Hot Springs (10 page)

She was right. These were losing-your-favorite-doll hysterics, these were staying-up-way-past-your-bedtime hysterics.

“You can be anything you want,” said Bernice. “I’m sorry. Mommy’s sorry. Mommy’s got her own problems, but they have nothing to do with you.” She thought how, in fact, they had everything to do with her, but she didn’t elaborate. Right now, the thing was to get the child back to her former, mini-adult state. “What about ice cream?” she said. “I’ll bet they have ice cream here.”

That seemed to help. Emily’s sobs stopped, except for an occasional one that shook her like a hiccup.

“Perfectly normal little girl,” said Gillian.

But what Bernice was thinking was that if normal meant this, she was going to need some help. “You ever go home anymore?” she asked.

“Christmas, usually,” said Gillian. “And then back when my mom was getting chemo. But I don’t like it there.” Gillian was originally from Binghamton, New York, and both her parents were psychologists. “The place is horrible—no sun, ever. I want to blow it up.”

“Shhh,” said Bernice. “They’ll hear you.”

“Who?” asked Emily. “Who’ll hear?”

“Them,” said Bernice. “The government.” She pointed her eyes upward, as if an FBI spy camera might be embedded in the stucco ceiling.

“Anyway,” said Gillian, “you can’t ever go home. Home isn’t a real place. I mean, it is, but only partly. It’s also connected to time and people and just the way the world was back when you were younger, and who you are inside, or who you were. There’s nothing sadder than walking along a street that used to mean something to you and finding out it doesn’t at all anymore, that you’ve moved on and it’s just a street.”

Bernice thought about a patch of sidewalk she’d always loved near the Walters Gallery, where there were two long, dark stains that looked like the stretched-out legs of a pair of pantyhose. Her mother had pointed them out to her.

“Anyone for dessert?” asked Gillian.

Bernice nodded. She noticed that Emily was still looking upward, trying to figure out who it was besides God keeping an eye on them.

T
he address turned out to be a small house about a half mile up from the center of Manitou. Landis went there a little before ten, after treating himself to Vietnamese food at a place he liked out on Academy, then going to the mall and pumping quarters into the ski machine. He’d skied a few times growing up, but never really got the hang of it, and skiing in New Jersey was sort of a joke, anyway. The first time, his dad had taken him, back in the days of lace-up leather boots. In high school he’d gone on some midweek excursions to Vernon Valley, but those had been more about smoking dope than anything else. When he’d first come to Colorado, he’d had a vision of himself, a solo figure gliding expertly down vast fields of white, past half-buried aspen and spruce, but money had been an issue, and then he’d hurt his back. The machines they had at the mall made you feel as if you were in the Alps on a beautiful day. He liked
how the image on the screen responded to the way he moved his feet, angling and carving through the imaginary powder. This was his secret, that he liked to do this. A virtual Franz Klammer.

The house smelled like must and fried fish, and there were people standing around in little clusters not saying much to each other, some who looked up briefly when he entered. It was a young crowd, and maybe an educated one—there were women with academic-looking eyeglasses, guys with beards. He sensed a certain desperation in the studied nonchalance around him. He searched the refrigerator, took the cheapest beer he could find, and headed out the back door to the yard.

Robin was standing looking at the fire, which seemed to have part of an old desk in it, along with a pair of skis and a bowling ball. “I told him it wouldn’t do anything,” she said.

“It might melt.”

“You think so?”

“Seems a good bet.”

“I figure it will just sit there. I don’t even predict a glow. What’s it made of?”

“Plastic,” said Landis. “Or rubber, maybe.”

“You came,” she said. “I didn’t think you would.”

“I like parties.”

They stood together in silence watching the bowling ball.

“We don’t have to stay,” said Robin. “We could go someplace. To tell you the truth, I hate these people. They’re Magic Bussers. Street theater crap. Some of them are, anyhow. It’s a cult. They plan public performances, and they all write the scripts together. Art isn’t democracy, you know. Only nonartists—only people without the vaguest notion of what art is—would ever think it is. Art is the opposite. If anything, it’s fascism. One person decides everything, and fuck you if you don’t like it. That’s art. What do you think?”

