Fay Weldon - Novel 23

by Rhode Island Blues (v1. 1)

  William and Felicity parked underground in a vast dark concrete cavern, and rose by lift to glassy, noisy, much peopled levels. Here gathered were the blue-haired and the bald, the disabled, the quick - not many - and the lame, the fast - not many - and the slow; united in the wafting smell of junk food cooking, in the solidarity of a common enterprise, the warmth of companionship, of shared elation and despair, of instant empathy one for the other. If there was a common enemy it was the Casino and its profits, yet how they rushed to embrace it, how friendly they found the foe, how moody and attractive the wall of noise; the beating pulse of vaguely familiar music, the background susurrus of a thousand slot machines, tinkling their triumph and their sorrow, generously disgorging money. The soft smiles and greetings of management. Give us your money and all will be well. We will not let you come to harm. Trust us. Here was one vast family of choice: here was home, companionship, support, charged by the agreeable excitement of risk, the continuation of youth by other means. Challenge for the brave at the blackjack tables, at craps, brisk male voices acting father, censorious - Surely for once you can get just this right: place your counter over the line, please, not on it: over I said, are you deaff - soft maternal female voices for roulette - You're sure this is what you want to do, you're suref And on the slots in shadowed halls at last the friendly siblings you never had, legion upon legion of them, row upon row of sharers in delight, hypnotized in concert at the family prayer wheels: whirling sevens, bars, cherries, jackpots.

  Booths everywhere: booths for change, booths for cash, booths for turning tokens into money, money into tokens: a temple given over wholly to moneychangers. Security cameras sweeping back and forth, back and forth, for your protection not your detection. Surely. Punters wandering, gawking and gaping, but knowing what to do, how to be, what the rules were. It was obvious to Felicity that she did not. And William walked ahead: she followed close behind. If she lost him she would be a time-traveller stranded in a future: she would never get back home. She saw that she had lived a long life on some other quiet planet, powered by the rising and the falling sun, but still unnatural. Here in this Casino was a wholly satisfactory alternate universe, the true one, as provided by a restless tribal nation obliged to settle down, created out of the male imagination for the delectation of women, and the furtherance of male power, the forces of nature quite undone.

  William realized he was walking too fast, and slowed and took Felicity’s arm. He took her elbow: the floor was glittery with some unknown substance. She hoped her feet would stay comfortable: there were women of her age wearing trainers; she’d sworn never to do so: but you could always change your mind.

  ‘This is nothing compared to Vegas,’ said William proudly. ‘Let alone Atlantic City. Good taste personified.’

  A central glass giant, a well-muscled Indian, milky white, in the attitude of Rodin’s The Thinker, towered above all else, directing the last battle. The white man was tricked, after all, and wandered lost in woods, and didn’t even know it. This was where victory and prosperity had led him. He had come to these shores wanting gold, and freedom, and killing to get it: now what he wanted destroyed him. A Japanese car, today’s prize, circled gracefully at his feet on an orange plinth.

  William, however, seemed far from destroyed. Twenty years had dropped away from him as the lift rose.

  ‘Much better than Vegas,’ said William. ‘I was five years in Vegas, two in Atlantic City. This Casino you get a better return on your money than anywhere else in the States.’

  ‘You said you were a teacher in a New York high school,’ she said, sadly. You told lies to men to get out of trouble, as you had to your father, yet expected them to be father, and not tell lies in return. Exon was the exception: he didn’t tell lies: he had no imagination. His fancy never outran his caution. And though his loss still grieved her, there was no denying he was the most boring man in the world. The wicked make better company than the good. ‘I was,’ he said. ‘But gambling paid better. For a time. Until I had a run of bad luck. Margaret went to law to get the house. It had been in my family since it was built: 1890. That didn’t stop her. The courts don’t look kindly on a gambling man. They don’t appreciate the work that goes into it. Now Margaret lives there with Tommy’s boys, and they let it fall down around them.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ It wasn’t a reproach. She wanted to know.

