White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  “Don’t know if that makes sense. But I’d feel being born of a passing pleasure made me pretty light stuff too. Like cheap ready-to-wear. I’d be the last to say that passing pleasure can’t be very pleasant, but I wouldn’t want my flesh and bones made up of it. It wears thin.”

  Now the big signs march along competing with the mountains:

  $50,000 Keno!

  400 Slots!

  Carson Nugget 17.5 Miles!

  “God, I was worn thin. So thin when we first met. You could see light between any two threads of me. Larger and larger part of my time was bein’ spent using up strangers. No matter whether or not they wanted to get used: because they did. And they do. But I was getting used up fastest of the lot. One day all the fun was over. I just woke up, wanted to pack it all in and go home, take him home with me. Only I hadn’t any home to take him to.

  “So I just went on and on. The drugs and liquor don’t help, but at the time, y’know, it seems they might. So it was on and on: nobody caught me at it. Like I was hoping someone might catch me at it. Nobody caught me at it. Except you.”

  “I didn’t catch you at it,” I said, tears approaching surely as the next casino. “I never saw you do anything.”

  “Maybe not, but you did something.”

  “It was all an accident.”

  “Don’t believe in accidents,” he said.

  Ormsby House!

  Four Restaurants, Two Swimming Pools!

  2000 Rooms!

  Enjoy Free Dining!

  Children’s Lounge! 12.5 Miles!

  “Never gave the future much thought. Could be, I supposed, I’d got no future coming. But thinking about—well, about Harlan with no future coming—that was just something I could not support.

  “I’d gotten so I understood losing my own family; they all died. Wasn’t anybody’s fault, not even mine.

  “But losing his family, now that I did for him. I ought, I wanted to be, his roof in the cold. Crutch for his weakness. Medicine for his pain. And if I hadn’t been a very good boy, wasn’t because I didn’t know what I signed up for.

  “Worse yet, only way I saw of doing it was to make some viable future for myself. Y’see what I mean?”

  I nodded silently. There were connections in what he said, which I could hear but wasn’t getting, or which some part of my mind was getting very well, just refusing to share with the rest. The car buzzed along.

  Suddenly he snickered. “Wouldn’t want to have popped out of a turkey baster, either.”

  The car hopped over a desert rise onto the main drag of Carson City. And main was almost all the drag there was. Out on the edge sprawl shopping centers, new and tacky, flat ground-gobbling buildings: land is cheap. None look over five years old, or built to last more than ten. Auto dealerships, RV sales, pizza, Taco Bell. Food, gas, diesel, bait. Then the motels.

  Then a sign: Carson City Urban Area: what used to be the town, bulbous neon casino signs—24 Hour Poker Bar! Shrimp Cocktails $1.00!—and old brick buildings housing multiple pawnshops, The Pony Express Hotel, Chinese Food, Irene’s Bar, Video Poker! Easy Slots!—and—

  Tom elbowed me. The Salvation Army Store: showcase windows, and six high-mileage, bouffant hairdo mannequins standing shoulder-to-shoulder right across the front! They all were wearing wedding gowns. “Want to get yours there?”

  “Nope. Got mine.”

  I punched my seat belt loose, let the VW coast, lifted my butt free of the seat, slipped the wool skirt down around my ankles, and quick! Whipped it off and stomped the gas before the car stalled.

  Wide-eyed and unguarded, Tom appraised me. I had molted. The damp white mini dress was a little crunched just now, but like a dragonfly’s wings, sun and breeze would bring it out.

  “Hey! That’s it!”

  A little green sign arrowing off to the right:

  Marriage Licenses

  park in rear

  Too late to turn. I hung a big U around the neoclassic bulk of Ormsby House, a Proletarian Pleasure Palace built for giants, and drove slowly in the opposite direction, one block closer to the hills.

  Main Street was a countrified midway. Then came the state buildings, leafy and sedately out of place with their historical markers, their cannons on the lawn. One block to either side lived in a different century.

