Still Life Las Vegas Read online

  Well, if you could tell him, tell him I’m, we’re coming home soon.

  I will tell him no such thing.

  Please, Vee—

  How can you find her? You can’t even get out of bed.

  Owen felt his jaw clench tightly. Well, I’m here now, aren’t I? he said hotly. She’s my wife.

  Vee exhaled loudly. You don’t know her, she said, and hung up.

  He put down the phone carefully. It had not even been two minutes, he was sure of that. The charge wouldn’t be too much. Owen felt strangely victorious. He had made it all this way. He had navigated himself all this way, down to Las Vegas, and had secured a free room in the finest hotel, to boot. He would find her.

  She would want to be rescued. She’d arrive at the canals and he’d be there, waiting for her, he’d extend an arm and beckon her into a gondola. Soundlessly, they’d float, in each other’s arms, and all would be well. Like Orpheus, he’d lead his Eurydice out of this underworld and back to terra superus, to Chicago.

  And he wouldn’t look back, no, not once.

  WALTER

  VENICE VENICE

  LATER

  Bridges, gondolas, lampposts. Stores. Bad opera singing. Stores. A painted sky.

  It’s pretty much as I remember it.

  My foot’s about to step onto cobblestone and the Great Indoor Shopping Experience known as the Grand Canal Shoppes. There are two life-size statues flanking the archway to St. Mark’s Square, on blocks of marble atop seven-foot pillars. A Young Apollo and Diana, in classic positions: slim Diana bending down to retrieve what looks like an arrow, foot pointed and arm outstretched; hunky Apollo seated on the block, one leg out and one leg bent, lyre at his side, face raised toward the eternal blue sky projected above. I don’t remember them being there before, but it’s not like statues are a big deal on the Strip. You can’t go two feet without running into an imitation Thinker or David. Apart from a few gawping tourists, most people pass through the archway without even glancing up. There’s no time to stop and admire Beauty when Armani beckons.

  No accordion players, though. We used to come here a lot, looking for them, the first years after the Venetian was built back up and rechristened Venice Venice. My father would take me by the hand and we’d go up and down the newly erected bridges, chasing after dark-haired accordion players. Then one day he said he didn’t want to go anymore. It wasn’t the same, he said, the Venice of Venice Venice wasn’t the same as the Venice of the Venetian. It was too vast now, he said, the canals were too wide and there were too many bridges. She would be impossible to find.

  I was also getting to the age where I realized that the chances of her making a return engagement were pretty thin, and I think he knew that. It wasn’t long after that that he started staying in bed more and more, started the staring, and since I was too young to go myself, well, that ended that.

  Strolling musicians at two P.M. The kiosk doesn’t mention which instruments. Is there anyone in a Pierrot costume, wielding an accordion, black hair? I consider asking someone about it, maybe Security Joe over there, the big black man with the navy blue jacket and the wire looping over his ear, but he’s already giving me a red-rimmed stink eye. He knows a vagrant when he sees one. I head over to the gelato stand across the square, the only place where I can afford to buy something. Single scoop.

  So much for the Great American Consumer Experience. I pass back through the archway, tending to the chocolate drips, when all of a sudden a high-pitched squeal pierces my ears. It’s one of those teenage-girl squeals I’ve encountered many times at Silverado High, a squeal that can only mean cruelty and public ridicule are about to follow. I brace myself for the onslaught, but it’s not a teenager in front of me, it’s a middle-aged woman with a freckled bosom and a pink Spandex top. Her mouth is open in a perfect O of surprise. I swipe at my face with my hand, figuring I must have had a major Nutella mishap, but then I realize that she’s not even staring at me. Her finger is pointing above my head.

  I look up, and there, on the block of marble, is Young Apollo’s chiseled leg. His thigh. His bare hip. His haunch. The haunch of Apollo. There isn’t any other way to describe it, it’s a haunch, like nothing I’ve ever seen. Three and half years of mandatory high school PE had never before revealed a haunch like this one. My gelato-lined mouth falls open into an O. O. O. There is no not looking at this leg. It’s powerful and sleek, massive without being crude. Every muscle is accounted for, every tendon and line can be traced from origin to end. It’s so real looking I turn away, blushing. There’s heat coming off the white stone.

