The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  Actually, it was a great idea.

  But my father didn’t end up enlisting, the plan foiled before it could even begin to be enacted. My father had been arrested a few times by then, so the Army wouldn’t have him, declaring him an undesirable, mentally unfit, 4-F. Not that my father liked the idea of active service. He just liked the idea of being a veteran afterwards, with all the honor and respectability and new opportunities that implied. For the duration of the war, he carried his papers around, proffering them to anyone who asked why he wasn’t in uniform. Of course, he could have founded the taxi company even if he weren’t a veteran, but Mickey Cohen (also 4-F) was a sure thing and the taxi company an uncertain venture, and therefore, like so many of my father’s ideas, this one flitted like a moth about our heads and finding it dim in there, flew off.

  47

  Las Vegas

  1952

  My name had not yet been picked off the Desert Inn’s marquee, I saw, when I arrived at my dressing room the next afternoon, but surely that was to come, the beak of some vulture, caw, caw, pecking away at the letters. Nate’s next move. My things still stood on the ledge before my mirror—my portable plug-in coffeepot, my Morphy Richards iron, my tissue box, Aqua Net hairspray, alarm clock—the photographs of my mother were still thumbtacked to the walls, my costumes still hung on the portable metal rack, my tool box–size makeup case still parted to reveal its three levels of red, blue, and black paints. I knew my timely appearance backstage would already have been reported to Nate—or rather that my lack thereof would have been.

  I took a deep breath. I was in full makeup for my midnight performance, orange face, false lashes, red lips, hair lacquered. In my hands, the vial of tranquilizers the hotel doctor had given me only yesterday morning. My plan was to take all the pills, just as Virginia Hill had done time and again. Her version of the walk away. Or the drift away. Or maybe it was just her way of trying to transmogrify Ben’s anger into compassion, my purpose now, with Nate’s. Either way, whatever way, I had to time this correctly. My dresser would soon be walking the hall to this room, to this chair, to me, to sieve me into my costume of velvet and fur. And there had to be pills to pump from my stomach when she arrived and when Nate eventually followed her here, as I knew he would when called. I checked the clock. 10:45 now.

  I had to drink two glasses of water to down the twenty-nine and a half Miltowns left in the prescription bottle, and when I finished doing this, almost immediately I had to pee, more from nerves than from the water. Did I have time? I wished I could ask Virginia—or any of the young Hollywood actresses or actors who had swallowed pills or rat poison or alcohol in some paroxysm of lost hope. I knew I didn’t want my dresser, the stage manager, or Nate coming in to find me slumped on the toilet in my blue cotton robe, half-undressed, or worse, toppled over on the bathroom floor, sash of my robe loosened, hem hiked in a rumple. Undignified. I had a different tableau in mind. So I scurried to the bathroom with more haste than was necessary and then ran back to my chair, where I unhooked my esme necklace and laid it across my lap. A private message. Then I let the pill vial roll from my hand and take its theatrical place on the floor beside me. The big bright lights around the mirror made the bottle glow against the dark linoleum. I didn’t want Nate to miss seeing it. Because that was the whole point of the exercise: for Nate to see this and let me go.

  This had to work, because Nate had shown me unequivocally that without his beneficence, my father and I would find our cupboards bare. Yet if I managed this right, Nate would leave my father alone, perhaps out of guilt even let him back onto the Flamingo grounds, allow him to climb its ladder all the way up to the F. And perhaps, also out of guilt, Nate would let me keep my place here on the Painted Desert stage, permit the continuance of those regular deposits into my bank account, like ones my grandfather made weekly into his own, courtesy of Wolfkowitz Painting, these courtesy of my own business. Esme Wells, Orphan Burlesque.

  I leaned back in my chair and looked up, ceiling low overhead, the pattern of dark and light against the exposed pipes and tubing both familiar and strange. I was a little nauseated, though whether from all the water or all the pills or my own thoughts, I wasn’t sure. I imagined I was already feeling sleepy. Maybe I really was. The green face of my alarm clock on the dressing-table ledge seemed to glow as the red minute hand did its sweep. Once. Twice. Again.

