Samax recovered his composure quickly, and his voice was smoother than ever. “Why don’t I just have my people offer him compensation for the damages?”
“Sir, we still have to take it downtown. It won’t take long.”
“Fine,” Samax said, and he showed them to the door. I sat frozen until he returned to his desk. “Now will you tell me why you did this?” he asked in his lowest voice.
Finally the tears came to my eyes. But I didn’t cry. “I can’t. I’m sorry this ever happened. I’m sorry for all the trouble—”
“Never mind that. I just want to know why, damn it. You know they could take you away from me because of this. If you really have no explanation to offer—if you risked so much for nothing—the thing becomes ten times worse.”
I shook my head slowly.
He threw up his hands. “Have it your way. The other boy—was it Auro?”
I nodded. “I didn’t want to drag him into this, Uncle Junius. He’d freak out. Anyway, it was all my fault.”
“You were right to shield Auro, but that’s the only thing you were right about.” He turned away and fixed his gaze on the desert again. His cheek twitched and he was pressing his fingertips into his temple. “I’ve never been so angry with you, Enzo. And so disappointed. I’m sorry you see fit not to level with me. Maybe you’ll change your tune later, but right now just go to your room and stay there. I have to deal with this man at Xaphan so the matter stays here in Vegas.”
“Why would they care about a ghost town?” I said, pausing at the door. “Nobody ever paid attention to it.”
He spun his chair around again. “And you think that gave you the right to commit arson?”
“No.”
“It’s not the town they would care about in Reno, it would be hearing my name connected to the fire.”
“You mean, VC Enterprises? Do you know them?”
“Know them?” he said sharply, picking up the phone. “Remember I told you about the man who sent me to prison?”
“Vitale Cassiel.”
“Vitale Cassiel is VC Enterprises. He’d like nothing better than to get at me—especially through someone close to me, and at this time there is only one person in my life who fits that description who actually shares my name.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle Junius.”
“I hope you’re sorry about more than the fact that you were caught.”
For the next six hours I lay in my bed ruminating hard on the fact that if this Vitale Cassiel had been able to maneuver someone as wily as Samax into jail—not to mention the fact that he could still make him blanch—he certainly would have little trouble getting me sent to reform school. When Della brought me a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk and told me that Samax had called off the customary sit-down dinner that night, I really started to sweat. Even with all the strings he could pull, maybe it wasn’t going to be enough.
Meanwhile, Auro couldn’t talk, but he could write, and when he got wind of what had happened to me in the meeting with Samax and the state troopers, he sneaked out of his room late that same night, went up to Samax’s library, and handed him a short letter in his cramped script. Samax was horrified.
“This is terrible,” he said.
“Terrible,” Auro echoed, the tears streaming down his cheeks.
Samax wrapped his arms around Auro, and later told me it was the first time he had ever seen Auro cry. It was also the first time in a long while that Samax had held Auro so close—another unintentional but beneficial offshoot of our burning down the ghost town. Actually, the best development of all was to come about an hour later when Samax was sitting at the end of my bed while I read Auro’s letter myself.
“How long has this sort of thing been going on?” Samax asked when I was finished.
“Since the day she brought me to you in New York.”
“I’m not going to ask you why you wouldn’t tell me, because I already know. You were thinking you had to handle this yourself, to fight your own fight, because otherwise it would never end—not really end.” He stood up and went over to the window, where Sirius was sleeping, and toyed absently with the telescope. “I know that kind of thinking,” he went on, “because I’ve done it myself, and there’s a lot of me in you. Sometimes you have to fight alone. But thinking you have to do it all the time, on principle, is stubbornness to no purpose. If you’re going to be stubborn, have a good reason for it. The situation with Ivy is my fault. I’ve looked the other way with her once too often, and what was always bad in her has festered into something much worse. For her to destroy that pendant of Bel’s is not just mean, it’s crazy. She’s crazy. Now, I can’t banish her outright from the hotel, because she’ll take it out on Auro for betraying her. And I promised him I wouldn’t betray his confidence. Since she seems to have declared war on you, and your mother’s memory, and who knows what else, I will deal with her as Sun Tzu advises us to with difficult adversaries—that is, by their own methods—so that this sort of thing never happens to you again. If it should happen, you must promise that you’ll come to me.”