  And then it occurs to me: Wasn’t his lyre on the ground, resting by his hip, when I passed through? Now it’s in his hand. And wasn’t that other hand, the one lifted to make a pass through the strings, resting on his knee before?

  I think, I must not have been paying attention, but I swing my gaze over to Diana, and she’s different, too. She’s now crouched, hand resting on her fallen arrow, her back straight, head raised, like she’s ready to leap up and resume the chase. I’m sure: They’ve changed positions. They’ve moved.

  I notice that each pillar has a little carved-out nook halfway up, with a porcelain urn inside. There are dollar bills in the urns. Then it hits me. Hits me hard. They’re real.

  I shiver. If I had any hair on my body it would have stood up on end. These statues are too still, too perfectly proportioned, to be real; and yet, they are. I can see, way up there, life in Apollo’s deep-set, unblinking eyes, even if they’re not looking my way. It seems impossible, the way his wrist bends back with the fingers spread out, never trembling. There’s not a nostril flare, no slow, telltale expansion of the chest. It’s wild. He really is a god up there, trapped in plaster.

  “Oh my Gawd,” Spandex Bosom exhales.

  It’s hard to be impressed living in a place like Las Vegas, where they cart in the latest Wonder of the World for mass consumption every other Friday. And there are certainly superhuman feats performed twice daily in almost every hotel on the Strip. But these gods, they’re different. They aren’t like those other living statue posers that crowd the walkways, those with bodies hidden under white draperies and gloves and their herky-jerky movements like bad robot impersonators. This Apollo is something else. Art made Flesh. Or Flesh, transformed into Art.

  “Damn,” mutters a man beside me, “damn damn damn.” He’s wearing glasses and breathes through his mouth. Little beads of perspiration dot his hairline. “I’ve been watching her for an hour straight and I haven’t seen her move a muscle.” His eyes never stray from their heavenward trajectory. “She’s doing it somehow but I can’t catch her. I can’t catch her. Ah shit! Shit! Her hand! When did she move her hand?”

  Diana is now clutching the fallen arrow, which, last I saw, was lying on the ground. She has it lifted just past her anklebone. Whipping my head around, I discover Apollo’s right hand now drawn past the lyre, as if he had just released a sweet chord into the air.

  The man pulls off his glasses and squeezes his eyes tight. He runs his hand over his hair twice and then over his face. “I was watching!” he cries. “How is she doing that?” He sounds both amazed and angry, like he’s been duped. He takes one last look up, then wrenches his body away. “I’ve been here too long,” he murmurs, shaking his head. “I need to go gamble.” And he flees.

  I walk reverently up to each porcelain urn, dig in my pocket, and divest myself of my remaining cash. Happily. I’ve been converted. This isn’t my father’s Venice, after all.

  OWEN

  THE VENETIAN

  EARLIER

  Three A.M. With the curtains drawn, the room was comfortably tomblike (womblike?), but Owen could not sleep, not even in these soft, warm sheets, under the ornamental canopy positioned over his head. We could kill two birds with one stone, Emily had said. The Venetian, surely, was one of the birds, and Venice the other. Look, there was an actual bird, the pigeon almost killed by a trompe l’oeil. They had probably taken it away to fin
ish the job, wring its neck in a discreet alcove. Pigeons are Forbidden to Attack the Guests. It was in their contract, right after Pigeons Will Not Defecate in the Square. Could a pigeon be potty trained? Walter. He sometimes regressed in his potty training, during illnesses. Ear infections he got, mostly. Is that what he had this time? Owen hadn’t even known Walter was sick; Owen had been sick himself. Weakness. Damn Vee. Would she leave any kind of message from him, would she tell Walter that his parents had not left him, that it was only a temporary, a brief epeisodion? Not likely. He should have insisted that she wake Walter up, so he could have spoken to him, reassured him.… Vee wouldn’t have budged. But he should have tried.…

  Owen threw off the sheets to get a glass of water from the bathroom sink.

