Johnny looked up from Genesis to see a bride and groom. The groom was short, stocky, maybe Mayan. The bride was small too, Asian, beaming. She wore a strapless dress, ivory, tight at the waist, rippling in folds at the bottom. Her dark hair was in an updo. She had super-long chandelier earrings on, grazing her bare shoulders. They walked hand-in-hand to the garden waterfall. A woman wearing one large camera came behind them wheeling a baby stroller, which she set to the side. Johnny watched, sketching the scene.
The wedding photographer, in black pants and a black hoodie, adjusted the bride and groom in front of the pouring water, and began to take pictures. Johnny sketched her back hunching into the shots, her elbows akimbo. The baby wasn’t in the wedding pictures, but Johnny sketched the baby into his scene. The stroller, the baby’s face, the bonnet.
Johnny looked at his watch. It was 11:17 a.m. Vivienne was due to land at 11:45, in twenty-eight minutes. That placed her right now as coming over the Hoover Dam. She loved that view.
He had time yet. She’d be in the hotel lobby around noon. She was on a mission. Johnny was under strict orders to stay away from Vivienne when she was working.
But my oh my, he loved to watch his wife clandestinely. To see her, the foreign correspondent, enter a hotel, to see her the way he had seen her the first time.
The first time Johnny Coma saw Vivienne Pink it was in Old Miami Beach, the first night of his honeymoon. He went out on Collins Avenue for a smoke, wandered down to 15th, took a right for no reason, hit Washington, turned left seeing a clot of lights and street people, got to the corner of Washington and old Espanola Way. He was at the Spanish Village built of pink adobe in the 1920s to house artists in cheap digs.
He looked to his left: through an archway he saw a woman in a red-andblack striped shirt, tight dark jeans, high red heels and a beige trench coat. She had two cameras around her neck. She was at the reception desk of the small Matanzas Hotel. She turned and snapped a photo of him looking at her from the narrow village-style street. The light captured her through the archway.
There she was: his wife. Only problem was the woman he had actually just married was back at the Sagamore on Collins Avenue, waiting.
He walked through the archway. “Got time for a drink?”
“Sure,” she said, amused, sending off voltage.
They sat in the February heat outside at one of the Cuban joints on Washington Avenue, where the owner, a guy in a windbreaker sipping thimble-sized Cuban coffees at the next table, greeted Vivienne like a long-lost daughter. Vivienne told Johnny how the café owner was a Havana Jew who had come to the city of Miami Beach on a small plane the night Castro took over. They drank mojitos made with fresh yerba buena, not spearmint, and Johnny spent the first night of his honeymoon not with his new bride, but with Vivienne. They were both twenty-nine.
Things weren’t pastel yet in South Beach, they were white and peeling and sunny slummy. Johnny sat with Vivienne, watching her for hours. She spoke a radiant Spanish, flirted with the waiters, knew people on the street, took their pictures, bums from the stucco shadows came out and shook her hand, guys rolling through on no-speed bikes stopped and posed for her.
Johnny never had sex with his one-day wife, she had been whining about her ink allergies for an hour when he stepped out for the fateful cigarette on Collins Avenue, walked over to Washington and fell under Vivienne’s sway. Vivienne, by her third mojito, was telling him about visiting the darkroom of the guy who took the original iconic pic of Che in Havana. If he had not gone out for a smoke to get away from his bride… if Vivienne had checked in to the hotel even ten minutes later… Their life together was based on a moment that might not have happened.
Now he had to go spy on her.
The lobby wasn’t like the lobbies of old, in those great old films, where the proverbial sneak sits in a lumpy chair (which even in black and white you knew had to be some godawful maroon), reading a lumpy daily, looking for the dame on a tryst or the skell on the lam. The guy could sit all day staring at the same page about bank robbers being hunted up in the mountains or mudslides on the coast or war in the east of Europe.
