Other Resort Cities

by Tod Goldberg

  “Oh,” Gordon says, “you live here a while it becomes like anywhere else. You find your shit, you know? This town, I can bartend until I’m sixty-five, seventy, and no one would think differently about me. Maybe along the way I find a rich old woman who wants to take care of a hot young stud like me, I hold her hand for a few years, take her to her Botox appointments, and then, one day, she dies in her sleep and I’m a millionaire.” Gordon’s laughing now, but Tania sees something sad in his face, like he’s not just joking around, like part of him believes this might be his best chance for a good life.

  “You’ve got it figured out,” Tania says.

  “ Presuming I don’t blow my head off first,” he says.

  “ You don’t seem the suicide type,” Tania says.

  “They’d just prop me behind the bar. It wouldn’t be much difference. But if you stick around until I get my millions,” Gordon says, “I’ll let you move into my guest house. We’ll sit around the saltwater pool all day reading thrillers and sipping cognac.”

  “I see myself moving somewhere with a bit more character. A little history. Less tourists. All my life, I’ve been stuck with tourists.”

  “Like Maine or somewhere?”

  “Somewhere,” Tania says.

  “No way for me,” Gordon says. “I’m California bred and spread.” Another girl—Tania can never remember if her name is Cindy or Bonnie, so she just calls her “sweetie”—slams her order on the counter, prompting Gordon to glare at her. “To be continued,” he says. “Don’t pack your bags for Maine just yet.”

  Really Tania was thinking about Russia—Tula, Russia, specifically—but telling Gordon that would mean she’d have to explain her situation, and she just isn’t emotionally prepared for that, at least not at work. Talking about Natalya here would make her trivial.

  Even still, going back to Russia has been on her mind constantly these days. Maybe Natalya went back. Maybe there was an email from Natalya waiting for Tania right this instant telling her to come back to Tula, that she was sorry, too, and that she’d love to see her mother.

  Before she picked up Natalya in Tula, Tania imagined Russia would be a perpetually gray country filled with scary Communists, like the ones they used to show marching in Red Square, back when Ronald Reagan used to scare her, too. Everyone told her to be careful, tell people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t kill her, to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  But when she finally arrived—she remembered the date exactly: February 22, 1997—after flying into Moscow and then driving for two hours with an administrator from the orphanage, she couldn’t get over how beautiful the country was, how pleasant the people she met seemed to be, how substantial everything felt. The administrator kept pointing out interesting landmarks between Moscow and Tula, talked about Peter the Great, discussed the rich mining history of the city. And what a city: Citadels from the sixteenth century. Lush green forests surrounding the Upa River. Museums honoring famous writers and warriors. It was nothing like Las Vegas, nothing like Reno, nothing like any place she’d ever visited. She wondered even then what it might be like to settle in Russia, to raise her child in her home country, to live in such a place! Yes, she’d come back here when Natalya was fully integrated as an American. Adopting a twelve-year-old would present problems, she knew that, but Tania thought that later in life they would travel back here together, maybe buy a little house. Tania was thirty-five then, just twenty-three years older than her new daughter. Young enough that they’d be like friends the older Natalya got, less like mother and daughter.

  So foolish, Tania thinks, grabbing up her tray. All of it.

  Adopting Natalya wasn’t something Tania planned. It was the money that did it. Well, the money and loneliness. A few weeks after she hit the royal, Tania’s fifteen-year-old dog, Lucy, woke up one morning and urinated blood; three hours later Tania watched while her vet quietly inserted a needle into her dog’s right front paw to put her to sleep (a term Tania has never liked, as the implication is that the dog will someday wake up and be just fine), and just like that, after fifteen years and three hours, she was completely alone.

  Oh, she still had family and friends then; people she honestly loved at some point. But when it all boiled away, the fact was that she just didn’t keep people very well. Her parents and older sister, Justine, still sent her Christmas and birthday gifts, invited her to their homes for Thanksgiving (they even offered money if she couldn’t afford a plane ticket from Las Vegas, since her parents lived in Spokane and her sister in San Francisco), called once a week—and she enjoyed talking to them, but afterward couldn’t recount a single aspect of the conversation.

