Waveland (11 page)

It's funny. You can still go through the motions; you can still do what you've always done—go to work, go to dinner, talk to people—but it rolls off you. If you're lucky you take up with somebody like Greta. She's charming and funny, and you're happy to have a companion whose view of things is not altogether different from your own. You live in her garage apartment for a couple of months, and you imagine things happening, and you manage to make friends with her to a sufficient degree so that you are invited to move into the house. You take up this new position with enthusiasm, but even that is a little manufactured. You don't know what she thinks or what she is planning or what she is looking for or why she's invited you in; but you go, nonetheless, and accept the room that is offered and arrange its parts elegantly, simply. You try not to detract. You try to listen, but sometimes you just slide away in your mind.

Sometimes, when you are putting your arms around this new woman it seems as if you are remembering your role, your lines, as if your
ability
to put your arms around someone is somehow reduced. Sometimes, when you touch the skin of her face, it only reminds you of having touched the cheek of a person you were once crazy about. You smell her hair. You shut your eyes, smelling her hair. You hold her close, her back to you, smelling her hair. Your eyes closed, your hands on her forearms, on the backs of her hands. You feel her weight against you, and you remember when you felt the weight of someone you were desperate about. In short, you
mimic yourself, and you wonder, Does she know? It doesn't destroy your connection to her, which is quiet, genuine, caring. Comforting, but lacking, perhaps, in intensity. The wind doesn't mean everything the way it did once. The rain is not shot through with the richest melancholy; it is just rain. This is a substantial loss.

Greta got up, scraping her chair against the deck. “I need another beer. What about you?”

“Sure,” he said. “You want me to get it?”

“I'll go,” she said. “I need to repair myself. Back in a flash.” She went inside, leaving him on the deck. He got up and stretched and leaned against the rail, leaned out to look around the eave of the house at the moon, which was egg-shaped and glowing in the sky. “She wants friends with interesting names. But not
too
interesting,” he said to no one, to the lake. “She ought to have friends first.” He sat down again and propped his bare feet on the white railing, silhouetted against the dark water. He regarded the length of his first and second toes as similar. Bad for dancing. Ducks flew by and splashed into the water, quacking. He rocked and waited for Greta.

When she returned, she had beer and peanuts, a jacket, and a grin on her face. “You know, I think we ought to get things straight, like what we're doing together,” she said.

“Oh, let's don't,” he said. “I want an interesting name. Blackie, maybe. How about that? Call me Blackie. I'll be interesting in an angry way. I'll be angry about everything— TV, people, the government, my too-successful brother. I'll be angry about me and you.”

“You're already most of that,” Greta said. “Why about us?”

“We're not thirty.”

“Right,” she said, pretending to take a note. “Wants a thirty-year-old.”

“If she could be on a leash,” Vaughn said. “So I could stop her from saying things I don't want to hear and doing things I don't want done and from putting on improper clothing.”

“The Disciplinarian,”
Greta said.

“Thirty may be a little old,” he said.

“Wow!” she said. “The eighty-four-mile-per-hour fastball.”

“Nasty. You're nasty for an old girl,” he said.

“I am not nasty. That's for sure. I'm here by the lake with you and your ex. Living life to the fullest.”

“We're bound to be dead any minute,” he said. “Figuratively speaking we're dead already.”

“We are not. We watch
Oprah
. We watch HGTV. We cling to the reality show of the moment.
Design Star
. We're right here. We're physically here, three-dimensionally here. We don't
look
dead.”

“We're debris,” he said.

“Oh, please,” she said. “We're as good as anybody—Gail, Eddie, the kids in their cars screwing. Are they debris? People in the movie theaters, or the people making the movies? Same, same. Being debris is some idea you have. Probably came from your dead father—”

There was a bit of silence then. He listened to her crunch her peanuts. A V-shaped ripple crossed the surface of the lake as a duck, which he couldn't actually see, swam away from them toward a light on the far shore.

“Sorry,” Greta said. “I didn't mean to mention your father. Are you going to start?”

“Pardon me?” he said.

“On your father. Are you going to start?”

“No, I am not going to start,” he said.

