A Glittering Chaos Page 5

  Melusine has no idea what to say. “I’m sorry,” she repeats and she stands up and throws away her empty coffee cup.

  She thinks this man is far more eloquent than any she has ever known and again, she wonders at how much he has shared with her so soon. She tells herself that perhaps it is just because they are in Las Vegas where everything is strangely unreal; a no-man’s land where honest emotions can rise up and voice themselves without any regard for place or propriety.

  The bus arrives and they hand their tickets to the driver and climb inside. They are the only people on the bus.

  “Thank you for listening,” the man says once they’re seated. “I needed to get that off my chest. Were we ever introduced?” he asks.

  She smiles. “I don’t think we were. I’m Melusine.”

  “Such a beautiful name. Is it French? I’m Gunther.”

  “Yes, it’s French. I had a great-aunt Melusine who died before I was born. And, according to myth, my name means I’m a fairy whose lower body turns into a snake every Saturday.”

  “Good thing today’s not Saturday,” Gunther comments. “That’d be tough to explain even in Vegas.”

  She laughs. She is sitting next to the window, gazing out at the Strip. The bus driver makes an announcement that Melusine does not understand.

  “He says even though it’ll take a little longer, he’s driving us down the Strip so we can see the sights and also so he can pick up the other passengers from the various hotels,” Gunther translates for her.

  Melusine nods.

  “It must be odd,” Gunther says, “to not understand anything.”

  “In a way it’s nice. Well,” she smiles and elaborates, “it’s not so nice when you’re lost in a hotel like I was, or anything like that, but I’m certain I’m seeing Vegas in a way no-one else might. Or perhaps not. Maybe I make too much of things. Perhaps I am just like any foreigner in a land where they don’t speak the language.”

  But she knows she isn’t telling the truth. Not being able to speak English has changed things for her.

  “It’s like I have more freedom because I don’t understand what’s being said. If I can’t understand the rules, I can’t be expected to follow them, can I?”

  Gunther frowns though she has been making a joke. A sort of joke.

  “They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas so I guess no one will hold you accountable for following the rules one way or the other.” He seems disapproving of what she had said but she has no idea why. She tells herself she does not care and she puts on her sunglasses and stares out the window. The Strip is mostly empty, and she likes to see it this way, wide open, without the pulsating nighttime crowds.

  Gunther holds his camera carefully with one hand and looks straight ahead. They are seated at the front of the bus.

  The bus stops at half a dozen hotels and soon there are no empty seats left. The driver turns on the air conditioning and Melusine shivers, having preferred the natural warmth of before.

  She has brought a small cardigan with her as well as her floppy sunhat and her purse is laden with sunscreen, a bottle of water and a bar of dark chocolate. She was excited when she made her purchases at the hotel store; that mundane collection of goods belied the sense of wild freedom she was feeling. She was going out into the desert; she was going to see the Grand Canyon.

  The bus nears the Stratosphere tower and stops at a traffic light. Melusine sees a sex-toy novelty store to her left; the windows are covered with thick black plastic with a curvy wave to it as if the sheet of blackness had been badly fitted and buckled in the sunlight. But of course, the wave is intentional, just like everything else in Vegas; it’s planned to catch the neon night-lights and mirror them, turning the shabby houses of filth into glittering palaces of beckoning delight.

  The parking lot in front of the sex store is home to a strange assortment of artwork, although Melusine doubts it can even be called art — a raggedy Marilyn Monroe mannequin with thick black tape across her mouth is strapped to a battered mechanical bull who tosses her in a circular motion; the old bull is bucking with the enthusiasm of a retired circus clown.

  Another worn-out fashion mannequin in full bondage gear is tied to one of a pair of playground swings. Sitting next to her, on the accompanying swing, is a small Latino child kicking herself higher and higher, unaware of the strangeness of her playground companions. Melusine looks around for the child’s mother and sees a man on a cell phone who must be the girl’s father; he’s stocky and blunt and he glances at the child now and then.

