Vivienne’s eyes stayed closed. Val had a great low voice. He brought her almost to hibernating mode, where she had a mere thought or two, her brain a sleeping bear in winter sunshine. Into the aestivating aesthetic. She was lucid dreaming in the sunshine.
Val lullabied on: “He made us the blossoms of spring three ways. Those peach and white blossoms like flower rain on a wedding day. But Van Gogh was Van Gogh, sure. If he had been alive in 1945, and he had gone to actual Japan, he might have shown us the white rain of the atom. He might have shown us Atomic Summer, after the snow and salt blossoms fell. He might have shown us humans like trees, and trees like humans; he might have shown us a mutant piece of meat that was actually a wine bottle melted in the radiation. We do not know. We just don’t know, baby. But we know that Van Gogh would have made forever art wherever he went. You can be efficient and you can be learned, but you either have heart or you don’t, you either have the juice, the duende, or you don’t.”
Vivienne kept her eyes closed. High piping light, helium and neon, danced in her eyelids. It was all red light behind her eyes. What was her intention anyway? Her stated intention was to take photographs of men on their way to war, Soldiers The Night Before They Deploy, but she could be, as Val was suggesting, like Van Gogh wanting Japan and going to Provence to get it; she could be in Nevada to find something else. Nagasaki, Nevada? Or was it Baghdad?
“If Van Gogh had moved to southern California, he might have painted a plain suitcase at a train station, waiting to be taken on board a train to a Japanese concentration camp up the highway, and it would have moved us as much as his paintings of chives or a chair. He would have found a Japanese woman at Union Station in LA walking through the archway where they collected citizens of Little Tokyo for in-state extradition. A woman whose kimono was in pieces, peeking out of her wicker basket, hidden en route to her new home in the Eastern Sierra, a deportee in her own country. I can picture it, Vivi, there he is on the train at the window, soaking in the California light under the brilliantine mountains. You know, Van Gogh would have been a great photographer. He would have shown us the wild stray dog light of the world. You have the juice, Vivi. Don’t dumb down your moxie. Open your eyes. Look at me.”
She did. There was a lovely man, Val the silver fox. He looked like an architect or an artist, but he did not desire to be one. No, Val Gold was the rare bird, an intelligence agent, a lover of art and literature who used them to hone his observational skills and to relax his trained body. A man who, unlike so many modern men cluttering up the atmosphere, was an avid consumer of the arts. One who did not ever think that because he loved reading he was, perforce, a secret writer, or that because he loved to go to galleries and museums he was, perforce, a secret painter. This made him first-rate at intelligence.
Vivienne took up a half-lotus position. She trained her eye across the pool. The sky was blue, but it felt red. The crystal clarity of light in the American Western winter? Well, it felt like putting your skull in a prism, and your eyes rotated in this prism that rotated back at you. Light watched you; out here, you were light’s delight. Light ate you. Sun was a monster. It drew you in to destroy you and your pictures. Everything was bleached as bones, when the light makes your eyes burn. Van Gogh might have been a cinematographer, bringing us the blinding bent light of the Western sky.
Val handed Vivienne her small director’s finder. It was her Cavision model, a nice two and a half inches long, swell for looking through to scope a particular shot. She brought it to Vegas to view stuff when she couldn’t use a camera, but she had left it in her room when she came down to the casino floor.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“Your room. I broke in while you and Junior were holding hands in the coffee shop.”
“You went into my room?”
“You want it or no?” He held out the finder.
“You bet I do.” She took it, put the rubber cup to her eye, turned the tiny lens rim and a gold heap beside a chaise on the other side of the pool came into focus. It looked for all the world like a statue, a gold folded lump on display. “You know, honey,” she said, moving the lens into the brightness, “Van Gogh wasn’t nuts, the light was. It makes your bones weak, all that vitamin D sucks away your calcium. You feel like spring fever every day when the light’s so manic.”
