Going Native (24 page)

"Super," sighed Nikki in the British accent she liked to affect whenever she was naked, and the shapeliness of her Madonna head, the liquid suggestiveness of her eyes, the entrancing movement of her lips as she spoke, were events equal in magnitude to their surroundings.

A chalky brown whiptail lizard darted furiously past, scaled quicksilver pouring down a rock.

"The truth," said Jessie, seriously.

Nikki laughed. "How could we honestly live anywhere else?"

And it was true. This country was special, not just because Jessie had been born out in it, but because it refined the senses, kept them keen. The body hummed like a receiver, intercepting messages beneath the noise of human traffic, down among the harmonic silences of spiders and scrub and soaring sandstone, whose baroque architecture often communicated directly with Jessie's heart, this primitive intimacy with the nonhuman a recognition of its continued existence deep inside her.

"If you ever wanted to kill somebody," Jessie mused, "this would be the place to do it."

Nikki made a face. "You possess the strangest mind of anyone I've ever known."

Then Jessie turned and whispered into her friend's ear, Nikki's brows arching in mock horror. "Sure your last name isn't James?" But she complied willingly enough, another act whose innocent energies she imagined nurturing the depleted earth, sex as good ecology, a psychic cloudburst. When they were done, they lay together on the rusty sand in the great blue basilica of this sovereign day.

"I love it out here," Jessie exclaimed. "I feel" -- she searched for the precise descriptive -- "rich."

She went on, "Eventually, you know, it will be revealed to tortoise and hare alike that the most significant moments in our lives are those in which we do nothing. What we do when we 'do nothing' is who we truly are."

Nikki opened an eye. "You're speaking in nonsensical proverbs."

"Why not? I'm in a desert, I'm having visions, I'm founding a religion."

"Great Goddess. Next, you'll be issuing commandments and praying for a penis."

"One commandment: Thou shalt keep thy hands to thyself -- unless directed nicely otherwise." She wanted inside Nikki's eyes, but they had retired again behind closed lids, so Jessie addressed herself to the intervening wedge of cartilege, that perfect, perfectly memorized, retrousse nose. "Of course I've imagined life from the owner's end of a magical skin flute. What red-blooded girl hasn't? The key to the kingdom. The axis of the culture. The snake in the bedroom. Sure, let's get it on. And the bigger, the better."

A slow thin smile creased the mask of Nikki's face. "Okay," she confessed. "Me, too." Her gaze contained the amused acceptance of someone who had learned long ago to ride, without too frequent a spill, the beast of her own mind. "Fantasies can be fun, verdad? But TV ain't real life, neither. I remember the first time I ever heard of Freud and this penis envy nonsense. I was shocked. This is insight? This is science? The lack is not between our legs; it's in the male head. All I've ever experienced down there is a power, not an absence, a big bold beautiful power."

"And lust," offered Jessie.

"Of course."

"And spiritual apotheosis."

"Certainly."

"And the essence of womanhood pure and true, such as it is, now and forever, in the glory to come."

"In the glory to come, yes, most definitely."

And beyond the cozy campfire of their lives, Garrett, scenting their happiness, came prowling like a hungry wolf. He began calling again, on the phone, in person, at home, at work. He wanted Jess back. Without her, the days were stones dropping one at a time onto the exact center of his forehead, the nights a sabbat of demons only intently imagined acts of suicide could keep at bay. He understood he was being tried upon the spit of love, and that understanding was also his hope. People changed. Indeed they do, Jessie agreed. I don't know you. I don't know the person who once thought she knew you. She was sorry. So was he, the rage rising in him like mercury in a thermometer. He wanted the kids, then. No, she could keep the kids if he could watch her and Nikki in bed together. At which point Nikki called the cops, who, over the succeeding months, became a reluctant third party to this essentially unchanging dialogue. Once Jessie awoke to find Garrett in the kitchen making himself a grilled cheese sandwich. He left without resistance, silent as a ghost. The second time they found him in the house, piling furniture in the middle of the living room, two police officers were seriously injured during the administration of the municipal muscle necessary to pry Garrett from the premises. The children cried, Nikki cursed indiscriminately, and a significant portion of Jessie's privacy was rudely appropriated by the evening news, a sensation comparable to being washed in used bathwater. For weeks she was ashamed to be seen in public. Now, apparently, the devil was loose again, Toby claimed to have seen Garrett strolling down Sahara Avenue only two days ago -- of course it was a friend, not the authorities, who passed on the warning -- and Nikki was talking guns and Jessie was afraid, not so much of her ex as of herself and what she might do if he dared to cross her threshold for the third out. Why should the course of her time be determined by a man who used to walk around with come stains on his shirt?

