Hello, Beautiful!

On warm spring evenings in Las Vegas, when the empty desert sky fades into darkness and becomes no more than a backdrop to the largest and longest-running floor show in the world; when the outlying desert disappears into the distance to lick its wounds, and its individual sand grains stop surfing the breeze into tourists’ eyes; when the traffic lights and the headlights up and down the Strip pale into obscurity and get flooded away by the nuclear blast of neon and chasers from the big hotels; then strange figures come out to play, personages unknown to the gamblers and remarkably unexploited by the Tourist Bureau.

At the Strip’s south end, a brand new hotel lurked. Its shiny, geometric facade glinted. Inside, its cards practically rustled in their eagerness to be shucked free of their cellophane and let out for their first time.

Out front, an ersatz, Cairo-copying monolith crouched, doing duty as sign, tourist bait, and porte cochere all at once. He gleamed with new paint and sported the rhinoplasty of which his original could only dream. He bulked one third larger than the old model, and much brighter blue and gold than it remembered ever being. Currently he glimmered with the night’s rain.

The Sphinx stared over the sidewalk and the heads of the tourists to an ineffable point somewhere past the hotel across the street. He sought, somehow, to adore the moon, which his faith told him must be hanging up there somewhere, far above this syrupy haze of signage that had caught him.

The darkness deepened. Brand new, white-hot spot lights shone up the edges of the pyramid, and on Sphinx's paws, face, and haunches. And he heard a giggle, a breathy, teasing come-on of a sound that would have made all the tourists within a mile share the most multiple simultaneous orgasm in history if they could have heard it.

“The night is lovely, Sphinx,” the voice came.

He sighed. “Get off my back,” he responded.

The figure demurred, audibly, and drew her hand across the back of his concrete head. Even through the concrete headpiece he wore, painted lurid blue for the presumed pleasure of the future guests in the front rooms, he felt her touch. And he felt what might have been a shiver, if such a thing had been possible in his poured concrete body. Venus had this effect on him. She simultaneously disgusted and titillated him, which made no sense at all for a pious being poured and created expressly for worship and to shade valet parking.

Venus, as far as he could discern, had been happily resident in Vegas for some time – decades, was Sphinx’s best guess, although she either didn’t remember or wouldn’t admit to it. Such girlish reticence was perfectly in keeping with her flirty, uber-feminine, utterly unliberated persona, but it was patently ridiculous for a women who also insisted on being remembered as an Ancient goddess, who boasted of her exploits among Greek and Roman followers and got miffed when no one else remembered. But then, as Sphinx had quickly learned, contradiction was her most accustomed motif, a touchy contrariness the inseparable counterpoint to her supple receptiveness.

Now he tried again to push her away without actually being able to push. “Stop, Venus,” he told her. He hoped, as he always did, that his lack of welcome would stymie or at least bore her. He had not yet learned to conform his own behavior to his understanding. The moon, a notoriously impatient goddess, might have despaired of him. “Just get off.”

A full laugh came floating back to him. “Oh, I intend to,” she trilled.

It took him a moment to understand her. “That’s disgusting,” he announced.

“Oh, Sphinx,” she moaned from what sounded like a lower place along his spine. “Oh, my Sphinx, oh my brother,” she breathed, in an echo from newlywed bedchambers and illicit love nests worldwide.

“I’m not your brother,” he mumbled, but she wasn’t listening.

The sky squeezed out another raindrop. The clouds were gathering, holding a special, smaller, nighttime reprise of their matinee performance, Deluge! Sphinx wished he could look up. Maybe if he got a little water in his eye, that would distract him from the moaning, and the weird rubbings which were growing just behind his headpiece. “Great Goddess above,” he whispered, “please save me from this.”

“Oh my Sphinx!” she rang out. Tourists on the sidewalk, though they couldn’t hear her, turned and looked up.

Venus had always been trouble, even Sphinx had learned that. Her relations with other deities, especially, had never been copacetic. From the first day she’d showed up on the beach in Greece, surfing in on a pile of seafoam as if it were the grandest of sedan chairs borne by nubile, hunky slaves, Olympus had looked down its nose at her. She wasn’t one of theirs. She didn’t play the game right.

Proper gods represented fundamental forces: earth, storms, the sun. Venus embodied Love and War— those two most cheap and human urges. She was an interloper on the mountain of divinity, a white-trash second wife scandalizing the country club.

But humans loved her. Even as they’d forgotten her origins and stopped inviting her to their battlefields, they’d retained the vision of an unspeakably beautiful woman, pleasure embodied. The rest of the old divine pantheon might be discarded, unloved and forgotten, but the Goddess of Love was alive and well.

Especially here. Venus had been perfectly happy to lose her war responsibilities and settle in as humanity’s embodiment of love in Las Vegas. Where else could she be appreciated as she was here? Where else was beauty an end unto itself, simple sexuality so pandered to or lauded? Las Vegas was Venus’ spiritual home, and she was its obvious goddess.

And where else could she have found a confidante as stalwart and, let’s face it, captive as Sphinx? He sighed, and wished he could close his ears to her, if not keep her at bay outright. "Oh, dear goddess," he prayed to the lost moon, "Save me!"

His goddess, as it turned out, had taken a powder.

NEXT POST: MISS HONORE MAKES HER ENTRANCE (Friday 7/24)