I said, ‘I don’t want us to get started here with the wrong ideas.’
‘We don’t have to be so grim, do we? If we can’t giggle over something so silly as getting married in Las Vegas, what’s the point?’
‘Let me see your hand.’
He held it out for me palm up. His veins ran like blue ink beneath parchment coloured skin. I flipped his hand and kissed the back of it, like he’d kissed mine. He laughed at that. He liked to laugh at a lot of things. I asked, ‘You brought the money? That’s not a problem?’
‘Will you take a cheque?’
‘Sure I’ll take the check. Then I’ll pay and go and you can find somebody else to marry in Vegas.’
‘Joke, darling, joke. Where did you lose your sense of humour?’
I could see it pass across his face that he’d forgotten I’d just been released from prison and that was as good a place as any to lose a sense of humour or to have it stolen or beaten out of you.
‘Harry Bendel told me two thousand. Is that right?’
‘That’s right. Cash.’
He snatched a strip of bacon from my plate, asked with his eyes if he could eat it and when I nodded he said we had a deal.
4
Mid-way between the towns of Littlerock and Llano the Englishman tossed me the keys to his Mustang. The Pear-blossom is a double-barrelled shotgun highway – two lanes shooting fast as buckshot through a flat stretch of scrub desert. I kicked the accelerator hard enough to crack vertebrae. The desert soared to distant mountains rippling in clear winter light. A car, a man, a clear winter day in the desert. This was paradise, I thought.
My hubby-to-be pointed his lens across the desert floor toward the granite slopes of the Sierra Nevadas. ‘I can never get my mind around the distances in America. How far away is that mountain range? Twenty miles? A hundred?’
‘About fifty.’
He let the camera hang on its neck-strap and stared out the windshield. ‘I feel like a pygmy out here under so much sky.’
From his bag he retrieved a 28-millimetre fixed lens and swapped it with the telephoto.
I watched his image like a movie on the silver screen of the rear-view mirror, pleased by his English parchment skin, so thin I could trace the route of blue veins at his throat. ‘What do you like to shoot most, people or objects?’
‘Both. People who are objects.’
‘You mean, like Edward Weston or Robert Mapplethorpe, studies of people that resemble objects in like, their approach to the beauty of the human form?’
He looked at me like a monkey had just spoken to him in French. ‘Not that at all, but don’t think for a moment I don’t understand what you just said, even if I’m surprised to hear you say it.’
‘Surprised by what? That I’m not an idiot?’
‘Not every ex-con is conversant in the iconic figures of twentieth-century photography.’
‘You know a lot of ex-cons?’
‘Ex-cons, no. Icons, yes. I photograph people whose physical images are a commodity consumed around the world like a bottle of Coca-Cola.’
‘If you mean celebrities, why don’t you just say celebrities?’
‘It’s more fun when you have to work a little to get it.’
‘To get what? That you’re a paparazzi?’
‘Paparazzo, singular. Most people just call me “princess killer”.’
He pointed his lens out the window and photographed a giant lobster crawling out of the desert, one of a line of monsters marching toward Las Vegas. Just out of Victorville half-naked showgirls strut from roadside billboards and money rains into pots advertising one casino or another but as the drive grinds on and the stomach grumbles the billboards appeal to baser instincts. About a hundred miles from the state line giant shellfish and cuts of meat rear out of the bleak landscape like an advancing army, each clutching an ‘All You Can Eat for $7.95’ sticker in the shape of a buzz-saw blade.
At the Last Vegas county courthouse we stood in a roped-off line for an hour, paid $35 to a bouffant Betty in a loud sweater, and got our no-blood-test, no-waiting-period, no-criminal-record-check, no-embarrassing-theology or second-thoughts-allowed wedding licence. You could marry a dog in Las Vegas and as long as you paid the licensing fee no one would care unless you and the dog were the same sex. At the curb of the courthouse steps we asked a tuxedoed blond polishing a limousine where we could go to get married and he told us we could do it in any of the casinos or one of a couple dozen wedding chapels. The best one depended on our needs and how much money we wanted to pay. The place down the street would marry us for $25 if the minister was sober enough to stand.