Outside her window the sizzling emerald fronds of the neon palm seemed to stir slightly at the touch of night currents unsensed by its organic cousins. Sometimes, even gathered within the snug immediacies of Nikki and the kids, Jessie felt as if she were marooned on a desert island far from home. The burden of existence, her own, her family's, became an intolerable mystery, though it was obvious something significant and indefinable was working its way through their lives, through everybody's life, a sure push into incarnation from some distant unknown ground, a growth, an unfolding into a duty and a death -- pleasant thoughts to accompany you down the long early morning hours. She wished she were a tree. Trees were her city's greatest lack. Trees provided oxygen and sanity.

Sometime after four the door of The Happy Chapel opened to admit a couple who might have passed for Ken and Barbie -- a pair of real "blanks," as Toby would say. He, dressed in navy blue polo shirt, beige pants, looked like a golf pro; she, a bottle blonde in white leather miniskirt and matching jacket -- her bridal outfit -- resembled a Roller Derby queen. They had come directly from the county recorder's office, marriage license in hand, and they wanted The Works: flowers, live music, videotape, still photography, garter belt, etc.

"Guess how long we've known each other?" asked the woman. Her name was Kara. She was as excited as an adolescent on her first date. "Sixty-nine hours. Can you believe it, can you absolutely believe it?" She reached around and pinched her fiance on the ass. When they kissed, it was like the indolent gluing together of shapeless organisms in a nature film on reproduction among lower life-forms.

"My mother's name was Jessie," said the man, reading it off her employee tag. "I'm Tom." His hand felt like a wire construct, a sculptor's armature. His eyes were washed out, full of bad weather and bad dreams.

"My first wedding," Kara explained, "was an absolute joke, such a piddling little thing, crammed into a deputy commissioner's office on Fourth Street. I was so embarrassed. Took about a minute and a half. About how long the marriage lasted, too."

"Well, I'm a marathon man myself," said Tom. "Should be able to squeeze at least a couple hours out of this one, don't you think?" He was speaking to Kara, but his smile followed Jessie around the room like a playful puppy eager for the pat of her hand upon his head, the private acknowledgment of a shared amusement. He emitted that peculiarly male air of affable assurance that lingered throughout her history like bad cologne. A man with a plan. She knew the type. Silently, she wished the bride good luck.

"Omigod, honey, look at the selection they have here!" exclaimed Kara, rushing over to glass counters ablaze with the stones and forged metal of several hundred unique wedding bands of which she seemed compelled to inspect each and every one, an interested Tom at her side, his proprietary hand never far from the cushioned appeal of her splendid behind, participants in a joint rapture over rather ordinary jewelry in which the fun was derived from regarding the trays Jessie set before them as containing priceless treasure from the burial chamber of a pharaonic tomb. Kara couldn't decide, each ring she tried on seemed more dazzling than the last.

"One month's salary," said Kara. "That's the usual rule of thumb, isn't it? How much do you make, anyway?"

Tom shrugged. He couldn't say exactly, his business was highly cyclical, all abrupt ups and downs.

"Now look here, mister, if you're going to start off this grand marriage by lying to me --"

"I never lie to my woman."

Her body softened, seemed to melt obligingly against his. "Now, what is it you sell again?" she asked in skeptically innocent tones.

"I sell America, babe. I sell pipe. Oil, gas, water. If you want it to go, call Puraflo."

Though Jessie clearly understood these facts were also meant for her delectation, she offered not a hint of response. In "hospitality," as in medicine, you learned to maintain a discreet distance from the "civilians" -- the present-day multitude of the physically homeless, quite modest in number compared to the great unseen armies of the emotionally dispossessed.

"Isn't he just the most astonishing money-making beast?" blurted Kara. She clung to his arm with childlike persistence, as if at any moment he were about to levitate into the miraculous air.

"Pick a good one, babe," ordered Tom. "No sense in fussing over ducats on an occasion like this."

