“A four-hundred-thousand-dollar property in my name at twenty-four is a big fucking deal—”
“Co-own,” Hunter shouts. “News flash: cosigning is not the same as owning, especially when it’s with Bailey and his father’s fucking money.”
“It’s about equity, idiot,” Michele says. “And we’re not taking any money from the Nazi, so calm down.”
“All your immigrant dreams coming true: a pink house with a green lawn and a white man.”
“Hunter’s just fucking with you, baby,” Chase says. “Hunter, chill. Okay?”
“Okay, forget that it doesn’t even sound good on paper and you sound like you don’t know half of what you’re talking about—forget all that.” Hunter’s getting drunk and sitting up straight. “There’s this nagging question: what are you going to do when Bailey dumps your ass?”
“Speaking of Bailey, he has a message for you, Hunter. He said: tell the pirate the girl’s real name is Brandi and she’s seventeen and a senior at Durango,” Michele says. “And yes, she asked for you: she’s into older men who drive crappy blue Caravans and live with their parents.”
“And I have a message for you,” Hunter says.
“What’s that, Hunter?” Michele asks.
“For the next three months?” Hunter says. “He owns you.”
When Bailey was a teenager he had a large head of bleached-blond hair and was tan and his shoulders were covered with acne. He would have been fat if he hadn’t lifted weights in his garage every night and drunk Creatine shakes twice a day. He had been diagnosed with severe ADHD and was homeschooled, though his parents were always taking vacations, which meant he had a lot of time to himself. “T-t-t-too, too, too much sugar,” Bailey would say, imitating his cousin Mike’s stutter, twitching, his thumbs tapping the table as his head bobbed. “D-d-d-d-d-don’t think I’ll m-m-make m-m-much of myself.” Bailey would laugh but Mike wouldn’t care since he hadn’t stuttered for years, and nothing seemed to register with him anyway since he returned from juvenile detention in Reno. Bailey spent more time with Mike, and Chase spent less time with Bailey for that reason.
Toward the end of August the summer they were thirteen, Bailey had been at Chase’s house all weekend and on Sunday afternoon, when Bailey was supposed to go home, he closed Chase’s bedroom door, leaned against it, slid to the floor, and cried. Chase didn’t need to ask why. He knew Bailey didn’t want to go home because he was scared of his father, especially on Sundays when his father would drink all day, and by the time dinner came he’d be a wreck. That’s when he would force Bailey and his brother to wrestle in the garage on cardboard mats he’d laid down. Bailey’s father had wrestled in high school and wanted both Bailey and his brother to wrestle in order to win scholarships at UNLV, so the two brothers would wrestle for hours, shirtless and sweaty, the bare white fluorescent lights that lined the ceiling of the garage buzzing as they pummeled each other. Their father would try to focus but sometimes his eyes glazed over and he would be in some other place. Then he would suddenly explode, cursing at them, disgusted with their effort, prodding them with a golf club. Once, when Chase was there, Bailey’s father told Chase he wanted him to take his shirt off and wrestle, too, and Chase lied and said he had a knee injury. When Bailey’s father insisted, Chase lied again and told him he had asthma. Bailey’s dad called Chase a faggot and sent him home.
Another weekend from that summer they were thirteen: Bailey spends the night at Chase’s house and Mike comes over and after they all go to sleep Chase wakes up to the sound of voices coming from Carly’s room. In his half-sleep Chase walks to her door and puts his ear against it and hears the same sounds he hears Bailey making when he wrestles in his father’s garage. Chase also realizes that Mike hadn’t been in the sleeping bag next to Chase’s bed when Chase stumbled up out of sleep. Chase turns the doorknob to his sister’s room slowly but it’s locked and so Chase stands in the hallway unsure of what to do, gripping the doorknob, until the noises stop and everything is quiet.