  She stood still in the crowd, which flowed gently by like a river, parting without aggression. Everything lacked definition: seen through a vision darkly, like Dr Rosebloom in the mirror. She remembered her mother’s dressing table, when she was a child. Rodin’s The Thinker in Lalique glass, milky blue, a Chinese ceramic powder bowl, a hairbrush and mirror set, silver-backed. Her father moved nothing after her death. A month later the brush still held a single red hair: the puff stayed in the powder bowl, as if one day her mother would just come back and continue. But how could she: she was dead. There was a little pile of hairnets behind the powder bowl, made of a delicate mesh of finest brown silk within an elasticized circle of ribbon. Women slept in hairnets in those days, so as not to muss their hair. Every time you washed your hair you removed the grease but left a fine film of soap behind. You put vinegar or lemon juice in the rinsing water but still you couldn’t get it out, still it refused to shine, she remembered her mother lamenting. You could buy hairnets at Woolworths, her mother said, cheaper but just as good as anywhere else. Little Felicity would choose to stretch the nets between her hands and look at the world through them: a fine crisscross of brown between her and reality, distorting it but softening it.

  ‘Careful,’ her mother said, when she was alive. ‘Don’t break it. It’s so delicate.’

  Now why had she remembered this after so long? What was her mother’s name? How could you forget your own mother’s name? She’d died and gone away and left her child without protection, that was why. Sylvia, of course, that was her name. Then Lois had taken over and within a day the dressing table was cleared and there was a stepmother in her mother’s bed. Felicity felt tears in her eyes. William sat her down on a fluorescent yellow bench. ‘If it upsets you I’ll take you home at once,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to put you off me.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said, ‘I understand that. It’s nothing. I’m crying because my mother died.’

  They went and sat down in a fast-food restaurant, without caring what it served. He told her about the death of his mother, when he was ten, in a car crash. His twin brother had died too: he himself had been thrown clear. Luck of the draw. They were all on the way back from hospital: William had trodden on a needle: it had gone right in, the doctor had to extract it with an electro-magnet. Yes, it felt like his fault, of course it did: if he hadn’t trodden on a needle they’d all be alive today. And why them, not him? All that.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why we get on,’ she said. ‘Because our mothers died when we were small. We recognize each other.’

  The waitress, in pert pleated blue shirt and red and white blouse, brought them coffee and bagels. Perhaps they’d ordered them, perhaps they hadn’t. ‘I never think about it,’ he said, ‘if I can help it.’

  ‘They say we ought to,’ she said. ‘But it’s so long ago, and no-one understands what it was like then. It doesn’t fade: so you blot it out.’

  ‘Perhaps you have to be strong enough,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we make each other strong.’

  But soon he began to look restless: she lost his attention: he wanted to get to the tables: they filled up early and sometimes even when it got crowded management didn’t open up all the available craps tables. Understandable, craps being least profitable from management’s point of view - which meant it was best for the punters. He preferred craps anyway, said William. The sense of others in the game with you: he liked that. One for all and all for one. Blackjack was a loner’s occupation. He’d won so much at blackjack last month they’d be keeping an eye on him. (He boasted: cock of the dung-heap.) No C
asino liked its patrons to be too lucky, but this one was both the most relaxed about it and nearest to home. Why should the Casino worry? It didn’t pay taxes. Death and tax, the two great certainties of the white man’s life, halved at one stroke.

  He wasn’t stupid like some people: he kept money aside from his pension for the Rosemount: he never mortgaged that, never risked it. Of course his fortunes were up and down. At first you hoped to even out in a day, then a week, then a month, then a year. Last week he’d evened out about two years’ worth of enjoyment. Felicity would bring him luck, he knew she would. She already had. The new shoes had an extra level on the heels, she noticed. He walked tall and proud: eyes followed him.

