The Desert Rose (6 page)

Harmony still kept thinking maybe it could be some kind of joke, her birthday was coming up on Saturday, maybe there was at least an outside chance he was planning to buy her a birthday present or something, she tried to think of good possibilities but it didn’t really work, she kept remembering the way he smiled when he waved the check at her. It was not the way he smiled when he was being nice.

Myrtle had been in a fret about Maude, but when she heard what had happened she forgot about that and came right over looped as she was and started offering advice, all of it having to do with calling the police and getting criminal charges started. Harmony thought of calling Gary but he seldom got up before four in the afternoon and it wasn’t four yet, so instead she let Myrtle call Wendell to get his opinion. But he was on his coffee break, nobody could find him, which for some reason caused Myrtle to assume he was having an affair with a bathing beauty, she often got a little insecure when she was drunk and imagined that Wendell was having affairs with women he had practically never
even met. Harmony got the phone long enough to call the insurance company and ask them to please stop payment on the check, but the girl she got was cross with her because she didn’t know her policy number, though she could have probably found it, given a little time.

Then Myrtle got on the phone again and somebody at the Grand finally located Wendell, but instead of asking his advice Myrtle spent fifteen minutes grilling him about how he had spent every second of his coffee break and then totally forgot to ask him what he would do if someone stole an insurance check from him. Though it was clear that Wendell had been completely innocent it didn’t have the effect of getting Myrtle in a better mood.

“Myrtle, you ought to be glad he’s faithful,” Harmony said, forgetting her own troubles for a second to marvel at the fact that Myrtle had managed to get angry at Wendell for not having an affair with a bathing beauty during his coffee break.

“Well, he don’t even have guts enough to get in trouble, I think I’m losing interest,” Myrtle said. She went back over to her house to get her drink and apparently went to sleep, because she never came back. Harmony sat on her bed with the phone in her lap for an hour, crying and thinking about calling the police, but she never did.

5.

T
HE
B
EST
thing of all about Gary, the thing that made him such a wonderful friend was that when you were really in trouble it never entered his head to criticize. Sometimes if you just bought some pants he thought were ugly or went to a hairdresser he had a low opinion of or were a little slow with a costume change he could be snippy for five minutes.
It was more likely to occur over clothes than anything, he was as bad as Pepper when it came to his preferences in clothes, but when Harmony called and told him Denny had stolen her insurance check he just said, “Oh, sweetie, I love you, I’ll come right out and we’ll talk this over.”

That made her feel better so she got dressed and decided to be brave, then the minute Gary stepped in the door she forgot about brave and cried like a faucet for about five minutes, with Gary shushing her and telling her not to ruin her eyes, she was going to have a show to do after-while, insurance check or not. Then while Harmony was freshening her face he went over to see what had become of Myrtle. Gary thought Myrtle was a hoot and always liked to exchange a few words with her when he came out, but this time he was out of luck, Myrtle was asleep on her little daybed and Maude was on the couch eating the stuffing out of one of the cushions.

“I knew goats had a bad reputation but I didn’t know they’d eat foam rubber,” he said, and complimented Harmony on her blouse, maybe just to cheer her up. Gary was a little dumpy man about the size of Ross but he had real warm eyes, brown ones, and gay or not he liked to hug her and hold her hand sometimes, which Harmony appreciated, she had come from a hugging family and was glad Gary wasn’t so gay he didn’t want to touch her at all.

They got in his camper and drove up Paradise Road to a bar they liked called Debbie’s and Marty’s, whose owner had run the baccarat room at the Imperial Palace for about twenty years. His name was Giorgio. For baccarat you had to wear a tuxedo and he had gotten pretty tired of it and wanted a place that was no frills as he put it, so he just bought an old bar and called it Debbie’s and Marty’s, in honor of the couple who went in with him.

