The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  At the end of it Nate said to me, “Esme, you know I’m much too old for you.”

  Inside his suite—and all the hotel suites at the DI were called, ridiculously, Hollywood Suites—we were alone together for the very first time, and in that sudden privacy, all previous constriction abruptly fell from us, which made me wonder what might have happened if we had ever been truly alone before this.

  We grabbed at each other unselfconsciously. Like a Flamingo tabby cat, I rubbed my face in his neck and he tolerated that briefly before taking my head in his hands to kiss me. His tongue was muscular, thick, and intrusive, the entire sensation new to me, but the shock was quick, and then I found myself clinging to him and sucking at that tongue. He pushed us through the living room and into one of the bedrooms, no words between us. The décor was blandly serene, Western, bright carpet, impersonal, the rooms of anyone, the colors and textures of the hotel lobby repeated here, very few personal items anywhere, a watch, some cufflinks, laid on a mirrored tray on the dresser, no photographs at all, as if he’d stripped himself of all the years and days that led to this one. Whatever else belonged to him must be tucked away in drawers and closets. But just those few items gave me a jolt. I was backstage, behind the scenes of Nate Stein.

  This violation of his privacy was almost more shocking to me, even, than his naked body, an exposure that happened quickly by our rushed disrobing, the shedding of his shirt, my dress, my somewhat complicated undergarments. If I were seeing the inside and outside of Nate, then he was seeing the inside and outside of me and what if he saw there was nothing much to me, after all?

  He was older, his flesh thicker than mine, solid and aromatic, the hair on his body almost a fur of black and silver, and he paused a moment to say, “Fuck. Wait,” as he pulled off his wedding band, let that crack of gold drop to the carpet somewhere, roll away even as he brought me near. He was an adult, with the bulk of an adult, and I was really still a girl, bones and a sliver of inexperienced flesh, no matter how I strutted the stage or how I was costumed, and what did he want with that? But I found the very maturity of him arousing and perhaps he found the very childishness of me equally so. Certainly he enjoyed the blond novelty of me, “blond even here,” he said, stroking a finger between my thighs.

  And then he said, “Esme.”

  Intercourse felt like being impaled with a thick object, his phallus both soft and hard at the same time, an invasion that made me recoil even as I welcomed it. Nothing I had ever done or known had prepared me for this, and during the odd warm hurtful chafing of that first time, I discovered what else we shared besides pleasure. A terrible loneliness.

  From us seeped such a loneliness that it wet first the sheets and mattress of that fine room and then from there, it dripped into the plush carpet, unstoppable. It ran down the thick walls, saturating the decorative paper that covered them and swelling the drapes to double their size, sorrow filling the room to the brim while we lay, punctured and flapping at the bottom of this strange pool. I found myself crying for my mother, my grandfather, my once buoyant and now tattered father, and Nate cried for someone or something, too, maybe for yet another wife he had once loved, now lost, or for his little son lost to him also in this grievous, unalterable way. Because all the love that Nate would have given to his ex-wife he would now heap upon me, now that he would not be seeing much of her anymore because of me. And whatever love should have belonged to Nate’s little boy, whom I’d also displaced, I would take in greedily, too, without ever encouraging him to share it. Or perhaps Nate cried for something I was too young to even fathom. It was a surprise to me both that Nate Stein believed he lacked anything in this life and that the two of us had anything in common at all. When we were done with the raw gutturality and the formless squawking and the ragged weeping, we spoke of none of it.

  Nate handed me a cigarette, my first since the one I’d tried long ago at the track, one of my father’s Chesterfields that made me cough until I threw up, which Nate lit for me, and the foul-tasting smoke of it in my mouth felt somehow like yet another intrusion I couldn’t refuse. His robust hair was flattened with sweat.

  “I’m going to take care of you now,” Nate said, his largesse born in part of guilt, for loving me though I was too young, for loving my body to excess as he did, for loving too much what we did together with my young body and his older one, which made us not so much father and child but something more slippery and less durable. But, if nothing else, I was used to slippery indefinable untrustworthy older men.

