The Desert Rose Read online

  “Well, I sympathize if you have to have braces, I had to wear mine till two days before I graduated,” Cherri said, leaning over and smiling at the mirror to make sure she wasn’t developing gaps.

  The dressing room was tiny, converted from a wardrobe closet actually, but Harmony didn’t really mind, she got undressed and got her G-string on and a bathrobe and sat down to do her makeup, something she had done so many times she was convinced she could probably do it okay even if she suddenly went into a coma or something. Jessie’s space was next to hers at the makeup table and when Jessie had done her eyes she sort of practiced smiles for a while, obviously trying to come up with a way to smile that wouldn’t show the gap between her teeth or maybe her braces if she actually had to have them. Of course it was ridiculous for Jessie even to fantasize that she could be a showgirl and wear braces, after all wonderful smiles were part of what made the show a gay spectacle. When Bonventre really wanted to fire somebody but didn’t want to bother to even think up a good excuse he would usually just say a waiter had told him the girl wasn’t smiling enough, or it could be a boy, Bonventre didn’t like men any better than he liked women.

  “Jessie, you’re getting on my nerves doing that, just put your makeup on,” Harmony said.

  “This is gonna give me bad dreams, I know it is,” Jessie said.

  In fact the dressing room was kind of gloomy. Linda, who was next to Jessie, was three and a half months pregnant and was going to have to quit in another week or two, plus Beryl who was English finally thought she had found a boyfriend only to have the guy inform her he had decided to be gay, after all. When Jessie got tired of looking at her teeth she turned around and began to look at her ass, having remembered that Genevieve had told her it was dimpled. Nobody in the dressing room was speaking to Genevieve except Harmony. Genevieve had even alienated Cherri, who was a perfectly friendly girl, by laughing sarcastically just because Cherri hadn’t understood about having to shave her pubic hair before she could wear a G-string. She had been very embarrassed, but Genevieve had just laughed and not been at all sympathetic.

  But then Genevieve’s lover, who was on the order of forty years older than she was, had recently lost his job and become a taxi driver, plus her child had learning disabilities, she tended to carry a lot of unhappiness from her home life into the dressing room. Even Murdo the ventriloquist hated her because she kept pointing out that she could see his lips move every time she happened to glance at his act. She wasn’t particularly pretty and the consensus was Bonventre only kept her in the show because he liked to have someone around who was as critical as he was.

  When Harmony was satisfied with her makeup she stepped out of the dressing room hoping to spot Bonventre and did spot him, only he was talking to Monique, obviously an argument, Monique’s face looked very tight. She was almost Harmony’s age only she was thinner and had a narrow face which showed whatever strains Monique happened to be suffering from. Harmony didn’t dare interrupt, particularly not to ask Bonventre what she had been going to ask him, she sort of gave him a wide berth. When Bonventre argued he kept squirting a nasal spray up his nose to keep his mucous membranes from drying out, he hated a dry nose. In the twenty years she had known Bonventre the only real change was that at first he had worn white suits and now he wore black suits, he had decided black suits were more sophisticated or more in keeping with the sinister image he liked to cultivate or something.

  Gary was backstage checking out all the costumes, he looked frazzled but things were no more out of control than usual, that Harmony could tell. She and the rest of the showgirls were in feathers for the opening number. The feather outfits were so large you couldn’t just put them on, they had to be lowered by a little hoist, which was another reason Harmony usually came out a little early, that way Gary could always adjust hers himself and help her get the huge headdress sitting right. That was very important, the headdresses were really heavy and if you didn’t carry them right you could really screw up your back. Another wonderful thing Didier had done for her was to educate her about posture, which was all-important if you had to walk around in heavy headdresses six nights a week.

  “Bonventre’s on Monique’s ass,” Harmony said as she was standing with her arms out, waiting for the feathers to come down around her, they were pink in the first number and she did sort of love it, being a feathered beauty, they were gorgeous costumes and the people out front sort of gasped when the curtain finally went up and they saw them for the first time.