‘Can we get Elvis?’ Gabe asked. ‘I heard we could get Elvis to marry us in Las Vegas.’
‘That’s true, we got the world’s only ordained Elvis impersonator.’ The driver admitted this with some pride, as though every town wanted one. ‘But Elvis is booked days in advance. You gotta wait if you want Elvis.’ He scratched his cheek and appeared to give the matter some thought. ‘If you can afford a hundred dollars or more, the most elegant chapel in town is here.’ He backed away from the door and pointed to a magnetic slap-on sign advertising ‘A Special Memory Wedding Chapel™’. He even offered to give us a free ride out, no commitment to stay and marry if we didn’t like the place.
When I saw the old-fashioned clapboard steeple of the New England chapel rising from a dry as dirt cinderblock housing tract, I realized we couldn’t have picked any better than ‘A Special Memory Wedding Chapel’ given a month of research. Inside the chapel pine needles and roses perfumed the air. A red carpet rolled down the aisle between padded oak pews and, with dark-stained beams arching over the altar, Las Vegas seemed two thousand miles away. The bride even had her own dressing-room and special entrance down a set of steps to the aisle. With only two steps in the set the bride’s entrance might have been short on drama but I appreciated the thought that had gone into putting it there. A nice woman from Australia gave us a tour of the place and listed our marriage options. We picked the ‘Memorable Memory’ package at $199 and got artificial candlelight, an organist, three roses for me and a rose boutonniere for Gabe, nine photographs from a professional wedding photographer and a souvenir scroll of our marriage vows.
The problem with two photographers marrying each other is that the number of cameras is greater than the possible subjects and when the vows are read the bride and groom are more likely to be trying to photograph the event than participate in it. I shot with a disposable cardboard camera bought at a drugstore. Going up against Gabe’s motor-driven Nikon I was seriously out-gunned but at least armed. I’d take his photograph, he’d take mine, then we’d both run over to get one of the organist. Then the part came when Gabe was supposed to put a ring on my finger, but he didn’t have a ring, he had this silver amulet attached to a leather strap, something he said he picked up once while on assignment in Papua New Guinea, a circular disc engraved with the markings of the prehistoric Papua New Guinean calendar. The hole in the middle was just big enough to fit my finger so I told him to pretend it was a ring and then it was kiss the bride time. We were both shy about that, hesitating and almost missing each other’s lips but when our lips did meet it was like they never wanted to separate. His breath was warm and sweet and there was this special smell about him that went to my head like a shot of whiskey.
When the photographer stepped forward to take one of our nine official wedding pictures, Gabriel lifted me into the air and told him to go ahead and shoot and then he slung me around his back. I screamed with laughter and that’s the photograph I thought I’d like best, Gabriel looking straight at the camera with me riding piggyback laughing at him, both of us shocked to be suddenly crazy about each other.
The orange glow on the horizon as we left the chapel wasn’t from the setting sun but the fused incandescence of a million lights wired into the mile-long cluster of casinos that formed the fabled strip of Las Vegas. We set our course by the casino lights and walked
. The first stars punched through a neon blue sky to wash the landscape of cinderblock homes, chain-link fencing and dead grass with twilight the colour of zinc. In the desert even ugliness takes on a particular kind of beauty. I put my arm through his and when I did his body leaned into mine with a kind of surrender.
‘Time to take care of business,’ I said.
‘Can I pay by credit card?’
This time I laughed and that pleased him. He dipped his hand into the inside pocket of his creased leather trench coat for a white envelope that looked and felt about twenty bills thick. ‘I got a fabulous deal on hundreds from my local counterfeiter. If you’d like, we can stop under the street light to count them.’
‘I trust you.’ I put the envelope in the left flap pocket of my leather jacket.
