Necklace of Kisses Page 11

  “And, Hilda,” said Ezra, “remember what we talked about—no more sugar.”

  She heard the soft, crumpling sound of the greasy doughnut bag as he took it. She heard him rummage around, find a Krispy Kreme, and take a bite.

  “I don’t mean to be harsh but it’s a tough world out there,” Ezra said, his mouth full of doughnut. “You’ve really got to look like a rock star to read at a coffee house in L.A. these days.”

  Hilda kept smiling but she felt sick. Her hands went to her thighs. The black skirt was too tight. Why had she worn it?

  Ezra said, “There’s another thing. I’m not thrilled with your name. I keep thinking you should try to find something catchier. Maybe something with a little hip-hop vibe. Hot Dawg.” He laughed. “Just kidding. How about Big H?”

  She thought he was raising his hand in a high five, so she held hers up shyly, but he didn’t slap her palm, so she pretended she was fixing her hair.

  “I have more ideas, too, but I have to go now.”

  Hilda heard him toss her glasses back on the counter. “My brother had that laser surgery on his eyeballs,” Ezra said. “He’s got twenty-twenty now. They burn the cornea or something; it’s really cool. Later.”

  He was gone. Hilda put on her glasses and picked up her poetry book. She didn’t even know why she wanted to cry.

  Don’t I Know You?

  What do you wear to an art opening of work by a man whom you should have kissed over two decades ago?

  In the morning, Weetzie went to the hotel jewelers, carrying the pouch that Lacey had given her. Inside it was a pearl, a ruby, an emerald, a sapphire, and an amethyst.

  “Is it possible to have these set by tonight?” she asked the diminutive man behind the counter.

  He squinted up at her with his pale eyes. He was wearing a silk turban and had a long, grizzled beard. His hands were fine and as quick as little brown birds. Jewels twinkled, starlike, on midnight-blue velvet in the glass case. Hot-pink, electric-blue, and gold sari fabric covered the cushions on the ornately carpeted floor.

  “Don’t I know you?” he said.

  Weetzie, who did not think that anything could surprise her anymore, gasped.

  “You’re him!” she said.

  “What brings you here?”

  “I’m escaping.”

  “Escaping? How ungrateful. I appear to you, out of a lamp, of all things, and grant you three wishes, any three wishes, and now you’re escaping?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “This happens to be my hotel! I like to pop in every now and then to see how things are going.”

  Weetzie sat down on a stool in front of the counter and rubbed her eyes. When she opened them, the man was still there. He twirled his whiskers, rather madly.

  “Did I wish for the wrong things?” She tightened her fingers around the silk pouch of jewels.

  “Who is to say? You wished for your heart’s desire. Now it has changed.”

  “But it hasn’t,” Weetzie said.

  “Then why did you come here?”

  “I wished for a duck man for Dirk, and he came. They’re still in love, like the day they met. I wished for a little house to live in, and Dirk’s Grandma Fifi died and left us her cottage and I still live there. I wished for my secret agent lover man,” she said. “But now he isn’t. Maybe he never was.”

  “Why do you say that? Because he watches the television all the time? Because he is sad? Because his heart is broken?”

  “I tried to wish for world peace,” Weetzie said. She felt her throat close up. “You said it wouldn’t work.”

  “I’m afraid not. Alas. Your world leaders keep getting stupider and stupider.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Make your own peace?” the man said. “Now, pearls for transformation, rubies for passion, emeralds for fertility, sapphires for truth, amethyst against intoxication. Let me see what I can do with those jewels of yours.”

  Zane Starling

  So, that evening, Weetzie wore the necklace made of gifts from a mermaid, a diva, a fairy, an angel, and a faun, and fashioned by a genie who, years before, Weetzie had set free from his lamp. With it, she wore her pink sandals and a strapless white satin minidress she had made with a sheet from the gift store, using her miniature hotel sewing kit.

