The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  Michaela was dark-haired and dark-eyed, her face hard and stern with a smile that was like a frown. She hadn’t gotten the dancing gig. Nearly fifty girls had shown up for the audition not knowing only one spot was available. But the entertainment director had approached her afterward and asked where she was from. “He told me I ought to stick around, if I had nothing better going on back home in Seattle. Which I don’t. He said he’d talk to some people for me. See if anyone else has any openings. Probably just wants to fuck me. But hey, you never know when a dancer’s going to break a leg, right? As for the time being? Who knows. I’ll just strip, I guess.”

  There was something about the way she said it. Something about her shrewd intelligence. They’d left the 86 Club with the remnants of an eight ball and walked north along the boulevard, past the new colonnade of Caesar’s Palace into the lights of the northern strip where the high-rise addition of the Sahara towered over Circus Circus, chain-link fences around freshly dug craters in the earth and the omnipresent cranes bearing the steel girders of more half-finished towers, Michaela telling how she’d come here directly out of Berkeley, had been accepted at a few law schools but was still trying to sort things out after what had happened to her that spring. A boy she’d known from school—this dickwad whose pleas she’d finally given into, finally agreed to go out with him though she’d known all along there was something strange about it—had drugged her and left her in Golden Gate Park, and Michaela had still not figured out what to do about it, whom to blame, for she didn’t blame him, though she didn’t know why, and didn’t exactly blame herself, at least—she said to Maddie, forcing a smile that was like a frown—not all the time.

  “But why am I boring you with all this? We’re supposed to be having fun, right?”

  In those days, the brightest lights were still downtown, to the north in Glitter Gulch, past the wedding chapels offering drive-thru service, left on Fremont and up past the Golden Nugget and the Pioneer Club with its gesturing cowpoke. It was in the main bar of the latter—the two of them ordering tequilas and turning away the looks of the men—that Maddie had first begun to feel that sense of something she’d never felt before, a comfort that had allowed her, for the first time in years, to turn inward. Sometimes when she looked at Michaela that first night, she’d seen a potential better version of herself, more adapted and cunning and capable of dealing with what had happened. It was not just Michaela’s ability to speak matter-of-factly while nibbling on goldfish-shaped crackers about an event that Maddie could not help but compare to her own experience (an experience about which she had never told a soul, not even her mother, despite Annabelle’s efforts). It was not just Michaela’s apparent grace that made Maddie feel she could tell her anything. It was also her admission that, beneath it all, she was still uncertain, just as Maddie was uncertain about exactly what had happened that night in the upstairs room at the French Quarter, an unsettled scene that she had tried to replay in her mind only to find the frames disjointed and sparse: a moment when the cowboy was approaching her, a moment when she knew what was going to happen and then another when it was happening. (And yet it was not fear that she had felt, nor anger. It was certainly not love or even anxious lust but rather an almost relieved sense of resignation, as if she was finally getting something she had long anticipated, but not necessarily looked forward to, over with.) Still, the memories and those that followed chiseled themselves carefully from the denial that surrounded them, and when Michaela had at last run herself dry—“Jesus! Can I dominate a conversation, or what? What about you? What the hell are you doing here?”—when the last of the eight ball was gone and they’d marched back out into the street in search of fun (in search of another eight ball) Maddie had found herself unable to begin chiseling, had found herself telling not the story of that night in the summer of her sixteenth year—but instead the story of the phone call she’d received earlier that same day (coincidence? or cause and effect?), the phone call that had led her to that wild party at the on-its-last-legs 86 Club in the first place, the phone call that had come in just after she’d arrived for work, gotten changed into her white outfit and come out onto the floor at just after two in the afternoon, which in Vegas meant breakfast.

