“I will,” Celia promised. She planned to stay as close as a shadow to Regine.
“And don’t think I’m going to start letting you stay out past midnight every night of the week.”
“No, Mom.”
In the car Regine said, “I have seen fights at Diaboliques. But both times it was one person being stupid and getting thrown out by the bouncers. I don’t think your mother needs to know about that.”
“Probably not,” Celia agreed.
“Plus, they do serve alcohol, but they put wristbands on the people who are over twenty-one. The bartenders won’t serve anyone without a wristband, but we don’t drink anyway. There’s plenty of time for that when we’re older. And they’re open until three, but we can cross that bridge later.”
“Oh, okay . . .” Celia was surprised by how deliberately Regine had misled her mother. Before now Regine had seemed so principled—everyone in the Rosary seemed to be. Celia supposed attending Diaboliques must be an opportunity they all treasured, and it must not pose a serious risk, or else they wouldn’t go. But the truth—the parts Regine had concealed from Celia’s mother, which Celia prayed she wouldn’t discover by phoning the club to verify Regine’s account—now made Diaboliques feel a little dangerous, both scarier and more alluring than it already had been.
“This is the brand-new driving-to-Diaboliques mix Brenden made,” Regine said, handing her a CD. “Except he likes to title the Diaboliques mixes in hyperbolic French, so it’s Voyage aux Diaboliques Neuf. Yes, there have been eight mixes before this one.” Celia studied the track list and surmised “Nightclubbing” must be the song playing on the car stereo.
They followed the same route as in the mornings before school to assemble the chain of black cars, and the procession felt even more glamorous to Celia in the nighttime than during the day. She had a momentary desire for sunglasses, which made her smile. From Ivo and Liz’s house the Rosary drove downtown to a warehouse neighborhood that was unfamiliar to Celia. But the street where they parked was clean, and she saw an all-night diner on the next block down.
Everyone wore a dressier version of their daytime style, and Celia thought they were a remarkable sight. As they got out of their cars, she looked around at this group of people who barely had stopped being strangers to her and in whose presence she still felt like a guest.
Ivo had on a morning-length suit coat over a shirt collar that spread out on either side of his polka-dotted black tie. It was clear to Celia he was the leader of this tribe, though she hadn’t learned why. Perhaps no one wanted to challenge him for the position. He was confident but quiet. She still hadn’t seen him look directly at her, but she was sure he had passed judgment on her somehow. Among the Rosary, Ivo remained the biggest mystery.
Liz wore a charcoal strapless dress over a fitted white blouse, a combination that never would have occurred to Celia. Liz had shown flickers of interest in her, and she had smiled at her on a few occasions, so Celia felt a little more comfortable with her. At school Liz carried a notebook in which she scribbled constantly, and even if the scribbles were words instead of drawings, Celia felt a kinship with her because of it.
Brenden wore a velvet suit of such dark midnight blue, it might as well have been black. With his hair swept up to its usual height he reminded Celia of a matinee idol, but the henna patterns on his palms made it harder to pigeonhole him. Brenden’s encyclopedic knowledge of the music Celia was just discovering made him the most impressive to her, and she longed to see his music collection. In the meantime she hung on his words whenever he told her the name of an artist or a song. She didn’t feel as though she was imposing because Brenden always was so pleased to share what he knew.
Marco sported a mandarin-collared jacket buttoned up to his neck and a piece of embroidered fabric wrapped like a long skirt over his dark pants. Celia thought he was adorable, but to her he also was fearless. She was amazed by his ability to push the boundaries of men’s fashion the way he did and somehow walk through high school unscathed. She knew it helped that he was so handsome. Nearly every day at school she heard girls talk about him with regretful longing.
Regine wore a corset over her black blouse and long skirt. The corset had a pocket on the side seam that held a watch with a silver chain that draped across her waist and clipped on the other side. Marco seemed to be correct that one of the reasons Regine had embraced Celia was in order to rise slightly in the hierarchy of the Rosary, if only by bringing in someone younger. Celia didn’t care. She was grateful to be there.