  She arrived at the gallery a little late, because it had taken her longer than she thought to finish making the dress. People were spilling out of the door and sipping champagne in plastic cups around the reflecting pool. Weetzie shouldered through the crowd to look at the painting in the front window. She noticed that something had changed, but she wasn’t sure what.

  A waiter came by with a glass of champagne and she took it, wondering if Pan’s amethyst would keep her from becoming too drunk. It didn’t seem to work; soon she was on her fourth glass. The bubbles stung her nose, and her knees wobbled. She felt full of golden light. Another waiter came by with a tray of hors d’oeuvres and she was suddenly so hungry; she had been too excited and too busy sewing to eat. Then another waiter with a tray, and another. She devoured potato puffs, crab cakes, mini quiches, shrimp satay. She washed it all down with more champagne and stumbled around, looking at the art.

  Zane Starling’s paintings were huge and disarmingly lifelike in spite of their subject matter. There was a painting of a woman with a mermaid’s tail holding the hand of her bleeding, two-legged twin. There was naked hermaphrodite with rubies coming out of his/her mouth. There was a red-haired pregnant woman with a whip riding on the back of a man with pointed ears. There was a faun with hairy haunches, a tail, cloven hooves, and devilish horns, masturbating, watching a large TV with a handsome, blond angel on the screen. The angel had a baby lamb in his arms.

  Weetzie went back to the painting in the front window. She looked at it carefully and realized that there was a new jewel on the woman’s necklace—an amethyst, just like the one from Pan. It must have been the champagne, but she could have sworn she saw the woman’s lips curl into an eerie smile.

  Then she turned around.

  A tall man standing in a crowd of people.

  He was wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and heavy-soled black shoes. His straight blond hair was graying at the temples and cut very short. Except for the gray and a slight crepeyness around his smiling eyes, Zane Starling looked just the same as he had looked over twenty years ago.

  Weetzie touched her throat where the necklace felt cool against her pulse. She smoothed her hands over her dress, suddenly embarrassed to be wearing a sheet. Then she walked over to him.

  “Excuse me? May I talk to you for a minute?”

  He nodded politely to the people around him and walked with her over to the front of the gallery. She gulped at the cool night air that came through the door. Sweat trickled down the sides of her neck.

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, fine. How are you tonight?” he said. His voice was kind, but his eyes were darting back and forth over her face; she wasn’t sure that he knew who she was, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him yet. Maybe he would remember.

  “I saw the painting in the window. I’m staying here, in the hotel, and I couldn’t believe it! It was such a weird coincidence. I’ve been wanting to see you. I wanted to tell you something.”

  He smiled, but this time he looked a little wary.

  “I’m Weetzie,” she said. “Weetzie Bat? We went to the prom together.”

  “Of course. Weetzie.” The skin around his green eyes crumpled softly. “You look just the same. I just couldn’t place you.”

  “Can we go outside for a second?” she said. She was feeling as if she might faint. The naked hermaphrodite on the wall winked at her, but it might have been the champagne.

  The moon was mirrored in the reflecting pool, a huge, floating lotus. The little glass shops along the water were all closed. Weetzie glanced over at the jewelers, but it was completely dark inside.

  “Your work is so beautiful!” Weet
zie said. “It’s so magical, and I try not to use that word too much because it is so sacred to me, you know? I like this word ‘numinous,’ because it’s not overused—it’s not even in every dictionary—and it sounds like luminous, which is another word I love and it means ‘supernatural, mysterious, a sense of the presence of divinity.’ I always thought that if anyone ever asked me to be on that program Inside the Actors Studio—not that they would ask me—I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the movies I’ve been in—Dangerous Angels is one—not that James Lipton, the host guy, would ask me to be on, but you know, it’s a fantasy—that I would say ‘numinous’ when they asked me what my favorite word was. And I guess ‘pustule’ is my least favorite word, or maybe ‘pitiful.’”

  She stopped. “Oh, God, I sound so pitiful. What am I talking about?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. She wished he wasn’t so nice. She wished there was something imperfect about him.