“Are you an artist?”

“Ha!” she said. “You’re pretty funny.”

Landis wondered what Bernice would think about any of this, or if she knew any of these people. She kept to herself. The time he’d suggested they could go to the museum up in Denver, she’d just shrugged and said, “Why?” But in the park one day, there had been a group of kids making a wall of paintings together—each of them worked his or her individual square, and then they were all assembled together into one huge canvas—and she’d wanted to join in, and had even made Landis paint a square, too. He’d tried doing his own work boot, but it hadn’t ended up looking like much. Bernice had painted a pair of squinting eyes.

“I once knew this guy who worked for Bob Dylan,” he said. “The guy would ask Dylan after a show if everything was OK. Dylan said things to him like, ‘More green, man. Put in a little more green on the guitar.’ Or he’d say, ‘The drums are too red, man.’ That’s the kind of stuff you get to say if you’re a genius.”

“You married or something?” asked Robin.

“Oh, it’s not like that.”

“So what is it like?”

He took a sip from his beer. The bowling ball split in half with a sound like a popgun. “I really don’t know much about art,” said Landis.

“Here’s what I’d like,” said Robin. “The guy whose place this is, Leroy? We used to go out. Only now we don’t, and he sees some Magic Bus skank. So what would be great is if you and I looked like we were together, and maybe even left together.” She grabbed his arm and gave it a squeeze. “You wouldn’t be required to put out, although we could see what developed. Mostly, this would be about making an asshole feel bad.”

“I don’t know,” said Landis. “I’m supposed to make a phone call.”

“You can make a phone call. I’ve got my cell—you want to use it?”

“No, that’s OK.” Telling Bernice he was at a party didn’t seem wise.

“I hate my cell,” she said. “It’s a leash. It’s like being on house arrest. When we were dating, he called all the time to check on me. ‘What are you doing?’ he’d say, all innocent. And I’d be, like, ‘I’m taking a crap, if you want to know.’ He was crazy jealous—it drove me nuts. But now, now he’s got his skank. Of course, he invited me to his party, because we’re still friends. Friends. Do you think you can be friends with someone you used to fuck but now don’t anymore?”

“Never tried,” said Landis. Robin wore a motorcycle jacket with the sleeves cut off, so you could still see the elaborate etchings on her arms. There was a dragon on one. He couldn’t see the other.

“You have any tats?” she asked, noticing him noticing.

He shook his head. “Never got my ear pierced, either. All that started a couple years after me.”

“So you weren’t allowed?” She stepped right in front of him, close. Her jacket was open, and she pushed up against him, smashing her mouth against his, moving her tongue around. He could feel her ample breasts against his chest, and without really thinking about it, he put both hands behind her and squeezed her ass.

“Hey,” she said, stepping back. “I didn’t say you could do that.”

“You didn’t say I couldn’t.”

“Do you think he saw?”

“I don’t even know who he is.”

She gestured with her head toward a short guy with spiky hair and a Che Guevara T-shirt a few yards away, by the fence, backlit by a tiki torch. He had glasses and was laughing in a very fake way while holding forth on something to a group of three other people who seemed to hang on his words.

“He doesn’t look like he saw.”

“Hell, then. I’ll just go tell him we’re leaving.”

She walked off, and Landis did not watch her. He felt embarrassed by this, and wasn’t sure how exactly he’d agreed to whatever it was he’d agreed to.

They left his truck where it was and took her car, an old red Subaru. She wouldn’t tell him where they were going. She had a six-pack on the floor of the passenger side, and he opened one for her, which she held between her thighs as she drove them down into Old Colorado City. She drove a little too fast, he thought, and he didn’t care much for the death-metal tape she put in, but he tried to just relax.

She pulled over in front of a small, brick office building and led him around to a side entrance. “I work part-time for this guy,” she said.

First, she showed him the back room, where there were various molds and casts out on a table, dentures that reminded Landis of joke-shop chattering teeth. There was an antiseptic smell to the place, vaguely sweet. She took him to the examination room and switched on the lights. “Go on, have a seat,” she said.

He did, leaned back, stared up at a video monitor. “You sure this is OK?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “It’s fine.” She was fumbling around in a cabinet. “There,” she said. Music began to pump out of speakers hidden in the walls.

