“You’re a laugh,” Val said to Johnny. “You set up a guy in a coffee shop, so our Vivienne would have someone to snap. You basically handpick who your wife will pick…and you say it’s none of your business? Man, when she finds out.”
“She’s not going to find out, I told you. This Andy fellow is solid. He has the cabbage. Chances are he won’t talk.” Johnny turned the notebook page to a fresh one and drew a toothpick with a squiggle thing on it, then wrote #21 beside it.
Val glanced down at the line and squiggle, raised an eyebrow, “What’s that?”
“That, my friend,” Johnny said, tapping his silver space pen on the page, “is número veintiuno. To you, number twenty-one. To the fly on the wall, maybe an hors d’oeuvre or a toothpick. But that, my friend, is a marriage.”
Val looked at Johnny with a mixture of contempt and total enjoyment of the absurdity. Val’s shoes were dog flapped, slit, cut, Johnny’s left side was blood-dried, his face hanging off-kilter.
Johnny pointed to his sketch. “To the innocent, that is a tapa, a toothpick with calamari. If I told you it was grilled, would you believe me? If I told you Vivienne and I like it, would it make a difference? If I told you I could leave this page anywhere, anywhere she might find it, and when she saw this line and this squiggle and the #21, she would know immediately, instantly what it meant.” He tapped the page. “That, my Valerina, is love. That, my friend, is marriage. That is the ultimate spycraft. The secret signs between marriage partners. Do you know what Vivienne would say when she saw this?”
“Do I care?” Val’s eyes looked at the #21, and at the verandah space where Vivienne might return.
Johnny leaned back on the red leatherette. Their lit cigarettes sat in the black plastic ashtray, burning to ash. “She’d go, ‘Oh. Aw. Gee. He left a little love note, he left me a note that said:
Dear V, my Vivienne, darling Vivi, let me remind you, you are the star I steer by.
Remember how we used to go to Txapela in Barcelona up the Passeig de Gràcia at two in the morning for tapas at the counter? How we had to sit on the west side, how we had to sit right by the part open to the street, how it had to be the fourth and the fifth stool in and the first order was Dos Numero Veintiuno, and then Veintiuno, dos mas. Before we even sat down, when we still had one leg in the street, we would say, ‘Two Number 21,’ and then, with the melting squid in our mouths all olive oil and tender, we would say, ‘Number 21, two more.’ Number 21 meant the order number on the tapas menu of the Basque tapas joint where the fresh squid, which had walked up from the Mediterranean a moment ago, was off-the-cuff sizzled in the wee hours. We solved all the world’s problems with squid and Rioja. Number twenty-one also meant we kept doubling down on the grilled calamari in the place we learned it was swell to drink the best wine in the best place, Barcelona, where the protocol is informality, and to drink it as the locals do, in short unstemmed flat-bottomed three-inch-high round glasses. The wine tutored us in how to drink the wine. The squid taught us how to eat it.
“All that, huh?” Val said. He knew it was true, and he hated that it was true. If Val wrote down #21 on a piece of paper and handed it to Vivienne, she might think it was a motel room number, or an invitation to blackjack.
Johnny ripped out the page from his Moleskine. He got up and went inside the restaurant. The waiter was schmoozing the lady at the cash, who was snapping rolls of coin into the till. Johnny folded the piece of paper. “You see a woman and a guy go around the corner a few minutes ago?”
“A man and a woman around the corner a few minutes ago?” the lady at the till asked.
“Yeah. She’s in pink. He’s tall; gold jacket. A few minutes ago.”
“A few minutes ago? Gold jacket, tall, she’s in pink?”
“That’s it. Can you knock on his room door?”
“Knock on his room door, sir?”
He gave the mirror-talking woman the folded piece of paper with #21 on it. “Pass this in. When they’re done.”
“Done, sir?”
Johnny did not like how done rhymed with fun. “Done?” he said. Now he was doing it. “Yes. And tell her Johnny loves her.”
“Johnny loves her, sir? Will that be all right with Johnny?”
“It will be all right with Johnny. I am Johnny.”