  Drowsy, desolate, full of small secret life. Pigeons courting on the buckled sidewalks. Tall old cottonwoods: crows in the tops broadcast their views with all the force of radio evangelists. Tall old nineteenth-century mansions, some for rent. Vacant lots, desert-bright, where mansions used to stand. Nineteenth-century cottages housing—

  Wedding chapels.

  Well, at least these didn’t look like card parlors or funeral homes; rather like gypsy spiritualists instead:

  MADAME LEONA will READ

  the FUTURE in your PALM:

  LOVE, MARRIAGE, MONEY,

  BUSINESS, PERSONAL.

  You know the look. Lace-curtain nefarious.

  I put us in the middle of a vacant lot. No Trespassing signs hung from a chain around it, but the chain lay in the gravel. Lots of tire tracks wandered in and out.

  Next door a big Victorian and lesser antique structures rimmed a square of grass. A faded neon sign on a pole in the middle of the grass said Serendipity Square.

  It was a place divided like a nursery school into play areas or fantasy locales, only here the daydreams were for older children. Right from the sidewalk I could see The Livery Stable with Ye Olde Hitching Rack in front, a Photographer’s Shoppe, with racks of frills for dressing up in, an arbor arched above a swan boat from The Tunnel of Love—and in between it all, beds of black-eyed Susans, herbs, marigolds, and leggy old roses nobody pinched the hips off. Along the edges of the walk, onion plants produced fat yellow onions at their bases.

  The shed nearest the street was Rhett’s Stage Stop. Sidewalk changed to boardwalk in its shade. A real live wedding was going on inside, but you couldn’t see in very well because of the rococo message painted on the glass:

  Office for Chapels

  Follow Footprints

  Your Choice of Four Chapels in Serendipity Square:

  Scarlett’s Chapel (Elegant)

  Rhett’s Stage Stop (Western)

  Wedding Parlor (Homey)

  Garden Chapel (In Season)

  Special Offer to You: Less than Cost

  Greatest variety of Marriage

  Safest, Fastest, and Finest Marriages in the World.

  OFFICE

  Hopeful white paint footprints pace the boardwalk, but they’re not going our way.

  Across the street, the State Building wears the dowdy and abandoned graces of a 1920s city high school: same huge, somnolent rumble of air conditioning, same chain link around the light wells. In the shadow of its wings lies a little gravel parking lot. On its rustic stone hang four green signs and a white one: the white one says

  Do Not Park

  In The

  Middle Of This Lot

  The green ones say, in order, left to right

  City Prison Van

  State Prison Van

  City Delivery Van

  Marriage Licenses Downstairs This Building

  Down, down two steps at a time, to blond wood and gray linoleum, the standard institutional smell. There was a chest-high counter and desks and file cabinets, and two women clerks. A little prop-up sign on the counter said

  License Fee $25.00

  Cash Only

  This License Must Be Used

  In the State of Nevada

  Correct Change Is Required

  After 4:00 p.m. and

  On Weekends and Holidays

  “Hullo,” said Tom.

  The papers seemed perfectly straightforward. There was nothing reasonable to prevent anyone at all from getting a marriage license, and no place he could use it but the State of Nevada. Even the ballpoints on the counter worked. Tom paid the clerk too much, and told her to keep the change.

  He sai
d, “I’m about to ask a dumb question. Have you a paper handy with the wording of your marriage vows?”

  “Oh no, honey,” said the older woman. “Each one of those J.P.’s just has his own he likes to use.”

  “J.P.’s?”

  “I’m sorry, honey: Justice of the Peace. Get so used to people knowing what I mean.”

  “Could I speak to him?”

  “Well there’s no J.P. here Sundays, you know, that’s the problem. Used to be they took turns on the holidays, but with the budget like it is—”

  I would have said about now, had anybody asked me, “It isn’t going to turn out like the rings.”

  “There’s the chapels of course—” she said, still flustering with his money “—right across the street and they’re every one open till midnight—”

  Good thing nobody asked me.