On a strange dark street, assembled with these alluring people, Celia felt a little plain in her comparatively simple black dress and black heels, but Marco whispered to her, “You look great. Regine wouldn’t have let you out of the house if you didn’t.” Still, Celia was nervous. This was a different kind of unease than she had felt on Monday at Suburban. That first day she had been scared of asking for attention she didn’t really want. Tonight she was scared of not being interesting enough. They walked down the block, a series of uninviting buildings that might have housed heavy manufacturing in earlier decades. The muted bass thud of dance music signaled that the club must be close, but from the outside Diaboliques offered few clues about its contents. A single red light bulb glowed in a bare socket above an unmarked door in a brick wall, guarded by a brutish-looking guy dressed in black jeans, boots, and a black leather jacket, smoking a clove cigarette. The spicy smoke was foreign, making Celia nervous and reminding her she had allowed herself to be taken someplace about which she knew practically nothing. When they approached, the bouncer broke character and greeted them familiarly.
“Hello, folks! Good to see you all! Who’s this?”
“Hey, Rufus. This is Celia,” Liz introduced her, and Celia’s hand felt tiny in Rufus’s broad grip. He grinned at her, and she wondered what it was like to stand outside a club all night while everything went on inside.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Paperwhite. Have a good time.” Grasping the door handle, he cleared his throat and said in a dramatic voice, “Twinkle, twinkle . . .” Celia was surprised to hear the Rosary chime in, adding “Release the bats!” in unison.
“What does that mean?” she whispered to Marco.
“It’s one part Alice in Wonderland, one part of the song by the Birthday Party,” Marco whispered back. “It just amuses us.”
Meanwhile, Rufus had opened the door for them. Instead of a room full of people, though, a dark flight of stairs awaited them. Celia followed the Rosary inside and up, then along a hall with no doors and plain black walls. The corridor turned left and right and then they arrived at a vestibule with a podium. A plump girl in a Victorian gown put down her nursing textbook. She took their money and marked their hands with a hint of contempt. After they passed, Marco whispered to Celia, “She’s always sour. I gave up trying to win her over a long time ago. Plus, I’ve only ever seen her in three different dresses all the time we’ve been coming here, so how interesting can she be?”
After another stretch of hallway, at which point Celia thought they surely must have reached the back side of the building, they emerged through a doorway onto a mezzanine that was dark except for a few candles on low tables and the occasional sweep and flash of lights from the dance floor below. In those flashes Celia could make out couches on which a few darkly clad people practically disappeared into the shadows; all she could glimpse were some pale faces and a plume of fiery red hair.
“Come take a look. We never go down there,” Regine said, and Celia walked with her to the mezzanine railing next to the stairs leading down. Below her lay a dance floor the size of a basketball court, filled with people dancing like frenetic circus performers.
She looked over the railing for another moment, but she sensed the others were waiting for her, so she turned back to them and they moved to the far side of the room. The perimeter of the mezzanine was so dark Celia hadn’t noticed another flight of stairs, but there it was, and the Rosary climbed higher. At
the next landing there was an awkward little antechamber with several doors and people passing through in all directions. A man with metal spikes protruding from his ears and his chin walked by them. Celia wasn’t sure whether the others had surrounded her intentionally, but she was glad to have them as a buffer. They went through the door on the left and Celia saw another bar tended by a man and a woman clad head to toe in vinyl. Beyond the bar lay an even larger dance floor with a crowd that heaved and spun, this time to music that sounded more like rock. She saw people who looked like characters from Tim Burton films and was as entranced as she might have been at the theater. She would have been happy to stand there and watch for quite some time; she wished she had her sketchbook with her.
“It’s a little of everything out here,” Marco said. “We check it out every once in a while, but the music is all over the place. Patrick plays a more consistent set.”
“Who is Patrick?”
“You’ll meet him. He’s the main reason we’re here.”
Celia gathered that there was even more to come, and sure enough, the Rosary moved again, back through the crowded landing and across to a door on the opposite side. As they passed into another hallway the energy seemed to focus a little. Not as many people came in this direction.
