Exit to Eden (37 page)

"Hot damn, you're my kind of girl," I said. I took another swallow of the coffee. "But I left my snakeskin boots back in New Orleans."

"I'll buy you some new snakeskin boots," she said.

"What about some breakfast?" I kissed her again. "This boy needs some grits and eggs and ham and flapjacks, the works."

"All you really think about is food, Slater."

"Don't be jealous, Kelly," I said. "Right now, you're the only thing in this world I love more."

******

We stayed in the big gaudy silver Hyatt Regency long enough to make love in the shower, stash the driver in his own room in front of a color TV, and then we took off for Neiman's, Sakowitz, and the swanky sci fi shopping malls with their glass ceilings, fountains, and fig trees, and silver escalators, and everything for sale from diamonds to junk food.

I loaded up on good books at the B. Dalton, mainly some old favorite stuff I thought I might read to her, if she'd let me. And she kept picking out blue and lavender and purple clothes for me —turtlenecks and velvet jackets, dress shirts and even suits. I made her buy kinky high-heel sandals, strapping them on for her myself in the store, and she had to at least try on for me every pretty white dress we saw.

Then late afternoon we hit Cutter Bill's for what we really wanted—pearl button cowboy shirts, fancy belts, skin-tight Wrangler jeans, and Mercedes Rio boots.

It was dark when we got to Billy Bob's Texas and the place was jammed. We had on matching everything, including hats, and we sauntered in like a couple of natives, or so we figured it. Who knows what we really looked like? Two people crazy mad in love?

It took me a moment to realize we'd entered a city-block-sized compound, with souvenir shops, billiard tables, restaurants, and bars—even an indoor rodeo arena—and thousands eating and drinking and crowding onto the dance floor while the seamless sound of the live country-western band rolled over everything, going at once to my head.

We danced every number the first hour, fast, slow, in between, drinking beer right out of the bottle, and just copying the dancers around us until we had it down. We slunk around the floor with our arms around each other's necks, waltzed, swung, danced cheek to cheek, smooched. It seemed insane that women had ever worn dresses, that lovers had not always worn exactly the same clothes. I could hardly keep my hands off her gorgeous little bottom in the tight jeans, her breasts bulging under the tight shirt. And her hair was still that feminine mane, that silky dark veil over her shoulders, that was the final touch. When she pulled her hat down over her eyes, leaned against the wooden railing with her ankles crossed and her thumbs hooked in her pockets, she was too damned pulchritudinously fuckable for me to stand it. Nothing to do but dance.

The rodeo in the little indoor arena was the real thing and not half bad. I loved the smell of it, the sound of those stomping animals. She covered her face a couple of times when the guys were almost trampled, and then we wandered into the restaurant part for some big juicy hamburgers and french fries, and around eleven, I discovered she knew how to play pool.

"Why the hell didn't you tell me?" I said. Time for some serious gambling. And by midnight she'd won three billion dollars from me. I wrote her a check.

My feet were killing me. But I was still grooving on the dim yellow lights, the endless thumping music, the deep, sweet, sentimental voice of the baritone singing Linda Ronstadt's old "Faithless Love." One last dance.

"S&M boots," I said finally. "Why don't you lasso me and drag me to the car so I don't have to walk?"

"You're not kidding," she said. "Guess who's walking out of here in her sock feet? Come on, cowboy. Time for the proverbial roll in the hay."

******

A little after eight when I was doing laps across the pool, singing "Faithless Love" with a lot of bubbles in it, she came out, dressed up in jeans and boots again, and said we should take off for Canton right now. Only it wasn't Canton like in China, but Cant'n.

"Post haste, wherever the hell it is," I said, climbing out of the water. "But an emergency ration of eggs Benedict and Miller's beer first, okay?"

I also wanted to cut off her Wranglers with a scissors and make love to her before we left. We compromised on that.

(We didn't have a scissors.)

Canton was a town an hour south of Dallas where every first Monday of the month for one hundred years they have held a gigantic flea market which attracts people from all over the States. And by ten we were rocking south in the limo again, the driver in the back, Lisa at the wheel as before.

"Quilts," she said, "that's what I'm looking for, the last genuine batch from the thirties and forties, made in Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma, where the women still knew how."

It was ninety-eight degrees when we got out of the car.

But from eleven until one we shuffled through the dusty dirt paths of an endless sprawling marketplace past thousands of tables and booths full of beat-up furniture, prairie antiques, dolls, paintings, carpets, trash. Quilts we found by the pound. I know because I was carrying them over my shoulder in a green plastic sack.

"What would you do without me?" I asked.

"Gee, Elliott, I don't know," she said. "Hold still and let me wipe the sweat from that brow."

But I'd also kind of fallen in love with the quilts by that time, learned about the old patterns-—Dresden plate, and wedding ring, and flower basket, and lone star, and postage stamp. I was loving the colors, the stitching, the feel of these old things, their clean cotton smell, and the gentle way that the vendors bargained with Lisa and she got them for the price she wanted every time.

We ate hot dogs from one of the stands, and dozed for a while under a tree in the shade. We were all dusty and sticky and just watching the families pass—the barrel-shaped guys in short-sleeve shirts, the women in shorts and sleeveless tops, the little kids.

"You like it out here?" she asked.

"I love it," I said. "It's like another country. Nobody could ever find us here."

"Yeah. Bonnie and Clyde," she said. "If they knew who we really were, they'd kill us."

"I don't know about that," I said. "I could handle them if they got rough." I got up and bought two more cans of beer and sat down again beside her. "What are you going to do with all these quilts?" I asked.

