Melusine is impatient. “If she’s not willing to try to move on, then you can’t help her. If she’s only got one expectation of a perfect result, then she’s doomed both of you and you can’t help that. One needs to be flexible in life. Things more often than not don’t turn out the way we hoped or planned.” She realizes that’s she’s trying to give herself advice in case things do not work out between her and Hans after Vegas. She wonders if she will be able to take her own advice with the kind of grace she’s glibly advocating.
“It sounds very simple when you say it like that.”
“It is.” Melusine insists. “What if you go back to your wife and say look, yes, we’ve suffered terrible tragedies, there’s no escaping that. These are our options; stay stuck in our grief, or try to make a change. I’ve heard that adopting can be very fulfilling. You just need to change your mindset — or hers, if you can.”
He is quiet for a moment. “I don’t even know if I want children. If they’re yours, you just deal with it, it’s like they come with the package of marriage and so forth. But if you have to order them on the side, to put it in crass terms, well, it makes you think about what you really want from life and from marriage.”
“And what do you want?” she asks. “You’ve got a good job as well as your creative photography. Is that enough?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t. You’re right. When you put it like that, my life sounds quite barren.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she is quick to correct him. “I was just asking.”
“It’s okay. It’s all stuff I need to think about.”
She nuzzles his neck. “You taste like chlorine now,” she says and he nods and kisses her.
“So do you. Considering that we only have the rest of today and one more night together, do you have any ideas what we should do? I don’t.”
“I’d like to pretend we have more time than that. Let’s do that. Let’s pretend we’ve got all the time in the world. What would we do then?”
He rubs her neck and thinks. “We’d plan where to have lunch. Then we’d think about taking in a show and where to have supper. Then we’d watch the pirate show down at Treasure Island and the volcano at the Mirage and then we’d walk the Strip and buy large drinks in plastic beakers shaped like bongs and I’d stand by impatiently while you shopped for trinkets and knick-knacks. And then, finally, inebriated, we’d come back home and I’d fuck the panties off you, or you’d fuck the living daylights out of me and then we’d go to sleep. That’s what we’d do, if we had all the time in the world.”
She grins. “Let’s do that, shall we?”
He pulls her close. “Why don’t we go and have a shower together first and wash all this chlorine off and play it by ear? How does that sound?”
She agrees and they get out of the spa pool that had stopped whirling a while back.
Back in his room, he fixes the Sweet Dreams, Do Not Disturb sign on the door and takes her into the bathroom. He pulls the shower curtain closed, adjusts the water and climbs in, holding his hand out to her.
Her hair is soon wet and water runs down her face, and her arms are around his neck and her eyes are closed. He is soaping her back, her buttocks, her breasts. She faces him and he cannot stop his hands from exploring her body. His fingers dip into the curves behind her knees, his thumbs speak to the muscles and ligaments of her calves. He cups her breasts, one at a time, holding their sweet heaviness in his hands. Her nipples are taut and she is so hot for him and she wants him right then but he makes her wait. With his cock pushing against her, and the water running down their bodies, he slips his finger inside her and she comes again and again. Then he turns her to face the wall, and he spreads her legs the width of the bath and bends her over. He pushes himself inside her and despite her orgasms, the water has made her dry but he feels so good, so immense.
Melusine is glad he can’t see her face. Pleasure has contorted her features and she’s relieved to have privacy. She lets go with abandon, matching his thrusts and he soon comes inside her and she sees blinding colours of exploding lights behind her eyeballs.
He turns off the shower and they step out and dry each other clumsily, leaving large wet patches.
“Let’s lie down for a bit,” Gunther says and she nods.
He closes the heavy drapes and the room becomes as night. It’s not yet noon.
She moves towards him under the covers, and they lie chest to chest and the sensation of his skin, and his hair, and his heat — and the realization of the oncoming loss of it all — fills her with tears and she can’t stop herself; she cries rivers before she can disguise what’s happening or even turn away.
