There was a short pause of disbelief from her end.
“How did you know?”
“Apparently I voted for him. I’m like an elephant. I never forget a butt when I see one, especially if he doesn’t wash his hands after wiping it.”
“Did you know he was a democrat?”
“Don’t kick me while I’m down, Elise.”
“Joshua, I’m so very sorry for what I did… and the way you found out about it…. and the way you ended up meeting him. None of that was planned in advance.”
“Good, then you’ll leave the congressman and come back to me.”
“This is very difficult.” She gave birth to another uncomfortable pause. “I don’t want to loose you, but you must understand that I’m torn. I don’t want to loose either of you.”
“I wonder what your psychology textbooks would have to say on the subject of adultery.”
“It’s not like that. This is complicated.”
“I doubt it. And you do realize he’s married too. I looked it up on Wikipedia. How can he be so open about it and fly under the presses radar? And another thing, how long do you really expect this to last before he drops you?”
“Joshua, you were away so many times on your vagabond adventures… for so long. I didn’t intend for this to happen. I didn’t go looking for it. But I had needs and somebody else came along to fill them.”
“Tom.”
“Yes, Tom.”
“It’s good to see my tax dollars hard at work.”
Elise laughed. I gathered it was mostly derived from nervousness, but I didn’t appreciate it.
“The naked atheist encouraged you to have your little exploratory fling with the congressman, didn’t she?”
“Ellie? What does she have to do with this?”
“Influences, that’s all. Her very world view eradicates any need for the kind of morality that’s chiseled in stone.”
“We’re not bringing her into this.”
“What can I do to fix this then? If its because I’m regularly gone, I’ll give up photography like that.” I snapped my fingers. “If that’s what you want.”
“I’m not sure this can be undone.”
Her words hit me like a ton of bricks.
“Wow, that’s wonderful news, honey. In the meantime, what am I supposed to do? It seems like everyone in the world is screwing each other while I’m the only one getting screwed over.”
“Joshua, you mean more to me than words can say. I’ve missed you. I so desperately wanted to tell you that at NOSTIMOS.”
“Leaving me for the congressman is a funny way of saying it.”
“I didn’t leave you for Tom. I left you to live with myself for a while. I felt so alone, and trapped. What’s happening with Tom and me is a completely different issue altogether.”
“I disagree.”
“Tom and I aren’t living under the same roof. I found a nearby apartment.”
“It sounds to me like he’s keeping your bed warm.”
“Sometimes.”
Her candid response hit me with another unwanted load of bricks.
“I wonder what the Catholic Church has to say about that. Maybe we should both visit Father William’s confessional booth together.”
Elise started to cry.
“I know, I’m a whore, aren’t I? Please don’t say it.”
I kept silent.
“Why won’t you say anything?”
“You told me not to say it.”
Elise sobbed. I felt horrible… and angry…. and self-righteous. Why couldn’t loving one woman be easy?
“Joshua, do you still love me?”
“Elise. None of this makes any sense. You’re a therapist, for God’s sake. Please help me to understand what’s going on. Why can’t you just call the whole thing off with Tom?”
“I don’t understand it myself.” She wiped snot from her nose. “All I know is, whatever happens between us, I don’t want to loose you.”
“I don’t even know who you are anymore. Elise, I’m tired.” I wasn’t tired. “I have a long day of photography tomorrow.” That much was only partly true. “And a wedding before the weekend is through.” That was the gospel truth. “I’m going to bed.”
“Do you still love me?”
“You know I do.”
“Will you wait for me?”
“I’m not changing my phone number, if that’s what you mean. Now I really need to get some sleep.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know its not. Goodnight, Elise.”
I hung up the phone. Finally I had a say in something.
4
I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror, particularly the fatty rim around my waist. I ironed my shirt over the flab with fingers hoping it would go away. It didn’t. When I lifted my shirt up it was still there. Damn.
