Angela liggles. It almost makes him cry when she does that. He hits the next image. It’s the old dude with the prickly hat. He’s smiling like crazy, showing off those gorgeous crow’s feet. The unexpected part is the server. She’s laughing, open-mouthed, an expression of sheer release. A tendril of brown hair dangles across her forehead. The lighting radiates her face, a button nose, sharp eyebrows, kittenish eyes, just enough cleavage for sexy, not so much to keep her out of a family brochure.
“Angela, old girl, I hate to make the obvious comment, but – Jackpot.”
“Oh… hoh,” she robots. “You… so… funny. But you’re right. It’s perfect.”
Sixteen
Karen takes Brenda to breakfast at Barton’s 93 and then sees her off. She spends the rest of the day watching free movies in her room (her room that she must get rid of). She fully intends to cross the street and see if the General Store is, in fact, a general store, but curiosity steers her in the direction of Cactus Pete’s Buffet. She’s beginning to see how addictive the casino lifestyle can be. With its plate glass walls and colorful artworks, the buffet is a little irresistible.
What’s worse is that the food is really good. Attendants offer freshly sliced cuts of turkey and roast beef. There are a dozen varieties of seafood, tasty vegetable sides, and an endless selection of pastries, pies and custards. Karen vows to stop at two platefuls, but then she sees a tray of white cheddar macaroni and has to give it a try. She sits at her table taking nibbles, feeling plump. She hopes that no one sees her, but then, of course, who would?
“Hi!”
It’s Dr. Al, looming over her table in a caramel-colored leather jacket. He holds out a beer as if he’s toasting her.
“Karen, right?”
“Yes. Have a seat. I’m making a pig of myself.”
Al sits down and rubs his hands together. “Another victim of the buffet.”
“It’s amazing!” she says. “You just don’t expect the food to be this good.”
“Before Cactus Pete’s, I was the business manager at a culinary academy. When I arrived here, I decided that a casino could pull in extra business if the buffet food had the same quality as a fine restaurant. We built this one from scratch, and, I am happy to report, we have won quite a few awards.”
“Fantastic! I’m a little concerned about my budget, however.”
“Sure. Well, the general store is a legit grocery store, so you could save a little money there.”
“I was wondering about that.”
Dr. Al smiles as if he’s harboring a secret. Karen takes another bite of the mac and cheese. It’s impossibly good.
“I hope I’m not being presumptuous, Dr. Al, but I feel like you’ve got something on your mind.”
“Yes, I do. Sorry.” He fiddles with his phone and shows her the screen. It’s a picture of an elderly fisherman receiving a beer from a radiant young woman. It slowly occurs to Karen that the radiant young woman is her. And that she looks happy. Naturally, she begins to cry. Dr. Al watches her with a growing look of concern.
“This is not really the… reaction I anticipated.”
Karen wipes her eyes with a napkin and smiles. “I can’t believe… how beautiful… Who took this?”
“Gerry Vincent. My regular photog. I asked him to shoot some candids at the convention. He’s got a tremendous eye. We’d like to use it for the brochure next year. If you come by my office tomorrow and sign a release, I’ll cut you a check for a hundred. A modeling fee.”
Karen’s eyes go out of focus. “A modeling fee? Me? A modeling fee?”
Al snickers. “Do I really have to tell you that you’re an attractive woman?”
“Yes!”
“Karen, you’re an attractive woman. Something more than that, too. You have this… girl-next-door quality.”
Karen plants her chin on her palm. “Wow. Could I meet this photographer? I want to thank him.”
Dr. Al thinks about it. Gerry is a creature of habit, and not fond of interruptions. But perhaps Gerry’s routine needs to be messed with.
“You can meet him right now. Follow me.”
Seventeen
Gerry and Sophie are deep into a fetchathon when Sophie detours from her well-worn path to bark at the door. Gerry opens it to find Al ambling up the steps with a fetching brunette. There is no evading Al, he’s too much of a presence. Gerry puts on his best fake smile.
“Dr. Al! What brings you here?”