No, the Flamingo lobby was more like a carpeted check-in area of an airport. Men and women with luggage snaked along between the velvet ropes, then scattered to the individual agents. Off to the side, away from the check-in was the coffee wagon, the portable caffeine delivery system in case you couldn’t make it down the hall to the Tropical Breeze (if you name it, they will believe it) coffee bar, or up the hall to the other coffee bar past the three eateries and the deli. Or to the cocktail waitresses circulating the casino floor, serving short squat glasses to tall reedy men, or tall drinks of clarity to round stubs.
It was a noticer’s dream: everything open and viewable.
Of course, that meant he could be viewed too.
He located himself at that coffee cart. It was in full view but people coming up the escalators from down below, just arriving, tended to be disoriented, looking ahead not behind them, and as soon as they spotted the registration sign, rolled their goods along to get in line. You could hide in full view by figuring out where people rarely looked. He got a small black coffee. The server looked surprised and pleased. So many workers had been retrained to make coffee with doodads and twirls and sugar syrups like the coffee version of college girls on March break with pretty pink sick-making drinks that when an old school Johnny came by like a trucker at a truck stop and just got a coffee, a server just stared, blinked and poured the hot jolt.
Just in time.
Here came heaven in a trench coat.
Vivienne. Vivi. V.
He did not know if Vivienne saw him, or sensed him, when he saw her come up the stairs, making her sweet little hard-shell suitcase heel beside her.
She walked past him forty feet away. He loved her in profile. She had on the grey silky trench coat she had bought in Paris when he took her there for their twentieth wedding anniversary. The trench looked well worn, a foreign correspondent’s attire, tied in classic Vivienne style, belted in front, in a studied nonchalance, très négligée. Grey collar up. Short red hair, pixie style. Slim black jeans. Her red-striped shirt was the new version of the short-sleeved red-striped shirt he saw her in the first time, in the tropical steam. She had kept the worn-out short-sleeved one and used it as a rag to clean her camera lenses.
Ah, the scarf he bought for her when they were in Paris. Nice, small, with green, pink and orange fishes, tied tight around her neck. Her clothes looked born on her body. The war photojournalist, how she travelled before she changed to her work clothes. She wore her old short pointy mod boots with the gold-tipped toe. They had a gloss under the lobby lights. She must have had them shined at the airport, she liked to get there early, get her footwear polished.
Vivienne was the woman that women noticed sitting easily up at the shoeshine man in airport terminals. She asks Mr. Shoeshine about his work because work fascinates her. She forks over a twenty-buck tip, and they collaborate in a moment. Just a brief square bracket break from the disasters in the headlines.
She got in line at check-in. She fluffed her hair. Maybe she had seen him without moving her head. Vivienne did things like that. It was Vivienne who taught him that hair-fluffing is a tell, that men touch their hair when they see a pretty woman approaching.
He felt elevated just to see her pass on by.
It was the West, Ms. Pink was getting into costume. Vivienne chose clothes that told her body a story. And her body passed along the story to her brain. She arrived in the great silver state of Nevada looking like she had just been to Paris and had come home.
She was leaning on the check-in counter, schmoozing with some lanky Larry who looked like he had been here for the first atomic cocktail of 1951. There she was, no doubt saying to ole Lar there, “Hi, great to see you again. You look good, Larry.” Vivienne could read a name tag with an eye sweep, like him she had learned to look, absorb, look away and look back in less than a second. A
n urban skill, trained as a child on the subways.
“Hello, Miss Pink.” – Larry having the same skill, reading her name on the screen in a flash second, talking to her like old pals – “Good flight?”
“Great as always, Larry, always good to be here. I see you arranged for some sunshine for me, I was getting awfully grey around the gills up in Toronto. You’ve got family there, don’t you?”
“Winnipeg, Miss Pink. Well, they used to live in Toronto. Way back.”
“Sure they did, I knew it, I could tell, we might be mishpoche, who knows.”
“At least machatunim,” Larry might be saying. Look at her waving her head, talking with her whole body and why not. Life was short, that was Vivienne’s motto. Because it was short, she lived it like it was long. Look at her, loosening her belt, as if ole Lar can’t see it from his side of the counter. Now he’s leaning into her, semi-confidentially, no doubt saying, “Let me see what I can put you in today… Miss Pink, I have upgraded you to our executive floor, I believe you need a desk to work. It’s a lot quieter.”
