I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs
It was usually a party around here. In fact, that’s why the man in the diner had turned up in Palm Springs to begin with. Wipe Out was a multi-location pool party-cum-EDM festival largely attended by those who’d missed out on tickets to Coachella and Angelinos who took every excuse to bus out of town. Diner man – his SAG card said Jack Ontario – had scarcely a passing interest in that music or that scene, but his dismal prospects in LA shaped even the bleakest of desert pleasures into a mirage.
That was two weeks ago. Now here he was, shirtless and shoeless in an empty highway diner, chlorine from the attached hotel’s pool dripping every now and again into his coffee. The hotel in question was dressed up like a motel, the decor meeting the clientele in their performance of that newly chic ruse — pretending to be poorer than you really are. Jack Ontario was bucking this trend. He really was down to his last few dollars and, in the middle of night, he was spending them all on the worst black coffee in the world and a plate of bacon.
Outside in the neon-lit carpark, a lone traveler was dragging her suitcase towards the lobby’s sliding doors. Seeing her approach, the desk attendant stubbed his joint out on the fake jukebox beside him. It was crooning about God and little green apples. As he handed over her keys and pretended to inspect her driver’s license, he appraised her. The way she leaned on her suitcase made it clear that the journey had been far from painless, but if she looked at all rumpled, it was only in the fake way that women on television do after a one night stand. Made up. Smelling great. A short crop of silky caramel curls, sunglasses, and a suede trench coat in the middle of the desert. Yes, this girl was going in the attendant’s screenplay.
The pool was open until two in the morning, which had made sense when the electronic music enthusiasts were in town. Now it was just Jack and the bacon in his stomach floating atop the fluorescent blue water. He thought about the self-tape he’d made such a show of rehearsing on the Flixbus into town. It was for a series produced by Snapchat; he’d been called in for the role of an Australian teen six years his junior. Ontario had never been further south than Tijuana.
A few days after he taped it, he received an email from his manager, Stephen.
Great work!!! If they go in another direction it won’t be for a lack of skill.
That was what Stephen always said when he knew they were going to go in another direction. Jack had seen the brief note while waiting for the bus back to Los Angeles, and then instead of piling in after the other bottle-kissed twenty-somethings, he’d picked up his bag, walked back into the lobby, and asked the stoned receptionist if he could stay longer.
“Sure thing, Man. How much longer you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” he grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl on the desk, “Is it okay if I don’t know?”
“For the next couple of weeks it’s okay if you don’t know. After that I’m expecting a fuck-tonne of tourists for the Clamtastic Canyon Run.”
“Right, yeah. I’ll be gone by then for sure,” he said.
“They call it Clamtastic because it’s sponsored by the local seafood shack.”
Jack nodded. He hadn’t asked a follow up question, had he?
That was a week ago and now Ontario wasn’t sure if he’d be able to make good on his promise. He was beginning to wonder if he might want to stay on, maybe see the Clamtastic Canyon runners and the desert-based fish monger who paid their way.
He was trying to imagine the type of person who would take part in such an event when a single dollar landed in the water beside him. His eyes were so keen to scan the bill (how he wished it had been a twenty) that by the time he’d realized its worthlessness, the woman who’d dropped it – that lone traveler from the lobby scene – was laying her towel down on a bed at the other end of the pool.
Of course he was taken in by her beauty. He’d only built an immunity to Hollywood-shaped people en masse. Perhaps if they’d crossed paths in one of those half-scam casting director workshops, or even an ultra-low budget chemistry read, he’d have been less affected. But Jack Ontario hadn’t seen anyone aside from the desk attendant in days and in his loneliness, the girl appeared to be his own personal saint. He imagined that were she to step into the water with him, he might be baptized into whatever sect she shepherded. But she didn’t go near the water. Towel in place, she lay upside down so that her hair hung from the foot of the bed.
Claudia (cloud-ee-ah) was enviable from a distance. Well, not just at a distance. She was still enviable if you were pressing your nose against her own, able to feel for yourself its surgically perfected lilt. But within her particular set, she was failing miserably. Her parents were producers, though she was always eager to point out that they didn’t produce anything good. They did things for The Mouse and a couple of tv gigs that somehow ran for several seasons without anyone watching. I’ve never even been inside the Dolby she’d lamented as a preteen, by way of an explanation for why the family-friendly feature film or flashback-of-the-rom-com-lead audition hadn’t gone her way.
