Julia skims through a box of old notebooks and sketch pads and finds a Polaroid of Chase at sixteen wearing jeans and no shirt and flexing West Side Vegas Crips gang signs, a black skullcap on his head. “It’s a pretty convincing pose,” Julia says before reading a passage from one of his poetry journals: “SMACK-crack! motherfucker break your back, wannabe a star, far, is not where you’re going—”
“Let’s not do this now,” Chase interrupts.
Julia solemnly turns the page.
Chase peers out the window at the wilted palm tree across the street and the swastika wrapped around its trunk.
“She just doesn’t look like a hooker,” Julia says, staring at a Polaroid of Michele. “Did you take these?” She’s holding a small stack of pictures that Chase shot of Michele when they were in high school. In most of them Michele is wearing only a bra and panties.
“I drew from them.”
“I’m sure.”
“She liked to show off.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“What?”
“Did you have sex with her? When you were in high school?”
Chase doesn’t say anything.
“Well that answers that,” Julia says. “Have you had sex with her since high school?”
“No.”
“And you never loved her?”
Chase hesitates. “No.”
“So you just fucked her?” Julia flinches.
“Yes.”
“And it meant nothing?”
“Maybe it meant something to her.”
“But not to you, though.”
“I don’t know what it meant, Julia.”
“Why not, Chase?”
“Look, we just slept together for like a month and we did a lot of shit we probably shouldn’t have and then it stopped when I went to college and met you.”
“And you didn’t want her to be your girlfriend?”
Chase shrugs.
Julia stares at another Polaroid. “She’s beautiful. She’s funny. Why wouldn’t you want her to be your girlfriend?”
“Because there was nothing there.”
“But I think there was,” Julia says.
When Chase flicks the light switch in his mother’s room the television comes on, too. Something about that makes him sad, as does the wooden crucifix hanging over her bed. In the top drawer of a filing cabinet in his mother’s closet is a small black box. In it is a white gold diamond engagement ring that his mother said was appraised at $11,000 and was left to Chase by his grandmother when she died. He examines it and decides that it might be something Julia would like. It would be the kind of ring that she would choose. The top of his mother’s dresser is mostly lined with framed pictures of Carly and Chase, though there’s a small black-and-white photograph of his mother with her parents when she was a little girl in Indiana. The photo that he hates the most is of the three of them—Carly, their mother, and Chase—standing in the backyard of the Green Valley house. Chase never knew what his mother liked about the photo or why she bothered to frame it (expensively) and keep it on her dresser because all of them are wearing sunglasses and Chase holds a basketball while his mother drinks from a can of Diet Coke and Carly, hungover, turns away from the camera. Chase realizes the reason he hates the picture is that he can’t remember who took it. Outside his mother’s window, next door, the neighbor’s son stands in the front yard spraying two pit bulls with a hose as the dogs bark wildly and try to catch the water with their snapping jaws.
His mother meets them on the sidewalk in front of the yard holding a bag of groceries. She kisses his cheek. Chase smiles as his mother and Julia hug. His mother removes her sunglasses and offers them each a Snapple. Chase goes through the motions: he tells her the house looks great because he knows that’s what she wants to hear. But his mother wants a lot of things. She wants the kids to stop drag-racing down Beverly. She wants the neighbors to remove the discarded sinks and the couch cushions from their yellow lawns. She wants the helicopters to stop flying low over the neighborhood. She wants the wrinkles and the dark circles under her eyes to disappear. She wants the blond dye in her hair to last longer and look more natural than it does. She wants the large sloping lawn she had back in Green Valley. She wants to tear down the Sahara marquee. She wants her husband to come back from Malibu. She wants Chase to help her.
“Edward’s sitting on his ass again,” Chase says.
“Eddie just bought the time-share in Idaho.”
It makes Chase sad that he’s supposed to be impressed. “I thought he was aiming for Montana.”
His mother suddenly looks confused. “Wait—it might have been Montana.”
“Are you gonna go with him?”
“Is there any way you two would come up for the Fourth?”
“We’ll see,” Chase says, thinking automatically: no way. “So are you moving up there with him?”