  “—Come back Mondays through Saturdays now,” she called after us. “You could just step down the hall—”

  The boardwalk led around the Stage Stop. There the footprints descended, onto the cracked and grassy walks of Serendipity Square. And it was hard not to follow that row of white prints around the corner once the suggestion had been made—very hard—in fact, it must have been too hard.

  A well-dressed man shot out the front door of the big house and almost scampered toward the Stage Stop. He froze when he saw us, as a squirrel does, noticing it’s not alone.

  Tom waved.

  “May I help you?”

  “Depends,” said Tom. “We were hoping to get married.”

  “Did you have an appointment? Trouble is, we’re so insanely busy—Weddings in three out of the four already, you know—There’s no Justice over there on Sundays—”

  “Right. Well, we were leaving anyway.”

  “No, no! Wait, why don’t you see my wife? She’s just inside—” pointing behind him to where painted footprints marched up wooden steps.

  “Hullo, ma’am.”

  To the left inside the dim house a long velvet room (obviously Scarlett’s Chapel, elegant) bulged at the double doors with a wedding in progress. To the right, closed parlor doors (homey) and muffled voices.

  The woman at the desk raised faded eyes.

  “We’ve no appointment I’m afraid; we didn’t know—” Tom tucked his head, studied his shoes. It was an almost scandalously foregone conclusion.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, are you sweet people all the way from England?”

  “Your husband said there might be some small something y’could do—”

  “You know, the papers, the newspapers do pieces on us all the time, why just last Sunday—I’ve got Xerox copies, I should give you one—the years we’ve done these chapels, we’ve had couples from thirty-five different countries —”

  Tom’s eyes moved up to hers.

  “From England,” she murmured. “What a long way.”

  “Yes ma’am, it is.”

  “Oh dear.”

  ———

  It was built of lattice, held firm by a hundred summers of white paint. It crouched in a narrow side yard, an old iron fence between it and the street, like it was playing hide-and-seek and we were the first to find it. Leaves fluttered down around it from the cottonwoods. Crows cawed lustily. White butterflies visited the grass. A white wicker table and chairs furnished its insides. The chairs had plastic cushions puddled by a sprinkler. Another wicker object might have been an altar or a buffet, depending. Around the sides on pedestals were wicker urns of plastic flowers, aged and sunburned to a median orange.

  “Wait,” called Tom. “One thing, are those removable? I’m sorry, but I can’t stand plastic flowers. They make me think of cemeteries.”

  The stands were lashed to the lattice with electrical wire, but the plastic bouquets came off. When they were gone, the little garden chapel stood even more dreamlike and forlorn, a childhood place: not even your own childhood, Ray Bradbury’s childhood, maybe. Old and thoughtful. Spooky-gracious.

  Its floor was all uneven, with half bricks and homemade concrete pavers set in it like precious stones and painted glossy red and glossy green, as if your grandfather did it himself and Grandpa was more loving than handy. Here came the woman with her husband and another man, very tall, very old. He wore a hearing aid behind one ear and gold rim glasses. His black suit had a green patina. Ray Bradbury would have loved him.

  Reverend Such-and-Such I didn’t catch (retired) shook both of our hands. His own were slow and warm, withered as the desert evening. Tom asked his question about the wording of the vows. He’d clasped me firmly from the back, both arms, just as he’d done when asking after rings.

  “The State requires me to determine of you both your true intent,” said the Reverend Such-and-Such, sweet old ponderous pulpit-voice punctuated by the click of dentures, “and if your true and uncoerced intent is to marry, that I pronounce you man and wife in the name of the State—”

  “That’s all?”

  “Whatever else you wish, if you wish to be more—”

  “No,” said Tom emphatically. “That’s what I wish. Exactly that. No more.”

  “And your given name is Thomas?”

  “Yes, sir. Hers is Miranda.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The old man draws a long formal breath.

  “Now understand,” says Tom, “I’ve no objections to your mentioning the presence of God, so long as y’make it short.”

  The old man opens his mouth.

  “—Short and kind,” says Tom.

