Are Snakes Necessary?

by Brian De Palma

  Nick takes out his iPhone and snaps Elizabeth’s picture.

  “What’s that for?” she asks.

  Nick explains he’s a photographer. And she inspires him.

  “I’m probably not the first.”

  He smiles and knows it’s time for a little colorful backstory.

  He tells her he was the one who took the Ferguson photo that became the defining image of racial unrest in America.

  “The guy with the flag shirt? The one who threw it back at the police?”

  Nick tells Elizabeth yes, that’s the one. (He doesn’t mention that he hadn’t noticed the man was wearing a flag shirt when he took the picture.)

  Elizabeth looks disappointed. For one thing, she was looking for a longer tale. Maybe one that involved more planning and artistry, and less chance.

  “Sort of like life, isn’t it?” Nick says, trying to strike the right balance between self-confidence and self-deprecation. “Inadvertent fortune. You stumble into the right place at the right time. It would be better if you could say your actions were prompted by thought and not instinct, and much better if your good fortune led to more good fortune, a long and continuous series of happy endings, rather then a quick pop followed by a slow fizzle.” He sounds every bit like the Brown Rhetoric Department grad he is.

  Elizabeth gives him a small smile. “All my stories have long series of happy endings.”

  “Really?” says Nick, amazed by her audacity or whatever it is. “How do you manage that?”

  “Ohhh,” Elizabeth draws the word out, “stuff like seating myself next to you.”

  “And are we going to have a happy ending?”

  Nick is amazed to find people—he, of all people—actually say stuff like this.

  “Could be,” says Elizabeth.

  Let’s hope, thinks Nick. Happy Endings. Now there’s a title for my photo book.

  The flight attendants make one of their endless announcements. Flight path. Altitude. Really? Who cares? But the heat of the moment dissipates and Nick and Elizabeth return to a quotidian conversation. Elizabeth wants to know why Nick is going to L.A.

  The photo opened doors, but Nick explains that was a while ago. He kind of hit a wall in New York. So while he’s waiting for the return of the muse or good fortune, he’s decided to take his old college girlfriend’s offer to bunk out on her couch in L.A. and see if he can get some movie work.

  Hildy Akers recently starred in an indie hit and moved to Tinseltown to field the offers.

  Elizabeth leans in close to him, tilts her head slightly to the side and gives Nick a long languorous kiss on the mouth.

  She leans back in her chair. “Getting inspired?”

  “Yes! Now I’m bursting with ideas,” says Nick. Her smell—sugary, citrusy—knocks him out.

  Elizabeth is pleased with herself. And she has an idea: “Why don’t you come to Las Vegas? Forget the couch. My family has a cozy little apartment that’s empty. And it has a bed! I’ll get you a job on a local magazine. Come on. Take a wild chance.”

  “Is this one of those offers? The kind you can’t refuse?”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” says Elizabeth. She kisses Nick again, hard, then pulls back. And then she kisses him again, gently this time.

  Nick tastes her lip gloss and thinks he can see stars.

  God, she’s good.

  “Aren’t you just a little bit curious?” Elizabeth is practically purring.

  Yes. Nick is definitely curious. He’s surprised to find himself entertaining practical thoughts. For example, he’s thinking that he didn’t check a bag through to L.A. so there’s no reason at all not to get off in Las Vegas and, well, see what happens.

  The flight attendant rolls up with a cart full of dinner trays.

  “Chicken marsala or lasagna?” she asks.

  “Yes,” says Nick. “Yes, yes, yes.” He looks over at Elizabeth and they collapse into giggles. The flight attendant looks at them like they are loopy or stoned or something, which they might as well be.

  In truth, Elizabeth is not actually sure what she’s doing. But it comes kind of naturally once she’s in the swing of it. Toss a ball in the air. Does he bat it back? Yes! Toss another. Oh look! Right out of the park. Giggle. Smile. Kiss the boy. Watch him light up. Knowing how to speak to the animal in the man is half the game. The rest, Elizabeth finds, is really a matter of will. Does the woman want to go through with it or not? Knowing that this is really all that counts—at least with respect to the outcome of whatever conversation (yawn) is taking place on the surface—is a big part of Elizabeth’s not insignificant power.

