A Trip to the Stars (56 page)

It didn’t help my state of mind that I was in town, not to build something, but to destroy it; in fact, to oversee the demolition of the very building I was standing atop, surveying the desert. I was twenty-three, a licensed architect now, serving my apprenticeship with Calzas, and this was my first job. The Hotel Rigel, a twelve-story building erected seventy-four years earlier, in 1905, and vacant since 1971, was one of those orange-red brick buildings with marble and terra-cotta trim common to the Southwest at that time. It was as solid as the bedrock upon which it had been erected, and it saddened me to think I was helping to engineer its reduction to a mountain of rubble. After the rubble was cleared away, it would be replaced by a civic center—auditorium, theater, gym—which Calzas had helped design. A worthy project, I thought, but still wished they had chosen a different site. I had been in town a week, setting up the demolition with a specialized crew of eight men. The foreman and I were making a last circuit of the building before the men activated the complex set of explosive charges which had already been put in place and would be detonated at four o’clock.

Vitruvius’s
Ten Books on Architecture
was among my primary
reading when I was tutored by Labusi, who felt the building of earthly palaces and memory palaces were closely related activities and who once observed to me somberly that the wrecking ball and the construction crane were of equal importance to the architect. I don’t know if Labusi had culled this idea from Vitruvius (I never found any such statement in his books), but I realized that he intended me to hear it as a larger metaphorical statement on the human condition, for he went on to draw an analogy between the architect who must both raze and erect buildings and the physician who ought to possess both the skills required for bringing an infant into the world and for seeing an aged person out of it. Labusi often offered up his most valuable nuggets to me in this fashion.

I realized now just how much of my education had been geared to the notion that I would someday be an architect. Of course this was Samax’s doing: it was he who had set Labusi’s curriculum. And no mean cartographer when it came to charting the lives of others, he had mapped mine out even more closely than I had suspected. For starters, the emphasis he had laid on geometry and trigonometry, drawing lessons, and all the memory work. I recalled that on the very day my life coincided with Samax’s, he was studying first a blueprint, in the abandoned factory, and then a map, while we flew cross-country in his jet. The map, which he had shared with me, was of the northern Sahara, but it was only years later that it occurred to me to ask Calzas what it was they were converting that factory into.

“A museum,” he said after the slightest hesitation. “For collectors. Your uncle came up with the idea that people like him, with private collections, needed a place to exhibit on their own terms, outside the museum bureaucracies. To rotate in the stuff the public rarely has a chance to see, without pigeonholing it in some easy-to-swallow package. But his fellow collectors were gun-shy—they were more comfortable with the bureaucracies—and so the idea never got off the ground.” Calzas shook his head. “As you know, quitting isn’t one of Samax’s strong points. He was pretty pissed, but it would have been a disaster if he had tried to go it alone.”

“So what happened to the factory?” I said.

“He sold it to a real estate company. What they did, I don’t know.”

When I went to Samax with the same question, I received the same response. Within a year of my coming to Las Vegas, neither he nor
Calzas ever again set foot in the former factory. And it would be twelve years before I returned there myself, soon after my twenty-second birthday in the wake of an utterly unexpected series of events that left me overwhelmed by the need to find out what had happened to Alma all those years ago.

The first of these events was the unannounced return of Auro to Las Vegas. Touring with the jazz quintet he had formed the previous year, he was booked in the lounge at The Aladdin for a week. One member of the quintet, the bassist, a Tunisian emigré from Atlanta, was Auro’s lover.

“Frankie Fooo,” the bassist introduced himself to me, extending his hand, “with three
o
’s.” He was a short, thin man with a dark complexion, a ponytail, and teeth straight as piano keys. Smiling broadly, he added, “The third
o
is the note you hold.”

Frankie Fooo talked fast and he talked a lot, proclaiming to me at once, and later to Ivy in my presence, that he and Auro “were the greatest pair of rhythm men, ever. Bar none.” “Bar none,” Auro added emphatically, tapping his fingernails on his ride cymbal. His black and silver drums glittered, the bass drum emblazoned with the band’s name,
THE ECHO QUINTET
, and its logo, an orange parrot.

