To See You Again (25 page)

In fact, I was thinking two contradictory things at once: one, if I got into a bath, David would surely come back early, to find me looking a little silly in that tub. And, two, he would be down there for several hours. Weighing those possibilities, I pulled the draperies apart, more heavy pink velvet, and looked out into the still-bright late afternoon sunshine.

Close up, just outside the window, that filagreed concrete looked barely stuck together, and I had the San Franciscan’s familiar thoughts of earthquakes. Beyond all that dangerous lace stretched miles of casinos, giant signs that advertised casinos, miles of jammed thoroughfares, people, cars.

I closed the draperies and started my bath. Of course the tub filled very slowly, such an enormous volume; after what seemed a long time there was only about half an inch of water on the bottom. I rushed through with washing, somehow, thinking that actually I should have lingered; I would look much less foolish if there were a lot of water (maybe David would join me in the tub?) and besides, I probably had a lot of time to kill.

But I didn’t, no time at all: I was out of the tub and wrapped in a towel, deciding what to wear, when David burst into the room, grinning and exhilarated. “I knew it, you bring me luck!” he almost shouted, among welcoming swift kisses on my neck. “You’re wonderful—I may have to keep you around.”

Well, great. I would have liked to ask how much money he won, just out of interest, but I did not, and it didn’t matter; I was so pleased that he felt lucky; he was lucky and attributed it to me. And mostly I was terrifically pleased that he had come back so soon. And I thought, maybe that would be enough? No more machines and tables?

David had gone over to the telephone; he was dialing and getting room service. I heard him order champagne and a plate of hot Chinese hors d’oeuvres. He said, “They’re terrific here. I’m starving, aren’t you?”

I smiled, but I thought that since we were expecting room service we could not, just then, make love. No siesta. Also, I wished that I had brought something to wear other than the pink sweater tidily folded up in my bag, since David was feeling so festive. However, I saw no point in regrets on either score, or not for long. I got dressed, as modestly as I could, and David said how clever I was to bring a sweater that matched our pink velvet room, and we both laughed—in love, having a good time together.

The champagne arrived, and the hot Chinese hors d’oeuvres, which somehow made us hungrier; we reminded each other of all the San Francisco jokes about being hungry after Chinese food. We decided to go on down to dinner, to something called the Bacchanal Room.

Our high mood continued through dinner, in that crazy room which almost exceeded my fantasies of camp, of tackiness. The waitresses had obviously been selected for the size of their breasts—huge breasts bursting from the tops of their
miniskirted “Roman” tunics, as they bent down to pour out wine from great round green glass bottles. I finally saw a wine label on one of the jugs: Californian, fairly good and very cheap. David and I laughed at all that, amiably. I saw that we were having the fifty-dollar dinner, and I thought again how nice that everything was comp.

David said, “Do you realize that we’re celebrating two weeks of knowing each other? Two weeks ago tonight.”

I was very touched by his saying that; it was not something that many men would say, or even think of. I would have liked to tell him that I couldn’t believe it had only been two weeks, but that seemed too trite to say.

We smiled, and leaned together in a kiss, and whispered words of love to each other. “I am crazy about you,” I murmured to his ear, and at that moment I surely was.

All the wine, or simply the heady excitement of love, had made even the gaming room look better. Walking toward a roulette table, I felt a sense of possibility. Maybe we would go on being lucky, in dollars as well as love. Sometimes a few thousand can really improve your life, and it’s silly to think otherwise.

Several turns of the wheel later on, maybe fifteen minutes later, I caught a very unhappy look from David, which I took as a cue that maybe I was not, just then, Lady Luck; maybe it was time to walk around on my own for a while. I went over and whispered to him that I’d be back soon, I wanted to explore. He nodded distractedly, with the smallest smile.

