The Gift of Women Read online

  “Vaquero’s didn’t see how he used their money same way he did. And his buddy, Bunny, who gave him the other half, said he didn’t trust him, and would take me as collateral. He had a kinda cravin’ for me as the madam of a railroad museum, too.

  “Frank as can be was Bunny. Starting with him, Bunny wanted me to pay for Ham’s half in bed – if ou’t went wrong. He’d send others to build business in the casino cars and cathouse-cum-caboose.

  “‘Always wanted to own a fucking train,’ says Bunny, ‘but that’s not what we’ll call it. We’ll call it El’s Railroad, after you – sound good? The El is yours and not an alias?’ says Bunny, ‘’cause I like it, see – El’s Railroad. Long ago, I seen this caption on a Nevada billboard: Come on in to WHAT-CAT-AND-MAN-DO, where miners can work off their wages in sin. I like things catchy.’

  “Bunny pays Vaquero’s off for their embezzled stake in El’s Railroad. They want nothing to do with a legal brothel in Nevada; and after Ham is inside for five years, Bunny gives it to me anyway. Couldn’t use it no more. Decided to climb aboard me one night, then he got off and shot himself before he couldn’t remember who I was or what he was doing. In his opinion, and who’s to argue, a hood with Alzheimer’s is no good. There, I told you in good plain American, my story. Randy Burming’um girl makes good just lying on her bum.”

  “You didn’t freak out?” Terry asks, and I look at Terry as startled by her word choice as by what Elizita has told us.

  “Does it freak you out?” Elizita asks back.

  Freak is the kind of word Terry is leery of, as if in saying it she might expose herself to something of it in herself. Under her linguist’s dispassionate, academic cool, Terry’s attitude to language is superstitious. I know she has avoided mentioning Elizita, in many ways, because mentioning her would arouse the old tearaway times. The side of Terry, or me, that Gruff Gordie took for a spin on the back of his bike, and we kept hidden from each other. The side that starts, not with love, but a fuck, for fuck’s sake, and gets confused.

  I watch Elizita touch a drop of water that hasn’t dried on Terry’s shoulder with her finger. The drop has fallen from the wet ends of her hair, which Elizita takes in a towel and begins drying.

  “Come on, did I actually freak you out or turn you on, Terry?”

  “The way you talk about selling sex, Elizita…”

  “That turn you on?”

  “I’m curious. Interested in how you say what you say. Just when it gets wet and exciting for me, it turns and sounds matter-of-fact for you.”

  “You’re a linguist, you should be the first to understand that. If sex is your business, talk about it business-like. But I’m glad you got wet twice.”

  It’s easy too to forget that Terry became Terr, i.e. Tear, aka, tearaway.

  It’s only when we get drunk that we return to that girl. This is one of those times. At school she passed everyone else in her set in being precocious, ahead of them in every department, except real sex – I believed. Lover of gesture, the body linguist, who gave no content to her vocabulary, whereas Elizita would always end up doing everything she said or thought or imagined. Everything, even if it meant having a bun, or her head, stuck in the oven.

  Long before I started this programme, I tried to define Terry and her tribe at the Collegiate. The closest I have come to a definition is “renewable virgins.” They have to be won round again, wooed each time after they have made love, as if they possess no memory of the last time they were aroused. How can I describe it? They are as virgin after passion has passed, as unruffled as the water when the wind has died. Their composure closes over everything, sealing them into a renewed assurance of their beauty and desirability, their impenetrability.

  For me, their bodies were always connected to the sea – now, sexily, inextricably confused with the backdrop of a pool in the American desert.

  When I stopped the car in the Amargosa, I had the same sense of recognition and enormous inertia, the certainty that there had never been any movement made by me over its dust and sand. Outside, it felt exactly the same when I lay on the back seat of the car between Terry’s thighs, post-passion, with the engine and the air-conditioning on. I knew I might just as well have been outside sweating between the hot fenders of the rental, looking up the road through the heat waves at the desert.

