Darling (6 page)

But it is not Haim's lucky day. We continue up an incline, alongside a muddy riverbed. Winged insects bedevil my ears. We walk around a screen of acacia trees, at which Haim steps aside to reveal . . . a waterfall, a crater filled with green water! There are several Israeli teenagers swimming, screaming with delight as they splash one another. A tall African youth stands poised at the edge of the pool.

This Ethiopian Jew (we later learn) has come to this desert from another. He has come because the Abrahamic faith traveled like particles of desert over mountains and seas, blew under the gates of ancient cities, and caught in the leaves of books. Laughter, as spontaneous as that of his ancestress Sarah, echoes through the canyon as the boy plunges into the stone bowl of water. Displaced water leaps like a javelin.

I am standing in the Negev desert. I am wet.

•   •   •

John the Baptist wrapped himself in camel hide. He wandered the desert and ate the desert—honey and locusts and Haim's gray leaves. John preached hellfire and he performed dunking ceremonies in the river Jordan. People came from far and wide to be addressed by the interesting wild man as “Brood of Vipers.” When watery Jesus approached flaming John and asked for baptism, John recognized Jesus as greater than he. It was as though the desert bowed to the sea. But, in fact, their meeting was an inversion of elements. John said:
I baptize only with water. The one who comes after me will baptize with Spirit and fire.

•   •   •

Desert is, literally, emptiness—its synonyms “desolation,” “wasteland.” To travel to the desert “in order to see it,” in order to experience it, is paradoxical. The desert remains an absence. The desert is this empty place I stand multiplied by infinite numbers—
not this place particularly. So I come away each night convinced I have been to the holy desert (and have been humiliated by it) and that I have not been to the desert at all.

Just beyond the ravine is a kibbutz, a banana plantation, a university, a nuclear power plant. But, you see, I wouldn't know that. The lonely paths Haim knows are not roads. They are scrapings of the earth. Perhaps they are tracks that Abraham knew, or Jesus. Some boulders have been removed and laid aside. From the air-conditioned van or from the tossing Jeep or through binoculars, I see the desert in every direction. The colors of the desert are white, fawn, tawny gold, rust, rust-red, blue. When the ignition is turned off and the Jeep rolls to a stop, I pull the cord that replaces the door handle; the furnace opens; my foot finds the desert floor. But the desert is distance. Nothing touches me.

Yet many nights I return to my hotel with the desert on my shoes. There is a burnt, mineral scent in my clothing. The scent is difficult to wash out in the bathroom basin, as is the stain of the desert, an umber stain.

Standing, scrubbing my T-shirt, is the closest I get to the desert. The water turns yellow.

•   •   •

I tell myself I am not looking for God. I am looking for an elision that is, nevertheless, a contour. The last great emptiness in Jerusalem is the first. What remains to be venerated is the Western Wall, the ancient restraining wall of the destroyed Second Temple.

After the Six-Day War, the Israeli government bulldozed an Arab neighborhood to create Western Wall Plaza, an emptiness to facilitate devotion within emptiness—a desert that is also a well.

I stand at the edge of the plaza with Magen Broshi, a distinguished archaeologist. Magen is a man made entirely of Jerusalem. You can't tell him anything. Last night at dinner in the hotel
garden, I tried out a few assertions I thought dazzling, only to be met with Magen's peremptory
Of course
.

Piety, ache, jubilation, many, many classes of ardor pass us by. Magen says he is not a believer. I tell Magen about my recent cancer. If I asked him, would he pray for me here, even though he does not believe?
Of course.

Western Wall Plaza levels sorrow, ecstasy, cancer, belief. Here emptiness rises to proclaim its unlikeness to God, who allows for no comparison. Emptiness does not resemble. It is all that remains.

“No writing! You cannot write here.” A woman standing nearby has noticed I carry a notebook. I have a pen in my hand. The woman means on the Sabbath, I think. Or can one never write here? It is the Sabbath.

“He is not writing anything,” Magen mutters irritably, waving the woman away.

The True Cross

A little water and the desert breaks into flower, bowers of cool shade spring up in the midst of dust and glare, radiant stretches of soft colour gleam in that grey expanse. Your heart leaps as you pass through the gateway in the mud wall; so sharp is the contrast, that you may stand with one foot in an arid wilderness and the other in a shadowy, flowery paradise.

—Gertrude Bell,
Persian Pictures

A sixty-nine-year-old body is still beautiful. It refuses any covering. A nurse is standing by the bed when we walk in. The nurse attempts to drape the genitals of the man on the bed with the edge of the sheet. But the hand of the man on the bed plucks the sheet away.

I'm afraid modesty is out the window, the nurse says.

There are two large windows.

There are three chairs for visitors, comfortable chairs; there is a foldout sofa for a spouse—that would be Peter, Luther's partner of thirty years, more than thirty years. Peter called two days ago. He said it was time.

