The Gift of Women Read online

  Terry notes that three out of four are into bodies and one is into money. They laugh with Terry at her observation, which, they agree, is true.

  Bodies and money. Who is into both?

  P. laughs and suggests herself and her fitness barn. Then, all of them talk instantaneously of El, in Nevada, and look down the lens of the camera, trying to see me. I am not sure how much of the footage that follows is usable. Since so much of it is gossip about El and with every glass of wine it grows more lewd and ghoulish; compassionate, then sentimental for the prodigal El. I already recognize these emotions may turn into a matter of dispute between Terry and myself in our room later.

  Since it involves El, it is sure to. Terry has never told me Elizita is in America.

  After pursuing the old girls of the Collegiate through their daily routines – J., at the CSTD; B., at the VSE – I am able to combine pictures of hands on the stockroom floor, brandishing buy-and-sell orders, with those of arms heaving a rhythmic forest of fingers in the air, which I shot through the windows of The Fitness Barn at eight in the morning. A fistful of images, as it were, of what gets the alumni of the girls’ Collegiate up and going in Vancouver.

  Money and muscle.

  I take the thumping beat of music and feet of the early-morning exercisers to a clacking intermezzo of halyards and gulls on the masts of sailboats in the False Creek marina where P., the proprietor of The Fitness Barn, lives in a penthouse with her Swiss-Canadian husband.

  On the last evening the conversation comes back again to El and her love life.

  “She would die for it.”

  “She nearly did.”

  I can’t work out which of the voices go with these two overly spontaneous remarks. Now, the consensus is that Terry and I should go and do a story on El in Nevada. Does anyone have an address?

  The physician, J., has a phone number. Elizita wrote to her once and gave her this in case of emergency. J. has provided Elizita with hers, for the same reason.

  “What might that emergency be?” J. asked Elizita.

  “A man, or your woman’s things that doctors don’t deal with, or the odd urge to visit Nevada,” came the reply.

  When they are serious on the matter of Elizita, the women admit that, except for her “odd urges,” El did have common sense and was wise in the ways of the world, and that led her to try psychiatric nursing, which B. (the trader on the VSE) points out, drove her to put her head in the gas oven. Discussion erupts over state-controlled care versus support at home, which, because of responsibility to the family, obliges one to go out and find a job to supply the everyday needs, not to mention love. Somebody suggests that the intimate touch is what El truly understands.

  “She’s about as sensitive as a sea anemone,” says Terry, draining her glass.

  “Meaning?”

  “Whatever floats by, whatever feels good, Elizita gloms onto.”

  J. looks at Terry, then at me; they are already holding on to each other’s hands when J. speaks for both of them, “Let’s phone and tell her you’re coming.” And before I can say Jack Robinson, J. is giggling into the receiver, “You’re there, you’re there. Lovely to hear you, El.”

  (Pause)

  “No great alcoholic event. We’re all here, just having a wee glass of wine with Terry and Gavin. You’ll never guess what they’re up to. Making a program on us Old Girls, so we thought – you’ve got to talk to Elizita.”

  (Pause)

  “She wants to know who’s going to talk to her. Terry or Gavin?”

  “I’m not doing the interviews,” I say, and Terry takes the receiver from J.

  “That’s fine,” Terry shouts into the phone. “It’s fine,” she shouts back at us, moving at the same time and trailing the long cord from the phone to the table where J. is pointing to a pen and pad. “Wait a bit, wait.” Terry begins writing.

  “Can we all say something to her?” asks M.

  “No, we’ve probably said too much already,” says Terry. “She only wants to talk to me and she wants Gavin to come and video what she’s up to.”

  Terry comes over, holding up a piece of paper for the camera on which she has printed: Clear Haven Hotel, McNair, Nevada. Night or morning of July 12. Phone: (702) 641-8899.

  “Strange way to set up a meeting. Night or morning and the date, as though El’s running an agency.”

  “Shows she’s a professional, same as the rest of us,” says B.

