Nevada

Poor culp. His wife, Sarah, wanted to marry her lover as soon as the divorce came through, she couldn't wait a day, the honeymoon suite in Honolulu had been booked six weeks in advance. So Culp, complaisant to a fault, agreed to pick the girls up in Reno and drive them back to Denver. He arranged to be in San Francisco on business and rented a car. Over the phone, Sarah mocked his plan--why not fly? An expert in petroleum extraction, he hoped by driving to extract some scenic benefit from domestic ruin. Until they had moved to Denver and their marriage exploded in the thinner atmosphere, they had lived in New Jersey, and the girls had seen little of the West.

He arrived in Reno around five in the afternoon, having detoured south from Interstate 80. The city looked kinder than he had expected. He found the address Sarah had given him, a barn-red boardinghouse behind a motel distinguished by a giant flashing domino. He dreaded, yet anticipated, the pain of seeing Sarah again--divorced, free of him, exultant, about to take wing into a new marriage. But she had taken wing before he arrived. His two daughters were sitting on a tired cowhide sofa, next to an empty desk, like patients in a dentist's anteroom.

Polly, who was 11, leaped up to greet him. Then the fears of abandonment she had been entertaining rebuked her joy. "Mommy's left," she said. "She thought you'd be here hours ago."

Laura, 16, rose with a self-conscious languor from the sofa, smoothing her skirt behind, and added, "Jim was with her. He got really mad when you didn't show."

Culp apologized, "I didn't know her schedule was so tight."

Laura perhaps misheard him, answering, "Yeah, she was really uptight."

"I took a little detour to see Lake Tahoe."

"Oh, Dad," Laura said. "You and your sight-seeing."

"Were you worried?" he asked.

"Naa."

A little woman with a square jaw hopped from a side room behind the empty desk. "They was good as good, Mr. Culp. Just sat there, wouldn't even take a sandwich I offered to make for no charge, Laura here kept telling the little one, 'Don't be childish, Daddy wouldn't let us down.' I'm Betsy Morgan, we've heard of each other but never met officially." Sarah had mentioned her in her letters: Morgan the pirate, the landlady. And her residency witness. Fred glimpsed himself through Mrs. Morgan's eyes. Cuckold. Defendant. Discardee. Though her eye was merry, the hand she offered him was dry as a bird's foot.

He could only think to ask, "How did it go?"

The question seemed foolish to him, but not to Mrs. Morgan. "Eleven minutes, smooth as silk. Some of these judges, they give the girl a hard time just to keep themselves from being bored. But your Sary stood right up to him. She has that way about her."

"Yes, she did. Does. More and more. Girls, got your bags?"

"Would have kept their room one night more, but then this lady from Connecticut showed up yesterday could take it for the six weeks."

"That's fine. I'll take them someplace with a pool."

"They'll be missed, I tell you truly," the landlady said, and she bent down and kissed the two girls. This had been a family of sorts, there were real tears in her eyes; but Polly couldn't wait for the hug to pass before blurting to her father, "We had pool privileges at the Domino, and one time all these Mexicans came and used it for a bathroom!"

They drove to a motel not the Domino. Laura and he watched Polly swim. "Laura, don't you want to put on a suit?"

"Naa. Mom made us swim so much I got diver's ear."

Culp pictured Sarah lying on a pool-side chaise longue, in the bikini with the orange and purple splashes. One smooth wet arm was flung up to shield her eyes. Other women noticeably had legs or breasts; Sarah's beauty had been most vivid in her arms, arms fit for a Greek statue, rounded and fine and pale, arms that never aged, that preserved the grace of girlhood, without a trace of wobble above the elbow, though at her next birthday she would be 40. Indeed, that was how Sarah had put the need for divorce: She couldn't bear to turn 40 with him. As if then you began a return journey that could not be broken.

Laura was continuing, "Also, Dad, if you must know, it's that time of the month."

With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurled her body from the rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair. She climbed from the pool and slap-footed to his side, shivering. "Want to walk around and play the slots?" Goose bumps had erected the white hairs on her thighs into a ghostly halo. "Want to? It's fun."

Laura intervened maternally. "Don't make him, Polly. Daddy's tired and depressed."