  “I can’t wait to get on the ground,” Nick tells Elizabeth when, at last, they’ve sent the flight attendant on her way with her trays.

  “To do what?” Elizabeth wants to know.

  “To take off all your clothes.” He says this like he means it. And he does. “I’m very good at undressing women.”

  Elizabeth explains that that will have to wait. Why? “Because I have to go home first. I’m a married woman.”

  “I see,” Nick says.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Should it?”

  “I don’t see why,” Elizabeth says, “if it doesn’t bother me.”

  And so begins a season of dreamy illicit afternoons in the Diamond-owned Desert Paradise apartment complex, where Nick makes himself at home as soon as Flight 271 from LaGuardia lands in Las Vegas in the dog days of summer.

  CHAPTER 7

  Nick’s 12th-floor apartment is a mess. He doesn’t pay attention to things like that.

  Nick looks at his watch. It’s nearly ten. He strides out of the apartment and into the elevator.

  Nick checks himself out in the elevator mirror to make sure his starched white shirt is tucked into his jeans the way he likes. It is and he likes what he sees. So would most of the women in a thousand-mile radius.

  The doors open. Nick walks into the lobby, crosses the garden-green carpet, sidles past a wall of bamboo (why bamboo in a Vegas apartment lobby? oh, don’t ask) and walks to the delivery entrance door. You can never be too careful. Diamond’s got eyes on his beautiful wife all over Las Vegas. Nick flips the latch so it can be opened from the outside, then steps away and watches in the mirror by the wall of mailboxes.

  The door swings open just a minute later. Elizabeth Diamond, draped in a white chiffon dress, walks towards him, her red patent heels click-clicking across the floor as she does. Special delivery.

  Her lips move up in a tiny flicker of a smile when she sees Nick; for one moment, her willowy white-blond hair sticks to her Wild Poppy lip gloss and smears, just a little.

  Elizabeth wipes her lips, erasing both smear and smile. She returns to her expressionless expression. She does not look at Nick again. He walks ahead of her through the lobby and back to the elevator, where he enters “12” on the control panel. Elizabeth stands behind him. Studying her shoes.

  The door opens. Nick gets in. Elizabeth gets in. The door closes.

  Nick takes Elizabeth into his arms, slides his hand up her dress and squeezes her ass. Their kiss is deep, passionate, animal. It nearly knocks them out. When the doors open on 12, they stumble out dizzy and disoriented, the way people do when they get off roller coasters. Nick and Elizabeth go directly to the bedroom, tearing each other’s clothes off on the way.

  Afterwards Elizabeth stands naked next to the kitchen table drinking Fiji water from the bottle. Nick lies in bed watching her. He likes what he sees and picks up his iPhone and snaps a few pictures.

  “More pictures?” Elizabeth purrs. “How do I look?”

  “Fuckable,” says Nick. He puts the phone down. He’s got a way with words. But he’s a little spent so you wouldn’t necessarily know it now.

  Elizabeth sets the bottle on the table, draws her initials in the dust on the fancy induction stovetop. “Don’t you ever clean this place?” she says. (It’s obvious he doesn’t.) She opens the fridge looking for something to
eat. She comes up with a peach yogurt.

  (No, you wouldn’t think a lanky, intense 32-year-old guy who is too busy with his intense 32-year-old life to bother cleaning his kitchen would eat peach yogurt. Don’t understand people too quickly. Nick always says that.)

  “Get one for me,” says Nick.

  “I’m not the help,” says Elizabeth. God, she’s good looking. “Besides, this is the last one. Someone needs to stock up.”

  Nick gets out of bed and pulls on his shorts. (Yellow and green with palm tree patterns.)

  “This place is a disaster,” says Elizabeth, looking into the empty refrigerator and the sink full of dishes next to it. “I remember when it was livable. Now it’s a crash pad. Aren’t you making enough money to hire a maid?”

  “To do what?” Nick asks. “We only use the bed.”

  Elizabeth picks her clothes off the floor and starts to get dressed. “You’re right,” she says, slipping her dress over her head. “I’ve got to get used to dry cleaning my clothes after I come over.”

  Nick pulls her close and kisses her hard on the mouth.

  “I love you, Nick—but do you know why all love stories end tragically?” Nick would like to know why. “Because the lovers can’t get together. Ever.”