  J. agrees, “Equal to any, or all.”

  “Even if she isn’t,” B. butts in, perhaps not feeling quite equal herself, “doctors aren’t the only ones who can fix people up,” she says.

  “Are you going to fly or drive?” J. asks us in order to change the subject.

  “Two days is enough for the drive, isn’t it?” I ask.

  “Then, you won’t fly down with me,” says M., who has already asked us to stay with her in Palo Alto so that she can show us Stanford.

  “You’ll still be there in a week…” Terry hesitates.

  “And with El you’re never sure where she’ll be,” M. agrees. “Alright, but you’ll pay a penalty on your ticket for the change.”

  The repetitiousness of the fir forests in B.C., Washington and Oregon vanishes through the interior, where the coastal ranges and highlands turn into a plateau on the other side of the Rockies. The land appears to have been spread out to dry, like a great wrinkled sheet with dust the colour of blood blowing all over. It intimidates and infuriates me with a need for speed in the car. I drive in a daze of constant acceleration, as if the rising of the road will continue into an unrelenting sky that has magnetized the metal of the machine to its light. Something in me is geared to match its glare with velocity.

  Could we cope with living here?

  Our accents seldom fail to start a conversation wherever we stop. We become the centre of a warm huddle, setting fire to curiosity and confidences.

  The good folk always explain who they are and ask where we are going; our lives and theirs are summed up in those few sentences we share along the way. One half of the life we have to tell about is our destination.

  When asked, we answer, “The Amargosa Valley, to visit a friend, El., to make… Well, not really a whole programme, part of one that will have her in it for the BBC. She went to school with my wife.”

  One trucker who’s driving a silver tanker of milk and wears a T-shirt that says

  Got no Beef,

  All Pure Cow’s Milk,

  no Bull

  agrees. He would do a programme on El. “Nobody better to do one on around the Amargosa.”

  “Why nobody better?” Terry wants to know, wondering – I’m sure, as I am – if this can be the very same Elizita, who is known by (what sounds like) her initial alone.

  “Now don’t go teasin’ me, like you don’t know,” the trucker laughs at Terry from the door. “They must make you all like that over there. Never tell in the daylight, what you do in the dark. ”

  “What’s that all about?” Terry asks me, as she is left listening to the truck driver sing a rougher version of what he has just said, outside,

  “Never tell

  in the daylight

  the hell

  you fuck with all night.”

  EL or hell? I am not sure what way we should hear the line.

  Hour after hour of listening to the radio leads me to a morbid absorption in the lyrics of the songs, the miserable epitaphs and epigraphs about love, all manner of contrivances and conceits begin to appear genuine. Where does the new Country misery in the music come from? The old?

  I wonder if I will use this song the trucker flung over his shoulder as the beginning of the segment on Elizita, or will I reject it? Odds are I shall veer away from the EL or the hell I might fuck with all night.

  The way people talk here may sound rough and lazy, but there – in the steady, mournful tones they use to answer our question about how far we still have to drive – it drones as quotably as any lyrics on the radi
o: “Once your ass is bust, and your foot falls asleep on the juice, you’ve arrived, buddy.”

  It is the truth bottled in a hyperbole because I do ache after the driving.

  Through the hill towns, the lyrics are runways of neon we drive into and out of – a line of song and spangle of light turning on and off like the radio. A bleak loneliness in them fits the endless break-ups we listen to in the ballads. The same feeling is mined as doggedly as metal in the mountains. And driving into the night, I feel I’m plunging into a mine – the roof, hung with lights, leading into deeper, gloomier shafts of darkness. Until I can see no end to it, no bottom to the achy-breaky heartland of prospectors and lonely miners, who dream of cathouses, or their wives smothering at home on the remoteness. One day they come up and their wives are gone, and all the men are left with are the songs.

  I’ve been reading, I’ve been listening, preparing for this segment which will take place at the edge of Death Valley surrounded by ghost towns.