“Oh. I see, sir. You’re Johnny? Good. I will be sure to pass the note to her, when she’s finished.” As forecast by the therapist-doctor-waiter, Van Morrison’s voice came on the loudspeakers. “Madame George.” Van singing about how Madame Joy saw them to the train. Johnny was joyful in a small way to have a message in the wind to her. Maybe she didn’t know how much he loved her, maybe she didn’t know he relied on her love to stay alive.
The waiter said to the lady at the till, “Lauren, bear with me. I gotta make an adjustment.” He reached into his black Swiss Cheese Sandwich T-shirt and after a series of squeaking sounds, he pulled out an arm. He laid the wooden arm on the counter. “Not the best, but it was all I could afford, you see, sir. The VA is trying to see if they can get me an arm that fits.”
Lauren said to Johnny, “Billy is good people. He lost his arm to the Taliban.”
Johnny was feeling dizzy. His ears opened to hear more of the wildcast mumbles of Van Morrison and the dilating doom of a velvet judgment day.
28
ATOMIC PYTHON TATTOO
THERE WAS RUIN here. The word lush was not a word you used here, you used stark. In a small motel in a beautiful stark nowhere place just shy of the badlands, a man and a woman in the afternoon winter sun had retired inside a small nondescript room. When the duende is humming, you need no luxury digs.
“Let me kill your husband,” Andy said, easy, Vivienne in his arms in bed. He could have been saying Let me drive you to my mom’s house. Johnny was still her husband, Val was still the second guy and Andy was still the promised air of springtime. Vivienne looked at her left arm: not as mottled as the right arm. She put her camera into her left hand and, with that weaker hand, she shot her right arm, forensically, the living autopsy of bomb damage. She had always wanted to go to Japan, but hey, Japan had come to her another way. Tōmatsu, the great Japanese photographer she so admired, who took the great photos of Okinawa, of Hiroshima, of the American sailors and the Japanese teens emulating the American sailors, why, Shōmei Tōmatsu could put Vivienne Pink in his photo gallery of the skin of America, which had become a dermatological landscape of damage. Hey, baby, I’m a mess, let me be your model. I’ve got Atomic Neck. I’ve got Nevada Arm. I’ve got me a Holiday Atomic Tattoo. An A-Bomb, the ultimate hack of my body.
“Are you game?” Andy asked. “But what about that other guy, what’s his name who stuck his face in our business back at the Flamingo?”
Vivienne was wary of the way this Andy was talking. He sounded too sane. “I’d like to spend my life with you,” he said. “I’m going to sit outside for a bit.” He put his gold jacket on over his bare chest. He had his jeans. He was still barefoot.
Vivienne lay on the bed, frantically immobilized. The red door was open. She crawled to the end of the bed, taking pictures of Andy’s back just outside the door, his left arm in that gold suede jacket, his arm bent the way a long-time smoker bends it, solicitously, politely, enjoying it, an intimate story with his hand. A story of how you make the endless time pass.
Vivienne knew she was in shock, and she kept being in it. She kept playing through the skill set of knowing the danger she was in, and staying in it. Of recognizing it the way a marathoner might recognize his hypothermia or his dehydration and keep on going. The way he might know his cramps as not ordinary cramps and keep on going. Know injury and know the payment coming, having paid that payment before and kept going, using that now-familiar skill set honed when you have said, I cannot go on one more inch, and you do. And it is a kingdom of incremental inches, and then glory comes, and you know it came only because there was a choice: go ahead, or turn back, or stand pat. And you could not look yourself in the mirror i
f you stood pat or went back, so you inched on, and then you looked yourself in the mirror, and more glory: your damn face had been blown to a distorted fuck up. You did not, however, give up. If you gave up, there was no story.
Vivienne framed Andy in the golden Western doorway, his arm in the gold jacket, his cigarette shorter, his hand – Yes! – about to flick the ash down and she got that drooping arm, the ash falling in the air, and her own left arm she lifted into the frame, a skin object that resembled the shingled roof of the eatery in the distance. The subject was a clothed man, the photographer a nude woman.
