Devils in Exile

Come Undone

Maven kept an eye out for Danielle as he navigated the dance floor, heading out through the parted curtain. If nothing else, it gave his wandering around the club a purpose.

He cleared the top-floor rooms without coming across her, then made his way downstairs, patting the VIP bouncer on the back as he passed, emerging onto the main floor. He moved to the main bar and ordered a Budweiser, and while he waited, felt a brushing sensation against his shoulder, a cascade of brunette ringlets.

“Is this all there is?” said a young voice, the owner of the springy hair, jammed up against the bar with her back to him.

“What do you mean?” yelled her friend over the music. She was trying to get served, but the raised finger wasn’t drawing any attention. “We made it! We’re in!”

“I guess I was expecting gift bags. Or live unicorns or something.”

Maven smiled. He saw ankle boots and plenty of leg.

The bartender came back with Maven’s beer in an aluminum can, and Maven directed the barman’s attention to the women next to him.

The friend shouted their order, then leaned onto the bar to see Maven and thank him. Her look when she saw Maven — a recognition of something special — got the attention of the woman next to him, who turned. She had a darkly featured face, clever eyes, plum-painted lips, and a beaded choker that crossed her throat like a second smile.

“This is all there is,” Maven told her, fighting his eyes’ inclination downward. “No unicorns.”

“No?” she said with a lingering smile. “Too bad...”

Her friend shouted, “What’s upstairs?”

“More of the same,” said Maven, his eyes going back to the girl with the ringlets. “Only darker and less crowded.”

She was smiling at him and he was smiling at her. They were having a moment until two more friends came rushing up, pulling at her arm to go dancing. “Samara, come on!”

She saw the change in his expression, the clouding of his face. Her name was the same as that of the city in northern Iraq — but she had no way of knowing what that meant to him, or why the surprise of hearing it here made him freeze. He watched her — in a denim bustier with a lace-up back and a short, black suede skirt over ankle boots — get absorbed into the undulating mass out on the dance floor.

“Hey. Gridley. Wake up.”

It was Danielle, suddenly, next to him.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“What?” said Maven.

She already had her sunglasses on, her silver clutch under her arm. “I am so done, and not up for driving. He said you had a headache, you could take me.”

Maven checked one more time for the girl named Samara, but she was gone.

Danielle looked at him. “Are you drunk, Gridley?”

She still referred to him by the name of their hometown.

“Well, I am,” she said, squeezing a numbered plastic tag into his hand. “Now be a fucking gentleman and go fetch my coat.”

She waited at the door, and he followed her outside with her coat on his arm — long and black, a light crepe fabric — moving past the queue of hopefuls waiting to get inside. She passed female stares and male sighs and even outright wolf whistles, immune, her arms crossed against the cool night air, or maybe folded in anger against an evening and a city she felt was beneath her.

She moved fast, Maven a step or two behind, watching her calf muscles work, her hemline riding up along her left thigh. That their relationship had formed into a brother-sister thing frustrated him. Calling him Gridley was equal parts affection and put-down.

Maven was still occasionally amazed to be in the orbit of the once unreachable Danielle Vetti. Beyond that, his fealty to Royce superseded all. It was enough just to exist in this alternative reality where he had connected with the girl of his high school dreams. She hadn’t demonstrated any true interest in him, and anyway he would never cross that line.

Except in his mind. She once alluded to some questionable photo shoots she had done in pursuit of her New York modeling career, and Maven had spent way too many night hours on the Internet searching for the pictures.

She rounded the corner, not slowing down. Maven said, “Something wrong?”

“Yes, something’s wrong. I’m fucking cold.”

“How about your coat here?”

She didn’t answer. That solution made too much sense.

“Every week, the same goddamn thing,” she said. “Week after week after week. How does he not get sick of that place?”

“He likes what he likes.”

“Admit it, you’re sick of it too. I mean, it wears on you. It’s like partying inside a bug zapper in there, those swirling blue lights. No — they should actually do that. That would be so worthwhile. Every fifteen minutes or so, just randomly zap somebody on the dance floor. Put them out of their misery.”

She unfolded her arms to go into her bag, bringing out a cigarette and a butane lighter. Danielle only smoked when she drank.

Maven stayed to her left, out of the smoke stream, ears still ringing from the club.

“He is the control freak of all control freaks.” She made a wild gesture with her cigarette before pointing it at Maven. “You want to drive a girl crazy, Gridley? Insist on only tantric sex.”

Maven’s face widened. Too much information.

“And then—” She smoked. “And then there are these tenants of his. The four fucking Musketeers living below us. Running around at his beck and call... doing God knows what. I mean, what am I here, a kept woman?”

“A very well-kept woman.”

She glared back at him, and Maven realized maybe “a kept woman” wasn’t a compliment after all.

“I work for what I have,” she said. “Believe me — believe me.”

She was smoking the hell out of that Camel. It was almost gone.

“Boston,” she said, looking at the buildings overhead, enunciating it like a curse. She turned into an open-air parking lot — and Maven stopped.