Walking through those rooms, I was suddenly in an underworld of weird lights and unfamiliar, discordant and disturbing sounds, of money and machines. And faces: pale and harried, anxious underwater faces, all frighteningly
alike. And I remembered something strange: some years ago, having heard that mescaline was fun, lots of laughs and great sex, my then husband and I took some, and it wasn’t fun at all, or sexy; I went off into a nightmare of plastic buttons, weird clothes, plastic, everything distorted and ugly,
wrong
. I didn’t know the man I was with—my husband. Of course, at that moment in Las Vegas, I was not nearly as terrified as I was on mescaline, and at least I knew where I was, but I hated it, I was frightened.

I walked for as long as I could, trying, and failing, to find the wonderful tackiness that I had imagined. Also, I was afraid that David, losing money, would want to go on playing for most of the night. I was braced for that; I was perfectly ready to say, in a good-sport voice, that I didn’t mind at all, and to go up alone to our crazy fantasy room.

However, when I came up to him, touching his arm in a fairly tentative way, although for a moment he looked unsure about who I was (well, by that time I was not too clear about him either), in the next moment he looked relieved. He nodded good night to the people just next to him; he took my arm and we headed toward the elevator.

On the way up he said, “Well, I guess you can’t win every time.”

“I guess not.” I did not ask how much he lost, of course not.

Then at last we were in bed, finally making love. But even as we went through the familiar gestures, as we kissed and touched, as our rhythms meshed and accelerated, I had a crazy sense that we were not ourselves. We were any two people at all, tired people, straining for pleasure, in a room whose fantasy was not their own.

I had a thin sleep, disturbed by violent dreams that I could not remember in the morning. I looked over at David, already awake, just barely smiling, and saw how pale he
looked, how suddenly old. He must not have slept well either, and I hoped that was not a sign that we did not sleep well together. More likely we were disturbed by the unfamiliarity of the place, and David was unhappy about however much money he lost. We did not make love; we got up and dressed very hurriedly.

We had breakfast in a too bright cafeteria sort of place, where everyone looked as anxious and unrested as we did. On one wall there was a big flashing keno board, so that no one would have to miss one minute of the thrill of gambling. I asked David how keno was played, and he explained, minutely, but I found it hard to listen, much less to understand what he was saying.

At last we left that depressing room and walked out into the netherworld light that never changes, although it was actually about nine-thirty in the morning. With a meager smile David said, “Well, back to work,” and sinkingly I understood that he would probably be at the tables all day (“comp” doesn’t come exactly free). I thought I could go out and spend some time at the swimming pool; I wondered if he would even come out for a swim.

Suddenly, then, we were standing in front of a mammoth, double-sized slot machine, a giant, and David was saying, “Do you have any singles, by chance? This baby really pays, and you can put in up to three one-dollar bills.”

I had three singles in my change purse (and five twenties in my billfold; I knew exactly how much money I had which is how it is when you’re more or less broke, I’ve found—in flusher times I don’t precisely know, and rich people never know). I was getting my dollars out of my change purse, obligingly; I was about to start putting them into the maw of the machine when out of nowhere a tall gaunt
woman strode up to it. She was dark brown, sun-withered, with startling, ferocious bright blue eyes; she was wearing purple, with pounds of silver jewelry, an expensive old desert rat. With a challenging look at the huge machine she expertly slipped three dollar bills into its slot; with one heavily braceleted arm she reached for the lever and pulled it down. And a clanking cascade of silver fell into the trough.

Which would, of course, have been ours if I had got out my dollars a little sooner.

“Well,
Jesus
,” David said to me. “Why didn’t you—Oh Christ!” For at that moment she did it again, right in front of us: put in more paper money and pulled the lever and caused a deluge of silver dollars, all banging against each other.

David was so angry that for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. His face was pale and swollen, almost ugly, his eyes wildly large and dark; for a flicker of an instant I was reminded of his look in moments of sexual passion, but this was rage, pure fury.

Instead of hitting me (or maybe in order not to) he mumbled something: I’m sorry—I hate you—I’ll see you later? I honestly do not know which of those things he said; he turned away and walked off, a small neat man, going fast, I had no idea where.

