The Desert Rose (11 page)

She said sure, so they did, he had already turned it on. Mel had a nice little body, very trim, but once they got in the Jacuzzi he didn’t renew the move right away, she didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe he was so old-fashioned he thought you had to get married before you fucked. It didn’t seem possible he was that old-fashioned, but something was weird.

“Hey,” she said. “Did you mean it about getting married, Mel?”

“Yes, I did, Pepper,” he said. “I’d like to marry you very much.”

“What would it be like?” she asked. She felt a little cautious. He had always been extremely kind, but still, a guy who collected old underwear could turn out to have bad tendencies of some sort.

Mel chuckled, he seemed delighted that she had asked.

“Pepper, from your point of view maybe the best thing about it would be that I’m very rich,” he said.

It was interesting he emphasized that, because she had been thinking that too, no more living in a duplex with a yard full of peacocks and her mother’s stupid boyfriends. Plus she could stop modeling in order to get clothes and she would never have to do things like hand out fried chicken at Gino’s, which she had done the summer before for practically no money.

“I have so much money that now it makes itself faster than I can spend it,” Mel said. “That can be nice.”

I bet, Pepper thought.

“That’s the simplest part of it, you’d like the money,” he said. “I guess you’re thinking this is all weird, I could have just tried to sleep with you instead of making movies of you in old underwear. Though actually I find it exciting
to make movies of you, and I suspect you find it a little exciting too.”

Then he touched her breasts. “I do
want
to sleep with you, Pepper,” he said. “Do you know what usually happens when I make movies of young girls?”

She didn’t, she had kind of been wondering, maybe he had closets full of the real scuzzy stuff, little cunts to look at whenever he wanted to. After all she was only there a few hours a week, other girls could still be coming for all she knew.

“Usually I just dress them and photograph them a time or two and then I undress them and photograph them and that’s usually it, I never see them again. Oh, maybe we fuck or maybe we don’t but pretty soon they’re gone.”

“Why?” she asked, she just wanted to know what he made of his own behavior.

Mel shrugged. “I get bored so easily,” he said. “If I get bored with someone visually then I don’t even care if I sleep with them. I’m very visual. I like really complicated effects, but most people just aren’t subtle enough, either visually or sexually. Sexual effects can be very good effects but mostly they don’t vary
that
much. Usually there’s a kind of time limit, before I get bored.”

She could sort of follow it, already with Buddy the fucking could seem boring. He was so obsessed with himself that he tended to grind away, well past the boring point.

“Now with you that’s not true,” Mel said. “You’re never boring visually, because you’re never the same.”

She knew it was a big compliment, he was looking at her sort of keenly.

“You’re very beautiful, Pepper,” he said. “A lot of beauty is static, but not yours. You never look quite the same to me. Whatever happens to you shows up in your
face or the way you move—there are always subtle differences. Like today it was a fight with your boyfriend, you were angry but very beautiful.”

She liked hearing that, it was interesting, what he was saying.

“You don’t understand yet how selfish I am,” he said. “I made all this money for myself, so I could enjoy myself absolutely any way I want to. I’m very snobbish visually, and very easily bored. I need someone like you, extremely beautiful and very subtle. Also you’re not scared of the unusual. I think if we’re adventurous the effects could keep changing for a long time.”

“I’m not saying no,” she said. “So would we ever fuck?”

“We certainly would,” he said. “For periods. Probably there’d be other periods, when we wouldn’t.”

Then he grinned, sort of appealing, his looks were growing on her more and more, the curly hair certainly didn’t hurt.

“The problem is how to preserve some effects that we both find exciting,” he said. “Most things get monotonous, you’re too young to really know that yet. We want to try and keep some kick.”

The words made sense, so far as she knew, it was just nothing she felt she had to worry about.

“I’m forty-five,” he said. “You’ll have to live nearly thirty more years before you really understand what I mean. I won’t get bored with you because just looking at you is exciting, but what’s going to keep it interesting for you?”

Pepper had no idea, she just wasn’t too worried. At the moment she was more interested in why he wanted her to work at the Stardust.

“Why do you want me to take the job?” she asked. “It’s two shows a night.”