  Gunther watches Melusine.

  “Freaky, no?” he says. “The kid’s got no idea where she is. Look at the sign right above her head: Nude Dancers, All Day.”

  Melusine nods and watches the girl who’s swinging happily. Melusine makes a note of the store’s name, thinking that she might come back later — perhaps they’ll have something better than Kurt the ever-erect über impotent dildo to help her relieve her pent-up frustrations.

  She watches a grungy teenage couple stop and exchange a deep-tongued kiss and she is furious with herself; she should never have let her youth leave without having experienced the normal illicit adolescent lusts. She should have been promiscuous, and she should have kissed drunken boys at parties and been drunk herself. She should have fallen into flowerbeds and other kids’ parents’ bedrooms and been felt up without even knowing anything about her nameless partner other than how good he tasted at that moment. She should have tasted cocks and semen and sweat, and her own juices. She has no idea what another’s skin feels like, or even, stupidly, the different shapes of men’s backs. She wishes she’d drawn men to her naked body, and caressed them and delighted in their differences, delighted in her pleasure of them.

  But that is all gone, and it is too late. She has never had oral sex in her life and she is certain that except for moments by her own hand, she has never had an orgasm.

  She wants to weep with loss and anger. She is forty-three years old and it is too late.

  She looks out the window and bites her lip, hard.

  They have passed through the Strip and the bus has turned onto the freeway.

  Melusine is lost in her own thoughts.

  I just want it for a bit. Or, I just want a bit of it. Please, don’t let it be too late. In the darkness no one will know that I’m too old. In the darkness no one will say that it’s too late. I don’t feel old but oh, dear god, am I? What’s wrong with me?

  She sighs, tired. Morals, desires; it’s all so tiring.

  The bus travels for hours through the arid burro countryside, with the sky a flawless blue dome above. Next to her, Gunther is equally disinclined to talk. He gazes ahead or closes his eyes to doze. Melusine is sure the other couples on the bus think that they too are husband and wife. She looks down at Gunther’s hands as he sleeps, noting the careful grip he keeps on his camera. His hands are strong, finely-sculpted and tanned. Once again she thinks of Hans; his hands are pale and he has thin narrow bony fingers; fingers bleached by washing with antiseptic, fingers that change lenses to measure prescriptions and make fine adjustments.

  Hans, whose hands fluttered like disturbed moths around their baby when he was born; hands that disappointingly failed to settle and caress.

  And Melusine had been further disappointed when Hans’s air of diffident parental reserve failed to disappear as their son grew older.

  Hans had, in the most polite of ways, refused to even hold Jonas as a baby, saying that he was too nervous he’d hurt him. When Jonas was three months old and in his crib, Hans had once held the boy’s tiny foot briefly and Melusine had exhaled a gust of relieved air, believing that the worst was over and that a threshold had been crossed. But the action had not heralded the emotional breakthrough that she had thought or hoped for.

  Throughout the years, Hans continued to project teacherly rather than fatherly affection and Melusine had feared that her son would suffer lasting damage from his father’s steady distance. Not th
at Hans was disinterested in Jonas — he was deeply interested in him and he dedicated much of his time to focusing on projects that they could do together; showing him how to fly kites, teaching him photography and taking a keen interest in his homework and even attending his soccer matches. But as much as Hans could be present in body and scholarly mind, his heart and love were inaccessible.

  Melusine often wondered how he would have been had their child been a girl. She thought that he would have been very different. She’d suggested that they try for a second baby but Hans remarked that the world was already full of enough children and that one was exactly the correct amount of child.

  Exactly the correct amount of child? Melusine had despised him at that moment, and then understood the awful consequence of allowing such a feeling to linger, so she chose to call him sensible and thoughtful instead.

