The Gift of Women Read online

  “Gruff Gordie?” Terry and I say it together.

  “Lord luv yuh. Gruff made me feel at home. Trouble up mill, man in charge of works, getting sommut fixed,” says Elizita. “On the ten o’clock train between the Holywood and Helen’s Bay stop, Gordie fixed me. I was thirteen and I thought I was mad. He was only twenty-four, you know. It feels like no difference now. Then, it felt like I was fucking my father and couldn’t wait for the train to get out of Helen’s Bay station to have more before it stopped in Carnalea.”

  “Always wore a brown Harris tweed sports coat, after work. Grey worsted pants,” I say, as he comes to mind better…

  “Did you go out on that bike of his after work?” Elizita asks me.

  I did. I remember how he had checked me automatically, getting off, to see what his Triumph Bonneville had worked up, if it was properly tuned.

  “Never put on a helmet in his life. Always managed to do the ton for me,” Elizita sighs.

  “Is this railroad, repair yard thing to do with Gordie?” I ask.

  “Only coincidentally. It’s what Ham wanted me to run to begin with, a museum to hold old rolling stock, passenger cars and some locomotives. Maybe rent them later like they do at one of those places in Reno, but a lot of gambling went on in them instead, and a little bit of t’other too.”

  “Did Gordie ever take off his sports coat?” I ask.

  “He did,” says Elizita, “but his arms and legs were hairy. Made of the same Harris tweed as his coat.” El pulls herself out of the water. “Remember, Terry, the peeler stopping us for being three up on Gordie’s bike?” Elizita turns to help Terry up out of the water by her elbows, turning her with them, like a doll, putting her arms round her from behind to talk into her ear.

  “Cold?” she asks.

  “I can feel my goosebumps turning into nipples,” Terry says over her shoulder to Elizita.

  Elizita whispers something, a few details about the repair yard being an hour or half-hour’s drive away. Then, she grins, drops her hands to Terry’s hips to grip them, riding an invisible pillion with her, jerking as if she changes gear, bumping Terry’s rear end, driving her toward me.

  “Is Cecil still in Salt Lake City?” Terry asks over her shoulder when their two faces come close-up to the camera.

  Elizita laughs. “He could be, for all I hear from him. I told you he thought his being nice turned me on, saved my life, but it was an accident and I took it for fate bringing me the right man at the right time. For a while I told him all about my agonies, about how Gordie damaged me, but not how Gordie also made me permanently horny. If the first time you fuck it’s for fuck’s sake, love gets separated, lost in a different slot. Then, Ham comes right in and hauls Cecil by the crotch of his Levi’s to Salt Lake City. And how can I tell Cecil it’s the same for him as for me? Recruited by the crotch.”

  “Let me get this properly.” I want El to repeat it clearly after me. “If I am correct, you came to Salt Lake City on a honeymoon business trip. I know you did marry Cecil. In Salt Lake, while visiting Levi’s, this Ham offers Cecil a job running a Vaquero’s operation. Is that the word they use – operation?”

  “Of course. Weren’t you listening?” Terry scolds me.

  I am squinting through the sun in the direction of El’ s hands winding my wife into her wrap. The waiter appears out of the sun for her, a movement from one of Elizita’s hands, or the putting on of the wrap itself must have summoned him.

  “Time for some orange juice, or how would Buck’s Fizz hit you – to celebrate?”

  “Pitcher of Buck’s Fizz with a squeeze of lime, Bryan,” she says to the waiter without waiting for an answer.

  “Yes, Ms. L,” he says.

  That’s all the waiter says.

  “For business and all transactions I’m L. Easier to be L over here. Elizita is just a bit too Mexican, although it’s not bad if they think that. A Mexican with a Burming’um accent.”

  Owning one letter of the alphabet that everybody here knows is hers – not just a few friends like us, who said El like a single L for the snob sound of it – naturalizes Elizita, makes her American. We might mock it, but admire her instead, all the more for it.

  “Do you live in this museum for old rolling stock and locomotives?” I ask. “L’s, is it?”

  “I’m L, but the place is E-L’s. Sure is,” Elizita clarifies. “The business name, EL’s, really starts with Vaquero’s World here in the U.S. , Mundo Vaquero in Latin America. After Cecil learns the ropes for the Vaquero franchises. This is in ’72 or ’73, round about there. Ham puts him forward as the person to set up a test outlet, a boutique in Mexico City. Ham will pass the outfitting of the store and the training of the Mexican who owns the franchise on to Ces, then Ces can do the same in the other cities.

