She told him about Kansas, about her dream to escape banality and leap onto a stage. It seemed that they were both haphazard Vegas transplants—although maybe anyone and everyone who lived in the city was there only by chance. After all, Vegas was chance made tangible. She didn’t tell him her real name or reveal anything more than superficial details of her childhood, like taking refuge in the public library or pushing tacks into the bottoms of her shoes when she mimicked tap dancers. She left out the Aviator. She failed to mention her parents and sister Dawn. She merely said she’d been raised by relatives, and she thought he could tell by her tone that it was as good as being raised by wolves.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Javier; she did—implicitly, instantly. He was so utterly, oddly familiar. Rather, it was that she didn’t want for him to know the extent of her damage, just how faulty the product known as Ruby Wilde really was.
For their third date, she drove him out into the desert to watch the sunrise, drink coffee from a thermos, and eat flaky, marzipan-filled pastries from Freed’s Bakery. That morning, it was just below 40 degrees. Somewhat embarrassed by her relative wealth, Ruby skipped her fur coat and instead wore a thick turtleneck sweater over bell-bottom jeans and old, scuffed boots. In the nebulous gray dawn, they sat on the back end of her Karmann Ghia, looking eastward.
“The sky looks wounded,” she said. A thick band of deep lavender cloud sat like a heavy bruise on a meager sliver of red sky.
“Is like your painter Rothko. Those lines, those soft bands of color, how they blend into each other.” He pointed.
“Will you teach me?”
“What?”
“About art. I don’t know enough. I need to know, for design school, and I don’t know anything.”
“I can teach you dad. And other things, too.”
He touched the angle of her jaw with his dawn-cool fingertips, turned her face toward his and kissed her deeply. His mouth tasted of coffee and cigarettes; she felt his bitterness on her tongue. Ruby slipped her own cold fingers beneath his hair, felt the heat at the back of his neck, and pulled him closer.
“I think maybe,” he said then paused. “Maybe today is our day.”
He was nearly featureless in the dim light, the sunrise still held at bay by the onerous bank of clouds.
“Yes,” Ruby agreed. “Our day.”
“We will have a lacy day,” he said, and she realized he meant lazy, easy.
She didn’t yet know where he lived, but she guessed that he must be ashamed of his circumstances, and so they went to her apartment.
* * *
—
HIS NIPPLES WERE a dark maroon, and his uncircumcised penis had a slight purple tint to it—a decided contrast to the variety of pink penises Ruby had known. She imagined him striding across a savanna, all sinew and barely restrained power. As she stroked his body, she knew that he was capable of running at great speed, of sinking claws into the shoulders of his prey and bringing it down. Ruby was eager to be devoured, eager to succumb. And so, she did.
She lay wholly, completely naked beneath his gaze. Determinedly, she let go all artifice, all pretense of self-assurance. She’d touched his scarred foot, and so she let him see her scars without once attempting to hide them or distract him from them. She let his fingers caress their contours, let his tongue linger over their pearl borders. She let him see her face when he looked up from her body, when he tried to see behind her eyes, to learn the secret birthplaces of her wounds.
He waited until afterwards, when he lay on his back, staring at her ceiling and holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger. Ruby was lying on her side, watching him, thinking she’d never before in her life been so relaxed, so “lacy.”
“Why you hurt yourself?” he asked, crushing his cigarette and turning on his side to look at her. When he touched her face, she smelled the tobacco on his fingertips. “Such a beautiful wooman, and she makes those scars on her body.”
Ruby took a deep breath that became a sigh. “I don’t know.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, still stroking her face. “Dads no true. We have promised each other to be honest and true.”
She owed it to him to live up to their promise, as brief-lived as it might be. Ruby rolled onto her back so that she wouldn’t see his face. She specifically did not want to know what emotions might cross his countenance—disgust, incomprehension, pity, fear. His wound was valiant; hers was shame incarnate.
