Thrill-Bent Page 20

  I want to leave Zazzle’s immediately, but Shirley has other ideas. As I sleepwalk down the few steps of the Pool (Lynne has exited ahead of us and disappeared behind a red door in the back of the bar) he points to our former table, which is still empty, and leads me over to sit down.

  “Can’t we just go?” I ask, disoriented, lipstick-smeared, all too aware that my bra is clasped on the wrong hook and my underwear is bunched up like a bouquet of flowers in the sad, stunned gutter between my asshole and my clit.

  “In a minute,” he says, and heads toward the bathroom. I sit in the same chair I sat in before, but of course I am not the same person I was then. When I sat in this very chair a mere few minutes ago, I was a person who essentially believed that the hard evidence makes the case. Now, with my butt tucked into the same convex swathe of Naugahyde that so willingly supported my skeptical, materialist ass a few—but I couldn’t say precisely how many—songs ago, I find myself transformed into the kind of person who believes that a stripper who makes her living convincing people that they are special, thinks I am special.

  Dear Chantelle, I muse. I hope you like clang. Is it possible to eat love and not be consumed? Sometimes, when your mouth is flown open and you’re spinning on a jet stream seven miles above earth, when your body is arched, suspended in time by pure pleasure, do you wonder where your thumbprint went?

  Shirley must have angled the bathroom’s hand dryer directly at his crotch, because the wet spot is barely discernible now. Or maybe the men’s room at Zazzle’s has installed a crotch-level “hand” dryer for just these occasions—and I imagine their frequency is more than just occasional, somewhere in the ballpark of once or twice per customer. He takes his seat and smiles at me conspiratorially.

  “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asks.

  “You know I did,” I say, and I try for a smile but what surfaces on my face must look more like a smug sneer, or like the flare-nostriled disgust of someone who has smelled an eggy fart in an airless public place. I don’t want to process my lap dance with Shirley, even though he brought me here and paid and everything. Even though he is the one who warned me that the concepts of “lap” and “dance” are as checkered and fugitive as the cells that compose our bodies, the cells that constitute the big Seurat painting of everything that exists.

  As we talk I am unconsciously scanning the room for Plum. Finally I spot her standing at the bar across the room, talking to a tall man in a cowboy hat. She is not touching him; she stands on her towering heels with her arms dangling gracefully like a debutante at a cotillion. She tips her head back and laughs at something he says; I see, or think I see, her errant tooth gleam.

  This is the feature I will use to recognize her in fifty years: I’ll be wheeling my walker down the Seizure-world boardwalk and a leathery, younger gal in a snazzy tennis outfit will cross my path. She’ll pause briefly, her upper lip just raised in a sort of de rigueur friendly old-person smile, and I’ll see the tooth, the tooth racing to the front and center of her mouth, and I’ll know it’s her. She’ll give her racquet a playful slap, a hello and goodbye, and I’ll see that her eyes are inconsolable or her chin looks terribly disappointed or her cheeks have been artificially pulvinated in an effort to evade time’s erosion—but her front tooth will emphatically jut out, insisting on selfhood.

  She looks freshly brushed and lipsticked. I can’t help wondering what else went on behind the red door—did she spray on more Love’s Baby Soft perfume? Did she take a Handi Wipe and swab the warm, glistening goo from her waxed and perfect vulva?

  The man leans over the bar to order a drink. As he does this, she glances over at me for a split second. I stare back, agog. She raises one hand and just barely waggles her fingers, the smallest, saddest, sweetest wave I’ve ever seen.

  What I have created and become accustomed to, the paradigm handed down to me from generations of nose-to-the-grindstone Jews and efficacious, clubby Mormons, is shattered in an instant by a girl named Lynne, named Plum. I no longer care to preserve a shred of my genetic code, of the causal link that made sense to someone somewhere who once believed questions had answers. What exists for me now, what feels familial and essential, what I want to tuck me in at night and make my lunch and feed me from the core of its sepia, tear-stained haunt-edness from now until eternity is the mental photograph of this girl across the bar with her fingers tickling the air. I exist, and she exists, and the fact that we don’t know each other’s civic statistics—I never told her my name, and I don’t know if either of the names she gave me is true—only serves to exacerbate the umbilical affiliation between us. I recognize this myopia, this emotional radar that tracks her scent across the bar. She and I are the only two people who live and move; everyone else is weirdly stationary, cardboard cutouts in newsprint gray among whom we move, but they don’t have skin to touch or voices to hear. We are at a big party, atop a buoyant sea whose sole purpose is to bob us up occasionally on swells of noise and color so we can recognize each other from across those vistas, perceive with a pang the other puzzle piece who fits perfectly into our jigsaw, and wave. I know this liquid feeling heating my throat like a shot of whiskey, this absurd longing for what already is, what is unchangeable. This is the feeling of being in love.

