Harsh Oases Read online

  The Senator from Puerto Rico was trying to charm the skivvies off the Women’s Wimbledon winner. I couldn’t say as I blamed him, since her plyoskin outfit was little more than a glossy blue lacquer over her formidable physique. Next to them, the Archbishop of New York was arguing politics with the Prime Minister of Ireland. Both had had too much to drink, and they seemed about to come to blows. I hoped they wouldn’t. I hated to see women fight. In other corners, drinks hoisted high in a complex social semaphore, other couples and groups played their mindgames on each other. The three-piece band on the stage in the back of the room blasted forth their own quirky version of Stella Fusion’s hit, “The Climax Decade Blues.” Bodies thronged the sweaty dancefloor.

  The single club on the main island of the Hesperides is always called La Pomme d’Or. It’s an unbreakable tradition. Its owners—usually stolid businessmen, but sometimes more interesting types—come and go, lasting as long as profits or their ulcers dictate. But the long, low building with its wicker-furnished veranda and glossy mahogany bar has a life and identity of its own. No one would dare rename it. Its last owner hadn’t, and he had been almost as much a fixture as the place itself. A man named Hollister, or something like that, who never left the building until certain events that culminated in two deaths forced him out and off the island.

  The current owner was Larry Meadows. He stood by the bar now, surveying the organized chaos with a benign gaze. After all, furniture and glasses might get smashed, but he would still have had the honor of hosting the bash. And it wasn’t every day—or night—that one’s bar was elected to cater the official party following the premiere of a Nike original.

  When the boozy fleet had anchored in the Bay, and everyone had been ferried ashore, I had managed to become separated from Jasmine. Now I was contriving earnestly to stay out of her clutches for a bit longer, no easy task in such close quarters. I knew I would pay for my rashness in the morning, but it didn’t signify now.

  I had to talk to Nikki Nike alone.

  Something about the woman had intrigued me deeply. Obviously, the awesome sky-fires she had ignited played a part in my fascination. But she exuded a personal force and charm that had snared me like a net of unbreakable spidersilk. The dignity and aplomb with which she had stepped from the capsule, as if out of Botticelli’s painting. The transfiguration lighting up her features after the celestial show. These bespoke a deep inner-directedness, a self-assured capability that transfixed me more strongly than anything sexual.

  Ducking behind a dizzy debutante as a shield, I wove my way toward the largest knot of people, knowing I’d find Nikki there.

  On the outskirts of the group, I spotted her, trapped in the middle. Still wearing her silver suit, sans headgear, she looked like a chromed product of Detroit or South Korea, save for her face, which was pixieish without the least trace of cloying feyness. Her teeth were very white and small, as she smiled valiantly at the fawning compliments, but her grey eyes looked nervous and weary.

  I used my weight to shoulder people aside. “Excuse me. Excuse me, please. Message for Miz Nike.”

  People parted at the sound of the twentieth-century magic incantation. Reaching Nikki, I said in a voice meant to carry, “Miz Nike, telephone call for you. I believe it’s New York.”

  She sized me up instantly, and wasn’t fooled. Still, she said, “Oh, yes. I was expecting it Where can I take it?” Her eyes were a thankyou-card Hallmark never wrote.

  I led her to the bar. Still no sign of Jasmine. We stopped near Meadows. He turned his placid face, behind which there was always something going on, toward us.

  “Marty, Miz Nike,” he said. “Anything wrong?”

  “Not a thing, Larry. Just wondered if the back room was empty.”

  Larry’s left eyebrow twitched slightly. Otherwise, nothing registered. “Sure. Feel free.”

  I took Nikki’s ungloved hand. My autonomous nervous system almost gave up breathing. I felt like a cloddish adolescent. What was the matter with me? Perhaps I’d swallow my tongue when we started talking.

  The private rooms of La Pomme had been the living quarters of the last owner. Now, one served as Meadows’ office, the others as storerooms.

  The party sounded like a distant war once the door was closed.

  “You looked as if you could use a little peace and quiet,” I said. “I took it upon myself to help.”