‘You really shouldn’t. I’m a scoundrel and a cheat and you shouldn’t believe anything I tell you because it’s likely to be a lie, particularly if it’s the least bit funny.’
I thought he was joking so I smiled. This look passed across his face like he wanted to kiss me and not as part of any fake ceremony. I was all for him giving it a go but he hesitated and the moment passed. That might have been the beginning and end of our sexual relationship if not for the jogger who came upon us between street lights, the kind of regular Joe in mismatched sweatshirt and sweatpants who turns his baseball cap backwards. I didn’t pay any notice to him until he pulled up and said, ‘Let go of her, you prick.’ I didn’t wait for him to let go of me; I released his arm and stepped back. With two grand in my pocket I couldn’t be certain Gabe wasn’t trying to scam me. That’s how doing time influenced my thinking. In my head I heard, Pay off the bitch and get your man to stick her up at gunpoint. I’d just spent five years with people who pulled that kind of stunt for a living. But the jogger grabbed Gabe’s shoulder and spun him like I wasn’t even there. I’d been around enough fights to understand that the aggressor has all the advantages; most often the fight is over before the assailed understands she’s even in a fight.
I said, ‘Hey mister, leave us alone, we’ve done nothing to you.’
Gabe stepped aside like he wanted no part of it. He said, ‘I’m not about to –’ but didn’t get to finish what he was trying to say before the jogger grabbed his neck and threw him down. Gabe lay flat on his back as though he couldn’t understand how he got there. The first moments in a fight are critical. It isn’t so much the punch as the counterpunch that tips the winner. Gabe’s idea of a counterpunch was to shout, ‘What are you doing? You’re bloody nuts!’
The jogger fumbled at the ankle hem of his sweatpants and straightened with a folding combat knife between his thumb and forefinger. He smiled like he was enjoying himself. The carbon-steel blade was dark as asphalt. At night you’d see the fist hurtling toward your chest but not the blade. Gabe tried to scramble to his feet but the jogger kicked his legs out from under him. He turned his back to me and flicked the blade forward like he wanted to cut, not kill. He didn’t consider me much of a threat. I was only a girl. What I knew what I could do. I shucked my leather jacket and could I do?
threw it over his head, then kicked him just below that thing all women are supposed to envy and I tell you he suddenly wasn’t so happy he had it. His knees knocked together and he bent over at the waist. I kicked the side of his knee and he went down but he wouldn’t let go of the knife so I aimed for his kidney. It wasn’t so much fun. I don’t care what my reputation is, I don’t like hurting people. The jogger wasn’t a quitter but after I kicked him in the head a couple times he didn’t have any fight left and when he curled into a shell I grabbed my jacket from the ground and we both ran. We didn’t know if anybody else would come after us and even though we won the fight we were still scared. When we reached the safety of lights we caught our breath on the curb.
‘Who was that guy?’ I asked.
‘Never saw him before in my life.’
I looked at him like, who are you trying to fool?
‘No, really! A complete stranger.’ He lowered his head and I dropped mine until just our foreheads were touching.
I said, ‘Pretty scary, huh?’
‘I haven’t been so frightened since my big brother locked me in the closet with the girl next door.’
‘How old were you?’
When he said ‘Twenty-seven’ we both laughed and it felt like the fear left us with each exhalation of breath. Whatever his deficiencies as a fighter his wits hadn’t left him. Then he kissed me a good long kiss right there on the curb and I knew it could lead to only one thing.
5
‘Will that be one bed or two?’ The registrar at Bally’s Casino wore a friendly smile and name badge that read Cathy.
I said, ‘One bed. If we don’t get along he can sleep on the floor.’
Her friendly smile didn’t waver a bit. People in corporate customer-service jobs rarely understand when you joke with them. But then, it wasn’t really a joke. I didn’t like the wild way my heart raced at a hundred and twenty beats a minute and then skidded all four chambers down to no beats at all. Half the time I couldn’t breathe fast enough and the other half I felt drugged.