“Marry me,” Val said. “Remember when we were in Amsterdam last month and we got up and turned on the TV and there’s Rumsfeld resigning right after the election. So we went to look at the apple blossom paintings at the museum, and it didn’t matter. Defence men come and go but the Van Goghs are forever. You and me, Vivi, let’s get married.” It was an old routine. Art got Val hot. Her view? Val could ask her, time and again, because there was no chance she could say yes. And he knew it.
A guy from the other side of the pool dove into the water, swam and touched the pool edge near them while staying underwater, and swam back. As he lifted himself up on the other side, Vivienne recognized who it was: the young man in the white T-shirt. Her prey had followed her to the pool?
His unadorned torso showed he had a good body, but he had something else. He was, well get that, a damn exhibitionist. The Shy Exhibitionist. He wanted her to take pictures of him. He came to ignore her, to demonstrably say yes. To make her work for her art. All right then. Before Val knew what was happening beside him, Vivienne was up out of her chaise, stripping off her pink leather jacket, her khaki pants, her shiny black shoes and her green T-shirt. Down to her grey-and-black Paris-bought bra and thong underwear, Vivienne dove into the pool and did five fast laps, landing on Mr. White T-shirt’s side. She got up out of the pool. He was not there. She wiped the water out of her eyes with her wrists. He was off to the side watching her. He was standing at the towel stand, where there were no towels, it being winter. He had on black trunks and a gold jacket over a bare chest. His hand was radiating like a pink beam.
Vivienne walked over, dripping water. “Got a light?” she said.
He smiled at her. “I do.”
She stood like an idiot, realizing she had asked for a light with nothing in her hand. She liked that. She liked looking like an idiot. It was haimish. But noir haimish, all the same.
“Do you always ask for a light before you ask for a cigarette?” He was looking at her wet goosepimply body, bold in his up and down. He offered her a cigarette from a bright pink package, the Pink brand that had kept them company in the hotel coffee shop but which was jumping with saturation in the sun. The pink with bows on it, one gold, one black. Party-time packaging.
“Hello, Andy,” she said. “That’s me. Vivienne Pink.”
“They’re from out of Okinawa. Japan after the war,” he said. “The sailors in their whites, and the ladies who serviced them. I love that expression, We’re in the pink.”
“And so we are,” she said. He did not acknowledge that they had met before. Or that they had traded stories, confidences. She wanted to get that white T-shirt back on him, pronto. She could feel her eye wanting it. The prey was drawing out the hunter. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her into a hidden green area and kissed her on the mouth, not lightly and not for a short time. Charisma, the gift the gods give so that you might bestow it on others. His kiss in the dry air made her lips spark.
She had sixteen pics of his dead man’s stare in her head and there were still 9,984 beats left in a second.
It gave her an extra thrill that Val was watching. Of course he was. He had watched her dive in the pool, get out, talk to the guy from the coffee shop and disappear out of sight while they kissed each other. She knew Val would imagine the kiss. She liked that. But Andy was her intention. She was on the job.
Vivienne ran her fingers down his cheek, inhaling his cheekbones. He was emitting the air of a man who knows the power of a well-timed surrender. “Why don’t I come up to your room?” he said. “That is, if you’re not doing anything for the next hour or so.”
“One sec,” she said. She walked b
ack to the chaise, looking right at Val who was looking at her. He was not smiling. She picked up her clothes and returned to Andy. As they walked through the garden back into the hotel, Vivienne scrambled into her pants, leaving only her bra on top.
She slipped the key card in the lock at room 27117 and the door green-lit them in. The TV was still on, there was Clark Gable holding Marilyn Monroe close in the desert cabin in The Misfits, his weathered face and her wild cleavage and bare feet dancing. Vivienne wanted a portrait: Andy, The Night Before He Deployed. Enter the game with your worthy adversary, Vivienne. Bring your moxie to the man.