  She stood a few feet from me, her left knee locked tight, her right bent outward slightly, foot forward. Her crossed arms compressed her small breasts. She gauged me again, totalled my second score with my first, averaged the result, and passed me.

  Her form slumped. “Well, yes, you were right. Being spam in a can is more tiring than you might think. And the show was so perfect, it drained me even more.”

  “Sit down, then,” I said. “Let me get you a drink.”

  She collapsed into a deep chair. I went to the small bar on the far wall.

  “Larry’s private stock,” I explained, pouring two scotches. When I handed her one, she looked a bit irked, and I kicked myself for not having asked what she wanted. But I was so used to servicing Jasmine wordlessly, that I had acted on automatic.

  She took it though, and sipped. “Do you bring all damsels in distress here?” she asked.

  “Hardly,” I said. “Larry and I play cards here occasionally.”

  “He called you Marty,’“ she said.

  I winced. “Larry’s the only one who calls me that. It’s Martin. Martin Fallows.”

  We shook hands.

  “Let me say thanks, Martin. I was really dead on my feet, but I felt obliged to entertain.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Maybe you can help me some day.”

  Congealed silence filled thirty seconds, as our conversation hung by its fingertips over the abyss of embarrassed unfamiliarity. Desperate, I said, “Uh, you have quite an unusual name. Your parents?”

  She smiled. “No. My own choice. Artist’s prerogative. Nike, the goddess of victory. And Nikki, from an old Prince song.”

  “Great singer,” I chimed in. “Too bad about his career ending so badly.”

  I was referring, of course, to the famous case prosecuted under the Robertson-era Helms-Falwell Morals Act. Taking it all the way to the Rehnquist court and losing had pretty much bankrupted and demoralized the pop-star. But I had heard heartening rumors that, in the new atmosphere that began to bloom a couple of years ago, after Joe Kennedy’s election, he was contemplating a comeback.

  “Yes,” Nikki agreed. “He still sounds great.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just heard him at a private party last month.”

  Well. There wasn’t much I could add to that. I switched the focus to her assumed surname.

  “You’re very concerned with success, I take it.”

  “It’s the only thing that counts, Martin. Failure is instructive, up to a point, but ultimately unsatisfying. Consider this piece I did tonight.”

  I nodded in what I hoped was an intelligent fashion.

  “Sure, I could have stayed groundside, while we shot up the canisters. But what if something went wrong, and I wasn’t up there to do my damnedest to fix it? Besides, what kind of art is it where the artist never even approaches the canvas?”

  “Putting it on the line,” I said. A little cynicism slipped out.

  She shrugged. “Gotta walk it like you talk it.” Her lips caressed her glass, her throat worked beautifully.

  “How was the whole thing possible? I thought aurorae were visible only around the poles.”

  “Not so, Martin,” she said somewhat pedantically. “May 13, 1921, Samoa had fine viewing. Same for Mexico, September 13, 1957. All it takes is a walloping big geomagnetic storm, set off by intense solar activity, like what happened two days ago and is just reaching us now.”

  “And you seeded the atmosphere with what?”

  “Lithium, barium and a soupcon of Europium.” She shook her cropped head, marvelling. “Hard to
believe a couple of pails of exotic dust could paint such a picture. I gather you enjoyed it.”

  “Very much.” I hoped I sounded sincere instead of flattering. But it was hard to produce the unaccustomed tone.

  She straightened in the soft chair, as if resisting its comfort. “What about you, Martin? What do you do?”

  That stopped me cold. What could I tell her? I am the paid consort of an aging, washed-up television star. I work on my tan, play poker, and drink too much. But I was once a Harvard graduate, who imagined he was something akin to a poet. It all sounded like self-pitying slush. So I simply said, “I live here, in the Hesperides.”

  She knew everything that implied. Emptying her glass, she lost all interest in me. She got to her feet, and said, “Thanks again, Mr Fallows. I feel better now, and I really should rejoin the party.”

  At the door, I said, “Will you be doing aurorae again?” Meaning, of course, Will I see you again?

