Eighty Days Yellow Read online

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Summer responded, her mind still journeying through a storm of anger.

  ‘I thought we had an understanding.’

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘For my sins, yes.’

  ‘And a multitude of sins they must no doubt be. A veritable herd of them.’

  ‘Why are you so aggressive?’ he asked Summer, sensing their conversation was taking a wrong turn, a very bad one.

  ‘So I’m the one who is guilty of taking a step too far, am I?’

  ‘That’s not what I was saying.’

  ‘And who was it who was allowing himself to be groped by Charlotte as if I didn’t even exist and happened to be standing there like a fool, as naked as the day I was born, shaved like a common slave?’ she continued.

  ‘I have never thought of you as a slave, whether past, present or future,’ he remarked.

  ‘But you have no problem treating me like one.’ She almost choked on the words. ‘I am not a slave and I never will be.’

  Dominik, in a forlorn attempt at regaining the initiative, interrupted Summer. ‘I just thought that by demeaning yourself with that . . . gigolo, you were letting both of us down, that’s all.’

  Summer fell silent, tears of shame and anger pricking her eyes. She briefly felt like throwing the glass of water she was gripping over his face, then thought better of it.

  ‘I never made you any promises,’ she finally said to Dominik.

  ‘I never asked for any.’

  ‘It was an . . . urge. I just couldn’t control myself,’ she said by way of apology, but then turned against him again. ‘You placed me in that situation and abandoned me. It was as if you’d triggered my demons and moved miles away, leaving me alone with . . . God knows what. I just don’t know how to explain it, Dominik.’

  ‘I know. It was partly my fault too. I can only apologise.’

  ‘Apology accepted.’

  She drank from the glass. The ice had long melted and the water was tepid. Silence fell again between them.

  ‘So . . .’ Dominik finally said.

  ‘So.’

  ‘Do you wish to continue?’

  ‘Continue what?’ Summer asked.

  ‘Seeing me.’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘A lover, a friend, an accomplice in pleasure. You choose.’

  Summer hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘I understand.’ Dominik nodded with resignation. ‘I really do.’

  ‘It’s so complicated,’ Summer remarked.

  ‘It is. On the one hand, I want you. Badly, Summer. Not just as a lover, or a plaything, as something more. On the other, I find it difficult to explain that attraction and the way it’s become twisted so quickly.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Summer said. ‘So not a marriage proposal, eh?’ She grinned from ear to ear.

  ‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘Maybe some form of arrangement?’

  ‘I thought that’s what we already had.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  ‘And it visibly doesn’t work, does it? So many unknown factors at play.’

  They both sighed in unison, which made them smile. At least they could see the humour in the situation.

  ‘Maybe we should stay apart for a while?’

  It didn’t matter which one of them actually said the words; it was on the tip of the other’s tongue anyway.

  ‘Do you want the violin back?’ Summer asked.

  ‘Of course not. It was always yours. Unconditionally.’

  ‘Thank you. Truly. It is the most magnificent gift I have ever been given.’

  ‘You deserve it a hundred times over. The music you created for me was unforgettable.’

  ‘Both clothed and unclothed?’

  ‘Yes, clothed and unclothed.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we wait; we think; we see what comes next and when, if ever.’

  ‘No promises?’

  ‘No promises.’

  Dominik left a five-pound note on the table and with a heavy heart watched Summer walk out of the cafe and her silhouette gradually melt into the night.

  He looked at his watch, the silver Tag Heuer he had bought himself years ago to celebrate getting his tenure.

  He looked not at the time, which was at the imprecise, blurry junction between evening and night, but at the day. It had been forty days since he had seen Summer for the very first time, as she performed in Tottenham Court Road station with her old violin, a date to remember.

  The appointment with the headhunter who was filling the vacancies for the orchestra in America went particularly well, and barely a week later, Summer landed at JFK airport, having unceremoniously given up her room in the Whitechapel bedsit and deliberately foregone her deposit. She had not said goodbye to Charlotte or her other acquaintances. Only Chris, whom she had briefly explained herself to as best she could, as she wanted his blessing.