  * * *

  She hovered behind him at the crowded craps table. He tried to explain to her what was going on. She tried to focus, but it was like listening to traffic directions. You stopped to ask strangers the way, but when they spoke you didn’t hear them. There were two croupiers, darting, stretching, raking. Each player waited his turn, rolled two dice directly down the centre of the table to hit the low wall at the other end. It bounced back and stopped. People sighed or rejoiced as their interests were affected. William explained that the player threw for the whole table. You could have sequence bets or roll bets. He lost her there. Could she have understood even in the old Savannah days? She doubted it.

  ‘A six or an eight is most likely,’ he said. ‘A four or a ten least likely. But then the rewards are higher. The greater the risk, the higher the reward, that’s the principle. Jesus, it’s like life.’

  There was some disagreeable confusion and delay at the table. Someone had declared that his winnings had not been paid out properly. Of course they had been: punters tried to cheat the Casino, not the Casino the punters. The Casino’s confidence trick was so vast as to go unnoticed. Security men gathered: gently the offender was eased away. William occupied the interval instructing Felicity further. She appreciated his efficiency. He didn’t like wasting time. Money, certainly: time, no. She had been trained for years in disapproval, she realized: she had never been a willing pupil, but some had rubbed off. She, the one-time hooker, had learned the pleasures of moral superiority: she didn’t like it in herself; it chafed like a too-tight shoe.

  She had never in her life thought of herself in those terms. A hooker. But that was long ago, so long it didn’t count.

  And now she was with William, wasn’t she? This was what she’d always wanted, always trusted would happen: she’d never quite given up. She loved him. He wanted to marry her. This was his pre-nuptial confession. She had yet to make hers to him.

  So he was a gambling man: was that so terrible? It might be if you were a young woman with children dependent on a gambling man for your comforts. But now both were free, surely, to entertain themselves as best they could? It was all there was left to do, at the close of life. And who cared about the money?

  Felicity had a momentary twinge of guilt about Dr Bronstein. Of course he couldn’t place Kosovo on the map. Who could? It’s not as if it was a place where academics gather together. Reykjavik in Iceland he would know about, a great conference centre at least in the summer months, volcanoes for side shows, and he would even be able to spell it, but they wouldn’t ask him about Reykjavik. It was one question suit all, just as cheap clothes came One Size Fits All. Kosovo was the upgrading on Kuwait. And Dr Bronstein might so hate Clinton as to refuse to name him, unaware of the dire consequences of so doing, of being declared incompetent, and all because she, Felicity, had failed to give him proper warning. He might very well get the year wrong: the young, for whom time passed slowly, never realized how easy it was to misremember the exact year you were in, in sheer amazement at the number since you began: and it was the brisk and sensible young who did the testing and sorting of those who could still manage, and those who couldn’t.

  ‘It’s like climbing mountains,’ William was saying. ‘It’s rolling with destiny.’

  ‘Or casting the I Ching,’ said Felicity, forgetting all about Dr Bronstein. ‘Discovering the pattern of the times.’

  ‘We’ll make a gambler of you yet,’ he said, and turned back to the table. The seas had closed over the complainant: the urgency of the game was picked up as if it had never been lost. William’s hand was steady on the dice. He threw a double three. Everyone seemed to like that and cheered, and she could feel him glow and could not resent it.

  Presently Felicity began to feel bored. Whether William was winning or losing she could not be sure. He flung tokens in the table one side of a line or another: croupiers raked them in. From time to time he fetched others in. If you didn’t understand they barked at you, asked what you’d meant. She’d never been to school: presumably this was what it was like. Her father had wanted her educated at home, which meant she had educated herself. Though he’d allowed her to go to ballet lessons. White tutus and points.

