The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  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 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 been pregnant once, if only for a few weeks. Her boyfriend, a bouncer at the Wild Horse everyone called Slim Joe, got her pregnant—this was when she was thirty, though she told Slim Joe she was twenty-two—and Tania spent a long weekend off from work shopping for baby clothes at Walmart, rummaging through garage sales for baby carriages and strollers. 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 Joe, 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 been particularly cruel, only that he was stupid, and stupid would not do as a role model, plus he told everyone he was Bennie Savone’s nephew, as if that was something to be proud of, the glory of being adjacent to some two-bit fake-ass Pacino.

  She decided to move to Spokane with her child—who she thought she’d name Corey no matter the sex—and her 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 Slim Joe 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. 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.

  When she woke up the morning after seeing the documentary and couldn’t get the idea of adopting a Russian child out of her mind, 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 under 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 $30,000 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 and half years. Five and a half 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. This Tania is sure of. And if Natalya never 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 timeshare”), the gaudy jewelry only a vacationer would find the impulse for, the fancy clothes she never sees inside the casino but assumes are worn somewhere. She’s always reading about these gala charities and benefit balls held in Palm Springs but can’t imagine the people 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 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 people would be able to tell just by looking at her. Maybe she might occasionally be mistaken for a doctor. That wouldn’t be so awful. Maybe people would treat her with respect without understanding why they did so. 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.

  The idea of being a hygienist was one she pursued during that year of waiting, if nothing else because it looked good on all of her adoption applications. People at the various agencies seemed to treat that with some dignity. But 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 okay, 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 to their parents’ ATM card.

  Tania checks her watch. She agreed to meet Gordon at six thirty 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 she 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 she was likely to pop some Two-Buck Chuck 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. This searching was her infinity. A bottomless hope. But she gave Sundays up after her 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 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, 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 wha
t 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.”

  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 she 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 sentimental, she’ll spray a bit of Natalya’s perfume on her old pillow and 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 the liquor for 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 basset Lucy dying to coming home from her overnight shift at the Mirage to find Natalya gone, along with all of her clothes, a couple thousand dollars in cash Tania kept in her closet, and, most disheartening, three full photo albums of pictures taken since Natalya’s arrival, the last five years erased, as if Natalya had never existed.

  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 she’s tacked on another month to her life, so that she’s now pushing seventy), she knows that she ended up in Palm Springs because it was the only place where she had no memories, no connections, nothing 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, 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.

  “I’ve ruined the night,” Tania says. She and Gordon have been sitting at the patio bar in front of the Hyatt for three hours. There’s a man playing acoustic guitar on a small stage a few feet away from them, and every fifteen minutes or so he plays “Margaritaville” and another ten tourists stop to sing along. “I didn’t mean to go on like that.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Gordon says. He reaches across the table and tries to take her hands, but she puts them in her lap before she remembers her own admonition: Be human.

  “I should go home,” she says, forgetting that she doesn’t have a car anymore, that she’ll need to call a cab or ask Gordon for a ride, since the buses stopped running hours ago. “I’ll end up telling you about every boyfriend I’ve ever had otherwise.”

  Gordon doesn’t smile like she thinks he will. He just stares at her. “Let me ask you something,” he says eventually. “You think you’ll ever find her?”

  “No,” Tania says, and for the first time she believes it. The truth is that no one has ever asked her this question, though of course it existed in the subtext of her life all the while—a nagging sense that her search for Natalya was what she should be doing, but the fact remained that if Natalya wanted to be found, if Natalya wanted Tania to find her, specifically, it would have already happened. “I may locate her at some point. But I don’t think I’ll ever see her again.”

  TANIA STARES OUT her sliding glass door as Gordon’s taillights disappear down the hill, back toward Palm Springs. It’s midnight and though the air has chilled, Tania feels feverish. She told Gordon, as he pulled up to her complex, that she’d invite him in but was afraid she’d caught a bug sitting outside for so long this evening. She shakes her head thinking about it, how silly she must have sounded, as if she could catch consumption from sitting outside listening to Jimmy Buffett songs on a spring night.