  I wondered how Virginia had felt as she waited for the pills to make her insensible, corralled up there in Benny’s suite or in her bedroom on Linden Drive or in some hotel room in Europe. She had done this so many times in so many different places. Had she gobbled those pills down in a single minute or had she walked and walked the room until finally she said, “Goddammit, I’m going to kill myself,” fumbling through her drawers and suitcase for her own bottle of Miltowns. Or her own bottle of whatever. And then what. Peace or terror? Or perhaps the repetition of this practice had dulled both for her. If I changed my mind, I could put a finger down my throat, turn back the clock. I’d wait fifteen minutes. Then I could do it or not.

  But in fifteen minutes I didn’t want to put a finger down my throat. Each one of my fingers had become too heavy even to flick, let alone lift to do something prescriptive. I was barely conscious enough to hear my dresser knock and say, “Miss Wells?” whatever time it was she said it. Her subsequent shout was from someplace far away and then a hub of noise crowded at the dressing-room door and fractured as it bore down upon me. When I opened my eyes, it was only because Nate, big face in my face, was using one arm to hoist me up out of my chair, shaking all ninety pounds of incredibly heavy me, while he stretched his other arm toward the rim of light behind him, wagging his fingers and bellowing, “Get the doctor!” Then he brought those fingers toward me and forced them, bulky and bad tasting, down my throat. Which produced nothing from me, my muscles too limp to respond. I was so weighted down by the pills, pills that themselves weighed almost nothing at all, that my body found itself utterly incapable of mustering the simplest involuntary response.

  So Nate started walking me about my small dressing room, or rather, his feet were walking left, right, up, back, two steps in each direction before a wall loomed up and he had to turn, and my feet were dragging, my hip on his hip, his arm at my waist, my head hanging, my sash hanging, swinging left, right, left, right, as we passed the couch, the chair, the door, the little tables, the costume rack, Nate folding my arms around him the way I had folded my mother’s limp arm around me at the National. And he was saying my name, “Esme, Esme, Esme,” over and over and over. Shut up.

  When the doctor arrived along with the stage manager who’d escorted him directly, hurriedly, here, dressing-room door opening with a bang, Nate screamed at him, “What took you so long, you goddamn fucking shitheel?” And the manager backed up, terrified, and then disappeared down the backstage hallway as if it were his hide that needed saving, but the beleaguered doctor stood firm, his face flushing, poor man called here at all hours to fix the dread deeds Nate had wrought. The doctor was the same one who had prescribed me the Miltowns, now here to undo their damage.

  He waved his fuzzy arm, pointing to the bathroom, and Nate dragged me there, a sack without volition, and propped me up by the edge of the toilet as the doctor directed. The doctor drew a red rubber bag and hose from his black satchel. He threaded the hose into my nostril, an invasion against which I could not protest, not in the slightest, and so I just closed my eyes. I couldn’t move even to gag, the big white floor tiles flickering at my feet, and as the doctor pushed that rubber tubing down my throat, Nate shouted, “You’re too late, you’re too late. Why don’t we have a goddamn fucking hospital in this city?”

  And the other thing Nate kept saying, over and over, was directed at me. “Come on, Esme, come on, come on.” And I couldn’t answer him, of course, nor could I silence him. I couldn’t even turn my head. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see him. Be quiet. With a syringe, the doctor sent water coursing through the tubing an
d into my stomach where it sloshed in that vacant tomb and then he worked the pump at the head of the tube. Nothing.

  And then I felt a hand on my wrist, nails in my skin. I opened one eye. My mother was standing there with a blackened face. She put her red-lipsticked mouth to my ear. “Wake up.”

  I could smell her.

  She pulled on my arm.

  And whatever was left inside me was suddenly heaved up and out and I vomited liquid and powder even as the doctor was still pumping my stomach, and as I splattered his shirtfront, the sink, the floor, everywhere but the toilet, he cried, “Good girl,” triumphant and relieved, of course, that once more he had come through for Nate, had not let Nate down.

  And Nate sat on the bathroom floor in all that mess and cried.

