Free The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry

just liked to feel composed and sort of ready when the curtain went up.
    Down below she saw Bonventre still in the wings, still arguing with Monique, although it couldn’t have been more than three minutes to curtain. She could hear the audience sort of rumbling and the clink of lots of plates and glasses being stacked none too gently. The waiters hated to work after the curtain and were probably grabbing plates of coq au vin or trout amandine out from under the noses of people who still thought they had a few minutes and were sometimes kind of indignant at not getting to finish eating, after all they had worked for their money and paid for their dinners. Fortunately they still had their drinks or their champagne and once the show started would soon forget about all those uneaten English peas.
    As usual both of Gary’s assistants were working with Jessie, her headdress was on at a tilt but finally they got it right and hustled her up on the disc. Harmony heard a curse from way backstage, evidently just one of the magician’s pigeons getting loose. Then the announcer announced the show, he was a very handsome guy named Jerry Fowler, Harmony had dated him awhile just about the time she was leaving the Trop. Jerry really wasn’t very enthusiastic about anything except the sound of his own wonderful voice, that and occasionally blackjack, but he had done her the favor of introducing her to Ross, who atthe time was too shy even to speak to her, she was just really getting famous then and was pretty sought after. As a light man Ross didn’t suppose he could aspire to date a showgirl, particularly not a famous one like her. Ross had had a very slight opinion of himself and for that matter probably still did. Harmony had done her best to convince him he was cute, even going so far as to marry him and have Pepper, but she soon had to admit that the slight opinion wasn’t going away. One of his main lines was “This is too good to be true.” Gary had explained to her that some men just practically couldn’t accept being loved, they didn’t feel worthy at all.
    Standing on the disc, with the show finally assembled down below her, all the dancers in place, Harmony felt a little pang. In some ways Ross had been the sweetest of all, maybe that was why he was the one she actually married. The funny thing that only a few people in Las Vegas knew, just Gary and Jessie and a couple of others, was that they weren’t even divorced. In the eyes of the law they were as married as ever. People kept saying Harmony get it and a couple of times she had thought well, maybe I should, but she had just never gotten around to it. There had been no one else she exactly felt like marrying, and apparently Ross hadn’t found anyone that would apply to either, if so he hadn’t mentioned it in the little notes he wrote when he sent the money. She had never even discussed the fact with Pepper, it was sort of a forgotten thing, even she forgot about it most of the time, but the truth was she was married to a man she hadn’t seen in fourteen years.
    It didn’t bother her, just once in a while something would bring him to mind and she would find herself wondering how bald he was by now. The little bald spot upset him almost as much as the thought of a dimpled ass upset Jessie. If Ross was ever late to work it was because he spent too much time trying to figure out ways to comb over thebald spot. That too was kind of sweet, they lived in a motel then and it was memories of Ross standing in the tiny bathroom trying to comb hair over his bald spot that kept sort of giving her the pangs now and then. One definitely came as she waited on her disc, but then it was finally show time, the orchestra struck the first notes, the curtain began to come up, lights flooded the stage, the disc began to go down, and at just the right moment, when the brilliant light struck her legs, Harmony spread her arms and smiled.

II

    T HE T HING about Madonna that Pepper