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Page 9


  “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.”

&
nbsp; “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.

  11

  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?”

  “Your husband gets killed,” Greta said.

  “We should talk,” he said.

  “I shouldn't say that,” Greta said.

  “You're among friends.”

  “I am, aren't I?” she said, gripping his shoulder in a surprisingly stout way. “Still, it's not something to take lightly, not a good idea to treat things that way.”

  “Maybe it's healthy,” Vaughn said.

  “Okay. We can drive around and I can point out the sites where my husband beat me. ‘Here's where he came after me with a belt when I burned the steak,’” she said, mock-pointing.

  “Ah, the memories,” Vaughn said.

  “The good news is that in the end he took one for the team.”

  “Greta—”

  “Sorry.”

  She stayed with Vaughn for a while longer, then said she was tired and wanted to sleep, so kissed him most circumspectly and went off to her room.

  Vaughn didn't feel much like sleep. He wandered down to the kitchen thinking that he really wanted to go back to Greta's house and watch television until daylight, then sleep until the afternoon. It was too spooky being back in his house. It had been dumb to come. Surely his being there was worse for her, especially if she was still having trouble going on. He thought it might keep Tony away, but with Gail going off in the middle of the night, that wasn't working. Gail was always a bit erratic, a little scary, prone to act quickly, as if hit with a cattle prod. It had been hard to figure her out when they were married, and it was harder now. Sometimes she seemed brilliant, gifted; sometimes she just seemed nuts. The stunt with Tony was typical, right up to where he beat her up—that was new. Still, a hopelessly wrong guy was par for the course. She'd done that before when they had trouble. There was the sign painter, a big heavy set guy with arms like Popeye; he turned out about the opposite of the way he looked. There was an alcoholic who wasn't allowed to drive but owned a big black truck in which he and Gail sped up and down the beach highway for a while, her at the wheel. One summer she even brought home a guy she met at the beach in Florida, a shave-his-head type with a cocky grin and artificial manners.

  Vaughn had been no saint. The worst was a woman at the office in Dallas. He and Gail were doing a trial separation. So he was with this other woman all the time. She was attractive, a designer at the firm. They spent nights together. They spent weeks together. They had sex. They went to dinner. They went to movies, to the zoo, for drives into rainy nights, to old restaurants with big wooden booths and white tablecloths. It looked like romance, but the truth was that Vaughn couldn't make himself care for the woman. She smelled odd. She didn't look right in the bed. She didn't act right. She didn't say the right things. She had a hard, brittle voice. He missed Gail. At the worst times he wept, and the woman held him. Try to imagine that now.

  They talked. She told him about her father, how her mother had abandoned her to her father. An ugly story, complete with details about her father slipping into the bathroom when she was a teenager coming home from a date, slipping his furry fingers into the waistband of her panties. The woman only wanted a decent relationship, and Vaughn gave her none of that. Eventually he and Gail patched things up.

  Years later he ran into the woman at a conference in Chicago. She was married and hoping to start a family. She and Vaughn had some drinks and a desultory tryst, sex in the hotel, all the usual; and in the aftermath some friend of her husband's saw them walking out of the hotel. He threatened to blow the whistle, so she ended up going to dinner with him. Vaughn left the conference early, never found out what happened.

  He tried calling her a few weeks later, tried a couple of times, but she was done with him. The calls were short and deadly.

  He thought now that they were probably too easygoing about such things in their marriage. The affairs were expected, assumed, allocated even, probably as much a matter of protection as anything—the air bags of their marriage. If you knew a wreck was coming, it didn't hurt to plan ahead. On the other hand, maybe the planning made the wrecks a little more likely, a little more frequent.

  Vaughn was rinsing a knife after making himself a peanut butter sandwich on raisin bread. The bread was older than it should have been. The knife had made a piercing metallic sound drawn against the other knives when he pulled it from the drawer. It was part of the silverware set she'd ordered from the Museum of Modern Art. Very handsome, now very old. He folded the sandwich up inside a doubled Bounty paper towel, caught the light switch with the sandwich as he left the kitchen. He walked through the dark house looking at the stuff he'd once owned with Gail—the furniture, the pictures, the knickknacks on the shelves. Nothing much had moved in the year since he left, and yet he felt as though he was in one of his neighbors' houses—somebody he did not know well or want to know well, just another person of about the same age, the same financial condition, the same limited vision. He shook his head at the stuff. The furniture was nondescript, the lamps were knockoffs of better lamps they couldn't afford or thought foolishly expensive. The couch—why had he even bought a couch? Useful, maybe, but impossibly ugly, certainly. Where had the training gone, the belief, the desire to furnish the house well, to buy only beautiful things? When
had the fatigue set in, and comfort and ease become more important than quality and provenance?

  He knew that everybody had crap in their houses, that all the houses he'd endlessly studied for so many years in Architectural Record, Domus, and dozens of other magazines that were the backbone of his real architectural study, were just fantasies, set pieces, tableaux, even if the world they suggested was one he had spent much of his life longing for the way a kid longs for the treats of Christmas morning.

  Vaughn went upstairs eating his sandwich. He couldn't remember what it felt like to be desperately in love. He felt almost nothing for Gail by now, though he knew his role and duty, and accepted those without question. He was comfortable seeing to her when she needed a hand. With Greta there was something more, something about prospects, just the suggestion of possibility—a small, certain warmth; less responsibility, more ease.

  He sat on his bed and tried to remember feelings he'd had but drew a blank. He could remember being in love with Gail many years before, but like so many things, the memory was by now just the name of the thing.

  You don't plan to lose that stuff, those feelings, but you become a different person over time, with different borders and parameters, different ideas, different ways of functioning. What you used to do you don't do anymore. You can't. You won't. So maybe the wife or girlfriend gets something short of your full romantic capacity. And you do, too. Pretty soon romance is diagrammatic.

  He was thinking about that word diagrammatic when there came a little tick on his bedroom door, and then the knob turned and the door opened and Gail was standing silhouetted against the hall light.

  “Can I come in?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  The only light in the bedroom was coming from the hall. Gail picked her way across the room, sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Where did you go when you went out?” he said.

  “I just went out for a while,” she said. “I had some things to do. I had to think.”

  “What about?”

  “What do you think I was thinking about?” she said.

  “Puppies?” he said. Even though he couldn't see her shaking her head, he could see her shaking her head. “Sorry,” he said.