  She remembered her mother teaching her to read and write. After that there had been Lois, and Lois’s baby - what was the baby’s name? She couldn’t remember even that. And through the haze of the brown silk net, more things to remember. Uncle something, with the heavy jaw, who had given her history lessons, and been all charm, like William, until one day he wasn’t: everything held together, by the memory of once good times which yet might come again, so suddenly shattered. And after that, the baby, and a different life.

  Why did she remember all this now? She had worked so hard at forgetting. She had told Sophia about the baby. She should not have done it. It stirred up too much stuff better forgotten. If you dwelt on the past it gave you no time to live in the present. And then there’d been Angel, who’d run away to Europe, got married, gone mad, produced Sophia, and died. Of course she didn’t want to think of the past. Who would? Bury it with the noise of the present: that’s why she had always got on with Joy, who understood the importance of moving in a cloud of shimmering sound waves, even if she couldn’t hear the sound itself.

  Stocky girls with plump bosoms, short skirts and massive thighs moved round the tables carrying trays of cold drinks. Challenging fate is a thirsty business. Their bare arms were bulky and sweaty: they could never stop: the trays were heavy: the drinks were long and free, and were exchanged for tips. William had gone to time and trouble saving five dollars on the way here, picking between gas stations; now he paid out an unnecessary ten. No Vegas showgirls these, with legs up to their navels, the pick of all America, albeit hard-drug skinny - these were local girls for local tastes. Once in Savannah she’d been just such a girl, supporting Tommy, though he was none of her own. You did what you could, sold what you had. She’d always been the girl behind the bar, never the one in the chorus line, high kicking; the one who got propositioned, not the one who got red roses. In those days she’d blamed her legs. Not long enough. Ballet lessons when small had overdeveloped her calf muscles, she’d always suspected. Buckley had called them English legs, and someone, before Buckley rescued her and turned her back into the lady she was born to be, had once told her fat legs meant good in bed, and that was why she was so popular. She thought it was more to do with the fact that she was nicely spoken and smiled a lot and handled the customers with tact and politeness, where most of the other girls were tough and brassy and looked as if they’d give you a social disease, if it were left up to them. Age had slimmed her legs down, of course: these days they were as skinny as you could wish. Practically stick-like. Some things, not many, got better with the passage of the years.

  William’s eyes didn’t follow the girls; she was glad of that. They moved among men who had their minds on more subtle excitements than sex. She failed to attract his attention, shrugged, and went to play the slots. If others could work out what to do, so could she. She turned fifty dollars into quarters, found a vacant seat flanked by two women so large they overflowed their seats - which was why it was vacant, no doubt, but she didn’t mind - and fed them into the slot. Feed, press the button, watch the next spin. Wait, feed again. She could make
no sense of what was going on, but the machine knew when it had won and when it hadn’t. When she won it disgorged coins, and her neighbours, alerted by the clatter, looked at her and smiled, happy for her. That was nice. When the machine hadn’t won, it stayed silent. That was all. You could trust a machine to do something as simple as that. But quite what constituted winning was beyond her. You went into a trance; what brought you back to reality at intervals was a sense of triumph. Only eventually did she realize what everyone else around seemed to have been born knowing, that the lines which went through the middle, above or underneath the symbols when the drum stopped rolling represented success or failure. The payline. In the middle was best.

  Gamblers believed money was for spending, not for saving; they were generous, not envious; they were the salt of the earth: thus they defied fate, bent it to their will. They shared common wisdom: she could feel it emanate down the row, even from her fleshy neighbours with their scanty hair, double chins and hopeless bodies. When she had over $150 back she stopped. So easy. She filled the bucket provided by the Casino to hold her winnings, changed it at a booth, and put $150.50 back in her purse. She went back to William.

  ‘I won,’ she said. Three hundred per cent profit. Beginner’s luck.’ ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘From now on in you’re a lucky person.’

  He stopped too: $7,500 in profit. In counters.

  ‘The art,’ he said, ‘is knowing when to stop.’

  ‘It’s now,’ she said, so they both did.