I went jogging, but not very far. It was the first time that I’d gone jogging in a couple of years and my butt drug behind me. I was clearly out of shape and the Frontier, at least the empty lot where the Frontier casino had only recently stood, wasn’t but a couple of blocks away. It was near the Sahara and Stratosphere and what looked to be a Trump Tower in the works. I passed a fifty-something prostitute in a G-string with yellow fingers, flat bags for breasts, and muffin-top hips, being careful not to step on a littered assortment of calling cards scattered across the sidewalk as I went. I was already out of breath. I couldn’t even recall the last time I’d worked out, but Elise and I were going to get back together, I was certain of it. And when that happened I wanted to look good for her.
Hotel casinos lit up with the glow of pigeon glitter. I didn’t like that about Vegas, the way it sought to attract my total attention and at my most primal level. The streets were as lonesome as I’d always expected them to be. Even at night the sun seemed to bake the desert. I stopped in front of the empty lot where the Frontier once stood, held my hands behind my head, gasping for breath, and remembered how it was.
It was Palm Sunday again in the unlikeliest of earthly temples, the strip – three-thirty in the morning, 2002. Elise and I drove this direction, northbound, from the twenty-four hour courthouse to where I currently stood – the empty lot. It was a working hotel then, but only a sign with big bold letters remained, THE FRONTIER. I took note of the bulldozer and a wrecking ball.
We had just gotten married at 3:30 in the morning in front of a courthouse judge. Michael and Josephine came along as witnesses, but they didn’t stay the night. That’s dedication. There we were now, baby-cheek rookies in a Toyota Corolla, rusted and stripped of its paint, two fleshy temples of chastity cropping eyes through the rain-splattered windshield for a vacancy lit sign. My cheeks were so creamed that I couldn’t assemble a beard and Elise, my little French girl, was angelic and not yet twenty. Dear Lord, were we ever that young?
Bare feet hanging from the passenger window, her hair was braided into a single gold column and she wore a blue summer dress. Or was it red? And maybe she was wearing heels after all. Time was a thief. It had already begun to chisel away the intimate details and drain the blood from my memory-veins. I was afraid to let go. What if only empty lots and fuzzy photographs remained? But there was another troubling element. The worst thing about memories, good memories, was the thought that they’d soon become enemies. The pain of Elise leaving me was too much to bear, and survival was on the horizon. I was afraid I’d have to lock them in a box as far back into my skull as they’d possibly go and do whatever I could to keep the key swallowed. Would I have anything left to remember?
Our Corolla slowed down to a grinding-chug on the boulevard, turned over this curb, and parked in that empty corner. As I slid out of the car wearing corduroy pants and a shaggy Beatles mop-top of hair, I opened her door, grabbed her hand, and led her sprinting across the parking lot and through the double sliding doors of the casino.
If I strained my eyes into the wrecking balls neck I could still make out the glow of our room, hinged fourteen storie
s above its flattened ruins as though its light had never dimmed. I could still hear a faint hum. It was the slowest elevator ride of my entire life inching from the fourteenth to the lobby floor while pimple faced teenage girls giggled about a boy they’d met in the pool earlier that evening. I wanted to tell them that I was about to get lucky. I wanted to tell the desk clerk too, and then everyone in the casino. I was about to have sex with a girl for the very first time.
There I was again, Beatles mop-top hair guy, sprinting through the parking lot like a crazy mad man with a mission, to retrieve the box of condoms that we’d forgotten about in the trunk. I wanted to shout it to the raindrops. I wanted to drive up and down Las Vegas Boulevard with a blow horn. I’d just married the girl of my dreams, I wanted to proclaim, and now I was about to return to my room, as soon as I found our box of condoms, and do it with her time and again. Not a single condom would go to waste, either. Of course, had I actually driven up and down the boulevard proclaiming my message, it would have been a complete and utter waste of time, especially considering the fact that there was a girl in the fourteenth floor waiting for me to return with a box of condoms and have sex with her.
