All the Beautiful Girls
Page 17
“You have no right!” Ruby yelled, managing to catch hold of the shoulder strap while Rose grabbed the body of the purse and tugged.
“Have you looked in a mirror?” Rose asked. “Have you seen what you’re doing to yourself? You haven’t been to work in days!”
“I quit,” Ruby said, still clutching the purse strap.
“Aw fuck, Ruby! What’s going on?”
Ruby capitulated, let go of the purse. And then, completely without warning, she began yet another of her incessant crying jags while Rose dug through the purse and pulled out the huge glass bottle of amphetamines. She held it up, shook it as if it were a maraca.
“For this?” Rose asked. “You’re fucking up your dream life for this?”
“It’s not my dream life. I hate it.”
“Dancing? But why? Why all of a sudden?” Rose sat at Ruby’s feet, put her hand on Ruby’s bare calf. “You haven’t even shaved your legs,” she said, rubbing her hand up and down the stubble. “This is not you. It’s not you at all.”
“There’s no meaning,” Ruby said, and a small kernel of herself was pleased at last to have found a way to say what was wrong. “This killing. The riots.”
“Since when are you such a big civil rights activist?”
“I pay attention to what’s happening in the world.” Ruby rubbed her forehead. She felt an enormous headache coming on. “At least the marchers, they have a purpose. At least they have something they care passionately about.”
“I thought you had dance.”
Ruby shook her head, winced with the pain the movement brought on. “It’s not dance. Not really. It’s prancing. And it’s not important. There’s nothing of value in it.”
“You give people pleasure. You take their minds off of their troubles. You show them beauty.”
“It’s not enough.”
“So, what do you want to do? Protest? Throw rocks through plate-glass windows? Set shops on fire? Link arms, carry placards, and have fire hoses trained on you? Tell me. What exactly is it you want? Because the Ruby Wilde I know doesn’t sit around feeling sorry for herself. She doesn’t drug herself. She deals with things.”
“There aren’t any black showgirls, have you noticed? None. Why not? Is Vegas only for white people? And as for Ruby Wilde,” she said, flinging her hands in the air as if she were tossing confetti, “it’s not even my name. C’mon. Really. Have you even noticed?” Ruby looked into her friend’s face. “Nothing in this entire place is real. It’s all fake. It’s all smoke and mirrors, painted scenery. Silicone tits. Dyed hair. Fake eyelashes. Fake tans. I spent my entire childhood wanting to be anyone but who I was. And, man, I sure found that. I don’t wear costumes—I wear disguises. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
Rose sat listening as Ruby continued at full speed.
“You’re the only one honest enough to go by her real name. Not Vivid. Not Dee for Deelicious or Deesire or Deelight—whatever the hell it is. I’m a fake. Faker by the day.”
“You’re real to me.”
“You’re the only genuine thing, the only real person in this whole fucking shithole. I mean, what are we doing? The real world is trying to stop a war, to find racial equality. Not us. Not Viva Las Vegas. We’re living in la-la land. We’re hanging on by our fingernails to the good ol’ days. Dean Martin, Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney. Andy Williams!” Seeing Rose’s expression, Ruby stopped with the list-making. “They’re the past! I mean, it’s ridiculous. Vegas takes the current hits—but only the ones that don’t say anything. The ones that won’t make people stop and think, that just tell them what they want to hear.” She began humming Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” “We’ll perform those, dance to those. But ‘Monterey’? Or ‘All Along the Watchtower’? No, those songs might actually say something. Mean something.” She took a breath in preparation for yet another verbal sprint.
“C’mon,” Rose said, trying to pull Ruby up and out of the chair. “You’re gonna go stand under the shower, and then I’m taking you out for a steak. Thick, red, juicy steak.”
“Maybe it’s just as well,” Ruby said, resisting Rose’s tug. “They’d take ‘Purple Haze’ and have us shout ‘Kiss the sky!’ while wearing headdresses in the shape of giant red lips.” Ruby giggled at the image.
“Stand up. You have to eat.”
“I can’t eat.”