  “Harmony, lean this way or at least move your tit,” Gary said, adjusting her position a little. Once the headdress was on she turned her neck a time or two, making sure it all felt right. The other girls were lining up, all except Jessie, who would invariably be last. She would get insecure about her makeup or something and go back to check it which meant that if a hoist didn’t work or the costume slipped or a zipper stuck Jessie would be the one it happened to. Gary’s two little assistants spent hours pleading with her to line up a little sooner but Jessie couldn’t help it, she was sort of doomed to be last. Half the time they only got her into her feathers and up on the disc about ten seconds before the curtain went up.

  “He’s not on her ass, he’s after her ass, everybody knew that except you,” Gary said and then hurried off to do Linda, leaving her with the living-on-another-planet feeling, she was experiencing it pretty often lately. Maybe it was just Denny that had caused her not to notice things like Bonventre being after Monique. It had been a while since love had hit sort of totally, like it hit when Denny came along—people could warn her all they wanted to, love had hit and before he started coming up with the bad surprises like not paying her back for the scuba-diving equipment she had tended to get to work feeling fairly dreamy and had not been tuned in to backstage gossip all that much. In fact she had never paid all that much attention to it. Knowing Gary, it was easier just to get it from him, that way she could just think her own thoughts and not have to try and keep up with every little anxiety in the whole company.

  When the dancers began to line up Harmony went slowly up to her disc, being careful not to snag the feathers on anything, and then just waited, doing a little deep breathing. She wasn’t really nervous, she just liked to feel composed and sort of ready when the curtain went up.

  Down below she saw Bonventre still in the wings, still arguing with Monique, although it couldn’t have been more than three minutes to curtain. She could hear the audience sort of rumbling and the clink of lots of plates and glasses being stacked none too gently. The waiters hated to work after the curtain and were probably grabbing plates of coq au vin or trout amandine out from under the noses of people who still thought they had a few minutes and were sometimes kind of indignant at not getting to finish eating, after all they had worked for their money and paid for their dinners. Fortunately they still had their drinks or their champagne and once the show started would soon forget about all those uneaten English peas.

  As usual both of Gary’s assistants were working with Jessie, her headdress was on at a tilt but finally they got it right and hustled her up on the disc. Harmony heard a curse from way backstage, evidently just one of the magician’s pigeons getting loose. Then the announcer announced the show, he was a very handsome guy named Jerry Fowler, Harmony had dated him awhile just about the time she was leaving the Trop. Jerry really wasn’t very enthusiastic about anything except the sound of his own wonderful voice, that and occasionally blackjack, but he had done her the favor of introducing her to Ross, who at the time was too shy even to speak to her, she was just really getting famous then and was pretty sought after. As a light man Ross didn’t suppose he could aspire to date a showgirl, particularly not a famous one like her. Ross had had a very slight opinion of himself and for that matter probably still did. Harmony had done her best to convince him he was cute, even going so far as to marry him and have Pepper, but she soon had to admit that the slight opinion wasn’t going away. One of his main lines was “This is too
good to be true.” Gary had explained to her that some men just practically couldn’t accept being loved, they didn’t feel worthy at all.

  Standing on the disc, with the show finally assembled down below her, all the dancers in place, Harmony felt a little pang. In some ways Ross had been the sweetest of all, maybe that was why he was the one she actually married. The funny thing that only a few people in Las Vegas knew, just Gary and Jessie and a couple of others, was that they weren’t even divorced. In the eyes of the law they were as married as ever. People kept saying Harmony get it and a couple of times she had thought well, maybe I should, but she had just never gotten around to it. There had been no one else she exactly felt like marrying, and apparently Ross hadn’t found anyone that would apply to either, if so he hadn’t mentioned it in the little notes he wrote when he sent the money. She had never even discussed the fact with Pepper, it was sort of a forgotten thing, even she forgot about it most of the time, but the truth was she was married to a man she hadn’t seen in fourteen years.

