A Glittering Chaos Read online

  Melusine would return to bed and, as her husband slept, she would run her hands down her legs, her beautiful legs that Hans never seemed to notice or simply took for granted and she often wondered if other husbands bothered to take off their pajamas while making love to their wives. She has never felt Hans’s bare chest on hers and for that she now feels glad. These days, after so many years, her spontaneous desires having faded, his pale, cool, hairless flesh seems distasteful to her, and the intimacy of skin embarrassing.

  Melusine’s best friend Ana had sighed over the injustice of Melusine’s leggy beauty. Ana was chunky and stocky but her face was that of an angel while Melusine felt herself to be plain at best.

  She and Ana had known each other since they were toddlers, and had been inseparable apart from a brief period when Ana had watched Melusine leave school early to hang out with the speed freak druggie girls.

  One day at school, Ana broached the subject and asked Melusine, “and so? What’s it like? Speed, I mean?”

  “It is an orgy of the wind, the lust of mountains where a pious star loses its way, collides and dissolves into dust.”

  “You’re quoting from that stupid poetry book again, aren’t you? Come on, Melu, I mean it, tell me the appeal.”

  Melusine paused. “It’s incredible. I never knew I could feel that alive. I cannot describe it to you. It’s like every single nerve-ending is ignited by crystal diamonds and washed clean with the sharpness of glass and I feel like I could shatter and fly through the universe and I am invincible.”

  Ana looked at her. “How long are you going to do this for? It seems to be becoming a habit.”

  Melusine shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

  “Your parents,” Ana said, and those two small words carried volumes of meaning. “It would kill them if you really go down this road, Melu, you know that. You were their miracle when they thought they could never have children. Not like my parents who had five kids and can hardly remember our names or who’s who.”

  Melusine laughed. “Your parents know every single thing about every one of you,” she said.

  Ana had paused. “How do you do it, do you take a pill, snort a powder, what? I’ve always wondered.”

  “The first few times I took pills,” Melusine said, “but the last two times, I injected.”

  Ana was shocked. “But how did you know how much to use or how to do it?”

  “Marthe showed me. She was very nice, very gentle. It felt quite erotic actually, her shooting me up. Like I would imagine lovemaking.”

  “So now you’re a lesbian?”

  Melusine blushed. “No, Ana. I’m just saying it felt good, it was very erotic, the intimacy of it.”

  “Marthe’s a manipulative bitch. I’m telling you. You think she’s your friend but she’s not. If you stop going to her drug parties, she’ll drop you like a stone.”

  “They aren’t drug parties,” Melusine objected, knowing that they were.

  “Melu, get a grip, okay? Marthe’s going to end up a scabby junkie. You think she’s so cool but imagine her a couple of years from now. No teeth, bad skin, you’ve seen what happens. Your whole life will be ruined.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, you’re bugging me big time, Ana. Back off.”

  Ana let it go. “Let’s go clubbing tonight then? Dress up like Cyndi Lauper and go dancing.”

  “Clubbing? The community centre spins a disco ball above a basketball court, we all wear fingerless lace gloves and put food colouring in our hair. Yeah, right, big time party.”

  Ana got angry. “Fine. So go hang out with your druggie friends, see if I care.”

  Melusine watched her friend march off. She couldn’t tell Ana that she was struggling with life and the seeming pointlessness of it all. Only Ingeborg seemed to understand.

  I am cut off from myself and from everything else.

  Melusine returned to Marthe that night but the thrill had been diluted by Ana’s bleak prognosis. Melusine felt slightly removed from it all and even Marthe’s sensual touch seemed cooler, more rushed and impersonal.

  “You know you can do this yourself,” Marthe said, her tone slightly sharp. “And I can hook you up with a guy. He’s got lots of stuff, he’ll keep you happy forever.”