  I blame my work all over again for the separation. I feel I haven’t even touched her, but as soon as someone else lays a finger on her, I feel it pass through her to me at the same time. The same with the desert. I felt the whole scope of it as soon as I saw the dust trail of another car cross it on a dirt road in the opposite direction while I stood watching. The same with the sea, with the water in the pool here at the Clear Haven, the moment Terry and Elizita break the tension of the water, they swim through me – Terry and her set, her whole generation and class of women, with the two of them. Outrageously forward and elusive – exclusive.

  As girls, they stripped gladly to leap into the sea when they believed their bare skin was the only skin touching it. In the sixties, when hippies made the mad baring of mind and body common, it sent theirs into mourning. The unwashed discovering the sun blazing on their skin and inside their heads at the same time amused, then offended. Here, in America, I realize why so many of them have come across – whatever it is, everybody has a right to the virgin experience. And at the same time I feel that you can try to screw the desert till you’re blue in the face and you won’t even leave an impression.

  I watch Elizita let Terry’s hair drop out of the towel in her hands and her look at it. “You need to be paid attention to,” she says to Terry, then asks her, “Would you…?”

  “Would I what?”

  Elizita lifts Terry’s robe and drapes the silk men in the tub and the women on their knees around her shoulders. Hand on Terry’s shoulders, she rubs them lightly, lifting the silk, letting it drop, not actually rubbing at all.

  There was a leaf off a particular hedge, which we used to place on the backs of our hands while we rubbed dust and gravel from the road over it. It would stick to the skin and when we peeled it off, the flesh underneath would be clear white and pungent with the smell of the leaf, and the pattern of the veins would be left, a pale skeleton over the open, faintly sweating pores of the hand.

  In the room when I stand in front of her and hold back her robe I expect to see marks…that the men in the tub have slipped from the silk and are branded on Terry’s back and between her breasts, their heads bobbing up and down there. I want to put my mouth and hands in among theirs – can she feel that when I touch her?

  Elizita could before we left the pool deck, in spite of the camera held like a cross to ward off a luscious vampire.

  On the road, in El’s convertible, I begin to think about something else: beyond the primping, the prompting and priming, even as girls Terry and the troop at the old tidewater pool slyly preened darling, daring Elizita, knowing how beyond the good, acceptable boys, there were bad rips, but good-lookers they could groom Elizita for and learn all about through her. The ones El would sail by with in the dark, acknowledging with a lift of the hand and small movement of the fingers that she saw, had been seen by her twittering klatch. Unable to hold back, Elizita kissed in full view under the lamp, directly down the steps from their school-house at the pool’s front entrance, excited, driven by the hands of the boy, the looks of her friends. They pooled their teenage prurience in her, back then.

  Now, the clanging of an engineer’s bell isn’t wildly advertising a train’s going by, but greeting Elizita, who stands on the seat of the convertible in her bare feet while the restrained orange and greens of the railcars pass by, shaking and shuddering over the crossing. El slips down into the seat, smiling.

  “Will that keep them on their toes or on their backs?” Elizita asks Terry, as she places her feet back into the straps of the high heels on the carpeted floor. “The yard isn’t far.”

  The red Impala convertible turns to run parallel to the
track now. “Not a speck of rust,” she says of the car. “Desert air. Good for the lungs and old automobiles.”

  There is parking all around the corrugated railway yard, where a caboose and three Pullmans sit, the tail end of a train outside the repair bay or roundhouse. The white markings for the parking berths and direction signs blaze off the black tarmac outside.

  “You can fly in, if you care to.”

  Elizita sees we have noticed a landing strip with pot lights to mark it in the night. These blue ground lights which Elizita says she always imagines as the footlights for her big shows.

  “There’s nothing more exciting than seeing the naked fuselage of a plane when someone important is landing inside it,” she says. “Like a god coming down from the sky with a hard-on just for you. Oh, about coming in… Two things I want from everybody coming from abroad, a passport and a medical certificate dated now – though we do do very thorough inspections on-site. You’d be surprised who turns out to be the dirtiest.”