His mother avoids the question again and asks if they want to come inside and get something to drink but Chase feels anxious and is ready to leave—he feels trapped. It’s the stale cigarette smoke clinging to the walls and the illegally watered lawn and all the memories of the two years before he left the house on Beverly. He tells his mother that they just stopped by so Julia could say hi. When they’re getting in the Mustang, the pale sun swollen and the air heavy, his mother wheels around and calls out to him.
“Some boys came by the other day looking for you.”
Julia’s getting a massage when Michele calls Chase’s cell. She says she needs to see him. Chase is lying on the bed in the room at the Hard Rock trying to sleep. He tells her he can’t. He vaguely mentions something about dinner plans.
“I’m bleeding,” Michele says.
Chase used to sit with Michele at her grandmother’s house when Michele was in bed because she was too weak to get up. She would get terrible migraines. Nosebleeds spurted out of her. Menstrual cycles wouldn’t end. Chase changed the sheets and then he’d wash and bleach them. Chase would walk Michele to the bathroom and hold her as she sat on the toilet. He would tell her some lame joke or recent gossip about celebrities to make her laugh. These memories harden him.
“I’m sure the coke helps.”
“I gave that shit up,” Michele says.
“Did you give up going to school, too?” Chase asks. He can’t control it. “Don’t you have some kind of comprehensive exam this week?”
“It’s tomorrow.”
When Chase starts laughing, Michele screams, “I postponed it, fucker.”
“You can do that?” Chase asks. “You can postpone—”
“I mean I will.”
“When are you going to do it, Michele?” Chase yells. “The test is tomorrow.”
“I’m taking a leave of absence,” she finally admits in a small voice.
“A leave of absence,” Chase shouts. “A leave of absence from what?”
“I’ll go back in the fall or maybe winter.”
“That’s fucking great,” Chase mutters. “You’re fucking miserable.”
“You treat me like shit,” she says.
“How did it go last night?” Chase asks because when he left her last night, outside of Hookah Lounge, Michele was a mess. And despite Chase’s protests, Michele was on her way to a man’s house. “Did you actually go?” Chase asks.
“Suddenly this matters to you?” She’s sobbing.
“Shouldn’t it?”
She laughs harshly through the sobs and then says, “I don’t remember, Chase.”
Chase feels his chest clench and he closes his eyes. He might cry; he might not.
“Seriously Chase, please grow the fuck up,” she says, after the crying subsides, and then in a sarcastic tone, “Well, supposedly I was just so coked to the gills, right? How could I remember anything? According to Hunter I was doing so much coke—supposedly because I was so quote-unquote upset about your little girlfriend—that, of course, I probably just passed out, so who knows what he did to me.”
“Jesus, Michele.”
“You want to know the truth, Chase?”
“You don’t know what the truth is anymore, Michele.”
“The nice bald man with the twin daughters in Colorado laid out three thousand dollars and begged poor little cokedup Michele—who was so upset about Chase’s girlfriend being in town—to let him go down on her because he loved her shaved little pussy because that really does it for him and that’s about as far as it went.” She pauses. “And you know it, Chase, so why do you make me tell you the same damn story every time?”
A wind and dust advisory is issued that night. Part of the Strip—from Spring Mountain to Flamingo Road—is closed when pieces of the Venetian sign tear loose just before midnight. Palm fronds scratch against the window of Julia’s room. In the morning there’s a message on Chase’s cell. Michele called at three: the wind out at Bailey’s house up in the hills would not fucking stop and it was such a completely bad sign and there were positive and negative ions in the atmosphere and when the wind was like this the ratios were distorted and the fragile balance in the atmosphere was thrown off and it made everyone insane and she couldn’t help it she was completely wired and just so stressed these days and she was actually a little scared for Chase because she loved him and didn’t he think there were more sirens and police helicopters than usual? She was wide awake and had just scrubbed Bailey’s bathtub and done three loads of laundry and driven to the Hills in Summerlin where they had broken ground on the house already. And there were suddenly all of these new girls with appointments at the suite all night and she wanted Chase to know that she had tons of money for him and that he could come and get whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it and to sleep tight and not panic even if there were demons scratching at the door because sleeping makes them go away.