I knew Sun Tzu’s book about warfare—along with von Clausewitz, it was one of Samax’s favorites—but I never knew exactly what Samax did with regard to Ivy, and I never asked. It had the desired effect, however: for a long time, she avoided me like the plague. As for Auro’s letter, he succinctly told Samax about everything except the phoenix flight of the hummingbird we witnessed. That was something we would always keep between us. For, if anything, we became closer after our misadventure in Hydra. On occasion we would meet up in the quincunx orchard at midday—something we had never done before—and Auro would bring out two spaghetti sandwiches, on pumpernickel with ketchup, his favorite meal. Also, without Ivy hovering so close, he was able to join me for the first time in the swimming pool, where I taught him some basic strokes.
Auro went through other changes as well. He was less reclusive, less fearful when he encountered unfamiliar guests at the hotel one on one. One day such a guest, a gypsy friend of Labusi’s who came to visit for a week, gave Auro a parrot. The parrot, with fiery orange plumage and pinwheel eyes, was from Madagascar. Auro named him Echo, though it was he who parroted the parrot, the latter chattering fluently from his wicker cage or while perched on Auro’s shoulder. But the biggest change in Auro after the fire was the fact that he took up the drums, with a vengeance. A positive outgrowth of his echolalia, and its unique effect on his hearing faculty, was that he turned out to be a natural percussionist and rhythm man. A room was cork-lined for him on the third floor, where he practiced with a full set of black-pearl Ludwig drums and Avedas Zildjian cymbals which Samax bought him. He went at them night and day, working out his fury at his father’s death and his mother’s tyranny and his increasing frustration with his own muteness. In the process, he became a jazz drummer of phenomenal eloquence, articulate with drum skins and sticks, tempered brass and steel brushes, the high hat and the floor tom-tom, bells, maracas, castanets, tambourines, and the triangle, as he could never be with his voice.
Around the same time, to escape some of this domestic turmoil myself, I plunged into a colossal memory project: to memorize the names of all 3,445 numbered asteroids in the asteroid belt. When I mentioned it to Labusi, he dismissed it out of hand. “Why undertake such a useless endeavor when there are so many important things you can memorize?”
Now, Labusi himself had memorized subjects as esoteric as the catalogues of defunct museums, the names of every member of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and entire games of chess from obscure tournaments, so, aside from his lack of interest in the subject, I knew his true resistance stemmed from the fact that asteroids were Hadar’s domain, and between the two of them there was an intellectual rivalry—based more on vanity than anything else. At any rate, had I confided to Labusi my true reason for memorizing the asteroids’ names, he would have objected even more vehemently, for I knew that deep down he was more pragmatist than Pythagorean. Which was a shame, because in ter
ms of harmony—musical and metaphysical—my notion was surely Pythagorean to the highest degree.
I was convinced that if I could memorize the names of all those asteroids I would in effect be reconstituting mentally the bulk of the exploded planet between Mars and Jupiter of which Hadar claimed the asteroids were the fragments. In short, the planet would become whole again in my head. So from a green astronomical manual I began memorizing the forty pages of asteroid listings, placing the names in sequential slots around my memory palace. However, from the first, the listings obsessed me in a completely unanticipated way: the simple fact, of which I had been ignorant, that most of the asteroids were named after women. The list began with three thousand women’s names! Memorizing them—Iris, Flora, Victoria, Irene—filling my memory palace with them—I began deriving an increasingly erotic pleasure. By the time I reached #s 208 to 211, Lacrimosa, Dido, Isabella, Isolda, I was arranging the names on a long set of shelves on the ninth-floor corridor of my memory palace, outside Desirée’s room—a locus where I wanted to linger. Desirée’s rooms themselves were not a part of my memory palace because, even after five years, I had never entered them in reality.