That said, she’d won a daytime Emmy as a child for her star turn in a made for television movie-musical about a porcelain doll who comes to life, finds Jesus, and saves its owner from a burning building. The Presbyterian American in particular commended little Claudia Dephrey for her depiction of youthful piety. Her central claim to fame since, more than the unmemorable film, was occasionally appearing in those internet sidebar spam ads that promised to tell you where these child starlets are now.
Claudia was in Palm Springs, in truth, because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs. She’d told her parents she was shooting a short film out here. She’d told her friends she wanted to try mushrooms. She’d told herself she was going to read a book.
There was one in her pool bag but Claudia already knew she wouldn’t crack it open. It was a romance in which the characters were described as ugly enough for the novel to be considered literary. She would just watch the glossed-up series, and feel a bit sick the whole time knowing that none of her reps had even known about the auditions.
“Oh, I read for it but so did everyone else, lol,” her friend Sadie had said, and Claudia had silently accepted the reminder of her own low-status with a submissive sip of her ginger carrot juice.
Can you see the stars in Palm Springs? She’d Googled that on the bus. She wasn’t sure that they were far enough away from the city’s light pollution. The internet had said yes, but at least from the side of the glowing pool she wasn’t dazzled.
“I think you dropped this,” the boy in the pool said, climbing out of the water and walking towards her. Yes, she’d known she had.
“Oh, thanks.” She took the dollar note from his hand and tucked it between her bathing suit strap and her left breast. She tried not to smile too widely when his gaze followed her hand in that dumb puppy way that came over men in the grip of lust. She imagined a beat in the script. And then, “And who am I thanking?”
“Jack,” he answered, proffering his hand, “Ontario. Jack Ontario.” She wished she had something coquettish to consume at this point. A drink with a straw. Any fruit. If it were her script, she’d probably make it an olive on a toothpick. The implicit threat would undercut the virginal energy she exuded.
“Thank you, Jack Ontario,” she said, emphasizing Ontario like it was a long-held private joke between the two of them.
“Anytime,” he said, sitting on the pool chair beside her. He pulled a cigarette and lighter from some ambiguous place just out of shot. A continuity error.
“You can’t be from LA, smoking that,” she said.
“It’s a good appetite suppressant,” he said, dodging the real question. She noticed it. Maybe this was one of those films about a mysterious young man outrunning his past. That would be a letdown.
“Aren’t you going to ask for my name?” she asked, haughty and coy, like a good romantic lead. The truth was, he already knew it. Close up, he realized he had been following her on Instagram for eight months. This information didn’t dethrone her in his mind. On the contrary, he was now paranoid that she’d noticed his pathetically consistent engagement amid the crowd of her ten thousand other followers.
“I’m trying to remember it,” he said, lightly. “I think I saw you in something at the Santa Monica Film Festival last year?”
“You saw Blood Face?” She asked, and he was surprised to hear a little disappointment in her voice.
“I really liked it,” he said, “That’s why I’m sure I’ll recall your name if you give me a few more minutes.”
She nodded, but Jack could see he’d unsettled her. Back in Los Angeles, he might not have minded. Sometimes he found some respite from his anxiety, knowing that he had the upper hand in his flavor of the week relationship. But they weren’t in Los Angeles, and he found more solace now in knowing that Claudia was above him. He wanted to affirm that with his own behavior. He wanted her to affirm it with hers.
He walked away to where his tote sat, on a chair on the other side of the pool. He returned with a packet of tobacco and some rolling paper inside a sandwich bag. Jack began working on a second cigarette over the plexiglass table between them, pretending to make a mess of rolling it up. As he’d hoped she would, Claudia took it from his shaking hands and deftly twisted it. She placed it between her lips and lit it with a matchbook that bore a school logo on the side.
“Ah, you went to school …”
“Yeah, with everyone on The CW,” she said, without bitterness.
“I was going to say in LA. You’re born and raised.”