  “Depends on the sun. I’d like to, but I also have to see about raising more funds. The videotape of tonight’s show should help.”

  Nikki opened the door and walked out. I followed.

  I didn’t even see Jasmine till her open palm connected with my face.

  Sunlight struggled painfully into the kitchen through the slits in the pastel blinds. I sat at one end of a white oval table, drinking black coffee. Jasmine occupied the opposite seat, surrounded by a cloud of hostility and hangover-bitterness. She was reading the online edition of Variety on her lap-micro. I knew her forlorn daily pattern. First she would run a search for her own name, which usually came up negative. A quick scan for the names of influential friends would be followed by a desultory reading of the entire issue, in a fruitless search for some thread running back to her lost career.

  Jasmine had had one of the leads in a weekly television soap: Children of Paradise, starring Jasmine Williams as Alyx Wagner. Her character had been—God help me—“an eminent neurosurgeon.” (Jasmine needed help in real life to remove a hangnail.) At the apogee of her arc of fame, she had been getting close to a hundred thousand an episode.

  But then the producers decided to switch to Empatrax.

  Empatrax necessitated that the actors wear wireless sensors hidden in their hair, which would record their emotions. It was still all very crude. The actors needed a shot of mild neurotropin to facilitate the recording, as did the home audience to receive it via their patches. (The new Empatrax sets received a digital signal which only a few stations could yet broadcast. Digitization had been the only way they could cram the extra information into the old bandwith.) The emotions were sometimes vague. Occasionally they caused headaches. Still, for all its crudity, Empatrax was obviously the wave of the future. Everyone was scrambling to convert.

  Trouble was, not all actors could perform convincingly in this new medium. Their tracks came out blurred and useless.

  Jasmine was one such. Like a silent-movie star confronting the talkies, she just couldn’t perform.

  This realization devastated her.

  The producers might have been willing to dub her part. But she hit the liquor-greased skids. Started fluffing lines and missing rehearsals. The writers eventually got instructions from the producers to prepare her death scene coincident with the expiration of her contract. They had sent her to a backlot Singapore, to minister to the survivors of the infamous CBW attack, where she nobly succumbed to a horrid bug.

  I came into her life somewhere on the downslope, when she was still employed. She was in LA one day. Came to have her car—a cherry-red ’Ninety-six Brazilian Viper—waxed. Later that day, in bed, she told me she liked the way my muscles had moved while I stroked her fender. So I landed the job of stroking her ego and body.

  That had been over a year ago.

  Things had gotten really bad only since her death. Out of work, carrying a bad rep, living off a few less-than-spectacular investments, she grew more and more testy each day.

  Last night was an instance.

  After I had grabbed her wrists to stop a second blow, she began to accuse me loudly of having carnally enjoyed Nikki right there in Meadows’ office. Of course, she didn’t phrase it so delicately. When we convinced her it wasn’t so, she started to cry, saying I hated her and couldn’t stand to be seen with her.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say it wasn’t so, that it was myself I didn’t like. So instead I hustled her out and home. She fell into bed like a sack, and I knew she had pills inside her too.

  And now she wouldn’t even talk to me.

  “Jazz,” I said. She didn’t look up. Her long brunette hair lay stringy on her shoulders. Her heavy breasts somehow managed to sag in defeat, despite their bioengineered supports.

  “Jazz, would you like to do something today?”

  She raised her telegenic face. “Like what?”

  “I was thinking we could borrow your pal Trollinger’s sub, and scoot around for a while.”

  “That’s so boring,” she said. “You go if you want.” She dropped her eyes back to the unrewarding plasma screen.

  I didn’t argue.

  Trollinger was in his glass-and-alloy palace down by the shore. He reacted suspiciously agreeably to my request.

  “By all means, Martin, my good fellow. The hemosponge units are all charged.” Seated, he tucked a thick strand of hair behind his ear and looked up at me from under lowered lids. “Dreadfully sorry about the scene last night. You say Jasmine is still brooding?”

