2004
She has been alone so long the sound of a knock at her door startles her. Elise turns, head cocked, questioning. She puts down the charcoal pencil and goes to quiet the pounding.
The pounding grows louder as she skirts easels, a drawing board, her meager furniture. “All right, all right.”
Who can it be?
Her life has become cut off from everyone she has ever known: family and what few friends she once had. When you become a cut-rate streetwalker, somehow the desire to keep in touch with Mom or Cathy from high school just isn’t there anymore. “Yeah, Mom, today it was the same old, same old: blew a dozen guys, let six fuck me, and took one up the ass. But, hey! I’ll make the rent this month.” It wasn’t the kind of news, either, one posted on the alumni website.
“Jesus! Give me a second.” She struggles with the locks, wondering:
Do policemen ever make house calls to prostitutes? At least in any kind of official capacity?
She swings the door open and memories rush in, images forming and dispersing with the rapidity of montage. Terence. Gone are the chains and leather. Tonight, nothing more than jeans and a crisp white button down cotton shirt. Asics running shoes. He looks devastating. But not devastating in the way most people would interpret that word; his appearance begs a more literal interpretation. The pedestrian, everyday clothes don’t make him appear more normal, but emphasize his ashen pallor and dark-eyed intensity. The street clothes can’t mask a hunger that’s frightening. She really hadn’t expected to see him again. That’s the great thing about the business: one is always meeting new people.
“What do you want?”
“What? I get not even a hello?”
Elise leans against the door frame, crosses her arms across her chest. “Why? When I didn’t even get a goodbye?” She starts to close the door. “Now, if you can’t tell me something as simple as what you want, I really don’t have time to be standing here.”
He smiles. His teeth are tiny, baby-like, pearls between thin pink lips. “Isn’t the answer obvious? I wanted to see you.”
“Didn’t you see everything you wanted when you were here last time?” Elise recalls how, against her wishes and her will, he had devoured all the art she had created over the past months, drinking in her vision, raping her creativity. She wasn’t ready for a showing. She doesn’t know if she ever will be.
Terence laughs, his deep voice dead, an echo. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did. I saw probably more than you realize.”
Empty words. Does he mean to praise her? “Okay. You’ve seen me. I’m busy, so, please, could you go now?” Elise begins to close the door again.
Terence puts up a hand Elise cannot fight. The door stays open. She stares, waiting.
“I want you to come with me, meet my friends.”
His friends? Elise cannot imagine the ghouls that would number Terence among their friends. Would they be like him, locked in some sort of pseudo-goth glamour? Besides, it’s been so long since she’s met anyone (other than in her role as professional caregiver), she wouldn’t even know how to act. What would she say? What topics could she talk about? “That’s impossible. I don’t have time.”
“It might help your art.” Terence gives a small smile.
This statement intrigues Elise. “In what way?”
“Experience. Isn’t that what you feed from? Isn’t that what inspires all artists?”
“Oh, please.” Elise tries again, without success, to close the door. “Save the art school platitudes for the kids at the Art Institute downtown.” She sends a pointed stare his way. “Really. I’m very busy. The best way I can ‘help my art,’ as you put it, is to keep working at it.”
Terence sighs. “Look, I won’t take up much of your time.”
Elise shakes her head. “Really. I think you should be going. This foot in the door routine is just irritating right now. In about five minutes, though, it will be illegal.”
“What if I make it worth your while?” Terence takes out a wad of green and presses it into Elise’s palm. For a moment, she is tempted to slam the door in his face. Instead, she looks down and counts five hundred dollars. She realizes she has become more of a whore than she realized.
“All right, I’ll come with you, but for just a little while.”
They roar down Sheridan Road, weaving between cars, making their own lanes as they speed between two rows of moving traffic, surging forward. They squeeze between parked and moving cars and buses. Elise prays no one will fling open a door as they whiz by. She imagines how quickly it would happen, her body flying through the air to crumble in a heap on the pavement, the slow stream of red darkening the asphalt. The sirens. The upended motorcycle wheel, spinning forlornly. Perhaps cinema would be more her forte. Or perhaps she can store the image for later retrieval. Already, she is wondering how the broken body on the road would look in a painting of black and white, the only color the trickle of blood from the victim’s head.