“I hate the Grateful Dead,” said Landis. “And for some reason, I can’t seem to get away from them.”

“Resistance is futile,” she said. “Anyway, different music for different activities.” She had something in her hands.

He hopped up out of the chair. “How did you say you know this guy?”

“I work for him.”

“Work how?”

“Office stuff, phones. He’s a drummer, and we dated for a while.”

“So you
can
be friends with someone you used to . . . you know.”

“What makes you say ‘used to’?” Her eyes seemed lit—it was a quality he recognized. He wondered why he kept finding himself with chemically unbalanced women. She turned around and adjusted a couple of dials on a little panel below the counter. Then she put a mask over her face and drew three deep breaths. She took it off. “That’s the stuff.”

“Whoa,” said Landis. “You sure that’s safe?”

“Come here.” She stepped behind him, put the mask over his mouth and held it there with one hand, her other moving lightly over the front of his pants. “Feel anything?”

“I don’t know,” Landis said into the mask, his voice muffled. “You?”

“I think so. Yes, definitely.”

Tentatively, he inhaled the sweet gas. He’d never had it before. Dentists had always just shot him up with Novocaine or used nothing.

She stepped away from him, settling herself into the chair and putting on the mask. Her expression had turned dreamy. She was old enough to be a mom, he thought, and then he realized he had no evidence she wasn’t one. There were hollows around her eyes, and he wondered what she thought of them, or if she thought of them. He felt dizzy from the gas, although not particularly like laughing.

“You know what’s sexy?” Robin said, leaning back, holding out the mask for him to have another whiff. “Dentists’ chairs.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Imagine if I were passed out in this one, for example. You could pretty much do anything you wanted to me and I wouldn’t know. Have some more.”

“What if someone comes? The police, for instance. Why would the lights be on in a dental clinic on a Saturday night?”

“Oh, he’s in here working late all the time. Weekends, too. Here, have more.”

He did. A lightness moved through his brain, circles and stars dancing in Hollywood musical choreography. He noticed she’d unbuttoned her jeans, the top two buttons, exposing the upper part of her purple satin underwear.

“But he’s not coming tonight?”

“Who?”

“Your boss.”

“These are the rules,” she said, ignoring the question. “You can watch, but you can’t touch.” Taking another long hit from the mask, she let it dangle by her chin, reached down with both hands and pushed her pants and underwear down to her knees, revealing a shaved pubic area with labia that effloresced like the edges of an exotic mushroom. She licked her fingers and began to masturbate, slowly, eyes closed.

Landis wasn’t sure what to do. He’d heard of things like this happening, but had never quite believed in them.

“Oh,” she said. “Mmmm.”

“Um,” he said.

“Shhhh,” she said, peering out at him through one eye, just for a moment, then closing it again.

The “Ode to Joy” beeped out in asynchronous contrast to “Friend of the Devil,” and without any noticeable shift in rhythm, Robin reached into her pocket and removed a phone, which she flipped open with one hand, the other continuing to massage herself. “Hey,” she said.

Landis helpfully went to the stereo and turned down the volume, then began to make leaving movements.

“No.” She waved at him to stay. “It’s all right. I’m with him now.” She smiled, listening, her left hand paused for a moment. “That’s right. No. At the office. I’m in the chair.” She winked at Landis. “Uh-huh.” She began to move her hand again, this time quite dramatically, and she groaned a bit into the phone. Then she held the phone out for Landis to take, which he did. He held it up to his ear as she worked herself with a new intensity, one hand holding her lips apart, the other rubbing up and down vigorously.

“Buddy?” said a voice.

“Yeah?” Landis answered.

“Tell me what’s going on over there, really.”

“Well, I can’t say. Nothing for you to be concerned about, at any rate.”

“What did she tell you about us? Never mind. It’s probably not important.” Landis heard the sound on the other end go muffled, as if the guy had his hand over the receiver. He’d turned away from Robin, who was now making sounds like a singer warming up for choir practice. The guy’s voice came back, clear, deep, and nasal. Landis was glad for having something, anything, to occupy himself. “Tell me what she’s doing.”