“It builds,” she began at last. “Something inside of me builds—a pressure, like floodwaters behind a dam. The pressure grows until I can’t stand it anymore. I try to resist, I really do, but I can’t. And so then I cut. Most of the time, I can barely feel it at first. It’s the blood, primarily, that helps. When I do it, I let a little of the water out from behind the dam, and then the pressure subsides. The waters recede.” A part of her thought about her vocabulary, wondered if she should choose different words, speak more slowly. But he kept up with her.
“Is pain, sí? You are talking about pain. Your words are all about pain.”
Ruby nodded, keeping her eyes focused on the ceiling.
“There must be another way. A better way for you to let this pain fly out of you.” He leaned up on an elbow so that he could see into her face. “You have had no one you can give dis pain to? To unburden your heart?” He pressed a hot palm over her breastbone. “Ruby?”
She shook her head no. “I haven’t,” she said, simply, clearly. “Never.”
“Then I am the one,” he said. “I am the one you will give this pain to.”
She reached and touched his face, let her thumb drift softly across his lips. She closed her eyes, and in that self-imposed darkness she felt the shift of tectonic plates, the collision of landmasses. She opened her eyes, and he was there, still. He was looking at her, and it was not with pity or even compassion. He looked at her straightforwardly, and she thought, Yes, this man can handle my pain, my past.
“I think—” she began. She closed her eyes, gathered her courage, and reopened them. “I think maybe you are the one.”
They went to the library together—a place she’d not often gone since moving to Las Vegas. The moment they walked through the entrance, she realized how much she’d missed the sanctuary of libraries. They calmed her, and she remembered how thrilling it was to scan banks of shelves, to think about all the wonderful words there were to read, all the things there were to learn. She had to get back to that—and here was Javier, apparently heaven-sent, to inspire her.
They sat together at a broad, empty wooden table, and Javier opened large-format books with plates of collections from the Louvre, the Hermitage, the National Gallery in London, the Met, and more. He taught her about the span of Michelangelo’s color palette, the sculptural quality of his paintings; he discussed the progression from Giotto’s flatter works toward Mantegna, and the achievement of dimension in drawing and painting. Javier helped her to see more than she would have seen gazing at the reproductions on her own.
“Is fantastic, this painting. You see?” he whispered, presenting her with Mantegna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ. “You see the perspective even in the wounds, yes? They have depth. And look at the shadows in these toes!” he nearly shouted.
She saw the animation in his face and wondered if he’d heard his own words, if he felt his war wounds. She felt her own omnipresent wounds like a steady, beating pulse. Did he not feel anger or some pang of absence when he gazed at Christ’s well-rendered toes? Had he learned to live with the loss? Maybe Javier could help her reach that place in her own life, help her find a sweet, flat meadow of quietude about her past.
“You must see them one day,” he said, and Ruby adored the wistful longing in his voice, the clear love of beauty that possessed him. “When you see the paintings, when you stand in front of them, you see the size.” He
demonstrated with his hands. “Is one thing to say, oh, this one is twenty-two inches by sixteen, por ejemplo. But to be there. And to step close, see the brush strokes. The thickness of de paint. The colors. These”—he gestured dismissively toward the books—“these no are right.” He flipped through one volume until he came to Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers.
“I have seed this one. I have sitted and stared at this one. This sky here—is not right. When you are there, you see is much more vibrant. Is deeper. Cobalt. If you are there, you see what the artist intended.”
He pushed back his chair. “I will take you,” he promised. “One day, I will take you to my country. We will go to the Museo del Prado, and you will see Fra Angelico’s Anunciacíon. You will see the masterpieces of Alberto Dürer. And we will lie in bed for the siesta, and hear the church bells, the singing of the doves. And we will make love.”
Ruby didn’t want to wait another moment before boarding a plane to Madrid. “We don’t have to wait until someday,” she said. “I have the money. I can take us.”
He shook his head vehemently. “No. No, I must be the one. Is the man’s job. I will make the money, and then we will go, mi amor. Then we will go to my country.”