“Lots of mirrors?”
“I think you will enjoy it.”
“Larry, you know it’s always a pleasure.”
She reaches across, that little charmer wife of his, and shakes Larry’s hand. Of course, she had a crisp twenty in her hand. She’d seen a lot of things; she tipped.
He had begged her not to go to war anymore. Sweetly, she had said yes. She was a photographer, she was tricky. If you tied her down with guy wires, she’d fly away wearing the whole damn tent. Johnny stayed away – officially. Unofficially, he kept a weather eye out for his Vivienne.
Vivienne moved towards the elevator area. She lit up the spaces she came into. Johnny looked back to old Larry. Larry was watching Vivienne. She paid attention to everyone she was with, how rare. Larry looked like he had a bit of that light on him as the next human came to the desk and Larry snapped back to work.
Vivienne stopped, cupping her camera underneath its body. She moved with her camera even when not shooting as if the camera were a well-fitting nerve-connected prosthetic. The brain sends a signal to the nerve endings that connect chest, shoulder, rotating cuff, elbow, forearm, wrist and eye. A kind of a soul android, Vivienne called it. A neural path engraved in my body after forty years on the job, ten thousand hours. A third breast, a third lung. It was not that a steel extension made a human bionic; it was that the human made the steel breathe. Vivienne stood there, unembarrassed, completely aware of her surroundings, her eyes two sponges.
She emerged from the elevator twenty-two minutes later. It was not yet one in the afternoon. She had four good hours to work in. Oh, five if you counted the blue hour, and Vivienne counted the blue hour. She counted the gold hour, and the mauve hour before the golden hour before the blue hour before the pre-dark, too. Civil twilight, nautical twilight in a land with no sea. There she was, transformed, an actor costumed for her next scene. She knew that her subjects moved differently with different clothes, why wouldn’t she?
Johnny was lost in looking at Vivi. If he had stayed married to Ms. Dye Allergy, he would have been safe with a hard-wired kvetcher. Vivienne was hard-wired to kvell from the power of the shadows. Ms. Kvetcher showed him what life writ small could be. Vivienne took the larger canvas for granted, she took misfortune as life’s absurdity, even when she had to keep her head still for weeks, had to use a feeding tube after a bomb in the Baghdad booksellers’ market sent her flying and dislocated her jaw as she landed on Tales from the Thousand and One Nights.
Ah, there she walked: the pink leather jacket she had bought in Buenos Aires, 1982. As Vivienne told the story, it was April, the beginning of Argentina’s winter. She was walking along Maipú towards the Hotel Gran Dora where she was living. A white Ford Falcon, a routine vehicle of abduction during the Dirty War, pulled up on the busy Saturday street – a hand reached out a door and grabbed her. Vivienne held her camera high. She fought back. The car dragged her along Maipú. The doorman at the hotel saw her and ran to help her. The kidnappers pulled off her old brown suede jacket. The doorman pulled at her other arm, her foot bent back and twisted, her face hit the car door, the thug inside punched her face numerous times, then the doorman yanked her free and the white Ford Falcon crawled off, stuck in shopping traffic. Abductions in Buenos Aires then were as common as shopping. If the doorman had been on break, Vivienne would have been taken and dropped from a high plane into an ocean.
Limping, she insisted she had to go, right now, and replace her jacket. A couple blocks and she was in one of the high-end fashionable leather stores of the day, where, due to the manic depressed economy, smart sparkling clothes at the pricey end of the scale had cost less than bargain basement. For twenty-five American dollars cash, she got a beautiful, fully lined, soft pink leather jacket, still good twenty-four year later. To the world it was a pink bomber jacket. To Queen Moxie, her skin resistance.
Who would think seeing her stride out of the hotel elevator, looking so intriguing, that for years she had slept in that pink leather jacket, with a Swiss Army knife in the right-hand pocket and the blade out just in case? Even home in Toronto.