Auro had changed in all sorts of ways, obvious and subtle, in the five years since I had seen him. I still would have recognized him anywhere, but the part of him with which I had been most familiar—frightened and retiring—was not apparent. Or maybe it just manifested itself in other ways, internally. But I wasn’t sure; it was my belief that taking up the drums had been a last-ditch survival instinct on Auro’s part, and that the ceaseless hours he had put in becoming a professional—and then making a name for himself—had burnt away much of the fear that had crippled him all his life. On the surface, he had transformed himself completely. That night I was treated to the sight of him—who at one time had been forced to dress in plaid shorts and white shirts, with bow ties—wearing a lime-green sharkskin suit with purple silk lapels, a shimmering tangerine shirt of Indian silk, a green-and-gold checkered tie, and pointy gold lizard boots. On his left hand Auro wore five rings—topaz, amethyst, turquoise, opal, cat’s-eye—spread over three fingers. Gold bracelets jangled on his wrists, and an onyx medallion dangled from his neck on a long chain. And the wraparound shades he seldom removed.

Physically he had filled out a bit: his chest not so sunken, his shoulders slightly broader. His curly hair was long and he sported a goatee. His black eyes were steadier, and the welt of a scar where his left eyebrow should have been actually gave his face more character now. I believe someone’s mouth reveals as much about him as his eyes; Auro’s mouth had become warmer since I had last seen him. His lips were no longer tightly compressed, or chewed on, or chronically chapped, as they had always been. As for his hands, the drumming had transformed them outright: he had gone away with the thin, too-white hands of a boy and returned with the wrists and fingers of a man, tendons and veins bulging powerfully when he played.

Auro was affectionate to me, full of questions about my life over the previous years. He used our old method, writing on a scratch pad in his tiny script. He seemed glad to see Desirée, and was especially animated when Zaren Eboli came to hear him play But from the moment Ivy walked into the lounge at The Aladdin, he tried to steer clear of her. For Ivy, that week must have been hellish—certainly she ended up making it so for me. Despite her pleas, and an invitation from Desirée, Auro steadfastly refused to come out to the Hotel Canopus. Samax happened to be away that month, on a rare trip abroad, undergoing hydrotherapy and acupuncture treatments in Kyoto to ease the continuing aftereffects of his stroke. But that had nothing to do with it. Having left the hotel, Auro told me, he had no intention of ever going back.

“I understand,” I said to him. “You left for good.”

“For good,” he nodded vigorously.

Ivy didn’t understand. And there was no reason I would have expected her to. She had been laying low for those five years, so elusive in the end that she became nearly invisible. She who had thrown her weight around so haughtily during my early years at the hotel was now even less of a presence than Dolores, who at 103 still maintained her daily routine, sitting in her niche in the garden every afternoon, alone or with Labusi when he wasn’t competing in a billiard tournament. Ivy had aged badly. She was one of those women who retain their good looks unchanged up to a certain point and then lose them all at once, as if some corrosive chemical has been introduced
that effects overnight what the natural ageing process should have produced over many years. The hollows around Ivy’s eyes and mouth had so intensified that when I glimpsed her in dim light across the lobby or down a corridor, her face often resembled a skull mask, sharply delineated into pools of black and white. She always dined alone in her rooms, and barely spoke to anyone, and more and more frequently disappeared to Reno or Lake Tahoe for weeks at a time. She was almost totally alienated from Samax. The incident with the hummingbird pendant had seriously undermined her standing with him, and after his stroke he shut her out altogether. I knew how his mind worked: he wasn’t going to allow anyone as untrustworthy as Ivy near him when he was so vulnerable. But it was Auro’s absence that truly knocked the wind out of her. Ivy could deal with the enmity of someone like me—she fed off such negative energy—and Samax didn’t really frighten her as much as he might have thought, but Auro’s slamming the door in her face had been a serious trauma. For twenty years Auro had been all she had, as she often, gratingly, reminded him, especially after Nestor died. Now, aside from that single postcard with the two-word message,
I’M OKAY
, Auro had maintained a total silence toward her—unbroken even at Christmas and on birthdays—and it had been eating at her like a poison for which she had no antidote.