Al shakes his hand. “I wanted you to meet the young lady from your prize photo. Gerry, this is Karen.”
Karen takes Gerry’s hand and he quickly puts the pieces together, the button nose, the perfect eyebrows, the smile that grows and grows until she’s hugging him. Gerry feels like a ripe fruit at the grocery store, having all the seeds squished out of him. Karen eventually lets him go and laughs, embarrassed. Gerry can see Al behind her, wearing a grin.
“I’m sorry,” says Karen. “But you don’t know how much that photo means to me. You made me look so… happy.”
“When I first showed it to her,” says Al, “she started crying. I never knew you had this effect on females.”
“Neither did I.”
The three of them stand there in silence. Sophie takes the opportunity to run at Karen’s feet and give her a thorough sniffing.
“What an adorable dog!” she says.
“Thanks.”
“You know,” says Al. “I just got a great idea. Gerry, I’d like you to take Karen out sometime this week and take some photos of her. Around the casino and around town. Just charge me for your time. And Karen, too. How’s thirty an hour?”
“Sure!”
“Well, I gotta get back to the casino. Karen, you want a ride?”
“No. I’ll walk.”
Al drives away in his golf cart. Karen and Gerry stand out front to exchange numbers and set up their shoot. Karen fidgets, not certain what will happen if she goes for another handshake.
“Thanks again for… making me a star.”
“Hey, you made the shot. I was just in the right place.”
Karen smiles, and yes, there’s something about that smile. A little embarrassed, in a most fetching way.
“I’ll see you Thursday.”
“Good night.”
She walks toward the casino, which looms like a friendly monster over the low-lying neighborhood. She smokes her breath like a cigarette, feeling playful. Feeling young.
Eighteen
“So you’re really serious about this non-driving thing?”
“Yes,” says Gerry. He’s had this conversation before, and he’s learned to be brief.
“Well,” says Karen. “I guess you’ve got your reasons.”
“Yes.”
“Should we bring the dog?”
“I don’t, usually. She’s a little rambunctious.”
“Well, we’re not shooting for Vogue. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Gerry decides to stick to exteriors. He’s assuming that Dr. Al wants to see Karen in various game-show poses before various Jackpot landmarks. The weather couldn’t be more perfect. It’s a rare sunny day, and although it’s still cold, the light is apple-crisp. They start with Cactus Pete’s – the façade, the swimming pool, the amphitheatre – then cross the street to the Horseshu, Barton’s 93, Four Jacks and the West Star. Gerry tries to make their operation look strictly amateur, but Karen’s not making it easy. She’s got three bags of accessories and is continually trying new hats, scarves, shawls and sunglasses. In front of Barton’s, Gerry stops to tuck in a strand of hair that has escaped her beret. The moment feels fleetingly intimate, but with all his boudoir experience he knows there’s a falseness to that. It’s just a job.
He can tell, however, that Karen is coming through the lens. She is enormously cute, but she doesn’t push for it. She’s comfortable in her own skin, which gives her a certain accessibility. He doesn’t need to prod her into poses – she has a natural ability to shift into subtle variations
– but he pulls out one of the old jokes when he wants the open-mouthed laugh. (“Cindy Crawford? That bitch only wishes she could be you!”) He suspects it might be nervousness, an eagerness to please, but the laughter seems to be genuine.
At the end of the afternoon, they stand at the entry sign for Nevada, atop the hill overlooking town. The sun stripes the casinos in orange light that ends on the snowy flanks of Middle Stack Mountain. Karen and Gerry shoot some more of the game-show photos before the sign, as if the big prize were the entire state of Nevada.
“Time out,” says Karen, and heads for her bags.
“Not long,” says Gerry. “Running out of light.”
As if to make his point, the casino signs and streetlights begin to fire up in a random progression. He watches Karen as she executes an impressive costume change. She removes her cream sweater, leaving her in nothing but a bra, then pulls out a gauzy white shift and slips it over her head. It catches at her shoulders and settles over her hips like a mist. She reaches under and pulls off her jeans, revealing long, lean legs. She steps into a pair of white dance shoes and unties her hair, letting it hang loose over her shoulders.