"Who says? Let's go. I may never see Reno again." The city, as they walked, reminded him of New Jersey, its skyline low against the sky, whose desert clarity at evening had the even steel tint of industrial haze. Above drab shop fronts, second-story windows proclaimed residence with curtains and a flowerpot. There were churches, which he hadn't expected. And a river, though not so grand as the Passaic, flowed through. Mecca to so many, the Reno courthouse seemed too modest; it wore the disheartened granite dignity of justice the country over. Only the downtown, garish as a carnival midway, was different. Polly led him to doors she was forbidden to enter and gave him nickels to play for her inside. She loved the slot machines, loved them for their fruity colors and their sleepless glow and their sudden gush of release, jingling, lighting, as luck struck now here, now there, across the dark casino. Feeling the silky heave of their guts as he fed the slot and pulled the handle, rewarded a few times with the delicious spitting of coins into the troughs other hands had smoothed to his touch, Culp came to love them, too; he and Polly made a gleeful hopeful pair, working their way from casino to casino, her round face pressed to the window so she could see him play, and the plums jerk into being, and the bells and cherries do their waltz of chance, 1-2-3. One place was wide open to the sidewalk. A grotesquely large machine stood ready for silver dollars.

Polly said, "Mommy won twenty dollars on that one once."

Culp asked Laura, who had trailed after them in disdainful silence, "Was Jim with you the whole time?"

"No, he only came the last week." She searched her father's face for what he wanted to know. "He stayed at the Domino."

Polly drew close to listen. Culp asked her, "Did you like Jim?"

Her eyes with difficulty shifted from visions of mechanical delight. "He was too serious. He said the slots were a racket and they wouldn't get a penny of his."

Laura said, "I thought he was an utter pill, Dad."

"You don't have to think that to please me."

"He was. I told her, too."

"You shouldn't have. Listen, it's her life, not yours." On the hospital-bright sidewalk, both his girls' faces looked unwell, stricken. Culp put a silver dollar into the great machine, imagining that something of Sarah had rubbed off here and that through this electric ardor she might speak to him. But the machine's size was unnatural; the guts felt sluggish, spinning. A plum, a bar, a star. No win. Turning, he resented that Polly and Laura, still staring, seemed stricken for him.

Laura said, "Better come eat, Dad. We'll show you a place where they have pastrami like back East."

• • •

As Route 40 poured east, Nevada opened into a strange no-color--a rusted gray, or the lavender that haunts the corners of overexposed color slides. The Humboldt River, which had sustained the pioneer caravans, shadowed the expressway shyly, tinting its valley with a dull green that fed decklings of cattle. But for the cattle, and the cars that brushed by him as if he were doing 30 and not 80 miles an hour, and an occasional gas station and cabin café promising slots, there was little sign of life in Nevada. This pleased Culp; it enabled him to run off in peace the home movies of Sarah stored in his head. Sarah pushing the lawn mower in the South Orange back yard. Sarah pushing a blue baby carriage, English, with little white wheels, around the fountain in Washington Square. Sarah, not yet his wife, waiting for him in a brown-and-green peasant skirt under the marquee of a moviehouse on 57th Street. Sarah, a cool suburban hostess in chalk-pink sack dress, easing through their jammed living room with a platter of parsleyed egg halves. Sarah after a party doing the twist, drunk in a black-lace bra, at the foot of their bed. Sarah in blue jeans crying out that it was nobody's fault, that there was nothing he could do, just let her alone; and hurling a quarter pound of butter across the kitchen, so the calendar fell off the wall. Sarah in miniskirt leaving their house in Denver for a date, just like a teenager, the sprinkler on their flat front lawn spinning in the evening cool, against the prairie drought. Sarah trim and sardonic at the marriage counselor's, under the pressed-paper paneling where the man had hung not only his diplomas but his Aspen skiing medals. Sarah some Sunday long ago raising the shades to wake him, light flooding her translucent nightgown. Sarah lifting her sudden eyes to him at some table, some moment, somewhere, in conspiracy--he hadn't known he had taken so many reels, they just kept coming in his head. Nevada beautifully, emptily poured by. The map was full of ghost towns. Laura sat beside him, reading the map. "Dad, here's a town called Nixon."

"Let's go feel sorry for it."

"You passed it. It was off the road after Sparks. The next real town is Lovelock."

"What's real about it?"

"Should you be driving so fast?"

In the back seat, Polly struggled with her needs. "Can we stop in the next real town to eat?"

Culp said, "You should have eaten more breakfast."

"I hate hashbrowns."

"But you like bacon."

"The hashbrowns had touched it."

Laura said, "Polly, stop bugging (continued on page 240) Nevada (continued from page 168) Daddy, you're making him nervous."

Culp told her, "I am not nervous."

Polly told her, "I can't keep holding it."

"Baby. You just went less than an hour ago."

"I'm nervous."

Culp laughed. Laura said, "You're not funny. You're not a baby anymore."

Polly said, "Yeah and you're not a wife, either."

Silence.

"Nobody said I was."

