To See You Again (24 page)

He told us that he was a lawyer, and I was struck, at that moment, by the odd fact that the only lawyers I know
these days are young women—friends of about my own age, I mean. The men I know are in what could be loosely described as the arts, although you would have to stretch that to include journalism and some commercial art. Which, according to a rather conservative friend of mine, explains why I have so often been dumped: I tend to be drawn to “unreliable” artists, beginning with my husband, a painter, who cut out for New York when I was pregnant with Barbara, just leaving a note. (This was not as bad as it sounds; we were not getting along well at all, and it is probably harder to bring up a child with a husband you don’t get along with than by yourself, or that’s what I imagine. Besides, like so many good artists, my husband—my former husband—was much more successful in New York than out here, and sometimes sent money for Barbara.)

Anna asked David what kind of law he practiced, and he said that actually he was in investments. “I still find it exciting, sometimes,” he said, and he laughed in an appealing way. “Basically I’m just a gambler.”

I said that sounded like fun, which it suddenly did, and I got a beautiful smile from David. “Well, it is,” he said.

How is it that certain things between people become so quickly clear? I don’t know, no idea, but quite soon it was obvious that David and I were—relating? communicating?—were compellingly drawn to each other, would probably spend the rest of the evening together, and probably in bed. It was clear too that Anna didn’t mind or feel left out; actually she seemed pleased at the situation, as though she had introduced us to each other, and I could feel her thinking, Oh, at last someone sensible for Maud, a lawyer in a three-piece suit. Also—the early luck of lovers—she was meeting the current man in her own life at the airport, coming up from L.A., later on. And so we all three talked and laughed,
and David and I stared at each other with curiosity, sneaking smiles—and with an almost breathless anticipatory lust.

Then Anna went off to meet her Hollywood friend’s plane, and David and I came back to my place, on Pixley Alley, where Barbara (ten, old enough to be left alone, I hope) was already asleep. And immediately, on my old brown corduroy sofa, we fell to kissing and touching, to falling in love.

Like Romeo, he left my house near dawn, a faint yellow light that seemed an enemy, so famished were we still for more of each other—although, by then, so utterly exhausted. But I am bringing up Barbara, or trying to, in a way that could be thought prim, old-fashioned; I do not force the fact of my lovers upon her attention; for the most part I keep them out of sight. And actually there haven’t been so many; my experience with my husband scared me off men for a while, and I was very busy then with Barbara. But I have had a couple of long-term involvements that ended badly, by being dumped; I don’t seem to know when to get out first.

In David’s case, however, being so much in love, I asked him for dinner with me and Barbara, the very next night.

He and Barbara got along well. I had made a spicy pot roast that is one of her favorites (and also, I remembered at some time during dinner, the favorite of the last lover in my life before David came along), and David liked it too, and we all ate and laughed a lot together. Obviously used to meals with kids, David did not ask about school or her plans for being a grown-up; instead he mentioned a couple of movies that he’d seen, and he said that when his kids were little he used to take them to the small beach in the Marina, very near us—Barbara and I used to go there too, which she remembered.

And, aside from a few furtive but uncontrollable embraces
when she was doing something in another room, we waited for Barbara to go to bed, to fall asleep. And then we rushed together, wild and insatiable. And tender. In love.

Two weeks later, that was how we still were, still wildly in love, and astounded at our luck in meeting, although a few problems of a practical nature had made themselves apparent; namely, money and children. About money problems David was very direct, which I liked. When I asked him for dinner again, he said, “It’s really good of you to cook. I’m trying to stay out of restaurants until the next infusion of silver comes along,” and he laughed, making it okay, not grim; and he always brought along the wine. The child problem was harder to get around, though; his three spent weekends with him, and if they met me just then, he thought, they would tell their mother and she would be even angrier, more demanding when they got to court, and it would not be fair to tell them not to tell her, too burdensome. And so the second weekend of knowing each other we were apart for two whole days, early (very early) Saturday morning until late Sunday night. Barbara was less of a problem, having met and liked David; still, she was why we didn’t get to spend the night together.

