Yes, I thought, I’ve got some dirt on me now.
11.
I thought the Vegas trip was off because — to summarize a long, agonizing, half-inebriated debate — who pushes a car with a body into a lake and goes on holiday?
“You might be surprised,” Honey said.
Her lack of remorse shocked me. I didn’t like to imagine what else might have passed between her and Aurbuck, all the things she may be refusing to tell me. On the other hand, she suggested, maybe we should think of it as a well-placed period of time away from the neighborhood, rather than a vacation. “A dish of lurid sherbet before the return to overcooked meat and potatoes,” was how she put it.
So, the following Thursday, first week of December, we packed, got dressed, and splurged on an airport limo to Torrent to catch the flight to Vegas. The two of us were wrecks, in our own way, but we didn’t talk about it, just focused on getting somewhere else. About thirty miles from the city it started to snow those wet, ragged flakes that join together and slide off the windshield in a mass.
She sipped from her flask and checked her phone a lot, concerned, she said, that the flight might be canceled. I didn’t worry at all. It was as if there were so many concerns whirling around in my head that I couldn’t pick a favorite. The overload, and a couple of sips from her flask, made me numb. Her cell rang once or twice, but she said she didn’t recognize the number so let it alone. “Now’s hardly the time to chat with strangers,” she said.
Time seemed to slow down as the 727 lifted up and away. I turned in my seat to watch the city lights and traffic on the highway heading north and south — a stream of red one way, a chain of white glitter the other. And then the squares of dark earth; the wild, uncultivated fields to the west; the forests filling up with snow; the cold, deep, lonely lakes up around Buckthorn County and farther north. I squinted through the window as if I might see Fortune Bay slide past, the MG bobbing in the dark, icy depths with you know who inside. I turned away.
After we leveled off the flight attendant came down the aisle with the drinks cart and Honey relaxed. She ordered a shot of bourbon on the rocks. I’d had more sips from her flask than I’d planned and declined. Three thousand feet began to feel transcendent in a way it never had before, not that I’d flown often, just a couple of trips east as a teen to compete in piano recitals or provide accompaniment. We were above it all, if only for a few hours.
Honey seemed her old self, her eyes soft and warm as the whiskey in her glass. She pressed her knee against mine and asked if I remembered the part in Gilda where she goes off partying with some guy she just met and tortures her old lover by saying, “If I were a ranch they would have named me the Bar None.” We shared a boisterous laugh about that one, and then low-keyed it, not wishing to draw attention. “Kiss me,” she whispered and pointed to that tender spot just below her ear.
She took off her coat, a dark pea jacket she bought at the Sears close-out sale, something versatile, she said, to keep her toasty through the hellish winter. Underneath she wore a silk top and a light sweater to fend off the airplane chill. A guy across the aisle watched her fingers slip the first three buttons of the sweater free and then stared at her legs. When he looked at me I winked — I don’t have a clue what came over me — and he blushed and looked away.
I imagined him after disembarking the plane, his route through the city in a cab, business meetings by day, gambling and drinking along the Strip at night. Two or three months later, settled into real life again, the woman on the plane would come back to him, just as she had come back to me: her low whisper, her beautiful fingers on the buttons of her sweater — that laugh.
* * *
The chauffeur lifted our suitcases from the trunk and led us through the bright, blinding entranceway of the Grand Hotel into a foyer the size of a tennis court smothered in scarlet broadloom. As Honey signed in, I squinted into the shadowy interior of the place: the sounds of roulette wheels and slot machines and dice scrambling across reaches of hushed grass-green, all laced with the tinkling of glasses and murmured conversation, now and then the sound of a distant piano.
Up we went in the elevator, the two of us staring at the vague outlines of ourselves in its black marble walls shot through with gold and polished to a sheen. When we let ourselves into the room I felt as though I’d stepped off a platform and into the sky. I even latched onto Honey for a moment, who kept her legs.