  Compulsive behavior tends to be about making the world predictable to ourselves. We keep checking to see if we turned off the oven because we want to confirm that we are safe; we order the bills in our wallets by denomination to ensure that the things we value in life will be lined up according to a predetermined—determined by us—standard. A recitable rank and file. Whenever I rinse out the tub after I take a bath, I flash on an image of Baby Huey, hulking and ridiculous with his giant diaper and lollipop; when I pass the SunTrust Bank on Second Avenue, I begin humming “Three Blind Mice.” Obsessive thoughts, the crazy, unexplainable associations we make and then get stuck on over and over again, exist to remind us that we are the same from day to day, even with our dreamlike quirks and vagaries. I had the same bizarre thought the last time I performed this action, therefore I must be the same person I was the last time I performed this action. We create a tyrannical dictatorship and then live under it as serfs, working hard for the narcissistic boss who provides us with order and safety. We are protected, but we live like children. Craving structure, we are not grown up enough to take responsibility for revolution.

  Thrill comes in when the pattern is perforated. Falling in love is thrilling because we feel vulnerable to what someone else feels. We can’t control the situation, even though we desperately want to (or we think we want to—if we could make the object of our desire fall in love with us just by wishing, that would remove the element of peril and return the whole endeavor to the realm of safety). When in the thrall of thrill, our emotional selves no longer take orders from their intellectual tyrants, and the narrow confines of our empires become intolerable. There is nothing less parochial than love.

  Thrill rides are artificial ways of plucking us out of our own little fascist states and depositing us, however briefly, into alternate domains. Of course, we know that we may safely return to serfdom when the lap bars spring open (as opposed to in love, where there are no such promises of restoration). Thrill rides are dummy runs; they prepare us for love and death.

  Shirley slows way down as we again approach the giant cloud, this time from the opposite direction, gently pulling off onto the road’s wide dirt shoulder. Braxo—his name sounds like industrial-strength handsoap to me, even though I understand that he is going for a more glamorous emanation, like a royal nickname or the informal sign-off of an underage genius—stands by the side of the road, hands on his hips, head cocked like a pistol. His fluffy, monstrous creation swells up before him, and he seems to be regarding it with interrogation, even scorn. His posture is cartoonish: tall, skinny frame clad in a loose dark suit, swayed impossibly backward like a popsicle stick being flexed by a precocious child. His black hair juts up from his he
ad in a foppish pompadour, completing the question mark. The sky, fighting being consumed by nighttime, is like an enormous purple bruise that has gathered around a fat, white scar—mottled and veined, descending in hue from mauve to blue-black, emanating a saintly halo. When I squeeze my eyelids together, the blob rises back up into the sky, cushioned by its own sucking light, its ethereal blankness, and levitates back to its proper spot in the universal order of things.

  Shirley hasn’t said a word to me since we left Zazzle’s, after he insisted on getting a quick lap dance from a petite redhead wearing a white wristband (“That means she’s over eighteen but under twenty-one,” he explained, “so although this may be exceptionally immoral and karmically imprudent, it’s not actually illegal”) while I watched. Only I didn’t watch—I swiveled in my chair until I was pointed in his general direction because I knew he wanted me to take on the role of the horny bystander that he originated just a few moments ago in the Pool. But I looked past him into the mirrored wall behind the bar, where my face, pale and moon-eyed, appeared to me as a doll’s face, one of those old-timey china-headed dolls like the sisters dressed up in miniature calico frocks on Little House on the Prairie. Once in a while I was distracted by a hair flip or a moan issuing from the redhead, and I’d look over to see Shirley staring straight ahead, his lips pulled tight as a clothesline, his eyes dead gemstones tucked into the flesh of his face, while the girl flip-flopped like a performing carp in his lap. It was fucking depressing.

