"It might be a good idea to put all these people to work boarding up your windows."
"On the other hand," said Price, "it might be cool to see what they do." This gave Art pause, because it was essentially the same reason he had chosen to stick around his own house. "Look at these people, Art. What kind of quality job do you think I'd get out of them if I gave them all hammers and nails and plywood?" An Asian woman with an incredible fall of glossy black hair laughed at this. Price squeezed her into a one-armed embrace and kissed the top of her head. "This is Shinya. Call her a whore and she'll roll both eyes and think it's funny."
"You're such a dick," she said, smiling and socking Price in the arm with no force.
"This is Shinya's date, Tobias." Price indicated the man leaning against the wall opposite. Price was between them.
"Hey." Tobias pulled a hand out of his pocket and shook Art's, damply. He was wearing a huge, untucked work shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, and his eyes were hidden by blocky spectacles with lozenge-shaped tinted lenses.
"I probably won't be able to remember everyone's name," Art said, thinking he already sounded like a dope.
"Tobias and I have a bet that Shinya will be on her ripe little knees and blowing him by midnight,'' said Price.
Shinya hit him again, giggling. "You do not! God, you're such a dick!'' To Art, she added, "He's just fantasizing about what he can't have."
Art was not sure what the response to this should be.
"Come on, Art, let's you and me talk like grownups." Price cut Art away and began touring him. Suzanne tagged along behind them, uncertain whether she'd been invited.
"What's the party for?'' said Art.
"For nothing," said Price. "Because I can." He grinned. "Actually, you're correct-I did hear about the storm, that it might even be a hurricane, and that decided me. See all these people? I get them together in rooms, like ingredients in a recipe. I like to watch what happens when you mix spice with sweet, or salt, and let the crock-pot bubble. So, that architectural wonder up near the radar-dish thing, that's yours?''
"Yes, I designed and built it."
"A being of accomplishment." Over his shoulder, Price told Suzanne: "Thanks for bringing this breath of fresh air; I was beginning to wonder whether I'd ever be able to have a conversation above fifth-grade level. Now stop heeling like a dog and go find your friend Dina. She needs to know you're okay so she can get back to her own emotional difficulties."
Suzanne retreated, but grasped Art's hand, enough to turn him. "Don't leave without finding me, okay?" Then she headed for the stairs.
Price had one eyebrow raised. "Why, Art… did she fuck you already?" Art was mustering a properly outraged response when
Price clapped him on the shoulder and interposed: "Never mind. Unfair question. Rude, even. Presumptuous. I apologize; I don't even fuckin know you, right?"
"Something like that," said Art, not sure if he'd just been headed off, shut down.
"Normally, Suzanne is the world's biggest child twatling. Stuck-up, whiny, always bitching about how no man in the world can live up to her needs, which equals your basic daddy fantasy. She hooks up with these muscle-bound losers she thinks will protect her, and it always goes wrong. You want a Dr Pepper?"
Art expected the offer of a beer, or something stronger. It was almost as if Price was reading his mind.
"I mean, you look like somebody who did their drinking yesterday, and you need to spell yourself. Pace is the key. Have a fizzy brown caffeinated beverage."
Art accepted while Price popped not a beer for himself, but a ginseng soda. "If you don't like Suzanne, why did you invite her to come here?"
Price's expression was open and placating. "Don't get me wrong, I love Suzanne. I knew she'd come with Dina-her pal-and I needed all these ingredients for the current recipe."
"She was pretty upset, last night."
"She'd have to be, to get lost on the beach in a storm. Why'd you let her in? Scratch that; another dumb question. It must have been weird for you."
Art was not sure to which aspect Price was referring.
"You know, a stranger out of nowhere? A castaway delivered to you by the storm, who just happens to have a lush little body? it's like a letter to Penthouse."
"I couldn't very well tell her to go away, not in her state."
Price laughed out loud, heartily. "I'll bet! She didn't even have any shoes!" He drained most of his ginseng soda in a single robust pull and pitched the empty toward an overflowing bin. Two points.