  “I wouldn’t call this apart,” Nick pulls Elizabeth very close.

  “And I wouldn’t call it happily ever after either,” says Elizabeth.

  “Happy today, aren’t we?” says Nick.

  “Gloriously.” Elizabeth is glorious. In so many ways.

  But she’s also on a narrative tear. “Take Romeo and Juliet. Two kids from rival families that hate each other. The lovers face impossible obstacles. But they defy them and make secret plans, which of course, fail. And in the end, everyone dies for love. Great.”

  Nick looks absentmindedly at Elizabeth’s thighs while she talks.

  “We’re not kids, Elizabeth,” he says. He sits down at the kitchen table. In another world, one before cancer and surgeon generals, he would light a cigarette, probably Marlboro, and slowly inhale.

  “No. We’re older and wiser and just as fucked. I told you to get a girlfriend.”

  “But I don’t want anyone else.”

  Elizabeth shakes her head. Neither does she. She kisses his mouth. She kisses his neck. Nuzzles his left ear. She’s moving down his torso when she sees a half-packed bag on the floor. “Going somewhere?”

  “You know you’re not supposed to ask about my work. I’m going to find out about my new assignment today.”

  Elizabeth laughs. She’s got a beautiful laugh—it’s full of sunshine and something bright, wild poppies maybe.

  “Don’t dummy up on me, Capa,” she tells Nick, “I got you the stupid job. Where are we going this time?”

  Elizabeth puts her long leg in her high shoe as she repeats the question. Her grace takes Nick’s breath away.

  “Where are we going?” he says. “Nowhere. Here. We’re going here. It’s impossible to go anywhere else.”

  If he had one, Nick would definitely have another drag off his cigarette. “Do you think he suspects?” he says, not taking a drag of the cigarette he’s not smoking.

  “No,” says Elizabeth, twisting her little foot into the high shoe.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if he knew I’d be dead.”

  And no, she’s not being melodramatic. Elizabeth tells Nick there are rules for trophy wives. And Rule #1 is: no fucking around. And no, she can’t leave either. Why? Because only he gets to call “game over.”

  “Suppose you break the rules?”

  “There is a box. Six feet under. Waiting for me out in the desert.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” says Nick. Elizabeth isn’t kidding.

  “Look, Nick, Bruce bailed me out when I was in a lot of trouble. I owe him, big time.” She looks back down at the half-packed bag. “So what’s the next junket? The next big scoop?”

  “I don’t know. He just told me to be ready to leave in twenty-four hours.”

  Nick puts his hand on her bee waist and pulls her towards him for another kiss. Or six or twelve. It’s hard to tell where one ends and the next starts.

  CHAPTER 8

  Nick drives his ’79 Cutlass Supreme into the Vegas Today parking lot. He has Maroon 5 on the radio as he zips the Olds into his reserved space, the one right next to Bruce Diamond’s.

  Diamond is a bit much. He’s tall, handsome, and ridiculously rich. See the Ferrari in the Reserved for the Boss space? That’s Bruce Diamond’s car.

  Diamond loves expensive cars, priceless paintings, beautiful women. He loves throwing huge piles of money around. He loathes losing anything and he has an ego as big as the MGM Grand. You know it the minute you see him. He’s so full of himself and all of his big hungry qualities, he is near to bursting. It’s actually fun to watch him in action. There aren’t many people who are so completely as you see them.

  Vegas Today, a super-glossy magazine, is distributed in every suite in Vegas. That includes the VIP, VVIP and VVVVVIP suites, the Safari Suite, Tahiti Suite, and every other suite and room in every hotel in Vegas, seven of which Diamond owns.

  The magazine chronicles the lives of the high-toned desert dwellers. There aren’t many of these. So it also devotes supersaturated high-end (expensive) ink to the entertainers, whales and rollers who pass through town. The magazine provides useful service pieces: the best microdermabrasion in the desert, the best four-handed massage, helicopter rides over the Grand Canyon.

  Once, a long time ago, Bruce had journalistic aspirations. He likes to be in the thick of things, to have the story everyone wants to tell. He likes the idea of digging for dirt and coming up with gold. And pictures. Lots of them. Images you’ll never forget. For a long time, he wanted to be that person. But his life took another turn and he wound up as a real estate speculator, a lucky one, so instead of being the guy who goes out and shoots the story, Bruce hired one.