I stood there, I watched the woman in purple, the cause of our trouble, as she shoved in a couple of dollars more, which did not pay off. Then she scooped up all her loot into an old cracked brown leather bag. She turned and looked at me as though she, and not I, had been abandoned (well, perhaps she was, years back) and then she too was gone.

In a blind way I headed toward where I thought the pool was, but I found only more rooms full of machines, for which, at that moment, I had no stomach. In one of them the light was jarringly bright—in fact there were spotlights all over—and I saw huge cameras. It was a movie set; they were
actually making a movie, at that very instant, in Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas. I recognized the star, in his canvas chair; it was Omar Sharif, anyone would have known him, with those big black sulky eyes. I had never liked him much, and it occurred to me then that he and David looked a little alike, although Sharif is larger and older than David, and I thought, in passing, how odd, to fall in love with a man who looks like a movie star you don’t really like.

I did not find the swimming pool, and I walked faster until sheer luck or something landed me in front of the elevators. Nowhere to go but back up to the fantasy tower, where I realized that I rather expected David would be. Maybe to apologize, or maybe to say what an unlucky person I was for him; why didn’t I leave?

I was answering that last accusation; in my mind I was saying to David, Well, what was I supposed to do, knock that woman down?—as I opened the door to an empty and unmade room.

Sunlight strained through a chink between the draperies, but I did not want to open them; I did not want to see (again—ever) that network of concrete filagree, so precariously stuck together, nor the acres of casinos just beyond. I did not want to see Las Vegas again, not ever.

That knowledge came over me with the force of cold water, a wave, and in the neutral temperature of that room I shivered for a moment, standing there perfectly still, and resolute. Then, suddenly galvanized, I rushed into motion. I pushed everything barely folded into my canvas bag (my “backpack”); for a moment I stared at my slightly awry image in the mirror, but decided to do nothing about how I looked, no effort at order.

I was thinking that David might come in at any moment, for whatever reason. Or someone might stop me, leaving
the hotel with my suitcase. Or, worst, I might not have enough money for air fare. Right then I decided to go home by Greyhound; there was a chance that David could have been at the airport, but he would never go by bus; I could not say why but I was absolutely sure of that. I hoped I had enough money for the bus.

My heart had risen to the top of my chest and it beat there violently, so that it was hard to breathe. But I made it from the room to the elevator without meeting David in the hall, and he was not, of course, in the elevator, going down.

Despite trembling legs and a displaced heart I got across the lobby; probably, actually, I was not the first person to leave that place, in that condition. Also I guessed that my suitcase could have looked like an oversized handbag, if anyone wondered.

A bellboy handed me into a waiting taxi, and I had to say “Greyhound” twice before the driver understood; I was having trouble with my voice, and probably that is an uncommon destination from Caesar’s Palace. As we flashed past those miles of casinos (the bus station was a long way off, worse luck) I thought, I
knew
, that I should have left a note for David, but I was really running scared, and besides, what could I have said, beyond something dumb about neither of us being quite the person the other one thought, which he had undoubtedly figured out on his own. What can you say to a person who really likes it in Las Vegas—who thinks it’s real?

My first piece of luck: there was a bus just leaving for Reno, where I would have to change for San Francisco. The long way home. It was also more expensive than the more direct way, through Bakersfield, would be, and I had just enough money, in fact three dollars over (the three that I did
not put into that machine, which must have meant something). I could have a hamburger in Reno. I bought my ticket and I got on, just in time.

The bus lurched into motion, out of the station, and onto a freeway where there were casinos all over the place. Again. But fairly soon we were past all that, and heading out into the desert.

I settled down for a fairly long trip, maybe boring, maybe in some ways a little frightening, so much desert. But from then on I was going to be all right, I thought.

The very old couple, of whom everyone at the beach is so highly aware, seem themselves to notice no one else at all. Tall and thin, she almost as tall as he, they are probably somewhere in their eighties. They walk rather slowly, and can be seen, from time to time, to stop and rest, staring out to sea, or to some private distance of their own. Their postures, always, are arrestingly, regally erect; it is this that catches so much attention, as well as their general air of distinction, and of what is either disdain or a total lack of interest in other people.