The Lure (32 page)

“I’ve been hostile to him from the day we met. He’s no better toward me.”

“But you can’t show him that you think he’s responsible for this. He’ll know why—and who you are.”

“That’s why I don’t want to see him. Not until I calm down enough to look at him without wanting to strangle him,” Noel explained.

“Fine. Maybe that is the best way to do it. Get control of yourself. That’s the surest way to nail this heartless bastard!”

The instant the Fisherman said it, Noel felt the hate in his voice as an almost palpable thing. More palpable somehow than Noel’s own grief and anger over Randy. Perhaps because it wasn’t tinged with gratitude, unconscious until now, that Randy was dead—Randy who’d initiated Noel so deeply into homosexuality. Sure, that must be the reason why his own anger couldn’t be as strong as Loomis’s—because Loomis had no guilt, no mixed feelings.

And, as Noel hung up on Loomis, he wondered, too, if the Fisherman didn’t have a more embracing enmity, one of longer duration, with more experiences, more grief, because he had more deaths and mutilations to tally against Eric than just this one.

What if Loomis did know about the fraternity gang rape years back? What if he did think Noel was a psychosexual? What if he had tested him severely, was still testing him? It was all for an unswerving, determined, and just cause, wasn’t it? Other men were more ruthless, more unscrupulous in attaining their ends—their puny goals of greed, power, influence. Loomis merely wanted to rid the world of an insane criminal.

Once he thought that, Noel realized it was the counterbalance he had needed the night before, when he’d become hysterical—as Vega had been so fast to point out. Seeing only from his own perspective, Noel had hated Loomis. Rising above it, above his puny little ego and its problems, he now saw how he fit into the larger picture. Loomis’s almost sacrosanct cause would be Noel’s cause: his just anger would be Noel’s noble fury; his controlled purpose, Noel’s goal.

Noel would get even with Eric for Randy’s death in his own way. And he would take his time doing it.

Despite that decision, it was another three hours before Noel could bring himself to call the town house.

Okku answered, which was lucky.

“Please tell Mr. Redfern I won’t be able to come in for a few days,” Noel said, acting as though it were an ordinary job, he an ordinary employee.

“Hold on! Hold on!” the manservant said.

Noel heard a buzz, then a ring, and before he could figure out that Okku had not been interrupted on another line, but was connecting him to Eric, he heard:

“Noel?”

Too late. Noel tried to control his voice and the anger he still felt.

“I’m not coming in for a few days,” he said.

“Listen. I heard from Reed and Jerry that—”

“Right!” Noel interrupted, not wanting to hear another word, not another syllable of the hypocrisy. He’d heard from Reed and Jerry! Sure, he had! “See you later,” Noel managed to get out and quickly hung up.

He kept the phone off the hook the rest of the day, took a Valium, a shower, then went to sleep. He’d been afraid of dreams, horrible dreams, but thankfully none came.

When the downstairs buzzer rang three days later and the doorman said that a lady had come to visit Noel, his first thought was that it was Mirella Trent. He didn’t want to see her and was signaling back to tell Gerdes not to let her up, when he received a loud buzz and the slight electrical shock that meant Gerdes was leaning on his end of the button. The old man’s cracked voice announced, “She’s coming up.”

Noel cursed once, then looked at himself in the mirror. He was unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, wearing jeans that ought to have been laundered a week ago. He hated being seen like this. Well, maybe Mirella would be disgusted and leave. Of course, perverse as she was, she might find it a turn-on; she’d always professed a taste for workingmen. He didn’t want her, though. He still felt too much resentment toward her for what he’d discovered about himself the last time he was with her.

Suddenly it was too late to do anything about his appearance or the slovenliness of the apartment—the doorbell was buzzing.

Defiantly, he opened the door for her. “Yeah?”

“You look awful. Have you been ill?”

It was Alana, not Mirella.

Noel fell back from the door. She looked at him once more, then came in, shut the door, repeated her question, and put a cool hand up to his forehead. He brushed it away.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You certainly don’t look fine.” She was wearing the lightest hint of patchouli today, but she smelled as fresh as a mountain cascade. He felt even slimier next to her.

“I thought you were someone else,” he said lamely. He felt completely unprepared. He looked awful, the place was a mess. She was like a rare Ming vase suddenly placed in a Chinese Laundromat five steps below street level. She didn’t fit.

She sat down in the big rocking chair, let him get her an ashtray and a soft drink, and rocked back and forth gently, alternately looking at him and outside through the tall windows, smoking a St. Moritz cigarette as though she’d been here many times before, as he foolishly reiterated that he was not ill, but had merely been upset, needed time to think, to be alone.

“It’s such a lovely day,” she said when his words had come to a dead end. “Why don’t we go out?” It was as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said, though he knew she had. “I’ll wait while you clean up. Perhaps we’ll go for a walk in the park. Or have lunch. We never did have that lunch,” she reminded him.

All so tactful, so gratefully said, Noel couldn’t refuse her.

Fifteen minutes later he was walking with her to the parked Mercedes. Alana handed him the keys and slid into the passenger seat.

It was a glorious June day: a few high, motionless clouds, like wads of cotton, but bright sunlight reflected off the streets and glass building façades as they drove up Sixth Avenue.

At Fifty-seventh Street they stopped for a light, and Noel turned to her with a sudden, insane idea. “Let’s split somewhere. To Mexico. Just you and I. I have some money, some credit cards we can bum. We’ll live in an adobe hut. Go swimming. Make love all day. Eat tacos.”

She laughed tentatively for the first time, then broke into a laugh. “I don’t like Mexican food.”

Before he could suggest an alternative route, she said, “Why don’t we walk into the park?”

