Darling (8 page)

Today looming over the tiny black cube is the Makkah Clock
Royal Tower, a tower reminiscent of Big Ben—a much bigger Ben—taller than the World Trade Center, with a golden crescent as its finial. Within the Makkah Clock Royal Tower is the eight-hundred-room Fairmont hotel. At its base there is a mall with four thousand shops. The Bin Laden Group, the engineering firm founded by the father of Osama bin Laden, is responsible for the overscale buildings set down upon Mecca.

Percy Bysshe Shelley died by drowning at the age of twenty-nine on July 8, 1822, when a small schooner was lost in a storm off the coast of Italy. Shelley's body was recovered from the sea and burned in a funeral pyre on the beach, after the ancient Greek fashion. Shelley's heart was not consumed by the flames and was buried under a motto devised by his friend Leigh Hunt—
Cor Cordium
(“Heart of Hearts”)—in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

•   •   •

The Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens occupies a volume of cubic space reminiscent of a nineteenth-century train station. People come and go. There are hundreds of tulips and bluebells and daffodils, foxgloves, hollyhocks; there is a dense, loamy smell. There are false flora and fauna among the real—bees, ants, ladybugs, butterflies, giant poppies, toadstools. Georgic implements of gigantic scale (flowerpots, watering cans, hoes) are strewn among the flora as if abandoned by a race of giants. Most wonderful are leaping, flashing jets of water that materialize and disappear in midair. These I watch for many minutes, knowing the water or fluid must be encased in a translucent conduit, like Luther's oxygen tube, but I cannot see the tubes, cannot detect how it is done.

The Bellagio's floral exposition is a celebration of spring and does not attach itself semantically or symbolically to Easter.

On Good Friday afternoon I am stalled on Interstate 95; I am on my way to the hospice. The commuters surrounding me are headed out of town for the weekend or into town for the weekend, so there is that much of pending Easter, but nothing of Good Friday, beyond my own lonely sense of appropriate Good Friday weather (overcast, as in the Sacramento Valley of my childhood). The van ahead of me has a sign in Spanish on its bumper
: ONLY GOD KNOWS IF YOU WILL RETURN
. I try to recollect the Russian novel or memoir; I think it is one of the childhood reminiscences of Gorky, but the scene memory serves is too dimly lit for me to recognize the woman who stands at the window in pale, pinkish light. In fact, I do recognize her, but she is the wrong woman at the wrong window, the wrong light and season; she is a woman from a Pre-Raphaelite painting—
Mariana
by Millais—whose back is fatigued. Everything in the provincial Russian room behind the wrong woman is in readiness—the spoons, the linen, the breakfast breads, the samovar; she has stayed behind; the others have gone to midnight Mass, miles away. It is the dawn of Easter. The woman imagines the vibration of cathedral bells through the frozen air and the cracking of ice beneath the blades of the sled. Only God knows if they will return.

Luther is in bed; the head of the bed is raised. Jimmy is sitting in a chair beside the bed. Peter has gone to the airport to pick up Andrew and John. The oxygen prong is out of Luther's nose; the tube snakes under the pillow. Do you want the oxygen tube? Jimmy asks.

Luther nods.

What difference does it make? OK, something to do, I think to myself as Jimmy hooks the loop behind Luther's ears. Within two minutes Luther has torn the prong away. His breath is clotted with phlegm, like Maya Lin's
Silver River
.

Luther's eyes slide toward Jimmy on a slow tide of consciousness.
Light,
he says. You want the light on? Jimmy asks.
Light,
Luther says again, flicking his hand slightly. Then, summoning all his power:
You are in the light
. Oh, sorry, says Jimmy; he moves his chair toward the foot of the bed. Luther flicks his hand again:
More
. Jimmy moves farther away. Luther seems momentarily delighted by the power of his wrist. I don't know if he means he can't see Jimmy because Jimmy is sitting in front of the window or if Jimmy is blocking light that is precious. After Jimmy makes one further move, Luther nods, smiles, sleeps. Either way.

•   •   •

Entr'acte

On YouTube: The lights dim. A kettledrum rumbles through the pit as the silver limousine drives forward onto the stage's reflecting surface. Light pours from the proscenium like rainbow melt. The chauffeur hops to; he crosses in front of the limousine to stand at attention, his hand poised on the handle of the downstage door. The strafing beams fuse into a single column of preternaturally white light as the chauffeur opens the door.