  Melusine, enjoying the crystalline surge of godlike power, was not listening to Marthe. She ran out into the night and she ran and ran, into the forest, with the leaves slapping at her face and the smell of loam strong in her nostrils and her ears throbbing with the loud drumbeat of her pounding heart. The blackness was thick and the night was full of sounds. She ran until she could run no longer and then she lay under a tree, feeling the worms crawling in the earth beneath her and the insects burrowing in the leaves and she herself was a glowing prism of light; a star burning in a frenzy while the trees stretched and yawned and grew and the leaves groaned as they flexed green fingers.

  She lay there in the dirt until the euphoria faded and the buzz-glow dimmed and it was just her, Melusine, tired and dirty; cold and horribly awake, exhausted and far from home.

  She had lost her shoes and she limped home, arriving to find her mother brewing coffee.

  “Long party?” her mother asked.

  “Communing with nature.”

  “Is this communing going to be a regular occurrence?”

  Melusine gulped a large swallow of scalding coffee and took a slice of toast that her mother was about to eat. “No, Mami,” she said. “I’m done communing.”

  The tension fell away from her mother’s shoulders. “Good then. And clean your room, it’s a terrible mess.” She turned away so that Melusine could not see her cry.

  Later that day, Melusine told Ana she was done experimenting and Ana hit her hard on the arm with a punch she’d learned from her brothers.

  “Ow! What did you do that for?”

  “For freaking me out. We were all worried. You’ve been messing around with that stuff for ages, you think we didn’t know? You’re like a sister to me, Melu, and you drive me crazy but I love you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Melusine said, although she wasn’t. “But it’s water under the bridge now, okay? Let’s never talk about it again.”

  Melusine went on to study philosophy and German literature while Ana focused on selecting her future husband and Marthe ignored Melusine with lip-curled disdain. But Melusine no longer cared and years later Ana proved right; Marthe dropped out, lost her youth, her teeth, and most of her brain cells. Melusine came across her panhandling, gave her ten dollars and was grateful for having dodged that bullet.

  And now decades later, lying in her bed in Las Vegas, Melusine questions if her longing for grinding sex is like her once-upon-a-time craving for amphetamines; it had come out of nowhere and was threatening to dislodge everything she knew and stood for.

  She had recently reread Ingeborg’s complicated novel Malina, the first in a planned series of three novels on styles of dying and how patriarchal society murders women in seemingly invisible ways. In Malina, the protagonist’s lover tells her: “Your problem is you don’t have anything that needs you to be there!”

  Melusine feels as if she has nothing that needs her to be anywhere at all. She decides that she needs to get out of Las Vegas for a day. Get out into the desert, see the Grand Canyon. Get a grip.

  She swallows half a sleeping pill, happy to have a plan.

  4.

  THE NEXT MORNING she wakes to find Hans lying beside her, his hands folded behind his head, his eyes wide open. Melusine is glad she’s hidden Kurt, the giant black dildo, as well as her ticket stub to The Apollo Boys.

  “I love Vegas,” she says to Hans as they dress and get ready to go down to breakfast and she is surprised; she really does love it though it is aggravating her volcanic emotional disruptions.

  Hans looks surprised. “I really thought you’d hate it,” he says. “All the chaos. Vegas is humanity at its chaotic worst.”

  “But it’s a glittering chaos,” she sa
ys. “Eine glitzernde chaos. Hans, can you book that show Zumanity for me? It’s too hard for me to try to explain to the concierge. And I want to go to the Skywalk at the Grand Canyon — and you need to talk to the concierge before you go, because I want to go today. So you can’t leave before she gets here, okay?”

  Hans looks at her. “You want to see Zumanity? Of all the Cirque du Soleil shows, that’s the one you want? It’s like a glamourized strip show. Why don’t you go and see Celine Dion? Or Donny and Marie? Or one of the other Cirque shows?”

  “Are you crazy? Donny and Marie? Give me a break. Hans, for once, just do what I want, and book my shows, okay?”

  They stare at each other and she tries to recall a time when she found him endearing, funny and astute. He has not changed. He still brings her flowers and thoughtfully-wrapped first editions of obscure German novels that he hunted down for her, but she is suddenly aware that he’s lost in his own world of pain and she is too preoccupied by her issues to be able to ask him what is going on. She wonders if he too has been triggered into an emotional wasteland by the empty chair at the kitchen table, a chair that, previously filled, used to unite them as a family at dinner. Has the departure of their son brought home anew the terrible loss that Hans had suffered in his late teens?

