerial harness was Vina’s idea. Putting distance—the whole Atlantic Ocean—between him and the band had originally been her strategy too. Like many confident, talented people she saw no need to give a non-creative person a piece of the cake if she didn’t have to; she could handle Colchis Records. Sure she could. She already had her solo deal, she’d held out for plenty (multi-record options, generous recording funds), she reckoned she knew her way around the insalubrious parts of Contract City as well as its glamorous, brightly lit boulevards—the mugger-shadowed back
streets of small print as well as the shining royalty marquees—so now that Boss Yul was taking on VTO, she would negotiate that contract too.

After signing, she had begun to have her doubts. Record sales were huge, way up in the superstar bracket, multi-millions of units were being shifted, but the amounts paid into their bank balances were shockingly small. On her say-so Ormus had bought that white elephant of an apartment on the Upper West Side, and all his bank accounts were fiercely in the red. Ormus—always the more trusting one—left the business end to Vina and the lawyers and accountants she employed. At financial meetings he often actually fell asleep until Vina shook him and put a pen in his hand, whereupon he signed on whatever dotted line was indicated. Now she feared he might have done well to stay awake. She did not share her doubts with him but admitted that, if only to provide an objective second opinion, she wanted Mull Standish back on the team.

At first, to be honest, she confessed to Ormus, I was a little jealous?, because he’s so in love with you?, pretty pathetic, huh. Of me, I mean. But we need somebody in between us and Mr. Yul Singh. We need cushioning, distance. It’ll improve our bargaining power.

This was after the
Peace Ballads
, at around the time when YSL started to crack the whip about her political utterances et cetera. So when Vina went so far as to wonder whether they were being fleeced—golden fleeced, she called it—by Cool Yul, Ormus suspected a personal, non-business agenda. He wanted to protest, Yul has been pretty good to us so far, but he saw the look in Vina’s eye and didn’t argue. Besides, he’d been missing Mull Standish himself.

Standish had remained in England, unable to tear himself away from poor pickle-brained Waldo picking up leaves in Spenta Methwold’s gardens. However, his continued presence was misinterpreted by Spenta as a sign of his long-term interest in her own forlorn offer of companionship, and there followed a slow, melancholy comedy of misunderstandings played out in a form of Noh theater, or as stylized dumb-show tableaux: neither did Spenta speak her own hopes nor could Mull Standish find the words to dash them; and Virus Cama watched everything but said nothing, while Waldo was now capable of only the simplest, most innocent insights about the birds and the bees
and the flowers and the trees and the sky up above. Standish felt trapped between his gratitude to Spenta, for giving Waldo a semblance of a place in life, and his solicitude for her; things had been allowed to go too far, and the truth—that she had given her ageing heart to one who could never take it—would only humiliate her now. In this strangulated environment he felt energy flow out of him. He began to think the unthinkable: that life might after all be no more than a defeat.

Vina’s telephone call came like a blood transfusion. At once he set in motion his long-prepared fast-track plan to divest himself of all his British enterprises, even his much-admired listings magazine, which had beaten off an upstart rival to maintain its grip on the market, with spin-offs successfully launched in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow. As for Spenta, he now had a face-saving way of leaving her. When he told her of his imminent departure her chin shook for just an instant. Then, reconciling herself in that moment to her fate, she said, Of course go. I will look after our two injured children. We are a sort of accidental family, after all, isn’t it; a family of damage and loss.

Mull Standish bowed his head and withdrew.