Liberace emerges; Liberace unfolds; Liberace pops; his arms open wide—O glory! He wears a sequined Prince Regent suit and a white fur coat with silver lamé lining and a Queen Isabella collar as high as a wingback chair. The chauffeur kneels—knighthood is in flower—and adjusts his Master's train, twenty paces of fur carpet. Somehow Liberace now holds a microphone (diamonds on his fingers); the chauffeur must have passed it to him when we were looking elsewhere.

Liberace questions the audience: “Do you know what kind of car this is?”

Golly.

“It is a silver Rolls-Royce. I bought it in England and brought it back here.”

We bid farewell to the chauffeur. We give him a hand. His name is Thorn. Or Thor; we didn't quite . . . “We'll see more of Thor later,” Liberace promises with lupine relish. Thor drives the limousine off, stage left. Another round of applause for Thor. For Rolls-Royce. For England!

Liberace addresses us as the Big Bad Wolf might address an infant or a canary or a little lamb lost—a petting voice, not unkind. Necessarily, he supplies all the answers to his petit catechism. It is exactly the cadence and the Socratic method of Mister Rogers. He tugs the tonnage of his train along the lip of the stage. To some women seated in the first row: “Yes, you can feel it. Do you want to feel it? It's nice, isn't it? Do you know what it is?”

Golly.

“It is virgin fox! I had this made for a command performance I gave for Her Majesty, the Queen of England.”

Press
PAUSE
.

Regard the rapacious eye the Wolf casts over his audience; he wets his lips as the women in the first row reach forth gingerly to pat his plush. An invitation to pull the fox's tail is an example of Las Vegas's complicated negotiation with the middle class. The middle-class tourist is invited to approach luxury on a budget, as long as she loses money. Your AARP membership card will get you an upgrade; hotcakes come with the room; parking is free. On his side of the footlights, Liberace is permitted to play the last sissy in America as long as the women in the front row agree to pretend to believe that Liberace is a great friend of the Queen of England; that Liberace is a sleeping prince who just hasn't found the right woman; that Thor has a chauffeur's license.

Liberace died on February 4, 1987, in Palm Springs, California. He is entombed in Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills), Los Angeles.

•   •   •

The only time I hear Peter—or any of the staff at the hospice—refer to the Strip hotels, it is with reference to parking. Peter likes to park at the Flamingo; he says the exits are easy and some of the hotel's vintage modernist fixtures interest him. An aide at the hospice asks me where I am staying. “I used to park at the Bellagio,” she says, “but now I park at the Renaissance.” (As far as I can tell from my precious few conversations with the citizens of the real Las Vegas, the Strip is a free parking lot.)

The last time I was in Las Vegas it was to give a speech on public education. An emissary of the association I was to address picked me up at a small hotel I can't remember and drove me to a vast Greco-Gonzo extravaganza along the Strip I can't remember.

The next morning, the same emissary took me on a tour of the city before my plane departed. The Angel Moroni blew a summons eastward atop the Mormon Cathedral. Many miles of stucco; miles and miles of sky. At a café, I expressed surprise at the façade normalcy of domestic Las Vegas.

“But that's just what Las Vegas is,” my companion replied. “The real Las Vegas is normal. An air force town, a university town. We are forming a symphony orchestra.”

A normal American city does not have hundreds of hotels whose headliners are stitched-up gods and goddesses, whose entertainments are plumed masques, parodies of human sacrifice.

•   •   •

All week I have been puzzling how a city as defiant of death as Las Vegas can provide a hospice on North Buffalo Drive that is as morally and functionally serious as the one that harbors Luther.

Solo
Dios sabe si volverá
. Henry David Thoreau schoolmarmed his nineteenth-century countrymen with the assertion that one could not be a true traveler unless one left one's gate with no certainty of return. The art of walking involves an ability to saunter—the word derives from a French expression for people who have no homeland (
sans terre
), or from the French word for Holy Land—
Sainte Terre
—which became the noun used to identify religious pilgrims,
sainte-terres
. They have no particular home, Thoreau writes, but they are “equally at home everywhere.”