  It is in the late twilit evening when we finally creep along the strip into McNair. The Clear Haven Hotel happens to be well over on the other side of town. Brick-built, in a residential area, less contoured in lights. Once more we have to drive into, then out of the town centre. In the lobby we stand, cooling our heels in fresh pastel carpet of a modern silver mine; we blink at the ranks of slot machines in the casino. Idly, we watch a man and a woman sit side by side, playing four at once; like a tag team of piano players, they keep the play buttons busy, picking up the heavy dollar coins of their winnings from the trays to feed back into the machine. Terry is reading a brochure she was handed at the door after the valet swirled away in our car.

  DATELINE: Adult Entertainment Guide & Forum. Like the gills of a glossy fish, Terry splays the pages of the brochure for me. Totally Nude, direct to your room.

  Page left has a brief account of the legal brothels of the Amargosa Valley; page right offers The Sister Act: Cheryl and Marcy, who wear only origami stars on their nipples.

  When we are shown up to our room, its pastel-restful colours don’t lull us to sleep. I think of Cheryl and Marcy, angels gleaming in what the miners dream of above ground: one hell of a heaven. Terry and I argue about what I have shot during the day and we abuse the décor a while, trying to tire our minds out, but my eyes continue to look for the excitements that the darkness and the light of driving have accustomed them to.

  Without telling me, Terry calls the front desk, to see if Elizita has checked in. No, she has not, but she’s expected – as it says in the clerk’s handwritten message from the front desk – tonight or in the morning. The clerk asks Terry if she wants to call El’s number, or would she like a car to take us to her after we’ve unpacked. He can discreetly guarantee that El’s is the best, the right choice for a visit – us being Europeans.

  “Should we take a cab?” Terry asks, enjoying being able to say cab.

  I shake my head. Her saying cab signals a change in her that I can’t place.

  Terry falls back on the bed, splaying her legs over the end, swinging them, then she throws herself up into shoulder-stand and her skirt falls down over her face.

  Juvenilia, the sister act?

  I go out of our room onto the balcony. The pool below us is longer than I expected – it might be a blue runway for one of the float planes, flying over here from Lake Tahoe. There are so many small planes, switching directions, turning into the hills, their lights moving along flight paths above and below each other.

  Terry has come back to herself and is unpacking. She asks me only to look after the equipment – to hook up and play back the video on the TV. In the audio portion of the Vancouver footage, the Ulster accents thicken as the recorded conversations progress.

  “Remember swimming round the American carrier in the bay? We were so cold, we could have taken our togs off and they would have thought we had blue swimsuits on.”

  “I would have screwed the whole crew, just to get warm,” Terry turns deliberately to pronounce this for the camera.

  “You would?” I hear myself come in obliquely from under the casing of the camera.

  “What girl wouldn’t?” they say in unison, standing behind Terry.

  The planes lift and fall in air to the waves of voices. I close my eyes, leaving Terry to look at her friends on-screen.

  I continue to dream in what I call my commentary mode. “There is a point in Pentecostal meetings,” I am saying, “when people let everything go. With groups, this is the way. Two of the same persuasion meet in the street and you have a revivalist meeting, but opening your body to a congregation is hardly a religious experience, is it?” Then, I raise my hand in some form of testimony, and out loud I carefully count the seductions I know to have taken place on Methodist Church outings. The computation of purity and fornication in the one place dazes me.

  The desert and the small morning wind appear to be made principally of light. At the same hour as the Collegiate girls used to climb over the wall to the outdoor pool, which was built at the bottom of the small cliff, under the school, at that hour. When I look down, there is Elizita, standing by the hotel pool.

  “I told you she would be,” Terry says so close to my ear that her lips touch it. The girls synchronized their sensuality young; it tied in with another near-mystical urge, being the first person of the day in the water. After that, the freshness of its blessing was gone.

  The two of them, Terry and Elizita, walk toward each other and hug. The force behind their smiles begins to make their heads, then their bodies, shake. In the moments before touching, they adopt the walk of the hard men back home, as if they are approaching each other for a punch-up instead of an embrace. The hunch of the shoulders, the rough tongue they give to the greeting is several rungs in the vocal and social register beneath them. “How’s about you, daughter?”