“You’re going to. So give up now.”
Rose led her down the hallway, and then while Ruby watched, Rose lifted the toilet lid, unscrewed the bottle top, and tilted the jar of pills into the toilet bowl.
“I can get more,” Ruby said. “Any time. All I want.”
“I know that. But it’s a start.” Rose tossed the empty bottle in the trash and turned on the shower. She tested the water temperature with her hand. “Get those clothes off and get in,” she commanded. Much to Ruby’s surprise, she did as she was told.
Ruby had forgotten just how good a shower could feel, and she lingered beneath the flow of warm water. She inhaled the rose, sandalwood, and flowery scents of her Yardley Khadine perfumed soap and realized that something was trying to escape. Something that lived deep inside her, that had settled in the marrow of her bones. The speed was beckoning this ancient, lurking thing—this boiling, black anger and shame—to escape. Clearly, Ruby could not afford this. She’d go crazy. Rose was right. She had to quit the speed.
When she climbed out of the shower, Rose handed her a clean towel. “At least your bed was made.” Rose smiled.
“I always make my bed.” Ruby toweled her hair. “I cannot stand an unmade bed. It feels dirty. As if something’s terribly, terribly wrong. In a really perverse way.” She looked in the mirror, shouted down the pictures of Uncle Miles that had arisen, unbidden. In her steamy reflection, she could see the curve of each rib, the adamant jut of her hipbones. Rose stood behind her, watching Ruby’s expression as she discovered just how wasted she’d become.
“Jesus, kiddo,” Rose said. “You don’t do a single, solitary thing by half measure, do you?”
Ruby looked pleadingly toward her friend’s reflected face. “I know it’s making me crazy, that I’m not thinking right anymore. But I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know if I can.”
“You can. If anyone can, it’s you. I already talked to a doctor, and he told me what you can expect.” Rose held up fingers, counted off the side effects of amphetamine withdrawal. “Fatigue. You’ll probably sleep a whole bunch, then suffer more insomnia. For several days, he said. You’ll either be hyper or dragged out, slow on the uptake. You might have nightmares. But,” she said, holding up a final finger. “You’ll be hungry enough to eat a horse.” She grinned.
Ruby touched her hipbone. A man could slice himself open on this, she thought, before promising Rose she’d try. She would try.
Awash in Rose’s kindness and humbled by her friend’s love, Ruby got clean. It wasn’t easy. As a matter of fact, it was far worse than Rose had predicted. For more nights than seemed possible, Ruby was both exhausted and insomniac. She grew increasingly frantic, watching the hours of two, three, and four A.M. slip past while she remained adamantly awake. In the daylight, her thoughts seemed sluggish, delayed. She would stand in the grocery store, staring into the pyramids of apples and oranges, and she’d wonder what she’d come to buy. She couldn’t even manage to choose one variety of apple over another. Intense cravings nearly consumed her willpower, and all the while she could sense Vivid’s cache of drugs, so close by.
But Scallywag held on, and once she broke free of the drug, Ruby found it unbelievable that she’d descended as she had. She paged through her frenzied design sketches and saw them for the crazy, drug-fueled failures that they were. She burned them in the apartment complex’s barbecue pit, and as the smoke rose, Ruby decided she’d give up cigarettes, too. My body is my temple, she told herself, smiling
.
“You sound like you’ve found Jesus or something,” Vivid said when she came by with a bottle of wine and Ruby turned that down, too. “Get real,” Vivid said. “You can’t be a showgirl and refuse to drink. You just can’t.”
That, Ruby had to agree with, and so she’d drawn the line at banning booze. Still, as the days passed, she felt stronger, more herself than she had in months. She’d successfully mortared-in whatever darkness had tried to overtake her. And, she thought she understood something: Dance was enough when it served as the vehicle of her escape from Kansas, her childhood. But now that she’d left Kansas in the dust, dancing wasn’t enough. Reading the newspaper, reading books—that wasn’t enough, either. Was it love? Was Rose right—did she need a more permanent, reliable man in her life? Maybe the Aviator was right—she needed to use her brain, not just her body. But how? She told herself she’d find the answer, search for it. For now, she knew only one thing with certainty: It was time to go back to work.
