Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

  "This is the hallway, Jake. The bedroom's through here."

  "Oof." This was the French exclamation of relief. "I must sit myself. I have made a rendezvous."

  "Who with?"

  "Aha." He tried to wink at me, but succeeded only in looking as though he was trying to stick his tongue up one nostril. "You will see."

  Before he could say anything else, he passed out. I hauled him as far as the second bed, then returned to watch the football—or the advertising, anyway.

  A few minutes later, there was a businesslike rap at the door.

  I opened up to be greeted by a kind of Batman and Robin of the sex trade. Although they were more like James Bond and M, one of them obviously up for it physically, the other too old to do anything other than give advice from an armchair.

  The older one was tall and white. She had large, suspiciously upstanding breasts, a wrinkled cleavage, and no apparent waistline. She was in a short red dress with a zipper down the front and glossy black high-heeled boots. The younger partner was black, short, and almost totally spherical. Her breasts, stomach, backside, and thighs all bulged out, chubby but firm—she only needed to touch a switch somewhere and her glittery Vegas T-shirt and black hot pants would ping off and hit the walls.

  "I got a call from Jake," the older woman said. "He not here?"

  I assumed the worst. The sex-mad lunatic had phoned out for in-room entertainment.

  "Sorry, there's been some mistake," I said. "I'll go and get your money, but you really can't come in."

  "What?" She looked insulted, as if she'd actually prefer to earn the cash.

  "I'll pay you right now, don't worry." I did my best to look honest and friendly, realizing too late that I was now smiling at a third woman—Alexa.

  She looked from me to the women, to me again. From the half-dressed hookers to the guy in his underwear.

  "This isn't what it seems," I said hopelessly. In my limited experience, women usually care more about what a situation seems than what it is.

  "No?"

  "No."

  "You collect these phrases, Paul," she said. "'I can explain,' 'It was an accident,' and now this."

  "But it's not how it seems, I can explain, and it was an accident."

  I was intensely conscious that we were having a row while being watched by two prostitutes, and something very English inside of me wanted to go somewhere private and explain things in a civilized way. But Alexa had obviously been in America long enough not to care that she had an audience for her emotional outburst.

  "You mean it is an accident that there are two hookers in your room? Because that is exactly how it seems to me."

  "Yes, but they haven't even been in the room. And anyway, talking of how things seem, in Miami you weren't exactly—"

  "Oh yes, that's it. Attack me to defend yourself. You're the one with two hookers in your room."

  "No, this is my mom," Jake groaned from somewhere behind me.

  Alexa laughed.

  "Jake, keep out of this, please," I said, even more pissed off than Alexa about the lameness of the excuse.

  "Pathetic," she said, and stormed away down the corridor.

  I dashed after her, begging her to stop, but quickly remembered that there were two prostitutes trying to get into the room. And it struck me now that their eagerness to go through with the deal might have something to do with them wanting to help themselves to my credit card, laptop, phone, passport, and anything else they could lay their hands on. I had no choice but to let Alexa stomp away toward the elevators.

  To my horror, I found that Jake had actually invited the hookers inside, and was sitting half unconscious on the corner of a bed, with the two women standing over him, whispering to each other.

  "This is my mom," Jake repeated.

  "Alexa's buggered off now, so you can stop bullshitting," I said.

  "It's my mom."

  "I'm his mother," the tall white woman said, tugging on the hem of her dress as if covering an extra half inch of thigh might make her look more maternal.

  Juliana had been woken up by all the noise, and was blinking at us from her bed.

  "His mom?" she said. "Even that's legal in Vegas?"

  13

  There was another knock at the door, which I'd left ajar.

  Oh shit, I thought, the management. I couldn't believe that these two women had snuck up here unnoticed. I was going to get evicted.

  But no, it was Alexa again. And she was looking worry-ingly calm under the circumstances.

  "Sorry," she said. "Sorry to doubt you."

  I was confused as to how she'd stopped doubting me so quickly.