* * *
—
HE BROUGHT HER pastries and hot coffee, fed her crescents of mandarin oranges while she soaked in a hot bubble bath. He evaluated her drawings, gave her critiques. “Less is more,” he said, pointing to one of her best drawings. “I show you.” He drew a woman’s figure swiftly, with minimal lines—just as Vargas did. “Do you see? You do not need all those fussy lines. The brain will fill in the gaps.” Next, he drew a leaf with a few scant lines, and Ruby could see what he was trying to say—her brain did complete the drawing, and that made the rendering so much better. Javier’s instinct for simplicity, his self-assurance, inspired her to work even harder.
When she wasn’t distracted by work, she was longing for him. She’d never before been this hungry for a man—for the timbre of his voice, the smell of him, the heat of his skin. His touch. The only other time Ruby had felt such intense longing was when she’d dreamed of hurling herself away from Kansas. But this was something wholly different; now, she wanted to pull something into her life, not escape it. She wanted to run headlong toward this man. At last she understood the songs where women sang about waiting frantically for the phone to ring or thinking they would die without a glimpse of their lover.
Javier also stood up for her. He listened to her complaints about work, about some of the other girls’ lackluster performances or the inadequacies of the choreographer, and he rallied to her side.
How long had she yearned for shelter, for someone who could make her feel safe? For an ally, an advocate? How unwilling she’d been, until now, to trust someone enough to give up any of her tightfisted control. She’d always adamantly rejected the concept of a knight in shining armor, and now, here she was—besotted, a believer.
When she awoke in the night, she reached for him, and sleepily he would open his arms to let her pillow her head on his chest. His presence was comfort, blissful comfort that had been so very long in arriving.
She imagined taking Javier to meet Aunt Tate and Uncle Miles. Javier would loom above Uncle Miles, size him up, instantly know that he could snap the old man’s neck or strangle him slowly, letting Ruby watch as Uncle Miles’ eyes caught sight of impending death. How long had she secretly fantasized about watching her uncle endure a measured torture and death? How long had she wanted for someone to exact revenge for her? Javier became her promise. A solemn vow of justice.
While her friends begged to meet him, she hadn’t yet introduced Javier. They had been seeing each other for over a month now, but she kept him to herself, like a secret stash of Godiva chocolate. She needed it to be just the two of them, for them first to cement their relationship before she brought in others. Sometimes, she wanted to close the two of them into some secret forest den where they could live their lives as quiet, smitten hermits, their love undiluted by the world.
* * *
—
“YOU MUST BE sure to have Thursday night off,” he said.
“But why?” Ruby asked while swiftly trying to crush the immediate, reflexive hope that Javier was planning some sort of romantic surprise.
“I am taking you to a meeting. On the campus, with some friends of mine.”
She hadn’t known Javier had befriended any UNLV students, but in a way it made sense that he was hanging out on the campus. She remembered finding a copy of The Rebel Yell, the student newspaper, on her coffee table. Javier would fit in far better with the students and academics than he did with the slick denizens of the Strip.
“What kind of meeting?” Ruby reached for a pear and bit into it. She wiped juice from her chin with the back of her hand.
“Is for a protest. We are planning a protest.”
“Oh!” Ruby was thrilled. “Against the war?”
“No, no. Is something else. You will see.”
If it wasn’t the war, it had to be something to do with civil rights. “I’d love to,” she said, kissing him with her sweetened lips. “Thank you for including me.”
She could hardly wait until Thursday evening. At last, she would be part of something meaningful. Javier was ready to tackle what was wrong with the world, and she would be right there at his side.
The meeting took place in the men’s dormitory, and Ruby was one of only two women in the room. The other, Mary Alice Higgins, wore her brunette hair long, straight, and parted down the middle. She wore very little makeup and dressed plainly, in a simple cotton skirt and blouse. Holding in her lap a three-ring binder, Mary Alice nodded curtly when Ruby sat down next to her on one of the room’s two twin beds.