In fact, the very first time I did enter Desirée’s rooms was a year later, on Columbus Day, 1971—the night of the valedictory dinner at which Deneb announced his departure, to write his monograph on Atlantis. After that dinner, everyone retired to the ballroom for an impromptu farewell party. And that was where the second—and for me, far more important—auspicious event of the evening occurred, for I danced with Desirée, not once but twice.
The party was the kind Samax liked, because he was the impressario, improvising as he went. First he ordered up a case of Dom Pérignon ’57 from the wine cellar. Then he had the cook lay out a spread of black, white, and red caviar, lobster medallions, roasted prawns, shellfish salad, fresh and pickled fruits from the garden, and a cart of cheeses. Aromatic flowers were brought from the greenhouse and arranged around the room in slender Japanese vases. The lights were dimmed and the curtains opened on the enormous windows overlooking the desert night, a half-moon in the sky over the jagged silhouettes of the mountains.
Eboli was in heaven at the piano, running through his jazz repertoire, from the Jelly Roll Morton rags that were his passion to some Ellington and Monk. His eight fingers flew over the keyboard with amazing fluency and precision, and though Ivy had made only a perfunctory appearance, Auro sat on a stool beside Eboli, watching him raptly. At first, Eboli played solo, but then after Samax, tapping his glass with an oyster fork, had offered Deneb a farewell toast, an extraordinary ensemble took shape around the piano, a trio that played, not jazz or classical pieces, but an eerie, otherworldly music which sounded as if it were emanating from some remote source across a vast, timeless expanse. Rising and falling, sometimes clear, sometimes vaporous, this music carried everyone in the room along with it.
The trio consisted of Deneb himself, playing his Atlantean flute, flanked by Labusi, who had fetched his cello, and of course Eboli, tinkling his keyboard on the highest octaves, eyes closed behind his glinting spectacles. It sounded as if the three of them must have rehearsed many times for just such an occasion as this. Yet Labusi told me later that, while he and Deneb had once in a while played together in the privacy of his rooms, neither had ever collaborated with Eboli. Their synthesis on such disparate instruments, its sinuous harmonies and rippling fugues, eventually configured itself into a waltz, and instinctively people wanted to dance to it.
Through the shifting silken shadows, I glimpsed Calzas dancing with the wife of a visiting archaeologist from Kenya, and Sofiel the gardener moving stiffly with his wife, Kim-Yung, whom he towered over, though he was only five two, and Samax following a neat ellipse with a pretty French lawyer who had come for the weekend to negotiate the sale of some Corsican urns he wanted. I had never seen Samax dance before, and while not surprised by his nimbleness, I noted his pleasure and wondered why he didn’t dance more often.
Making a beeline for Desirée the moment her partner—the archaeologist—dropped her hand, I soon found myself holding her close while she instructed me in her throaty whisper in the fundamentals of the waltz step. The lights had been dimmed even further, and as Deneb and Labusi traded off solos, and then Eboli offered up a great waterfall of sound, we wheeled around the ballroom and I hoped they would never stop playing. It was the closest I had ever been to her, feeling her body up against mine, her breasts, hips, and shoulders, her arms wrapped around my back and her long fingers resting lightly on my spine. We were the same height at that time, so I looked directly, frankly, into her dark faraway eyes while inhaling the fragrance of her jet hair. The most exquisite moment for me, though, came just before she laid her cheek against my shoulder, when I felt her breath, warm against my own cheek as I turned her slowly on the black marble dance floor. The piece of music Zaren Eboli was playing on the piano was one I would never forget, and when I inquired afterward he told me it was called “Stella by Starlight.”