He holds her and she cries harder.
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
She cries herself out and gets up to blow her nose.
“Well,” she says. “I guess it’s too late for me to play it cool.”
“You don’t have to play it at all, Melusine. You know what I wish?” he asks her.
“What?”
“I wish we were the couple on the Skywalk, the one the photographer saw. I wish that was our lives.”
But it’s not and he doesn’t have to say it.
“We should go shopping,” he says unexpectedly and she gapes at him.
“Yep, retail therapy. Always makes everything better. Let’s go and spend some money, okay? We’ll have fun and it’ll be stuff that will always be ours, yours and mine.”
She laughs. “My face is too swollen to go out.”
“Sunglasses. No one will care anyway.”
They get dressed and walk down the Strip, holding hands.
“Expensive stuff or cheap stuff?” she asks. “I can’t afford expensive stuff.”
“Me neither. I haven’t exactly lived a budget-conscious life. Cheap it is. There isn’t a cheap store in Vegas that doesn’t have our name on it. But I wish I could buy you Prada. You’re very Prada, Melusine.”
She strikes a fashion pose and he reaches for his camera. Melusine carries on strutting her stuff and she realizes that she’s having fun for the first time in years; her own fun, and not just the joy of watching Jonas discover the world. This is her moment, hers.
They carry on down the Strip and buy crazy sunglasses, fridge magnets, shot glasses, mouse pads. Melusine buys earrings and a huge pink piggy bank that she tells Gunther is actually a wishing well.
“What will you wish for?”
“You know I can’t tell you,” she teases him. “But here, you may have the honour of making the first wish.”
He drops a dime into the piggy bank with his eyes shut tight and then she does the same, holding her breath.
Please let something happen in my life. Let me do something that means something, something real. And keep this man in my life. I know that’s two wishes but everyone’s allowed to push their luck in Vegas.
Every item they buy is ablaze with Welcome to Las Vegas or scantily clad showgirls. They spend hours perusing clothing, backpacks, hip flasks. Seems like there is nothing in the world that does not have a Las Vegas logo on it.
They walk down to the Sugar Factory and Gunther buys her a Sweet All Over tote bag and a large red velvet cupcake that they share messily, trying to eat from it at the same time and ending up with frosting everywhere.
Back on the Strip, he buys her a bracelet with blue glass beads and a necklace with her name spelt out in diamanté block letters that the shop girl strings on a leather cord.
They walk for hours, and Gunther translates some of the t-shirt slogans for her; sorry boys, I eat pussy and you say bitch like it’s a bad thing and young cunts are all the same.
“And even I can understand that one,” Melusine says, pointing, “fuck you, fuck fucking fuck you. I guess they just couldn’t fit another fuck on it.”
They pass a crazy girl playing the concertina, her teeth bared in a horrible facsimile of a smile and they come across some dreadlocked hippy teenagers
selling roses made from palm fronds and they end up at the Venetian, watching the gondoliers floating around.
“How will we stay in touch?” Gunther asks suddenly. He’s drinking a beer and he passes it to her.
She takes a long swallow and nearly finishes it. “Gosh, I was thirsty, I didn’t realize. Um, I don’t know, Gunther. Don’t you think the question really should be whether we stay in touch at all?”
He looks crushed and her heart lifts. She was testing him.
“Ah, come on,” she says. “You know I didn’t mean that. I’d like to mean it but I can’t.”
He is relieved.
“I don’t want to email,” she says. “It would seem so…,”
“…so glassy, cold, flat and impersonal,” Gunther finishes her thought.
“Exactly. And email and those things, they’re not communicating in a real way. You adopt a persona that isn’t quite you, even if you don’t mean to. And after you and I have had all this,” she sweeps her hand around, “I can’t bear to think of us being trapped on a Skype screen, looking all contorted, and trying to pretend like it feels good to be talking to a computer. It would make you feel even further away from me.”
“I’ve got an idea, we can write letters to each other! Do things the old-fashioned way.”