Claudia responded to the implicit accusation, “You don’t know who I am. So it must not be much of an edge.”
“I dunno,” he said, “I think you must be choosing to remain mysterious for the time being. I can’t imagine you not winning any role you really wanted to.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the plexiglass and then threw it neatly into a trash can.
“But I wouldn’t count on your anonymity sticking. Even if you do like it, Claudia Dephrey.”
They walked through the carpark and into the lobby, past the sleeping desk attendant and the lonely bar. Claudia insisted on playing snooker and playing it properly. She found some chalk in the storage closet and drew such a haphazard D with it on the table that Jack wondered if it would be any guide at all. He didn’t know anything about snooker. She was sorting colours, measuring the distance between her fingers, comparing different cues before every shot. He asked if he was allowed to hit a certain ball and if she said yes, he did.
“I’m winning,” Claudia told him, pocketing a ball,
“I’d believe that even if it was a lie,” he said. Claudia leaned her cue against the back wall and climbed onto the table, her legs swinging over the edge.
“I’m winning by so much that I’m not sure we need to keep on at it,” she said, “I feel like a bad sport.”
He placed his cue beside hers, before returning to the table and framing her hips with his hands.
“Where are you from, Jack Ontario?” She asked. She didn’t mind if this was his film now.
“Wyoming.”
“Where in Wyoming?” She placed her hands either side of his face.
“Casper.”
“Like the ghost?”
“Well, I, uh, well, it’s spelled the same way.” They were about to kiss.
Jack’s phone lit up on the table and he instinctively scanned its face.
“Sorry,” he said, “I should have …”
“No, no. You should check it.”
FANTASTIC NEWS SNPCHT JOB IS YOURS! UR ON SET MONDAY
It was Sunday morning now. Someone had fallen through. Probably a real Australian with a shoddy visa. But he’d take it. Of course he would.
They slept on the pool chairs, never touching, and woke before the single remaining housekeeper made her five o’clock rounds.
“Why did we sleep out here, when we both had hotel rooms?” Claudia asked.
“It was more romantic like this, wasn’t it?” Jack replied, not turning towards her, “We probably would have slept with each other if there had been a bed.”
“I wouldn’t have minded that,” she said, unembarrassed, “And is sex not romantic?” He didn’t answer immediately and her confidence began to wane.
“It can be,” he said, “I imagine. But I wouldn’t want that here.”
“What’s wrong with Palm Springs?” She was looking at him now,
“Too many mountains. Too much like Wyoming.”
“Does sex not exist in Wyoming?”
“You don’t exist in Wyoming.” There was some silence before an automated cleaner at the bottom of the pool began to softly whir.
“I could if I wanted to,” she said, even though she didn’t know anything about Wyoming. She hadn’t even known it was mountainous until just now.
“I can’t imagine it.” He turned towards her. His expression was determined, as though he were trying very hard to imagine it despite his proclamation.
She couldn’t picture Jack in Los Angeles, either, even though she knew the very studio lot he’d be on tomorrow morning.
“It’s still so dark,” he said, facing back towards the sky, “I can still see the fox.”
“The fox?”
“The constellation. See? It starts over there, above the water tower.”
“So you can see the stars here,” Claudia murmured. No one had ever taught her about constellations. She wondered if this was the sort of knowledge one accrued growing up in Wyoming.
“Of course you can,” he said, waving his hand at the sky. But his arm fell halfway through the gesture. They’d vanished while he spoke. Dawn was upon them.
“I’m going to tell people,” Claudia said, “That the desk attendant?”
“Ralph.”
“Sure. Ralph. I’m going to tell people he was Elvis.”
Jack laughed,
“Why?”
”Will you back me up?”
“What does it matter, if I’m never going to see you again?” He was asking a different question that he already knew the answer to. He could see that that was how she felt.
“I’ll be able to tell, Ontario,” she said. “One person saying something is a lie, two people saying something is a rumor. If you back me up, I’ll hear it from someone else one day and I’ll know you’re good.”
Jack thought he could hear the Flixbus over the cicadas.
“I’ll make sure you hear it then,” he said, with a conviction he didn’t feel.