The jacket had duende; it had lived through invisible war, fear, aftermath, visible missiles. That jacket had been to the morgue, it had seen humans shot at point-blank range. That jacket had been to the beach in Beirut, with the ruins of civil war hotels back of it, that jacket had eaten in the desert and the tropics, that jacket zipped up to her glass jaw, that jacket was a prop with certain power. That jacket could talk to her through her skin, transmitting its power. You could put that jacket on a chair and it would tear the hair off a psychiatrist.
She had turned post-traumatic clothing into a power source. Johnny needed her close, or the darkness of his own writing would bring him to places too low to live in.
There she went – her hair red, her back pink, her legs khaki – past the roulette tables, down the stairs to the coffee shop, her pickup spot for men.
And she was his. She’d better be.
4
NEON
NEON IS THE beautiful and rare element found so little on earth, but so much in our universe, a perfect gas for the excitable highway. Neon is younger than photography in use. Neon is about the same age as the movies in commercial diffusion.
Hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon. The five most abundant chemical elements by mass. Neon, which stars make in their Alpha genesis moments. Neon, true neon, is red. Red-orange as sunsets and rock planets and hot ranges and firebombs. Any other colour is adulterated neon. Up the neon alleys the rare earth sighting of true neon is in a multiplicity of pleasure to the eye, a kind of pleasure zoo, this red neon.
Neon the new, neon the noble. Edelgas.
5
THE BIRDMAN OF PARIS
OUT ON THE wide cosmopolitan boulevard a man in a large bird suit held up a sign: THE SLEIGH BROKE. He was standing in front of Paris Las Vegas and its sky-high replica of the Eiffel Tower.
He twirled a red ski pole, poking the passing parade of desert sunshine lovers. He had not acquired the bird suit’s head. It was a man’s head and a bird’s body. He wore a tiny elf-sized white fedora. Below, he sported a pilly blue Speedo over the bird suit and on his bony legs he wore dusty brown Frye boots. He held out a begging bin: a vintage plastic tub with pink flamingos carrying high stacks of yellow and blue coins.
“The bird is in charge of public safety!” the birdman on the boulevard shouted. “The birdman, not the president. As I myself declared in a recent radio interview, Mister Bush has put the bird in charge of all matters concerning the public homeland. It is the feathered one who shall rise to save the people. The bird will save the banks. Ha.” The bird began to sing, “The women were easy, but the money was easier.” He put one bird foot and one hand forward, in a Jimmy Durante–style vaudeville move, and continued, “The crooks were on the lam, and the biggest crooks of all were Fannie and Freddie. Oh ho, the women were easy but Fannie and Ginni
e were the easiest money of all.”
The bird resumed his more deadpan demeanour, sticking his ski pole arm out to waylay the boulevard walkers. “Just a thought on security. There are no words, yet let it never be said that at the end of the day we must make a new beginning to be able to assume a more confident posture as to who are the bad guys; quite so. When one was busy travelling on matters of some urgency as to the future of, if I may call them that, women in 2040, and so forth. Pursuant to, anything helps. Any change; God bless.” Holding out his plastic tub.
A shaven-headed man in a navy blue knit cardigan with a shawl collar, navy velvet pants rolled up at the cuff and low grey desert boots with no socks came up to the birdman on the desert boulevard as the late morning traffic zoomed and idled by in its white and red sedans and pickups through the bright time dust. The man was Johnny Coma.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” Johnny asked the bird.
“Leave me alone,” the birdman said, the stentorian tones replaced by a nasal whine.
“There we go,” Johnny said. “This man, ladies and gentleman, advised in Vietnam, advised the World Bank, attended the UN sixty-nation Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1963. When did they let you out of the, ahem, facility? I thought you couldn’t fly.”
Danny Coma had attended a counterterrorism conference at the Bellagio in the spring of 2004. Hotel security found him in the pool area trying to climb an orange tree at two in the morning. He was ejected. He turned up as a character on the Strip. The Birdman of Paris.
“Ha. I walked back the threat. Vet that! Let them try and find me here. This old spook still has a few tricks up his wing.” He turned his attention to a red-faced woman, her skin the result of the wind, the sun, the brutal three per cent humidity. “Got a penny, got a nickel, got a quarter, got a loonie, got a toonie?”
Death Valley Page 4