But there are no accidents. The wind whips through their hair. She clings to Terence’s back, wondering why pressing against him offers no respite from the chill of the wind off the lake, just a block or two to the east. She lays her cheek against his back. After all, nothing separates her flesh from his but white cotton. But even this divider seems to throw up a wall against warmth.
Have I done the right thing?
Elise asks herself.
Going off with a stranger, someone who, just last night, betrayed me?
But Elise knows Terence is right when he says she needs experience to create. And if the experience turns out to be bad, or even fatal, well then, who will know the difference?
Terence rounds a corner near Loyola University and continues south. Now, the broad expanse of darkness that is Lake Michigan is to their left. Elise looks over at the water, how the moon glows silver and distorted on its surface. She has a quick image of playing in the icy surf one early summer day, the air fresh and filled with promise. Idyllic. She wonders if this “vision” is merely a figment of her imagination.
“Almost there now,” Terence yells back, the wind stealing his words almost before they reach her ears. “I hope you’re ready.”
“I hope I am, too,” Elise whispers.
The bike sputters as Terence comes to a stop. He pulls between two parked cars on Thorndale. The absence of the Harley’s engine roar seems strange, making the more commonplace night sounds of traffic and insects underscored by the pound of the surf seem surreal, as if they exist in a void.
“Where are we going?” Elise runs fingers through her windblown hair, trying to smooth it.
“Home.” Terence begins walking away from her.
It must be wonderful,
she thinks,
to have such confidence, to know that when you start to walk away, someone will follow.
He is walking toward an old mansion, one of the only ones left in this mile or so long strip of high rises fronting the lake and having the feel of southern Florida, if not the warmth. Elise has passed the old house many times, and had noticed it because it was an anomaly, here on this strip of high-rise apartment buildings. “I thought this place was abandoned.” It had always looked so, and looks so still. Its windows are black and empty (eye sockets whose vision was stolen in a gruesome maneuver); the yard sports patches of bare earth and weeds, and the entire façade radiates emptiness. The house seems solid and has the earmarks of architectural confidence and even style, but the overall effect is fearsome, as if the house disguises something alive and waiting, breath held, attempting to look innocuous to lure the unwary.
“No, not abandoned, my dear.” Terence stops and turns. “Although I suppose it’s not unfair to describe it as lacking a certain
lived-in
quality.” He snickers and begins moving toward the broad and crumbling concrete front steps.
I suppose he’s expecting me to ask what he means by that
. Elise will not give him the satisfaction. She follows him up the stairs and notices he does not remove any keys. He simply stops, hand poised on the doorknob.
“You’re going to really like my friends. And I’m sure they’ll love you.”
In spite of the mockery that is a nearly constant key he sings in, there is none of that in the simple statement. On other lips, “they’ll love you” would probably be welcome, calming to a new visitor.
But on Terence’s, the phrase sounds like she is being described as an entrée, words to be followed with, “I’m sure you’ll be delicious.”
A quick chill. “I don’t think this is going to work.” Elise turns, heading back out toward Sheridan, where there are plenty of cabs.
“What are you talking about? You mean we came all this way for nothing?” He lays his hand gently on her arm. “Now, don’t be silly. You’ll come inside. You don’t have to stay long.”
It all sounds so reasonable, Elise thinks, stealing one last glance at the lakefront before following him inside. Part of her wonders if it will truly be her last.
Inside, Elise paces, heels clicking on the dusty wooden floor. Outside of a gallery, she has never seen such a collection. But no, not even a gallery would contain such an eclectic mix of art: representational mixed with wild flights of fancy, abstract sculptures welded from metal, looking violent and harmful, sitting next to a figure carved from marble in a classical manner (the careful chips and missing digits on the one hand made for a convincing replica, Elise thinks; such attention to detail). Perhaps a museum might yield such a mix, but in a museum, there are separate rooms for separate periods and styles. There is logic and organization. In a museum, there could not be this anarchy of form and vision; this chaos that somehow makes a statement on the hunger human beings have for expression and creation.
There must be a defining element,
Elise is certain,
that ties all of this together. Something I haven’t yet been able to decipher.