  When she finished I got up and headed toward the front exit. I figured if Shirley didn’t follow me I could always get a taxi. So what if I had to use what little money remained in my bank account getting back to my hotel on the Strip? If it meant that I didn’t have to spend another minute inside the gold-painted Ali Baba dome of Zazzle’s Palace, where young girls with no solid infrastructure teeter and sway and manage to bear the whole weight of the entire sagging, waterlogged world ... I’d eat Top Ramen every night for weeks; I’d sell all my David Foster Wallace hardcovers, and some vintage beaded cashmere sweaters that I never wore anyway because the lining always bunched up and made me look like Ethel Merman. But when I stepped out into the parking lot I saw there were no taxis, just a dozen empty sedans, two obviously rented red convertible Mustangs, and a taupe Lincoln Town Car, its driver leaning all the way back in his seat taking a lengthy drink from a small silver flask. I was about to approach him when Shirley came out and keyed open his Fiero. As he ducked into the car, I saw his hand brush through the air, waving me over. He leaned across to thumb open the passenger door for me, and when I got in he had already started the engine and immediately began backing out of the driveway. I looked at him apologetically. He shrugged and took a left onto the highway.

  In real life, I’ve noticed that nothing comes to rest where you will it to. Braxo’s cloud is perched within the exact dimensions of his artistic vision, poised there while he critiques and amends. But no person has ever alit precisely on the not-too-hilly, above-sea-level, parking-accessible, animal-free zone that I was plainly waving them toward. Maybe my air control signals are a little rusty, but the people who hover above me generally come to rest somewhere entirely inappropriate, somewhere intimate and scary, somewhere very nearly underwater where untrained beasts of all sorts roam and plunder along the sloppy, scalloped hem of coastline. Guests and demons moor between my organs, on my tongue, in my coffee cup. Nowhere I would choose to host a creature from another world.

  Shirley stops the car and cuts the engine but doesn’t turn off the headlights, dousing the scene in a stripey, film-noir blur. Even with all the windows rolled down, there is perfect silence. Just the desert, the Spaniard, and an extraordinarily large squirt of what appears to be shaving cream on the darkening horizon.

  “Wasn’t there something about this in Revelations?” I whisper to Shirley in the blackness of the car’s interior. “’And a cloud shall alight upon the earth’?”

  “Speaking of alighting,” he says softly, “Braxo looks like he’s sporting a huge spliff.”

  Indeed, illuminated by one of the high beam’s bright spears I see the lanky fingers of the artist’s right hand closed around the end of a joint the size of a small puppy. He points it behind him, and the glowing red cherry trails him a little, like a short tail. Amazing as it seems, Braxo still doesn’t seem to have noticed us, though we are less than ten feet away from him in a hissing green sports car whose high beams are currently lighting him up like a marquee. He leans back even farther and tilts his chin toward the sky. He seems to be in great danger of either toppling over or folding himself in half.

  We get out of the car and Shirley saunters toward Braxo, sidling right up beside him, cocking his head the opposite way and silently gazing in the same direction for a long moment, as though they are at the wine and cheese reception for a gallery opening.

  “Admiring your handiwork?” Shirley asks casually.

  “It is true enough,” Braxo says without missing a beat—though I’d expected him to jump three feet in the air when he heard a voice, since he’d given no indication that he was aware of our presence—“I am a kind of God.”

  “A perverse kind, I’d say,” says Shirl with a snort. “Dragging items out of their rightful place in the sky and setting them down on earth wherever it suits your fancy. More like one of those petty Greek tyrants than anything in the Old Testament.”

  Braxo finally straightens up and looks down at Shirley, and they both break up laughing. Braxo’s laugh is a loud honk, and when I close my eyes I can imagine that a small flock of geese is experiencing an emergency. When they wind down, Braxo offers Shirley a hit off his fatty—I wonder if the Spanish roll their weed with tobacco like the French—and Shirley waves him away with the slightly overdramatic “safe” gesture of an umpire. He skitters over to me, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the dusty hard earth to present me to Braxo. I feel like a scared kid whose parent is dragging her to sit on Santa’s lap.