  Elizita takes sight of me across Terry’s shoulder. Her face sets.

  I wonder if I should follow Terry with a hug, apply my lips to one or both cheeks. I choose a hug, and one.

  “Elizita, you are…” She’s waiting for me to pick a word. I go for one, “…what can I say, looking so, very…splendid.”

  “Jesus, Gavin. You’re not still a grammar school boy, are you, talking to one of the governors' wives on Prize-Giving Day?”

  She’s given me my cue. “What the hell, El? You could be the prize. Life-size trophy, in that silver get-up.”

  “Never a truer word, Gavin. Never a truer word.”

  She glances at the camera case I have brought down with me and set on the glass tabletop, which gleams as brightly as the pool under it. She aims a moment without expression at the camera, then tells Terry, “He hasn’t changed, has he? Still set to watch us girls to see what we’re up to.

  “Well, here I am, ready to be introduced to your viewers.”

  In her wrap of silvery silk and a pair of rubber pool shoes, I’m tempted to cap her quip about viewers with what pops out of Terry’s mouth.

  “Voyeurs, love.”

  “Oh, I luv it when you call me love.”

  I look down at Elizita’s feet, at her pool slippers. They too are coloured silver. They make her feet look small, severed from the tan of her ankle and leg. Her hair is short. The silk and the chill of the early morning have braced her skin. It has a winter tan, like khaki, or like the skin of a potato that had been scrubbed and baked evenly and firmly in the oven. A smidgen of oil is all it will take to darken it.

  “You look really great, yourself,” Elizita says to Terry. “I bet you catch an eye or two that Gavin doesn’t notice.”

  “Could be, but look at you,” Terry replies. “Great robe – your whole outfit, great,” and Elizita stares into my silence behind the camera. “Doesn’t she just make you want to kiss her?” Terry says with a low, salacious hiss, like she’s saying it into my ear.

  “I already have, haven’t I, Elizita, and I have chapped lips this early in the morning,” I answer, trying to make them laugh and ignore me.
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  “What’s ’e been up to that ’e needs Lypsyll?” Elizita asks.

  “Putting his footage in his mouth,” Terry says. “Come on and give Elizita a kiss.”

  “Doesn’t matter one way or t’other,” Elizita pouts in that North-of-England accent, which she brought with her to Northern Ireland, and has now imported to Nevada. “A touch of t’other does no harm though. Am I right or am I rat-shit?” she asks Terry.

  “No harm,” says Terry.

  In B., Elizita was a touch of t’other from Birmingham, who joined the school at thirteen when her father was transferred to head the Inland Revenue division for Northern Ireland. In a short while, her class adopted her Birmingham way of saying things, especially t’other. T’other was touted everywhere.

  “Remember the old pool first thing in the morning? Whatever was it Sandy put in it to keep us from getting the lurgy? Whitewash on the walls, chlorine…?”

  “Fresh sea water and tea leaves,” Terry continues for her. “Parts of the pool smelt like a cuppa with too much milk in it.”

  “Tea in the teeth. Remember when you got tea leaf in your teeth?”

  “Remember those awful changing boxes that smelt of bums and armpits? Others used them for undressing, but not we. Sandy knew, y’know, that we compared our parts.”

  “Needed his cup of tea to keep awake in that equipment room. Well, one end of the changing boxes was the back of his equipment room, right? Had a slot in t’ wall, for lettin’ in air and coolin’ the old bugger down. While us girls – out in the chill, tits standing to attention. Ready for inspection, right?”

  Elizita gives the two fingers – which is one finger over here. Who to? The ghost of the old voyeur, or me?

  “Gavin McFee, that man had his big peeper fixed on us, well before you came along with your camera. Now, let me look at you,” she says, and I step back, thinking she’s talking to me, but she tugs open Terry’s gown that came supplied with the room, a whisper of silk which she found hanging in one of its closets – an entire gown comprising a Chinese or Japanese print of a bathhouse, where the women are on their knees beside the men in the porcelain tubs, washing them.