  At first, she’d thought it was some sort of joke, had thought some cruel co-worker had set it up, or perhaps the floor manager, whom she knew disliked her for denying his sexual advances, who had reminded her that personal phone calls were not allowed, though some of the girls received no less than five a night. Would he be capable of such a thing? All day, Maddie had walked around in a daze, trying to come up with ways of explaining it away. Though she had recognized the voice immediately—not that it had stopped her from playing dumb, from adopting the tough girl act that had become second nature (Yeah, this is Maddie. Who the fuck is this?)—though she’d known at once who it was, she could not accept it as true: that after they’d so awkwardly gone their separate ways in the aftermath of their uncoordinated flight from Alaska, the woman she’d once known as Mother would be coming back into her life with a phone call, would be attempting to reconcile the last two years with an impromptu visit.

  Annabelle had married some grad student, a Vietnamese guy fifteen years her junior, had moved first to Boston and now to Michigan where the new husband had taken a teaching job. Maddie had listened, mouth open, as the familiar but somehow changed voice on the other end of the phone detailed the haphazard sequence by which she, a forty-one-year-old divorcee, had fallen deeply in love with, and had that love reciprocated by, a twenty-six-year-old Vietnamese man who’d graduated summa cum laude from MIT in a branch of artificial intelligence research of which ninety-nine percent of the world was ignorant; had continued listening, still stunned, as the voice claiming to belong to her mother, that depressed sponge of a woman she’d known in Fairbanks, detailed her “reemergence” and “new appreciation of life” and gave her the full itinerary of their “extended honeymoon,” which, after a week on St. Martin, was now going to take them—and here she’d even had the nerve to pause dramatically—to Fabulous Las Vegas! Maddie had been too dumbfounded to disagree or question any of it, had been startled into something like paralysis to hear Annabelle’s confession that she had contacted him (through a lawyer, of course), had demanded that he arrange and pay for the divorce, and that if he didn’t … well, then she might just have to publicly disclose certain unflattering details from his past—this disembodied voice from Maddie’s childhood leaving her unable to speak, only to nod, incapable of cohesive thought, still sitting in the little folding chair next to the phone when the manager had come over, long after her mother had hung up, and read her the riot act.

  She picked them up at the airport a week later with the same sense of disconnection, having borrowed a car from one of her roommates. The young husband who climbed into the backseat while her mother got up front looked much older than the twenty-six years he claimed, dressed up in a suit and tie, just the type of sucker this city feasted upon, his hair (so out of fashion for someone only a few years older than she) almost making her laugh. She had driven them up and down the Strip, giving them the PG-rated tour, had led them out on to the floor at the Stardust and, while the young husband vanished amidst the maze of tables, had sat her mother down on a high bar stool in an out of the way corner and leaned in.

  It was still strange to look at that face and to see herself in it. Annabelle seemed not to have aged but gotten younger. Certainly she looked healthier—healthier than Maddie—and yet there was a frenzy behind her smiles, her forced conversations that seemed intent on saying nothing. It was Maddie who had eventually tried to bring up Max, and she had watched her mother’s face fall immediately, watched it take on the lost expression she remembered from her brother, whom she had tried to stay in touch with only to have him stop returning her calls. She understood his anger, of course—but that did not mean she was ready to confront it. “Yes, yes,” Annabelle said, stammering and staring down at the floor, lying or
concealing something. “Yes, I’ve spoken to Max. I spoke to him on the phone and—” But her voice had trailed off. And then a pained smile had stretched across her face. “Oh look! Here comes Dat!”

  The whole week had been like that, Annabelle’s talent for avoidance remarkable, her affected desire—for the new husband’s benefit?—that they appear to have a boisterous, sisterly relationship pairing awkwardly with Maddie’s fear of her own secrets being revealed. They didn’t discuss the two years that had passed; her mother didn’t ask how Maddie liked school, what she was studying, if she needed any money, what her plans were—which was a relief, actually, because Maddie couldn’t have told her anyway. After two days, the new husband seemed to convince Annabelle that they ought to do their own thing, and Maddie had stressed her way through the next three days at work, waiting for a phone call that never came. It was not until their final day in town that a dinner date was arranged. They met at the MGM Grand, where Dat had offered to pay. (Remarkably, it seemed he’d come out nearly eleven hundred dollars in the black.) Maddie mumbled her way through it, indignant and perhaps jealous. At the end of it Annabelle stood and pronounced it the best meal and best trip ever, though she’d barely touched her food and her eyes were watery.