  “Anyway, what I wanted to say was, I’m so sorry I pushed you away that night. On our prom. You were too much for me, I think. This lady I met at a wedding, she said you are my animus but I wasn’t ready for you yet. I was too young. I didn’t like myself enough or something. Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  He nodded patiently, but she could tell he wasn’t really following her. It struck her that if he had been upset at all about what had happened, he had forgotten it a long time ago.

  “That’s very nice of you, but don’t worry about it,” he said. He smiled over her head at someone. “I’m glad you could come to the show.”

  “I meant to ask you,” Weetzie said quickly, “who is that a painting of?” She pointed to the woman in the window. She hadn’t let herself even think it before, but the picture did resemble her, not to mention her necklace of kisses.

  “Oh, that’s my wife, Karen. I wish you could meet her but she’s at home with the kids. And she has her practice. She’s a therapist.”

  “How many kids do you have?” Weetzie asked.

  Zane Starling pointed over to another painting. It showed a woman with six arms. In the palm of each hand she held a tiny baby. In her belly was a self-portrait of Zane Starling, sleeping peacefully. The woman had pale skin, rosy cheeks, long, brown hair, and blue eyes. Weetzie was not sure if it made her feel relieved or sad that she did not resemble Tracy Calla. Except for something about her chin, mouth, and neck, she looked nothing like Weetzie, either.

  “Six. The oldest is in college and the baby is five. Every time Karen gave birth she’d say what a miracle it was and shouldn’t we see what other combination we could come up with, so…but I have to keep selling a lot of work.”

  “Where are you living?” asked Weetzie.

  “We have a house in Upstate New York. You should visit sometime.”

  “Thank you,” said Weetzie, but it wasn’t for the invitation.

  He had not blinded her. He had not kissed her. He had freed her.

  Weetzie felt something scratchy in her eye. She rubbed it with the back of her hand. A tiny spark of a jewel slid down her cheek encased in a tear. It was recognizable as a diamond, even to a rhinestone fanatic. Weetzie handed it to Zane Starling. Then she left.

  Coyote

  Max rode his motorcycle out to Joshua Tree to visit his friend Coyote. Coyote lived in a sand-colored adobe house near the monument and held sweats in the lodge he had built. He rode his horse, Luna, through the Joshua trees at sundown. He watched the sky, followed the cycles of the moon. He never missed Los Angeles; Coyote wondered why he had ever lived there at all.

  Max rode under the arching gray bridges of freeway, past minimalls, gas stations, greasy fast-food places, casinos, strips of empty highway and dry brush with billboards for topless bars and retirement living. The air smelled foul; his eyes stung. He stopped at a rest area to use the men’s room and kept thinking about how people disappeared at places like this. He wondered if he might disappear, now that Weetzie was gone.

  Finally he got to the windmills on the hill. The air began to feel cleaner. There was a powdered-sugar sprinkle of snow on the distant mountains. The horizon danced with blue heat.

  Max rode through the desert cities. He imagined finding a little cabin and living out here with the roadrunners and the bats. Each town had a market, a bank, a gas station, a video store, a used bookstore, cheap Chinese food, coffee, cigarettes, beer. What else could anyone want? Max thought to himself. Right? I’ll collect scraps of metal and other junk to put in my yard, among the cactus plants and creosote. I’ll sit on my dilapidated porch and drink my coffee and smoke some weed and try to learn what the stars are saying. In a place this dry and colorless, I will not be able to think of her.

  When he arrived at Coyote’s, they did sit on the porch and drink coffee and Max smoked a little pot he’d brought, but, of course, he did not stop thinking of Weetzie for a moment.

  “I wish I were more like you,” he said to his friend.

  “And why is that?”

  “You are so centered all the time. Like you don’t need anyone in order to be okay.”

  Coyote tossed his head and laughed, bitter and deep as the coffee they were sipping. “Let me tell you something. The other day this guy came to one of my sweats—Native American dude, very angry, very hard. He started laying into me at one point about everything—my name, the way I spoke. He goes, ‘You think you are the noble savage? It’s every fucking cliché there is, man. Get off this high horse, you are so full of shit,’ things like that. I didn’t say anything; I just walked away. He was wrong and he was right. Have I ever told you about who I really am?”