  “Braxo, this is my new friend, Jan” he announces breathlessly. “She is a fan of clouds in their many diverse locations.”

  I try to curtsy in a tantalizing, somewhat ambiguous way, like Plum did to signal the end of our acquaintance. The impulse to appear seductive and cool, unruffled in the presence of a genius, is an attempt to display my own artistic contempt for predictable behavior. Unfortunately, my back foot slides at the last minute on the slippery dirt, sending up a brief spray of ochre sand that blossoms in the headlights like a chrysanthemum, accompanied by an involuntary grunt.

  “Are you all right, dear?” is the first thing the famous iconoclastic artist says to me.

  “Yes, fine, sorry,” I mumble as I regain my balance.

  Coming around the bend, the bend of the cloud, that is, are two lanky androgynes in silver suits and masks, with what appear to be large leaf blowers strapped to their backs. They resemble Stormtroopers, and they are heading toward Braxo. One of them pulls the mask down and unstraps the ominous black welding goggles that are riding on top of a do-rag hair covering. As soon as she takes the goggles off, it is clear she is female, with big brown mournful Winona Ryder eyes. She says something to Braxo in Catalan, and he honks—this time seemingly not in mirth but in frustration.

  “Well then, we’ll have to resume in the morning, no? It is two moments before dark anyways.” He claps her on the back with jovial, aggressive force and turns to us. “The pressure in their tanks has fallen down too low to insure proper foam texture. We will have to recharge the tanks at the facility tomorrow.”

  “Braxo is renting a hangar from the county to store his equipment,” Shirley explains, “under the condition that he hires off-duty Clark County helicopter pilots to take photographers up once the work is completed.”

  “Yes, instead of looking up the clouds, I want to have an imprinted record of what it is like to look down at one.” Braxo crosses his arms over his chest and launches one hip out about a foot to the left as
if he is posing for a picture himself.

  “Yes,” I say, remembering a detail from some documentary I saw in art history class, “didn’t Christo commission aerial photographs of all his installations?”

  Braxo twirls toward me with the whites of his eyes showing all the way around his pupils. “Christo? That hack? You imply that I am taking my cue from a third-rate grade-school dropout?”

  It’s clear that I have inadvertently scratched the wrong surface here, and as I notice the Stormtroopers surreptitiously backing up on tiptoe toward the bend in the cloud, I have an idea to change tacks. I ask Braxo whether I can have a quick tour of the project before the sky is completely black.

  “I can just tag along with them,” I almost beg, gesturing toward the retreating twosome, “if they won’t mind the intrusion?”

  He fires a torrent of Catalan at the pair, and they stop in their tracks. The other silver-suited phantom has pulled off her headgear at this point and is shaking out her thicket of chestnut hair.

  “Of course,” she says in English, and smiles at me. “I am Gloria, and this is Pila.” She motions to the other statuesque Trooper. “We will do the continent with the lady friend.”

  I leave Shirley and Braxo to sort out their various lingual and litigious concerns and trot over to join the Andorran beauties, intrigued by the promise of a continental tour. I suppose clouds are continents, though I’ve never thought of them that way. This one, I find out immediately by examining Gloria and Pila’s backpacks as they walk ahead of me, is made of polyurethane foam shot from industrial cannons, like the kind that do insulation in office buildings. As we walk, I am mesmerized by the cloud. Its texture is incredibly smooth and luscious, like Mister Softee vanilla ice cream. Each scroll of lather melts into the next, creating a random woodgrain-like pattern of barely distinguishable white-on-white, a delicate gossamer brocade you could study for years and never get tired of. I wonder what kind of cloud Braxo is approximating here. Not diaphanous, like those gauzy sunny-day clouds that offer no shade. Not ominous, no hint of gray or pressure mounting, angry tears threatening to spring forth from its massive guts. It is more like those cumulus clouds from Italian Renaissance paintings: fat and muscular, glossy and lit from within, evidence of god’s vice-grip on beauty and power, lush toys floating around heaven’s inconceivable romper room. The structure really does appear to be organic, to have fallen from the sky intact. But the sides of the cloud look to be ten stories high, much higher than backpack blowers could create—unless these bewitching android-senoritas can actually hover like hummingbirds.