  I hadn’t said any such thing. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Perhaps I’ll visit. Just to console her. Tell her about the awful fool I made of myself when being presented to King Charles last year. She’ll get a good laugh out of it”

  I studied his narrow face for a moment. In the end, I forewent a comment.

  Deep beneath the surface tension, the blue water clear as a baby’s soul around me, I pondered the fishes as they threaded the wavy kelp, wondering if a shark’s maw was not mercy incarnate, compared with civilized life.

  There are days—at least in my life—when Time flows both too slow and too fast.

  Too slow, because the Now you are trapped in is a treacle of tiresome people and events.

  Too fast, because you anticipate the daily waning in your powers that tomorrow and the tomorrow after will bring.

  The period after that first auroral display was full of such days.

  Jasmine was frantic for work. She had no definition of herself beyond that of “star,” could not live a life outside the public eye with any contentment. It made her a frightful bitch, totally unlike the captivating and alluring woman who had picked me up, and for whom I had imagined it would be a lark to act as mindless stud and escort. She got on my nerves with unerring consistency, and I asked myself why I simply didn’t leave. But the facts were that I owed her, and pitied her, and had no plans of my own.

  Let me give you an example of our life together.

  One afternoon, as we sat on her uncomfortable and stodgy antique Memphis Group furniture, she began to whine for strawberries.

  Now, Jasmine knew as well as anyone that there were no strawberries available that year. (The engineered antifrost ice-minus bacteria, long deemed stable, had mutated and destroyed the entire California crop. Other states were fighting outbreaks by burning whole fields of berries.) However, nothing would do to satisfy her cravings but big red juicy strawberries. The drunker she got, the more insistently she rhapsodized and demanded these nonexistent fruits. She got me so pissed by her lush’s whining that I launched a cruel barb.

  “Hey, Jazz,” I said with utter seriousness. “I understand Papp is doing Richard II with an all-female cast. Why don’t you try out for the lead?”

  She primped immoderately. “Do you really think I should?”

  “Yeah. Then you could deliver the lines you’ve lived.” I filled my voice with bombast, and conflated several of Richard’s lines.

  “‘I have been studying how I may compare/This prison wh
ere I live unto the world./I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.’”

  The lamp that dented the wall and shattered, meant for my head, cost at least five hundred.

  I think we would have gone on in this vein and ultimately killed each other, had it not been for Colin Trollinger.

  One day the epicene Englishman arrived with news for Jasmine.

  I knew she had been screwing him frequently and whole-heartedly, in a last-ditch gamble to land a role. I didn’t really care, although I felt a little hurt. I only hoped he had come through with something good for her.

  In the end, it proved neither the worst role, nor the plummiest. At least it wasn’t a commercial.

  “Jasmine, my love,” Trollinger shamelessly caroled as he strolled in unannounced. “Pack your bags. You hit the road in a week.”

  She shot from her seat and flung herself on him, nearly smothering the poor guy beneath her ample mass. “Oh, you darling! You’re wonderful! I knew I could count on you. Is it a part in your latest film? Don’t tell me it’s Eunice!”

  Colin was casting for I Will Fear No Evil at the time. He had the grace to look slightly discomfitted. His last two films had been Empatrax (new theaters with in-seat patches were going up fast), and Jasmine should have known he couldn’t hire her.

  “No, my dear, it’s not one of my projects at all, I’m afraid. It’s a stint of summer stock. The road show of Simon’s last farce—that thing he left unfinished at his death that the producers cobbled together. Immensely popular on Broadway, if you recall.”

  Jasmine released Trollinger and stepped back, crestfallen.

  “Come on now, girl. I realize it’s not Shakespeare”—Jasmine looked poisoned daggers at him, and I thought, You couldn’t know it, Colin old buddy, but that was an unlucky choice of playwrights—”but it’s work. Buck up now. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to fix this for you.”

  Jasmine smiled tentatively. “I suppose it’s a foothold.” Brightening, she said, “Will I have my own dressing-room?”

  “Absolutely,” Colin cooed. “A private, air-conditioned trailer.”

  “Then I’ll do it! Oh, Martin, think what fun we’ll have with a change of scenery. I swear this island was killing me.”