“Okay,” she says. “I’m gonna work fast, so keep that shutter clickin’.”
She works various dancerly poses around the sign, before the lights of Jackpot. Gerry stalks her like a hunter, working the variations of flash and exposure in the tricky light. Illuminating Karen, leaving her in silhouette, framing around the sign, bringing in the townscape. The wide-angle shot is gorgeous, a lone dancer in the enormity of that sunset sky.
She stops to rest, breathing hard. “I think I’m all out.”
Sophie barks. Sophie never barks.
Karen speaks in an imperial voice. “Bring me the dog.”
Gerry hurries to the car, pulls her out and hands her over. Karen holds Sophie at eye-level and considers her options.
“Okay, doggy, this is a difficult move, so be still. I know that’s hard for you.”
It’s the arabesque, third position. Karen holds Sophie in both hands and flexes her knees. She lifts a leg behind, long and straight over the skyline, and stretches her arms to offer Sophie to the heavens. Gerry snaps away. Just as Karen reaches full extension, Sophie leaps.
She knows it’s a bad idea, but she has to drop him off anyway, so she’s there, and then she has to use the bathroom, so she’s inside the house, and he mentions leftover beef stroganoff, and she’s very hungry, so she says yes. And the reason it’s really a bad idea is that all day long he has had his eyes on her, and of course that’s his job but she can tell he cares, he’s doing his damnedest to make her look beautiful, and this sensation soaks into her skin and she just glows. And at the last, the arabesque, and Sophie takes that leap, and she doesn’t want to mess with his process but she’s dying to see the results.
So Gerry heats up the stroganoff while Karen plays with Sophie. She’s always wanted a fetchy dog, and this one is dedicated to the form. Sophie is such a positive force, Karen can totally understand why people have companion dogs. The stroganoff is excellent – a cabernet sauce, a family recipe. They go through a bottle of merlot and start on a bottle of pinot grigio, and tell jokes about the day’s shoot, Karen standing just so to make it look like she’s holding the cards of the Four Jacks casino sign in her hands. The whole day she wanted to be sexier, to show more skin, but it was cold and it wasn’t that kind of shoot. Gerry makes popcorn and they sit together on the couch to watch When Harry Met Sally and how many times she wants to kiss him but there’s some kind of protective shield around him and little moments of bashfulness but that just makes her want to kiss him more. But she can’t, she needs to stay in Jackpot and she’s happy to curl into the frame of his shoulder and she tries but cannot make it to the end of the movie although of course she knows how it ends.
She wakes in the early-early and hears one half of a conversation. She has heard this before. She falls back to sleep, and when she wakes she’s alone, on the couch, under a red plaid comforter. A piece of notebook paper sits on the coffee table.
Thank you for choosing Vincent Photography for your post-modeling needs. (Please note: you will not be paid for time spent drinking wine and eating beef stroganoff.) I’m off to a boudoir session (yikes!) and have taken doggy with me. Feel free to make use of the bathroom and kitchen facilities (coffee is fresh, eat whatever you like). But first, you might want to follow the blue dashes down the hallway.
The dashes are squares of painter’s tape, running the right-hand wall like highway stripes. They stop at a room on the right, continue across a half-open door and end with an arrow aimed at a large desk. Atop the desk is a computer with a wide monitor, its screen being filled and refilled with manicolored fractals. Karen clicks the mouse and the screen awakens.
She is neither silhouette nor completely human, the falling light striking her here and there, a mythological being in black and white. Behind her are the lights of Jackpot ghosted by a slow-shutter exposure and the pillowy backdrop of Middle Stack Mountain, the moon picking just that moment to peer above the ridge. Karen is extended in the perfect arabesque that Madame Dubois dreamed she would someday perform, her leg straight and true, her toe teasing the West Star Casino. The shift falls over her torso like a thought. Her arms stretch toward Utah, a supplication to the Great Salt Lake as a dark creature flies from her hands. Sophie’s limbs extend in four directions, as if demonstrating the small evolutionary gap between dog and flying squirrel.
