Still Life Las Vegas Read online

  I wish I could remember snow. After all, I’m supposed to have lived in Chicago for the first five years of my life, you’d think that would have laid down some kind of imprint, but all that time’s down the sinkhole. Life began at five.

  This apartment building, La Marguerite, is the only place I can remember calling home. It used to be this hot flamingo pink, with all these bright plastic flowers sprouting in the courtyard. Over the years, sun and neglect have bleached it out to the color of a dirty Band-Aid. The flowers have all been plucked or pissed on. The building’s faded like the rest of the neighborhood, and it sits, squat and tired, like all the other ugly brujas on the block, another lost cause.

  My father and I have watched the flow of tenants here come and go: the tide of Mexicans, El Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, and various other -ians, swept from their countries by poverty or plague. They settle down here, and a few years later, it’s either up or back; they sweep out to make way for a new wave of immigrants. Five building custodians have left during our time here; two have died, one by his own hand. Only we remain. Those mildewed stains on the back of our shower wall haven’t lasted as long as we have. I’d like to call it stability, but really it’s just inertia.

  My father used to talk about us making our own exodus from the place, about getting an apartment with a bedroom for each of us, but we never could afford it, not with his job history. Even when he was working more or less steadily, that stretch of years at Premium Outlet as a security guard, we were always just getting by. That was when I was still in elementary school, and my father would get the women in the building to look after me while he worked, a succession of brown-skinned, kindly-faced abuelas who never seemed to mind, though they were settling down themselves after a long day of scrubbing toilets and making beds. He wasn’t asking for too much, though: he left for the Outlet after I went to bed and would get home in time to fix me breakfast. He just needed someone to keep an eye on me in case the unexpected happened; if a fire broke out or if I spontaneously combusted in the middle of the night, I’d know which door to knock on to get help.

  Every night except Sunday, after I brushed my teeth, my father would lead me across the open walkway to whichever apartment was acting as sentry. We’d tap on the door, and I’d present my pajama-clad self to Mrs. Hernandez/Alvarado/Trini/The-One-with-the-Mole. My father would mouth “thank you” and they would get their chance to take pity on the Motherless Boy. “Pobrecito niño!” they’d cry, stroking the side of my face with their leathery palms and cupping my chin. Then back we’d go to our apartment, where I’d pad off to bed (this was when the bedroom was still mine), vaguely embarrassed.

  My father would switch on the lamp and sit at the edge of the bed. I’d say, “Tell me a story,” and he’d say, “Well…” and then off we’d go, halfway around the world. My father and I would set sail with Jason and the Argonauts, follow Orpheus to the gates of Hades, enter the maze with Theseus. He knew all the myths, and never from a book. I asked him once why he had so many stories in his head, and he told me, “That used to be my job,” and for the longest time I thought that meant he got paid for putting kids to sleep.

  When it was all over, when the last monster had been slain or the final nymph had turned into some kind of tree or flower, my father would pat me on the shoulder and lean in for a kiss good night. He’d flick off the lamp, and then, every night, always, he’d stand by the doorway in the dark for the longest time; I’d almost forget he was there. I’d be well on my way toward sleep when his voice would float over to me in the darkness: “I’ll be back. I won’t forget.”

  And he’d always be there in the morning.

  Now, of course, he never leaves.

  * * *

  Evening. I don’t realize how dusky it’s gotten until the outside lights pop on. The yellow bulb glaring over my shoulder darkens the entire parking lot, even though the sun is still lurking somewhere out there, beyond the buildings, where the mountains live.

  My row of cookies is done. I set down the package and wipe my hands on my shorts. Within finger’s reach is my black notebook, where I’ve pulled it out of my backpack. Clipped inside is a mechanical pencil and a pen, extra fine tip, black. I leaf through the pages, telling myself I’m looking for inspiration, but already I know what I’m going to draw. I click my pencil, once, twice.

  A clean, white page. I work to get it just right. The black hair cascading down, wave after wave of swooping pencil, hiding the already hidden eyes. The alien darkness of sunglasses I scratch in as they jut out from the strokes. Three lines become the mouth, pressed together in concentration, and a pair of parentheses frame them, arching from the smaller curve of the nostril toward the soft V of the chin.