  “Your father is the most thoughtful man I know,” she’d remark frequently throughout the years to Jonas, her constant companion when he was young. “Unlike most people who just blunder through life, your father thinks consequentially.” Jonas would nod and pick at her pastry dough or peer into a mixing bowl.

  Jonas was a serious little boy but exuberant, full of fun and joyful with his mother, while carefully respectful and distant with his father. He participated in Hans’s projects with an almost indiscernible impatience, as if he understood that his father was trying his best and he was too polite to tell him outright that he was failing.

  As a teenager, Jonas became increasingly less tolerant towards his father, and he went through a difficult period where he was downright rude to Hans. Then his anger morphed into depression and he spent a lot of time in bed, sleeping. Just when Melusine was despairing, Jonas discovered, almost by accident, that girls liked him, and being on the receiving end of their crushes cheered him up again.

  His period of dating cheerleaders lasted for about two years and then he got bored of them and discovered the pothead boys instead, giving Melusine a whole new avenue of concern.

  Jonas moved out of home when he started university and he had been gone for just over six months when Melusine’s parents died in rapid succession. He attended both of their funerals, crying with Melusine and holding her hand, while Hans hovered, concerned but incapable of empathy, despite his ongoing pain at the devastating loss of his own sister when he was a young man. Melusine had felt bitter; surely he of all people could understand loss. And perhaps he could understand but he could not open his heart to her, or let her share his own unresolved grief, and Melusine took this to be a deliberate slight; she was filled with a bitter fury that found its way into her baking, and even her signature specialties carried a sourness she couldn’t eradicate, which was why she’d prepared no more than a simple Apple Walnut Bundt cake at recent dinner parties — an offering far beneath her usual high standards.

  Thinking about all of this now, she hopes she’ll be able to get over her anger soon so that she might return to baking; the one creative outlet that had literally and figuratively fed her soul. She missed it, and she missed being with Jonas while she baked; he’d sit and chat for hours or do his homework or help her.

  “Do you have any children?” Gunther asks her suddenly, startling her by apparently reading her mind.

  “Yes. One. A boy.”

  Jonas feels light-years away and she chokes, swallowing down how much she misses him. “I had him when I was young although at that time it just seemed like that’s what you did; you left school, got married, had a child. Although I did go to university in between, to study German Literature and Fine Art. That’s where I met Hans; he was studying optometry, and we met because I was lost in the wrong cafeteria.”

  Gunther laughs. “I can imagine! So what is he like, your son?”

  She thinks. “Self-reliant. Protective of his mother. Kind. And of course very handsome and intelligent and all the rest.”

  Gunther grins. “How old is he?”

  “He’s eighteen, nearly nineteen. He’s studying engineering at university although I get the feeling he might switch to law. I had him when I was twenty-five. I’m forty-three,” she says, “and I’ve been married for twenty one years. There, you have all the mathematical statistics of my life.”

  “I’m thirty-six, same age as my wife,” Gunther says.

  “Thirty-six feels like so long ago,” Melusine muses.

  “Just seven years.”

  “A lot can change in seven years,” Melusine tells him. “Or nothing much at all which can amount to a lot, too.”

  She decides to change the subject. “That’s a huge camera,” she says. “Do you take pictures professionally?”

  “Yes, I shoot fashion for a catalogue in London. Which is where my wife and I live. I went there after graduation, wanting to get in with the famous, or shall I say infamous, fashion crowd. I never did that but I’ve managed to earn a healthy living and I do my own photography on the side. I’ve won a lot of awards for my fine art.”

  “Are you trying to impress me?” She hears her voice flirting with him and she suddenly feels confused.

  He smiles at her and she notices for the first time that one of his front teeth is slightly chipped and she finds this sexy. She looks down and blushes.

  “Is it working?” he asks. “Because, if it’s working then yes, I’m trying to impress you.”

  The bus pulls into their destination, and saves Melusine from answering. She cranes her head forward. “Oh, my god,” she says, “look over there.”

