Professional Amateurs
Her hair was a curly brown hexagon. Sky-blue powder dusted around her soft green eyes and her lips were a crimson flower. It was the violinist.
“I heard you play,” I said. “I was there at the Wu-Krazer commercial. That night. I saw the original. You were amazing.”
“My name is Octavia. Bengt tells me that you compose?”
III
We all moved to London because everyone said it was the place to be and we lived off of the docklands, Ella and Bengt and Octavia and me. We bought a perfect island that we had made for us special and we christened it Diamondback Island because W-K had started it all. It was great for the spots and the manor house we built was designed with shooting angles in place. We put the house near a rock where sea lions would come and roll around and roar, because Ella loved sea lions.
I was living my dream. I would wake up with notes in my head, put them down (on paper, in a spirit of defiant anachronism) and then spend the rest of the day turning them in to music with my beautiful Octavia, who used her bow like a rapier. Octavia sola: there had been contractual problems and Erictho Nickrenz had left with her two sisters after a day on the island.
“Eri was just trop jalouse, Arnaud,” Octavia told me a thousand-thousand times, stroking my arm gently with her knuckles as we settled into the moonlit sheets at night. “The real quartet is us. The actor, the actress, the composer and the player.”
My music was heading out in all kinds of directions anyway, so we hired studio players and brought them out to the island on our new, cherry-red hydrofoil. We had a drummer, a bible-thumping Tourette’s victim from the Alabama Free State who hit crazy beats. We had a blind flautist called Zohar who charmed snakes on the streets of Soho. We had a chorus of staid accountants from the Department of Attention who could sing like seraphim. I recorded it all and played the better things as background for commercials with Bengt and Ella. A cantata of mine was performed in Poland and artistocrats from San Dimas to Siberia were eating up my songfiles.
So everything was brill for Octie and me. The problem came from the other side of the perfect manor house.
You see, Bengt was driven—driven by his fame. Ella had been much bigger than him before they met, so she was used to it. But Bengt still drew adrenaline thick from when people on the street asked him if he would penetrate them repeatedly behind dumpsters or falafel stands. He put himself in the situation often enough, taking the hydrofoil to the city and getting lost in the miniskirted throngs of Covent Garden. Eventually, the right kind of redhead approached him and he succumbed.
Ella smelled her on his breath that evening. She did not ask Bengt about it, she merely refused him intercourse and pondered her revenge.
Well pondered, revenge came only the next day in the form of a steamy commercial for Wagging-Tail Tights. Ella, her eyes smudged with kohl, slinkingly donned Wagging-Tail thigh-high-risers in the candle-lit depths of a Piccadilly bath-house. Her award winning breasts were more exposed than they had ever been. She approached a muscle-bound British pit-fighter of minor renown and circled him with her legs. Posed at the pap’s camera, in full close up she circled white lips with red tongue, jingling, “Wagging-Tails, they’re so hot—make me want twice what Bengt Marc’s got.”
“Bengt ill-equipped to handle Ella,” ran the hearsay rags the next hour. After the usual reality disclaimers, they opined that Ella was quite likely dissatisfied with Bengt’s prowess at intercourse. The journalists had taken things too literally, as they usually did, but they did point to the fact that something was wrong.
All of this did not quiet Bengt’s desire to penetrate fans behind video stores and power stations.