Nineteen
Gerry goes to Barton’s for breakfast. The diner there is a little more private, and it doesn’t hurt his business to be seen at places other than Cactus Pete’s.
The food isn’t great, although there’s more of it. He receives a trio of sunny side ups and enough hash browns to stuff a mattress. And then Angela. She settles on the opposite bench. The bottom half of her hair is a standard purple, the top an unnatural black. She wears a silver jacket over a cream-colored sweater and is, for Angela, oddly quiet.
“Hi Ang. What’s up?”
She fishes up a smile. “You like her, don’t you?”
“I assume you mean Karen?”
“Ballet girl. Yeah.” She throws up jazz hands. “The one that was foretold.”
“I’m just doing my job.”
“Nuh-uh. She’s got you. You won’t need me anymore.”
Gerry sets down his fork and reaches for her hand. Her fingernails are purple and silver. “I’ll always need you, Ang.”
She blinks her big green eyes. “You’re calling me Ang.”
“Presumptuous?”
“Maybe. I’m a little tired. Maybe it’s time. I’m a little young to be your guardian.”
“My guardian Angela. I love you, you know. And I will always need you.”
She’s crying. He didn’t know she could do that.
“I guess I’d… like that. But maybe not so often. Might be time for me to move on.”
Karen Roosevelt? Karen Kay. Quill. Johnson. Murot.
Karen sits in the slots at Barton’s 93, sipping at a coffee as she punches plays into a retro machine. You know you win when sevens and bars line up and make a loud noise. This morning, that’s about her speed. She’s been called to a meeting with Dr. Albert High, and she feels like everything depends on this. Her Mt. Hood cushion is gone. It’s time to find a reliable income and a place to live. The photography has been a dream; Gerry has been a dream. But the coffee in this casino sucks. She takes a sip, gnashes her teeth and sees the most remarkable thing. It’s Gerry. As if her thought has conjured him up. He’s sitting in the diner, a table reflected in a mirror over the hostess desk. He’s sipping at an orange juice and talking to someone she can’t see. It seems a little intense, like two lovers ending a relationship. Lovers. That would explain his good behavior the other night. God she’s cynical.
Karen lands three sevens and gets a nice payoff. She’d like to go on playing, but this is money she needs. She’s also madly curious about Gerry.
She prints out her ticket and walks to the diner.
“One?” asks the hostess.
“No. Meeting someone.” She follows the reflection to Gerry’s table and finds him still talking.
“Angela, you’ll always…”
He stops.
“Hi! How are you?” He stands and hugs her.
“Gerry? Who are you talking to?”
“Sorry. An old friend. She had to go. Join me!”
Karen slides in opposite. “Are you a self-talker?”
“Sometimes. I’m a little nervous this morning. Dr. Al called me in for a meeting.”
“Me too!”
“Oh. Well, I guess we know what it’s about. In fact, we’d better get going.”
He picks up the receipt and hands it to the hostess with a twenty.
“Gracias Rosalita.”
She gives him a smile.
“Vamanos, Karen.”
They cross to the sliding doors and into the parking lot.
“Hey, what’s your last name, anyway?”
“Roosevelt,” says Karen. A self-talker. Oh well, mad genius…
“Relation?”
She’d have to get used to that.
“A little. FDR, eighth cousin.”
They cross the wide lot. The sky is a steel overcast, maybe thirty degrees, and she forgot her gloves. When they arrive at the interstate, she reaches for Gerry’s hand. He turns.
“Protect me?”
She’ll always remember the way he grins back.
“Of course.”
Dr. Al’s office sits at the end of a long hallway, offering a view of the swimming pool and the mountains in the distance. Al sits at a cherrywood desk with a black granite inlay. One wall displays a famous boxing painting from the ‘50s, Dempsey and Firpo. The other is covered with shelves of CDs, most of them jazz. Dr. Al waves his visitors into two small chairs covered in black leather. He pulls out an oversize print of the ballet photo.
The Girl in the Flaming Dress Page 4