“Let me know if she turns up, huh? And why don't you give me her whole name, so I can find her paintings somewheres.” He takes the stub of a pencil from his back pocket. “Where could I look for 'em?”
“It's Gypsy,” I say. “That's all. Just Gypsy. You can get prints from a Web site, if you e-mail me at that address on my card.” I think of him seeing his own face in her vivid work and wonder how he will feel about it.
Eldora asks, “Ramón, was she with anybody? They told us in Tucum-cari that she was with a man.”
He finishes scribbling Gypsy's name on the back of my card, which makes me feel better because it increases the likelihood that he'll hang on to it and actually call me if Gypsy shows up. “Yeah. I didn't know him, though.”
“They said outside she wasn't with anybody.”
Ramón snorts. “That's because Danny wants her and she won't give him the time of day.” He calls over his shoulder to an invisible person, “Allen, who was Gitana with last night? You knew him from Albuquerque, right?”
A white guy with a shock of red springy hair comes out of the back. “Loon. He's Lakota, early fifties. Good guy, mainly.” His face twitches a little.
My mother says, “Mainly?”
“Well, he's a Vietnam vet, and when he gets delusional, sometimes he's behind the lines.” His blue eyes meet mine, and I see in them the harsh reality.
“Thanks.” My heart races a little. For a minute, I feel another flutter, as if another heart, the baby's or my sister's, is racing along with mine.
God, let us find her, I pray. Soon.
Part Four
LA FONDA HOTEL
When Santa Fe was founded in 1607, official records show an inn, or fonda, was among the first businesses established. The current La Fonda was built in 1922 on the site of the previous inns. Spring special: stay the second night free!
Chapter Twenty
Eldora, 1973
There's a drag against my sinuses as I open the curtains in my room at the El Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. India doesn't know what she's doing, bringing us here. She thinks she's being kind, treating me, or maybe she's treating herself, I don't know.
I light a cigarette and look down at the plaza, watching snowflakes as big as my palm float out of the gray sky. I can see my girls, aged eleven, as clearly as if they're really out there. Gypsy in her braids and India in her bandanna, venturing out into the wilds of the square, using each other as a foil against danger. It's true, what I told India at the graveyard, that you just have no idea what love means until a child swells your heart up like that.
Love doesn't necessarily mean you're a good parent, however.
Across the square in 1973, a man arrives. He's tall and broad-shouldered, a substantial man with thick black hair and a tailored suit. He looks clean and elegant, and I see women noticing him. My body goes soft at the sight of him, and by the time he's at my door, all he has to do is come in, take me in his arms, kiss me, and I'm ready. We both are. It's a wild lust, this one, and we don't even get all of our clothes off. Even as I want him, take him, devour him, I'm hating myself for it, a cut and tangle as sharp as any I've ever known.
I understood early on that sex was a dangerous thing, a weapon that could turn against you in a second. Only twice did I let it turn my head, and each time, it was a disaster. The first time was in Las Vegas. The second time it was Glenn, who waltzed into Hogan's Night Club in the spring of 1973 and melted my bones. I took one look at him and thought, “Oh no oh no oh no.”
He was a big man. I like big men in general, but especially men with some substance to them—shoulders, hips, solidity. Dark men. Ethnic, I guess you'd say these days. Italian, Spanish, Arab, Indian—American or Eastern version. One of my favorite flings was with an Arab prince who had more money than just about anybody on earth. He kept me in fine fashion for a time. Until I met Alex.
But that's another story. Or maybe it's part of the same one, since with both Alex and Glenn I let sex turn my head, let the boiling juices in my body bubble up until they poured right through me and tried to burn away everything good in my life. Alex was first, in Las Vegas. I wasn't even twenty years old—a girl that age is inclined to passions, and I think I can be forgiven that one.
The second time, though … there's just really no excuse. I'd been married a decade. I'd put my past behind me. Mostly, life was good, but there would be pockets of restlessness that welled up in me every now and then. I'd go dancing or throw a party and it would all be okay … for a while.