I quickly decided if I were going to spend any breath proclaiming a message, it would be a sermon of action, a wise decision. I scrambled back through the parking lot and into the hotel lobby as quickly as I could. The elevator ride back to the fourteenth floor promised to be even slower than the one I’d taken down to the lobby. I didn’t take the elevator. I took the stairs.
5
I pulled my shirt off as soon as I entered my room in Circus, Circus, gasping for breath and dripping of sweat. The air conditioning was on. I stood in front of that for a moment and studied the police tape in the parking lot. Four hundred miles away, I wondered what Elise was doing right then. She had told me she was having sex with that guy almost every day. I hoped she was doing anything but that. Then again, it’s all that I could think about, Elise in the naked embrace of that other man. I started the shower.
As steam filled the bathroom I turned sideways and studied myself in the mirror hoping I’d lost some of the fat that clung to my thighs. I hadn’t. I turned the other way just to make sure. My twenty-one year old self suddenly stared back at me from his looking-glass end of the FRONTIER. Stark naked, two hairless nipples formed beady eyes over the pale teeth of his ribs. His penis was slathered in the cake-like icing of menstrual blood. He twisted the ring on his wedding finger then looked down at his shrinking pillar. Is this what it was to be grown-up? The once virgin quietly considered the thought, having just reached orgasmic heights in a woman’s vagina for the very first time. It was the lovely French girl in the other room. I watched the Beatles mop-top man in the mirror silently rehearse her name on his lips. Elise, he said. He liked the way it sounded and repeated it again. If sexuality leads to pocketed moments of self-knowledge, then this was about as enlightening as they came.
Twenty-One Year-Old Self returned to the Frontier bed in the other room, where the lovely twenty year-old French girl was waiting for his return. I left the steamy Circus, Circus bathroom behind hoping to follow him.
“I think we just conjugated,” the lovely French girl said, biting her lips as she smiled, “and I’m awfully afraid that we dirtied this bed.” She held a sheet, wrenched with menstrual blood, over her breasts.
“I believe it is what the French call the bed of conjugation.” Twenty-One Year-Old Self pivoted across the mattress on both knees, resting both hands on either side of her fatty breasts.
“Je t’adore.” She spoke to him in French. “Tuesmon home.” I loved it when she spoke to me in French.
“I take that to mean you want a little more practice conjugating,” Twenty-One Year-Old Self told her after they kissed.
“Oui.” She bit her lips again.
She dropped the sheet from her immaculate flesh. And then she spoke something else in French. I recognized its meaning that time around. It’s a word that we English speakers refer to as dirty.
6
Michael returned to our room before I finished taking my shower. He poked his head through the bathroom door to ask how I’d been doing while he was away providing for the family and to announce the sober realization that he’d only won six hundred dollars rather than the thousand that he’d led me to believe. I told him I was clearly disappointed. What good is a man if he couldn’t keep his simple promises?
Michael frowned. “I guess I can only afford to buy you one margarita instead of two. Maybe we can splurge and add a rim of salt. Now come on, Cleopatra, get some pants on and let’s go.”
“I think Cleopatra only wore dresses.”
“I don’t care if you wear a dress or a bra. But if you think I’m gonna be seen in public next to you in your current attire, forget about it.”
As we passed through the casino on our way to the parking lot rimmed with police tape I opened my wallet and retrieved a dollar. Michael frowned. I promised him this was it, just this dollar and not a penny more. “I’ll be buying you that frozen margarita,” I confidently smiled as I slid it in a slot machine and pulled the lever. It wouldn’t give me my money back.
We continued on through double sliding doors into the warm desert night and strolled southbound on Las Vegas Boulevard (past the police tape), glowing, electrified, and bustling with life, smoking cigars as we gazed up at the various hotels, the smooth curvature of Wynn, recently opened with its impressive landscaping, and old classics like Caesar’s Palace, Treasure Island, the MGM Grand, and the fountain show that ran every fifteen or twenty minutes at the Bellagio.
It was the frozen margarita stand in front of the Venetian that Michael met him for the very first time.