“Everyone,” Javier began. “Dis is Ruby, who will join us as I told you before.”
Everyone—a total of six earnest and naïve-looking men—nodded to Ruby, who at nearly twenty-one, seemed much older than the others. She’d purposefully toned down her makeup and selected an outfit she thought would let her fit in on a college campus: flared, hip-hugger jeans, heeled sandals, and a loose-fitting, purple, translucent tunic top with a visible black bra beneath. Still, it was clear she was overdressed. Ruby waved her fingers to the group, which seemed focused, very businesslike. Javier had brought two six-packs of bottled beer, and he passed them around. The students shared a bottle opener.
Barry, who seemed to be the group’s leader, started the meeting. “First of all, the plan is to meet up here, Saturday at eleven, sharp. By noon, we’ll have newspaper and television coverage—at least that’s the plan. Kevin, you’re in contact with the news media?”
“Yeah. My roommate’s doing an internship at KSHO, and he’s given me all the contacts I need,” another student said.
“Okay.” Barry checked off something on his clipboard. He was lean, wearing bone-colored corduroy pants that hung loosely on his scrawny hips, and his chin-length hair was densely curly, like a wedge of uncooked ramen noodles. He didn’t look in the least like the subversive SDS members or other radical protestors Ruby had read about in the newspapers.
“Barry’s a poli-sci major,” Mary Alice whispered to Ruby. “He knows how to get things done.”
Ruby saw Mary Alice’s comment as an opportunity and so asked, “What, exactly, are we protesting?”
“Javier didn’t tell you?”
“He acted like it’s top secret.”
“Well, it is. Sort of. We’re going after the test site.” Mary Alice shifted into a more comfortable position on the bed.
“What for?”
“Hey, you two.” Barry thrust his chin at the women. “I hate to sound like your third-grade teacher, but is there something you want to share with the class?”
Ruby felt herself color, and Mary Alice said, “She was just asking what we’re protesting.”
“Jesus. What a flake,” Ruby heard one of the others say.
“Anyone else confused?” Barry asked, and the rest of the group laughed. “Well, then I’ll give Ruby her own very special rundown.” His sarcasm stung, just as it was meant to. “The Nevada Test Site is sixty-five miles from here. I don’t know how long you’ve been in Vegas.” He paused, waiting for Ruby to answer.
“Three years. Since ’67.”
“Okay then. By that time they’d stopped atmospheric nuclear testing.” He paused again, assessing her expression and clearly deciding she was part imbecile. “That means they used to conduct nuclear detonations above ground.” He raised a hand high, as if to show her what “above” meant. “Atmospheric shots, they’re called. When I was growing up in Vegas, we could see the mushroom clouds rising in the desert. Now, they’re testing weapons underground—which means you don’t see the clouds, but you can still feel the seismic effects.”
Ruby nodded. She’d felt the ground vibrations from a few of the explosions.
“So, anyway,” Barry continued. “My father is a radiation biologist. He used to work out there, before he came here to the university.”
This must be why Barry was leading the group—he spoke with some authority. But what Ruby didn’t understand was why they were upset about the testing program. Wasn’t it necessary to the country’s defense, a way of ensuring that American weapons kept up with what the Russians were developing? She’d ask Javier later, since there was no way she was going to expose herself to more ridicule.
“Our protest is twofold,” Barry continued. “And, Jeremy and Adam, this is where you two come in.” Barry checked his clipboard. “You guys are in charge of banners and signs. I have poster board over there.” He nodded toward one of the built-in student desks. “There’s tempera paint, and you guys can find a few old sheets to use, right? I have a list of slogans here.” He eased a page from his clipboard and handed it to the two sign-makers. “For the rest of you, what the slogans will address is the environmental impact of the nuclear tests and the need to promote peace over weapons of war.” Ruby heard a couple of yeah, mans and right ons from the others.
All the Beautiful Girls Page 20