But the weekend after that—it seemed a miracle—we got to go away together. His wife was taking the kids somewhere, to see her parents, I thought—and Anna offered to have Barbara stay with her; Barbara loves North Beach. And so—a weekend away. We were going to Las Vegas.

About Las Vegas, I was not entirely clear on why David thought that was such a good idea, other than his having had some good luck there, just before we met. But actually I didn’t care, and in my fantasies Las Vegas was so awful that it was almost great: supremely tacky, high camp.

We were even going to stay at Caesar’s Palace. I wondered about that—it sounded expensive—until David explained that at Caesar’s Palace he was “on comp”—which, he then further explained, meant that everything is complimentary, the room and the food and drink. “I’ll just have to roll a few dice,” he said, laughing. Actually I didn’t much care where we went, I was so reveling in the prospect of sleeping and waking together.

Picking me up to go to the airport, David seemed a little surprised by my suitcase, a striped canvas bag that I have always liked. He eyed it, said, “What a curious bag.”

“Well, it’s very practical; you don’t have to check it on planes,” I explained, and then overexplained, “You said not to bring too much; no one dresses up, you said.”

“Oh, baby, it’s a terrific bag, don’t fuss. It’s just that it looks sort of like a backpack.”

Feeling criticized, and fighting that feeling, I then began to think how surprised and pleased he would be to find that I had brought mainly wonderful nightclothes. In that way, with those thoughts, I succeeded in cheering up.

On the plane, drinking champagne (comp of the airline), we passed by the most glorious, fantastic clouds that I had ever seen: white and mountainous, almost imperceptibly shifting, like avalanches, and all that whiteness gilded with the sun, in the California and then Nevada mid-afternoon, in late spring. They must have been omens of some sort, those clouds, I thought; our weekend would be as glorious as clouds.

  •  •  •

We landed at the Las Vegas Airport, nothing remarkable. Perfectly all right. Why then did I experience a moment of panicked craziness, in which I imagined myself actively going mad, running amok? I saw myself crazily hitting someone (David?) or flinging myself on the bright green carpeting, in a child’s tantrum. That passed quickly, however, a hallucination; I held David’s arm and we pressed together sexily, walking along toward the Avis desk.

There were slot machines all around; well, of course there were, and only that fact made that airport different from any other where I had been. Taking my arm from David’s for a moment, I reached into my bag for quarters; coming up with several, I told him that I would be right back.

But he restrained me. “No, don’t do that now.”

“Oh, why not?” I was really surprised, he looked so serious.

“Well, if you didn’t get a jackpot right away I’d think we were jinxed. The whole weekend shot.”

He laughed, but clearly he meant it; I guessed that he was superstitious over money. And then it was clear to me that he was serious, really serious about making money on that trip, and I thought, Oh, poor David, how foolish you are. (I was not in wonderful financial shape myself, at that time, having been demolished by the I.R.S., but I had seen no need to tell David about my money problems; why add to his.) I secretly planned to see that we spent most of our time in bed.

Falling in love with people you hardly know of course is in some ways a problem, it then occurred to me; you know the shape and taste of each tiny vein in their flesh, and all their secret smells, but maybe not how they feel about money, for example, or how they really like to spend their time when they are not making love.

  •  •  •

By the time we got to the car, then, I was braced for heading straight for the tables, and hoping for the respite of a short siesta (I love siestas; the best time for love, I think) between gambling and our dinner. And so I was quite surprised when, in the rental air-conditioned Cougar, heading out of the airport, David said, “I really want you to see some of the land around here. The desert. We don’t have to go as far as Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, but I’ll head down in that direction. First.”

Another problem of not knowing a person well: when he’s making some sacrifice for you, you can’t tell him that you don’t really mind, it’s perfectly okay to go on into town and start shooting craps, or whatever, right away.

However, thigh to thigh, in the cool new Cougar, speeding out on the wide white highway, at first it seemed wonderful, interesting: strange rock formations in the distance and, nearer to hand, all that sand and brush, like a set for a cowboy movie.