Family trips of my childhood always began with a prayer. I suppose when one goes on vacation, one is courting death in some fashion, tying the morgue tags onto one's suitcase. But then, too, vacations are respites from death, from thoughts of death. I have sometimes wondered why friends under medical death sentences have undertaken arduous trips or undertaken arduous labors. To put some distance between themselves and death—the obvious answer.

Once, at Westminster Abbey, I paused to read the epitaph of Edmund Spencer:

HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND

COMMINGE OF OVR SAVIOVR CHRIST

IESVS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER,

THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME

WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE

OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS

WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM.

HE WAS BORNE IN LONDON IN

THE YEARE 1553 AND

DIED IN THE YEARE

1598.

The expressed hope of dust, pronounced in a present tense, dizzied me. Westminster Abbey might crumble—must crumble—Spencer's vigil will continue until the end of time. I was leaving London that afternoon. A storm was forecast. I imagined an airplane spiraling upward into a black sky.

One can become overwhelmed on vacation—I have become so—by thinking thoughts that are too large. There is a condition identified in psychology textbooks as the Stendhal syndrome, also called, or related to, the Jerusalem syndrome, that describes a tourist's overwhelmed response to great works of art or to a sudden apprehension of scale, antiquity, multitude, death—the accompanying fear is of one's insignificance, but also of squandered opportunity.

Of course, a vacation city must be defiant of death, a desert city like Las Vegas doubly so, for it is a city built on a desolate landscape. My predicament is that I am here for death and the city of distraction is in my way.

•   •   •

Never had I seen blacker hair or whiter skin or a being more made for limelight. Elvis Presley appeared within a ten-thousand-watt corolla—The Messiah of Memphis. He was romantic, agile, potent. He wore a chest-baring Prince Charming jumpsuit—the “Burning Flame of Love” costume, designed by Bill Belew. Presley was already, that night in 1969, playing to the midnight sun—both feet planted in the Liberace–Peggy Lee weird. He stood very still. His nostrils dilated as though he smelled the crowd in a feral way.

I grew up in an America that shared certain narratives. It is not the same now. Everyone had seen Elvis on
The Ed Sullivan Show;
everyone had seen the photographs in the pages of
Life
magazine—photographs of Tupelo, Mississippi, where he grew up, an only child; of the haircut, when he was inducted into the army; of the sleeping private through the train window; of his parents, Vernon
and Gladys—of Gladys, his mother, with such dark eyes; of his leave to visit his mother's bedside; of his mother's grave.

The platter spun at 45 rpm. The aural helix opened like a can of white-meat Apollo: an engorged voice; a slurred diction; a humpy, syrupy croon. Elvis wasn't black. He wasn't white. He wasn't masculine. He wasn't feminine. He wasn't inimitable. He was a liberator.

The theme of Elvis's show that night was the theme of Las Vegas (the gambler's prayer)—resurrection. During an interlude, between sets, the voice of a woman called through the dark in a calm voice: “Elvis, I am your mother.” Immediately, several security men were weaving among the tables. Elvis did not look in the direction of the voice. He raised a bottle of Gatorade to his lips as all eyes watched the security men escort a woman in a two-piece suit through a door in the wall that closed silently behind them.

After the Elvis show, Marilyn and I went to another hotel, to a lounge that seated no more than fifty people, to watch the “Ike and Tina Turner Revue.” Tina Turner whipped the Ikettes through an aggressive choreography of stiletto heels, swinging wigs; wheels of sweat spraying from the stage. The Turners were already reprising their hits from the fifties; to that extent they were furiously treading fame, sinking. (Las Vegas lounge acts are a sink.) This was two years before every Top Forty radio station in America was pumping “Proud Mary.”

Elvis Presley's final performance at the Hilton Hotel was in December of 1976. He was scheduled to return the following winter. He died at Graceland, his home in Memphis, in August of 1977 at the age of forty-two. He is buried at Graceland.

•   •   •

Peter has gone home to change clothes. The nurse has given Luther two shots. Luther alternates between sleep (a boiling gurgle
in his chest) and high-pitched, teakettle trills (bird-like, hymn-like), or he perseverates, with every exhalation,
Mama Mama Mama Mama
.