Andy, not turning around, said from outside, “I can use my gun. I can go around the corner and put two in him, and you and me can hotfoot it over to Lone Pine, maybe up to Independence, Mammoth Lakes. Are you game?”
“Are you nuts? I told you this is not a movie. Stay away from guns.” She moved closer to the door, then she decided she had to take the shot another way. She walked backwards to the bathroom and took a pic of the ordinary modern nondescript twin beds and the TV on the plain particleboard bureau and the standing lamp with the pink accordion shade by the doorway, and the doorway framing Andy’s arm, which he had threaded through the white metal arm of the chair, and which was, sans cigarette, gripping the bottom of the chair. His tense arm and hand told a story.
Once in a while, the gift of the gods, those tumbling sparkles, the charismatas, get lit on fire out of the embers of their own atomic memory base. Once in a while, what a woman made a man feel, he feels again, how roiled up and unsettled she made him feel; how she made his soul seep out to the surface of his skin, and show itself to the lens of the camera; how they entered a conversation together, between the maker of art, her, and the materials of her art, him. How he felt vulnerable as her plasticity. How he loved it – as if she were forgiving him for something he had not done yet.
“Your husband loves you,” Andy said, not moving from his chair outside the door.
“What do you know about my husband? Leave my husband out of this. Not your concern, honey. Buzz off about him, okay?”
“He is looking out for your welfare,” Andy said.
Vivienne did not come to the doorway, or go outside. One minute Andy was suggesting killing Johnny, next minute he was talking like he knows him, like they’re pals. One minute he was her soldier-nurse, next minute the nurse would be a killer. She sat down on the bed, seeing an old bicycle wheel leaning up against the trunk of a tree. She got a shot of that, saying, “You want to kill my husband, then you say he is looking out for me, he loves me. Which is it?”
Andy craned his neck back, leaning through the motel room doorway. “Both,” Andy said. She saw smoke curl around his head, a new cigarette, a new shape to his fingers. “Jojo loves you very much.”
“What did you say? Jojo? Jojo?! Where in God’s name did you get Jojo from?” She did not say, my husband’s nickname, my name for Johnny, because she had trained herself in being secure. After all, Johnny was a well-known writer and many a man, and many a woman, wanted something from him: glitter dust, glitter semen, glitter blurbs, the taste of labour by association, Johnny Coma’s glitter name. Johnny called them glory hounds. This kid could have gone and Googled her, and found Johnny, but her names for Johnny and Johnny’s names for her were not on any website. In fact she and Jojo planted false information about themselves, which their closest friends knew was false, in order to follow it, and see who among the poseurs passed on the, as Johnny called them, wiki-winks J and V had inserted themselves.
So how did this soldier boy on his way to Iraq, who she had encountered in the hotel coffee shop, know her nickname for Johnny? Calm down, Vivi, she said to herself, no doubt you dropped it, said it in the room back there, after all, you did gender-bend with this guy twenty-six stories up, the night before he was due to deploy.
Still. It bugged her.
She came to the doorway. He did not look up at her. She tapped him on the shoulder. He still did not look up. “What else do you know about me?” she asked.
“You?” Andy said. “Plenty.” He flicked his cigarette into the dirt.
“You fucker. Stop talking to me like that. You know my husband is just around the corner. Johnny is. Johnny, to you, if you do not mind.” She crouched at the door, duckwalked forward, rested her right arm on the arm of his chair. He moved his arm. He got up, walked past her into the room. Vivienne stayed outside and took pics of him through the doorway with the dark inside and the light outside, Andy a shadow figure, a phantom, the TV on, colour flashing out, a good pic of his shoes at the end of the bed and the colours off the TV screen in profile.
“You want this book finished, don’t you?” he said when she came in.
“I do.” She searched his eyes. There were flecks of hurt in there, discipline and light.
“I know you are married,” Andy said.
“Good,” Vivienne said.
“I am not going to get all hung up on you.”
“Good.”
“Or see you and me fixed up together.”
“We are agreed,” she said.
“I am not going to come back from Iraq with you on my mind and look for you.”
“Honey, you will never be in that position.”