We were up high — thirty floors — and the suite was all tall windows and glass and shiny floors. The furniture seemed shifting, hard to pinpoint, and I realized this was because most of it was made of acrylic, even the dining table and chairs, right down to the placemats, which could have been cut from a bolt of mirage. The only color was violent splashes of scarlet poppies in white vases, a sofa with chrome legs and red leather cushions. There was a dizzying outdoor terrace accessed through a set of sliding glass doors, and an adjoining sun room with rattan lounges and overstuffed cushions and two or three planters with miniature palms plus a few other exotic plants I didn’t know — none of them would have survived Buckthorn. I hadn’t wondered until then (after all, we’d been so busy) how the heck she was paying for all that opulence. She hadn’t asked me to chip in. When I told her I had every intention of doing so she laughed and explained how she’d won the Vegas holiday draw at the bank.
“I thought I told you! It’s practically a freebie, I just called ahead and changed the bank’s lame booking for a decent room.”
“Decent?”
“You just have to ask the right questions in the right manner. It’s not even the very best suite. That one was occupied. Look, don’t worry about anything. It’s all squared away. We’ll just relax and have a fine old time at the bank’s expense.”
I followed her into the bedroom and we threw the suitcases on the floor because the fancy bed seemed to whisper don’t you dare. The thing was massive and round with a pink silk comforter, black satin sheets, and two white end tables on either side. We exchanged a smirk regarding the boudoir’s hackneyed but expensive décor, unpacked a few things, and Honey “reconnoitered” while I undressed to take a shower. The bathroom was also huge, and the one truly separate room in the place. The overall sheen and polish continued: the marble floor, the tiled walls with a variety of brass faucets and nozzles fixed to them.
I twisted a few of the spigots, got in, and had a good long cry about my mother, my father, Inez, what Honey and I had probably gotten ourselves into with Aurbuck — everything. It was satisfying and violent, what with the force of all that water coming at me: a real hurricane of grief.
In the days to come Honey would decide she didn’t fancy the shower and opt instead for bathing. “Are you kidding me? All that hardware? I’ll bet it’s like being blown off a cruise ship crossing the North Sea and living to tell the tale.”
“Please don’t tell the tale,” I said.
I wrapped a towel around me and took my time as I regained my composure, examined the bathroom amenities, as they called them: creams and lotions in a variety of fruit flavors, a body wash and repair kit, loofahs and four rolls of thick white face cloths to match the bath and hand towels. Then I pulled on one of the hotel robes (white, with fancy gold lettering over the pocket) and wandered back out to our platform in the sky.
Honey stood on the terrace with her back to me, her phone pressed to her ear, the city spread out beyond. It seemed an endless shimmering sea of candy-colored lights. Except that it did eventually end — and suddenly, as I had seen very well when we had dropped through the clouds that night and circled the airport a few times before cleared to land: the lights of the strip, the hotels, towers, fountains, all kinds of amusements and distractions I’d never get to the bottom of — and then the desert darkness (the true endless part) spread out beyond. I felt as though we were in the center of a sort of sargasso sea of lights floating uneasily in the night, or lost in the innards of an immense com
puter board.
She turned, smiled, and walked back into the suite, sliding the glass door closed behind her. “Checking tomorrow’s weather,” she said and dropped her phone onto the dining table, that phantom-type thing you might have thought would support nothing but air. When I asked what was in the forecast she pulled me close, kissed my neck, and dried the tips of my hair with the robe’s collar.
“Look how your hair curls against your neck right there,” she said. “All these years I’ve known you and I never saw that.”
She’d taken to pointing out things about me that she found charming or sexy, which embarrassed and thrilled me at the same time. I had certain assets it seemed, things I never thought about myself. She made me feel confident, somehow, as though I could slip into a different version of myself (or a different life) like one of those luxurious hotel robes.
When she untied my robe a warm breeze seemed to pass through me. Every inch of my body opened to her, all on its own, without any help at all from my mind, which couldn’t have done anything about it anyway.
