Black Elvis

Imaginary Tucson

76 Joe can see it all in his head. At the president’s reception in Byron, New York, there is caviar in silver dishes, expensive wine served by waiters in black tie. In a corner of the room, by an enormous window that overlooks the postcard-perfect, sloping front lawn of the college, its bright green tongue leading the eye to a horizon of gold-and-red-stained trees, Kate entertains three or four handsome young professors. She is tall, blonde, Nordic-looking, and her figure is shown off nicely by a simple black dress with a low neckline, but there is something else about her that has made her the center of all this attention. A sensuality, a promise of trouble and fun in her green eyes. She clearly knows about sex. Not in the way that other women in academia seem to know about it, as something they enjoy but also feel responsible for analyzing and deconstructing according to whatever approaches to meaning they considered in their dissertations. With Kate, there would be no apologies, just uninhibited pleasure. There is a man, of course—she’s made that clear—but there’s always a man. From their positions on the walls, past presidents and trustees gaze out enviously from their portraits, flat now as treasury notes. Voices rise and fall with clever remarks; fat shrimp glisten pink on snowy beds of crushed ice. When Kate thinks of Tucson, she sees the swimming pool outside of the apartment complex where Joe is subletting, the weather blindI M AG IN A RY TUC SO N I M A G I N A R Y T U C S O N 77 ingly sunny, with undergrad girls walking around in microbikinis. Long waisted, dark skinned, smelling of coconut oil and taco sauce, they have come over after class to measure out the rest of the afternoon one margarita at a time. Reclining in a plastic chaise longue is Kate’s boyfriend, an expert on Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy and Leonard Gardner, muscly, tough-guy writers, out of one of whose books he might himself have easily tumbled. They love his Brooklyn accent, his sleepy, deep-set eyes, the slightly off-kilter look of his nose so that no matter which way you are looking at him, you still want to adjust your view. In between his East Coast origins and here lies some murkiness the girls don’t really care about. Graduate school in the Midwest, a girlfriend who is also a visiting professor someplace. Someplace else. And now, Joe is going to play his guitar for them, as he often does out there by the pool, tanned and shirtless. He is so much more interesting than boys their own ages. He knows things—about music and books and history and culture—and speaks of them with authority, always in that nasal accent. He’s going to play a surfer tune—have any of them ever heard of The Ventures?—and they will get up one by one in their tiny excuses for swimsuits and begin to dance, their thin bodies casting rhythmic shadows over the blue pool. Joe’s tiny apartment, sublet from a French professor who is on leave this year, is full of pictures of other, nicer places: Hawaii, where she has a condo, St. Tropez, Nice. The across-the-hall neighbors run a nonstop party, and clanking, muffler-deprived cars pull up in the parking lot outside at all hours of the day and night, spilling out young Mexican men with cases of Budweiser. Between 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., it is too hot to be outside, period. He has tried to use the pool, but it felt like swimming in warm spit. The desert landscape here in the north of the city has been overlain by apartment complexes and the huge cement buildings of chain stores. 78 I M A G I N A R Y T U C S O N In between the lonely roads that connect these pockets of commerce , saguaro and cholla and agave and palo verde cook bravely. Sometimes, driving down to school, ignoring the smell of the waste treatment plant, he feels he’s living inside a particularly spare Dr. Seuss illustration. Kate’s students wear dirty college-logo caps, and stare at her in class silently, defiantly. They have not done their...