  She’d had a series of boyfriends, too. Most of them long-term affairs, actually, and at the time had just broken up with a DJ at the Rio after he accepted a six-month gig on a cruise ship, but their relationship hadn’t even been intimate. All things being equal, sitting on the sofa at home and talking to her dog was preferable most of the time anyway.

  That night, though, her dog dead, her parents and sister filled with the kind of comfort people without pets usually provide—“What you should do tomorrow is go to a rescue and pick up an abused dog,” her father said—she sat alone on her sofa and watched a documentary on HBO about the plight of children in Russian orphanages. By the film’s conclusion, Tania decided to make something of her life, to put her royal winnings to good use, give someone a chance at a better life, allow that money to be more than just a house she’d struggle to pay for night after night. She’d found the perfect place in Summerlin—a three bedroom with a little lap pool out back, Corian counters throughout, a view of the Red Rock Mountains—and was preparing to make an offer, though she didn’t even know what that meant. Either she’d buy or she wouldn’t, and she hadn’t.

  No, she didn’t need a house. Tania knew her life was disposable, as if someone could cut her head off and paste it on another girl’s body, and the world wouldn’t notice at all. She needed to become. She would adopt a child from Russia. She would look into dental hygienist school—several girls she’d worked with at the Mirage were studying at the community college during the day to become hygienists, and it sounded like a good job, albeit one spent on your feet all day bent over people, which in concept sounded not much different than cocktailing.

  She’d always had maternal instincts. Tania had even been pregnant once, if only for a few weeks. Her boyfriend Clive got her pregnant—this was when she was thirty—and Tania spent an entire long weekend off from work shopping for baby clothes at Target, rummaging through garage sales for baby carriages and strollers and figuring out how to decorate the baby’s room. It was too soon, she knew that, as she’d only just missed her period, but she’d taken an at-home test and had an appointment to see her gynecologist for the following week and felt a great desire to begin this new phase of her life, sure that being a mother wasn’t so much a calling for her now as it was a station: a chance to be a better person. She was certain she’d need to move in order to get away from Clive, who, while he was a fun guy to waste time with, would be a terrible father. It wasn’t that he’d ever hit her or even been particularly cruel, only that he was stupid, and stupid would not do as a role model. No, she decided, she’d just move up to Spokane with her child—who she thought she’d name Corey no matter the sex—and her own father could play that positive role until she found someone smart, someone who didn’t work at a restaurant or bar. When she miscarried a few days later, she broke up with Clive to pay penance for her own conceit; to bring a child into this world, when they couldn’t even save the dolphins or blue whales or whatever, well, it was just silly. A dog would do. Yes. A dog would be enough until things felt more stable all around. But even now, in the small storage locker she has in her building in Desert Hot Springs, there’s a box marked “Corey” that she’s hauled around across two states and several years.

  When she woke up the morning after seeing the documentary and couldn’t get the idea of adopting a Ru
ssian child out of her mind, couldn’t stop thinking that her life had been lived in service, strictly service, and that this was her chance to actually be a real human, to get off her ass and make something stable for someone else, she knew she had to act. She had to learn to keep something, to not spontaneously rid herself of responsibility.

  What Tania didn’t realize was how long and arduous and pricey the whole experience would be. It took just over a year between the day her dog died and the exact moment she stepped off the airplane in Las Vegas with her daughter (her daughter!) by her side. She spent eleven months searching for the right child, filling out the paperwork, getting the approvals, paying the fees—it was $20,000 to the Russian agencies, another $5,000 for lawyers and paperwork stateside—until, in the end, she had to ask her parents if she could borrow another $5,000 just to get to Russia, where she’d need to stay for a month to attend adoption hearings and to get Natalya legal for her arrival in the U.S. Her parents ended up giving her $10,000, told her it wasn’t a loan, that it was a gift, that they were so proud of her.