Mel shrugged. “It’ll keep you in town,” he said. “Besides,
you’re a dancer, you’re not going to stop dancing just for me.”

Nope, sure wasn’t. “Maybe I
should
leave town though,” she said.

Mel grinned the appealing grin. “That’s right,” he said. “Maybe you should.”

Still, where she worked wasn’t the big issue, there was one for sure that was more important.

“So what about guys?” she asked. “What if we weren’t doing much and I got involved?”

“Of course you’ll get involved,” he said. “You’ll have many, many men. You’ll draw them like moths and most of them you’ll just burn up in a twinkling. I don’t want to be one of the ones that’s burned up.”

She didn’t know about that, why would he marry her if he didn’t care about the other guys? That was one she’d have to check out with Myrtle, who claimed to be an authority on the complications of things like that.

“You’re not even jealous?” she said.

“Oh yeah, I’m jealous,” he said. “If I happened to catch Buddy standing on the edge of a cliff I might push him right off.”

“I wish you would,” she said. “He’s an asshole anyway.”

“Just bear in mind that jealousy doesn’t preserve anything,” Mel said. “My jealousy won’t keep you from getting bored.”

I don’t know, maybe this is not for me, Pepper thought. It was stupid that Buddy thought he was so cool when he wasn’t, but Mel
was
cool and that was definitely worse. It was hard to understand but it was worse.

“What about you?” she asked. “What if you find someone more beautiful than me?”

“That’s not too likely,” Mel said. “I couldn’t believe it when you walked in.”

“What if you do?” she said, it was a key point. Somebody could always arrive.

Mel grinned. “If I do you can divorce me and get a lot of my money,” he said. “Then you could do whatever you wanted to do.”

Pepper got out of the Jacuzzi, she’d had enough of talking about it, she was not sure she believed he wanted to marry her. Maybe it was just some kind of come-on that was more complicated than it needed to be, maybe it was too much to think that all that money could be hers. He had a room where he kept towels, some of them vast, as big as rugs, of course there was a sauna and a little room with a massage table in it, apparently he liked to get rubdowns. She was angry and ready to split, she felt he was just enjoying some game of some sort with her. All that talk about preserving effects was bullshit, plus she didn’t like it that he was prepared to be so cool about the other guys. Then he came in, wet and naked, looking upset, maybe he had thought she would enjoy talking all night or something. What she felt like was leaving and figuring it all out later, but to her surprise he came right over and kissed her, she thought boy are you weird, but it turned out okay, they ended up fucking on the massage table. It took her anger away. Then Mel gathered up her clothes for her and they went in the house and she dressed. She would have been happy to stay the night but he seemed a little depressed.

She sort of got worried, maybe she had blown it somehow, he was actually a lot better lover than Buddy, it was just that she had been impatient with all the talk. He put on a beautiful blue Japanese robe, he still looked sort of low but while she was drinking some orange juice he disappeared for a minute and when he came back gave her a thousand dollars. She felt really worried for a second, maybe he thought she had hustled him or something, he had never given her that much.

“You don’t have to give me money, I’m not a hooker,” she said.

He gave her one of the little corner of the mouth kisses. He didn’t seem mad, just a little sad, maybe he had been building up to a different effect or something.

“So why are you giving me this?” she said. “I don’t understand you.”

“No, you don’t, it’s the very thing that may save us,” he said and felt her cunt for a moment, she would have stayed but it wasn’t what he had in mind, what he had in mind was a light feel and a few kisses.

Getting the money made her feel slightly cautious, she wanted to know if she was suddenly going to have to earn it some way. Mel had nice skin, actually, he kept himself in good shape which was a trait she admired. It had been the big barrier with Woods, he just would not take any kind of care of himself, ate junk food and anything gross he could find and hit the arcades all night, he was definitely a mess.

But Mel’s skin was very smooth, she sort of felt weird and would have liked to stay, which he sensed, he put his arm around her and held her a minute, that he had never done.

“The more I give you the more you’ll have,” he said. “I could always get hit on the head by a brick or something. Of course the probabilities are against it, but the principle is important.”