Julia is sleeping. Chase stands outside on the balcony under a gray morning sky. He comes out onto the balcony the first time the cell vibrates. The Hard Rock beach: brief stretches of sand punctuated with palms and green umbrellas and purple chaises around a jigsaw-shaped pool. It looks dirty when it’s empty. He turns away. Only Julia’s head is visible under the covers because the air-conditioning Chase likes makes the room too cold for her. Clothes from bebe and Ann Taylor—pastel work shirts and several different pairs of black slacks she tried on and decided against—are slung over chairs everywhere. Chase checks the airline’s Web site to see if Julia’s flight is on time, hunched over Julia’s laptop, which sits on the table near the window, surrounded by name tags and a Hermès leather-bound notebook and her Palm Pilot and a half-empty wineglass and the copy of The Wall Street Journal Chase bought for her in the shop downstairs that morning and a stack of her résumés. She used thick paper with bold print. He runs a finger over the raised black lettering: her name, NYU, Stanford.
What no one who reads the résumé will see is the row house in the North Philadelphia neighborhood where kids walk pit bulls off leashes and empty vials are wedged between sidewalk cracks and a burned-out television sits for a month on the strip of high grass in front of the neighbors’ house and transvestite prostitutes rummage through her mother’s garden to steal strawberries and bell peppers and men with lazy eyes and nappy hair show up unannounced at the front door asking for money because the word spread that Julia’s house was where they gave out food.
His eyes scan the table again: her business card; Stanford; her résumé, thick paper, bold print, NYU; bebe tops; Hermès bag; Palm Pilot; the Journal. His cell keeps vibrating and he gazes at the number and it’s local and he steps back onto the balcony and writes the directions on an ATM receipt. It’s just after six in the morning and even though Chase knows he’s pushing it he agrees to do the drive. He slips out of the room and slides the do not disturb sign on the doorknob, and manages to get back to Julia’s room before she’s awake.
Julia’s flight is leaving on time so Chase is driving too fast. He’d like to slow down, take his time. He feels the same way every time Julia leaves him, every time she’s come to Vegas in the past five years, every ride he’s given her to McCarran. He wants Julia to stay. He’d like to leave with her or skip the flight and drive her all the way to California.
“Remember when I used to fly home and you’d come with me to La Guardia?”
He’s thinking of New York. He’s thinking about when they were in college. His voice is shaky. He’s suddenly nineteen and in New York and their first summer apart lies ahead and that same panic grips him now and he’s so sure that he’ll lose her. Tears well up in his eyes, as they did then, and he looks away. She touches his cheek, which makes it worse.
“It’s June,” she says. “You’ll be there in less than a month.”
Chase takes Maryland Parkway until it hits Boulder Highway and when he passes the Hard Rock he gets caught gazing at the giant electric guitar after reading the third of four two-way messages from girls he’s never met who need rides at three and seven. He runs a red light at the intersection. Horns blare and a car swerves. He checks the rearview. No one hit anyone so he keeps going. He turns at Sahara, which takes him to Paradise and then to the Strip, and he pulls in to the Palace and slows down and watches the blond kid, the valet, start toward the Mustang. The radio is on and the Rolling Stones are singing “Gimme Shelter” and Chase leaves the volume turned up and sits in the car. The valet doesn’t know what to do and finally opts for knocking on the window and asking, “Sir?”
His cell rings and he squints to see the display.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Where are you?”
“Driving.”
“It’s a busy day,” Bailey says, a tense energy in his voice.
Bailey texts Chase the information. Bailey says the girls will meet Chase at the suite. Bailey tells Chase to just go from there.
“Where?” Chase asks and suddenly realizes it doesn’t make a difference. “Oh, yeah.”
“We owe you some money,” Bailey says. “For Rachel.”
“Michele got me.”
A beat of silence. “Right.” Bailey can’t mask his uncertainty. “How much again?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t count it.”
“Whatever, dude. Right. You didn’t count it. Jesus, Chase.”
“Bailey—”
“I’ll just ask Michele. I’m sure she counted it.”