  Natalya lived with Tania for five years. Five good years, Tania thinks now, dropping off drinks in the slot aisles for nickel and quarter tips, though like everything else about the past, she’s sure that’s just the romantic version. She loved Natalya, though. This Tania is sure of. And if Natalya never really loved her, that’s okay, too. She’d given Natalya the chance and there was worth in that.

  After her shift ends at six, Tania walks down Palm Canyon Drive and looks into the shop windows, examining the silly T-shirts and bumper stickers (“What happens in Palm Springs, stays in Palm Springs . . . usually in a Time Share”), the gaudy jewelry only a vacationer would find the impulse for, the fancy clothes she never sees inside the casino, but assumes someone must wear somewhere. She’s always reading about these gala charities and benefit balls held in Palm Springs but can’t imagine who the people are who attend such things or where they buy their clothes. Surely none of them pile into the Mercedes and come to the tourist traps to do their shopping.

  Tania pauses in front of Chico’s and peers inside at the shoppers, all of whom look to be around her age, but are infected with what she thinks of as Realtoritis: their hair about five years past the trend, their tans rubbed on, their heels inappropriately high. And yet they exude an air of success, as if by showing property they somehow glean personal value.

  She wonders, if she were a dental hygienist—if she somehow managed to finally pass chemistry, which she failed three times while she lived in Las Vegas, twice in the year she waited on the adoption, once in the six months after Natalya ran away (and really, she didn’t run away, she just left)—if people would be able to tell just by looking at her. Maybe she might be mistaken for a doctor occasionally. That wouldn’t be so awful. And maybe people would treat her with respect without understanding why they did it. Cocktailing was never her dream job, but then nothing else struck her as all that compelling, either. When she was young, if there was a chance to fuck up, Tania usually took it, just to see what it felt like. And the result was that she felt, after forty-seven years, that she’d lived, even if she didn’t really have much to show for it anymore.

  The idea of being a hygienist was a good one, and she really pursued it during that year of waiting, if nothing else because it looked good on all of her applications. She wasn’t just a cocktail waitress, she was “studying to become a dental hygienist,” and people at the various agencies seemed to treat that with some dignity. But now, staring at the women trying on skirts too short by a decade, she thinks that it’s all the same in the end. Just a job. Just a way to afford the things you want. Tania doesn’t want anything anymore. She needs to find Natalya, if only to know that she’s alive, but even that has quelled some in the intervening years as she’s learned how frequently teenagers adopted out of Russia simply pick up and leave when they have a little money or the keys to the car or the PIN code to their parents’ATM card.

  Tania checks her watch. She agreed to meet Gordon at 6:30 in front of the statue of former Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono that graces a courtyard up the street from the casino. He asked if he could buy her a drink after work, and when she told him she didn’t drink anymore, which wasn’t strictly true, he didn’t flinch. “Then let me buy you a lamp. You must like lights, right? I know a great little lamp store. They even give you the shades and bulbs, too. It’s a real deal.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said, but agreed to meet him anyway and now was going to be late if she didn’t hustle. Sundays were always sad nights for Tania, and the truth was that she was likely to pop some Two Buck Chuck tonight in front of the TV herself, Sundays her night off of the Internet, a night away from her search. Really, it was more a habit now than anything: Check the message board at LostAndFoundChildren.com to see if anyone responded to her photo of Natalya; read the listserv messages from her Yahoo group; scour every search engine, newspaper archive, and blog index on the planet for any mention of Natalya’s known names. This searching was her infinity. A bottomless hope. But she gave Sundays up after her own mother told her to start weaning herself, that she had to grasp the idea that Natalya wasn’t really her child, that she’d just been a child who lived with her for a time. “Think of it like a car lease,” her mother said. “That’s how we’ve approached it emotionally; she wasn’t our granddaughter, just a child who lived with our daughter.”