“If I had a picture of you beside my bunk, I would never look at it in the middle of night. I know what you look like, don’t worry, I won’t come after you.”
“Same page,” she said.
“Jojo won’t let you go,” Andy said.
“Shut up about him or I will...”
“You will what?” He sat up straight, shaking the headboard.
“Stop it,” Vivienne said.
“He has you on a leash. I thought you were better. J does.”
“This is a one-minute warning,” she said. She wanted his head and the wall to meet cute, real cute, cute as a motel wallboard concussion. No one had ever called J by that one initial but her. You do not come into a marriage and start using the private names of the lovers. Who does that? This was way over the line. Woe betide the stranger who uses the tender names of lovers from outside, to them.
“The J-man, yeah I bet that’s it,” Andy said. “Do you write him letters, ‘Dear J-man, Dear J-ster. My little J.’”
“Thirty seconds.” Fight or flight? Her adrenaline had one highway: fight. The adrenaline surge had already shut down her peripheral vision. She saw Andy in a focused lit circle. “I would not advise it,” she said. “You have ten seconds.”
“J. Oh J.” Talking high and mocking.
“Nine.”
“J, J, J, J. Oh J dear, would you?” The letter J was not a word, it was not a symbol, it was hardly a sound, it was the strangled sound of love, performed only for those in the private cave.
“Five,” she said.
“Oh, darling J-ster.”
“Four.”
“Mister J. Coma. Is it V and J?”
“Three.”
“Do you call him J when you do it? Was it the J-man who banned you from going back to Baghdad?”
“I am warning you.” Her blood was boiling, her hands were shaking, her thighs were shaking, her hand was her weapon, her power, her art. She stood over him, feeling the blood in her bicep. And the rush to her open hand, and she slapped him hard. Her hand lay on his cheek in a print, deep red. “You shut up about me and my husband, okay?”
“No. No I won’t. I met you, I thought you were a feminist, but you have to check with him before you can work?”
She put the power of her gut and her eye in her fist and gave him a hard one on the jaw. Jaws were on special today. They both heard it crack. He was on his feet with his hands around her wrists. She kicked his nuts. He let go of her wrists. She punched him hard and precisely in the skull. “If the bomb does not get you, Vivienne Pink will. You dare.” She put her hands out, palms open, fingers urging him, Come on, come on.
“I told you a girl like you always hurts a guy like me.” He socked her in the solar plexus.
“Is that what the military teaches you?” she asked. They were both crouched in animal attack position, bums out.
“Maybe.” He was holding his right wrist with his left hand. “You’re solid,” he said. He rubbed his head where she had cracked him one.
“What did you think?” she said, unsmiling.
“You seem too sweet to be that solid,” he said.
“That is a man’s way of thinking, honey. How’s your jaw?”
“I think it’s broken.”
“Good. Teach you what to say.”
“He does love you,” Andy said.
She looked around the room. Nothing to denote a visitor. “Where is your luggage?”
“I don’t have any, somebody dropped me off.”
“Oh, great, are you that loose? Who was she?”
“Only with you,” he said, stepping to her, kissing her tight.
She backed off. “You insult my husband, then you think you can kiss me?”
Andy got his wallet out of the secret zip pocket inside the gold leather jacket, unfolded it and showed Vivienne a thick neat pile of bills lining the black wallet. “Guess where that came from? Five thousand dollars. Five. Not one, not two, not even a handsome three. It was going to be two on layaway and three when I delivered. But I convinced the guy to give me the full five on faith.”
“Good for you, baby,” she said. “I just bet you did. What was it? To kill someone? To service the next girl? Blackmail? Oh I know, surveillance. You could surveil your subject up here in Joe Schmo’s Motel up nowhere’s ass on a mountaintop just out past the backside of deadwater lakes. Man, you must have some real grift gene in you.”
“That’s true, I do. My dad did his fair share of mah-jong tiles with the boys back at Boulder Dam. He had to hock his sax once, never mind, yeah, I convinced the guy I could do the surveillance, so he gave me the full five thousand. Meet Mister Benjamin Franklin and his little Benjies. Cast your eyes on fifty Bens, Vivi.”
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