Harmony still felt a little shaky and would have liked maybe a vodka tonic, but Gary said forget it, he had seen
her put away vodka tonics before when she was upset and was afraid she might fall off her disc or something if he let her drink. In the opening number she and Jessie, they had always been sort of paired, were the showgirls who came down from the ceiling on discs and of course in the finale went back up again. Harmony had no fear of falling off. She had been riding down on the disc twice a night for over twelve years—it was such a popular thing that the producers kept it in every show—but then it was true vodka tonics went down awfully easy so she contented herself with a couple of beers.

“Well, basically, it’s just a matter of do you want Denny in jail or don’t you?” Gary said.

But Harmony just didn’t really want to be involved with that question. She looked around the bar hoping maybe someone from the show was there who might sit down and chat with them. She didn’t know if Gary really knew about Denny being in jail twice before, not for anything real serious, once just for hot checks and once for stealing a car from his father-in-law not thinking he would call the police much less press charges, but the man had apparently never liked Denny being married to his daughter, so he did. Mainly the jail things were just things Denny bragged about, just a little bit of wildness, he did like the idea that he was wild, sort of in the sense of always seeing how far he could go or doing things like making love in the middle of the lake.

“You see, I don’t think he realizes,” she said. “I mean, his mind doesn’t work like yours and mine, Gary. He probably just thinks I know somebody who will loan me the money if I really need it.”

“Only you don’t,” Gary said, not being harsh, just pointing it out.

“Yeah, but Denny just thinks about scuba diving and betting on basketball and doing coke and stuff like that,”
Harmony said. “He’s not like you. It’s not like he ever understood my life.”

Not like I do either, she thought, holding up the empty peanut bowl so Giorgio would bring some more. She kind of had to wave it around to get his attention but when he saw her Giorgio came right over and filled it up, giving her a grin with his very white teeth. She had always sort of thought probably Giorgio would ask her out someday but so far he hadn’t gotten around to it, just expressed his affection by being liberal with the peanuts.

Gary meanwhile was being very patient and kind but Harmony knew him well and could tell that he thought her attempts to excuse Denny’s behavior were total horseshit, which was probably true.

“He understands that you live eight miles from town, which is too far to walk,” Gary pointed out.

Then Harmony remembered the unusual business about Pepper and Bonventre, which was a good thing to change the subject to since Gary was fascinated by anything that smacked of intrigue in the world of the shows.

“Hey, could we go to Madonna’s?” she asked and told him what Pepper had said. He didn’t look the slightest bit surprised, which made Harmony feel like she must have been living on another planet or something, because Gary seemed to think it was normal whereas she had never given the possibility of Pepper dancing at the Stardust one moment’s thought.

“Would you let her if he makes the offer?” Gary asked.

“No, she’d have to be topless,” Harmony said, realizing that was a strange answer since she herself had been on stage there topless for twelve years. Another funny thing was that when the pressure to be topless had got real intense, which had been fifteen years ago almost, it was Gary who had persuaded her that it was right to do it. Previous to that she had always been covered and had never supposed
she would work topless but Gary of course had seen her breasts, he had to dress her, some of the changes were so quick modesty was the last thing on anybody’s mind, and he had made it seem like basically an artistic thing, told her her breasts were truly beautiful and what was the point of the show if not to show people beauty, mainly people who never got to see very much of it at any one time.

So she agreed to work topless, not being so sure at all that she really wanted to, plus Bonventre made it worse by telling her practically every day that her breasts didn’t match. But finally she began to feel that Gary was right, it was just beauty she was offering, and after all most of the people in the audience were married couples, older ones mostly except for the honeymooners, and a lot of them came from small towns and they just ran grocery stores or had car dealerships and sort of led ordinary lives so it was true they didn’t get to see all that much beauty. Often if a couple who had seen the show happened to see her in the bar afterward they would almost always come up and tell her how beautiful they thought she was and how much they enjoyed the show. They were so sweet about it usually and seemed so thrilled to meet her that Harmony more and more realized Gary had been right.

But Pepper was just sixteen, at that age she would never have uncovered her breasts on stage, probably not even if Didier had asked her and she had loved Didier a lot.

“Anyway, Madonna says Pepper can easily get a ballet scholarship if she keeps working,” Harmony said.