  “It’s okay,” he said, and Tania sensed solace from Gordon, though the truth is that she’s forgotten how to read young men. They used to be so obvious to her, but now they’re just mannerisms in her peripheral. “There will be other nights. I know where you work.”

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek and got out of his car, didn’t bother to turn and smile or even give a little wave when she got to the top step of the metal staircase that leads to her apartment, though she knew Gordon was watching her. He’d been raised well enough to wait until a woman was inside her home before driving off, but not well enough to be doing something better with his life than bartending at an Indian casino, and that alone made Tania sad for him.

  Tania opens the sliding door and steps outside onto her tiny patio. She’s arranged three pots of daisies around a single white plastic chair and though it doesn’t seem like much, it’s all she can do to keep those daisies alive. She stands against the wrought iron railing surrounding the patio and stares south toward the wind farms of Palm Springs, watches as light jumps between the spinning windmill turbines, listens for the low whine of the coyotes that often rummage in the dumpsters behind her building and who she sees lazing in the shadows on the hottest desert mornings.

  She knows she gave up too much tonight, that things will be awkward with Gordon from now on, but that’s okay. Nothing’s permanent anymore. There’s nothing that says this life has to be lived waiting for the next shame. “Natalya is not coming back,” Tania says aloud, and then she says it again and again and again, until her words have lost all shape in her ears, until she feels something rise up inside of her, a sense of confidence, of lucidity, that she can’t recall ever possessing. She sits down in the white plastic chair and realizes what she’s feeling, after so long, after all these years, is relief.

  THE SPARE

  Chicago

  Summer 1973

  If Dark Billy Cupertine had to kill a guy, he preferred to do it up close, with his bare hands. He didn’t want to get used to it, was the thing, and if you were popping motherfuckers in the back of the head, maybe you could pretend it wasn’t real, that the bullet did the work, that you weren’t involved, like how all these young guys from the neighborhood talked about greasing motherfuckers in Vietnam. Just a thing they did every day. Push a button and boom, done. You kill a guy with your hands, you punch his teeth into his throat, you beat his eyeballs into the back of his head, you break his windpipe and watch him choke on his own blood? Man, that’s yours.

  “This would go faster if you grabbed a shovel,” Germaio Moretti said.
The two of them were in a vacant lot, surrounded by a corona of semi-built homes, that eventually would become a three-bedroom house, Germaio chest-deep in a grave being dug for a guy named Randall Dover, who owned a car dealership in Batavia.

  Mosquitoes the size of tennis balls buzzed around them. Near dawn and still in the nineties.

  Billy said, “You kill a guy, you dig his grave. That’s the rules.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since now,” Billy said. Germaio didn’t really answer to Billy Cupertine, since he was cousin Ronnie’s personal muscle, but Cupertines were Cupertines, and so Billy had rank. Cupertine blood ran The Family since 1896, back when it was just a crew robbing steam trains. “Plus, I’m going on vacation in the morning. I can’t be showing up covered in fucking dirt.”

  “I’m lodging a complaint with the boss,” Germaio said, not even half joking. “You know my back is shit.”

  Billy shook out a cigarette, lit it up, looked back across the Des Plaines River. He could see in the distance the thirty-foot-tall lights ringing Joliet Prison. His old man did three years there. Ronnie’s pop, Dandy Tommy, did eighteen months. Germaio did a five-year bid, but somehow Billy had avoided spending any official time there, apart from visiting his father. Longest he’d ever been locked up was a couple months off and on in juvie, then maybe three months total in county over the years, but nothing since having a kid. Because the fact was, if he got arrested for the shit he did now, he’d be staring at life sentences if he was lucky. He told Ronnie he needed to be more careful, couldn’t be doing this hands-on bullshit, that he could oversee, but he wasn’t gonna be on the dirty end of this business.