  He had seen that picture of Liberace, on the kiosk in the airport. VISIT THE FABULOUS LIBERACE MUSEUM! Was that an omen? Or was it the pigeon (that’s right, that’s where he was going with the pigeon idea), was the pigeon the sign that he was in the right place, the place of the killed bird? He was no oracle. Was it telling him that the bird was already killed at the Venetian, that he needed to go elsewhere; maybe the Liberace Museum was the other bird, and she was on her way to killing that bird. Oh, Emmie, Emmie, where art thou? We could kill two birds with one stone.… Which birds did she mean?

  It would be a long night, even in Egyptian cotton sheets.

  Owen turned onto his side and flicked on the radio alarm clock by the winged lion on the nightstand. Electronic keyboards and a clarinet solo crackled softly from the speaker. Emily would have hated this New Age music, but it was the perfect soporific. Owen settled into the pillows and closed his eyes. Underneath the radio music—from another suite? or perhaps coming from the recesses of his pillow?—he heard the familiar tinkling of piano keys. Another song, snaking its way into consciousness. He opened his eyes, recognized it immediately. Another moment, and yes, there was Ray Charles’s tobacco-and-honey voice growling softly into his ears alone:

  Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through …

  Owen found himself crying again, but this time it wasn’t painful. Not at all. He didn’t even notice the tears until the rivulets trickled into his ears, effortless. Like a soft summer rain. He felt relief. Here was his sign, unmistakable. Owen looked up into the blackness and smiled.

  He whispered,

  Little Miss Peach, you found me.

  EMILY

  HELL

  EARLIER

  Emily crossed the twenty-four-hour driving mark in complete darkness. There was no landscape, no horizon in sight; the headlights picked out black highway leading into a black sky. Even the stars were absent, covered by a thick, heavy cloud mass that stretched into the infinite, muffling light.

  She met with very few fellow drivers, even while skirting late-afternoon rush hour outside of Denver. There had been the occasional solitary car accompanying her for various stretches of highway, but eventually she outpaced them all, watching them grow smaller and smaller in her rearview mirror and finally disappear, never to be met up with again. And for hours now—no one. Just her, the rattling Volvo, and night in Utah-soon-to-be-Arizona, which was altogether too vast, too replete with silences waiting to be filled.

  She entertained the notion that rather than driving to her extinction, she was driving in it. Perhaps she had died without noticing. She had fallen asleep at the wheel, slammed into some majestic rock outcropping, and was at this moment driving a phantom car across the country toward whatever afterlife she deserved.

  The thought was momentarily cheering, but Emily knew it was simply fantastical speculation. She dragged her upper teeth across her cracked bottom lip, repeatedly, until it drew blood. Yes, she was still alive. She could taste it. This flight into the paranormal, it was due to a surfeit of caffeine; it was the lack of sleep; it was the darkness. And, she admitted to herself, regripping the steering wheel, once you think you’ve seen a vision of Liberace, well, you’ve opened a door to almost anything.

  For a while, Liberace had been an excellent car companion. She imagined his face turned to her, all openmouthed wonder and soft brown eyes perpetually widening, anticipating something delightful. Together, they played duets: “The Beer Barrel Polka,” “El Cumbanchero,” and “Kitten on the Keys” were her jaunty sound track across Colorado. Emily saw every glissando, arpeggio, and flourish as if his rhinestone Baldwin grand were there up on the dashboard. But when night began seeping into the landscape, the Utah terrain grew less and less hospitable to such frivolity. The music stifled. Liberace and his smile flickered, then disappeared.

  It was just as well. Liberace was not a part of her adult life. Her childhood affection for the man was not easily reconciled with who he really was; by the time she was out of high school he had devolved into some kind of hoary, rhinestone-encrusted punch line; it was easier to just look away. She had stowed him away as completely as she had her accordion.

  Still … She fingered the soft red feather tucked into the visor above her head. His company was infinitely preferable to the now-empty space next to her. There was also a whole lot of empty space behind her. When she looked into the rearview mirror the night sky seemed to have oozed into her car and spread out, black and cavernous, and in that blackness her eyes kept trying to form shapes, to reassemble the backseat, to discern the forms slumped and sleeping there.…

  Lists. She needed lists. Thoughts arranged in bullet points: organized and controlled.