  It didn’t bother her, just once in a while something would bring him to mind and she would find herself wondering how bald he was by now. The little bald spot upset him almost as much as the thought of a dimpled ass upset Jessie. If Ross was ever late to work it was because he spent too much time trying to figure out ways to comb over the bald spot. That too was kind of sweet, they lived in a motel then and it was memories of Ross standing in the tiny bathroom trying to comb hair over his bald spot that kept sort of giving her the pangs now and then. One definitely came as she waited on her disc, but then it was finally show time, the orchestra struck the first notes, the curtain began to come up, lights flooded the stage, the disc began to go down, and at just the right moment, when the brilliant light struck her legs, Harmony spread her arms and smiled.

  II

  THE THING about Madonna that Pepper wasn’t too sure what she thought about was lately she had been acting very maternal. It was a little like having two mothers, it meant basically two people you had to dodge instead of one, although it was no big deal dodging her real mother, maybe she saw her for ten minutes at breakfast and sometimes on Sunday. She spent a lot more time with Madonna, five afternoons a week at least and usually Saturday and Sunday too. Madonna said if you want to dance you dance every day, then if you have the energy to do other things, fine. But dance first. Even when Pepper first started with her, at five years old, she made it real clear that if you wanted to get anywhere with her you had to give up some other stuff.

  That was okay, Pepper did love the dancing, besides she could do whatever she wanted to at night, movies or dates or whatever. It was just that lately Madonna had gotten kind of possessive, and one thing that was clear was that she didn’t care for Buddy. Usually when the lesson was over Buddy would be waiting for her in the little Cadillac his father had bought his mother for her birthday. So far as Pepper could tell it must be a funny marriage Buddy’s parents had, his mother was usually in San Francisco and his father either in New York or L.A., they didn’t hang around town a lot. Of course Buddy had a Mustang they had bought him to go to college in but as he said, why drive a Mustang when you can drive a Cadillac. The thing he didn’t do was drive his father’s Mercedes. His father would probably have killed him on the spot if he had even so much as scratched it—Victor was lenient about a lot of things but not about that car. According to Buddy his father had managed to talk his mother out of divorcing him because he didn’t want to give up half his millions, but the price was she could stay gone as much as she liked and fuck whoever she wanted to, although Buddy said that probably just meant nobody. One morning standing outside their bedroom he had heard her tell Victor that she had had about enough of penises and didn’t particularly want to ever see another one. Buddy had been kind of startled, he thought he was real cool where sex was concerned but hearing his mother say that had disturbed him or something, plus the remark had upset Victor so much he left and went all the way to Spain to think matters over.

  So for about the next month Buddy was paranoid about whether she was suddenly going to stop wanting to fuck him. He worried about it so much that she was about in the mood to do just that, tell him the deal was off, so long it’s been good to know you, it was exactly what he was expecting anyway although he tried to act like Mr. Confident.

  Madonna had never said anything against Buddy, but then she had never said anything nice about him either, and Madonna was usually quick to comment if she thought a boy was unusually good-looking. Pepper thought Buddy was great-looking and kept waiting for Madonna to maybe slip in a compliment but she never did, she ignored Buddy and once in a while asked about a boy Pepper had dated for a while named Woods Weeks, a total genius with computers and video games but nothing to compare with Buddy in the looks department. Buddy after all had been a model too, that was where they met, at a session out at Neiman’s. Buddy didn’t need the money, it was just that Victor knew the owner of the store socially and the man had seen Buddy by the pool one day and suggested it, which pleased Buddy, he was pretty vain and proud of the fact that he photographed so well.

  That was how it all started with Mel. One of the other male models was gay and told Buddy about a rich guy he knew who liked to make home movies, it might involve getting naked but it wouldn’t involve any real action. The guy was grossly rich and if he liked your looks and the way you moved he would pay really well for just making a little movie of you walking around or standing on his diving board or something, plus he was very liberal with drugs, there was always lots of coke and just about anything else you wanted, and it was totally safe, the guy was a guy the cops would never touch, probably not even if he chopped up four or five people with an ax, he was protected.