The night I met Glenn I was sitting with my friend Juanita in Hogan's. Juanita was married, too, and her husband was a soldier, so sometimes he was gone down-range or whatever, and we'd head down to the bar, where we'd smoke cigarettes and drink a little too much and dance, then go home to our husbands and families.
Glenn walked into the Hogan that night wearing a white suit, his dark hair long and wavy on his neck, and those high dark cheekbones. I just thought, “Oh, shit.” I didn't, as I should have, tell him no when he came over five minutes later and asked me to dance. I looked up into those brown eyes and put my small hand in his big one, and that was that. I could smell it on him, the desire, and he smelled it on me.
There's just something about that first moment of knowing. It blooms all through a person, toes to eyebrows, all of it swelling and aching, until you feel as crazy as a drunk. He had long eyelashes and a beautiful mouth with big white teeth. He held me a little too close, but not obnoxiously, and whispered, “I have never seen a woman so beautiful in all my life. I can't even believe you're real.”
I'd always had a strong sense of destiny, you understand. I knew something would carry me away from that awful world in Elk City, and it did. I knew I'd have a great love someday, and I did. He died and I made do, but remember, I was only thirty-three when I met Glenn. Old enough to know better, but young enough to hope for some passion in my life. Glenn's eyes, his hands, the genuine ardor I saw in him, made me think it was Destiny that had come knocking again.
When I got back to the table, my friend Juanita, who was good and smart and knew me pretty well, said, “Eldora, you don't want to mess up your life. You've got it good. I hope you remember that.”
And she didn't know the half of it, really. Didn't know how much Don had given up, what he'd done, to give me and the girls the life we had. I forced myself to light a cigarette, order a martini, and forget about the man across the room who looked like a cross between Dean Martin and Tom Jones. I made myself think about Don, and especially about India and Gypsy and how much they loved their daddy. He was babysitting tonight so I could be here, sitting there with his daughters, probably eating Jiffy-Pop and watching the Movie of the Week. While I sat here dressed up in a mini-skirt and a low-cut blouse, my innards aching for something I couldn't even really name.
In those days I had no idea why Don let me go out with my girlfriends, knowing that I took off my wedding ring and danced with other men and flirted all night long and usually came home fairly drunk. It's not like I did it all the time—maybe once or twice a season. It would build up in me, the need to be something besides a mommy and a wife who did things like remembered to go to the dry cleaners. Honestly, sometimes I'd sit there in my pretty little car, with the smell of dry cleaning in bags and five pounds of hamburger in the trunk, and I'd want to laugh and laugh. Better than screaming.
It just seemed, sometimes, like I went to sleep in one movie and woke up in another one.
Don knew it. That's what I can see now. It had to kill him, but if he didn't let me blow off steam once in a while, there was no telling what I'd do. So he'd kiss me on the head, tuck another ten-dollar bill in my cleavage and wink at me. “Don't run off with anybody tonight, sweetheart,” he'd say.
I'd say, “Not as long as you're in the world, Don Redding,” and kiss him full on the lips.
It was April when I met Glenn. The spring had been making me crazy, and I was haunted by memories that sometimes felt like they'd kill me. I'd just
wake up in the middle of the night, out of breath, reliving the worst moments as if they'd just happened. Never screaming. I didn't scream when it all happened, and I didn't scream in my dreams, but I'd be shaking and shivering so hard Don would crawl out of bed and get me a brandy when even his big, burly arms couldn't get me to stop.
See what I mean when I say … oh, never mind. You just can't see diddly when you're young, and that's the truth. All the things you think are so important, things you think you'll just die without—none of 'em add up to a dime's worth of happiness in the end.
A man who will get up out of a warm bed to bring his wife a brandy because she has nightmares, and he doesn't even know what those nightmares are because she won't tell him, well now, that's a man worth having.