  "I decided to give you a chance, so I returned and I heard. She really is his mother."

  She kissed me—on the cheek—and came in to say hello to everyone.

  I got the coffee machine working, and we all sat down in the living room area of the suite to talk about what on earth was going on.

  Jake's mom—who introduced herself as Sam—was totally upfront about her job. Or part-time job. She was doing this to earn extra money. She'd just borrowed heavily to buy a nail bar.

  "Great business, though," she told us. "Every woman in Vegas needs nails." She held out her own hands, and her friend—Nayna—did the same. Both of them had what Americans call French nails—white varnish with an even whiter tip. Short, presumably to prevent painful accidents with their customers' delicate regions.

  It sounded as though she'd always been on the fringes of the sex industry. Dancing and waitressing in clubs, mainly, she said. This seemed to explain a lot about Jake's own casual attitude to sex.

  "But a poot, mom?" Jake was now sober enough to feel pain and humiliation.

  "Poot?" Of course, mother and son had lived apart so long they were now divided by language.

  "Hooker," I translated.

  "So what? I did it for free with your goddamn dad, and that taught me a lesson." Now I understood why Jake had fled to Paris. Home life can't have been too homely. "And you're only here so you can beg for more money," she went on. "Where you think I'm going to get that?"

  "That's not why I came," he said.

  "It's not?" This was news to his mom.

  "No." He explained about the name change, and said he was planning to do the legal stuff in Nevada, where all you had to do was prove that you weren't just trying to shake off a criminal record by changing your name from Mugsy Slaughterhouse to Fred Niceguy. In France, he said, they only let you change if you could prove that your old name was uncool—a Frenchman's biggest hangup. So people called Aimee Moncul (which sounded like "love my butt") or Jean Cultamaire ("I sodomize your mother") were the only ones in with a chance. Even the French didn't "respect posy" enough to let Jake change his name to Rimbaud.

  "Whoa." It looked as though his mum's day was getting much too complicated for her.

  "Anyway, I won't need your frick anymore," Jake said.

  "Frick?"

  "Money," I interpreted. "Why not?" I was as keen as her to know how Jake was suddenly going to achieve financial independence.

  "I got a job. A new job. In New Orleans."

  "Really?" We all seemed to say this at once—Sam, Alexa, and me. Juliana's smile told us she was in on the scoop already.

  "Yeah. I'm going to be a prof in a school."

  "Teacher," I told those who needed help.

  "The Cajuns need me," Jake said. "They need French. They need Baudelaire."

  Here, he lost his mom for a moment. She, like almost everyone else on the planet, didn't understand why anyone would need this "Baudelaire," whatever that was.

  "What you're saying, Jake ..." I was still trying to come to terms with this, "is that you're going back to New Orleans to work in a school?"

  "Yeah. I was bavarding with the musicians, and they said no kids talk French these days, their culture is in dispari-tion."

  I at least understood what he meant. Alexa did, too, apparently. For the first time ever, she looked a
t him with something other than distaste.

  "C’est super," she said, honoring him with some French. "It's strange, how in America you can discover your real roots, whatever the roots are."

  The others nodded at this, but I didn't quite understand. It was too abstract for me. And besides, I hadn't discovered any roots at all.

  "I have rediscovered my French roots," she explained. "I wanted to make a film about the American lifestyle, but it has transformed into a movie about why Americans should love France and French culture."

  "Like French nails?" Nayna asked.

  Alexa didn't laugh this off as she might once have done.

  "Yes," she said, "French everything." She explained that she'd filmed the French influence on design in Miami, Americans' love for French clothes and food, the French train in Boston. (I couldn't remember her filming it with me—I wondered if she'd returned there with the hairy Irishman.) And now she wanted to interview Americans about the Paris Las Vegas resort. "Even as far away as San Francisco, they love French culture," she added.

  "San Francisco?" I asked. "You going there next?"

  "Yes, and you must come with me, Paul."