  “Ces is what Ham always calls Cecil because he insists on being called as he always was, Cess-ill, and not See-sill. Ham cuts that one to Ces, puts Ces on a plane permanently and humps me till his heart’s content.

  “Ces is in Chile now, owns a vineyard. He just doesn’t have it in him to come back. That’s the deal.”

  I am listening to Elizita say deal, admiring the American way of saying it in her North Country accent, but her mouth isn’t English, her mouth and her teeth and her jaw are like Cleo Laine’s. There’s a great heartiness when Elizita laughs and always, as it did before, it makes me want to put my ear to her chest to hear if it’s as genuine inside as it appears to be outside where it booms at you.

  The Buck’s Fizzes – champagne and orange juice with a squeeze of lime – arrive. Hardly one moment after Terry has drunk it back, she is touching me in front of Elizita. Doing it for Elizita to look at. But I force back the urge to shift away, pretending not to feel the touch of Terry’s fingers until I get up to take a higher angle on Elizita’s head as she talks.

  Elizita straightens her back as she sits on the metal chair, which is painted stark white. Its seat is topped with a green circular cushion. She talks, leans back, lifting her breasts, drawing me toward her as she does – to make me feel that at any moment I might topple onto her lap, wriggling and giggling as I did years ago. I could as easily be lying, mumbling to her thighs instead of listening to her.

  I have to sit down again.

  Now, it’s Terry, perhaps mimicking me, moving back and forth in front of us, dipping all the time while she speaks to a still-reclining Elizita, or to me where I have sat down to keep from falling. Terry holds herself over us, her hands resting on our shoulders, a squeeze going with everything she says, as if her hands are the words, kneading what she wants to get across with her body into us. The closer she gets, the more fervent she is about how good it is being here, in touch at last, the more she leans over, the more I feel she wants to lower her breasts into my mouth or Elizita’s. It is obscenely solicitous, but Terry does this deliberately. “Gavin says the camera reads body language. That’s his business, Elizita. And I’m letting my body speak for what I can’t on this gorgeous morning.”

  Terry leans her face all the way down to Elizita’s. Elizita reaches her hands around the back of Terry’s neck, holds her head to steady her, then kisses her.

  I’m almost angered into a lecture about my job to avoid deciding if Elizita kisses fondly or the other way. “For my part, I need to see that my body isn’t doing the talking, or the lens will miss the point.” I get up, pick up where I left off, following their every move. “I’ll carry the camera and you two carry on the conversation. Okay?”

  They burst out laughing, and it acts as the correction I need. In the process of doing a programme where one is personally involved, constant self-reminding about cutting oneself out is required. And that the personal and the public can be separated in the editing room.

  Elizita has picked up on her story.

  “I keep asking Ham – why Salt Lake City? He has his answer: ‘Piety and a slim possibility of polygamy, plus it gets so hot folks can’t bear much underwear. Denim coveralls, that’s it. American
Gothic in smocks, and coveralls, nothing underneath but good honest sweat. You can put your hand right in the pocket of any mechanic’s coveralls and feel his ball bearings. That turn you on, L?’

  “Yes, he was the first to call me L, here. Just like Cessill, Ces.”

  Elizita looks at Terry.

  Terry licks her lips. “I like the ads for jeans,” Terry says. “Bare bellies, and the zipper undone as far as it will go, without…”

  “Getting pubic hair caught in it, ’cause there ain’t any – all shaved off. So, Terry – my darlin’, that’s what you think of those young men models – male flowers for the masses. A pretty little flash of the pubis flesh, but not the awful, little lizard thing, hiding behind the flies on those eye-candy lads.”

  Terry shuts her eyes and opens her mouth to the sun.

  “You’re beginning to burn,” Elizita warns her. She takes sunscreen from the pocket of her gown and gets up, pulls down the straps of Terry’s swimsuit and Terry’s hands immediately go up to her breasts, but Elizita is already applying the screen to her shoulders.