In New York, facing the full horror of the Vina-negotiated contracts, he became once more his capacious, potent self. He insisted on absolute control, no arguments, and fired all the band’s advisers five minutes after he finished reading himself in. Then he called Ormus and Vina to a crisis meeting in his reopened midtown office suite. Right now it was just a secretary and a Xerox machine, but expansion plans were at an advanced stage. It’s a catastrophe, of course, he said, drumming his fingertips on the table. Only one more album under firm contract and eight more optioned. That means they can dump you whenever they like but you can’t walk away from them or change the deal. Just eleven percent of suggested retail list price, for crying out loud, less three points for the producer, and will you look at these numbers on free goods and promo. Let me spell it out for you. One cassette of
Peace Ballads
has slapped on it an SRLP of, let’s keep it in round numbers, seven dollars. Never mind what it’s discounted at in the stores, this is what all the figures are based on. Then you take twenty percent off for packaging, that gives you a royalty base of five
sixty. At eleven percent that’s a royalty of sixty-two cents per cassette sold. But now you subtract twenty-one cents for Mr. Producer, which I take it is none other than our friend Mr. Singh, and then hello, we have this completely off-the-wall twenty percent for assorted freebies, so you can kiss goodbye to one fifth of what’s left. That leaves just thirty-two point eight cents, out of which you’ve got to pay the other band members, LaBeef and the Baths, one percent each, generous to a fault, so that costs you another twenty-one cents. The pair of you are left with exactly eleven point eight cents per cassette, split two ways, but first you deduct the quarter of a million in recording costs and the full hundred and fifty thou for independent promotion—
one hundred percent of the total
, and you
signed?
—off the top of that, and what do you know, here’s a thirty-five-percent reserve against returns. So what’s it sold, six million units, call that one hundred thousand dollars each, maximum, and by the time you’ve paid your taxes you’ll see maybe fifty-five percent of it, but that’s only if you’ve got a good accountant, which is not the case. I’m guessing fifty thousand with taxes paid, bottom line, and that’s on a mega-megahit. You
children
. And meanwhile you’re spending money like it’s going out of style, million-dollar apartments, fancy electronic toys, I bet your gigs lose money too, I haven’t even started on Ormus’s pathetic writing deal, and you’re wondering why the numbers are red. Jesus Christ.

So what do we do now, Vina asked in an unfamiliar, deferential voice. I mean, are we permanently fucked? How do we play it?

Standish sat back in his chair and grinned. We start playing sneaky bridge, he said. We finesse.

Yul Singh’s trans- and inter-continental movements make him a hard man to pin down. He owns a Napa Valley winery, a secret Arizona hideaway ranch, a Caribbean island and great stashes of classical-period sculptures in bank vaults in, allegedly, Toronto, Boston and Savannah. It is said he visits these vaults alone, at night, to fondle his winged marble Nikes and full-breasted Aphrodites in subterranean chambers with two-foot-thick walls of steel. He has mistresses and protégés, schemes and assignations, and always plays the cards close to his chest. He also owns cows. Sixty-six million dollars’ worth of Holstein dairy cattle, a sizeable proportion of the entire Massachusetts herd. Cows are sacred,
mystic, he tells people when they ask why. Also, business is doubleplus good.

For reasons nobody understands he has studied and now conforms to the arcana of maximum security, booking himself on several flights leaving at the same time for different destinations, using assumed names, avoiding predictability. You’re just a high-rolling record-industry honcho, for goodness’ sake, Standish scoffs to his face at their first meeting at Colchis, in a room full of circular platinum and gold. What, you’re acting now like Carlos or Arafat?

To which Yul replies: Listen, Standish, no offense, I like you but you’re behind the game, which the fact is it’s signed sealed and delivered, your artists are bound and gagged on my personal sacrificial altar, am I making myself clear, I own them, the devil didn’t own Faust the way I have these babies, they’re mine.

Standish has good ears, close to the ground, contacts from his old days as one of the great builders of the city, and when Yul Singh unsurprisingly gives him the brush-off, he puts these eavesdroppers back on the active roster. I want him to know he is no longer playing patty-cake, he tells Ormus and Vina, he has to understand that the negotiation has entered the major leagues. For this I need inside material. He does not add that the first news he has received from his paid listeners is that he himself might be in need of security, his old jilted lover Sam Tropicana has heard he’s back in town and certain explicit threats have been made, certain red-faced fulminations have been overheard both in the somber upscale setting of the exclusive Knickerbocker Club and also in the more unbuttoned environment of the sidewalk outside Catania’s pizza place in Belmont in the Bronx, near D’Auria Brothers Pork Store and Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 187th Street. There is no getting round the fact that Sam Tropicana is now one
large frontage
but Standish declines to panic.