Ruby passed the artist Constance Maxwell at her usual spot in the lobby of the Dunes, where she created pastel portraits of patrons. Finding Bob Christianson’s office, Ruby laid on his desktop the hundred-dollar poker chip he’d given her.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” she began.
“Honey, everyone worth his salt knows who Ruby Wilde is.”
“Well, I’d like to work for you. To dance for you, here, in the Casino de Paris show. The Persian Theatre. Wherever you’ll have me.”
“You want to wear costumes by the god otherwise known as Carlos Garcia Vargas.”
“I do.”
“You want to pose for photos on the racecourse, at card tournaments, if that’s what I ask you to do. Even if the publicity job is set for ten A.M., and you didn’t get to bed until three or four.”
“I do.”
“You remember I’m a straight shooter. I tell it like I see it.”
“I do.”
“Well then, Ruby Wilde. To dance for me, you need to put on some weight.” He looked straight through her attempt at disguise—a loose-fitting silk tunic top and black palazzo pants. “Men don’t fantasize about fucking a coat hanger.”
Ruby pressed her lips together. She’d been trying to regain weight; she’d have to try harder.
“Deal?” he asked.
Ruby extended her hand. “Deal.”
“Start learning the routines. See Charlotte, backstage. Give her this,” he said, writing instructions on the back of his business card, just as he’d done when Ruby first met him. “She’ll fix you up.”
“Thanks.”
“Remember when I told you that you had the perfect showgirl body?”
“I do.”
“Then get it back. Once you do that, we’ll talk again.”
“Okay.”
“One more thing,” he said, standing and stretching his back. “And this is nonnegotiable. Stay off the speed.”
She hid her surprise. Apparently, Bob Christianson did see everything. “I will.”
Ruby slid her sunglasses back on and left the casino. She felt that if she’d said one more “I do,” someone would have had to pronounce them man and wife.
* * *
—
SHE TOED THE line at the Dunes. Ruby ate at least six meals a day, gobbled mixing bowls full of pudding. She added avocados to nearly everything. She buttered and ate bread and more bread. Fully loaded baked potatoes. Entire cans of nuts. Slowly, the weight climbed back on, and she started to see soft curves replace forbidding bone.
Celebrating the dawn of 1969 with her friends, Ruby made a silent wish for love and inspiration in the new year. The Aviator sent her a Christmas card, letting her know that he’d been transferred to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. He’d be that much closer, and she thought that one day she just might surprise him with a visit. In the meantime, Ruby dutifully replaced her wallet’s old emergency notification card with a new one, including the Aviator’s updated contact information.
Ruby thought about the passage of time, the changes she’d seen and made since she’d arrived in Vegas coming up on two years ago. Soon she would turn twenty, and the undercurrent of dissatisfaction she’d felt while drugged remained. To tolerate the superficialities she’d begun to refer to as Vegas plastic, she came up with a plan for escape. Ruby tallied her savings—which were substantial, given her income of just about sixty thousand dollars a year, including all of the gifts she converted to cash, the chips she’d been given by enamored men. She had nearly eighty thousand dollars in savings. She told herself she would dance for one more year, smile and charm and stomach Vegas life for that single year, and then she’d set herself up as a designer. She was thinking about L.A. And, if only he would mentor her, she was determined to get Carlos Garcia Vargas’ help.
He’d been designing at the Dunes since 1963 and was known for his use of rich textiles. Vargas didn’t limit himself to silks or satins—he used chinchilla, velvet, and fox. One of the first costumes Ruby wore of his design was made entirely of strings of hot pink beads that were held together by gold-toned cuffs located at strategic points—upper arms, hips, neck. Lacing meant to simulate a Roman soldier’s footwear ran from ankle to calf, and Ruby’s headdress was a complicated tower of black, knotted material that swiveled marvelously when she moved. There was a diamond-shaped cutout revealing her belly button, and rows of diamond cutouts marched dangerously low across her belly.