On the casino floor below, roulette wheels clattered, slot machines shrieked out the big winners and everywhere hummed the machinery of dreams. Two hours earlier the sun had set but inside the casino the lights blared as brightly as they had at noon or at midnight or at any time since the power switch had been thrown. Next to Hollywood, which exists only in the imagination, Las Vegas is the most surreal city in America. I’d just survived five years of cold-steel reality. I loved the twenty-four-hour artificial dream-time of six-foot showgirls, $7.95 all-you-can-eat buffets and million-dollar slots and most of all I loved the idea that in another day or two almost everyone would vanish into lives that had no connection to the place.
‘No matter what happens tonight, we’re still free,’ Gabe said when we rode the elevator up to the room. ‘Even though we’re married, we have no obligation to each other except to be truthful.’
Free. I loved the sound of the word so much I didn’t consider what he meant by it. I watched him bounce from the bed to the window, where he drew back the curtains to a view of carnival lights below. It had been so long since I’d made love to a man that I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to move. I wasn’t courting a man so much as disaster.
Then before I could stop or even slow it down we were in each other’s arms and I’m lying to you because I didn’t want to stop or slow it down, I wanted it here and now. I ached inside from emptiness and longing. We held each other so fiercely that in moving toward the bed we tripped over the armchair and nearly sprawled to the floor. He slid his hands underneath my v-neck sweater and wrestled with the twin hooks of my bra, vanquishing them upon the third assault. I stripped off his black cotton T-shirt and flung it arm over arm across the room. His chest was thin and smooth as a young boy’s. He gasped and then laughed when I took my teeth to it. Gabe was ticklish in body as well as mind and he most naturally inhabited a zone between the erotic and the amused. I’m not a woman of much experience but, compared to the limited number of men I’d known, Gabe was not an accomplished lover. He was the funniest man I’d ever sacked and did not lack enthusiasm for the act itself even if he had the endurance and technique of a hundred-metre sprinter; ten seconds after the gun sounded he’d take his victory lap and head for the showers. He wasn’t intentionally inconsiderate of my pleasures, just fast and at the end of his run, too exhausted to help me across the finish line. His humour made him fun to be around despite this but a laugh is not a substitute for an orgasm.
Gabe differed most from other men I’d known in his ability to talk, sometimes for hours about absolutely nothing, and this kept us in bed together as much as the sex. We talked mostly about our childhoods and families – typical new-lover stuff. I told him I was the youngest child of a machinist and a woman who had worked a series of retail jobs throughout her life, most recently at K-Mart. I didn�
��t tell him any of the bad stuff about my family. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t seen or talked to my sister since my sixteenth birthday, wasn’t even sure she was still alive. That my brother Ray was the only one of five children who stuck around, either out of loyalty to Mom or because he was too weak to make his own life. That my dad thought I was a devil-child and was proud to say so whenever he could. Maybe I was guilty of projecting a false history of myself, but I didn’t like to talk about the violence and hatred that coursed through my family like a disease. ‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘One brother, Nigel. Absolutely mad about football. Arsenal’s greatest fans, we were. As kids we were close as cleats on a football boot. He’s too respectable for football now. A barrister, very solid sort, wears the wig in the Queen’s court. Not like me at all.’
‘Yeah? And what are you like?’
‘A complete rotter. Haven’t told the straight truth about anything for twenty-two years and counting. Every time I try, the silver spoon gets in my way. My family is frightfully UMC you know.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Upper middle class.’
‘Does that make you a Lord or something?’
‘God, no. Grandfather had the rotten luck to be illegitimate. Father’s never got over it. Tries to compensate all the time. Dresses in tweeds, speaks as though he has a mouth full of marbles. What a bore. But dear mother had a wild streak in her youth. My middle name is Keith because she was so daft about the Rolling Stones she shagged my namesake once. She’s respectable now so let’s not mention it to anyone and certainly not to father, but she’s the one I take after.’
‘How does Rose fit into the family picture?’
Killing Paparazzi Page 2