Out there on the desert it was terribly hot, I could see that, could almost see the heat in the shimmering blue air, but inside the car it was cold—too cold, but I hated to complain, and for all I knew it was comfortable to David.

And very soon it got monotonous, all that gray sage. And frightening: I began to think of missiles, ballistic ranges, nuclear tests. I wondered why there were no rabbits around, it had so much the look of rabbit country; and then, as quickly as I wondered, I thought that probably they had all been killed, war victims, dying of guns and cancer.

David could have been reading my mind, for at the moment that I had my sinister rabbit thoughts he said, “Well, actually it is a little grim, isn’t it. Think we might as
well head back?” And he turned off the air conditioner and rolled down a window. We were instantly warm—hot, really—but that seemed preferable to the unnatural cold, in the menacing gray desert. We turned around, and headed back toward Las Vegas—going much faster, I noticed, than when we were headed out.

Caesar’s Palace: it must cover several city blocks. Acres of white filagreed concrete, rising in towers, in endless curved archways—much more Indian than Roman in appearance. In fact, in moonlight or a heavy dusk it could be miraculously mysterious. Close up, in the harsh sunlight of midafternoon, in spring, it was just violently tawdry, a monumental excrescence.

Which should have prepared me for the interior, but it did not. David and I walked into a series of enormous rooms that could have been subterranean, so dim and unreal was the light. And in those rooms were
a million slot machines
, at least a million; every space for walking was an aisle between those consummately garish, volcanic machines. Everywhere people feeding in money, jerking handles, scooping it up. Everywhere money, and smoke; everyone was smoking, and most of them drinking something. That afternoon could have been the middle of the night, been anywhere at all—the middle of hell.

I whispered to David, “It’s unreal.”

“Oh no, baby. It’s real, all right.”

David seemed to know where he was going, and I followed his not quite familiar shoulders; I behaved as though it were perfectly okay, the tacky-funky place of my imagination. I could not wait for us to be alone, to touch and kiss, familiarly. And a great fear seized me that he would want to
start gambling right away; at any moment he could have put our bags down beside a machine, or one of the black tables where cards were being dealt, chips thrown out, along with dollars. He could have stopped there and smiled at me and said, “Well, how about it?” and I would have had to smile back and say okay—a good sport, a friendly lover. I could almost see and hear him saying that, but surprisingly he did not; he continued past another roomful of machines (that I could see was labeled “Salon di Slots”) until we were at a check-in desk, and then a few minutes later, after a quick encounter with the computer, we were standing at a bank of elevators.

“We’re in what’s called the New Fantasy Tower,” David said to me, and we smiled at each other in the private way of happy lovers.

The other people who went up with us in the car, to the fantasy tower, were large and pale, Midwestern-sounding. I paid very little attention to them; they seemed quintessential Las Vegas visitors.

We got out and went down a red-carpeted hall to our room, and David opened the door. At first glance it was a fantasy room, a very sexual fantasy. A round bed covered in pink velvet, with a round mirror on the ceiling, and not far from the bed, an elevated pink tiled bath, also round, and as large as the bed.
Well
. How super, is what I thought, at first. But right away quick second thoughts leapt forward. For one thing, new lovers, so far confined to sneaking around in the dark, David and I were not used to so much naked exposure to each other. Even the washbasin was out in full sight of the bed, no way to brush your teeth without the other person watching, much less to take a bath—and bathing together, at such an elevation, in the middle of the room, seemed somehow too forward a step for us, just then. It was a room for
just sex, a man coming into a hooker’s room, or she into his for an hour or so, and then leaving, no brushing teeth or washing faces. No breakfast together.

Looking at David, I thought I saw or felt the same conclusions on his face; he looked shy, slightly taken aback. And as I started to open my bag he said, “Well, I guess you’d like to wash up? This may be a good time for me to go downstairs and roll a few. Keep up my comp status.”

He smiled and I smiled back, and we kissed in a friendly way as I thought how sensitive he was, how delicate his instincts. But then as he smiled again, and left the room, I thought, Dear God, he could stay down there for hours. I panicked; what would I do?