“Where are the roaches? Shouldn't there be roaches out here? I guess winter's coming. Besides, she probably has the place sprayed every fifteen minutes,” Greta said. “I know that sounds hostile, but I didn't mean to be hostile. I think that's a good thing. If I could afford it, I'd get sprayed every fifteen minutes. I mean, my house.”

“Gotcha,” he said.

“I think we should go out to a casino and gamble,” Greta said. “Right now.”

“What time is it?”

“I think it's one, maybe two,” she said.

“Too much trouble,” he said. “You get excited and think you're a dangerous creature on dangerous ground. You throw away more money to be more dangerous, more thrilling. You swagger and wear cowboy boots, which make you taller and make you swagger, a double bonus. But then you remember the adage:
Be not the cowboy who owns no horse.”

“You have boots in your closet. I saw them,” Greta said.

“My father was very matter-of-fact when he died,” he said.

“Here we go,” she said.

“No, I just remember how matter-of-fact he could be. And he could be matter-of-fact at the most inopportune times,” he said. “Everyone thought it was insensitivity.”

“Was it?” Greta said.

“I don't know,” he said. “When Gail's mother called to tell her that her father died, I answered the phone. Her mother told me what had happened, and I went in the other room and woke Gail and said to her, ‘Your mother's on the phone. Your father died,’ and I handed her the phone.”

“Oh, man,” Greta said. “That's harsh.”

“I just remembered it,” he said. “I don't know why I did that.”

“It didn't occur to you to let the mother tell her?”

They both heard the garage door open, so they looked back across the yard in that direction. They could see in through the kitchen window, and out through the kitchen door, as the garage door rolled up and Gail's car backed right out into the street and shot away.

Vaughn turned to Greta and said, “What's that?”

“Looks like your wife is going out.”

“Where's she going? It's two in the morning. You just said.”

“It's past two,” Greta said. “It was two a while ago. I don't know. Maybe she's going to get a sandwich? Take a drive?”

“Fuck,” he said. “Come on, let's go.”

“We're following her?”

They went inside, upstairs to their rooms for shoes and such, then back downstairs and out the back door and into Greta's car.

There wasn't a lot of activity on the streets of Pass Christian at that time in the morning. They'd been too slow leaving the house, so they couldn't find Gail. They went straight out to the beach highway and looked at each other, trying to figure out which way to go.

First they went west to the bay bridge. Nothing there.

“She can't be here,” Vaughn said, pointing at the closed bridge. There were few cars out. For a while they didn't see anybody, then they came up behind a pickup in Henderson Point going east and a cop going at high speed but without
the siren. They followed the beach highway heading east. The night was chilly, and they let the windows in the car down. They drove past a pyramidical church that had survived the storm. It had lit-up steeples, veils of spotlights shooting off into the sky above it.

“Catholic,” Greta said. “Strange, huh?”

They drove through Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, and over to Biloxi. The coast was eerily empty. The year-long leftover mess from Katrina lining the highway was shocking in the moonlight. When they got to the Beau Rivage Greta said, “You want to go in?”

The casino wasn't as gaudy as the old casinos. It didn't look like a thirty-story pinball machine.

“You might have a good time,” she said.

“I don't have money,” he said.

“I have money,” she said. She turned into the parking garage and they swirled up the ramps until she tucked the car into a parking space between two white SUVs. “Let's do a walk-through.”

“And give up on Gail?” he said.

“We're not going to find Gail out there tonight,” Greta said. “If she left, she had someplace to go. Let her go.”

Inside, the Beau Rivage was all casino cliché—intricate purple carpet, nonstop dinging, too many people, row on row of blinking slots, a gold ceiling, piped-in rock hits blanketing everything, guys in white shirts and string ties, women in tiny skirts and push-up bras, a surplus of chatter. They stopped at the dice table.

“You played blackjack, right?” Greta said. “You played the tables in there?” She pointed to the high-stakes pavilion.

“Yes, I did. Night after night. Now, let's go somewhere else.”

“Are you afraid?” she said. “We're just walking through, looking at it.”