  At Elizabeth’s nudging, the one he hired was the 32-year-old lost boy from St. Louis via New York who came West to shoot movie stars, stopped in Vegas and didn’t leave.

  Nick is the kid Bruce might have been. That’s part of what bothers Bruce about Nick. The other thing that bothers Bruce about Nick is that Elizabeth, who met Nick on a flight from New York, tends to be a little giddy when she comes home from coffee dates with Nick and his starched white shirts.

  Nick settles into his Vegas Today cubicle. Bruce sidles up before he even has a chance to hit the power button on the computer.

  Bruce, all smiles, extends his hand and gives Nick his new assignment, the one he mentioned on the phone earlier. Nick listens carefully as Bruce sketches out the basics—a crazy murder, strange mind-boggling details, a Vegas connection (the perpetrator comes from a big-money casino-owning family)— and hands Nick an airplane ticket.

  Nick’s heart stops when he sees the destination stamped on the ticket: Wasilla, Alaska.

  Wasilla fucking Alaska. Really? WTF? And how the fuck is he supposed to see Elizabeth when he’s in some frozen boon-dock on a long-term assignment?

  This, of course, may be a question Bruce had in mind when he dreamt up the assignment. The thought crosses Nick’s mind when his cell vibrates in his pocket. He picks up the call.

  “I need to see you, Nick. We fought. This morning. He hit me. This time I’m through.”

  Bruce is still standing right outside Nick’s cubicle.

  “Yeah. Okay. I see,” says Nick. “What can I do for you?”

  “Come here. I’m all packed up. Get me out of here.”

  Bruce looks at Nick. “Go ahead, buddy, take it. Call me from Wasilla,” he says and walks away.

  Nick stands up and walks outside where he can talk. There, in the parking lot, Nick ascertains that Elizabeth is keyed up but isn’t hurt.

  So he tells her, “You know that mystery assignment you asked about? It’s a long piece. On a woman in Wasilla. Related to the Greens. She killed her six kids. The
y found them in a freezer under a frozen moose.”

  “Wasilla?” says Elizabeth, cooling down. “Isn’t that Alaska?”

  “Yeah. I told you, I’m sure he suspects us. He wants me out of town. Far out of town.” The cars shimmer in the sun. Everything here is a mirage.

  “Fuck him,” Elizabeth says. “Come over here now.”

  “I can’t, doll. Have to go to a staff meeting here. Can you hold on until the day ends? See you at 5:30?”

  What can Elizabeth say?

  The sun is still bright, dagger bright, when Nick pulls the blue Cutlass into Elizabeth’s long circular driveway, the one that leads to Diamond’s glass castle in the desert. Bruce opens the door.

  “Come on in, homewrecker,” he tells Nick. “Come to say your goodbyes? The missus will be down shortly. Meanwhile can I pour you a farewell drink?”

  Though entirely unnerved, Nick plays it cool. Mostly because he has no idea what else to do. The house looks like a place James Bond would feel at home.

  Bruce takes the bottle he is carrying and unscrews the top. He goes over to the bar to get some water and ice cubes and makes two Scotches on the rocks. He lifts his drink to Nick.

  “Well, well, you surprised me. I didn’t think you went in for this kind of cheesy stuff. Fucking the boss’s wife. Pretty ballsy.”

  Nick finds it harder to play it cool. “At least I don’t beat her.”

  Bruce laughs. Too hard. He follows this with an alligator grin. “How wrong you are.” Now Bruce is overly cordial. “My dear backstabber! She does all the beating. I’m the one who suffers. It’s suffering that drives me into the arms of other women. Very beautiful women, I might add.”

  Nick honestly has no idea where this is going.

  “Mrs. Diamond is one selfish bitch,” says Bruce. “She claimed she was frigid after I married her, and she’s been ice cold ever since. Fucking her is like fucking a corpse.”

  “That’s quite some discovery after you’ve been married all of, what, three months?”

  “Tell me about it,” Bruce says, and the edge in his voice could draw blood. “And you’re the reason why, friend.”

  “Don’t blame me if you can’t keep your wife interested.”