Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

  I cannot allow such a man into my life, but of course I do, and of course it is my undoing. As it is his.

  I can close my eyes and see us now, his smooth dark chest with its beautiful scattering of dark hair, my breasts, white and plump with the tips so redly aroused. I see my flat white belly ending in red hair and my legs opening for him. I see him entering me, a strong healthy root of power, see his face flushed and dark with the moment, and—

  Alex, Alex, Alex. God, I loved him. I never had another lover like him. For three years, we devoured each other. We were obsessed with it—with each other, with the delirium of our heady combination, with our passion, with having sex together. A thousand ways, a thousand places, a greed of fantasy and desire.

  It was impossible to stop it once it began. It was impossible that we should not have come to a bad end. Real love needs grounding, some moments of ordinariness, or it burns like gasoline, hotter and hotter and hotter until everything is cinders.

  But he's only one part of the lie that's my life. Just one. Layers and layers of them, and maybe, for me, I need to remember what's true and what's not.

  Standing there in that Castillo, forty years later, I think of India with a pinch in my heart. She needs to hear my story. The real truth, and I truly do not know how she'll take it.

  Chapter Eight

  India

  There is a message on my machine when I arrive home. It's Gypsy, a fact I can only make out because it's her voice. The message itself is unintelligible—the singsongy language of our childhood that seems to trigger nothing in me but frustration and confusion. It's long, probably five minutes, and I feel the pressure in my chest building and building and building the longer she talks. When it's finished, I play it again, closing my eyes tight and listening as carefully as I can to see if I can make out some meaning in her words.

  I can't. I save the message, though. It's the first time she's spoken to an answering machine in the language, and maybe if I listen to it enough over the next few days, I might begin to remember. Or maybe someone else—a linguistics person, maybe?—would hear some pattern that will provide a key to deciphering it.

  In the meantime, I can tell she's all right. Delusional, certainly, but cognizant enough to call, and although there's a certain excited sound to her message, it's more the excitement of happiness than the frenetic blur that would signal her “bad” voices are talking to her. She even laughed at one point, as if she'd told me something great or beautiful or even just amusing. Like, “I saw the most amazing canyon this afternoon! Wish you could have been here with me.”

  I think about calling my mother to let her know, but I could tell when I left that she was heading to her inner world and I don't want to talk to her when she goes there, shielded from the outside by her booze and cigarettes. It'll wait until morning.

  It's odd that Gypsy is keeping in touch, I think, kicking off my shoes and going into my office to check e-mail. There have been times she disappeared for months and we didn't know if she was dead or alive until she surfaced somewhere. This time, it's like she's on a vacation, her contact the normal sort of thing anyone on vacation would do: postcards, phone calls.

  Maybe, I think with a stab of guilt, she wants us to come find her this time. She'd been stable on her meds for a long stretch before this disappearance. I was, in fact, foolishly convinced that she was cured, that she would be one of those people who just start getting better as they age, and never get delusional again.

  As I flip through the queue of e-mail messages, I find that I'm squinting at the screen, my eyes dry and tired. My whole body is tired, really. I could drop down a well of sleep and never reemerge. Jack hasn't called, which means he's likely in late meetings, and I don't want to end the day without talking to him for a few minutes at least. I flip through the CDs and put Natalie Merchant into the disc player, settle on the couch, and put my feet on the table. My hands fall on my lower tummy. It feels the same from the outside. Maybe a little harder or something. Taut.

  Closing my eyes, I wonder how to tell Jack, but I haven't even formed the first theoretical method of telling him when a flash of gold lamé floats over my eyes. Then green-and-cream chiffon, black velvet, hot pink taffeta, beaded turquoise silk.

  I can see my mother in any one of them. Wearing stiletto heels and bare legs in the Las Vegas night, her skin smelling of Tabu perfume. No, not Tabu. That was something she wore for my father. Whatever it was that came out of the seams of those dresses is much more elegant.