  Max shook his head, a little ashamed. Should he have asked? Listened better? They had known each other since they were twenty. Coyote had always been someone he admired so much. Maybe he didn’t want to look past the grace.

  “See, my dad, he was that guy—drunk, womanizer, pissed off. He beat the shit out of us. I was becoming him at sixteen, but I didn’t want it. So I changed my name and left my family and tried to be perfect.” He laughed again but his eyes flickered darkly. “And now this asshole comes into my lodge and tells me I am a cliché. Because I try to be pure. Because I try to be what we once were.”

  “But you do it,” said Max.

  Coyote shook his head. “You don’t really know me,” he said.

  Max looked out over the desert. A light rain was beginning to fall, coaxing fragrance out of the earth, the sweet-acrid-green smell of creosote rising up. The bright moon made the raindrops glisten and cast strange, twisted shadows of Joshua trees. Lily, his witch baby, had once told him that those plants, which only grew in a few places in the world, were actually a type of flower. She had said, “A weird lily, like me.” He realized with regret that he hadn’t disputed this—that she had called herself weird; he was too busy thinking it wasn’t a surprise she was a little odd—his child and Vixanne’s. It was incredible that she had turned out as healthy as she had. Probably because Weetzie had raised her.

  “She left me.”

  “I figured that was why you came.”

  “I dream of her all the time. In the dreams I am following her down this path. She hears my footsteps behind her and she is afraid but she can’t see me.”

  Coyote nodded and took a drag on Max’s joint. His face was lined. His hair was pulled back in a long braid. He wore a tattered Western shirt, Levi’s, and boots. Max remembered seeing Coyote sprinting through the streets of Hollywood, wearing a fringed suede jacket, with his long, black hair streaming behind him. He was so young. Max had driven by and honked and waved. Coyote waved back, laughed, and kept running. Max realized that his friend had never seemed real before. He had been like a symbol of something wise and beautiful and perfect that Max could never attain, but that could guide him.

  He could still guide him. Maybe better than ever.

  “Let’s sweat,” Coyote said.

  Before they entered the lodge, they knelt on the ground in the rain and dug up clumps of mud with the
ir hands.

  Coyote said, “Make your spirit,” and Max found the clay becoming a large dog that resembled a horse, though he had planned on making some kind of mutt.

  The lodge smelled of cedar and eucalyptus. Sweat poured out of Max until he couldn’t see anymore. He felt every pore of his body opening.

  “I can’t stop seeing the people jumping,” Max said.

  Coyote nodded.

  “What do you do with that kind of pain?”

  Coyote pointed to the clay dog in Max’s hand. “Give it to him to carry. The strong part of yourself.” Then he said, “Once, I went to see a very wise man. I saw him once a week for months. Every time I went there I sat and talked about how fucked up the world was. I was getting more and more frantic. Poverty, disease, war. He listened and listened. Finally he said, ‘What happened to you when you were a boy?’ And I said, ‘My father beat me every day.’ “

  Max smoothed his thumb over the clay dog. He did not look at his friend.

  “Maybe it is time to look at the disasters inside of you,” Coyote said gently. He began to hum, deep in his throat.

  Max closed his eyes. He saw a little boy sitting in a dark closet. Someone was pounding on the door of the boy’s room so that the walls shook.

  Sweat, or maybe tears, poured down Max’s cheeks. It was only the beginning of remembering.

  Later, as they lay on their backs on Coyote’s adobe roof, looking at the constellations, Max asked, “Why death, do you think?”

  “The Iroquois say that the world was too full, so the men and women got together, separately, to find an answer. The men came up with the idea of not having any more children. But the women refused to give up having babies. Death was their answer.”

  Max nodded. He took a deep breath. It felt like he hadn’t breathed like that in months, maybe years.

  Coyote said, “She needed a pink hotel. What about you? What’s your pink hotel?”