  So Buddy had done it a few times, with the other male model. Mel had given them a couple of hundred apiece and hadn’t asked them to do any more than sort of model naked. Buddy had described him as real nervous but nobody to be scared of, just a little weirdo with lots of money. They assumed he was gay but he didn’t come on or anything, just followed them around with his little movie camera.

  Then about the third time he asked if maybe they knew any young ladies who might be willing to participate, he didn’t mean hookers either, he could get plenty of them just by dragging Las Vegas Boulevard a few times, he wanted high school girls who were basically proper girls but maybe liked a little excitement now and then or wanted to make a little money for college. So without even telling her Buddy had shown Mel a few pictures of her, a teen fashion spread she had done for Neiman’s, and Mel had been immediately interested.

  Buddy had said come on, do it, maybe you won’t even have to be naked, the guy’s real shy, plus it’s two hundred dollars a session just for walking around. Pepper immediately liked the idea, the thought was kind of exciting, after all Denny took hundreds of pictures of her and didn’t pay a cent, plus living off her mother and fucking her constantly. Why not do it and have the money to spend?

  Except even before she met Mel she had a sort of intuition or something that he was going to fall for her, he sounded at first like a guy who was just a pretzel waiting to be twisted, why not twist him a little?

  So she said okay, but tell him it’s three hundred and I’m not showing him my cunt, which freaked Buddy, he was so rich anyway he didn’t have much imagination about things like that, they sort of had a fight about it because Buddy said come on, you should at least do it once before you start raising the price, you might scare him off, he’s actually kind of nice, why make him mad? Then it came out that Victor knew the guy. At one time they had played bridge together, they belonged to some club in Palm Springs or something, the point was Buddy was nervous that his father might find out and Mel was nervous about the same thing, didn’t want Victor to suddenly get wind that he was making home movies of Victor’s kid. Buddy just wanted her to be polite and not cause any trouble, it sort of made her realize that Buddy was just gonna be temporary even if he was super good-looking.

&nb
sp; Also they had never had a big test of wills, she sort of was interested in finding out what Buddy was made of and discovered that he was made of toilet paper. She proceeded to wipe her ass with him and of course she got her three hundred and even made Mel cough it up in advance, before he had even seen her in the flesh.

  Mel wasn’t exactly a pretzel, it was apparent from the way he looked at her and the way he spoke that he was an on-the-ball guy, but still the first time she modeled he was so nervous that when he stood still you could see his legs shaking. He didn’t even ask her to be topless, much less bottomless. All he got for his three hundred was that she walked around in her underwear for maybe ten minutes, looking at things in his house. The house was great, very tasteful, she had expected something pretty vulgar but on that one she guessed wrong. Mel was into Japanese design, he had an elaborate garden with a fishpond and a little bridge, plus all sorts of ferns and four or five little Japs to keep it all watered and green. Also he had a big collection of Japanese ceramics, which she had to admit were beautiful, and scrolls and other very tasteful stuff.

  It was too bad his legs shook but otherwise he couldn’t have been more polite and gentlemanly, plus it was easy to see he was sort of totally in love with her looks from the first minute. In fact Buddy and the other guy got a little jealous before the session was over, the minute she walked in Mel sort of totally forgot about them. Pepper found it laughable, these two vain guys totally naked, both of them standing around trying to get their cocks to hang in a way that might interest Mel, both of them seemed to feel that the fact that they had fairly large cocks was a phenomenon that would excite the world—exciting the world was a phrase she got from her old boyfriend Woods Weeks who did in fact claim the world’s record Space Invaders score, somewhere in the billions, Woods was definitely a genius in terms of the arcade—but on that particular afternoon their two cocks weren’t exciting anybody, though Mel finally noticed they were sort of pouting and turned the camera on them for a while. Still, it was pretty obvious his heart wasn’t in it, he was just trying to be polite.