Michele loves hotels: clean white sheets twice a day, goose-down pillows, air-conditioned rooms. (Because of Bailey, Michele will never spend another night in her grandmother’s old house in North Las Vegas where her cousins now live. Because of Bailey she will never again fall asleep breathing in the scent of stale cat urine.) Michele loves the way room service waiters remove the steel cover from her heirloom tomato and Burrata salad dotted with green olives. She loves requesting turndown service at three in the afternoon. She loves leaving twenties for her Latina “sisters” under the pillows of the unmade bed. Michele loves hitting the floor with eight hundred in chips, drinking comped Cosmos, and playing roulette until she’s down too much or up just enough. She loves returning to her room to find chocolate mints scattered across her pillows. She loves sliding the window open as far as it will go and leaning outside, listening to the hum of the Strip. “Imagine all of that power,” she once told Chase. “You can hear it, actually feel it surging upward.” It made the fine hairs on her arm stand up straight. (She showed him—it was true.) She says the currents help her sleep but Chase knows Michele never really sleeps. Bailey will spend the money it takes to keep a suite at the Palace for the summer where Michele can be served fresh melon and strawberries in the executive lounge each morning and wear a bathrobe all day and receive complimentary massages from the Brazilian girl with the soothing voice who tells her stories in Portuguese that Michele pretends to understand. Bailey will keep the suite because it will keep Michele satisfied. Bailey knows that if Michele isn’t totally comfortable there will be no business. And Michele knows that if Bailey is convinced that she loves him (and she might), getting what she wants this summer will be easier and safer than she thought. Also: hotels, nice ones with white and gold walls, can make her forget about Chase.
They don’t make it to Rain or the Double Down, or anywhere for that matter. Their celebration ends abruptly when Michele’s cell rings while they’re waiting for the valet at the Palace to bring the Mustang. It’s Bailey calling. Michele walks away from Chase and Hunter and enters some info into a Black-Berry and when she returns she tells them again about this party in the Lakes and then the Mustang appears, idling. While Hunter tips the valet Chase turns to Michele. She glances at Hunter and then looks back at Chase and shrugs and something inside Chase sighs.
“I’ll drive you,” he says.
* * *
There are only two cars parked in front of the house in the Lakes.
“Doesn’t look like much of a party,” Hunter says.
“You guys don’t have to stay,” Michele tells them and Hunter sighs and gets out of the Mustang and pulls the passenger seat forward so she can get out of the car. Michele steps away very slowly and just stands there, the wind tangling her hair, blowing it across her face. “I’m taking a cab back.”
“You okay?” Chase asks.
“Oh God,” Michele laughs. “You know I never know the answer to that question.”
Hunter rolls his eyes and mutters something under his breath and gets back in the car. When Chase puts the Mustang in drive Michele calls out, “Wait!” and runs around to the driver’s side and leans in. Chase thinks she’s about to whisper something in his ear when she suddenly kisses him hard on the mouth.
“What’s that?” he asks.
Michele shakes her head, her lips tight, and says, “Nothing.” She gives an awkward wave before walking up to the house.
“What was that all about?” Hunter asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes. You do.”
Chase used to drive Michele around town just to look out for her. Twelve hours after his plane touched down at McCarran, when he returned from his sophomore year at NYU—Chase would never go back to Manhattan and received his BA at UNLV—he was letting the engine of his sister’s Mustang idle outside Mandalay Bay while Michele sat in the passenger seat checking her lips in a compact, then searching for the client’s room number on her cell phone. Mich
ele thanked Chase for doing this favor (the driver they had been using “flaked”) and she repeated what she had told him when Chase called her, panicked and furious after reading the casually alarming e-mail Bailey sent Chase to his dorm room on Fourteenth Street in New York. “I’m fine.”
Sometimes Chase would meet her clients and let them know he’d be outside or downstairs, waiting, or that he would be back in an hour or—depending on what they paid for—two. Sometimes Chase would wait inside the room without the guy knowing he was there but only if that was what Michele wanted. (Sometimes it was what the guy wanted as well.) It had been only recently—the last couple of months really, since January—that Chase started leaving Michele at the door and then it was at the elevator and then it was in the lobby, and finally outside at the Mustang where Michele would wink or purse her lips and kiss Chase quickly and not say anything because she understood what he was trying to do and that it wasn’t easy for him.