She looked weird for a moment as though she'd seen a ghost or something. Then she said, "Try to keep warm."

"That's not a very nice thing to say, Bonnie. What about old Clyde here, he can't keep you warm?"

She turned one of her rare smiles on me that was pure loveliness.

"You stick with me, Bonnie," I said. "And I swear, you'll never be cold again."

On the back to Dallas, we made love on all the quilts in the back of the car.

******

We put them on the bed when we got to the Hyatt and they really classed up the place. Then we swam, had dinner in the room, and then I read aloud to her as she lay beside me on the bed.

I read a couple of short stories I loved, and a funny part of a James Bond thriller, and my favorite paragraph from a French classic, things like that. She was a terrific listener. I'd always wanted a girl I could read to, and I told her that.

It was midnight. We got all dressed up again, and went up in the elevator to the Top of the Dome and we danced till the band quit.

"Let's go for a drive," she said. "See the mansions of Turtle Creek and Highland Park by moonlight, you know…"

"Sure, as long as we wake up Rip Van Winkle and make him do the driving so I can snuggle with you in the back."

******

I felt like we had been together for years and years. It couldn't have been any better for me, the way it was moment to moment.

We stayed in Dallas for four more nights like that.

******

We ate take-out chicken and watched the basketball games on TV, and we took turns reading aloud the short stories in the
New Yorker
, and chapters from the books. We swam in the pool.

At night we went out to the big glossy Dallas restaurants and the discos and the nightclubs, and sometimes we went for long rides in the clean countryside looking to spot old white farmhouses or old overgrown cemeteries with Confederate dead.

We walked through old-fashioned streets of little towns at sunset, when the katydids were going at it in the trees and we sat on benches by the town square and we watched slowly, thoughtfully, as the sky lost its color and its light.

We watched old movies on cable at two in the morning as we snuggled together under the quilts, and we made love all the time.

Love in the American Hyatt Regency spaceship where everything is brand new and nothing is permanent and the windows are imitations of windows and the walls are imitations of walls, and the lovemaking is so real it is like a thunderstorm, whether or not it is in the spotless bed or in the spotless shower or on the deep, spotless, carpeted floor.

Off and on we talked. We talked about just the worst things that had ever happened to us, school things, and parent things, and the things we thought were beautiful: paintings, sculptures, music.

But gradually our conversation started to wind away from ourselves. To cling to other subjects. Maybe she was afraid. Maybe I didn't want to say any more until she said something very particular that I wanted to hear, and I was being stubborn. I don't know. We still talked plenty, but it was about everything else.

We argued Mozart versus Bach, and Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky, whether or not photography was an art—she said yes, I said no—Hemingway versus Faulkner. We talked like we knew each other very well. We had a horrible fight over Diane Arbus and over Wagner. We agreed on the genius of Carson McCullers and Fellini and Antonioni and Tennessee Williams and Jean Renoir.

There was a splendid tension, a magical tension. Like any moment something could happen. Very important something either good or bad. And who was going to tip the scales? Like if we started to talk about ourselves again it would have to go a step further and we could not go that step. But hour by hour, it was remarkably wonderful, remarkably good, remarkably just plain all right.

Except when the Warriors lost to the Celtics in a really crucial play-off game, and we were out of beer and room service was taking forever and I was really, really pissed off. She looked up from her copy of the newspaper and said she had never heard a man shout like that over a ball game, and I told her that this was symbolic violence in all its glory and please shut up.

"A little too symbolic, don't you think?" She locked me out of the bathroom and took the longest shower in history. Just to have the final say, I passed out.

In the middle of the third night I woke up and I realized I was alone in the bed.

She had pulled the drapes and she was standing at the window looking out at the great steel wilderness of Dallas in which the lights never go out.

The sky was enormous above her, a deep midnight blue with a panorama of tiny stars. And she looked tiny against the window with her head bowed, and it seemed she was singing something to herself under her breath. Too faint to be sure of. Like the scent of her Chanel.

When I got up, she turned silently and came to meet me in the middle of the room. We put our arms around each other and just held each other.

"Elliott," she said like she was working up to tell me some dreadful secret but she just laid her head on my shoulder, and I held on to her stroking her hair.

Under the covers again, she was shuddering and yielding like a half-frightened young girl.

When I woke up later, she was sitting in the far corner away from the bed, with the silent TV turned towards her, so the light wouldn't bother me, I guess, just watching it, the blue light flickering on her face, and she was drinking Bombay gin straight with the bottle next to her and smoking my Parliament cigarettes.

The driver said next afternoon that he had to get home. He liked the money and all and the traveling and the food was terrific, but his brother was getting married at Redemptorist Church in New Orleans and he had to get back.

But we knew we could have let him take the limo back and just rented a car.

That wasn't why we were going back.

She fell utterly silent at dinner and she looked tragic, which is to say that she looked beautifully, exquisitely, heartrendingly, frighteningly, and wrenchingly sad. And I said, "We're going back, aren't we?"

And she nodded her head. Her hand was shaking. We found a little bar on Cedar Springs where there was a jukebox and we could dance all by ourselves. But she was too tense, too unhappy. We went back before ten o'clock.

******

We were both wide awake at four in the morning when the sunlight came down on the glass city. We got dressed up again in our evening clothes and checked out of the hotel. She told the driver to get in the back again, that she wanted to drive.

"That way you can read to me if you want," she said.

I thought that was a great idea, and we hadn't even tapped Kerouac's
On the Road
, my favorite of all the books, which to my amazement she'd never read.