  She hadn’t called Dominik, though the temptation to have the last word had been strong, among other reasons.

  The agency had arranged for temporary accommodation in a shared apartment with other foreign members of the orchestra just off the Bowery. She had been warned they were all from the brass section, as if their instruments somehow determined their personality. The remark – or was it a warning? – had amused her.

  It was Summer’s first time in New York, and as the yellow cab approached the Midtown Tunnel, she caught her first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, as impressive as in virtually every movie she had ever seen. It quite literally took her breath away.

  This was certainly the way to begin a new life, Summer thought. Her slow early passage through the traffic jams of Queens and Jamaica following the departure from the airport had only offered suburban ordinariness, but now, through the dirty cab windows, her eyes fixed on the distant skyline of tall buildings and recognisable landmarks and she felt filled with joy and hope.

  Her first week in the city provided her with little leisure time as she scrambled to fit in the necessary urgent rehearsals, set up the obligatory paperwork for her residence, acclimatise herself with the arcana of the Lower East Side’s peculiar geography and catch her bearings in this strange and wonderful new city.

  Her flatmates kept to themselves, which presented her with no problem. She had scarcely even been on first-name terms with those she had accumulated back in London.

  The day quickly came around for her first public performance with the new orchestra, the Gramercy Symphonia, and its initial programme of fall concerts in a local hall that had recently been restored to its former glory. They played a Mahler symphony, which somehow didn’t connect with her, and she found it difficult to impart much feeling into the music. Fortunately, she was just one of over half a dozen violin players in the string section and was technically adept enough to be able to hide among their ranked masses without drawing attention to her lack of empathy.

  In a fortnight’s time, they would be playing mostly from a more traditional classical repertory: Beethoven, some Brahms and a series of pieces by Russian romantics. Summer was looking forward to this, although not to the final concert of the season, which she saw had pencilled in some Penderecki, which was a bit of a nightmare for string players and in no way to her personal taste: strident, impersonal and, she felt, awfully pretentious. This was still some time ahead, though, and those rehearsals were not planned until later in the fall. She would try and enjoy herself before then.

  The weather in New York was unusually balmy, although Summer seemed to make a habit of getting herself caught in seasonal showers on the rare occasions she strayed far beyond her Greenwich Village or SoHo patches. The way her thin cotton dresses, once drenched, would stick to her skin as she rushed towards some form of shelter or made her way home in the rain reminded her of late spring back in New Zealand. It was an odd feeling, definitely not one of nostalgia, as if that had been another life altogether.

  She felt no need to go out and
socialise, meet men, have sex. A holiday, that’s what this was. Back in the solitude of her sparsely furnished room at night, she would listen to the sounds of the street outside, sirens blaring all through the night in between the blankets of silence, every sound the breath of this new city. Sometimes, through the thin wall that separated her room from one of the apartment’s other bedrooms, which was occupied by a couple whom she thought were actually married, brass players hailing from Croatia, she would hear them making love. A mini recital of voices in a foreign tongue, of repressed whispers and the inevitable sound of straining bed springs and heavy breathing. Then the inevitable clarion cry of the flute player as she came in a loud deluge of Croatian swear words, or at least that’s what it sounded like to Summer as she attentively listened to their scrambling movements and tried to imagine the spectacle of cock and cunt in love and war between the bedcovers and the ferocious hammerhead of the trumpet player’s member as he fucked his wife. Summer had often seen him wandering around the apartment in his underwear, impervious to her presence. He was short and hairy, and his penis seemed to stretch his jockey shorts to the limits of the material. Somehow, she sort of guessed he was not circumcised and imagined the way the head would emerge from the untamed folds of his flesh when he unrolled to full length in arousal. All the time banishing from her mind the memories of other cocks she had known, cut or uncut.