  “Dearly Beloved—”

  “And dignified,” says Tom.

  The old man smiles at him. “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here this evening for the purpose of uniting this couple, before God and man, in the loving bonds of holy matrimony (take her hand)—”

  “Right.”

  Tom slips his left hand down to find my left. Late sun bores in sideways, molten amber casting silver shadows, but where it shines through the orange diamonds, blood-red light-drops spatter both our arms.

  “—Thomas, do you take this woman, Miranda, to be your lawful wedded wife, to love and to cherish as long as you both do live?”

  “Right. I do.”

  The old man smiles at Tom again, before asking me the same. “Do you have rings?” (plain gold ones, like old country people wear—) “Repeat after me, ‘Take this ring, and wear it as a symbol of my lasting love—’” (—the kind that, if you leave on long enough—)

  “Take this ring and wear it as a symbol of—”

  “By the authority vested in me by the State of Nevada, I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  ———

  I was sitting in the car.

  Everything was dizzyingly dazzlingly hot. Trying to remember now, how to put the key into the lock. Almost went to sleep standing up, there in the summerhouse. Tom kissed me. Warm arms, warm front, warm mouth, sweet breath, sweet dark. Sleep forever. Then he let go, and I had to stand on my own. Remember him handing out hundred-dollar bills.

  Tom said softly but distinctly, “Goddamn bloody frigging fucking hypocrites.”

  I must have jumped a mile. I’m sitting in the car.

  “Oh, not those people—they’re honest people—It’s the government, that’s what it is.”

  I find the lock, and put the key in it.

  “I hate the government: license me to love, will they? I could be lying! Do they care? I could be planning to unload you in a year: they’d help me to fill out the forms for it! And you could be planning to shake me down for mental cruelty and half of everything I own! You could! Nothing easier: just tell ’em everything. And would they mind? God, no, so long as you paid the taxes on it. But license me to cherish? What the hell do they know?

  “Harlan and me—do you realize, that if one of us had sex change operations, they would let us marry? Think about it. I think about Harlan—he has the most beautiful body—I have ever seen. On man or woman either. He wouldn’t strip, or
show it off on stage, Oh no. It’s not in his nature. I don’t know if you can understand, he’s very—”

  “Chaste,” I said. The kind of information that I don’t forget. It stopped him open mouthed.

  “After his fashion.” (Now he’s forgotten that he told me.) “Takes a clown like me to do that.

  “Every cell in his body is male, believe me. And I love it. It’s not just that he’s got—that he’s—Well he does, y’know. And I’m very fond of—about the dearest thing I know, feeling him get—when I—Ah God, I don’t want to talk to you about that!

  “God made him right the first time!

  “And if he would go in a clinic, and have himself cut, and take those shots; if he would go through all that pain and shame to make a sideshow travesty of himself, your government would write him out new papers saying he was female, and a license saying he could be my lawful wedded love in public! They’d laugh at us, of course, but they’d pat us on the heads and say ‘All right!’

  “And he wouldn’t ever be a woman.

  “I couldn’t ever have children from him, any more than him from me: he’d just be my Harlan ruined and wasted—he’d be an abomination, and so would I if it didn’t give me the horrors to touch him! But your fucking government would call that satisfaction from us!”

  He looked away out of his window, wiping his face where I almost couldn’t see it. Defiantly, he turned back eye-to-eye.

  “Sooner do it to myself. Much sooner. Well what are you crying for?”

  “I don’t have Harlan’s looks.”

  “Who does? If that’s your only problem, you’re in great shape.”

  “You do.”

  “Sorry. And I thrive on flattery as well as the next. Nothing wrong with your looks, anyway.”

  “I’m flat-chested. I’ve got no hips!”

  “Well, it’s better than having too many! Now, I quite like the way the way you’re built.”

  “You would. I’m built like a guy!”

  “Oh no you’re not!”

  “Besides, you couldn’t marry him if you both had fifty operations!”

  “Yes I could! It’s legal!”

  “No you couldn’t!”