“I know this is going to be impossible,” she whispered. “But let’s do everything we can to forget all about time for the next seven days.”
When she let me go I felt my knees go too, and I had to sink down on one of those tricky ghost chairs. But then she came back with that tiny brass ashtray with the mother-of-pearl lid. She said she had a fabulous idea.
“Let’s draw the drapes, get high, and wreck the bed,” she said. When I laughed and insisted that I already was high and wrecked, she kneeled in front of me and took the collar of my robe in her hands. “You know, Nic, sometimes I think you believe we’re all born with some kind of impenetrable pleasure ceiling and you’ve already reached yours. Let’s see about that, okay?”
She said my hair smelled like a summer storm, like it had in the old days when we rode home on our bikes with the rain in our eyes.
12.
We took care of the first three days by never leaving the suite. Or rather, Honey left once to buy a pair of sunglasses in the boutique on the ground floor: cat-eyes with rhinestones — what else? When I asked her to model them for me she said, “Oh I plan to, I assure you.” But then she couldn’t find them in that minuscule purse of hers. “Only you could lose a pair of glasses in an elevator,” I told her. We ordered room service, watched movies on the big screen, lolled around in our bathrobes, picking away at gourmet pizza and sushi. Often we read aloud to each other from an assortment of complimentary magazines and brochures while we drank Chardonnay all afternoon. (Red we saved for evening, whenever that might occur. The borders in Vegas seemed . . . tenuous.)
Listen to this, I said, as we lay sunning ourselves on the terrace: Bodies: The Exhibition: Over 200 preserved human body specimens in dramatic action poses. The MGM Grand Lion Habitat: Watch lions play right in the heart of Vegas; Indoor Skydiving, complete with 120 mph wind; Tour the Grand Canyon by helicopter; The Mandalay Shark Reef; Big Elvis, a 700-lb impersonator who could be found at Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall and Saloon.
She lay on her back wearing one of the hotel’s eye masks to blot out the light — black satin, which made her look like Zorro relaxing on her day off. A dismantled newspaper lay under her lounge along with the scattered peel from that morning’s orange. As usual, she came out with several comments and wisecracks: “Skydiving in a 120 mile per hour wind? Ouch! I guess it’s not the naked kind.” Or: “A 700-pound Elvis might be found? How the fuck could you possibly miss the guy?”
“And here’s a good one,” I said. “Mandalay Shark Reef, 1,300,000 gallons of water swarming with predators. Should we go?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Even the eye mask couldn’t hide the droll look that came over her face whenever she hit on another old movie favorite. “Because we can never go back to Manderley again, Rebecca. You know that.”
As for Honey’s reading material, she enjoyed quoting from articles about different spirits, especially wine appreciation. Most rosé wines are ephemeral and should be consumed young. But this is not always true. “Ah, ha,” she said, winked at me and continued. A small number of serious rosés age and evolve beautifully, like some of the great Provençal rosés of Bandol, the idiosyncratic rosé of Château Simone from the appellation of Palette, also in Provence, and the equally distinctive rosé of Valentini from Abruzzo, Italy.
“How freaking luscious is that?” she said. I didn’t know whether she was referring to the content of the article or the texture of the words on her tongue. Her pronunciation was excellent, as far as I could tell, and the way she read I couldn’t help longing to savor every letter myself, never mind the wine.
“I think we should go live somewhere really old while we’re still young,” she said. “Some fascinating, remarkable place. Let’s rent a villa with a strange phrase of some kind engraved over its door — something worth saying, an ancient vow or warning of some kind — and who cares if neither of us knows what the hell it means. And we’ll have a courtyard with olive trees and marble statues of beautiful, broken women, and goddamn weeds poking through the cracks everywhere, splitting everything apart in the most violent and fantastic way. Let’s care about things like seasoning the earthenware pot and using the right chef knife. We’ll grow piles of herbs and spend hours stirring the sauce pot and linger a long time over every fucking thing.”
