Leaving Las Vegas (22 page)

“Where is the house? The one in LA, I mean.” He tells her and she knows it. One of Al’s later girls had worked in that house; in
fact, she claimed to have worked in a lot of houses, some very high pressure, some no longer around. Sera wonders if Ben ever clipped her. “Open this first,” she says, handing him the larger of the two gifts.

Always uncomfortable when receiving presents, or, more accurately, uncomfortable when presented with hard evidence that anyone would want to give him something, Ben reluctantly takes the package and unwraps it.

“Very nice,” he says, genuinely pleased as he holds the brightly colored shirt up to his chest. “This should work well with my suit.” And indeed, it does seem to complement the black suit he is wearing. “You know, this suit is the only clothing that I brought over from the motel. The shirt is a nice start, but I thought we could do some shopping eventually. It might be fun.”

“Of course,” she says, thinking it through. “I didn’t think about it before, but your suitcase must be full of liquor. You wouldn’t leave that behind. But what about the clothes? Where are they?… You threw them out, right?”

“That’s good,” he says, amused at following her thought process. “When living with a drunk it’s good to get in the habit of answering your own questions. I put them in the garbage behind the motel. But now that you mention it, I think that may have been a bit wasteful. I should have dropped them at some charity or left them on the street for the vagrants. In any case, they’re gone. I thought it would be a sort of cleansing. Except for what I’m wearing and that suitcase itself, that was the last of my stuff from LA. I feel lighter. It’s a good way for me to come to you, to your place.”

“Nice talk,” she says, and there is no sarcasm. “Keep drinking, Ben. It makes some interesting words fall from your mouth.” Then, with a smile, “They must slip out between the one-hundred-and-one-proof
breath and the occasional drool. Now try this one.” She hands him the remaining gift and sits back to gauge his reaction.

“Well,” he says simply, after opening the flask, “It looks like I’m with the right girl.” Turning it in his hands, he pauses to assemble his words. “I must say I’m rather impressed that you would buy this for me. I know it wasn’t done without some deliberation. Funny—how you did what I would have done.” He tries the flask in his pocket and, satisfied with the fit, goes into the kitchen to fill it.

“Do you want to do some gambling tonight?” she calls after him. “We could go out and play for a few hours.”

Returning to the room, he pulls his new flask out of his suit pocket and takes a drink, demonstrating its usefulness to her. He replaces it and smacks his lips, pats his chest with his open palm.

“I hadn’t planned to do much gambling, but if you’ll keep the bulk of my money here for me, I guess I can safely blow a couple of hundred bucks.” He reaches for his folded stack of bills and peels off two hundreds, then a third. Returning the three bills to his pocket, he hands the balance to Sera. “Giving you money makes me want to come,” he says.

Not sure how to take that, she takes it. “Then come. I’m going to change. Watch TV. I’ll be ready in half an hour.” She disappears into her bedroom.

He laughs to himself, thinking that she sounded ever-so-slightly offended by his stupid remark. Or perhaps the edge to her voice was an invitation to her bed, a frightening thought indeed, for in the back of his head is the nagging suspicion that his capacity for passionate lovemaking has been washed away in a tide of liquor and decline. Too much time spent looking in the mirror on the other side of the bar has revealed an image of a smelly, bloated, exhaustible, sick, self-indulgent man—not the
sort of man who incites concupiscence in a woman, certainly not the sort of man who satisfies it. He listens to Sera’s movements in the bedroom and thinks about his myriad deficiencies. They will become graffiti on her wall, ever larger and more intrusive as their lovemaking becomes habitual. The more he drinks, the worse it will get. He’ll probably be dead long before she realizes that the evening’s sex is over.

Ironically, though, he does want to come. His own quip has reminded him that it has been a while since he ejaculated; staying with Sera, he hasn’t been jerking off lately. He had planned to do it when he was alone at the motel but ended up forgetting. Suddenly he is preoccupied with it; he wants to come right now. The sound of running water indicates that she is busy in the bathroom, so he takes out his handkerchief and undoes his pants. Slowly, silently, he masturbates in her living room. He fantasizes about picking up a hooker tomorrow night when she is out working and, on that thought, comes painfully into his own hand.

“I’m ready,” she says, emerging from the bedroom fifteen minutes later. She wears a pale green summer dress: tasteful. Her hair falls freely, frames two mismatched earrings that nonetheless complement each other.

“I like your earrings,” he says. He has had time to put on his new shirt, which he wears under his suit. Were he harsher in the face he might look like a retired drug dealer, if there is such a thing. As it is, he looks good but slightly off balance. In fact he is off balance, having polished off the initial filling of his flask in order to embark on the evening’s activities armed with a fully loaded vessel. “I like women who wear mismatched earrings.”

“Well then, let’s hope that we don’t run into any tonight. I do expect some sort of loyalty here. Just because I fuck for money doesn’t give you cause to start picking up women and leaving me looking silly.” She holds her eyes firmly, and they seem to veto the
smile that sits beneath them. A technical jest that is an actual law, this is true communication, a woman at her finest.

“I only have eyes for you,… and we both know that you would never become romantically involved with a trick,” he says as he stands up.

She follows him into the kitchen, where he refills his flask and she phones for a cab. Turning out the light, they go out to the street and wait for the cab, which only takes a minute to arrive and collect them.