  He straightens his tie. “I swear Melusine, I have no idea right now who you are. I know your parents’ death is still recent and Jonas has left home, so you have a lot of empty nest syndrome going on but still…”

  “Right now, Hans,” she says, “I couldn’t agree with you more. I don’t know who I am either. Maybe I’m not coping so well with Jonas’s departure, or my parents’ death. And I agree, it doesn’t help that Jonas is seeing some gothic Cinderella who’s so far removed from all the girls he used to date, the ones that I understood. But whatever, let me go and see my shows and just enjoy my holiday, okay?”

  He nods, wishing only to be away from her. “I’ll book the Grand Canyon tour for you after we’ve had breakfast. I’m sure you’ll be able to go today. And I’ll be back in time to take you out for dinner tonight too, so that’s your day taken care of. By the way, I phoned and Mimi’s fine.”

  She looks at him uncomprehendingly. Oh, right, the dog.

  “That’s good,” she says, absently.

  5.

  AN HOUR LATER, Melusine is waiting outside the hotel for the tour bus to take her to the Grand Canyon. She’s drinking a cup of coffee. The hotel offers free Starbucks coffee 24-seven and she admits she enjoys it although she misses her good German coffee that delivers caffeine with such vehement potency. She looks at her watch. She wonders if the tour bus missed her hotel or if it left already and Hans got the details wrong. She sits forward on the wrought-iron bench, admiring the wild pink oleander flowers, the vibrant green grass and the cobalt sky, and loving the postcard vividness of Las Vegas even in the daytime.

  A man carrying a large camera pushes his way through the front door and stops to light a cigarette with an old-fashioned Zippo. To her discomfit, it’s the man from the second floor, the one whose door she’d repeatedly tried to get into when she was drunk and exhausted. She hopes, foolishly, that he won’t remember the incident, or her.

  He stands next to her, smoking his cigarette, in no hurry to leave.

  Melusine carefully avoids making eye contact. He was witness to her at a time when she was distraught and undone and she feels embarrassed. She notices again that he’s good-looking, although he carries too much weight. He’s got curly brown hair with a reddish tinge, a square head, a strong jaw and a pug-shaped nose. He looks like he could have been a rugby player at university. She blushes and stares at her feet, hating herself for her thoughts, how obsessed she is with men and their bodies and the various related desires thereof.

  “The grass is fake,” the man says in German and he grins at her. He’s got deep dimples when he smiles and a cleft in his chin.

  She looks up at him. She is surprised that he is offering so mundane an avenue of conversation when all she can think about is what his cock would feel like. It seems she is obsessed with this too; what a man’s hardware would look like, how it would feel in her hand and oh, dear god, what it would taste like. She has never held Hans’s cock or taken it in her mouth, and now, as she cannot help but think of it, she is filled with a vision of a limp Chinese noodle, flaccid, narrow and pale. Poor Hans, he has done nothing to deserve her vitriol. Or has he? Did all husbands have the same sex with their wives for over twenty years and expect that to be good enough? Maybe they did. She has no way of knowing and no one to ask. She supposes she could ask Ana, but that would be too revealing, far too humiliating. Ana has always let her know that she enjoys a great sex life with Dirk, although she had told Melusine that when Dirk mentioned he would like them to join the swingers in the neighbourhood, just for one night you understand, to see if she’d like it, she had fixed him with an icy stare and shut that idea down. For good.

  “And he’d better not be getting any on the side either,” she had told Melusine. “And if he does, he’d better make sure that I never find out about it because if I do, I’ll boil his balls for breakfast and feed them to the dog. And he knows it. Isn’t it enough that I dress up like a nurse and wear those latex boots that really hurt my feet? I mean I’m all for a bit of fun and I don’t mind trying new things and he knows that, but I don’t share and I told him that before we got married.”