2
Chase is hustling—he’s late. It’s a Wednesday morning and on Wednesday mornings at Centennial first-period study hall for nongraduating seniors is his responsibility. The phone rang at four a.m. and again at five and once more at six-fifteen. After taking a shower and getting dressed he checks his caller ID. All of the calls were from Michele but she didn’t leave any messages and she doesn’t answer when he calls back. He assumes the “party” at the Lakes went fine but he’s irritated when his call goes to her voice mail. Outside, in the overcast light of another hot morning, Chase rushes to the Mustang. He’s already sweating and hungry and needs coffee but has no cash (or time) to stop at Starbucks. On Boulder Highway the city looks dirty in the gray light and the heat won’t break. Last night the eleven o’clock news on KLAS insisted the heat wave wasn’t going to end, that it would stay right through the summer, which gives Chase a little jolt of satisfaction, since he’ll be in Palo Alto, and then hopefully San Francisco, with Julia.
Two blocks from his apartment and nearing the Strip, Chase notices a huge billboard that recently went up: a black-and-white image of a male model in red boxer briefs, his long blond hair falling over his eyes. There’s a question hanging over the model: “What Kind of Man Are You?” Chase’s nose starts to bleed—a summer heat-related ritual—and he twists the corner of a napkin and slides it up a nostril. It’s now 8:05. He has ten minutes to get to school but he passes a flower shop off the Strip. What would he miss at Centennial if he stopped? (Twenty minutes of class, kids copying homework under the flicker and hum of fluorescent lights, Chase sinking into his chair a little farther with the recirculated air flowing through the teeth of the vent over his desk muffling the sound of someone’s ring tone, Chase slipping into a trance while gazing at Gabrielle’s miniskirt, which will have risen as high as it can go.) So Chase parks and finds the large yellow French tulips that Julia likes: soft, cool, fragrant. His presence in the flower shop seems to annoy the heavy, tired woman working there and she reluctantly asks if Chase wants the tulips wrapped. He says, “Sure, thanks,” and grins and the tired woman doesn’t respond and wraps the tulips while Chase’s American Express card is processing. When the card is declined Chase tells the woman there’s no need to call. He checks his wallet even though he knows he has only one dollar in it. But then he remembers the jar of coins in the trunk of the Mustang.
Chase grabs the coins and jogs to the Vons on the other side of the parking lot. He dumps the coins into a change machine next to a bank of video poker slots. When he finally pushes the last of the coins through the mouth of the change machine he’s now twenty-one minutes late for school. But the machine chokes and rattles and then stops working completely and the panel goes blank and the red numbers that had reached an impressive $212 vanish. Chase shakes the machine and then calls for the manager, who ignores him when Chase explains that he’s late for work and that the machine broke and that the panel had read $212. When Chase asks if they can just give him that amount the manager says he needs to call someone else. Chase begs him (he’ll just take $200 to make things easier) but the manager doesn’t care and it’s another eight minutes to get the machine back on. The ticket prints out and reads $214.33, which the manager counts for Chase, slowly, as if on purpose, and then winks at him when he finishes. Chase leaves Vons, rushes to the flower shop to pay for the tulips and is now forty minutes late for school.
Last night Chase sat on the edge of his futon in his one-bedroom apartment on Boulder Highway. He had just read a story in a magazine about a twenty-four-year-old artist in New York whose new murals sold for $100,000 apiece. The twenty-four-year-old artist had sold three in the first two hours of his second solo show in Chelsea. The twenty-four-year-old artist was pictured with a smiling actress sitting on his lap. The twenty-four-year-old artist was unshaven and thin and wore corduroys and had a smug-little-genius expression on his face. While staring at that face Chase understood where the anxiety was coming from: he had not painted anything worthwhile in months.