  Then she would masturbate, her delicate fingers splaying her cunt lips open and playing her usual clever tune there. Oh, yes, there were distinct advantages to being a musician . . . The music from her body swirled through the otherwise empty room of the shared apartment like a torrent and brought both pleasure and forgetfulness, driving away the lingering ache she felt when her mind turned to thoughts of Dominik.

  Time was running short as the orchestra neared its first performance of the season, and Summer and her colleagues had had to spend most of the weekend in the bowels of a damp rehearsal space near Battery Park, going over their parts until she felt she would be sick if she had to pull another arpeggio out of her Bailly.

  She’d cleaned her face under cold water in the ground-floor washroom of the rehearsal space and was one of the last to leave the building. The day’s last echoes of the sun were fading over the Hudson river. All she desired right now was a bite to eat, maybe a takeaway sashimi plate from Toto on Thompson Street, and a good night’s sleep.

  Emerging onto the pavement, she was about to head north when a voice called out to her. ‘Summer? Summer Zahova?’

  She turned to see an attractive middle-aged man of medium height with salt-and-pepper hair and a short, carefully sculpted beard in the same shades of grey. He wore a seersucker jacket with thin blue stripes, black trousers and heavy dark shoes polished to within an inch of mirror shades.

  No one she knew.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I was allowed by some acquaintances in the orchestra’s management to watch and listen to your rehearsal. I was highly impressed.’ His voice was rich and deep, with an unusual lilt to it. He was not American, but she couldn’t place the accent.

  ‘It’s still early days,’ Summer said. ‘The conductor is putting us through our paces, aiming for more cohesion.’

  ‘I know,’ the older man said. ‘It takes time. I have experience watching orchestras, but I thought you integrated well, even at this early stage.’

  ‘How did you know I was a newcomer?’

  ‘I was told.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Let’s just say we have friends in common,’ he grinned.

  ‘Oh,’ Summer remarked, ready to continue on her way by now.

  ‘It’s such a beautiful violin,’ the man said, his eyes fixed on the case she held in her right hand. She was wearing a short leather skirt that finished high above her knees, a tightly cinched belt with an oversize buckle, no hosiery and brown boots that stopped at mid-calf level. ‘A Bailly, I would say.’

  ‘It is,’ Summer confirmed, a smile playing on her lips at last as she recognised a fellow aficionado.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I knew you were new in town and was wondering whether you might be willing to join me and some friends tomorrow night. I’m having a little party. Mostly musical friends, so you should feel at home. I know how big a city it is, and it’s still early for you to have made many friends, no? Nothing fancy, just drinks in a bar and then maybe some of us will repair to the place I’m renting for some further conversation. You can bail out at any stage.’

  ‘Where are you renting?’ Summer enquired.

  ‘A loft in Tribeca,’ the man said. ‘I only live in New York a few months a year, but I hold on to it. Normally I’m in London.’

  ‘Can I think about it?’ Summer said. ‘I doubt tomorrow’s rehearsals will end before at least seven. Where are you all meeting up?’

  The man handed her his card. ‘Victor Rittenberg, PhD,’ it said. He must be Eastern European, she decided.

  ‘Where from?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah, it’s a complicated story. Maybe one day . . .’

  ‘But originally?’

  ‘The Ukraine,’ he admitted.

  Somehow this snippet of news was comforting.

  ‘A set of my grandparents came from there,’ Summer pointed out. ‘They travelled to Australia and then to New Zealand. That’s where my name comes from. I never knew them.’

  ‘So that’s one more thing we have in common,’ Victor said, a broadly enigmatic smile spreading across his bearded features.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Summer said.

  ‘Do you know the Raccoon Lodge in Warren Street in Tribeca?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s where we are all meeting up. Tomorrow from seven-thirty. Will you remember it?’

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ Summer said.