  She is pointing at the Grand Canyon and it’s magnificent, breathtaking. She cannot wait to get off the bus. “You’re coming on the Skywalk too?” she asks Gunther, who nods.

  They are led through an information area to a ticket centre with lockers where they leave their shoes and Gunther’s camera, and they slip on hospital booties with large brown and beige polka dots.

  “Ruins the atmosphere somewhat,” Gunther observes. “Ladies and Gentlemen, your colonoscopies will begin shortly…”

  Melusine smiles. “It’s to protect the glass, I suppose. I do presume this thing is safe?”

  “The Skywalk? Rock solid. I read that you can land seventy-one planes on it and have more than seven hundred people on it and it wouldn’t budge.”

  “Reassuring,” Melusine says and they step out.

  “I must admit it’s much smaller than I thought it would be. I thought it would jut out over the Canyon a lot more. This is really just a little glass circle.”

  “Yes, but the view’s incredible,” Melusine says, peering over the edge and grinning back at him. “It’s elemental, raw, wild. Look, there’s the Eagle Rock that it’s all named after. It does look like an Eagle spreading its wings.”

  “Or Christ on the cross,” Gunther says and she squints, trying to see it as he does.

  “But look,” she points to the side, “at those people right on the edge of the Canyon. Surely that’s very dangerous? They have all these precautions about not scratching the glass but there’s not even a little piece of rope to stop people from going too close to the edge.”

  Gunther looks over to where she is pointing.

  “I bet I could get some very good pictures from there,” he says.

  “Just don’t fall off,” Melusine says.

  “You’d care would you?” he replies and Melusine’s stomach flips at the way he is smiling and she feels like a teenager on a school outing. She cannot think of a smart reply so she does not say anything and looks down through the glass floor.

  “Let me take a picture of you lovely couple,” one of the hovering photographers says. “Put your arms around each other and move just a little to the right. That way I can get the Eagle in.”

  They do as he says, and Melusine, tucked under Gunther’s arm and close to him, is aware of his heat, the tang of his perspiration mixed with cologne and deodorant and the fabric softener of his shirts. She is self-conscious about her unwashed hair, and she is glad she’s wearing her sunhat. She also wishes she
was wearing something more fashionable — he said he’s a fashion photographer and here she is, wearing a floral frock made from a polyester cotton blend so it won’t wrinkle. She tells herself that she does not care what Gunther thinks and she moves away from him slightly. But the photographer is not finished and Gunther pulls her back to him and grins at the camera.

  “Not used to being on this side of the lens,” he says. “Make sure your polarizer is turned to maximum,” he instructs the boy.

  “Got it,” the kid says back. “Okay, now lie on the glass floor.”

  “I’m not lying on the floor,” Melusine says as she steps away.

  Gunther shrugs at the photographer and follows Melusine.

  “The Skywalk is smaller than I thought it would be too,” she says. “Not much to do really once you’ve walked slowly around and looked down a lot. I’m ready to go and explore that dangerous-looking edge, and I want to visit the Indian Village and go to Guano Point and the other lookout.”

  Gunther, leaning over the railing, looks at her. “I’ll catch up with you then,” he says, “go ahead.”

  She is instantly disappointed but she nods in agreement and rushes out the doorway, throwing her booties in the bin provided and then instantly retrieving them as a souvenir. She walks through the gift shop and one of the girls on the computers calls her over and chatters, pointing at the screen. Melusine peers at the monitor and there she is, and she looks perfect with Gunther. They seem like the ideal couple, happy and relaxed.

  Goes to show you never can tell.

  She shrugs at the girl, turns and pushes her way out into the hot sunshine. She misses Gunther and wonders what to do next.

  She takes the bus to the Guano point and the view is so spectacular it makes her want to cry. She buys a coffee and sits on top of a rock, watching the ravens swoop for scraps of junk food. She gazes at the people around her; they are scrambling and chattering and taking pictures of each other and laughing and she feels unpleasantly invisible.