“I don't want to look at it. I'd rather be outside somewhere looking at I don't know what—beavers at the lake. Nutria.”

“You've got nutria in that lake?” Greta said.

“One. We took a picture of it. Tried to tell the people in the neighborhood it was a nutria and that we should leave it alone, but they killed it. They had guns.”

“Do you know the true history of the nutria?” she said.

“I don't,” he said.

“This guy brought them up from South America and was going to farm them, do something with them, sell them for food or something. Brought them to Louisiana, but they multiplied like rabbits, and then there was a hurricane or something that blew them off his nutria farm, and now they are a plague upon this nation.”

“Ours looked like a beaver,” he said. “With a rat's tail.”

“Rat beaver,” she said.

One of the fifty-dollar blackjack tables was operational— one guy playing, one watching. Two other tables had dealers but no customers. There was a short guy in a suit, the pit boss. Greta nudged Vaughn and sat down at an empty table. The dealer, a woman in her twenties with curly gold hair, started to shuffle. She had six decks it looked like, a shoe to deal from. The shuffle was elaborate. It involved shuffling various sections of the six decks of cards and placing them on the felt table, then combining the piles in specific ways. Eventually she got the six decks together, Greta cut with the yellow card, and the dealer put the cards into the shoe. Greta pulled out a credit card.

“This is a fifty-dollar table,” the dealer said. “If you want to play smaller stakes tables they're out there.” She pointed to the main floor of the casino.

“We know,” Greta said. She dropped the card on the table.

Without looking away, the dealer moved the credit card to her right and called the pit boss.

Greta asked for five hundred dollars' worth of chips. “Sit,” she said to Vaughn.

“We ought to go out there,” he said, pointing to the cheaper tables.

“I want to play here,” she said. “It's more fun here.”

“Does any of this look like fun?” he said, waving at the room.

“Not yet,” she said. “Just hang on. I didn't tell you, but I'm a blackjack genius.”

She got twenty chips, all green. She put two on the circle in front of her, and waited for cards. First hand out she got sixteen against a face card for the dealer. Greta hit, got a four, stood, and won fifty dollars. Second hand she got a blackjack. Third hand she got a pair of aces, which she split and got two face cards. Fourth hand she got a three and a seven and an ace when she hit. It went on like that for a while. When she was twelve hundred dollars up, she waved a hand at the dealer to stop. “Color me up, will you?” she said. The dealer did, and they walked over to the cage to pick up the money.

“Nicely done,” Vaughn said.

“Happens all the time,” she said. “Whenever I play. If you only play a few hands, you come out ahead.”

“Is that a mathematical certainty?”

“It's magic,” she said. “I saw it on TV. Blackjack is like flipping a coin. If flips start going your way, keep flipping.”

“So if you lose the first few hands?”

“Quit,” she said. “Try again later.”

She was hungry, so they went upstairs where there was a little café. He had pancakes. They were good—puffy and covered with whipped cream and strawberries and drizzled with maple syrup. Sick but good. Greta ate off his plate.

“We shouldn't be doing this, you know,” he said. “My heart.”

“It'll be fine. We'll work out tomorrow in that gym back at the castle.”

“No gym, sorry,” he said.

“I can't believe you actually bought that house,” Greta said. “I mean, it's a really big, really ugly, brick house.”

“I don't think it's that ugly,” he said.

“I don't mean it's
ugly
, but it's that kind of house—it's a banker's house.”

“If only,” he said.

When they got home, Gail's car was locked up tight in the big garage and no light was escaping under the master bedroom door, so there wasn't much left for Vaughn and Greta to do. They sat in Vaughn's room for a bit.

“How long are we doing this?” she asked.

“Got no idea,” he said. “Maybe just a week or two, maybe longer. You think it's crazy?”

“Yeah, it's a little crazy, but I don't mind. It's a change of pace. And I like seeing your house. She didn't change much, did she? It was like this when you were here?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Seems funereal now. More drapey.”

“It has this ‘you have arrived at your destination’ feel to it,” Greta said. “Reminds me of the house I had with Bo. It's not a good feeling.”

“It's a bird around your neck. Like, how will you ever get away?”