  Afterwards, I lay on the little dressing-room sofa like a deflated plastic doll, a single millimeter thin, while Nate sat on a chair by me, his hand on mine, repeating over and over to the flattened girl I had become, “Why did you do this, E? Don’t you know I’ll always take care of you?”

  Well, yes. I knew that now. Now that I had assured it.

  48

  By the next day, word had gone all around the Strip that Baby E had tried to kill herself because Nate Stein was leaving her.

  So be it. Better than the truth.

  49

  Within the month, my father had moved us out of the bungalow and off the Flamingo hotel grounds, the first time since we’d come to Las Vegas that we wouldn’t be living in a hotel. He had bought us a house, price tag $21,950, to keep me away from the Desert Inn, away from the Strip, and away from Nate and his influence. Or so he thought. It was hard to get very far away from Nate. Because, laughably, the house my father bought for us was in Paradise Palms, one of Nate’s recent real estate ventures with Moe Dalitz and Irwin Molasky, his ingenious new suburban tract just north of the Strip, right next to what would soon enough be the Stardust Hotel’s golf course. As for my father himself, after first reinstating him at the Flamingo, Nate then moved him to the newly opened Riviera, along with Gus Greenbaum and company, and promoted him to shift supervisor in the counting room. So after seven years in Vegas, my father was back in the counting room. Price tag for that trajectory: twenty-nine and a half pills.

  When we closed on the house, my father, triumphant, bottle of champagne wrapped in a white hand towel and tucked between us, drove me over after his shift to see it. I was no longer working. I was supposed to be recovering, quietly, out of sight, from my alleged nervous breakdown, while still on the Desert Inn payroll. The disabled list. We rode in the new 1953 black Ambassador Nate had bought for me, which was more than a car, it was half-car, half-spaceship, like the Viking 7 rocket, the car showy with its white top, white-walled tires, white details. It was a get-well-soon present, an act of penitence, an apology, metallic evidence of Nate’s unspoken regret. Tell me I didn’t ruin your life. Take this fun car.

  And, of course, I took it.

  The streets of Paradise Palms bore the names of the Indian tribes who had once been the sole inhabitants of Paradise Valley before the Spanish arrived here, before we arrived here—the Paiute, the Shoshone—and even the names of some tribes that had never lived here—like the Seneca or the Comanche or the Pawnee. The new neighborhood had baseball diamonds and Little League teams, playgrounds and volleyball courts, Boy Scout troops, an elementary school. The streets and lawns were landscaped with date palms and creosote and Joshua trees, with grass and with gravel. The houses were made of concrete, some façades ornamented with rock, some sporting fences of filigreed cement blocks like a child’s tower, and Models 2A, 2B, and 2C featured variously a flat roof or an A-line roof or a double A-line roof, with the option of a garage or a carport. The windows were big and tall, like the windows of the Sky Room, and every house had its own little pool in back, accessed by sliding glass doors. And whichever way we turned, left or right, I could see the site where ground had been broken for Nate’s latest project, Sunrise Hospital, for which Las Vegas had me to thank.

  Nate’s advertising pamphlets for these neighborhoods bore the slogans “Here Is the Better Life” or “A Place in Paradise!” And the houses were filled with band leaders and bookies, musicians and comics and singers and their families seeking just that—families from an upside-down world of some new kind of Americana where the vices of alcohol, gambling, heroin, and girls were now just the workday norm. And many of those big windows, I saw, were lit up even now, at 4:00 a.m. Most of working Las Vegas was up at night and asleep by day after they got the kids off to school.

  We drove north on Seneca Drive and turned west on Sombrero, north on Pawnee and then left on Silver Mesa Circle. My father parked in the driveway of one of the houses. A few cars were parked on the street or in driveways. The house was a one-story flat-roofed box, Model 2A, with the carport option and a concrete-block fence running halfway across the front of the modest house to shield it from the view of passersby. This was it, our house, all 1,000 square feet of it, not quite, not anything at all like, the showy mansions we’d once dreamed of owning in Hollywoodland, our Castillo del Lago, or even our Wells’ Loft. And it was located not on one of the lush peaks of the Hollywood Hills but on this tiny dry lot in a desert valley 260 miles east. Ah. I know. The Silver Folly.