7
THE MISFITS
A SHOCK WAVE changes the nature of the medium it travels through. Travelling through air, the wave changes the air, putting it under pressure, building it, making it steroidal, speeded. A shock wave is a propagating disturbance. The wave alters the atoms it travels through; demented, distorted, the air becomes weaponized. The air literally gives you a concussion. Shell shock is not psychological; it is the result of having your brain beaten by air mercilessly pounding your head. Shell shock is a hidden brain injury. Andy and Vivienne had that in common: they shared postwar-concussed brain. And those reverberating brains did come to the high valley city where the nearby atomic tests had mutated the air to attack the place at the speed of a supersonic plane. When you fly into Las Vegas you are not just flying into a military town, a union town, a Spanish city, you are flying into a still-reverberating concussion. What the paperwork called a syndrome, and then called a disorder, and then reified by calling it PTSD, left out the injured brain, the vibrating blur unseen, left out how you do not know yourself to yourself inside your head, left out how the present becomes a place of alien sounds and then the sky begins to rain the fallout rain, in the land of little rainfall.
Vivienne scooped up her camera from the bed. She sat down, motioned for Andy to sit beside her. She held her camera in her left hand, stroking the back of Andy’s skull with her right hand. What damage was under there?
They watched Clark Gable watch Marilyn’s dress slip off her shoulders in the car, her drunk and resting on his shoulder, him adoring her as he drove the big land outside of Reno.
Vivienne pressed MUTE. Seeing only the black and white images, The Misfits felt like a Spanish or Italian movie and one made much earlier than 1961. La Dura Vita. Marilyn Monroe looked like a still photograph that kept moving, to its own surprise. A creature who knew, a sylph Aleph, an escapee from the skies of Eden, a sex-charged Golem.
Andy asked, “Do you have wigs?”
“Sure, honey. Always be prepared,” Vivienne said.
“Do you have a blond wig?” he asked, a bit guiltily, like a guy shopping for eye shadow in a department store in 1963.
“I do.”
“Would you show me?”
Vivienne was up, sliding the closet open, going into her orange props bag. She came back to the bed carrying two wigs, one black and one blond. She put the blond wig on over her short red hair. “I used to have long blond hair like this,” she said. “But we Pinks all start out platinum, and age brunette or red.” She snapped a shot of the far mirror: a woman with platinum hair, a black bra loosely hanging, beside a man wearing a white tee.
“Wear the black one,” he said, holding it in his hands, pulling his fingers through the dark tresses. It was real hair.
“You know, I like the –”
“Wear the black one.” Vivienne took it from him, took off the blond wig, handed it to Andy to hold. She adjusted the black wig on her red hair.
“Look at me,” she said. “Totally different.” She snapped that pic in the mirror. The man who a second ago was with a glamorous blond was now with a black-haired woman who looked like she had left the daylight to enter heaven’s troubles.
Andy put the blond wig on his own head. Before her mind thought, her hands took the picture of the two of them in the mirror. A woman with long black hair; a man with long blond hair.
“My wife was a blond,” he said. “Make love to me. I want to be the woman who died in the car crash.” Changing his voice, he continued, “My husband, Andy, never saw me again. Please love me. If he dies in Iraq, then who will know me. Could you love me one more time? Please, Vivienne, love me. Let me pretend Caroline’s here with me. I know you won’t hurt her.”
He moved her up on the bed, unzipping her pants, removing her bra, cupping her breasts in his hands, sliding off his jeans. Let this, then, be a tender moment in the workplace, when things happen. Let this be stuff. Stuff happens, it was happening down under the duvet, with a soldier and a war photographer. The betrayals moulted off of each of them, the lies of the world high and low. She was experienced; he was tender and knew how to touch her; she had the gift of patience. They made love, listening to each other’s bodies. The movie rolled along. They sweat, played, whispered, each in a wig. “I wanted you in the coffee shop,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “You and my camera needed to meet.” The wig’s long blond hair lay back on the pillow. He took her hand to stroke his next rising erection. “I needed to get a pic of you, I still need it.” Getting him hard.