The next room they entered was closer in size to a living room, with crushed velvet upholstered banquettes around the perimeter and a smaller bar on one side, where a beautiful, slender but strong-looking man with black hair down to his waist held court.
“I know this song,” Celia said excitedly to Marco. “ ‘Alice’ by the Sisters of Mercy.”
Marco looked impressed. “Regine really is taking your musical education seriously, isn’t she? This is where we spend all our time. The music is a little older, more obscure, and the people are a little more mature. It’s more sophisticated than the other two rooms.”
She could see the difference as she looked around. The people in this room wore beautiful dresses and sharp suits, as well as items of clothing Celia would have been hard-pressed to name. Marco rattled off the names of fashion designers Celia barely recognized: Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Thierry Mugler. Some ensembles looked custom-made. There were people whose gender was difficult to discern. Celia felt plain again, even in her black dress, which was by far the most formal thing she had ever worn—the same black dress that an hour ago had made her wonder where she could go and not feel overdressed. The elegant clothes her friends wore made complete sense to her, now that she saw them in this context.
“Come with me. Let me introduce you to Patrick,” Brenden said, taking Celia’s hand. The contact made her flash back to when she was younger, holding hands with her father. But Brenden’s hand around hers also quickened her heartbeat. She understood the act for exactly what it was—a protective older friend trying to make her feel comfortable—but she couldn’t remember ever holding hands with a guy before for any reason, and Celia thought she must be smiling idiotically. Brenden led her over to the DJ booth, where a wiry man with carefully messy hair turned away from his music to greet them.
“Brenden!” Patrick kissed him on both cheeks and then looked curiously at Celia.
“Patrick, I’d like you to meet Celia. This is her first time here.”
“Hi, Celia, thanks for coming!” Patrick took her hand and kissed her cheeks, too. She felt like a celebrity, looking out over the room from the booth while Patrick and Brenden talked. This place was the opposite in every way of what Celia had been tempted to imagine based on the miserable school dances she’d endured. There was no jumping or running around, no yelling. The people in this room behaved as though they were part of a stylized performance. Whether they stood or sat, it was as if they expected to be photographed. When they talked, they looked almost formal, bending their heads together and speaking carefully. When they danced, it was minimal but expressive, with deliberate steps and gestures. Many of them moved their lips along with the lyrics of the songs, making it clear they knew the music intimately. When Brenden was done chatting with Patrick, Celia returned with him to the others, who had taken their places at one side of the room.
A new song began and Brenden started as though he’d been pinched. “ ‘Whispered in Your Ear,’” he told her in haste on his way out to the dance floor. “Patrick knows I love this song!” The other four moved just as quickly to join him. Celia hadn’t contemplated dancing, and she stayed behind, unable to summon the confidence to join them. She desperately wanted to avoid making a fool of herself in this place, so she watched them, hoping to learn some sort of proper dance technique by observation. Ivo’s dancing was restricted almost completely to a stately step-touch back and forth, his eyes often closed. Liz tended to work in a small circle, hands clasped behind her back, looking down as though she had lost something. Brenden occasionally made small gestures that illustrated the lyrics. Marco was the loosest of them, moving his hips and raising his arms. And Regine had the most elaborate style, windmilling her arms around her in an exotic manner, pushing and pulling the air with her hands as though she were performing an incantation. Other people watched her admiringly. Celia badly wanted to dance, but she had no intention of attempting it and being exposed as an amateur.
The inner sanctum of Diaboliques was so much better than she could have imagined, even if she had let her fantasy run wild. Instead of looking the same and doing the same things, as people often did in the outside world, in here everyone clearly valued individuality as long as it was executed well. They seemed to have noticed Celia, but to her relief, no one scrutinized her as if she might do something wrong. The ones who came over to greet members of the Rosary nodded in her direction, and she assumed she was being introduced in absentia. The room, the people, the night—everything was beautifully theatrical, and now Celia understood: the Rosary attempted to reproduce this feeling, this experience of Diaboliques, elsewhere in their lives. Being here helped her to understand the choices they made and the way they lived during the rest of the week. The next time she was in the middle of the chaotic school cafeteria Celia was going to find it that much easier to ignore everyone around her, as her friends did. Spending Friday nights here in this beautiful room, where everyone else from school would have been so obviously out of place, was the prize for enduring everyday life for the rest of the week. Celia realized she only had been on the outside, fearful of the eyes that dismissed her, thinking it was easiest just to disappear, because she hadn’t figured out where the inside was. It wasn’t with those kids at school any longer. It was here at Diaboliques. It was with the Rosary.