She started to ask why can’t I stay, she really wanted to but then she got scared to push him. After all he
had
fucked her, maybe she just better not push it.

“Do you really want to marry me?” she asked. At times it seemed a little hard to believe although she was right there and it was happening.

“Oh yes, Pepper,” Mel said. “I would be very unhappy if you said no.”

“Do you know my mother?” she asked, it was something she had built up a curiosity about and she always meant to
ask him but she kept letting it slip her mind. Her mother had had this army of boyfriends, there was a chance Mel was back there in the ranks somewhere, after all he was about her mother’s age.

Mel laughed, he thought it was amusing that she was so interested in that question.

“Well, everybody in Las Vegas knows who your mother is,” he said. “I see her in the Safeway once in a while but I’ve never been introduced to her.”

The weird part of that one was that he would be in the Safeway, she assumed he just sent the Japs to do everything.

“Oh, I go to the Safeway,” he said, reading her mind again. “I love it, it’s the one place I still go.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I go to see the styles,” he said. “It’s the great American style show, the Safeway. The combinations women wear when they’re just shlepping around buying eggs delight me. They wander around buying food and I wander around watching them in their outfits.”

That was definitely on the outside edge of weird, as Woods would put it, going to the Safeway to see outfits.

“You must vomit when you see Momma’s,” Pepper said, he was a guy with very peculiar inclinations, in her book. “Everything she puts on is tacky.”

“No, she doesn’t exactly have your purity, when it comes to fashion,” he said. “I will say you can’t miss her though.”

Of course not, she’d dress in neon if she could, Pepper thought. She watched Mel, but he didn’t seem that interested in the question of her mother, just a little amused that she brought it up.

“I think we chatted at the checkout counter once,” Mel said. “She seemed very friendly but I guess that’s the only time I’ve spoken to her.”

Sure, friendly, she would have fucked you in the grocery cart Pepper thought, but she let it go, he wasn’t really interested.

“I really do want you to marry me,” he said. “I don’t want you to say no.”

No way she was gonna say no, after all he himself said if it changed it changed and she would end up with a lot of his money.

“Okay, I will,” she said, feeling let’s just get it settled. She gave him a real hard kiss, thinking that would turn the tide so far as staying the night was concerned, but it didn’t, though he did stop looking depressed, he looked glad and said maybe she could come by tomorrow and they could work it out. Then he walked her to one of the Mercedes and told the Jap driver to take her home. The last thing he said was you know I’m crazy about your looks. That was probably the whole story, he couldn’t get enough of looking at her.

She was hoping Myrtle was up, though who she would really have liked was Gary, he would definitely have something to say about Mel, and probably some information. Plus Gary was discreet, even if he was hopelessly crazy about her mother he could still keep a secret, and so could Myrtle, both of them knew ten times more about her than her mother did, she had told Myrtle all sorts of things about fucking and drugs and stuff and Myrtle had never leaked. In fact, Myrtle had shared a secret or two of her own, one of which was that she was two-timing Wendell once in a while. Wendell had a big rival he didn’t know about, an air-conditioning repairman who lived across town. According to Myrtle he was better-looking than Wendell but un-dependable. It was hard for Pepper to believe that Myrtle actually still fucked guys, that thought was definitely on the outside edge of weird, but maybe it was possible.

When the Jap drove up with her in the car Myrtle was sitting in the lawn chair totally sloshed. She had some bizarre
habits, such as propping her little TV set in the window by the driveway so if she happened to glance over and see something she liked she would go in and turn the sound up and then come back out and watch it through the screen. She never bothered to watch TV except from out in the driveway, she practically lived in that lawn chair.

Meanwhile Maude was eating some Cheerios that had once had milk in them but it had dried up and the Cheerios were stuck to the plate. So Maude was slowly moving the saucer down the driveway trying to get the Cheerios off. Didn’t bother the Jap, he got out and opened the door for Pepper as if he were delivering her to the Riviera or somewhere. He totally ignored Myrtle and Maude and they totally ignored him. Pepper sort of wished Woods were there to see that sight, he would appreciate it whereas Buddy would be lucky even to notice it was going on.