“Of course, yes. Let’s do it.” I agreed because how could I do anything else, once she got going, once she grabbed my hand and dragged me away from myself? And I meant it. I would have thrown the old life away and vanished with her that night, or day, even if I wasn’t drunk on wine, on her, on everything. After all, I’d stuffed a guy into an MG and pushed him into a lake with her. I assumed she was speaking of that island dreamland of hers, and if so, then I was ready to become enamored of Elba too. What the hell? Maybe we’d both been born there in the life that counts.
“And there has to be a hand-pump in the courtyard, so we can splash our feet with cold water all through summer,” I offered. “And I’ll wash the salt out of your hair when we get back from the beach.”
“Here’s to lemons, almonds, ripe pears —”
“And sea breezes. And tangled sheets every morning.”
“Oh god, yes,” she said. “To our ruined bed.” She was sitting up by then, the mask pushed back into her hair.
And then I made her promise that even if things didn’t happen exactly the way we described she would never forget us. I wasn’t yet aware of how necessary the human capacity to forget really is, and how merciful. She patted the lounge beside her and when I got there (three seconds) folded me into the thick warmth of her bathrobe. Her body’s scent, that top-notch cologne owned by no one but her, mingled with the perfume of that morning’s vanished orange. A bit of newspaper ink stained her knuckles.
“Hell no, Nic. I won’t forget. I haven’t found one thing in this godawful fucked-up world that compares to you.”
* * *
Every time I turned around it was cocktail hour. I began to feel that our getaway was in Vegas, sure, but also some kind of boozing bootcamp, which probably really existed somewhere among all the Sin City craziness. I pictured the two of us wading through white water with two bourbons and a party tray held high above our heads, our khaki rucksacks packed with all the paraphernalia required for wilderness survival: corkscrew, shaker, strainer, ice bucket, shot glass — not that Honey ever measured out the booze.
Three days of cocktails, hangovers, room service, an endless loop of oldies at what Honey called the indoor drive-in, and on top of that long nights, and days, of sex that made me feel as if I’d slipped some kind of tether and floated free of myself. I had no words for what amounted to a series of sexual hangovers which were, in their own way, as unsettling as those induced by too much alcohol. Some nights, after what seemed like hours of lovemaking, I would wake in the night, or day, and for a
few awful seconds forget that Honey had come back into my life, or ever kissed me. And then my head would get going on my mother, my father, Inez — and the snow falling on the MG in Fortune Bay.
But then she’d wake up too and pull me against her. And all those crazy fantasies she shared with me — the azure seas, the sailboats, the marble ruins and those questions that lost themselves in the asking — flooded into me and stained my head back into a deep, blue calm.
By the time day four rolled around, we agreed it was time to get out of there — get dressed, walk around, eat a proper meal. We had gorged ourselves on each other while merely snacking on actual food and were thin and famished, wrung out like greedy lovers who, try as they may, can’t get to the bottom of their hunger for each other. And I guess the story goes that such lovers are doomed to flame out, go down in disappointment and ashes, but I knew that would never be our story. Because to sit next to her in a packed café, or feel her knee pressed against mine in the back of a cab, or listen to her laugh as a fake gondolier drifted down Las Vegas Boulevard — that was all I needed. And why, if achieving this kind of heaven was so easy, should our feelings ever be revoked, or ruined? Because who needed the pearly gates, and angels with trumpets, and everlasting life? All those divine promises down the road? These, if they existed, had to be out of reach to us now, and I’d die before I repented anything about her. So I’d settle for simply hanging around her for the rest of this life, while she moved about performing small adjustments to the everyday — the way she lined herself up while seated in a chair, chin in hand, the grace of her crossed legs, a few strands of hair eluding the ever-present elastic she had somehow transformed into something that, it seemed to me, would endure forever, like one of those objects of personal adornment you see under glass at a museum and stand there stricken, somehow, and never more alive.
Honey Page 11