She has already decided, even if she has yet to meet any of Terence’s “friends,” that she must come back. She will need to study what’s here. Some of it looks alarmingly authentic. But art worth millions stashed in an unlocked house that appears abandoned?
It can’t be.
Terence left her alone only moments ago. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” His exit was so quick, she almost didn’t realize he had gone. But Elise doesn’t care how long he keeps her. For the first time in months, she feels alive as she drinks in the genius of the work. She hadn’t realized she was starving.
And then Terence is back. Too soon. Elise pulls herself away from the figure of a woman, welded from burnished steel, her mouth open in torment or orgasm. The work reminds her of her own; it has the same clinical detachment toward something elemental, be it ecstatic or horrific. She fingers the metal, its smooth finish, wondering about technique and process.
Just a few more minutes alone here
, she thinks.
“These are my friends, the ones I told you about.” Two people emerge out of the shadows. First comes a man, much shorter than Terence, but muscular, strength bound into a compact frame. “This is Edward.” He gives a lopsided grin to Elise, not showing teeth. He takes her hand and kisses it; the chill and damp of his lips make her think of slugs. He looks into her eyes and she feels something right away: an odd connection. There is such intensity in his dark eyes; she senses how hard he is trying to engage her. It chills her, yet she instinctively is not as afraid of this one as she is of Terence. She thinks she sees sadness in his face, a melancholy so deep she is afraid to even attempt fathoming it.
“Edward,” she whispers. “I’m very glad to meet you.”
“And I’m really happy that you’re here. Terence told us a little about you last night. You’re an artist. I used to dabble myself…” Edward’s smile is tortured and Elise feels that his story is one of loss and pain. Instinctively, she pulls back, wanting to know more about him and wishing, at the same time, he would just go away. “But that’s all in the past.” There isn’t an ounce of mirth, though, in the smile that follows this statement. “Terence tells us you have something really special, he says you’re really gifted.”
“Well, I try.”
Terence pulls her away. Elise glances back at Edward, seeing one of the clone boys she has seen on the part of Halsted Street that’s “Boystown” central. Yet, there is a longing in his eyes that pains her.
Terence takes her hand and says, “Modesty doesn’t become you, love.” He pauses. “And this is Maria.”
A woman emerges out of the shadows in a moment charged with electricity. It hangs in the air like the ozone after a lightning strike. Her movement is so liquid, so gliding, Elise believes she must have planned her entrance. She wonders if there are casters hidden beneath her long, deep red dress.
Their gazes lock. The art in the room fades into a graying pastiche of color, the blurred background of a photo. The floor vanishes, leaving the two women suspended in midair, legs dangling above a black abyss. The huge fireplace loses its charred brick back and becomes a shadowed portal. Even Terence and Edward fade. And Maria glimmers and shimmers, perfection in close-up. Elise drinks her in, her exquisite bone-white skin. Dark curls frame a face of Botticelli beauty. Elise is swallowed up by dark eyes that bore into hers with knowledge and certainty. Elise can’t recall a time when she has felt such raw, animal connection. Especially not for another woman…
Elise bows her head, suddenly feeling a loss of words, a loss of self. What to say to this creature so stunning she is almost monstrous?
“I’ve been waiting to meet you.” Maria’s voice is broken glass in honey, rough and deep, scarred, as bass as a man’s, but decidedly feminine. She moves forward and embraces Elise.
Elise’s heart beats so hard the blood rushes in her ears, pounding. Maria’s embrace is ice, but Elise doesn’t recoil. She pulls the woman closer, wrapping her arms tight, wanting to warm her, to share her heat. Something stirs inside; her heart gallops. She wonders if the organ will explode, leaving behind a shower of red sparks. It would be a good way to die. She breathes deep and buries her face in Maria’s black hair, to take in whatever essence these dark strands give off. The closeness and the feel of the silken hair against her cheek ratchets up her desire, leaving Elise helpless, lost, and elated. She tries to pull away, imagining the flood of dopamine in her system as a cascade of silver liquid, trying without much success to convince herself this sudden lust for another woman is nothing more than the release of chemicals within her brain. But if any trickery is to work, any black magic to be successful, Elise knows it will not be self-generated.