  But all I said was, “Dad, this is great.”

  My father said, “Come on, E,” and jumped from the car, eager, ridiculously eager, to show me the prize he’d procured for us. He put the key in the lock and flung the front door open with a flourish, saying, “After you.” I swear, he practically bowed. And after he’d flipped on the lights, with some ceremony he handed me one of the two keys he’d had made.

  “Ours,” he said. “I paid cash.”

  Cash?

  Inside, the concrete floors were the temperature of ice water and the color of the giant gray moon that hung every night in the east before crossing the sky. Nylon carpets were coming, my father assured me, to be installed soon. He gestured at the big space around us, pointing out all the latest, most modern fixtures, the Tappan oven and fridge, the Whirl-a-way disposal, the Rheemaire’s heating and air conditioning, the Kentile vinyl-asbestos tile, the aluminum-framed windows—none of that old-fashioned splintering wood that constantly needed painting—the luminous ceilings, the wood beams that clung to those luminous ceilings.

  I wandered the long, flat space, my father hovering close behind me, watching me as I inspected the vacant living and dining rooms, one wall all brick fireplace, the other all glass, which framed the golf course and beyond that the desert valley and mountains. The sliding door opened to a small oval pool, not yet filled. Sliding doors from one of the bedrooms opened to the pool, as well.

  “This room can be yours,” my father said. “I’ll take the smaller one in the back.” He waved his arm to the little bedroom down the hall.

  Everything we did echoed, every step we took, every word my father spoke.

  “So what do you think, baby girl?”

  “It’s nice.” And it was. It wasn’t grand, but it was nice.

  “We can turn the fire on if you’re cold. It’s gas.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not cold.”

  But he turned it on anyway. I think he wanted to show it off.

  Then he went off into the kitchen, made some noise there, and when he reappeared, hatless, coat shed, dropped to the concrete floor or onto one of the fabulous Formica counters, he was ready for fun, the opened bottle of champagne under one arm, two glasses in his hand. To all the fabulousness around us, my father said, “Let’s drink! Come on outside, see the pool up close.”

  He opened the sliding glass door and stepped out first. I watched him pace around the small empty blue-painted cement pit, which I supposed we would soon fill. How? Was there some hose, a spigot? I couldn’t tell. I went outside then, too. The pool, one day, filled with water, would reflect that moon and those stars, but for now it stood like an empty gaping ditch, reflecting nothing. Some kind of debris s
kittered along the concrete bottom, stirred by the wind. Music from the house next door. Or maybe it was music from the Strip, notes also carried by the wind these few blocks. An organ. The Dancing Waters at the Desert Inn. My father circled the pool a few times, one hand in his pants pocket, other hand still holding his champagne glass. While I watched, he toasted the moon, what was up there of it. No. He wasn’t toasting the moon, he was toasting my mother who sat up there on the moon’s rim, dark hair shining, smiling down at him and at her daughter, more like her than either of them could have known.

  He drank his champagne and then my father cleared his throat. He wasn’t looking at the moon anymore.

  “I want to tell you something, baby girl. I went to the National after the funeral. I sat here, I sat there, I think I put myself down into every godforsaken chair in that godforsaken theater, but I just couldn’t quite figure out where you two might have been sitting that day. My plan was to watch Gold Diggers, the picture the two of you saw. But I couldn’t do it. I had to get up and leave halfway through.”

  He stood there watching me across our crater of a pool.

  “Don’t leave me the way your mother did, Esme. Don’t leave me half the way through.”

  And how could I tell him then that swallowing those pills had been a trick, a stunt, a grift, like his pocketing all the money from the bettors at MGM and hoping none of the horses came in at Hollywood Park, their losses his secret win, as my pocketed Miltowns had become mine. But I didn’t want my father to think less of me, to know that I could be so calculating, that I could gamble like that with my life. I’d rather have him think of me as an unmoored girl in distress, like my mother. And who knows, maybe I really had thought I deserved to die. So I said nothing.