They are whisked to the Strip and in no time find themselves walking through the crowd and clamor of a hotel casino. Smoke fills the room and diminishes Ben’s depth perception so that he sees compressed montages of green felt littered with mottled chips, of ice filled glasses on glass filled trays, of ass-filled panties and tit-filled bras, and more cleavage than would seem probable in a species at this advanced stage of its evolution. Cocktail waitresses and keno girls wear costumes that flirt at inadequacy and lick his eyes with the promise of a stray pubic hair or a poorly concealed nipple. Country boys on vacation wear athletic tee shirts and fine gold chains around their necks. Trying to look intimidating despite their intimidation, they glare from behind their moustaches and hope that their bright-eyed, busty girlfriends don’t wonder too much what it would be like to bear a bit of unfamiliar semen back home, packed up somewhere between those milky midwestern thighs. The floormen wear suits and expressions of feigned usefulness. The place pops with quick detonations of elation and anguish, money won and lost. The ceiling spits light and pretends not to know about the cameras that it not-so-secretly dangles. Security men crawl like cockroaches on catwalks hidden behind one-way mirrors. Chrome hemispheres eye the room tirelessly, showing it back to itself again, ever-so-briefly after it first happens: a light jump away. The
outcome of each bet is decided before the evidence reaches anybody’s eyes, a quantum of radiant energy.

Ben absorbs what he can from the abundance of energy that surrounds him and uses it like a stimulant, now as a body charge and later, hopefully, to cheat himself into more liquor. Pushing Sera roughly against a slot machine, he kisses her deeply. Her first instinct is to resist, then to succumb as a means of self-preservation, and finally, after he eases up in reaction to the sound of change knocked over by her hip, she remembers that she has nothing to fear from this man, and succumbs as a natural segment of passion. He licks her cheek and pulls away. With the occasional, surprising dexterity of the always drunk, he stoops and collects the spilled quarters in one motion, stands and returns them to the entertained slot-machine player, who then goes back to his previous diversion. Ben grabs Sera’s arm and, with a healthy trot, leads her towards the bar. She keeps pace, happy in her heart with this quick upswing, admitting to herself the theatrical appeal of this alcoholic. Her life has had so little entertainment, and she digs the drama as well as the drunk. Anyway, he needs her, and for that, she loves him.

The sonic boom of an Air Force jet passing in the desert serves as the reference point at which Ben’s memory resumes its record. From his vantage point on Sera’s living room floor he can see, through the top of the window, that it is still dark outside but won’t be for long. Since he feels all right physically he knows that he has only been down for a few hours. Nonetheless, his first move is to a vodka bottle which he senses on the kitchen table. Starting on all fours and gradually rising to a slouch, he makes his way to the kitchen, where he pours eight ounces of vodka and two ounces
of orange soda into a dirty tumbler. He downs the warm mixture in less than a minute and waits over the sink, ready should his stomach reject the elixir. Satisfied that he’ll be able to hold it down, and instantly feeling on his way up, he steps quietly into Sera’s bedroom and eases next to her, on top of the sheet that covers her.

She turns her head, opens her eyes, and looks at him. “How are you doing?” she asks.

“Very well.… Umm, I never expected anyone to have to do this for me again, but could you tell me how our evening went? I blacked out about the time we got to the casino. I can’t remember any of it.” Despite the severe independence that he has gained by planning his own demise, he can’t help but feel the same old guilt that he used to know when he would pose similar requests to his wife. Back then he was truly interested in her answer, but he has long since become bored with these recaps. Now, it’s not so much that he cares about what he did last night, but more that he needs to find out how Sera feels about what he did, how Sera feels about him.

“It wasn’t so bad. I guess I would have been prepared for worse. We were sitting at the bar talking about blackjack. You seemed just fine—a little drunker than usual, but nothing really strange. Then I noticed your head start to droop, so I put my hand on your shoulder. Wham! You swung your arm at me and jumped back, falling off the bar stool and crashing into a cocktail waitress. Her tray was full when you hit her, so there was a terrible mess. You were yelling
Fuck!
over and over again, very loudly. I tried to shut you up and help you to your feet, but you kept swinging at me—not so much like you wanted to hit me, but more just waving me away. Security was there by then and you stopped yelling when you saw them. They weren’t sure what to do. They said they were
going to carry you out and dump you on the street, but they didn’t move. It’s probably a standard bluff. Things started to settle down, and I talked them into letting me walk you out.”

“What did you tell them?”

She looks at him flatly. “That you were an alcoholic and I would take you home. I also promised that you would never walk in there again.”

He nods and smiles for lack of a better reaction. “What happened next?” he asks.

“You were acting okay, so we walked for about a block. Then you said that you wanted to go home and fuck, but I think that even you knew that that wasn’t going to happen. We got a cab for home. You made us stop at a liquor store, though I tried to tell you that there was still plenty here. Oh yeah! I almost forgot. At the liquor store you got two bottles of vodka. It came to just over twenty bucks, and you gave the kid a hundred and told him to keep the change. I asked you if you knew it was a hundred dollar bill. You said you did, so I let you do it. Anyway, we got home, you made us some drinks, and ten minutes later you were asleep on the floor. I covered you up and came to bed.”

“I warned you. I’m sorry,” he says sincerely.

“Here’s my speech. I know that this shouldn’t be acceptable to me, but it is. Don’t ask me to explain. Maybe I’m not doing what I should be, but I think I’m doing what you need me to do. I sense that your trouble is very big, and I’m scared for you. But falling down in a casino is little stuff. It doesn’t bother me. It has nothing to do with us.”

“That’s amazing,” he says, truly impressed. “What are you, some sort of angel visiting me from one of my drunk fantasies? How can you be so old?”

She turns away on the pillow and says to the wall, “I don’t
know what you’re saying. I’m just using you. I need you. Can we not talk about it anymore. Please, not another word, okay?”

He strokes her back absently, reviewing this, lost in his own thoughts and feeling the gathering calm as the alcohol enters his blood in force. “Why don’t you go back to sleep. I’ll go out and buy you some breakfast.”

“Be careful,” she says.

“Don’t worry.” Standing, he walks to the door.

She calls after him, “Ben, I’m working tonight.”