Kara pulled him down onto her face for another noisy prolonged kiss. Jessie rearranged the rings in her trays.

"I'm so happy," Kara declared, the blood up in her cheeks vivid as if she'd been slapped. "Is everyone this happy who comes in here?"

"We do tend to cater to smiley faces," confirmed Jessie, "but you'd certainly be a prime candidate for the queen of happy."

"That's 'cause I've got the king right here." She squeezed Tom's arm; helpless, they shared another kiss.

Jessie had seen it all before, the cuddling, the groping, the tonguing, appreciated her role as audience of one, a mirror to reflect the actors' desire back on the actors themselves, enhancing their pleasure, doubling their passion. Some of the exuberant folk she'd waited on in this shop would be more than thrilled to have a section of bleacher seats installed in their honeymoon suites. In a certain mood, who knew? she might also be so inclined.

At last, after a tedious scrutiny of the contents of all four jewelry cases, several false choices, Kara's quest for the perfect wedding ring ended with her selection of the Heavenly Light Diamonique cluster in fourteen-karat gold band -- cheaper in price certainly than real diamond, but, to her eye at least, far surpassing in natural beauty.

"It makes my knuckles look younger," she declared.

Jessie, eager to get the gems out of sight before Kara could change her mind again, began hastily restacking the trays when her arm was suddenly, forcibly seized.

"Hey!" she cried, trying to wrest herself free from Tom's intimidating grip.

"Go ahead," Kara urged. "He's a genius at this."

Tom inverted her hand in his and gently unfolded her fist. "Such delicate fingers." He gazed with clinical regard into the weblike wrinkling of her palm. "Destiny's map. Always a remarkable sight. Well, no cause for alarm here. That's the longest lifeline I've ever seen."

"Longer than mine?" cried Kara, disappointed.

"You don't actually believe --" asked Jessie.

"Oh yeah," affirmed this Tom character. "The whole show's been prerecorded from the beginning, planted into our hides before we were even born."

Jessie searched his features for signs of irony. The signs were unclear. "Free will got erased, huh?"

He was stroking the flesh at the base of Jessie's thumb, the mound of Venus. "We're just the cattle of that dude in the big house on the hill -- whoever, whatever, he or she is." He looked up. "Classic loveline you've got here. Obviously, you give as much as you receive."

"Lucky me. Those scales
are
blind, aren't they?"

"Tommy finds the love in everyone," Kara said, "so much love. I keep trying to tell him how naï
ve he is, but then, that's what makes him so sweet." She gave him an affectionate hug.

"I see a nimbus about you," he announced to Jessie, "bright and golden. Probably money, lots of money."

"Well, we are in Vegas."

"I see you on television, in the near future. Would that be something you're interested in?"

"I rarely watch it."

"Unconsciously, then. I think perhaps this is a desire you don't yet know you possess."

"Isn't he good?" asked Kara. "He's always discovering these precious little secrets in me which later turn out to be uncannily true."

"Yes," said Jessie. "I don't believe we've had a more perfectly matched couple in here in months."

Kara explained how it was the beauty of her hands that had brought them together, drawing Tom like an enchanted prince through the vulgar casino crowds.

"Women's hands," Tom exclaimed, shaking his head in wonder that such things should be.

Kara was a roulette dealer at the Silver Gulch. With the house percentage ranging from 5.26 to 11, depending on the bet, her game was not the most popular on the floor; unlike the busy beejay crew, the hectic stickmen in the craps pit, she could often be found standing idly behind her table, spinning the wheel, waiting for a player. When Tom began placing dollar chips on her layout, she barely glanced at his face, routinely marking him for just another grind -- and an especially stupid one at that, chasing the number 22 over several dozen consecutive straight-up bets without a single hit. All he won was her. For Kara the years had built up inside an elevation from which she could at last see the road clear in both directions, and as her trip proceeded, she was liking the view less and less. The guy was clean, well groomed, fairly easy on the eyes, his superficial charm sliced by the prowling fin of an irresistible mischievousness, and -- big and -- he owned a roomy green Ford Galaxie whose nose was pointed resolutely out of town. She was estranged from her family, her first husband was in the joint, the second vanished on her, and -- what the hell -- she guessed she was simply a Woman Who Loved Bad Men.