  ‘Great.’ He turned on his heels with a small wave at her and walked down the street in a different direction to her way home.

  Why not? Summer thought. She couldn’t stay a hermit indefinitely, and she speculated as to who their common friend might be.

  Victor’s seduction of Summer was a gradual process in which his cunning was deployed to great purpose. Knowing what he already did of her from London, from what Dominik had said and described to him under casual interrogation, he had soon realised that Summer, whether she was aware of it or not, had the characteristic traits of a submissive woman. What a wonderful coincidence it had been that, at her lowest ebb, the job in New York that Lauralynn, his old accomplice in mischief, had pointed out to her had coincided with his own move to the Big Apple, something that had been arranged long before, when he had accepted the post at Hunter College, where he now lectured on post-Hegelian philosophy.

  A libertine of old standing, Victor was also a fine connoisseur of submissives and knew the many ways to manipulate them and bring them round to him in the most devious fashion, exploiting their weaknesses and playing to their needs.

  From the way Summer had fallen willingly into the arms of Dominik and what he had observed on the one occasion he had been allowed to see her in action and play, he now knew the right triggers to push, the nerves to reach for, the invisible strings that could be pulled. Exploiting her loneliness as a newcomer to New York, Victor took care to tease her natural submission into the open, one careful step at a time, giving her exhibitionistic streak a subtle nudge here, or indulging the foolhardy form of pride that led her into awkward situations of a sexual nature on a whim there.

  Compared to him, she was an amateur, never realising she was being played.

  Victor knew Summer’s desires had been stirred and her sexual needs heightened by her experiences with Dominik. New York was a big city and could be a lonely one. Dominik was the other side of the ocean and Summer was here, unprotected, alone.

  During their first evening together, at the party he held in his loft in Tribeca, Victor carefully revealed his interest in BDSM, guiding the conversation onto the subject of certain private clubs i
n Manhattan and the more distant wilderness of New Jersey. He saw Summer’s reaction, the burning desire in her eyes, the inability to deny her sexual mores. The flame was lit, and she quickly gravitated towards it like a moth unable to control its dance towards the light.

  Try as she might, she could not resist the call of her body, the complex web that Victor wound. Summer missed Dominik, his strange, sexy games and the way that she enjoyed playing along. Victor’s voice was different, his tone firm and unyielding, without the softness of Dominik’s lilt, but still, if she closed her eyes she could almost imagine that it was Dominik instructing her, bending her to his will.

  It quickly became apparent to Summer that Victor knew more than he should about her, and she began to suspect Lauralynn had been his informer. She was no dupe, but she was willing to see where all this might lead. The call of twisted thoughts and the siren song of her body in a state of want could not be ignored much longer.

  By their third meeting, in a dark bar on Lafayette Street, she found herself at ease with Victor’s subtle grooming and was far from surprised when halfway through a normal, civilised conversation about the ugliness of more modern forms of classical music (although she personally had an indulgent appreciation of the works of Philip Glass, whom Victor couldn’t stand), he suddenly turned to her and, out of the blue, asked, ‘You’ve served before, I believe?’

  She nodded in response. ‘You’re a dom, aren’t you?’

  Victor smiled.

  The time for psychological games had come to an end.

  ‘I think we understand each other, then, Summer, don’t we?’ Victor said, laying the palm of his hand over hers.

  They did; the real world, that secret world she had been orbiting somewhat like a headless chicken, was summoning her again, beckoning in dulcet tones.

  You know you’re embarking on a path that is a dead end, but you do it anyway, because not doing so would leave you incomplete.

  Summer’s next meeting with Victor followed a long rehearsal session with the Symphonia, just two days prior to their first official performance of the new concert season. She was feeling high on the way the music flowed and how the sound of her exquisite Bailly now embedded itself into the corpus of the orchestra. Her hard work was bearing fruit. With the adrenaline going, she felt ready to tackle any damn perversion Victor might conjure. She was actually looking forward to it.