Nevada spun by. Sarah stepped out of a car, their old Corvair convertible, wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Her hair was stiff and sun-bleached and wild. She was eating a hot dog loaded with relish. Culp looked closer and there was sand in her ear, as in a delicate discovered shell.

Polly announced, "Dad, that sign said a place in three miles. 'Soft Drinks, Sandwiches, Beer, Ice and Slots.' "

"Slots, slots," Laura spit, furious for a reason that eluded her father. "Slots and sluts, that's all there is in this dumb state."

Culp asked, "Didn't you enjoy Reno?"

"I hated it. What I hated especially was Mom acting on the make all the time."

On the make, sluts--the language of women living together, it occurred to him, coarsens like that of men in the Army. He mildly corrected, "I'm sure she wasn't on the make, she was just happy to be rid of me."

"Don't you kid yourself, Dad. She was on the make. Even with Jim about to show up she was."

"Yeah, well," Polly said, "you weren't that pure yourself, showing off for that Mexican boy."

"I wasn't showing off for any bunch of spicks, I was practicing my diving and I suggest you do the same, you toad. You look like a sick frog, the way you go off the board. A sick fat frog."

"Yeah, well. Mommy said you weren't so thin at my age yourself."

Culp intervened: "It's nice to be plump at your age. Otherwise, you won't have anything to shape up when you're Laura's age."

Polly giggled, scandalized. Laura said, "Don't flirt, Dad," and crossed her thighs; she was going to be one of those women, Culp vaguely saw, who have legs. She smoothed back the hair from her brow in a gesture that tripped the home-movie camera again. Sarah before the mirror. He could have driven forever this way; if he had known Nevada was so easy, he could have planned to reach the Utah line, or detoured north to some ghost towns. But they had made reservations in Elko, and stopped. The hotel was three stories high; on the ground floor, a cavernous dark casino glimmered with the faces of the slots and the shiny uniforms of the change girls. Though it was only three in the afternoon, Culp wanted to go in there, to get a drink at the bar, where the bottles glowed like a row of illumined stalagmites. But his daughters, after inspecting their rooms, dragged him out into the sunshine. Elko was a flat town full of space, as airy with emptiness as a honeycomb. The broad street in front of the hotel held railroad tracks in its center. To Polly's amazed delight, a real train--nightmarish in scale but docile in manner--materialized on these tracks, halted, ruminated, and then ponderously, thoughtfully dragged westward its chuckling infinity of freight cars. They walked down sun-struck sidewalks, past a drunken Indian dressed in clothes black as his shadow, to a museum of mining. Polly coveted the glinting nuggets. Laura yawned before a case of old-fashioned barbed wire and sought her reflection in the glass. Culp came upon an exhibit, between Indian beads and pioneer hardware, incongruously devoted to Thomas Alva Edison. He and Sarah and the girls, driving home from a Sunday on the beach at Red Bank, would pass a service island on the Jersey Turnpike named for Edison. They would stop for supper at another one, named for Joyce Kilmer. The tar on the parking lot would sting their bare feet. A peppery smell of carbon waste and butane in the air. Sarah would go in for her hot dog wearing her dashiki beach wrapper--hip length, with slits for her naked arms. Her arms would be burned pink in the crooks. The sun would have ignited a conflagration of clouds beyond the great Esso tanks. Here, in Elko, the sun rested gently on the overexposed purple of the ridges around them. On the highest ridge a large letter E had been somehow cut, or inset, in what seemed limestone. Polly asked why.

He answered, "I suppose for airplanes."

Laura amplified, "If they don't put initials up, the pilots can't tell the towns apart, they're all so boring."

"I like Elko," Polly said. "I wish we lived here."

"Yeah, what would Daddy do for a living?"

This was hard. In real life, he was a chemical engineer for a conglomerate that was planning to exploit Colorado shale. Polly said, "He could fix slot machines and then at night come back in disguise and play them so they'd pay him lots of money."

Both girls, it seemed to Culp, had forgotten that he would not be living with them for the future, that this peaceful Nevada nowhere was all the future they had. He took Polly's hand, crossing the railroad tracks, though the tracks were arrow straight and no train was materializing between here and the horizon.

• • •

Laura flustered him by taking his arm as they walked into the dining room, which adjoined the dark grotto of slots. The waitress slid an expectant glance at the child, after he had ordered a drink for himself. "No. She's only sixteen."

When the waitress had gone, Laura told him, "Everybody says I look older than sixteen; in Reno with Mom, I used to wander around in the places and nobody ever said anything. Except one old fart who told me they'd put him in jail if I didn't go away."

Polly asked, "Daddy, when're you going to play the slots?"

"I thought I'd wait till after dinner."

"That's too long."