“Aw, let’s go for coffee,” he said, teasing.
Vivienne got on top of him, put him inside her. She put her strong small hands on his shoulders. “No coffee. I need to photograph you.” What is foreplay in the fields of art? What if the excellent close work, at work, is not the cause of a sexual affair, but the result of it? What if the fine sex leads to the work project bona fides? Art is promiscuous, artists just tag along after.
Andy was enjoying himself, his fingers pinching her nipples; Vivienne was getting adrenalized with intense panic: where were the pictures? She fell forward, the black hair fell on his chest, mingling with the blond. They were soaking wet with sweat and cum. She lay on the pillow beside him. She took off her black wig, threw it on the floor. He tossed his blond hair on the floor too. He kissed her, the way he had kissed her in the shaded corner by the pool, as if he knew her. “It’s a man’s world,” she said.
He stroked her face, “But it ain’t nothing without a woman.”
“We need to work,” she said.
“Just tell me what you need, Sergeant.” His ease was scary to Vivienne. A man that at home in his own skin can disarm an entire room. He had shown himself to her, and drawn her to him. There was a dare in the atmosphere: give up something of yourself, dear Vivienne.
“What I need,” she said, shy to say it, “is to – adore you.” It was true. Photography did not substitute for words. A picture was worth no words at all. A picture took you where words dared not go. On the TV, Montgomery Clift, his head swaddled in bandages, lay in Marilyn Monroe’s lap. She was stroking his concussed head. Monty Clift had been the beauty of beauties in the movies, and then driving down a canyon outside LA one night he had crashed his car and become mangled, his delicate beauty gone, his face reconstructed. The beauty is short, the morphine long.
A roped wild mustang was dragging Clark Gable the cowboy across the white salt playa in the high desert.
“They were still setting off atomic bombs while this was being made,” Vivienne said, the white duvet up to her chin. “They worked all summer. Summer in the desert, are you kidding me? They were outside Reno, at Dayton, there” – pointing to the TV – “Pyramid Lake is what? one hundred ten degrees. The atomic dust had to be blowing up that way too, plus they’re in thinner air at forty-five hundred feet near Reno, plus the Navy’s testing its own high explosives at nearby Fallon, plus add in all the damn dust off that dry lake, the two mares, the spring foal, that stallion, Gable, Monroe, Monty, Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter – their lungs, their skin. Summer, fall.
“I love this movie, you want to know why? Korea was over, Vietnam was not official, everything was flush. But you look at this, a guy trying to figure out how to be a man. The cowboy was looking for a simple manly life, looking for something raw, but men were being dissuaded from rawness. How can a man be hi
s own man, without working for wages? You want to know why I love The Misfits?” She put her hand on Andy’s shoulder. “Because it’s Death of a Salesman with cowboy hats. The cowboy wanted attention to be paid to him, but his days of roping the many horses were done. He had the smile, he could sell the horsemeat, but the life was sparse up in the canyons. The Korean War vet was flying planes now to coerce mustangs out of their mountain habitat. The rodeo man was concussed. The aging cowboy had his sales hat… They wanted a home, but all they had was houses. Jack Kennedy had three years to live. Let me shoot your back. Andy, honey.” She said his name tenderly, so he could hear her desire for him. If the artist has no desire for her subject, it is simply a road map with no emotion.
Andy gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You sure have soft skin,” he said. She put her head in his lap, lying on her side. He stroked her back with little tickles.
“John Huston, they were all inhaling that crap,” she said. “Gable has a heart attack two days after they finish shooting, November 6, 1960. Two weeks later he was dead. The bomb dust, the playa in heat, who knows? Less than two years later Marilyn Monroe was dead. When she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” she had forty-seven days left to live. Maybe the film work in the high desert made her brain crazy. Maybe the punch-drunk air at Pyramid Lake killed her. Monty Clift had a bad thyroid. Maybe it was a magnet to the radiation blowing upwind to The Misfits.
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