So Jimmy and I drove to Las Vegas on Holy Thursday. Luther has been Jimmy's friend for more than forty years. They met when they were both shoe-leather messengers at a law firm in San Francisco; that was before FedEx, before fax, before e-mail. In those days the windows of the nineteenth floor of the Standard Oil Building could be opened to the hum of traffic below; “Proud
Mary,” KFRC-AM Top Forty toiled through the speaker of a transistor radio on the windowsill behind the dispatcher's desk.

Peter hasn't slept properly for weeks. He tells me he shoves the couch against the bed at night so he can hold on to Luther's hand.

One time, when Luther had to go home to South Carolina on family business, Jimmy went with him. They walked through the woods behind the house where Luther had grown up. Luther pointed to a branch distended over a brown creek.
The old people used to tell us Jesus's cross was made of yonder tree. Every Easter, the tree puts out white blossoms by way of apology.

The body on the bed slowly turns. Bares its teeth. Luther is smiling. Luther wants to tell Jimmy something right away. He motions with his hand
:
Mama came to me a few days ago. She said it wasn't time yet.

•   •   •

One time, Luther's Mama woke up in the middle of the night and there was this old man sitting on her bed. You go away, she said to the old man.

Weren't you scared, Mama?

No, not especially, but I didn't like it.

Maybe you were asleep.

No, sir, I wasn't.

Well, what'd he do?

He just sat there staring at the floor like he was waiting for further instructions. You go away right now, I told him; I clapped my hands at him like I was a cross little schoolteacher, and I pulled the covers up over my head and said my prayers.

Who was it, Mama?

I don't know who it was; I pulled up the covers and said my prayers. He went away and he never came back.

Mama died more than ten years ago.

•   •   •

The desk clerk at the Bellagio upgrades us to a suite—large, but not as commodious as Luther's room at the Nathan Adelson Hospice on North Buffalo Drive. The view from Luther's room is of the parking lot of a small business park. A placard on the wall next to the window cautions hospice visitors to park only in designated slots.

At the Bellagio, our room overlooks the hotel's six-acre lake, an allusion to Lago di Como. The Bellagio's lake has an advantage over its inspiration: At fifteen-minute intervals, jets of water are witched up into the air by a Frank Sinatra–Billy May rendition of Frank Loesser's “Luck Be a Lady.” The jets shimmy, they fan, they collapse with a splat when the hydraulic pressure deserts them. Beyond Lago di Como, we can just see the tip of the Eiffel Tower.

•   •   •

In 1955 the management of Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn invited Nöel Coward, the British playwright and composer, to perform a cabaret act in Las Vegas.

Coward rather imagined he might end up tap-dancing to tommy-gun fire, so prevalent was the Vegas association with gangland. But he was agog at the money offered—thirty grand a week—at a time when his career was in a slump. (Coward had been superseded on the London stage by a new generation of playwrights; there wasn't much call in the West End or on Broadway for brittle drollery.) But then, Nöel Coward was a legend, and Las Vegas, because it was on the make, preferred legends.

Stars who might be on the downward slope of Hollywood or New York can achieve tenure in Las Vegas if they deliver what is remembered. Coward fit the bill. Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton, Liberace, Cher, Debbie Reynolds, Tom Jones, Charo, Mitzi Gaynor,
Céline Dion, Bette Midler, Patti Page—the golden legends of the Strip are as odd as you please, but Las Vegas audiences (as used to be the case in London and Paris, and perhaps still is) have long, fond memories.

Upon his arrival, Coward wrote colleagues in London: “The gangsters who run the places are all urbane and charming.” During the course of Coward's run,
Life
magazine photographer Loomis Dean rented a Cadillac limousine, stocked it with ice and liquor, and drove Coward fifteen miles into the desert to photograph him taking a cup of tea in the wilderness, attired in what Coward described as “deep evening dress.” The photographer used the desert as the geographical equivalent of a straight man. The famous photographs perfectly captured the incongruous equipoise that describes the Vegas aesthetic.

•   •   •

Forty years ago, more than forty years, my friend Marilyn announced she was going to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley. “Come,” she said. “You have to see Las Vegas at least once before you die,” she said.

We drove through a summer night. Sheet lightning blinked in the eastern sky. I listened as Marilyn described her father's gambling addiction—how he never lost a gentleman's amiability at the gaming table, how he had squandered most of his mother's fortune.

The Las Vegas hospitality industry is understandably respectful of losers. Marilyn's father never paid for a hotel room in Las Vegas, or for a meal or a drink. The city's generosity extended to the good loser's next of kin. All Marilyn needed to do was to phone her father, who, in turn, phoned the general manager of the Flamingo Hotel. The Flamingo comped us in what I guess you would call the wink of an eye.

In the morning, Marilyn passed her name to the Flamingo concierge, declaring we had come to see Elvis at the International. Elvis at the International was sold-out for the entire run. The concierge picked up the phone, called a uniformed officer of comparable rank at the International. And it was done. The only question that devolved to Marilyn and me was how much to tip the headwaiter at the International.

Elvis Presley first came to Las Vegas in 1956, when he was twenty-one years old. Middle-aged audiences in Las Vegas heard him with interested puzzlement at that time. Elvis was fresh—he was certainly famous—but he displayed none of that finger-snapping, syringe-in-the-toilet, up-tempo flash that Vegas found so inebriating. In 1969, on his return, Presley was nearer in age to the women in the audience, and he had learned the Vegas sell.