  The Web site could be fun. I can decorate it with paper doll images from the fifties and sixties, advertising art cut from ads featuring pink appliances. Drifting sleepily, I let images rise—those starburst shapes, a background of pink and gray. I want some neon, I think, in soft tones.

  Suddenly, I see the whole thing, the full frame of the page, Eldora's Cocktail Hour in pinkish neon script against the pink and gray of a magazine layout. No, not quite. Maybe … Lady Luck's Cocktail Hour.

  When the phone rings right beside me, my head jerks up out of a full sleep, and I blink heavily, trying to see the button to answer. “Hi,” I say.

  “Ah, have I wakened you?”

  “Jack! No.” My voice is too croaky to hide, though, so I say, “Yes. I must have fallen asleep on the couch. What time is it?”

  “Ten. Are you all right?”

  “Just a long day. I helped my mother get some dresses out of storage. They're amazing.” I tell him about the designer cocktail dresses. “There are fifty-two of them. I cannot imagine how she afforded them.”

  “Not if your theory is true about her being a cocktail waitress.”

  I frown, seeing ripples of chiffon. “You know, she's never really said that's what she did. There's a general spirit of cheerfulness, and she spent a lot of time at the Sands and she had a woman friend who was a showgirl and was helping my mother audition.”

  “Surely, if she'd been a showgirl, she would have said so.”

  Suddenly, I consider my father's part in all this, the fact that she said they hadn't talked much about her life before they met. “Well, maybe. But she might have been in one of the early topless shows. My father would not have particularly appreciated that.”

  “She certainly has the figure for it.”

  A blip of jealousy zooms over my nerves, and I tamp it down. How ridiculous is it for me to be jealous of my sixty-three-year-old mother? Except that it's been this way my entire life, me living in her bigger-than-life shadow. Once in a while you just want to be the star yourself.

  My silence must have stretched a little longer than I imagined, because Jack says, “What does she say about it?”

  “I know she wanted to be an actress, and went to Hollywood. It didn't work out for some reason.” I've heard the story a hundred times. “She was a small-town Texas girl—prettiest one, cheerleader, dance lessons, all that.” I stand up and carry the phone with me into the kitchen, put the kettle on for a cup of herb tea. “She doesn't say she was the prettiest one, of course. She's not that vain.”

  Jack chuckles.

  “I'm sorry.” I take milk out of the fridge, set a cup on the plain white counter. “I don't mean to be rambling on and on about my mother. I'm just blown away by those dresses.”

  “Truly, it's the most interesting story I've heard today. I don't mind.”

  “So they were boring meetings?”

  “You have no idea.” In the background, I can hear him open a can, probably beer. “I'd rather hear about your mother going to Hollywood.”

  “All right. The story goes that she and another girl were recruited to a camp, a dance camp or acting camp, something like that, and Eldora's mother, who was a strict Southern Baptist or maybe Adventist, was very much against it. So my mother and her friend hopped on a Greyhound bus and ran away from home when they were seventeen. The family disowned her and she never went back.”

  “So you've never known her family at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “It so
unds like a movie.”

  The kettle begins to gurgle, and I dig through the stack of herbal teas. “On a side note, I just want you to know I'm being heretical here tonight. Red Zinger.”

  He makes a noise of horror. “Primitive. On with the story. She went to Hollywood, then …?”

  “I'm not sure exactly why she decided Hollywood wasn't going to work out, but she and her buddy started going to Las Vegas on these little junkets, and there were lots of opportunities. So they moved there.”

  The kettle starts to whistle and I grab it, frowning as the picture I've had in my head all these years wavers in light of those dresses. You could get them on sale if you watched, she'd said to me. “Hmmm.”

  “Yes?”

  I frown. Poke the red tea bag with my spoon and watch it bounce back to the top of the water. “Designer dresses. That's all. How much would a designer dress cost on sale, even at the end of the season?”

  “On that I have no opinion, sweetheart.”

  “Yeah, well, I'm a champion shopper, and I've never found a designer dress I could bear to purchase. Not a designer cocktail dress.”

  “Perhaps she had admirers.”