For several weeks I had been dreaming of Alma, and her image in my dreams often conflated with the image of Desirée. Near the end of each dream, in a room with a domed ceiling, Alma glided up alongside me before a full-length mirror, but it was Desirée’s reflection that stared back at me. Alma still looked as she did the last time I saw her, wearing a long black coat, and it wasn’t difficult to figure out that the domed ceiling in my dreams was the planetarium of my memory; Desirée meanwhile appeared in my dream exactly as she did at that moment, in a long black dress with her hair swept back. But as we glided along the marble dance floor, my dream and my memory seemed to merge: the woman in my arms was as much Alma as she was Desirée. It had struck me long before that Desirée and Alma were the same age. On that night in October, 1971, Desirée was twenty-six years old, and wherever she was, Alma was the same. I knew, too, that it was not just mirror images, or planetariums and ballroom ceilings, that were merging, but that my sexual longing for Desirée was mingled with my yearning, which had intensified over the years, to see Alma again, to hold her close as she had held me on that last night we spent together at my grandmother’s house; if not to initiate intimacy, I wanted at least to effect closure where instead there had always been something like a severed wire crackling in the background of my life.
My arms around Desirée in the near darkness, the desert stars twinkling in the distance, she put her lips to my ear and whispered, “Enzo, I need you to do me a favor. Will you come to my rooms?”
My heart was beating fast against my rib cage.
“It concerns my cousin Dalia,” she went on, “who’s visiting for the next two weeks.”
I was surprised. “Your cousin? I didn’t know that you had a cousin visiting.”
“A very distant cousin. She just arrived this morning.”
“Is she here?” I said, looking around.
“No, she doesn’t care for parties. But I think you’ll like her.”
The waltz was fading away and one by one the musicians fell silent, Labusi first, then Deneb. Only Eboli played on, slower and slower, for about a minute, as the lights came up and Desirée took my hand and led me to the door. We stepped into the cool silence of the lobby, the thick glass door closing behind us with a hush.
Smiling faintly, she squeezed my hand. “You’ve never been to my rooms, have you?”
We both knew I hadn’t. Stepping off the elevator on the ninth floor, Desirée led me to her door, and as she unlocked it, said, “I want you to take something to Dalia for me. It’s a map and she’ll need you to identify some points on it for her. I know you’re good with maps.”
“A map of what?”
“Oh, a piece of the desert.”
I followed her across a bare white foyer, through another, leather-padded door, into her living room. It was pitch-black, silent except for our breathing. Desirée switched on a pair of lamps and any other questions I had for her—and there were a few—evaporated at that instant.
&n
bsp; The large room was sparsely furnished, but the furniture itself was plush: a long white sofa flanked by black lamps and a pink marble coffee table inlaid with topazes cut in the shape of suns. The thick, soft rug was also white. The room was centered by a gleaming baby grand, which surprised me because I had never heard Desirée play the piano downstairs. But what surprised me even more was the room’s truly central, and overpowering, element: not the piano or the furniture, but the dozens of photographs that adorned the place.
The photographs had two things in common: they were all 8×10, black-and-white, glassed within identical black lacquer frames, and they were all of men. Most were posed head shots, some were full-length portraits, and a few were blowups of snapshots: a young man in a train station with a suitcase, another sitting on a wooden terrace gazing at the sea, another smiling with a towel around his neck. The photographs were hung on three of the walls, covering about half the available space. The fourth wall was covered with taut silk with an oval mirror at the center.
My mouth must have been open, because Desirée didn’t wait to hear my obvious question.
“These are friends of mine,” she said simply, brushing the hair back off her cheek.
“Oh.”
“Excuse me a moment, I’ll get the map,” she said, and disappeared into the bedroom.
I studied as many of the photographs as I could. Could these all be her lovers? The youngest looked about twenty, the oldest no more than forty. They were all good-looking, but were not of any one type. Some looked athletic and outdoorsy, others bookish and brooding. It was clear to me from their style and perspective that all of the photographs had been taken by the same photographer, and that was Desirée. And they had been shot in many different locales: in some, there were bits of furniture and wall hangings in the background; in others, beaches, forests, and mountain lakes were visible through windows or doorways. In the lower right-hand corner of each photograph a date was inscribed in white ink. Just the year, in tiny numerals. I ascertained that the earliest year was 1962, when Desirée would have been seventeen.