  24

  The long fronds of Benny Siegel’s one hundred date palms rustled above me in the wind when I returned home in the early morning dark.

  The grounds beyond the pool stretched to the bungalows. I’d thought running from the valet stand through the overheated casino and across the grass would keep me warm, but it hadn’t. I was still cold. And I was alone on the concrete paths around the deserted, chilly pool, paths that led to the suite of bungalows Benny had built for the high rollers he imagined would come and stay here. And they had. But since my father and I had arrived long before any of them and because Benny loved me, he had given us one of the bungalows and no one had thought to take it away. Or perhaps someone had thought about it, but because of me, my father had been left alone. I can guarantee you this—my father had never once worried about this roof over his head, though I did, and he would never have seen himself as overstaying his welcome, he who found every insult and assault a surprise.

  I used my key. Quietly. I didn’t know what I was going to tell my father.

  I was so changed that I thought everything at home would be changed, too. But nothing was. The living room and kitchen were in their usual state of disarray, glasses and dishes left unwashed, racing sheets spread all over the sofa, cigarettes in ashtrays that needed badly to be emptied, left like this until finally even my father was bothered and he called for housekeeping.

  We had moved in here only three years ago, among the furniture Benny and Virginia, as the Flamingo’s chief decorator, the Queen of All That Was Garish, had chosen for the bungalows. Blue-and-orange diamond-patterned curtains. A lamp with a brass starburst for a base. A larger starburst hugged the wall, in melodramatic echo, as if that were a good idea. A television set, a big box more wood than screen. A few yards away, because the bungalow was, after all, a bungalow and small, stood a circular blond wood dining table and its four matching chairs, wooden backs curved, orange seat cushions to match the orange sofa. The shabbiness of it all made me pity myself and my father, even though I knew my father never cared about any of this, never cared at all about where he ate or slept.

  Not that we ate here much. We always ate at the hotel. We did everything at the hotel, which always felt more like home than this bungalow, even though my father and I had lived here together longer than we had ever lived anywhere else. When the hotel first opened, I’d get a key from the front desk clerk and avail myself of whatever room was empty at that hour of that day, climb into the bed and watch television. And when I got hungry, I’d order room service. Pancakes. Even at night, when forced back into this box of a bungalow as if I were a toy on a retracted spring (with orders to call my father down at the casino if I needed him), I’d sit at the front window as if deprived of a party. I’d look down over the pool to the Flamingo, lit like a three-layer birthday cake all night long, but even candles on the brightest birthday cake are eventually blown out.

  At the threshold of my own tiny room, a museum exhibit of my childhood, I paused. Bedspread and pillows white and pink, ruffles, my mother’s mirrored dressing table, dolls. I had been young enough at twelve to bring dolls with me to Vegas, baby dolls with painted hair, real golden hair, beribboned hair, bonnets. No books, of course. My Patriot radio, of course. A Slinky. A Coloredo game. Dinky Toys Railroad passengers. Fifty Card Games for Children. Ha. As if I needed that in Vegas.

  On the dresser, two photographs. One was of my mother, my age now, dressed to the nines to go out, strapless
tulle dress, gloved to the elbow, bracelets at her fabric-covered wrists. The other was of me, taken during those weeks my mother wouldn’t get out of bed. My father had driven me to the May Company department store to have my photograph taken for its Beautiful Baby contest. I was six, laden for the occasion with my usual multitude of bangles and necklaces, my mother’s black orchid pin jammed into my tangled hair, beneath that, my strained, unhappy face. My father had been absolutely sure, given that I was the most beautiful child in the city, if not the universe, that I would win the contest. Which I did not. Most pathetic child in the city, that contest I might have won.

  We’d brought here only our clothes and my toys. When we’d left Los Angeles, my father had put all our furniture in storage. “We’re starting over,” he said. “And you never know, we may need to leave Vegas in a hurry.” Prescient. Remarkable. For once thinking more than two days ahead. “We don’t want to have to stop and load a truck on our way out of town.”