  She’s complete. Now she can leave me alone.

  I can do it automatically, this recording of faces. It’s a habit. It started years ago, when I was seven, walking with my father downtown on Fremont Street. There was the usual crush of people staggering around us. He held on tight to my hand. There are no cars allowed on that stretch of Fremont, but my father kept me on the inside of the sidewalk, all the same. Suddenly, weaving in and out of the street chatter and casino noise: a jaunty, vibrating melody. I pulled at his hand. “Is that an accordion?” I shouted. My father nodded. I yanked his hand harder, bringing him down to my level, where I could whisper in his ear. “Maybe it’s her,” I said, because by this time he’d told me the whole story.

  My father went very still, listening. Then he nodded slowly. His bright eyes matched my own. “It could be,” he said.

  We raised our heads quickly, listening for the song’s direction, then set off, following the music. Halfway down the block: “That could be her.… Is it?” He pointed out an Asian woman with long black hair tucked into a corner of a building, chatting on a cell phone. No matter that she wasn’t even playing an accordion, I galloped forward, but he held me back with a hand on my shoulder. “No, not her. Too tall.” We continued on our way, and eventually found the source of the music: a middle-aged balding dude in a tux, playing for change.

  “Oh well,” I said, looking away quickly.

  “Next time,” my father said, patting my head.

  That became the game, locating women who could-have-been-but-weren’t my mother. And after each sighting, flushed with adrenaline and disappointment, I’d race to my room and drag out my notebook (black or dark green, college-ruled at first, then blank) to set down the faces before they disappeared from my mind. Next to each sketch I’d mark down the reason my father gave for her not being my mother: too old; too ugly; too skinny; too short; too not-her.

  The idea was, back then, that if I could eliminate all the characteristics that weren’t her, I’d arrive, eventually, at a picture of who she was. There wasn’t anything else to go by. No photos of my mother in the house; no Web site or a scrapbook or a locket with a fragment of her face glowing inside. She exists only in memory, and not mine.

  These days, I carry around a sketchbook. I draw lots of things, but not potential mothers, not anymore. Still, there she is, Mystery Woman with the Sunglasses, floating disembodied on the white page. What to mark down next to her? Too-what? I could catalog her with a question mark, or leave the space blank, but I’ve got no label for her.

  These days, there isn’t anyone to tell me who she isn’t.

  Sketch #1: Just the facts.

  OWEN

  WISCONSIN

  EARLIER

  He was curled up on the oily floor of the garage, just below the open driver-side door of the Ford Explorer, when the shoes appeared: scuffed and brown, possessing the merest undulation of heel. The epitome of sensible. They were waiting, expectantly, in front of his face. By this time the room had stopped its merry dance. Owen no longer felt the push and pull of gravity, the urge to bash his head against the concrete in order to slow things down. He had just managed to open his eyes (slowly—the heaviness was still there) when he noticed the scuffed brown brogues—was that a shoe name? Or just an a
ccent? An Irish shoe?—mere inches away from his nose.

  It took Owen a moment to realize that they were, in fact, attached to legs. He had imagined them to be a pair of little tan puppies (the looping brown laces floppy ears) who had come to nuzzle him awake. Hey, boys, what’s wrong? You say Timmy’s in the well? Well, Timmy’s going to have to wait. I’ve got a date with this floor right now, you see, and after that, I’ve got to find my wife.

  The shoes. Yes. He opened his eyes again (more difficult, this time) and they were still there. So were the legs. Apparently, they wanted something from him. He would have liked to have glanced upward, to make the acquaintance of the shoes’ owner, but found even that small sweep of the eye really quite beyond him. He’d have to hazard a guess.

  Vee? he whispered to the thick ankles.

  The voice came from impossibly high. Voice of God.

  You’re not the victim, you know, she said.

  And abruptly, she was gone, shoes padding off obediently with her.