  “A medical certificate for someone to get into a museum?” Terry asks coyly, opening the door on her side of the car only to be led through another in the corrugated wall of the railway yard. “Wouldn’t a death certificate to verify them as a historical figure be better?”

  Terry’s joke is eclipsed by the shadow inside. It slants down beneath the sunlight that blazes from a row of tall windows higher up. There’s this sense of being in an industrial palace, a small cathedral for rolling stock, where one pays and is transported.

  The flat platforms around the rails and turntables inside are meant to receive the vehicles rather than passengers. In this iron-and-glass arcade, three turntables attach to three tracks that splice into outgoing and incoming railroad lines. Operations are controlled by a switching house with levers, dials, large buttons on a console for the expanded facilities of the original roundhouse and repair bay. Vintage cars have been uncoupled and lined up on the track, not all first class, but brilliantly preserved. The fork for that track runs from one turntable, out of the repair bay to an old-style station platform. Its wooden sign says in white paint, ELVILLE.

  “We have fuck tours, or family-only tours, boarding for family further down the line.”

  Elizita points at the centre turntable with a caboose sitting on it.

  “My office is at the tail end of the train,” Elizita points it out. “My guard’s van,” she says, not using the American word, which I like better because it makes me feel I am where I am. Guard’s van reminds me of the dismal shout of my youth, boarding on my way to school, the guard shouting past the closing doors whatever expression took him on the day: “Everybody on!” “All aboard!” Missing that train was as miserable as catching it. A journey out on the grey mornings and in with the anemic light of the evening. Caboose for me sounds like and goes with moose, buffalo or bison: a creature out of the Wild West, and the great beast of the railroad that terrified the Indian tribes with the sparks belching from its nostrils.

  We mount the iron steps of the caboose on the turntable. “This is my lazy Susan,” says Elizita. “I give it a spin for my visitors.” On cue, it turns, taking us around for a panorama of the facility from the tailgate. “The choice of cake I have is simple,” she digs Terry with her elbow, “beef or cheese. Would you believe it that the railway brings in as much money as t’other.”

  When Terry doesn’t follow up on this small provocation, I ask El to tell me more about her railway.

  “I needed the right locomotives and cars, and a run through a gold mine at the other end. You can pretend you’re a miner, eighty or a hundred years ago. Lucky for me, I’ve been into railways and finance for a long time, compliments of Ham and Gordie.”

  “Ham and Gordie sounds like a sandwich, Elizita,” Terry observes without the wrinkle of a smile. “Just the one for your lazy Susan.”

  Elizita smirks and shouts “Maisie! Maisie!” through the glass panel in a wooden door at the back of the caboose. She turns the brass handle on the door to open it, only to find herself shouting into the face of a woman behind it.

  “Coffee, tea? Dry martini, milk?” Maisie asks immediately as we come in. Maisie’s smile is full and forthcoming, no sign of sarcasm in it to go with her question.

  Elizita’s mouth opens and her great teeth come on.

  “Guess?” she says to Maisie.

  “Martini for you two ladies, coffee for the gentleman?”

  She tries to catch sight of my face behind the camera. I apologize, I daren’t miss this first entrance to Elizita’s office.

  “Coffee,” I confirm.

  “Let me present my friends, Terry and Gavin. Terry and Gavin, this is Maisie, my exec.”

  I nod, but encumbered with the camera, my head goes up and down more slowly, moving my whole body with it, like a hunchback’s. Once the introductions are done, Maisie kisses Terry on the cheek.

  “Exec just means I do what she tells me.” Maisie’s explanation causes Terry to pause until Terry decides to kiss her back, heartily.

  We have stepped into an early nineteen-hundreds’ office. Rolltop desks with computers built in. Oak typing chairs with dark blue velvet cushions, Persian carpet and a single incongruity: some strange, posturepedic stool for the back that would let one lock one’s feet behind it and rock back and forth like a penitent. I wonder who uses it.