So, when she entered the empty red-and-gold lounge of The Aladdin in mid-afternoon and saw Auro adjusting his cymbals on the crescent-shaped stage, Ivy’s knees buckled and her breath caught in her throat. I actually took a step toward her, to offer support, but she recovered in time to cast me a baleful glance from behind her dark glasses. She wore a long black dress, and black cotton gloves, despite the heat; according to Labusi, she so badly bit and picked at her fingers and cuticles as to have disfigured them.

At the sight of her, Auro pulled up abruptly but remained calm. He endured a long embrace from her, then stepped back, disengaging as smoothly as he could, when she placed her hand on the back of his neck and pulling him closer began whispering in his ear. With no qualms about how it looked to anyone else, this secretive posture had always been the one Ivy assumed when she wanted to relate to him intimately. But Auro was having none of it, and he abruptly chose that
moment—with a sharp nod—to have the members of his band introduce themselves to us.

Ivy remained fixated on Auro, and the moment the band members were done, she approached him again. This time he politely waved her away. Being in Ivy’s presence always disturbed me, but the sight of her in black gloves was in itself a shock, bringing back my very unhappy memories of our first encounter, at the planetarium. But that aside, to watch her clumsy attempt at reconnecting with Auro, acting as if nothing had changed in all that time when he so clearly had changed—that gloved hand clasping his neck, exerting its full variety of pressures—made me gag. Whatever feelings of the same sort were churning up inside Auro he successfully masked—at least to my eyes.

Playing countless gigs night after night for years in smoky dives up and down the East Coast and through the South, living in hotels that were not, by a long shot, Canopus-style establishments, getting bookings in New Orleans and, finally, at the bigger New York clubs, and now touring the West for the first time en route to Los Angeles to finish recording his debut LP—making himself, in other words, into a performer—had brought out in Auro a toughness that obviously was not restricted to his professional life. I had seen traces of it—for example on that day when I set fire to the ghost town—in our years growing up together. But never had I caught in Auro’s eyes the centeredness under pressure, his pupils like sparks off a flint, that was so apparent that day at The Aladdin. Still, Auro’s echolalia was unchanged, and I noted soon enough that Frankie Fooo had assumed the role I used to play as Auro’s verbal prompter, tail-ending his sentences with phrases Auro could pick up on.

“We gotta ask everyone to leave while we rehearse,” Frankie announced, “but please come back tonight.”

Auro nodded emphatically. “Please come back tonight,” he repeated, shifting only the emphasis in the words.

We did, and the set they played that night was a gem. I had to believe Auro was pumped up, what with his relatives out there—for better or worse—hearing exactly what it was he had been up to during all those years away. The Echo Quintet played practically in its entirety the contents of the LP that was released four months later, a double album destined for cult status entitled
Echo Chamber
that
would gain Auro, who composed eleven of its fourteen cuts, an instant following in the jazz world. It was the advance buzz for this album that was getting them gigs at high-end venues like The Aladdin.

I had watched Auro drum many times when he was taking lessons at the hotel, but to see him onstage, playing with, and off of, other musicians, was a different experience altogether. He was an extraordinary rhythm man, the echolalia an asset for once, enabling him with the subtlest antennae to anticipate and answer the sounds his partners produced. The intense symbiosis he set in motion made the band one of the tightest I had ever heard. When he launched into his solos, it was with passion and a minimum of ostentation—no twirling drumsticks or overwrought cymbal action—all his flourishes tightly in the service of the music. All of this was made sweeter by the fact I was watching Auro display his talents before a packed house on the Strip. I was sitting at a front-row table with Desirée and Zaren Eboli. Ivy chose to sit alone, farther back, nursing a martini. Though she had been working night and day at her silent typewriter in a corner of the greenhouse, Desirée looked ravishing that night in a blue leather miniskirt and studded jacket. Eboli, who had been holed up for weeks with a bevy of new spiders he had brought in from Utah, had put on a silver tuxedo jacket for the occasion and ordered a magnum of champagne for our table. He was particularly proud of Auro, to whom he’d given many pointers on performing from his own days in the piano bars of the Latin Quarter, never dreaming the boy would one day employ them as a big-time performer. Auro’s way of repaying him came at the very end of the set when the quintet performed a tribute to Jelly Roll Morton—a medley of rags from “Dead Man Blues” to “Star Jam,” which pleased Eboli mightily.