She got calls from all over the valley, to the fancier parts of Indio, to Palm Desert, to Palm Springs, Indian Wells, Desert Hot Springs, off in the hills. We never went to Cathedral City. We lived there and didn’t want her to work where we went grocery shopping but pretty much never got calls from there anyway. We went to La Quinta, by the golf resorts, PGA West, called to the hotels but rarely went with no way to photograph the men, and too many cameras that didn’t belong to us that could photograph her, photograph me. Gated communities with their waterfalls and lighted xeriscapes, their tumbling plants and shooting fountains. She never gave her real name. The name she gave them would be sent to the guard house or she would be given a gate code and we would roll right in, without question. Sure, they had cameras, but so what? No one was complaining. They knew complaints would mean photos getting sent around.
I kept them all on a computer we had, every photo dropped in a folder with an address for a name. We never really knew names, not real names. No one knows anyone else if that’s the agreement, even now, even these days. Every day starts to feel that way, that you never really know anyone, even someone you live with.
It’s a cash business in a world of plastic people.
But we never went to Bermuda Dunes.
There’s something wrong with that place. It’s not a real town, it’s not a real anything. It’s an unincorporated island in the middle of the valley without any roads that go through. They pretend they are a town but it’s more like a fiefdom with its own security force instead of police. Some rich guy wanted to build the golf course of his dreams and named it after his favorite island getaway and the sand all around. Which, fine, whatever, there’s plenty of delusional assholes.
But he kept it completely private, completely isolated while surrounded by the other towns. Different electric company, different water company. They don’t even share sewage with the valley, every pipe leading straight down to septic tanks, seeping down through rock until they hit sand and then more sand, all of that water gurgling out while the shit builds. Centuries of drought and they throw their water away while everyone else struggles to clean it, filter it, pipe it back out, and Bermuda Dunes pisses it all away. But the golf course is green and the lawns are thick and the fountains at the gates gush twenty-four hours a day. The lords and ladies sit in their pools and suck on ice cubes while they flush all of their shit straight down and sit on it, float above it. When there is too much of it, some poor bastard with the worst job in the world sucks it all out, hauls it away.
The septic thing is terrible, sure, but is it really that different from the other communities? Yes. There are levels to the HOA there and the higher up you are, the more freedom you have. There are neighborhoods inside the neighborhood, low-income apartments and low-slung mansions, gates inside of gates. For some houses you need three separate codes and cards to get through. And all of it with private security that doesn’t give a shit about police because there aren’t any. The county sheriffs have jurisdiction in theory, but I’ve never seen one in there. Bermuda Dunes may as well be a private island, a banana republic, off the fucking map. And there’s only one way in and out for nonresidents. The traffic backs up for blocks with work trucks, nannies, deliveries, visitors, on and on. I didn’t ever want to go in there.
We had a year and a half of this built up. Then she gives me the address for the last stop of the day. I don’t know it, new client, and I don’t even know the street, so she tells me it’s in Bermuda Dunes.
“Fuck. Fuck that place. You should cancel.”
“The hell I should,” Mo said. “I looked up the street. It’s one of the big classic places. Sinatra shit. Deep-pocket money.”
“That’s even worse. Old money is drained down and low tips. They have no sense of what a dollar even is anymore. How old did they sound on the phone?”
“Not old.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Fifty, maybe. Hard to tell. Gravelly voice. You know. Hard to tell. When did you get so precious? When did you go back to giving a shit?”
It had gotten strange between us. Once it becomes routine to watch your girlfriend jerk off a guy while he sucks on her tit, something has gone really wrong. And I was certain she saw clients without me. I’d come home from a night out and she’d look far away from me while she was right next to me on the couch. Her silhouette looking blurry while we watched television. I didn’t say anything. I knew which variable could be dropped in our equation: I was the disposable one.
So I drove.
The entrance to Bermuda Dunes isn’t much different from all the others except how abrupt it feels, a sharp right turn into the gates. Some obscure provision about the point where Bermuda Dunes met La Quinta and Indio meant no one wanted to pay for a stoplight, so the four-way stop turns into a disaster about thirty times a day as everything backs up, waiting for the gate to let through guests and repair trucks and the endless chains of pool cleaners and landscapers.
Here’s a fun game: drive through the valley and count the beat-up white pickup trucks with a plug-in pool pump hanging off the bed, bungee strapped to a hand cart. And the wheels of the hand cart will be wrapped in duct tape. They clean the pools and sweat through the days, scrubbing down the walls with fifteen-foot extension poles because they aren’t allowed in the waters.
We were in line, the four-way stop lurching us in, when Mo leaned her seat all the way back, turned her back to me.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have a headache. All this stop and start.”
“Want to go home? You can cancel.” I was going to push on this point if she let me. Anything to not go in there.
“No. We are already here. I just need to rest my head.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
We continued to slowly roll into Bermuda Dunes, in pieces, as though the gates were taking bites from a long chain, chewing, swallowing, biting again.
“Different name today.”
“What?” She had a new standard fake name for gates. They never check it at these things, just look for the name on the list and wave you through, maybe print up a ticket for the dashboard. Veronica Hayworth. She said it was an inside joke, but I never got it.
“Yeah, they check IDs here,” Mo said. “So it’s under your name.”
“Fuck. We should get out of here. This whole thing feels like shit.”
“Come on, baby. Let’s get paid.” She looked at me and said it, something she had stopped saying to me a long time ago: “Please.”
She said please but it didn’t feel right. Please always feels like a pulling, like they are in front of you, leading you. But this time felt like a shove from behind, a hand between the shoulder blades. I stumbled forward.
And the cars kept worming up, chunk by chunk.
When we finally came to the booth, the guy looked straight at the list, barely glanced up at me at all. I thought he was just slacking off but then realized he was watching me the whole time, on a computer monitor linked to a camera above the door, pointed straight at me.
“Name.” Not a question.
I told him.
He handed me a printed-out card with a bar code, my name, and the address we were heading to. “Put that on the dashboard.”
I thanked him, pulled forward, listened to my phone tell me what turns to take. Mo sat up, suddenly feeling much better.
“He didn’t ask for my ID.”
“What?”
“You said they check IDs here. He didn’t ask for mine.”
“Maybe he forgot,” Mo said.
“Maybe.”
“It’s busy. Probably trying to get people through faster.”