Chase ignores the DO NOT DISTURB sign and pounds on the door of the Sun King suite on the twenty-second floor. A girl—eighteen or nineteen—finally opens it, wearing a tight pair of gray cotton short-shorts and a tank top that reads STAY HIGH. Pimp My Ride is on the TV in the background. The room is a mess of clothes and champagne bottles and glasses and room service trays piled all over the place. From where Chase is standing in the hallway he can hear male laughter and someone else telling the guy to shut the fuck up. When Chase turns back to the girl he figures something out and waits for her to do the same.
“Yeah?” she finally asks, annoyed.
Chase introduces himself. “I’m the driver. Are you ready?”
“For what?”
Pause. “You don’t need a ride?”
“Where to?”
Chase grins. “Do you recognize me?”
“Should I?”
“Your hair,” Chase says. “It was dark before.”
“Yeah?” she says as she backs away from him. “And?”
“Centennial.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your name’s not Gabrielle? You don’t go to Centennial?”
She blinks a few times and slowly shakes her head, clearly lying. “What do you want?” She keeps backing away.
“Look, I don’t care if it’s you or not, okay?” Chase says. “I’m supposed to be driving someone at three and I really don’t care who it is or who you are.”
“Hang on.”
The girl swings the door closed and leaves Chase standing in the cool hallway.
When the girl returns Chase asks
her: “Do you know where Michele is?”
The girl shakes her head again. “Either San Diego or L.A. I’m not sure.” The girl bites her lower lip. “She’ll be back Thursday or Friday.” Someone calls out to the girl but she doesn’t turn around.
“So no one here needs a ride?” Scowling, Chase pulls out his cell to call Bailey.
The girl leans in conspiratorially. “Honestly, dude? Michele’s a complete bitch now and she does all this coke and she’s almost thirty. She’s totally not worth it.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” he asks before he realizes that the girl meant something else entirely.
She looks Chase over—eyes scan the scratches on his neck—and thinks: no way.
“You should always call first, sweetie.”
“And you’re not”—he checks the text Bailey sent him—“Gabrielle?”
“No.”
“And you don’t need a ride.”
The girl shakes her head.
“And Michele isn’t here and no one here needs a ride today?”
The girl rolls her eyes. “She’s back on Tuesday or Wednesday, dude, okay? Call and make an appointment if you want.”
“What the fuck, dude?”
“Sorry, she bailed,” Bailey says as if this is enough of an explanation. “Tonight though is for real. Can you still do it? At seven?”
“Call me when you know for sure.”
“Keep your phone on.”
8
Chase can hear the contestants on a reality show screaming from the television in the apartment next to his. He’s sitting at the kitchen table listening to the wind. He leans back in his chair taking deep breaths as he stares out the window at a bright blue sky. He needs to finish three paintings for the White Trash Paradise show. Devon, who owns the gallery, went to Durango and UC Davis and laughed when he told Chase he came back to Vegas two years ago to “do something moderately constructive.” Devon’s is Chase’s first show in the five years he’s been back in Vegas. In response to Devon’s question—it was vague and about why any artist would leave New York—Chase offered something hollow about New York being “too commercial.” But to Chase, New York was NYU and Julia, which bled together until it became nothing more than a debilitating blur of impossible expectations. Of course he doesn’t tell Devon that, though in retrospect he probably should have. Chase’s paintings were oils on linen canvas done with the expensive Winsor & Newton sable brushes Julia bought him: his mother’s house on Beverly, neighborhood panoramas and the blood-red skies, a hot Salvadoran babe. There was enough that Devon liked in Chase’s portfolio to offer him space. The painting Devon liked the most—the one Devon told Chase he thought should “anchor your wall”—was the one that Chase was the most reluctant about: a girl sits on a bed and stares blankly out a window. Early-morning sunlight fills the room, bathing her in yellow. The girl wears her hair in a ponytail and her tan skin seems smooth until you move in closer and then you see the sores around her mouth and the white scar on her forehead. Outside the window is a sea of pink tile roofs that bleed together so that it’s impossible to distinguish one from the next. The painting’s title: Carly.
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