  Ah, Vee. Angel of Mercy. Sweet, sweet Vee. An Irish face to go with those Irish brogues. It wasn’t a hard guess, really. No points given for that one. This was, after all, her house, and, by extension, her garage. She was the matriarch. Matriarch. Yes, that word suited her. Not mother, not even to Emily, her own adopted daughter; never mother. Matriarch.

  The floor felt cool against Owen’s cheek, and he decided to remain there, as if there were a choice. I may need to rethink this plan, he thought, though there really was no plan to speak of. He had awoken that morning to the radio announcement, heard Vee bellowing in the kitchen, Damn it, she’s gone. Owen sat up instantly, Lazarus raised from the dead. That shot of adrenaline had miraculously transported him out of bed, into clothes, through the kitchen door, and almost into the Explorer before shutting off abruptly and dropping him onto the concrete. It was the smell—the humid, stale air that the car exhaled immediately upon opening (a corpse’s breath on a hot day, he thought, falling)—that had clobbered him behind the knees and felled him to the earth, as effectively pinned as pierced Diomedes outside the walls of Troy.

  Wait. Weight.

  It was hard to imagine that not too long ago the process of movement wasn’t such an agonizing event. His limbs used to be steady, once upon a time, his mind unfogged—why, he was tenure-track, after all—was—but the darkness hadn’t yet settled down on him, Erebos crushing him molecule by dense molecule. He hadn’t noticed how bad he was getting over these last hazy weeks (months?); because things were expected of him, he was forced to function. Wear the suit, sign the papers, make the deposition. He had become one of those trees that topple but slowly because of the mass of vines supporting it. And there, in the car on the way to his mother-in-law’s house, Chicago to Milwaukee, curled up in the passenger seat, he felt the vines release and the tree come crashing down. It was dead inside, but he had only just realized. Up the milligrams, was the verdict of his doctor. It’ll pass. May cause dizziness. Ergo, the floor.

  The brogues. He missed those brogues. Unlike Vee, they were warm, companionable. He should have named them. And hadn’t they borne the weight of those disapproving feet for so many years? It was something he understood. He wondered if Vee had always despised him, or only since recent events. Certainly, she had never been particularly warm to him, but warmth, he gathered, was not something she was known for. That’s just the way she is, Emmie had said, one particularly horrendous Christmas visit, rubbing that aching spot between his shoulders. Believe me, I would know. They were sitting in her former bedroom, impossibly small, on the same bed he had been confined to these past two weeks. But nothing prepared him for this—this active, accelerating iciness emanating from Vee. Had that always been present, waiting for the right moment to manifest itself, or was it a new antipathy? Antipathy. It sounded like a small, barren island. I am banished to the shores of Antipathy. His just punishment. Better here than on that other rocky shoal—Pity. He didn’t blame Vee. He didn’t blame anyone. But himself, of course. For him, the lowest reaches of Tartarus. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—

  And abruptly, she was back. (Hello, little brogues!) Those stern legs were bending; he could see knee, thigh, waist—Come on, come on, she said—and Vee’s hands were clenching the bulk of him; he towered over her but she was determined and her grip was steel. Vee managed to lift him to his feet and together they tangoed into the living room, where she shoved aside the coffee table with one deft push of her foot and released him onto the couch.

  He was panting and wet with perspiration. Sorry, Vee, the couch might get a little soaked, why not slide that doily over here and save a cushion—but suddenly she was grabbing his hand with both of hers, smoothing out his fist—Why, you do care after all, Vee, or should I call you Mom?—and only when she had pushed herself upright, jingling metal silenced by her closing fingers, did he realize that all along she was going for the car keys clenched tight in his right hand.

  She paused, looking down at him. Her creased face displayed nothing but Purpose. Vee’s arms were crossed in front of her, and she patted them twice, decisively, as if to rouse herself. He had seen Emmie make that same gesture, many times. A decision had been made.

  I’ll be back, she said. Another pause, and then: You rest.

  She went away. A moment later he heard the car start up and then that too was gone.