  “You’re beginning to burn too,” she tells me. She puts her fingertip to a freckle on my shoulder. “You’re hairier here than you used to be.” She touches the backs of my arms and my belly with the backs of her own fingers, moving along the hairs, missing the skin. “Can’t see any freckles here anymore,” she says, looking at my stomach, “but at least it doesn’t stick out.”

  I am embarrassed by being glad of this opinion. Terry has taken out a comb from the pocket of her gown and is running it through her hair, looking at us as she strokes the hair back from her brow. Elizita winks, then takes the comb that Terry offers her, puts her hand over the camera and combs my hair.

  “Still there,” she says.

  Again, I am stupidly glad and set the camera on the table, but don’t enter into the conversation. I leave the camera running, aimed at where Elizita goes into recliner mode again.

  “Ham thought Ces would look good in an ad. Ces was keen on them and wanted to get onto the board that made the decisions about which ones to run. Ces goes on at Ham for months about this. ‘You don’t start at the end, Ces,’ says Ham, ‘you come in on the idea for one. At the first pitch, dummy. Easier if we do a dummy run…’ Ham likes doing this, doubling up on the dummy bit. ‘I’ll rustle up one of the creative types and a photographer to let you see the process.’ In next to no time he turns up at the house with two birds. One in slacks, white shirt, black hair and black briefcase, black club-heel shoes, along with the other, a blonde carrying a heavy overnight bag full of lenses and light meters and a camera like yours, Gavin. Good for stills and live action.”

  Elizita laughs into the camera.

  “As soon as they’re in the door, Ham is asking, ‘Take a good look. Think Ces will do for the job?’ Before either of them answer, the creative type points and asks a question of her own. ‘That the wall-wide window with the view of the desert you talked about? What I want is him – Ces, is it? – against the windowpane, like he’s falling out of the sky, and into the desert. He’s a bit like David Bowie, right? Man-Who-Fell-From-the-Sky look for the Sky-Blue line.’ Camera Girl gives Ces the once-over while Ms. Creative lays the scene. ‘Good shoulders, cool butt, great abdominals, natural gleam off the pecs,’ says Camera Girl. ‘Won’t need a drop of oil,’ she says to Ms. Creative while looking at Ces, head to bare feet, in Sky-Blue Vaquero denims. Camera Girl pulls Ces’s shirt out of his trousers, rips apart the cleats with a pop and pats him on the rear end. ‘Don’t get too stiff with her,’ says Ham, ‘she’s a photographer, just doing her job, like I told you.’ Camera Girl’s fussing with the shirt, pulling at the front tails so the buttonholes on one side and the cleats on the other hang past the tips of his nipples. Then she asks him if he can hold that, back up, put his butt against the glass and spread his legs and arms out against it, flat as he can, too. ‘You got that stepping stool I asked for?’ Ms. Creative asks Ham. ‘We need him higher up in the window for the backdrop,’ she tells Camera Girl, and they grin at each other at what kind of backdrop it could be if the window doesn’t hold. Then, she yells over her shoulder for Ham who’s coming with a powder-blue-painted stepping stool. ‘This window strong enough to take him splayed up against it?’ ‘Strong enough to take a tornado,’ Ham yells back. ‘You wish,’ says Camera Girl, as she takes a comb to the blond hair on Ces’s belly, stroking it into a mane running up from his crotch to his belly button. Ces’s crotch is in full sail by now. ‘I’d leave you to it, but this is getting interesting,’ says Ham, and falls back onto the leather couch beside me, arms up, like he’s dropped out of the sky.”

  “You were there, you saw all this?” Terry turns from where she has spread herself on the recliner beside Elizita, and asks my question for me. I come closer to catch Elizita’s concentration as she remembers.

  “Yep. Sure as a cum frum Burming’um, Ms. Creative backs up and sits right there on the other side of Ham on the leather couch, like both of us aren’t there. Then, Ham wiggles his butt between us, but I get to see Ms. Creative’s folder, which she has been holding out front of her like a hymnal in the choir. It’s open over a shot of Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth and a photo of Ces at the pool, back of the house, Ham must have given her. ‘Is this a dummy run?’ I ask her, and she gives me a look that really makes me feel I’m not there, then, this smile like she’s suddenly registered this other bird in the room and likes what she sees. She nods to Ham, ‘Good choice.’