  “Did I agree to a martini?” Terry asks Maisie, who is opening a fridge, fronted by a wooden door to make it resemble an icebox. “What time is it?” Terry asks, hoping it is deep enough into the p.m. to forgive herself the tipple.

  Elizita laughs and picks up the bone-handled phone from its cradle and dials.

  “Time I called John… John, will you come and take Terry to her half-car? Yes, she’s the one from school. And her husband, yes. You can look after him too, if he lets you.”

  Maisie holds open the icebox door with her shoulder and removes a silver cocktail canister from the aluminium interior, puts it into the crook of her arm, and at the same time, reaches to take two fresh martini glasses from it between her fingers.

  “Martinis in the morning are a husband’s warning,” says Maisie, and pours.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I just want to look at the Barter Book. I always like to see if I recognize the names.”

  Elizita has already booted up and is scrutinising the screen.

  “Half or whole, this is how the cars are rented. For you, a half-car is on the house.”

  “Well, since you are paying,” says Terry, cheekily, her glass raised to the level of her brow in a salute to Elizita’s gift or to squint through it.

  “That’s right, half is on me, but if you want it, you’ll have to pay for t’other…” Elizita picks up her glass, turns from the screen and eyes Terry through her martini glass “…with someone other than each other.”

  From the look on John who has come in, he’s not going to enlighten us on what Elizita has just proposed. He has laid our bags down on the back platform of the caboose and he is black. He stands oddly correct, his shoulders held square, as if lined up with the suitcases he set outside. He positively bristles with patience as he stands and waits without speaking.

  “Don’t stand with those big muscles humped up round your neck, as if you’re still carrying those damn things you dumped outside. We’ll all trip over them, you know, you know?” Elizita says, echoing Ena Sharples’s sidekick from early Coronation Street on the BBC, but smiling with clear affection for the black man.

  John doesn’t witness this. He glances back at the cases, as if they have been wrongly tagged, and he has made yet another mistake that Elizita hasn’t twigged on to yet.

  “And where do you come from, John?” Terry asks.

  Terry’s plain butter-and-toast tone annoys me bad enough in the morning, but mulled with a martini and her spreading extra smarm on it because John is black gets my goat. That is, till I get a good look at her face. From that, I can’t tell if she’s being over-polite, or simply turned on by the big man, l
ike she was, still is – by rugby players.

  “There are no casuals,” Elizita tells the lens on my shoulder, and she turns to read through a sheet of computer printout on her desk. “It’s all cash or kind.”

  She stands up, comes around the camera to look at me, then goes and strokes Terry’s hair from her face so that she can see Terry’s eyes, which haven’t left John while Terry waits for John to answer her curiosity about his origins.

  “Montreal, I suppose,” he says. “Mother was Haitian and my dad from Indiana. He came and dragged me out of junior high to Quebec because he had big objections to the war. And me, I was with the Alouettes, they’re dead now.”

  By the time he has explained which war, the Vietnam, and that the Montreal Alouettes were a team playing in the Canadian Football League and that they failed financially and folded, Terry is touching his arm, sympathetically.

  “Any two will do,” says Elizita.

  “One pays for t’other, if they can find a taker. It’s a little gambling tool we’ve added to the trade,” Elizita explains. “Customer coin toss that needs to land a second head or tail to win.”

  Once again her fingers go to Terry’s hair, drawing it back from her face so that Terry can look directly at John or John at her. Her fingers trickle down under Terry’s cheek a second time, as though checking the set of the jaw and lining up her profile for me to film.

  Then, she turns to go over and put the same two fingers she placed on Terry’s face on the sheet of figures she has just looked at.

  “Three confirmed and two pending for today and tomorrow,” she reads out in John’s direction.

  “American football player,” Terry tilts her empty martini glass. “Very big and burly American football player. I’m so glad I’ve met one,” Terry says, touching the shoulder of John’s white cotton shirt.

  “Canadian – once.”