  He gasped loudly in the silence. She had set something off. It was the modulation in her voice, yes, that was it, the way her pitch lowered and softened with the two words, You rest, which reached inside and undid him. The flow of feeling—feeling!—coursed fast through his body—no, no no no—as the words echoed, not the meaning of the words but the tone, dark and forgiving, and his trembling began, and with it the sobs—large, painful, and without limit, Emmie, he cried aloud, over and over again, Emmie. Emmie. Emmie. And he needed her, and he wanted her to need him again, to fit in that hollow of his arms, but she was gone, just as he was coming back. Yes, I am back, he thought, his mind clearing, and this was followed instantly by When did I last take my medication? and then, in a moment of revelation (the cursed moment of revelation) he saw clearly the nightstand with no pill bottles on it and knew where Emily was heading, and soon he was lurching that way, too, by way of the kitchen where he had to, somehow, find a phone book and a way to the airport.

  * * *

  Hello, much better. Thank you. Owen was never so happy to see clouds before. Here he was, traveling at an oblique angle to the horizon, heading upward, en route as it were, when just hours before he had been inert matter puddled on a garage floor. Stowing his items in the overhead compartment, fastening his seat belt, returning his seat and tray table to their locked and upright position: he was master of all federal aviation requirements. Remarkable.

  Owen shifted his gaze to the left. Not everyone, apparently, was as overjoyed by his presence at the coveted window seat as he. His traveling companion, for one: she of the cropped pink halter top with baby blue sequins spelling out ICE PRINCESS across her birdlike chest. Owen had plugged in the airline’s headphones to maintain some privacy, but the gesture turned out to be largely redundant; the sour emanations of two weeks’ convalescence mixed with the earthier aroma of his cooling sweat had apparently secured as wide a berth as possible from his hapless midriff-ed companion. She was at this moment twisted in what looked to be an incredibly contorted position away from him, jammed to the far side of her seat, her Mademoiselle magazine perched precariously on the distal armrest. This poor Ice Princess (a reference to lineage, temperament, or occupation?) was in obvious distress, and short of hurling himself out of his tiny window Owen could do little to alleviate her suffering. Ah, but fear not, sweet nymph! Rescue is at hand! For at this moment, just as the seat belt icon dimmed, Owen saw the ever-attentive male flight attendant leap to her side with catlike reflexes. Sensitive to her plight, the attendant whispered a few discreet words to her and pointed to an empty seat two rows ahead (Owen, with smooth jazz pouring into his
ear, could not hear). Our princess fumbled frantically against her bonds, broke free, and catapulted herself into the unoccupied 16C. She smiled gratefully at her hero (her first smile of the flight), who in turn sauntered triumphantly down the aisle, his greater glory assured. Everyone was happy, the skies were never friendlier, and Owen was airborne and alone.

  Which was all to the good. It was amazing how quickly and smoothly things had pulled together. There was seemingly no end to the amount of flights going from General Mitchell International (MKE) to McCarran (LAS); he had only to pick a time. Mrs. Steiff from next door, with a mere modicum of animosity, agreed to look after feverish Walt until Vee returned home. The taxi arrived when it said it would, and though getting into the cab gave Owen a few moments of vertiginous anxiety, he kept his eyes closed and it was over soon enough. Airport security was quick and painless. The gods were smiling, for a change.

  Owen peered over the seats ahead of him. His recently evacuated neighbor was now happily ensconced in her spacious new accommodations, head bopping to some fantastically sunny music her Walkman provided, her hand flipping through the magazine pages with abandon.

  Now then, am I really that hideous? Owen sank back against the headrest. He wondered what changes might have come over him in these last few weeks. Had, perhaps, the Accident transformed him, shifted his features in some imperceptible but unsettling way? Did he now bear a mark that drove people from their seats to get away from him? Children would now run screaming from his lumbering path. His arms would reach out to them stiffly, his teeth bared: Run from me, I am depressed. Beware my depression.

  I suffer from depression, he murmured to himself, trying it on for size. This was the first time Owen had ever said those words aloud. He had been avoiding it, perhaps because to admit It meant to own It, having It branded on you forever. He is a professor. He is married. He suffers from depression. It became part of you permanently, like a son or daughter. More permanently, actually. Ah, no, no, best not to go down that road. Too dark, wouldn’t you say? Let’s stay up here in the heavens, shall we?