  We went to sit by the pool. The sun was dipping down below the dark ridge of mountains, and the palm trees in the hotel gardens were beginning to stand out stark and prickly against the sky.

  Alexa took the offensive.

  "Did you sleep with Juliana?"

  "No."

  "You looked like you wanted to."

  "Well, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, or even ask to."

  The Clinton reply seemed to satisfy Alexa, who started to explain what she wanted from life—love, she said, to know that she'd be loved.

  "When a Frenchwoman knows she is loved, she'll do anything. And as well as love, we need trust," Alexa went on. "Do you trust me?"

  Wow, I thought, a real trick question. Who can you really trust? Your bank manager? No way. The police? Forget it. Your folks? They start telling you lies the first time they take you to the dentist—"No, this won't hurt, darling"—and they don't stop till you've left home.

  So did I trust Alexa, who had sold the news photos that had dropped me in the merde in Boston, who had fixed up a sly rendezvous in Miami with Mike, and dumped me so that she could hang out with him and the arty lesbians Cherry and Gayle? Did I trust her?

  There was only one possible answer.

  "Yes, of course," I said.

  "Good." She put a cold hand on my arm. "So you will come to San Francisco with me?"

  "Why San Francisco?"

  "Ah." She smiled as if she was about to unveil some sexy lingerie. "I got an offer to have an exhibition there. You know, the same one I had in Paris." This was the collection of arty photos of me that she'd taken when we'd first started going out. The ones that had been illicitly posted on the Visitor Resources website. "A gallery saw some of them on the Internet and they contacted me."

  "Great," I said, before I started getting an uncomfortable jabbing sensation in my memory. "But last time we spoke, you were giving me hell because someone had put those photos on the web. You were going to sue Visitor Resources, and have the website shut down."

  "Yes, well. . ." She blushed. "Sorry. I was listening to the wrong people. I know that now. Will you come to San Francisco? After your voting ceremony, of course."

  "I don't know, Alexa. Will I have to wear my kilt? The kilt that you thought looked stupid. Do you want me to do a Scottish dance to publicize your show?"

  "No, of course not. Let's just finish the American trip together, like we started it. You, me, and Thelma." She looked me in the eye and seemed to upload a photo album of memories into my head. All the fun things we'd done together, the closeness we'd shared. "Please, Paul. We'll drive to Los Angeles, we'll finish your job. Then you must come to San Francisco with me."

  Leaving Las Vegas

  Uzi Does It

  1

  THE FLAMES WERE BUBBLING up through the water. I wondered how fire could survive in a pool of water. But this was Las Vegas, where anything is possible.

  The firepool was in a circular pit below the main floor level. All around it were couches, arranged so that you had to sit staring into the mesmerizing flames. I couldn't tell what color the couches were because everything was bathed in a pinkish-purple light coming from the tubes of neon set along the walls and reflected in tlie mirrored ceiling.

  I was sitting by the fire admiring a tall woman with diick black hair and a cute Cindy Crawford mole. Like practically every woman working in the city, she had no qualms about showing most of the surface area of her chest to the general public. It wasn't her chest I was looking at, though. I was admiring the length of outer thigh revealed by the split in her floor-length dress.

  She was perched beside me, bending over a menu and listing her favorite cocktails. She'd already said she'd recognized me from the TV, and inquired about the well-being of my Mini. Even Thelma was getting her fifteen minutes of fame.

  "The Scorpion's our signature cocktail," she said. "It has—"

  "I see you have American champagne?"

  The waitress smiled at Elodie's interruption. I'd decided to accept the forceful invitation she'd left on my answering machine, even though I knew she was less trustworthy than a horny female praying mantis. It was like Tony told me back in Miami—know your enemy. And I wanted to find out what she was up to, both here in Las Vegas and more generally.

  What was more, Elodie had provided me with an excuse to get away from the hotel and think about the Alexa situation. This sudden suggestion that we get back together and go to San Francisco was a bit like flames in a pool of water. I needed to figure out how it worked.