The nightmare is always the same, about a very bad night not long before I met my husband. I still get it sometimes. Right after Don died, I had it about three times a week, and on the off nights, I'd dream about Bea.
Anyway, Glenn. Like I said, I met him at Hogan's and it might never have gone any further except, by a sheer stroke of luck, three days later I stopped at the liquor store to get some vodka—those were the vodka-tonic years—for a dinner party we were having for some of Don's business associates, and there he was.
Glenn. Dressed this time in a pale champagne linen shirt that was open like he was too hot, so I could see just a tiny hint of hair on his chest. Don't get the wrong idea. He wasn't some Lothario-looking man. He was just damned good-looking and well-dressed. I was going to turn around and go right back out, but the clerk saw me and said, “Hey, Eldora. A fifth of Smirnoff?”
Glenn's head snapped up at the sound of my name, and those electric, Paul Newman eyes were on me. I could tell he remembered my name, and when he saw it was me, there was a flash of nerves and hope that's very hard to resist in a man. Confident, but pretty sure you are way out of his league. When a man like that gives you that look, I can tell you it's a pretty heady feeling.
“So we meet again,” he said.
“Guess so,” I said, taking money out of my wallet to pay for the vodka. It was easier to be sensible in the bright light of day. “How are you?”
“Better,” he said. “Now.”
I mocked rolling my eyes to the woman behind the counter, who knew Don, knew I was married.
“Men,” she said, shaking her head.
He waited for me to pay, then held open the door and I ducked under his arm, ignoring the heady smell of his skin. “I'm married,” I said outside, fitting my key into the lock of my car door.
“This is your car?”
“Yes.”
“Whew.” He admired it with the kind of full attention that let me know it wasn't a put-on. “I once had this very model, back in Arkansas when I was a teenager. It wasn't in this shape, but it was still a hell of a car.”
“What happened to it?”
He looked up, pinned me with those brilliant eyes. “I totaled it one night after a lot of beer.”
I couldn't think of anything to say. There was liquid lust burning through my knees, like I'd drunk antifreeze and was about to die. And it was just about that stupid, which I also knew.
He came around the car. “Let me help you with that bag,” he said, and took it before I could say anything. When he was right in front of me, he looked at my mouth. “I don't care if you're married.”
“Well, I do,” I said. And I took the bag back.
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee. What would it hurt to drink coffee?”
I looked back up at him, and there was a lock of black hair on his forehead that reminded me so much of someone else that it caused a sharp pain in my middle.
That was the trouble, of course. It wasn't so much that I wanted Glenn, but that he reminded me so very much of Alex, my lover, the one lost to me forever one night in 1962.
“All right,” I said.
Which led to the affair, which led to the road trip with my girls, which led to us having wild sex in this very hotel.
Thirty years later, I stand at the window of the La Fonda Hotel, smoking a Salem, and look down at the snowy plaza and wish with all I am that I could have made some different choices. Not all of them, just the really ugly ones. The ones that hurt so many people. I wish there could be some clean snow falling on my soul, making it look new and fresh.
Trouble is, though, you can't go back in time no matter how much you might want to. All you can do is see if you can find ways to live with yourself.
Or make amends. I wish I could, but all the folks I wounded so badly with my selfishness and confusion are dead. Or crazy.
Except India.
Chapter Twenty-one
India
After I settle my mother into her room, I carefully unpack my things, tidy my room, then head out to check the homeless shelter in Santa Fe. It's a busy place this afternoon, but the woman I speak with remembers Gypsy and knows she has not been around. I give her my card, ask her to call. She promises she will.
As I leave, I realize I'm absolutely bone-dead weary. Tired of driving, tired of looking in shelters for my sister, tired of thinking about my mother, tired of everything. I need some time on my own. Instead of going back to the hotel, I wander into the streets of Santa Fe. The spring snow has followed us down the road, and as I walk toward the plaza from the chic La Fonda Hotel—I've sprung for two rooms in the upscale hotel as a treat for her—the snow lends a lovely hush.