  But when the men my father had hired carried my mother’s shiny dressing table up the wooden ramp onto the flatbed truck destined for the Boyle Heights Storage Company on Los Angeles Street, I couldn’t bear to see it buried as she had been. So I said, “I want that.” And my father looked down at me, saw my face, and said, “Okay,” waved his arms at the men to lug the vanity back down the ramp.

  Benny had had one of his men bring it out to Vegas for us, and the minute the vanity was shoveled into my room I was sorry I had asked for it. There was no piece of furniture more emblematic of her. My father had been right. We should have left it all behind. All memories behind. But Benny was so pleased with himself for having brought it here for me, I couldn’t say anything. He actually came out to the bungalow to see the vanity for himself, as if it were my mother he was visiting. He had always liked her, wept like a fool at her funeral, feeling at fault. And here the dresser sat to this very day, ridiculously at odds with the blond wood of the rest of the room, the vanity all early-thirties glamour, every inch of its surface mirrored, every inch of it reflecting my own wavery image. Girl. Once a girl.

  I wished, suddenly, I could talk to my mother, to ask her if she felt the way I did now after her first time with my father. A little unsteady, a little battered. What next. After those Tom Collinses with my father in his boarding-house bed, my mother’s life careened off and dragged her in its wake because that first sodden encounter had engendered me. And she’d had to face her father, too, my grandfather with his ironed newspaper who swept a soft brown brush across his hats to keep them immaculate. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Impossible. She’d had to elope. But what if she hadn’t gotten pregnant. What would she have done? Continued chasing her bright dreams, I’m sure, unencumbered by me or my father. Well, she continued chasing them, anyway, the two of us slowing her to a crawl.

  I turned out the light in my bedroom, and in that moment when the light slapped up against the darkness, I thought I saw something flick past my bedroom window. Maybe. Bird? Bat? Palm frond bowing in the wind?

  It was Benny Siegel standing out there, shaking his head at the misadventure that carried me on its palanquin to Nate Stein at the Desert Inn. Baby E. What are you doing?

  Why had I conjured him?

  Perhaps because of the parade of gifts with which Benny had been slowly grooming me, wooing me, waiting until I’d come of age to take me, which I suddenly understood now. Virginia had understood this, intuitively, then. As had my father, I realized. But Benny had died and now Nate, a different predator, had taken me instead.

  But Benny wasn’t really out there. No. It was my father who had switched on the hall light behind me and was now reflected in the window glass before me. He was the one shaking his head.

  “Make no mistake about it, Esme,” he said. “Nate Stein is a dangerous man.”

  Who wasn’t of our acquaintance?

  But I didn’t think that at the time. I just thought with some relief, So he’s already heard. I won’t have to tell him, after all.

  25

  By the next day what had happened between me and Nate was known all over the Strip and not long after that, Nate moved me into his suite at the DI.

  Within the month, my father had been promoted back to box man at the Flamingo.

  And from then on he held his tongue about Nate, cautious, perhaps, about what I might repeat to him. Yes, my father held his tongue, though perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t.

  26

  I rapidly discovered that it was not going to be all that easy loving Nate. He might tell me in bed, “This is how adults fuck, little girl, what do you think of that?” might take too much pleasure in my emerging sexuality and disinhibition, which he teased from me, bit by bit, until to his delight I became reckless in the bedroom, letting him do whatever he wanted with me, might, some nights, sweating all over me, his flesh dripping onto mine, hair a sopping black thatch, say, “This is killing me, E. I’m fifty fucking years old,” taking my hand to brush my palm along the gray hair on his chest and at his groin as evidence, but even while I assured him of my affection, I never myself felt entirely assured of his. The vastness of his life compared to mine intimidated me, though surely my short life rivaled his in terms of tumult, which he slowly shared.

  Some nights, he would light up a cigarette and tell me about growing up in Detroit, playing handball with the Negroes on his block or the way the sharp wind off the wintertime Lake Erie cut right through your coat, your scarf, your shirt, poked its tongue straight into your lungs, directly disregarding skin and muscle. Once a gang of Negro boys surrounded him and asked to see his circumcised Jew dick, and Nate dropped the plated casserole a neighbor had made for his poor motherless family and used the pieces of the broken plate as weapons, one chip in each hand as he swiped at his tormentors. Porcelain claws. Detroit in my mind was a black city, with black smoke, black factories, black warehouses, industrial plants, Negroes—while the only two cities I knew were sun-drenched, horizontal sprawls. But in that black city, he’d lost his mother just as I’d lost mine in my sunny one.

