Schelling watched Kit Stoddard sitting at the bar and lifting her graceful, long-fingered hand to touch her shining red hair, pushing it out of her eyes, not so the eyes could see him, but so he could see the eyes and add them to his appraisal of her. Scott invited her to come to the party with him. She shrugged, looked at her two friends, and agreed.
He took her to the party at the new house in the Hollywood Hills that Mechanismo had bought with the signing bonus he’d received from Bulletproof Records. Scott walked with Kit through the faux Tuscan villa, looked at the things that all young musicians bought that year: a huge flat-screen television set, a saltwater aquarium with a couple of sharks in it, a couple of bad portraits of themselves. They crossed the broad veranda, and went down the widening steps to the lawn, where Scott had seen Artie Bains from Bulletproof Records trying to be part of a gaggle of recording artists. Scott stepped close to Bains and said, “When are you putting him on the road?”
Bains said, “The new CD isn’t finished yet, but the week it comes out. He hasn’t thought as far ahead as tomorrow, so don’t say anything.”
“Professional courtesy,” Scott agreed.
“I’ll explain it to him in a couple of days, when he’s sober, and then we’ll start booking dates. I’ll call you to see if we can avoid conflicts.” He saw Kit Stoddard and held out his hand. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Artie Bains, from Bulletproof. I know I would remember if Scotty had ever had a friend as beautiful as you.”
“Thank you.” Kit had never heard of Artie Bains, but she had certainly heard of Bulletproof.
Scott steered her out of Bains’s reach. “Good luck with the tour.”
Bains understood his good wishes. It wasn’t quite a threat, just a reminder that he had just given Scott information that Scott could use to make his next few days more difficult.
Kit saw the party exactly as Scott had wanted her to. He introduced her to the members of Los Federales and The Scheme, both of them groups he had signed. She met Marsha Steele in the powder room and then watched her come out, pick up a guitar, and give an impromptu performance of two of the songs on her next CD. At around two-thirty, Little Nancy’s limousine pulled up at the front of the house, and Little Nancy made an entrance wearing so much diamond jewelry that she was weighed down by it. Before she went down the lawn to disappear among the group there Little Nancy stopped and embraced Scott Schelling.
Later still, as they walked past the people at the buffet tables and milling around the three bars, toward the driveway where the valet attendants would bring his car, Kit said, “It’s amazing how anybody can make this much money.”
Scott said, “Mechanismo’s not only broke, but he already owes more money than he’s made in his life. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
“He is? After one CD?”
“He’s good. If he holds up, he’ll work his way out of debt someday. But he’s going to be on tour a lot, and the second CD had better hit.”
“Why is he in debt?”
“Because he’s new. He doesn’t know yet that there’s a difference between money and credit, and it wasn’t in Artie’s interest to tell him. I think Mechanismo’s signing bonus was two million. He put a million or so down on this house, which means he owes the bank about ten. If he got two, the government wants the rest, and they want it yesterday. He’s spent a lot on cars, jewelry, and parties. Tomorrow or the next day, Artie will sit down with him, add up the figures, and explain to him how money works. Then he’ll tell him what he has to do to get more.”
“Do you do that, too?”
“Do what?”
“Get them into debt to control them.”
“Of course not. Whenever I see this kind of thing coming, I try to head it off. I’m in this business because I love music and I want to find wonderful artists and help them create. Along the way, they make money, and the company I work for makes money.”
After only a few of those parties, Kit had begun to hear comments about Scott from people she met. She repeated the words to him with a worried look, as though she were bringing news to him that would break his heart. “Scotty, I think you’ve got to try to let more people know who you really are and what you’re like, and not be so aloof and invisible. Tonight I heard this person call you the Prince of Darkness.”
He grinned and shrugged. “If your competitors say you’re the worst, then you’re the best.”
Scott had become infatuated with Kit. He began referring to her as his girlfriend, and treated her generously. He let her buy expensive clothes in the boutiques along Montana Avenue with his credit card. He went off to work each morning at five-thirty and left her in charge of a big, luxurious house until eight P.M. or later. He took her to the best parties in town.
But eventually the relationship began to lose its freshness. Kit said she was bored and that she missed her friends. He did not want to meet her girlfriends, or let Kit take a car to the clubs. He ordered Carl to drive her to a restaurant where she had agreed to meet her friends, and then pick her up at a prearranged time and place. Scott didn’t want to have all of her friends, family, and acquaintances invading his life. He wanted her—the long red hair, the white skin, the soft lips. He wanted to see himself through her deep green eyes and feel her appreciation, her admiration, her arousal.
They had begun to issue short, cold, sarcastic comments, sometimes not answered, like solitary blows. One night he came home from work expecting to take her out to dinner, and found her in the bedroom getting ready to go out with her friends. He kept himself from speaking because he did not want to blurt out some jealous, angry remark that he would instantly regret. She noticed his dark mood and said he was pouting. He knew that if he spoke, she would react only by tormenting him intentionally, and then he would lose his temper, so he went off to the pool to swim while Carl drove her to her meeting place.
While she was gone, he found himself consumed by loneliness and longing. He had always been very gentle and patient with her, but now the feeling was different. He began to pace. At two A.M., he was waiting for her at the door, let her in and locked it, stripped her clothes off in the foyer and took her. When it was done, she kissed him over and over for a long time without speaking, and they went to bed and fell asleep in each other’s arms.
From then on, whenever she went out without him, he would lie in wait for her, thinking about her until she appeared. He would make love to her on the carpeted bedroom floor, or on the couch in the media room, or the big overstuffed chair near the door.
She enjoyed the game—the fact that she aroused him so much that he couldn’t control himself, or the power she had to make him wait by the door for her, staring out the window and listening. He thought about her during the day, caught himself daydreaming about her during meetings or when he was listening to CD cuts, trying to make a decision about the fate of a performer.
One night was worse than before. She came home much later from one of her evenings with the girls. When she came into the bedroom, he undressed her roughly. She resisted, and he snatched up the silk necktie he had taken off and hung from a knob on a dresser, and used it to bind her arms behind her, then pushed her to the bed and forced her. From her movements and sounds, he could tell that she was more excited than she had ever been. After it was over, they lay still for a minute, and then she said, “Untie my wrists, Scott.”
He could tell from the stern, cold way she said it that she was serious now. He untied the knot, and she sat up and faced him. “That can never happen again.” At first he thought he had misunderstood her—that she had actually hated it and wanted him to stop—but he studied her face in the dim moonlight, and knew that he had not. She was not angry. She was frightened because she had begun to see what he had already seen: Each time they had sex, it had become rougher, more violent. Each time they came together like this, they had to go a little bit farther. She said, “This has gone too far.”