Here is another New Mexico: well-tended adobe and wide wooden planks for sidewalks; vigas sticking out of the roofs, elegant paintings and exquisite handmade goods in boutique windows. The shops are trendy and pricey, and I know what a coup it is to land in one of the upmarket galleries along the narrow streets because it took Gypsy a long time to break in. With a sense of soft pleasure, I follow one lane down a hill and around the corner, and pause. Across the street from a very famous restaurant is the Turquoise Hare.
I peer in the window and see two well-dressed women in boots and skirts, one with long hair, one with very short. They have their heads together, admiring a painting, and to one side I notice the proprietor obviously not looking their way, giving them room to decide.
It is one of my sister's paintings these two are admiring. It isn't the first time I've seen strangers looking at her work, but it's rare to come across it in such a way. This one is part of her purple series—purple skies, purple ground, purple graves, and crosses. Smoky purples splashed with a little orange or whispers of blue or white or red. They're somehow moody and serene at once, threatening and promising.
They make me miss her. I want to feel her beside me, hold her hand, brush her pelt of hair.
I walk on, stop in a drugstore for some snacks for later, then carry my bag to Plaza Café on the square. It's an old landmark, and justifiably so—the homey smell of hamburgers sizzling and coffee brewing hits my nostrils as I enter. It's midafternoon and quiet, so I take a seat by the window, order a cup of tea, and look out at the plaza. The waiters and waitresses chat behind the long counter, a cozy, Spanish-inflected sound. I cross my arms on the table and gaze out at the square, quiet and beautiful beneath the falling snow. Across the way, in front of the Palace of the Governors, lines of Indians, draped in jean jackets and parkas, sit in lawn chairs, their silver and turquoise spread before them on multicolored blankets. I'm transported to another day.
Our mother had a headache and asked us to go find something to do for a little while. With a fve-dollar bill tucked in each of our hands, we rushed out to the plaza to see what we could see, buy some souvenirs and maybe a soda or candy.
And it was a thrilling place. The sun cut downward in thick yellow curtains, and the buildings were all soft, low adobe with balconies and features like wooden windowsills. It dazzled me.
“Look!” Gypsy cried, squeezing my arm. “Indians! Real Indians!”
We crossed the square, holding hands, and peeked around the wooden pillars holding up the porch roof of a long gallery. There was a w
oman, round as a pear, sitting cross-legged before her blanket of shining goods, her hair woven into braids that fell over her breasts to the ground. “Come on,” I said, “let's go look at her stuff!”
But Gypsy could not move. She shook her head and held on to the pillar, just staring.
“I want to look.”
She gave me a glare. “Go ahead. I'm not the scaredy cat.”
“Don't go anywhere!”
“I won't.”
Drawn by beaded barrettes a little farther down, I wandered away, kneeling to finger the bright red-and-yellow columns. “You have pretty hair,” said the young woman weaving more beads into order as she waited for tourists. “The butterfly would be nice.”
“I don't have enough money of my own right now,” I said. “My mom is in that hotel over there.” I pointed to the La Fonda. “She's taking a nap, but she might come out later with us.”
“You can look without buying,” she said. “Take your time.”
“How did you learn to do that?” I asked her.
“My mother taught me.” Her lean, long athletic fingers gestured me forward. “It is not hard. You see?” She dipped a needle thinner than most thread I'd ever seen into beads no larger than a mustard seed, and looped it into line with the next one.
“Wow.” My fingers ached to try it, handle the circle of cool bead, the tensile length of the needle. “Can you buy beads like that here?”
“You can buy them, better by mail. Do you have a good memory?”
“Very good,” I said. “My teachers say I'm really smart, though I'm not as smart as my sister.” I pointed. Gypsy was still hugging the post, her attention fixed on the blanket of goods in front of her. “She's kinda shy.”
Lady Luck's Map of Vegas Page 15