  “Ms. Creative gets up to go stand behind Camera Girl. Sure enough, Ces sprawls against that window and doesn’t smash down through it into the desert for real. Lots of shots, lots of repositionings until Camera Girl turns to Ms. Creative and clicks her through what she’s got. They nod.

  “‘Turns me on,’ says Ms. Creative. ‘Me, too,’ I say to Ham.

  “Camera Girl, she has an idea for another spread. Ces has to take the jeans off, hang them over his arm so the camera will catch his bare legs and hips on either side of the jeans. He keeps the shirt on, open.

  “‘Like you give birth to the folded Sky-Blues from your very own belly,’ says Ms. Creative. ‘An offer to the men out there to take them and put them on – the guys, I mean,’ says Ms. Creative.

  “‘Invitation for the lady friend is just to take them off the guy, as offered. We got to get those outside curves on the hips that will make a woman want to grab, so no boxers or that ugly bullshit. Off with them.’

  “Ces complies. Who wouldn’t?”

  “Bet you wouldn’t!” Terry taunts me.

  “Remember I’m Camera Guy. You’re good at this, Elizita, telling it like it is.”

  “Bare naked,” says Terry, and chokes on the bottom of the Buck’s Fizz, which she has overly upended toward her mouth.

  “Don’t quip with your mouth full, Terry – as Ms. Mathers would say at the girls’ Collegiate.”

  “Shall I continue? Ces pulls off his jeans, hopping to get his legs out and turns away to yank off his bullshit underwear. We’d get a rear-end view, but Camera Girl stands close behind him to block it, but holds both hands out on either side like she’s going to plant them on his butt cheeks.

  “Ces folds the jeans as neatly as he does afore he goes to bed. ‘Always folds his jeans,’ I say to Ms. Creative, who tells Camera Girl, ‘Keep the window behind him, move all that stuff from in front of it. We want just him, walking out of the desert with his Vaquero’s folded over his arms,’ says Ms. Creative, who comes and lowers her rear slowly on the couch on the other side of Ham again while she keeps her eye on the set-up as Camera Girl pops behind Ces to do the clearing.

  “She slaps him on the bare butt when she goes back to the camera.

  “‘Good job,’ says Ms. Creative, to put an end to the shoot.

  “Ham turns to me, but says to Ms. Creative, ‘You can pay anybody to do anything in America, and they’ll give it all they’ve got. The pay makes it a pure joy.’

  “‘What about Ces?’ I y
elp. ‘He’s doing this for zip.’

  “‘Don’t get your Brummie back up,’ says Ms. Creative while all three, Ms. Creative, Camera Girl and Ham look at me, then Ces.

  “I’d hate the bitch for knowin’ that where I cum frum makes me a Brummie if she didn’t go and add, ‘He’ll be paid in kind. Bare-assed kind.’

  “‘That turn you on?”she asks me.

  “‘Exchange of that kind allus does.’ What ’bout you, Terry… no need to answer.

  “Back to the excitement. Ces fell in love with the photographer. Saw her everywhere he went in Latin America for Vaquero’s. They’re probably fucking each other as I speak, in his vineyard, east of Valparaiso. Oh, yes. Set himself up there he did.”

  Pulling at the front of her swimsuit and pushing her fresh glass of Buck’s Fizz between her breasts, Terry turns to Elizita.

  “And Ces leaves you in Salt Lake City with Ham humping you, and Ms. Creative, till his heart’s content?”

  The question is let ride. “Cum up and see,” says Elizita, “I have a permanent suite here at the Clear Haven. We’ll leave, later. No need for you to drive. Park the car here.”

  “Leave for where?”

  “El’s Railroad,” she answers. “Where else? One thing I can guarantee about it, rent’s free. But, sex isn’t.”

  “Ham know we’re coming?” Terry asks, suddenly polite, and Elizita comes over, leans down and looks into her face.

  “I’ll have to write and find out. He’s doing time.” Elizita runs her hand over Terry’s thigh, brushing away nothing but sunlight.

  “You’re kidding about the sex?” I ask.

  “No, you pay in kind, like Ms. Creative said. Or in cash,” she adds matter-of-factly.

  “Screwing used to be a heartache, now it’s part of the trade. Ham really did want me as Madam Manager for his museum. To set me up, he’d pay half in money he borrowed from a friend, half he filched from Vaquero’s. Joint venture, good economics – cost-sharing.