Vargas also created costumes with enormous, feathered back pieces that looked like sails and turned the showgirls into stately, bare-breasted birds that floated across the stage. The back pieces were unwieldy, and their size—as much as ten feet wide and eight feet high—made it difficult to maneuver and see the other dancers. Still, once the girls stopped bumping into each other and got the hang of it, the costumes really were impressive, if merely because of their overblown qualities. They were extravagant in Vegas, and that was definitely saying something.
* * *
—
“YOU CAN’T JUST show up with some drawings and expect to be hired,” Vargas told her. Seated in his studio, he was wearing blue, striped, flared pants with a neon-green silk shirt. A vibrant purple silk handkerchief bloused from the pocket of his navy blue blazer, and his black Italian boots had decorative straps that crisscrossed at the ankle.
He caught Ruby looking at the boots. “They made me think of Michelangelo’s bondage slaves.” He grinned.
“I don’t—” Ruby shook her head.
“He carved the figures emerging from stone, but not fully. They’re still largely encased. And they’re chained, ropes across chests, tied down. Hint, hint,” he said, grinning even more widely.
“Oh.”
“That’s my point, don’t you see?” He crossed his legs, bounced the top leg as if to bring her attention even more fully to the boots. “That’s exactly why you need formal training. In design school, you’d have classes in art history. You’d learn what’s been done. You’d get context.”
“That’s necessary?” she asked, forcing herself to look away from his jittery leg. For a moment, she wondered if he was on amphetamines, but then she spotted the coffeemaker parked unobtrusively on his credenza, next to a spider plant that needed water. She felt her own dry mouth, longed for one of the butter rum Life Savers she still used to keep from smoking.
“Your work is okay,” he said, using a flat tone to signal his ambivalence. “If you had mountains of talent, you might get away with skipping some kind of coursework. But even then”—he leaned toward her for emphasis—“you need a solid foundation in fabrics, in pattern-making. Draping, drawing—especially from models.” He wore his dark, straight hair long, past his chin, and had pronounced, muttonchop sideburns. A mustache floated above his upper lip, and Ruby thought it looked pasted on. Well, why not? Women had their hairpieces, after all.
“Look, I’ll help you some. Point you in the right direction. I’m willing to do that, when time permits. But, Ruby, girl—you can’t just rely on your looks. Which is exactly what you did when you came to Vegas. Am I right?” He picked up a pen she’d thought was a joke—it was fashioned like an antique feather pen, but this pen’s feather was a giant ostrich plume dyed banana yellow. Vargas used it to stroke his chin.
Feathers and bondage, Ruby thought. Wow.
“I came to dance,” she said. “And yes, my looks got me hired.”
“But they won’t do a thing when it comes to fashion design. Your portfolio will get you hired. And to develop a portfolio, you need the background. Don’t skip the necessary steps—you’ll just regret it. Even then, what you’ll get is an apprenticeship. This profession is far more involved than showing up with a few drawings.” He pushed her portfolio across his desk toward her. “Comprende?”
Vargas let her have his design drawing for the hot-pink beaded costume, and he even autographed it. She saw that he drew in black ink and used watercolors. She’d been using colored pencils, and she could see how much richer the paint made his work. Even that little thing, she’d done wrong. Maybe he had a point.
Ruby took stock. She thought about the past several months, what she’d been doing with herself, how she could use her leisure time to pursue her dreams. Ruby began to scrutinize Vargas’ designs more closely. She tried to discern his inspirations, his historical references. She devoured fashion magazines, tore pages out of Vogue and put them into a notebook. She dissected trends. Jane Fonda’s Barbarella had latched on to the space craze and took everyone by storm—her tousled, just-got-out-of-bed curls, the boots that came up to her thighs, her cleavage. Fonda’s rampant sexuality, her ability to project both vulnerability and availability, put Ruby’s own efforts to shame. Ruby added Fonda to her notebook. She became a sponge, soaking up everything, from everywhere. Observing, learning, assimilating, and practicing. She was thinking about design schools, where she’d go, when she’d start applying.