  Maddie had seen them off at the airport, hungover and grumpy and sad but unwilling to admit it, Annabelle wiping her eyes and throwing her arms around her. “Thank you, honey!” she’d said, which Maddie at first had taken as gratitude for whatever fragment of forgiveness she’d managed to portion off for her mother. But Annabelle’s eyes lingered, her expression one of expectation. She’d stepped back and stood before her daughter, inviting an appraisal, and it was then that Maddie realized just how big her mother was—that what had appeared to her the natural accumulation of weight for a Midwestern woman turning the corner toward middle age was something more, something that for some reason shocked her. “Since you didn’t ask,” Annabelle had said to her in the airport, “I’ll just tell you. It’s going to be a girl! Oh, Madeleine! I’m going to be a mother again!”

  Later, it was Michaela—to whom Maddie had retreated in the aftermath of her mother’s departure—who’d consoled her. They were still new friends then, and yet Michaela had come over on Maddie’s day off with a twelve-pack of High Life and sat with her on the balcony of her apartment near campus, had clunked bottles with her and made her laugh through her tears and done everything Maddie thought a real mother should do, had talked her through that line of her mother’s that had bothered her so—I’m going to be a mother again! As if admitting that she’d somehow stopped being a mother to Maddie. Michaela had dragged Maddie through her anger and helped her accept that she was a sacrifice her mother had been forced to make, a role that she’d come to embrace during the next few months, the next few years, Annabelle becoming like some forgotten aunt who’d paid a visit and could be quickly dismissed, her new husband no more memorable than the customers who came in and out of the churches of fantasy where she lived and worked. It was on that night, somewhere toward dawn, that Maddie at last told Michaela—at last told somebody—the story of that night at the French Quarter. How it had begun not as a seduction—she’d been way too young for anything like that—but not an accident either. And how perhaps, maybe just for a moment, she had thought it was what she wanted. Maybe she had changed her mind. Maybe it was not what she’d expected. And yet that didn’t give Lyle the right to do what he’d done, it did not give him the right to keep doing it even after she’d told him to stop. And so if he’d just listened, maybe it would not have sounded bad enough for Max and Jasmine to hear, would not have looked so awful at the instant they came rushing through the door. And what had they been doing anyway? What had Max been doing in that room down the hall? And so who was he to judge her? Who was he to think that what she’d almost done was so incredibly wrong? Who was he to leave her with the guilty illusion that this was all her fault?

  Maddie chiseled the last piece of it free and then lay there on her bed, reaching for this dark-eyed lover-and-mother figure that at that very moment Michaela became, the surrogate whom she somehow knew already would be there for good—would be right there next to her, looking into her eyes every time Maddie, momentarily soothed, drifted off to sleep.

  FOR SIX YEARS, THEY RULED Vegas.

  Michaela sizzled, had danced in Berkeley all throughout her years there. In blue light Maddie would wait, just offstage but still visible, dressed in a plaid school-girl skirt, a ballerina outfit, a field hockey uniform, looking reluctant. Michaela would beckon her forward through the haze, a silhouette in smoke and green lighting. Still Maddie would wait in the wings, drawing it out as long as possible.