"OK, I'll play now. Just until the salad comes." He took a mouthful of his drink, pushed up from the table and fed ten quarters into a machine Polly could watch. Though he won nothing, being there, amid the machines' warm and impetuous colors, consoled him. Experimenting, he pressed the button marked Change. A girl in a red uniform crinkling like embers came to his side inquisitively. Her face, though not old, had the Western dryness--eyes smothered in charcoal, mouth tightened as if about to say, I thought so. But something sturdy and hollow-backed in her stance touched Culp, gave him an intuition. Her uniform's devilish cut bared her white arms to the shoulder. He gave her a five-dollar bill to change into quarters. The waitress was bringing the salad. Heavy in one pocket, he returned to the table.

"Poor Dad," Laura volunteered. "That prostitute really turned him on."

"Laura, I'm not sure you know what a prostitute is."

"Mom said every woman is a prostitute, one way or another."

"You know your mother exaggerates."

"I know she's a bitch, you mean."

"Laura."

"She is, Dad. Look what she's done to you. Now she'll do it to Jim."

"You and I have different memories of your mother. You don't remember her when you were little."

"I don't want to live with her, either. When we all get back to Denver, I want to live with you. If she and I live together, it'll always be competing, that's how it was in Reno; who needs it? When I get to forty, I'm going to tell my lover to shoot me."

Polly cried out; an astonishing noise, like the crash of a jackpot. "Stop it," she told Laura. "Stop talking big. That's all you do, is talk big." The child, salad dressing gleaming on her chin, pushed her voice toward her sister through tears: "You want Mommy and Daddy to fight all the time instead of love each other even though they are divorced."

With an amused smile, Laura turned her back on Polly's outburst and patted Culp's arm. "Poor Dad," she said. "Poor old Dad."

Their steaks came, and Polly's tears dried. They walked out into Elko again and at the town's one movie theater saw a Western. Burt Lancaster, a downtrodden Mexican, after many insults, including crucifixion, turned implacable avenger and killed nine hirelings of a racist rancher. Polly seemed to be sleeping through the bloodiest parts. They walked back through the dry night to the hotel. Their two adjoining rooms each held twin beds. Laura's suitcase had appeared on the bed beside his.

Culp said, "You better sleep with your sister."

"Why? We'll leave the door between open, in case she has nightmares."

"I want to read."

"So do I."

"You go to sleep now. We're going to make Salt Lake tomorrow."

"Big thrill. Dad, she mumbles and kicks her covers all the time."

"Do as I say, love. I'll stay here reading until you're asleep."

"And then what?"

"I may go down and have another drink."

Her expression reminded him of how, in the movie, the villain had looked when Burt Lancaster showed that he, too, had a gun. Culp lay on the bedspread reading a pamphlet they had bought at the museum about ghost towns. Champagne and opera sets had been transported up the valleys where now not a mule survived. Train whistles at intervals scooped long pockets from the world beyond his room. The breathing from the other room had fallen level. He tiptoed in and saw them both asleep, his daughters. Relaxed, Laura's face revealed its freckles, its plumpness, the sorrowing stretched smoothness of the closed lids. Polly's face wore a film of night sweat on her brow; his kiss came away tasting salty. He did not kiss Laura, in case she was faking. He switched off the light and stood considering what he must do. A train howled on the other side of the wall. The beautiful emptiness of Nevada, where he might never be again, sucked at the room like a whirlpool.

Downstairs, his intuition was borne out. The change girl had noticed him, and said now, "I thought so."

"You ever go off duty?"

"What's duty?"

He waited at the bar, waiting for the bourbon to fill him; it couldn't, the room inside him kept expanding, and when she joined him, after two, sidling up on the stool (a cowboy moved over) in a taut cotton dress that hid the tops of her arms, the blur on her face seemed a product of her inner chemistry, not his. "You've a room?" As she asked that, her jaw went square: it reminded him of somebody, who? The landlady.

"I do," he said, "but it's full of little girls."

She reached for his bourbon and sipped and said, in a voice older than her figure, "This place is lousy with rooms."

•• •

Culp arrived back in his own room after five. He must have been noisier than he thought, for a person in a white nightgown appeared in the connecting doorway. He could not see her features, she was a good height, she reminded him of nobody. Good, From the frozen pose of her, she was scared--scared of him. Good.

"Dad?"

"Yep."

"You OK?"

"Absolutely." Though already he could feel the morning's sun grinding on his temples. "You been awake, sweetie? Sorry."

"I was worried about you." But Laura did not cross the threshold into his room.

"Very worried?"

"Naa."

"Listen. It's not your job to take care of me. It's my job to take care of you."