  "We have American champagne, French, and Spanish," the waitress said.

  I could see Elodie preparing a speech about how only French bubbles can make champagne. Knowing her, she was probably on a retainer from the French wine industry to report any bars or restaurants misusing the trademark.

  "We'll take two glasses of American sparkling wine, then, please," I said, to defuse the diplomatic incident.

  "Great." The waitress stood up, smoothed down her dress and strolled away. The mood of the bar was zenlike coziness, and no snooty French girl was going to spoil it.

  "Look at those two, they're going to make love." Elodie nodded toward a couple in a dimly lit corner booth. I could just make out two silhouettes almost horizontal on the couch.

  "It's going to be a bit difficult on those curved sofas," I said. "They'll roll off."

  "Oh, you Englishmen have no imagination. I should know." She gave me a lascivious smile.

  She was the most glamorous thing in the bar apart from that endlessly dancing water flame, and she knew it. Her dress was the same color as the waitress's costume, but you would never have mistaken her for one of the staff. On her right wrist was a gold bracelet that looked so heavy she probably had to do special weight training to lift her hand. Her necklace was a string of pearls as big as blueberries, and the dress itself had that classic simplicity which tells you it had cost thousands of euros in the designer's own Paris boutique.

  There was no danger of her charms working on me, though.

  "Are we going on to McDonald's after our aperitif?" I asked her.

  "Honestly, Paul, you've become so American. No, we're going to France." She meant the Paris Las Vegas resort, of course.

  The waitress brought the drinks, told us she was there if we needed anything else, and left us to clink glasses.

  "To survival," Elodie said. "I'm very impressed, Paul. Your absurd, underfunded campaign started out as a total disaster, you have been obliged to make yourself look a complete jerk, but somehow you have survived."

  I thanked her for her kind words.

  "I'm very surprised you're even in Vegas. What was wrong with the car?" she asked.

  I told her.

  "Is that all?" she said. She seemed glad that the problem was so minor. "You know, after the
ceremony, to recuperate from your defeat, you must come to Clint's house at Venice Beach. It's on the canal."

  "Does it have gondolas?" I asked. "And what makes you think I'm going to lose?"

  "Oh, come on, Paul. You are on TV, OK, you have your website and stuff, but that is not what counts at this level. You Anglo-Saxons, you know nothing about the subtleties of negotiation. You have given them their TV coverage; you have been filmed with their logos. They have everything they want already. Why should they vote for you?"

  It seemed to be a typical French rhetorical question, so I didn't answer.

  I finished my drink, letting the bubbles fizz on my tongue. I looked over at the couple in the dark booth. They were sitting more or less upright now. They'd stopped short of making love.

  Maybe Elodie was right, I thought. I'd done everything that people wanted, and now I was waiting passively for a favor in return. The French, on the other hand, were promising help with the Big Dig in Boston, hurricane protection in Miami, and aid for New Orleans.

  But no, Tyler had said that they'd vote for the famous guy. And Renee had seemed more pleased with the work I'd done, even without the Mini, than with Elodie's promise of a Revolutionary reconstruction. Elodie was just playing mind games. She'd probably learned the tactic during her MBA course. She was, after all, the most manipulative, treacherous woman I'd ever met. Every time she kissed me on the cheek, I felt the prick of the blade in my kidneys.

  "Alexa told me she's in town," she said. "Will you go to Los Angeles and San Francisco with her?"

  "I don't know." The more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. After all, she'd never explained what had gone on with the Boston strangler. And the way she talked about it, she wanted me to go to San Francisco for her own reasons, to help promote her photo exhibition, not for the sake of our relationship.

  "Perhaps she came back because she thinks you need France's help to conquer America?" Elodie said.

  "Perhaps." She was fishing for information, but the one person I wasn't going to discuss my private life with was Elodie.

  "Come, let me show you how France can help Las Vegas," she said.