The music-which seemed up until now to consist of a single tune an hour long, unvarying in tone-paused off for a moment during which Art could hear several people go
awww
. Then it recommenced with a vengeance.
"You know most of these people have been conditioned to hear music only in four/four time, at a hundred and twenty beats per measure? It's not that they can't listen to anything else; it's that they literally will not hear it as 'music.' "
"It's kind of loud." Art winced as he said it.
"Next you're gonna say, That's not music, that's just noise. Are you feeling old all of a sudden, Art?"
Spoken in another way, by another person, it might have been an insult, but Art was beginning to feel Price said nothing by accident, and divulged nothing unintended. He looked up right into Price's gaze. His eyes were the color of… air. He seemed to have a membrane around him that insulated him from distractions, loud music, annoyances, anything that would disrupt the focus of his attention or interest, which was always direct and penetrative.
"I've had older," said a voice behind them. A hand lit on Art's shoulder to turn him. As he faced the woman who had intruded, she kept talking to Price. "First off, Price, that Japanese club shit, or whatever it is, sounds like having a locust stuck in each ear." She nailed Art directly with wide, viridescent eyes.
"That's my house mix," said Price. "For my dance fever crowd."
"That's also Price's idea of a little joke," said the woman. "Do you see anybody dancing? Then don't call it dance music."
"Well, some of them are sort of… spasming," said Art, with an expression still leery of offending his hosts.
The woman laughed in a full-bodied but controlled way, a talk-show response that could not be permitted to last for more than so-many air seconds. It was husky and from the diaphragm, not a girlish laugh, which Art could otherwise hear all around him. This woman, with her heavy mane of chestnut hair and thoroughbred length of neck, with her elegant, small teeth and heat static lighting her eyes, had to be the legendary Michelle, She Who Signed the Invitation. She wore a satin dress with a mandarin collar, slit to the hip on both sides. Her heels made her taller than Art; without them he estimated she would be at eye level, exactly.
"Michelle?" said Art.
She automatically shook his hand. "Travers. Price rarely assigns surnames at these things. No point."
"How'd you know her name?" said Price.
"Because-"
Michelle cut Art off, overriding him. "Because he got the party invite in his mailbox, and that little muffin Suzanne probably babbled all about us." She looked back to Art. "Close to true?"
"Close enough. Listen, Price, I didn't mean to come off like I was bitching about your music. Your house, your music."
Price smiled a big alpha-wolf smile. "Shit, most of these dimwits wouldn't have the balls to complain if they hated it."
Michelle flinked a Zippo lighter one-handed and fired up a long European cigarette about the diameter of a nightclub drinking straw. "Did Price give you the tour?"
"We made it from the living room to the kitchen." Art sipped his Dr Pepper, feeling strangely like a child standing in the midst of drinking, smoking parents. He had already deduced that Price and Michelle had this intimidating effect on most people who encountered them. It was calculated, intentional.
"Well, there's probably an orgy in the cabana house by now,"
Price said with a slight drawl that made him sound like a judge reluctantly pronouncing sentence. "I'll bet I can guess who: Jory and Darian, Lex and Marisa, and whoever they could get drunk enough not to care. There's five bedrooms upstairs, not counting mine, which is locked. If you were to butt into the others you'd find a variety of people sleeping last night, getting high, waking up with strangers, or huddled into an assortment of self-pitying minor nervous breakdowns."
Art thought of Suzanne's friend Dina, hiding in a spare room, trying to navigate her obscure life crisis. Suzanne was probably with her right now, apprehensive about running into her own apparently terrifying ex-boyfriend. He abstracted his gaze past Michelle long enough to verify that he did, in fact, see a woman naked from the waist down sitting on top of one of the large concert PA speakers in the living room, bobbing and weaving her head to the thumping bass.
"That's Estelle-Leigh," said Price. "She thinks my system is some sort of big vibrator."