  “Oh, no doubt. There's the car, too, which she says a promoter gave her.” A sudden thought pierces me. “Oh, God, Jack! What if she was a call girl? I mean a really-high-class one, or something, but—” Then I think of my father. No way he would have fallen for a call girl, even the highest of the high class. “No, that's not it, either.”

  “Perhaps she was acting and dancing. Why have you always assumed that she didn't?”

  “I'm not sure.” I'm not sure. I mean, she has the body for it, that's for sure—all legs and chest—but she's not a dancer. She doesn't seem to really know about the shows. “Maybe I'm just being mean to her. Maybe I don't want to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Mmm. Well, I expected someone different, after all the stories.”

  This sends a bristle up the back of my neck. Annoyance, irritation. Even my lover, who has till now claimed I was the most fascinating woman he's ever met, finds my mother more fascinating than me. “The stories are all true, you know.” I stir my tea more violently than necessary. “It's just that men can never see her clearly because they're besotted on sight.”

  He laughs. “I believe, India, that you might be a little jealous.”

  “Jealous? Of a bombshell has-been who can't recognize she's old? Who still flirts with every man in sight—at the grocery store, the nail parlor—where, I might add, she has learned some Vietnamese in order to flirt more effectively with the boys there—even driving along the road?”

  He says nothing into my pause, and I sip the tea, burning my lip. “Shit. I burned my lip.”

  “And so you should have,” he says with a hint of laughter in his voice.

  He's good at this, teasing me into a better humor. It's possible that I am … somewhat difficult, as Hannah has often said to me. I'd like to be nicer, better, different, but how do you change that?

  “All right, you wretch. You're right. Maybe I am jealous, and catty because of it. But she's also a pain in the neck in a lot of ways.”

  “I know.” His voice lowers. “You know what I think you need?”

  “What?”

  “My hands on your shoulders.”

  “Yeah? Lips on my neck, too, maybe?”

  “Not for a while. Perhaps I'd even brush your hair.”

  I make a noise of longing. “Oh, you wicked, wicked man. Tell me about it.”

  “I would use a natural bristle brush,” he begins, “and start at the crown.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I settle down on the couch and close my eyes, imagining as he describes it, how it would feel to have him brushing my hair.

  In the middle of the night, I awaken suddenly and sharply. I blink in the darkness, trying to get my bearings. Coyotes are singing right outside, and I think it must be their voices that yanked me out of sleep. Intrigued by their proximity, I get up to see if I can see them. I pull the blind and peer into the darkness.

  And catch my breath. Just below the streetlight in the parking lot, next to a red Ford Taurus, is a trio of them. They're smaller than I imagined, shaggy and dun-colored. One has a rabbit in his jaws, and one of the others lifts his narrow nose and howls at the sky. From a distance comes an answering yip—a sound of laughter.

  Then they're gone, disappearing into the wilds of a field between houses. I have goose bumps on my arms.

  Gypsy. I was dreaming of Gypsy when the coyotes called me.

  She was standing in a graveyard, flinging her arms open to indicate the scene. “Look, India,” she said to me. “Look at all this beauty!” And when I looked around, she was right. The sky over us was soft purple with coming rain, making the mountains on the horizon a rich blue. The graveyard was on a hill and the graves were piled high with flowers—all kinds of flowers, real and plastic, in orange and pink, white and blue. Pinwheels spun in the breeze, and the dolls and stuffed animals on the children's graves got up and danced. It was Day of the Dead, I knew suddenly. The crosses shone with some inner light, and even the shadows had a glitter like the lamé on my mother's dresses. “Gypsy,” I said, but she just spun around in a private dance with teddy bears and baby dolls, her hair blowing in the wind.

  There are tears flowing down my face now. She would tell me the coyotes had come to dance and sing for me, just as she was dancing in the graveyard.

  Letting my head fall forward to touch the cold glass, I close my eyes and let myself miss her. I know where the graveyard is—high in the mountains of New Mexico, near a tiny village called Truchas. She's painted it a thousand times. We saw it the first time when we took our odd vacation with my mother in her too-small Thunderbird the year we were eleven.