“Having fun?” The margarita vendor said.
I didn’t think much of the question and shrugged shoulders without getting a good look at his face or his uniform. I was about to tell him thanks, take a sip from the margarita and continue southbound when he said, “My point exactly.” He poured a second frozen raspberry margarita into a plastic cup and handed it to Michael, who was pulling out his hard earned winnings to pay for them. “Usually I charge for this sort of thing. But for you two gentlemen, it’s free.”
“Excuse me?” I got a better look at Margarita Man. I’d seen him before, in New Orleans of all places. It was the strange fellow with the bowling hat, white pants and shirt and red suspenders. He was still wearing the black leather gloves too, even in the baking desert. I caught sight of his cane leaning against the margarita machine.
“You never seem to have any fun.”
“Haven’t I seen you before?”
“No sir,” he said, same expressionless face, same southern slang. “Not that I can rightly recall.”
“Yes I did. I saw you just two weeks ago.” I caught a glimpse of his tattoo, EMINOR, inked into his wrist. Michael studied him long and hard, chomping down on his cigar. “You were the guy standing outside of the adult strip joint in New Orleans beckoning me to go inside.”
“No sir,” he said as a matter of fact, never an expression on his face. “As a southern man myself I’m very sorry to say I’ve never once been to New Orleans. I hear it’s quite delightful, particularly during Mardi Grass in the spring.”
“I saw that tattoo. The man I spoke to in New Orleans had that exact same tattoo.”
“I’m afraid you must have me confused with someone else.”
“Yes.” I didn’t drink from my frozen margarita. “I suppose I must.” But I was unconvinced. I turned and continued on down the street with Michael.
“How long do you expect to wear that wedding ring?” I heard Margarita Man’s southern slang when we were only twenty feet away.
I spun around. “What did you say?” But he was already helping another customer.
“Nothing, sir.” He looked up at me. “I didn’t say anything at all.” Except this time he grinned.
I turned my back to him again.
“Just so you know, I’
m a personal lover of poetry,” Margarita Man said. “Particularly the modern stuff.” I spun around. “I know people grouse and grumble about it, especially since everyone nowadays claims to be one, but I get this feeling that yours is different.” He smiled. “Perhaps you can show me some of your work sometime.”
“OK, this is really weird. Am I missing something?” Michael spoke into my ear. I didn’t say anything until we crossed the street in the direction of the Mirage.
“Did you see that tattoo on his arm?”
“Yeah. It was a big one, in italics or something. I think it said EMINOR. What the hell does that mean?”
“Good,” I sighed with relief, dumping my frozen margarita into the nearest trashcan available. “Then I’m not going insane. It’s the Latin word for menace. I looked it up. Whatever you do, don’t drink your margarita. We’ll go into the Mirage and buy another one.”
Michael threw his away without second-guessing my logic. And then I told him all about it.
7
On our return up the street, the strange man with the bowling cap and the red suspenders was missing. No surprise, so was the frozen margarita stand.
8
“So let me get this straight. You’ve never been beyond the borders of Vegas, ever?”
Amanda and I were standing outside of her fiancée’s strip club, The Office Lounge, with triple-X lights buzzing over the door. There was no life in her charcoal eyes. I figured it was likely submerged in the underground prison of her skull, closely guarded and hidden from the world, if it still existed at all.
“My grandmother was a stripper. My mother was and still is a stripper. And now I’m a stripper.” Emotionless, she thought on it. “It’s the family business, you know. I guess we’ve never had reason to get away. I did go to Red Rock Canyon once as a little girl.”
“How far away is that?”
“I don’t know.” She thought on it. “Pretty far, like twenty minutes.”
“Everybody needs to get away sometime. There’s an entire world of activity out there. Don’t you ever want to drive a few hours down the I-15 to Los Angeles, maybe for the weekend; see Hollywood, the Pacific Ocean, a Van Gough original at the Getty, or even an overnight trip to Disneyland?”
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 12