  Like a car lease. Tania knew her mother meant well and so she tried, on Sundays, to treat Natalya’s disappearance like an episode of a TV show that she found particularly emotionally affecting, if only for twenty-four hours.

  Up ahead, Tania sees Gordon leaning up against the Sonny Bono statue. He doesn’t see her yet, so she takes a few seconds to stare at him, notices that a few of the passing tourist ladies are doing the same. It’s late spring and the air smells like a mixture of coconut tanning oil and jacaranda blooms, and it only makes sense that Gordon has changed from his casino uniform into tan pants and a white linen button-down, but for some reason Tania is surprised by this, by how effortlessly casual he looks, how he seems to fit in so perfectly. Even from several yards away Tania can see his tan skin through his shirt, the contours of his body. She wonders how old he is, thinks he’s probably thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight, too young for her now, anyway. And what does she know about him? What does she know about anybody anymore?

  “There you are,” he says when Tania finally approaches him. He puts an arm over her shoulder in a friendly way and gives her a pat, like they’re brother and sister. “I thought you were going to ditch me here with Sonny.”

  “You know I’m forty-seven,” she says.

  “How would I know that?”

  “I’m just telling you,” she says.

  “Is today your birthday?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Then why are we talking about it?”

  “I’m not sure why you asked me out,” Tania says. “What we’re doing here. That’s all.”

  Gordon exhales, and Tania realizes he’s been holding his breath, that he actually seems a little nervous now that she’s paying attention. “Can’t people go out for a drink, Tania? Isn’t that what normal people do?”

  “Are we normal people? All day spent watching people fuck up their lives. Who would call that normal?” Gordon nods, but it’s clear he’s not agreeing to anything, just happy to let Tania vent whatever it is she feels the need to vent. She likes that, though is certain he’s just trying to humor her. Give him a break, Tania thinks. Act like a person for an hour, see how it feels. “Where was this lamp store you were talking about? I’m in great need of track lighting.”

  What Tania remembers about Natalya is insignificant if looked at obliquely. She’s realized this before tonight, before she saw Gordon’s expression glaze over while she prattled on about the way Natalya used to sneeze every time she ate chocolate, or how Natalya’s eyes were brown on some days and green on others, or how, when she’s feeling particularly sentim
ental, she’ll spray a bit of Natalya’s perfume on her old pillow and will set it down across the room while she’s watching television or cooking something, so that she’ll just get a whiff of it in the course of doing regular things, and it will be like Natalya’s in the other room, sitting on the floor like she used to do with her headphones on, listening to her English language tapes.

  She could blame on the liquor this sudden descent into reverie, but that would be useless. As soon as Gordon asked her, “How did you end up in Palm Springs?” she felt it all bubble out, the whole story, from her cocker Lucy dying, to waking up one morning in her townhouse in Las Vegas to find Natalya gone, along with the Ford Explorer, the keys to the safe-deposit box (where Tania—like every other cocktail waitress, bartender, and stripper in Las Vegas—deposited the majority of her tips so she wouldn’t have to report them to the IRS), and, most disheartening, three full photo albums of pictures taken since Natalya’s arrival.

  How did she end up in Palm Springs? She asked herself this question repeatedly, and the answer was always the same: it wasn’t Las Vegas. Usually that sufficed, but tonight, sitting across from Gordon, his face getting younger with every passing moment, until she’s certain he’s no more than thirty-two (unless what’s happened is that with each drink and sad detail she’s tacked on another month to her own life, so that she’s now pushing seventy years old), she knows that she ended up in Palm Springs because it was the only place she could run to where she had no memories, no connections, nothing corporeal to remind her of everything lost, but where the world itself was essentially the same. She could do her job. She could breathe the desert air. She could listen to the dinging of the slots, the whooping of the drunks, the crunching of ice in the blender constantly making margaritas, the drone of mindless cocktail conversation and pretend that her life had frozen in place, that she’d conjured the whole sad affair. Yes, she could close her eyes inside the Chuyalla Indian Casino and imagine herself thirty, childless and disproportionate to reality.