  In the distance, the coyotes celebrate the night. I raise my head. “Okay, Gypsy. I'm coming.”

  Chapter Nine

  India

  In the morning, I call my mother. “Can you be ready to go first thing tomorrow morning?”

  “Go?” Her voice sounds raw, like she's smoked five billion cigarettes overnight.

  “To Las Vegas? Have you forgotten?” “No! Really India? You'll drive with me? In my car?” “Yeah. And we'll look for Gypsy. I had a phone call from her last night, a message in our language. I couldn't tell what she was saying, but I looked up the number on the Internet, and it was a pay phone in Las Vegas” I pause, then add, “New Mexico.” “Did she sound okay?”

  “Honestly, she sounds happy, Mom. Like she's on vacation.” “Maybe she is.” She clears her throat. “I'll get ready. I'll need to get to the bank.”

  “All right. Figure out what errands you'll need to run, and I'll come over around three or so, and we can get it all done then.”

  There isn't a lot that can't be put on hold for a few days. I tend to work too much, a leftover from the too-hungry days when I was trying to get established and make a name for myself. I now have more than thirty regular clients, with new business coming in all the time, and lately I've thought an assistant to do some of the scut work would be nice. Just this minute, I'm caught up on most of the updates, except for one that I should be able to accomplish on the road via laptop. I'll have my evenings free, after all. My mother most often dives into a bourbon by seven at the latest, and is snoring by nine.

  There is a new site I'm designing, but my deadline is weeks away. I'll bring the work with me and fiddle with it if the mood strikes, but as my mother pointed out, I've been tired and maybe need some creative meandering time.

  In preparation for the trip, I pull up maps on the Internet and print them out to study, circling the places we know Gypsy wanders. The names are lyrical and odd: Truchas and Tucumcari, Santa Fe and Espanola and Acoma. Twice, she has surfaced at a homeless shelter in Gallup. Once it was Tucumcari. And I know she goes to Truchas and Espanola, because she paints them, traveling a crooked, twisting route from Raton, through the mountains, into Santa Fe because she loves descansos. Ther
e are a lot of descansos on those high narrow roads.

  Her travels echo the vacation we took with my mother when we were eleven. I remember the trip well, though I've never quite understood why it made such a deep impression on Gypsy. Why is it the root of both her distinctive paintings and her psychosis?

  What surprises me, when I look at the route of that old trip on a map, is how nonlinear it is. I've never realized that Tucumcari is so far out of the way—miles and miles to the east of I-25, or even the tiny State 76 that we took through the mountains to Santa Fe. I try to figure out the best way to drive it all, and I have a headache trying to make it into any kind of sense.

  “What the heck were we doing?” I say aloud to the empty room.

  The map screen flashes advertising for Route 66, showing where Tucumcari stands on the old road. I notice that Tucumcari to Gallup is along the old Route 66. Much of it would still have been in place when we took our trip—or would it? A stir of excitement touches me, a lost world, one that touches my life, my sister, my mother. Paper place mats, diners, neon, all of it surges up from some lost box of memories.

  Did I have a book of paper dolls from Route 66? I can't quite grab the vision and it slips away.

  And it has no relevance to the planning of this trip, anyway. How had we gone in those days? I can't remember. It had been, in some ways, a miserable trip—squeezed between the seats, the sun beating through the windows, my mother smoking and smoking. I have a flash of her jaw, set hard, and Gypsy and I exchanging looks as we stopped at a gas station.

  I shake my head. Where will we have the most luck finding Gypsy? That's where we should go first. Then on to Las Vegas.

  Nevada, that is.

  Slightly nauseous, I take a break to fix some cinnamon toast and stand at the counter, looking out my glass doors toward Pikes Peak. This afternoon it looks like a movie set, painted in blue and gray and white against a piece of plywood propped against the sky. The scent of the toasting bread curls out to tease my tummy. The sleep and the starvation at least make sense to me now—for a while there, I was afraid I was dying of some dread disease.