She realized he was no longer with her and turned.

“Huh,” she said, flicking her cigarette away after one last puff, talking smoke. “You haven’t been back here?”

Maven stood in his old parking lot. He looked at the cars, and up at the familiar buildings. The acoustics of the lot came back to him, the cars rolling by, the nightlife blaring one street over.

Nothing had changed. Except him.

He looked to the gate booth and saw a new guard sitting on a stool inside, arms crossed, headset buds in his ears.

Danielle tapped her foot. “You are drunk, aren’t you.”

Maven followed her to a black Range Rover with twin chrome exhaust pipes. Inside, he settled into a seat fleshed in white leather with smooth black pores.

How far he had come was obvious: from the guy checking cars to the guy riding in the Range Rover with Danielle Vetti. More startling to him was how staggeringly fast it had all happened.

He felt elated suddenly and turned to share a revelation with Danielle. “Do you know that life is just a dream?”

She handed him the car keys. “Could have fucking fooled me.”

He started up the Rover, the heat vents coming on, and she immediately went to work on the radio.

Maven backed out and rolled to the gate, the attendant stepping out of the booth in jeans, work boots, and an olive-drab field jacket. Hard to tell if the army coat was just warm and fashionable or really his. He raised the gate arm, watching them pull through. Maven checked the guy’s face, imagining a moment of solidarity between two guys on opposite ends of the spectrum. But the guard never even looked at Maven. He was too busy trying to sneak a look down Danielle’s dress.

Maven pulled away, revving the engine a bit, actually pissed. Danielle squirmed in her seat like someone trying to get comfortable in bed. “Let’s not go back yet. What do you say? The night’s not over yet. Let’s drive around a little.”

Maven looked over, her perfect bare knees twinned beneath the dash, her chest swelling against the confines of her dress. At a red light before Tremont Street, he turned and reached across her, past her shoulder, grasping the seat belt there and drawing the strap down across her body, clasping it between the seats. She laughed at his attending to her, then the light turned green and he drove on.

He took them north under the sails of the Zakim Bridge, starting to feel good again. The luxury vehicle at his command, his just right blood-alcohol mix, slinky music on the radio. He didn’t mind playing chauffeur because he was with her, she was feeling loose, and for once they were alone.

“So what’s with this headache?” she said.

“Nothing. Gone now.”

“Really? Been kind of a mope lately.”

“I — what?”

“A mope. A drip. A bummer.”

“Look who’s saying this to me.”

“Where were you Musketeers all last week?”

“We were... away.”

“Cape Cod.” Maven looked at her, and she smiled. “Brad said so, on the phone to Termino.”

“So?”

“Do anything fun?”

“Not really.”

“Little early for beach weather. You guys go antiquing?”

“A little.”

“Catch up on your reading?”

“Exactly. Caught up on all my reading.”

“See? Sourpuss. What’s the matter, poor baby? Has it been a while? I find that hard to believe.”

She slipped her left hand over his thigh, faking a grab for his crotch. He kicked up and swerved the Rover, not a good maneuver at seventy miles an hour.

She pulled her hand back, laughing. “The look on your face.”

Did she do these things to be funny or provocative? “I’m just saying — don’t reach down there unless you mean it.”

“Oh? You want me to mean it?”

“I’m just saying.”

He didn’t need to look over to know that she enjoyed her effect on him. She turned up the radio and went fishing inside her clutch for another cigarette. “Hey, Gridley.” She held something toward him. “Gridley,” she said again. “What do you say?”

“I don’t smoke,” he said, still not looking.

“I know that.” She pulled it back, holding her hand to her nose as though fighting off a sneeze. “I’m asking if you want to hit up.”

Maven turned and saw the silver-capped amber vial in her hand. “What the fuck is that?”

“Artificial sweetener.”

“Are you fucking offering me blow?”

“Oka-ay. I guess that’s a no.”

She hadn’t been fighting off a sneeze. She had been snorting a bump off the webbing between her thumb and forefinger.

Maven caught her wrist as she was pulling back the vial. “Who gave this to you?”

“Christ, Gridley, relax. Eyes on the road.”

He shook her wrist. “What are you doing with this?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing with this? What’s the big fucking—”

“The big deal?” He was incredulous. “The big deal?”

“Mother of Christ, all right, already.”

“What about Royce?”

“Royce?” She swung her head around to look. “Gee, I don’t know. Is he here now?”

“You know he—”

“I didn’t ask him if he wanted a bump, I asked you. Which was a big mistake, I can see that now.” She pulled back but he did not release her. “Christ! Always so concerned about him. It’s unmanly. You forget that I’m not his employee. Now will you fucking let go of my wrist, pretty please?”

He shook it again. “Who gave it to you?”

“You don’t understand, Gridley. People don’t give it to you. You have to buy it.”

“Someone at the club?”