  This was at the legendary Palomino Club—The Pal—the only all-nude club in town that also had a liquor license. The site had been grandfathered in when the county had decided that beer and bare weren’t a good mix and had adopted its crass trademark line: You can have booze or cooze but not both. The place had the benefit of name recognition and that vintage Vegas feel. Muted lighting and maroon upholstery, a bar upstairs with a stage and a stainless steel pole running to the ceiling that Maddie always studied for a second every time she arrived—at six o’clock, hours before the shows began—surprised not by how grimy and barren it looked now but by the transformation when the lights went out, when the place filled up and the anticipation began to twist in her belly. By the time Maddie had been coaxed out onto the stage, the shed components of whatever preposterous outfit she’d been wearing tossed among the crowd, money was being thrown at them. By the mid-eighties, management had taken the unheard-of step of building a special VIP room just for them, the price set at double the going rate. Still, the line on some nights had stretched all the way down the maroon staircase with its gold-plated banister, winding around the perimeter of the first floor and out to the sidewalk, where a set of stanchions were set up to accommodate the snaking line. Management doubled the price again. It didn’t matter. The line still went all the way down the block to the dumpsters in an adjacent alley, where industrious homeless men had begun hawking stolen wares, a new branch of staff hired simply to manage the outdoor crowd.

  In their dressing room, on these nights, preparing to venture out onto the stage again to perform the act that had begun with an honest energy but had transformed into something else over the years, Maddie and Michaela would argue, would not quite fight. For six years they had reigned like this as the most famous duo in Vegas—more famous, even, than the two Germans with the white tigers—had achieved guest spots at Caesar’s Palace and the Flamingo Hilton, had been treated like celebrities anywhere they went, lounging in the pleasures of what the locals called juice, had visited all the parties and mansions, Jacuzzis and private jets to Tahoe for sunbathing. It was just when the owners had doubled the price for the second time and hired the new staff and remodeled the VIP wing that another position had opened up at the Lido de Paris. The director had called Michaela, had left a message while they’d been onstage performing their first show of the night, a message she had retrieved upon returning to the dressing room, where they’d meant to towel off, get changed, powder their noses a bit as the saying went, and then head back out to the floor. Instead it had turned into this scene. This argument. The director had not even bothered to advertise the job; he knew who he wanted. They’d sat half-clothed in the dressing room, Michaela explaining the reasons why she had to at least show up for the audition tomorrow morning, Maddie holding in her hands the pink tutu she’d been in the process of putting on, unable to put into words the anger she felt, the sense of being cheated by time, of having arrived at a place in her life where she had finally wrested some sort of control from the situation that had taken over her life at sixteen and had defined her ever since.

  Because for her this had not been about the money. For Michaela, it had been an easy way to make some dough, the men a necessary evil. But for Maddie it provided something she’d been lacking ever since that day she’d fought to pur
ge from her memory. These moments on the stage, when she possessed the power to turn the revolving faces of the men into nothing more than vacant images, to rob them of their lives and their importance, had been the one thing she’d done that had made her feel better about her conception that she had been tainted for good. And it was because of this thing she and Michaela had made—this creature that emerged out of this dressing room three times a night, six nights a week—that she had begun whatever tentative steps she’d taken toward a recovery. She couldn’t say anything, responded to her cue and stood reluctant in the wings while Michaela rode the pole, beckoned her, helicoptered a satin negligee and flung it at her, their eyes meeting when they came together on either side of the stainless steel rod connecting stage and ceiling, the crowd around them gone, the two of them arguing out their positions on where to go and what to do with this crossroads, each attempting to win, with the deep focus of her eyes, a victory that would either move them beyond this stage or keep them firmly attached to it, a victory that Maddie was ultimately able to secure not because of any stronger sense of purpose or inherent rightness but because hers was the avenue of less resistance. While Michaela had to win the favor of her friend, Maddie had only to poke holes in Michaela’s confidence in order to ensure that the director would see what they both knew all along he’d see, what he took great pains to explain to poor Michaela the following week when she’d come in for her second audition—that six years had passed, that it had been irresponsible of him to get her hopes up, but that he had fallen so in love with the woman he remembered that it had made him forget that Michaela was now almost thirty years old, had made him forget how difficult it was to maintain the body of an elite athlete, which was what he needed for a professional show like this one.