Suitor

He arrived as a suitor, and Venus had always delighted in suitors.

“I’ve been noticing you,” he told her. Of course he had. He noticed everything. That was his job. He’d been noticing this woman for a long, long time.

She gave him a smile, just passed it out with as little thought as if it were a leaflet advertising strippers and escorts and he were just the last pedestrian who had walked by her with an open hand.

He smiled back, looked squarely at her — just like a tourist, who are known the world over for mindless smiling, even, if they’re not paying attention, when someone hands them pornography.

“I like what I see,” he said, and she threw him a dimple to go with the smile, the way Gypsy Rose Lee might have tossed a barrette from her hair to the guy in the front row who’d caught her glove and sat holding it, staring, starry-eyed, at her while the rest of her audience watched and chuckled at the schmoe who thought he’d connected with her.

“I’ve been here for a long time,” she said. “What took you so long?”

He grinned, all his teeth lining up in his mouth, like good, loyal foot soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, ready to do battle. The original Bugsy was known for his shark-smile. “You can’t approach a lady without preparing for it,” his ghost told the goddess. He pulled out a bunch of roses from behind his back.

“Oh,” Venus breathed as she took them. She’d always enjoyed this kind of offering best.

They were in a dark and empty place. Around them lay the black, dulled glitter of a grand showroom after the curtain had come down, after the crowds had left, after the cleanup crews had finished. Venus and her suitor stood in the very center of the booths and tables and draperies and faced one another as the scent of his flowers rose and billowed like incense. Around them, the empty air stirred with echoes of past decades, earlier intimacies, fabled sparks of romance. Marilyn and Joe might have sat in the booth in front of them. Priscilla, underage, might have clung to Elvis at the door. Memories of a hundred thousand couples on their way to the wedding chapel or on their first night together, or ten feet away from each other, just about to meet and fall in love, filled all the empty space of that room, wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

“You men knew ways to woo women, a few decades ago,” Venus commented.

“We did. I do,” he said. He slipped his arm around her waist. “I still remember.”

“What do you want with me?” she asked.

He kept his arm where it was, kept pulling her close against his side, but his expression turned more serious. “There’s someone here, in town. I think you know something about him.”

She looked away. “I know.”

“I’m sorry to bring this up, right when we’re just meeting and things are going so nicely. But I think he has to be... dealt with.”

It was a line from another era. All the memories of the lovers around them might have suddenly donned dark suits and cocked their fedoras low over one eye. The girls might have pushed their chests and hips out farther, gazing at the world with an arrogant challenge.

The ghost had learned much, in the last few days. He’d stood at a distance and watched this new guy operate, watched him pinball from blonde to brunette, and watched him watch the city, watch its players, look over its pickings.

Zem looked at these people the way a lion looks at a wildebeest herd. Not that the ghost knew those things or would recognize a wildebeest herd if it thundered down Las Vegas Boulevard in front of his eyes. But he knew Zem’s look. That, he’d seen before.

“Do you know how...” Venus started, then she looked him up and down. “No. You don’t know. You don’t know him.”

He never blinked, never stopped softly stroking the small of her back with his thumb, so conveniently lying right there. “No,” he told her. “I don’t know how. I don’t know enough about him. But I think you do. And I know… everybody. You tell me the how, baby. I’ll find the who.”

This was classic god stuff. Deities never do their own work, dirty or honorable. Didn’t you know that? The gods are toolmasters, puppeteers. We are all just felt animals with their hands up our asses.

“We need a champion,” Venus said.

He reached up to touch the flowers she was holding. Pale yellow buds, with their petals just beginning to open. Rare in the desert, and perfect for her— simple and fresh. Other women, trying to look like Venus, laid it on thick, had to use pounds of paint, but the original was untouched, herself, uncomplicated.

“I know people, kiddo,” he said. “I know everybody. Your friend–”

She drew back. “Not my friend.”

“Forgive me.” He nuzzled his chin against her clouds of hair. “I can see you hate him. He only wants to rule people. No temptation. No fun. It’s not how we do things here.” He smiled, sweeping his eyes around the crowded, empty showroom. “This town is honest, baby. We don’t have to lie to get the people in. And I can think of one or two… characters who might be able to help us get him out of here.” His lips turned up as his look and his voice stroked every pore in her skin. She shivered at the thrill. “Tell me what we need, angel,” he growled, “Tell me what’ll do the trick with this guy, and I’ll tell you where to find it.”

She looked up and stared into his eyes. If they’d been in a movie, the music would have begun to come up slowly. “And then what?”

The gods are inveterate bargainers.

A grin broke the surface of the ghost’s lips and spread slowly but inexorably, like a submarine surfacing till it was all she could see. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere.” The air, squeezed out from between them, danced all around their pressed bodies, electrified. If someone had been watching, some cleaning woman who remembered glimmerings of romance and mystery, she might have seen a sparkle erupt and fountain.

“We’ll talk,” he promised.

“Take me,” she invited, and the ghost pulled Venus, the eternally most beautiful woman in the world, inexorably from the room.

NEXT POST: THE BEGINNING OF THE MADNESS (Monday 9/7)