She was glaring at him, and finally he released her wrist. She pulled back angrily and dumped the vial into her clutch and dropped her bag to the floor. “Fine.” She leaned an elbow against the window. “Just drive then.”

He was going to cut off at the next exit and take her back home, but when the sign came up, he changed his mind, staying on the highway. Because fuck her.

“The way you four tiptoe around him,” she said. “Genuflecting. So desperate for somebody to lead you, to tell you how to think and what to do. Like a cult. You’re all brainwashed, fucking stars in your eyes. And so secretive. What a joke. Do you really think I don’t know what you were doing out there on Cape Cod all week? Do you really think I don’t know?”

She couldn’t know. She was guessing. She was close enough to Royce to figure some of it out if she cared — though she had never seemed to care before.

“Then again,” she said, “maybe he’s not exactly who he appears to be either.”

Maven drove on, saying nothing, not taking the bait.

“‘Realtors.’ That’s a good one. What’s ‘real’ about any of you?”

“You want me to take you home? Will that make you stop talking?”

“Home.” She huffed a laugh. “Home to your boss, you mean. Your master.”

She was high, and it was getting ugly, and being alone with her no longer seemed like a good idea. Maven decided to come back to the city on Route 1, giving her time to settle down while returning her to Marlborough Street before Precipice closed.

She rolled down her window after a while and turned up the music, singing along quietly with some of it, her arm outside the window, coasting on the current. Wind roared through the Range Rover, the stereo music like a jukebox playing inside a tornado. At one point he looked over and she was wiping her face, either pushing hair out of her eyes, or maybe crying.

Eventually she put up the window, but remained angled toward her door, watching the night go past. Maven eyed her shoulder beneath the thin strap of her dress, and the underside of her thigh below the slanted hem of her dress — until he realized she could probably see his reflection in the window. He settled back to drive the rest of the way in silence, and a memory returned to him.

Freshman year of high school, the parents of his pot-smoking buddy, Scotty, took them out to J. C. Hillary’s in Dedham one night. This was out of character for Scotty’s not-interested, never-around parents, and Maven and Scotty were both pretty well baked at the time, two little shits gorging on dinner rolls and giggling at silverware, trying to play it cool while the adults drank manhattans. The sedate, mid-to-upscale restaurant had Maven on sensory overload, compulsively taking little birdlike sips of water to keep from freaking out — but at one point he noticed a girl returning from the ladies’ room. After a few confirming blinks, he accepted that it was indeed Danielle Vetti, the Danielle Vetti, right there in the restaurant with him. She wore a knee-length skirt and a tight, cherry-red top, and he tracked her to a nearby table where she sat down with her family.

Another girl sat at the Vettis’ table, her back to Maven, a pair of crutches stood up against her chair. Not the sprained-ankle kind with the padded underarm bars, but the forearm collar, cerebral-palsy-type walking sticks, the sight of which sobered him. Maven never saw her face — the face of Danielle Vetti’s younger sister — nor that of her mother, who sat next to the girl, occasionally reaching over to swipe a cloth napkin across the girl’s mouth.

The hottest girl in high school had a handicapped sister. This discovery made a profound impact on him. Looking at Danielle Vetti pushing food around her plate, the rest of her family eating in silence, brought her down to earth for him. She was no more attainable, but at least understandable. She was real.

His school-shooter fantasies changed soon after that. He wasn’t the shooter anymore; he was the hero kid who jumped the shooter and knocked him out, saving Danielle Vetti. The one girl in school who secretly understood him.

She captured a song on the satellite radio and played it over and over again, Duran Duran’s moody and liquid “Come Undone.” As they neared the city, the overnight mist caught the ambient light and created a tangerine aura, a glowing shell of moisture over the city, dawn still hours away.

“He likes you, you know.” She said this so quietly, still looking out the window, that he wasn’t sure she was talking to him at first. “He talks about you, more than the others.”

Maven nodded, pleased, but didn’t let on.

She sat forward and turned down the radio. “Maybe I am a kept woman. Everybody pays one way or another. Just look at you.”

“What about me?”

“Come on, Gridley. You don’t think you’re a kept man?”

Maven sat alone inside the Marlborough Street pad, thinking about what Danielle had said. He realized that the bed he was sitting on, the tumbler of water in his hand, the Back Bay address — none of it was his.

What was he exactly? Royce’s employee, or his partner? His muscle, or his friend?

Maven shook it off. The best way to kill a good thing was to question it to death. Bottom line, the day he met Brad Royce was the luckiest day of his life.

He looked up at the ceiling, hearing her footsteps cross the floor upstairs. When he let her off at the door before going around to the alley to park the car, she had said to him:

“You’re a good soldier, Gridley.”

Then she reached over and held his cheek with her hand. A gesture of affection mixed with apology. He leaned into her soft palm, so slightly she could barely have noticed. It ended with her playfully pushing his face away.

He took it from her because he liked it, because he was all tangled up in a swirl of desire and concern. Even now, staring at the ceiling, he could still feel the touch of her hand upon his cheek.