“Why would she want a ballet scholarship if she can be lead dancer at the Stardust?” Gary asked.

Harmony didn’t really know the answer to that, she was suddenly getting the peculiar feeling that everybody understood her daughter better than she did. It was bad enough that all her friends felt they had to just immediately
tell her what she could expect from every boyfriend she managed to get—they were usually right, too, it was a big thrill for her if a boyfriend turned out not to be as bad as everybody said he was.

But that was just boyfriends, Pepper was her daughter. For presents Madonna always gave Pepper subscriptions to all the good dance magazines, she had always encouraged Pepper to set her sights high. Not that being the lead dancer at the Stardust was nothing, it was quite an honor really, but still it wasn’t like getting into ballet in New York or somewhere where you would have to dance a lot of different roles, at the Stardust Pepper would just have to do the same routines five or six thousand times depending on how long they ran the show. For a girl who got bored easily it didn’t make a lot of sense.

Plus there was always Bonventre to consider. Since Denny loved video games on Sundays they sometimes went to one of the arcades, one day it occurred to Harmony that Bonventre was like a human Pac-Man, he sort of beeped around the casino eating up whoever he bumped into. It might be a blackjack dealer or it might be a showgirl, it didn’t matter to Pac-Man.

“What do you think, does Bonventre just want to go out with her or what?” Harmony asked.

“Harmony, you just live in your own world,” Gary said, as if it sort of made him sad. From behind the bar Giorgio was smiling at her with his big white teeth again. He was quite a nice-looking guy really, very Italian. Now that he was out of baccarat he always wore bright shirts, they looked like silk, with the sleeves rolled up to show his muscle, he was always sort of smiling and showing off his muscle, it was kind of charming really, you could just see him thinking how could any woman resist me. Harmony loved it when some guy sort of preened like that for her, it was sweet and also more fun usually than actually going
out with him. The Continental types who looked so great in silk shirts usually got stiff as a fish once they put a suit on. They would even forget how to do the sexy smiles, much less conversation, and would sit there looking sort of worried and drinking lots of drinks until some sort of meal had been gotten through and they finally figured it was time to make the pass. Their behavior would become so hopeless it was kind of winning—unless they had terrible breath or something Harmony would usually let herself get won if only to see if she could sort of get them to remember how irresistible they had felt when they had just been sort of lightly coming on in a bar, or maybe letting her watch them shoot craps. It was definite that Giorgio was attracted, she had the notion he was a little afraid of her or something so she gave him a smile back, maybe he would get over it. She was trying to remember whether Giorgio was actually married or not, meanwhile Gary was not really doing much to clarify the situation with Pepper, he was just sitting there sucking ice cubes and waiting for it to be time to go to work.

“I think we ought to pick up Jessie, she’s got her own problems,” he said. “You know she had the dentist appointment today.”

“Oh, God, I was gonna call her,” Harmony said, ashamed that she had become so engrossed in her own miseries that she forgot to call her best friend on a day when she had a trauma to face.

Jessie had a very low pain threshold, any dentistry, even just a cavity, worried her for weeks, she couldn’t stop thinking about the novocaine needle. Gary might point out very gently that having novocaine wasn’t really that major but it didn’t ease Jessie’s mind at all.

Jessie lived in a sand-colored apartment building across the road from the Desert Inn. Sure enough when they got there Jessie was in tears, she was sitting out on her tiny
balcony in her bathrobe, crying and then dropping wet Kleenex beside her chair.

“Look at that, a pyramid of wet Kleenex,” Gary said, trying to joke. “You girls will be lucky not to both get fired, you’ve both certainly ruined your eyes.”

Jessie was a beautiful woman, an inch taller than Harmony, but not confident, it was actually not diplomatic of Gary to mention firing since that was what Jessie lived in dread of. In all she had three operations on her breasts, one of which was a disaster, they had done a tuck wrong or something and when it was over her nipples pointed straight down. Fortunately that was correctible or Jessie would have never worked another day. Even so she was paranoid about her scars, which were up under her breasts and hardly noticeable even in the dressing room, much less from the audience.