  He told me only a little about his father, who’d gone to prison briefly for stealing a check right out of an envelope in a neighbor’s mailbox in 1910, but how that petty crime and punishment couldn’t dampen the man’s ridiculous swagger. Nate hadn’t seen his father in almost twenty years. He distrusted fathers. Even himself as a father. Another failure. “So there you go, E,” wincing, “that’s my life. Part of the deal. Still want me?”

  Yes.

  But there were some things we spoke less about—his ex-wives, any of the three of them, now four of them, in particular the fourth one. I knew only that their divorce was final and that she was keeping their son from him to avenge her displacement by me, making the little boy half an orphan.

  I told Nate about the Sisters orphanage where I’d spent a spirit-destroying six months in 1939 until my father rescued me there in the dead of a Los Angeles winter, where trees had no leaves and the sky was gray and the rain made enormous puddles in the streets and driveways which had no drainage because most of the year the city didn’t need that kind of engineering, and where, from that landscape, the orphanage rose like a black wretch, and Nate took my hand and looked at me with a mixture of pity and comprehension, as if he’d already lived that story, had already lived all my stories, had lived long enough to live them all three times over, as if he’d like to journey to the past and rescue me himself before my father could, and he asked me then what he was always asking me now, “What can I give you, E? Tell me. Tell me what you want.”

  At that moment in time, Nate could have given me anything and I wouldn’t already have had it. I literally had nothing but my theater case, which held my entire soul and all my ambitions, a few items of clothing, and the sequined costumes Donn Arden outfitted his girls in, which, strictly speaking, were not really ours, but borrowed, assigned to us temporarily, mine twenty-two waist, twenty-six torso, with my name, E. Wells, marked in ink on the inside of the bod
ice. If I left the show, the costume stayed on its hanger on the dressing-room rack. But I knew better than to ask Nate for anything. What he wanted to give me, he would.

  His first gift to me was a necklace with a charm, the letters of my name, esme, the letters pavéd with diamonds.

  “Do you like it?” he asked, uncertainly, as if he’d never given a gift to a woman before.

  I did. It glittered and my father, mother, and I had always liked glittery things. esme. He had claimed my name and given it back to me, as if he somehow now owned my name, owned me. From that moment forward, I never took the necklace off, except to perform.

  27

  But in the morning, whatever intimacy we’d managed disappeared with the light. He was a fifty-three-year-old man, invincible, in charge of everything, and I was an eighteen-year-old girl in charge of nothing. If I was awake, from the bed I’d watch him as he stood in his underwear in the bathroom, shaving away the black stubble that reappeared on his face every day by late afternoon, manipulating his wild hair with combs, brushes, Brylcreem, dressing for his day of business, calling downstairs to his secretary for the location of his first meeting of the day. My first appointment of the day was to look at him. Or for him.

  If I woke late, which was often the case, I’d go find him, wherever he was, though I never knew exactly how he would receive me. But I was used to that. That’s how it was with my mother. You would think I’d have more self-respect than to go looking for him like this. But I didn’t. I was used to vertiginous insecurity. Sometimes Nate would hold out an arm for me, “Come here, baby,” no matter who was there with him or what he was doing, whether he was in his office making phone calls or looking over the books in the all-important counting room, which was always hot and smelly, with tobacco butts and paper money glued to the walls by the humidity, or sitting by the pool grousing with various men about the slow progress of the various hotels under construction on the Strip or meeting with his partners, more suits than mobsters, in his new real-estate development company, men who’d look away indulgently while Nate kissed the forehead of his child lover. But other mornings, he was curt with me, dismissive, flapping a hand in my direction. “Go away, E. Go play by yourself. I’m busy.” I was not to be included in his business or his circle of men. I was still Baby E.