•   •   •

The messenger room at the law firm in San Francisco was like a prison movie—time measured in poker games, crossword puzzles, knives, novels. A never-neatened splatter of
Playboy
magazines on a junked conference table. Perpetual “Proud Mary.” One corner of the room supported a mountain of legal briefcases. Another corner was a parking lot for dollies. There were fifteen messengers who sat on fifteen oaken office chairs facing the dispatcher, as in a minstrel show. When a messenger returned from a hike, his name was added to the bottom of the list; he sat down. (Messengers must be male. No experience necessary.) When a messenger took a hike, his name was crossed off the top of the list.

Luther got into the habit of stopping by a senior partner's office every afternoon for a chat, as if they were two free citizens of Athens. Luther found the Old Man interesting—his stories of growing up in turn-of-the-century California, of riding his pony over golden hills, of boarding a train that took him away to
Harvard College, of homesickness, of scarlet fever. “Well, that's how I learned self-reliance,” the Old Man said.

The Old Man was interested in Luther, too. Luther had gumption. Luther had learned self-reliance from his mother, who worked in a chicken-processing plant, who raised ten children, whose husband left.

Where's Luther? The dispatcher ran his finger down the list of scratched-out names. Proud Mary,
unh, unh
. Luther was in the Old Man's office, everyone knew.

One day, after Luther had been working for the law firm for a year, he told the Old Man he figured it was about time he tried something else.

Like what?

Like working for the phone company. The Old Man grabbed up his telephone and barked “TelCo” to his secretary, which was short for: Please get me the president of the telephone company.

Once the president of the telephone company had been procured for him (the firm represented every major California utility), the Old Man hollered into the receiver, as if from the bridge of his yacht: “Look, F., I have a young man here desirous of a career change. I'm going to send him over. Whom should he ask for? Sears as in catalog? Good-o! Love to Dotty.”

Luther went for his appointment at the phone company. He wore the black suit that he and Andrew and Jimmy shared. The suit belonged to Luther, but they all wore it—Andrew to be a pallbearer, Jimmy to be best man, Andrew to the opera, Luther to apply for a job at the phone company.

Right off, the employment manager offered Luther a job as a messenger. Luther pivoted on his heel, walked back to the law firm, elevator to the nineteenth, straight into the Old Man's office. Messengers didn't have to knock. Luther stood facing the Old
Man. With a shamed and thumping heart, Luther said:
If I wanted to be a messenger, I could have stayed right here.

The Old Man didn't get it right away, that Luther had been offered the job he already had. Once he did understand, the Old Man seized the phone with relish, catching the scent of hare. “Now look here,” the Old Man's voice rolled like thunder over Mr. Sears's salutation. “I meant for the kid I sent to get a leg up. He's already a messenger. Why would you offer him a job as a messenger? I'm going to send him back, and I expect you to offer him a decent job.”

The Old Man slammed down the telephone and winked at Luther: “Off you go, kid.”

The following week, Luther began training in the switch room of the telephone company. Over the years, he worked himself into the highest classification of every job he was assigned; he moved from switchman to trunk man to optical-fiber cable work. (The Old Man died.) To something so specialized he was one of only two or three technicians who knew how to do whatever it was he did.

The joke among the three friends was: Who gets to be buried in the black suit? And what will the mourners wear?

•   •   •

We establish a little routine. Twice a day I commute between the hospice on North Buffalo and the Bellagio on Las Vegas Boulevard South. Drop Jimmy off in the morning, spend a couple of hours at the hospice, pick Jimmy up in the late afternoon. In between, I look around. There is a street in town named Virgil. The famous hotels on the Strip are not actually located in Las Vegas, but in an unincorporated entity called Paradise.

In the nineteenth century, Rafael Rivera, a Spanish scout—a teenager—joined a trading exploration party out of New Mexico
that sought to establish a new trail to Los Angeles. Their hope was to find fresh water along the way. The party left Abiquiú in November of 1829. Rivera separated from the group at the Colorado River junction. He was, as far as anyone knows, the first European to enter the valley, to find the two lucky springs there, or, at any rate, to infer water from the vegetation of the valley. Rivera named the oasis Las Vegas—“the Meadows.”

The main street downtown is named for John Charles Frémont. In 1844 Frémont led a surveying expedition that followed the San Joaquin River south, through the long Central Valley of California. At the Mojave River, Frémont's party veered eastward, crossed the Sierra, then followed the Old Spanish Trail for a time. Las Vegas was already a place of refreshment along the Spanish Trail, a trail that had been blazed more than a decade earlier by Rafael Rivera. Frémont recorded two streams of clear water: “The taste of the water is good, but rather warm to be agreeable.” The streams, however, “afforded a delightful bathing place.”

John Frémont died of peritonitis in a boardinghouse in New York City on July 13, 1890. No one I talk to can tell me what happened to Rafael Rivera; whether he returned to New Mexico or Old Mexico or Spain; whether he married; where he lies buried.