“How do you like it?” Liz asked her at one point when they were standing off to the side again.
“It’s beautiful. I didn’t know anything like this existed,” Celia replied. “If you had described it to me I wouldn’t have believed you, and now here I am, in the middle of it!” Every song was strange and amazing. Every time she looked around she found something or someone new to admire. There were elaborate wall sconces that dripped cut glass like chandeliers. A woman in a fitted smoking jacket and floor-length gown used the mirror in her compact to check the flat, shiny waves of hair on her temples. A man arrived dressed completely in ivory. A sort of shawl-collared knee-length coat over a cream ribbed sweater and wide-legged canvas pants made him look like some kind of heavenly longshoreman. Celia studied everyone at Diaboliques, wanting to take as much of it home with her as she could. She felt the familiar impulse to re-create all of it in her sketchbook, knowing she could spend the rest of the weekend capturing all these stunning people. But for the first time, underneath that impulse was a new one: Celia wouldn’t be content to know this world from behind a sketchbook—she wanted to take her place in it.
In the midst of this sensory overload Celia noticed a tall boy with closely cropped black hair on the other side of the room. His broad shoulders and thick forearms made him look powerful even standing still. He wore a black shirt and pants that were plain by Diaboliques standards, b
ut Celia was more taken with the silvery sparks in his gray eyes, which she could see from twenty feet away—because he was staring at her. She looked away and then looked back, and still he stared. Celia felt a strange current flow through her, a mix of anxiety and pleasure. She wanted to decode the boy’s gaze, but she wasn’t sure she dared.
“Who is that?” Regine asked, easily locating the source of Celia’s distraction. Regine turned to Liz and pointed at the boy without even attempting to be subtle about it. Liz looked and then shrugged at Regine. Celia was embarrassed, but the boy across the floor didn’t seem to care. He continued to stare at Celia, keeping his hands deep in his pockets. “I don’t know about him,” Regine said. “Maybe I’m being overprotective, but I’ve never seen him before. We know all the regulars in this room.”
As it turned out, no action was required. The boy never came over, nor did he try to speak with any of them. A few times Celia saw him dance to the most abrasive songs Patrick played that night, and Brenden told her the names of the bands: Fields of the Nephilim, Christian Death, and Virgin Prunes. The boy had a leonine grace, gliding surely from foot to foot, but he kept his eyes down, and to Celia he looked as though he were hearing the music through headphones rather than loudspeakers. He didn’t seem to notice anyone around him until he finished, returned to his place across the room, and raised his silver eyes to find her again.
“If you keep watching him, he might think you’re interested,” Regine said.
“He’s the one watching me!” Celia protested. “I don’t know if I’m interested, but he is, well . . .” She studied the boy the way one searches for lightning in the night sky or peers down over mountain cliffs from an airplane window. The danger was beautiful as long as it stayed at a distance. As unexpected, as unprecedented as it was to be stared at this way by a boy, Celia wasn’t disconcerted by it. She had been transported to an alternate universe where everyone was brilliant and stunning, and everything was perfectly appointed, and all the new secrets she cherished were brought out into the open; why wouldn’t there be a brooding, handsome boy waiting there for her to arrive? Celia wasn’t about to question the rules of this new world, whom it would contain or what role he might play. And she wasn’t about to exert her own will, either. She had gotten this far with barely a single decision of her own. Celia was keenly aware that she wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the Rosary, so if Regine and Liz told her to be wary, she would play by their rules.
The Suburban Strange Page 5