When they had locked the car, she took his arm and let him promenade her into the park, first on a broad paved path, then past the swan pond, onto a cutoff, going north, deeper into the park, without saying a word.

She seemed to know all the byways. She steered them away from the more frequented areas, until they had skirted the carousel, past the Tavern-on-the-Green, the Delacorte Theatre where Shakespeare was given at night, into a secluded little hilly area with a green-lawned dell that Noel had never seen before. They stopped there. Alana looked around, and finally sat down on a flat sheet of basalt, set like a dark gray tablet amid the grass. Loosening the kerchief she’d been wearing around her head, she shook her hair free, long, almost blue-black in this light. Noel didn’t see anyone else in the little valley.

“There,” she said with relief, and lay back on the flat rock, her hair spread out, her thin silk blouse looking as fragile as Japanese paper against her skin.

“I’d like to kiss you,” Noel said, leaning over to do it.

She held up a restraining hand. “No. I promised.”

“Promised who? Eric?”

“Of course. The first day we saw you. At the Window Wall. We agreed then. Either both of us, or neither of us.”

Alana smiled as she said it, so Noel took it for a joke. He pushed her hand aside and leaned over her again.

She sat up, eluding him. Her smile was gone.

“I said I promised, Noel.”

“You can’t mean it?”

“Of course I mean it. I would never break a promise to Eric.”

“You already did,” he protested. “You kissed me once before. Remember? In the studio?”

“That was for the photographs. It wasn’t real, Noel.”

He sulked for a minute. She lay back down again.

“Why did you bring me here, then?” he asked.

“To talk to you.”

“Why here?” He realized he was being suspicious, but didn’t care.

“Because I like it here,” she replied simply. “I hoped you would like it, too.”

That made his suspicions even more foolish.

“Why don’t you lie back and relax?” she suggested.

He hesitated, then joined her. The stone was warm against his back, smooth, soothing. Above them the clouds seemed to have vanished; the sky was a pale, ringing blue.

“All right,” he said, deliberately harsh, “talk!”

She was silent at first, and, he thought, angry, but then she quietly said, “There’s so much to say to you.”

He wouldn’t help her a bit.

“First, I want to be certain that you know how much we care for you, Noel, both Eric and I, because that is most important. These past few days we both missed you a great deal.”

“What’s the matter? Was Okku too busy cooking to spot for Eric’s weight lifting?”

“Eric loves you. You don’t do him justice.”

“Sure.”

“As I love you, Noel. No. Differently than I do. But he does.”

“All right, let’s assume I believe Eric loves me, what next?”

“He needs you, Noel. He is going through a bad time right now and he needs your help, your support.”

“
He’s
going through a bad time?”

She seemed surprised by the intensity of his reaction. Sitting up on one elbow, she looked at him bewildered. He wanted to play with her hair desperately, but figured that would constitute an advance.

“Yes. It is true. I would know, wouldn’t I? Eric is very upset about, well, you know, this ghastly business about poor Rondee.”

Alana believed that. Noel could tell looking into her eyes—now brown, now black, now flecked, now even bluish in the sunlight—innocent, guileless eyes. She believed Eric was upset about Randy’s death.

“All right. So he’s upset. What else?”

“Nothing else. Eric needs you by him now. He wants you near him. I know you have your differences of opinion, but try to…”

“It goes beyond differences of opinion. One reason I haven’t been to the house is because I feel more than ever that my position is a false one there.”

From her puzzled look, he instantly wondered if that hadn’t been the worst thing to say. He tried explaining it away.

“I really can’t live off him, live with him, and I can’t return Eric’s interest, or infatuation, or whatever it is. I can’t. He doesn’t attract me. He doesn’t turn me on. Just the opposite.”

“No. No. You are wrong. I have seen you together. You are like a snake charmer and a cobra. Sometimes one is the charmer, sometimes the other. Everyone else has remarked it. It’s a strong and unusual attraction you have with Eric and you are foolish and wrong to deny it.”

“Well, I don’t see it.”

Noel wondered if Eric had ever told her about his taking the Mercedes the night of the party and the fight they’d had in the garage. Probably.

“Then you are choosing not to see it,” she declared. “The attraction exists. Now, I think that right at this moment you are merely a little confused and…”

“Is that what you told Eric to explain why I’m coming on to you?”

“Don’t make a bad joke, Noel. It is true that you are a little confused. You don’t know yourself what you are or who you want to be.”

“You win, Alana. I’m confused. Several days ago I made love to a woman and although she was completely turned on, I wasn’t. Later on that same night, I made love to several men.”

“In Le Pissoir?”

“In the back room there. That night I really let go of myself. I did things with absolute strangers I’d never thought I’d do. Things I’d scarcely heard of. I wasn’t disgusted about it. I didn’t feel it was awful or wrong. But neither was it all that gratifying. And if it weren’t for the drugs and atmosphere, I doubt that I even would have been interested. So you tell me, what is sex all about? A little pleasure, a lot of work, and for what?”

“If that’s how you feel, you must stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Sex. All of it. With men, with women. Stop for a while and don’t think about it.”

“But that’s not dealing with it.”

“Fou!”
She tapped him lightly on the cheek. “You just told me you cannot deal with it. No? Sex is not so important. Do other things instead.”

In the three days of furious thinking and rethinking since he’d awakened on the sawdust-strewn floor of the back room, that particular idea had never even struck him. She repeated it again, and again he was forced to admire her clearheadedness.

“Put it aside,” she said; “there are more important matters now: yourself, me, Eric, being friends. That is very important, no? You always want to kiss me, to make love to me. Why not be my friend, first? And Eric’s friend, too. He needs friends more than ever now. And so do you, Noel.”