And Chase was twenty-five, and a year had passed since he landed the teaching job at Centennial. It had been over a year since he convinced Julia to choose California over Philadelphia for her MBA and move to Palo Alto instead of staying back east because they had tried back east at NYU and Chase never liked it. But Julia would remind him that it wasn’t so bad. Her proof: the seventeen works Chase completed, getting an entire wall at Spring Jamboree sophomore year, selling three paintings in one day, flying his mother out, taking her to The Phantom of the Opera, sleeping in on Thursdays when neither of them had class and sharing a plate of scrambled eggs and sipping coffee in the empty cafeteria, the two of them alone in her dorm room, Chase adjusting the white sheets against Julia’s brown skin so he could sketch her while she slept.
Last night Chase stared at a Kandinsky print Julia had sent him until he had to look away: the Kandinsky print was a question she was asking. Chase gazed at the piles of failed sketches—incomplete with ideas he had been sure would lead to something. Three blank canvases he needs to fill for a local group show he is in (now only a month away) hung on the walls in a lame attempt to help motivate himself. He made a list of galleries in San Francisco and e-mailed them to Julia in order to prove that he’d done his research and was making an effort to plan for the life they both wanted, somewhere that wasn’t back east or Vegas. He would stare at Web sites and read reviews of other artists. He let himself imagine his first opening, selling it out, the profiles that would appear in magazines he’s never read. The same way he had imagined an NYU dorm room with his work on the walls and meeting a funky East Coast girl and never going back to Vegas. He let himself imagine living anywhere Julia wanted and with enough money to paint full-time. He knew he was nowhere close to that. Taped to the stucco wall over his drafting table, on glossy black paper in silver script, was the flyer for the upcoming group show, his first since college: White Trash Paradise. After he sent the e-mail, Julia called.
Chase still could never say anything that made Julia feel better when she asked him why he hadn’t yet moved to Palo Alto to be with her. He didn’t know how to answer Julia when she asked him why he was still living alone in a place that made him miserable. Chase was supposed to teach for a year and that was supposed to be it. He was supposed to earn enough in one year to finance the move (and he lived so cheaply that this was possible on a teacher’s salary). In Palo Alto he would find a job and support himself so he could continue painting and then the two of them could begin the next phase of their life together. Chase would tell her that he was, in fact, getting ready for the move to Palo Alto, and that he had to do it like this, and to please stop asking him when he was coming. Chase resented that Julia knew the answer: he was coming when he had something worth bringing. Because if he didn’t show up with something worth bringing where did that leave them?
Last night, after their phone call, Chase tried to sleep but ended up thinking about his mother getting old alone and who else was in his life and what kind of life was it anyway when he was cas
hing in four hundred dollars in Bally’s chips that his grandmother had left him instead of borrowing the money that Michele was always begging him to take? He still hadn’t paid AOL or DirecTV or his student loans. Chase hadn’t even paid for the groceries his mother bought him the week before. And so Chase got out of bed and called Julia back. He told her that maybe there was something significant about the fact that the National Black MBA Conference was being held in Las Vegas this year. Maybe this was a sign. Chase leaned back on the stool at his drafting table after finishing a bottle of Yellow Tail merlot, a cocky grin on his face, and said, “Maybe when you’re here we can stop by a chapel.”
On bad mornings, when Chase was sure he couldn’t walk into Centennial one more time, he would call Julia in Palo Alto. He would be on Summerlin Parkway heading west past the Stratosphere toward the high school and Julia would say things to Chase that he knew weren’t true anymore, but it made him feel better to hear them. Some mornings were worse than others and it really wasn’t the school or the teaching gig or the desert rats that made up the student body that bothered him—it was something deeper, messier. He couldn’t express it directly—he needed help—so he would call Palo Alto and just sit on the phone, silent, waiting for her to say anything. And on the bad mornings when he called and she wasn’t there—or didn’t pick up—he wouldn’t leave a message. He would just slide lower in the seat, driving faster, struggling to remember why he was pissing away twenty-five.
Nearing the school, Chase is relieved that Julia picks up the phone and that she doesn’t mention visiting a chapel. Instead she mentions California because she’s interning this summer with Accenture in San Francisco and has a weekend orientation and wants Chase to meet her there. She’ll be at the Argent, in a suite. “You can order room service and swim in the pool. We can look for apartments.”
The Delivery Man Page 3