  Things I Should Have Done

  • Made coffee

  • Gotten the dry cleaning the day before

  • Taken the Echinacea and vitamin C, four times daily, at the first sign of cold or flu

  • Called Owen at work

  • Called the day care

  • Divorced

  • Always kept the gas tank at three-quarters or above

  • Never said yes

  • Called the day care

  • Called the day care

  It wasn’t working. This list kept growing tendrils.

  The yellow warning signs began appearing at intervals. Her headlights would pick them out, and they’d shout out at her upon discovery. STAY ALERT! they insisted. STAY AWAKE! STAY ALIVE! Emily found the signs darkly amusing; in her case, they were missing the point completely. But then the little white crosses began sprouting up at the side of the road, and these she could not dismiss as easily. They were inescapable. Mile after mile, another would spring up just as she was sure she had passed the last one. The crudely made crucifixes would glow suddenly in her headlights, only to fade out, ghostly, as she passed. The piles of stones, the little bunches of dried-out flowers at their base, the ragged photographs pinned up and curling in on themselves: they were all too personal, and much too close. She gunned the motor, hoping to distance herself from them, but always more appeared. It was as if a cemetery had sprung up around her.

  How fitting, Emily thought, pressing hard on the accelerator, but she’d had enough. She would ignore them. She’d stare directly in front of the car, she would hum “Roll Out the Barrel,” she would get herself out of this stretch of mortality.

  And that’s when the engine died.

  She felt the pedal go slack under her foot, heard the sputter, and suddenly she was coasting. There wasn’t anything to do—she wasn’t driving anymore, she was play-driving. The car had finally given out. Emily could feel the adrenaline race through her body and her heart start to pump fast, but her mind remained curiously calm, even detached. Here she was, at the end of things. Events had been taken out of her control. She could only bear witness, fascinated.

  After the initial drop in velocity the car took a long time to slow. It was so quiet she could hear the crunch and pop of every stone under the tires. The Volvo cruised along at an amiable pace for almost a quarter of a mile before coming to a stop, as if on purpose, before yet another small wooden cross.

  The faltering headlights illuminated this marker as if it were showcasing a fine work of art. The cross
was smaller than most, and weathered; the white paint had peeled away in strips and the whole thing was leaning precariously to one side. At its base were two large red devotional candles, partially filled with sand, and a bouquet of bleached-out plastic flowers lashed to the vertical board with wire. A few of the pale leaves had melted together. Farther up, tied by thin cord, a ragged communion dress clung to the horizontal board. Tatters of ruffles and lace flapped free, the pink of the ribbons and trim only a faint shadow.

  “Oh come ON!” Emily shouted in disbelief. She threw her hands up in outrage. “Jesus CHRIST!” she shouted to the heavens, as if expecting Him to appear and explain Himself. He did not. She was alone.

  The headlights began to dim. It was when the dashboard disappeared that she felt real panic set in. It can’t end here, not here, she repeated to herself, yanking at the steering wheel, not in this car, not in front of that scarecrow child. Not here. Was there something there in the darkness, something small crouched behind the cross, rustling the fabric of the dress? She gasped for breath, teeth bared, hands clawing at the ignition. She was sure she saw movement out there. Something was walking toward the car, dirty-soled, naked, and tearful. Arms out.

  Her foot jabbed down on the brake. She turned the key. Once. Twice. Three times. Emily’s accelerating sobs mimicked the whine of the engine, unwilling to turn over. At her final try she let loose a full-throated scream that signaled the end of hope and reason, and that, seemingly, gave the engine the jolt it needed. The ignition caught on and the car roared back to life.

  * * *

  Emily pulled off at the Valley of Fire exit in Nevada. She was panting, as if she’d covered all seventeen hundred miles from Wisconsin on foot. The light from a truck stop shone out like a beacon. As she pulled into the lot, Emily wasn’t thinking of food, or gas, or restrooms. She just needed to get out of the car. She propelled herself from the Volvo, a little unsteadily, and made her way to the OPEN 24 HOURS sign. The door swooshed open. A gentle puff of cool air hit her face. For a moment she just stood there. The glare and hum of the fluorescent lights, the merchandise, the utter normalcy of it all completely shocked her.