"Excuse me," Art said. "I don't mean this to sound the wrong way… but is this some sort of swingers thing, you should pardon the use of the archaic term?''
The glint popped again in Michelle's gaze. It reminded Art of undersea creatures who could flash lurid colors for defense. "Ooh, Art. You mean like wife swapping?" She said it mischievously, like a dirty secret or the punchline to a ribald joke. "It's just a party, Art. Friends and acquaintances. Remote location, plenty of mood-altering substances, plus lots of time. Sex happens."
What did Art think he was looking at? Actors, ingenues, parvenus, people who sought the edge because they had read it was cool. People who wanted to be like the people they saw in commercials, driving cars faster than legal. No live band. Assorted goofy shave jobs, tats, and nobelium bars. A knot of New York, clad in black, disdaining beach culture. A couple of older, shamanesque attendees who could still remember hippies. A lot of people who were just wasted and trying to figure out what came next. A couple of geeks, the kind who would comp you computer favors as payback for getting them next to actual women. A couple more who probably had a little expert white-collar crime in their legal jackets.
An executive domme cast a pointed amber glance Art's way, appraising his value, then looked away with a priceless half smile of dismissal.
"Don't be so uncomfortable,'' said Michelle, linking arms with him. "This isn't one of those 'play party' things, because I have no patience for sensation junkies so deadened they have to wallow in one anothers' trifling little extremes, digging around in their skin with razors, trying to find nerves that still fire. No bondage rodeo-tacky.''
"That would be out in the cabana," Price interjected.
Michelle put a finger to Price's lips and soldiered on. "This isn't a Tantric grope-fest or a cable documentary about the turn-ons of the shallow, and we're not Scientologists. So relax and tell me a little about yourself."
"Architect," said Price. "Built that house up near the radar thing. Lives alone, except for this German-shepherd kind of dog. Sometimes engages in shooting practice in his backyard. Y'know, there's a guy here you ought to meet, if you're seriously into firearms."
"How did you know all that?" Art felt naked, his cover blown.
"Suzanne said as much. Plus, I've seen the house up there. Some of it's fairly obvious."
"I've never seen you that far up the beach, before."
Price shrugged. "Anyhow, this young man, Luther, might be able to procure you a couple of unpapered collector's items, if you happened to be of a mind. Look for the black dude with the silver dangly earring-it's an Eye of Ra."
Art knew the symbol from his reference books, and the leatherette box on his nightstand, formerly Lorelle's. It was the image prompted by Derek's odd hand tattoo. Michelle strolled Art into the dining room, which was doing duty as a huge buffet area. "We've got two waiter-bartender people who are here for the duration. They're not scheduled to restock until three or so, and if they're smart, they're just waking up downstairs.''
If this place had a downstairs, from what Art had seen, then perhaps its foundation was sufficiently anchored to keep the Whole building from taking wing if the winds kicked up into triple digits. He pictured the sink plan in his mind and imagined the grade of concrete used.
"He's probably banging her," said Price. "He's one of those sexually vague, LA-actor wannabes, and she's one of those pneumatic Latina chicks. She couldn't keep her eyes off him, and I bet she finally got the best of him. I thought he was gay."
"Maybe he's up there with Stefan, and she's up there with Libia," said Michelle, smirking.
Price indicated the spread in the dining room. "Snacks? Party favors? No needle shit, is all I ask. You a coke person?"
Art shook his head. "Long ago and far away, and never again." He crossed his heart. Between a serving dish of cheeses and a bowl dusted with potato-chip crumbs he spotted a silver treasure chest, about seven inches wide, lined with purple velvet. Inside were a scatter of black-and-white capsules like the one Suzanne had lost in his bathroom. "What are those?"
"Private stock. House mix."
"Like the music?"
"A very mild accelerator. Keeps the party going. Like a second and third wind, in capsule form. If you don't like who you are, it'll help make you into someone else, for a while.''
Art recognized most of the other ambient drugs. He examined a capsule. "Not acid? Ecstasy?"
Price's ready grin was prepared. "Nothing so crude."