  Nurse’s uniform? Latex boots? Melusine had changed the subject. She had wondered though, where one would find things like that, in their small town. But then she reasoned that Dirk did a lot of work with high-end vehicles in Frankfurt and he most likely shopped there.

  “Yes, it’s plastic grass,” the man continues, distracting her. “I guess it’s because it’s the desert. It’s too hard to keep the real stuff watered and lush and green and they want everything in Vegas to look perfect. Disneyland for adults is what they want, with everything nice and bright and shiny.”

  He sits down on the bench next to her. “Do you mind?” he asks, sitting down as he does so, so what can she say? She nods, meaning she doesn’t mind, or if she does, that it’s too late anyway.

  “Well even if it’s fake, it looks good,” she says and the man laughs.

  “That’s Vegas, isn’t that right? Doesn’t matter how fake it is, so long as it looks good. It’s all about looking good. If you don’t look good, don’t bother showing up.”

  “I’ve seen lots of people here who don’t look good,” she says. “Lots of women mainly; out of shape, wearing clothes twenty years too young for them and with suntans that are just horrible. But they look so happy, running around in their evening gowns as if they’re about to attend some glittering ball for the middle class — you know, big drinks in hand, more feather boas than I’ve seen in years, and bad cleavage.”

  She stops, having no idea where that came from and thinking it an entirely inappropriate utterance.

  But the man just laughs. “Bad cleavage?” he asks. “From a male perspective, I’m not sure such a thing exists. But I know what you mean. And that’s the beauty of Vegas; you can pretend for five minutes that you’re a movie star about to get laid by the hottest thing out there, and you’re young again and randy as all hell and life’s one big party.”

  She wants to tell him that she never had that youth but she remains quiet and looks at her watch.

  “What are your plans for the day?” he asks.

  “Going on a tour to the Skywalk,” she says, “if the bus ever gets there that is. I think my husband booked the wrong one or something.”

  “I’m going on that one too.” The man looks amused. “Imagine that. Don’t worry, the bus will be here soon.”

  Melusine is not happy that the man is coming on the trip. She wants to be alone with her fantasies, alone with her longing. She doesn’t want a real life distraction butting in.

  But she tries to be polite and she smiles.

  “Great,” she says, “we can enjoy the
spectacular scenery together.” But she looks away.

  The man stretches his legs out in front of him. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I won’t get in your headspace. I need some time to myself anyway. And forgive me for confiding in you — a total stranger — but I really need to tell someone or I’ll go crazy. A few months ago, my wife lost our fifth baby, another miscarriage, and this one was in her second trimester. We thought everything was going to be fine. The nursery was ready and we had named the baby, it was a little girl. It was terrible.” He looks away. “Thank god I was invited to do some work here in Vegas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally cut up about it too, but I don’t know what to do with her grief. I don’t have any answers. She looks to me for answers. She looks to me and all I can see is that she’s begging me to fix this; fix it, her eyes say, but I can’t. I’m worried it’s the end of us. And I love her.”

  Melusine turns to him, taken aback by his revelations, thinking it odd he would confide that much in her, a total stranger. She wonders if it’s the fact that they are both German that has him assuming such familiarity. Nevertheless she is moved by his sincerity.

  “Oh, I’m very sorry,” she says. “I can’t imagine that kind of loss. Poor you. And your poor wife.”

  The man nods. He folds his arms across his chest. “I had this trip planned long before and I guess I could have cancelled but I didn’t. I didn’t want to. And she knew that too. She watched me packing and I knew she was thinking that I could have cancelled but what could I do? What good would I do by staying?” He sighs.

  “How old is your wife?”

  “She’s only thirty-six. But I don’t think there will be any children now. We can’t even try again. It’s too much for her. Too much for me. Funny, we always took it so for granted, that having babies would be so easy, so natural. That we’d have to take precautions to not let it happen too soon and now it’s the opposite; now it would take a miracle for it to come true. And I never realized how long a month can be, all that waiting. And then, once the baby is conceived, there is every single long day of worrying until finally the worst nightmare happens again and again and again and then you have nothing.”