Melusine is taken aback; that was going to be her suggestion. “How odd that you should say that. I had that idea too. My favourite poet and her married lover wrote letters to each other for years but I must point out that their relationship ended in madness and death.”
He laughs. “Gotta love a happy ending. And who was she, your favourite poet? It’s a pity I’m only beginning to get to know you now and it’s nearly time for us to leave each other.”
“Her name was Ingeborg Bachmann and her lover was also a poet, Paul Celan. He committed suicide by jumping into the Seine and she died from a lit cigarette that set her apartment on fire in Rome. They’re not sure whether her death was an accident or not.”
“She sounds very Sylvia Plath,” Gunther comments and Melusine is further surprised.
“She was. But how do you know about Sylvia Plath anyway?”
“A girl I had a thing for at university was in love with Plath and I was so into this girl that I even read The Bell Jar. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it but I could appreciate the prose.”
Melusine feels a flash of jealousy towards this ghost girlfriend from Gunther’s past and the effort he had gone to. “I had a big crush on Ingeborg when I was a girl. I learned a lot of her poems off by heart. I often feel as if she sums up how I feel much better than I can.” She closes her eyes:
When someone departs he must throw his hat,
filled with the mussels he spent the summer
gathering, in the sea
and sail off with his hair in the wind
She regrets saying the poem out loud, thinking that she has revealed too much.
“That’s beautiful. But even though we’re sailing off in different directions, Melu, don’t think this is the end of us, okay?”
She bites her lip. “But how will we post things? You can’t send things to my house. Hans will see. Or Jonas might see. And I can’t ask my best friend because she abhors affairs. Oh god, Gunther, was this an affair?”
“This was just us. And whatever it was, or is, I thank god for it. I guess sending you things at work is out of the question too. Here’s a suggestion.” He encircles her and kisses her neck as he speaks. Melusine wonders at her own daring with these public displays of affection but she figures the odds of Hans seeing her are slim to none.
“Not to change the subject,” he says, “but I’ve been meaning to ask you something but you keep distracting me.” He brushes his hand lightly over the curve of her breast to emphasize his point. “You studied literature at university which means you must have studied English at school — how come you don’t understand a word of it?”
She grins, proudly. “Stupid guttural language. I did the minimum and then forgot it all as fast as I could. Which is easy if you don’t use it. German is so lyrical and lovely and Ingeborg convinced me of that too:
I with the German language
this cloud about me
that I keep as a house
drive through all languages.
“Ingeborg didn’t need English, so why would I? But back to you and me. I like the idea of this posting thing but I just don’t know how it will work.”
“Get a post office box,” he says. “And when you’ve got it, email me the address, just email me once. I’ll give you my email address. Don’t write anything else, not hello or a message or your name or anything because then I will feel like I have to reply and I agree, no virtual anything. Because this, what we have, will always be real.”
She nods, resting her forehead on his chest.
And then, out of nowhere, she wants him gone already. She cannot bear the thought of saying goodbye and she wishes their parting was over so that she could be alone to mourn her loss and nurse her memories. But, equally and immediately, she knows she is wishing away time that she will long for later.
“Why am I always two people at the same time?”
Gunther doesn’t seem startled by the question. He runs his thumb down her cheekbone and caresses her lips.
“I’ve got no idea. But it makes you doubly intriguing. Come on you, and you, it’s time for supper. We’re going up the Stratosphere to have dinner and drinks and watch the world turn. How does that sound?”
“Sounds great. But we may have to cab it, my feet are killing me from all this walking.”
“A cab it shall be.”
Up at the Stratosphere, he studies a wine list. “Red or white?”
“White!” she knows she replies too emphatically and he gives her a glance.
She picks up her menu, seeing typography with no meaning. She wants to tell him she will miss him but she does not think he wants to hear it; she fears it will drive him away. But, she asks herself, is she confusing him with Ivan from Malina, or with Ingeborg’s Paul? She looks at him. He is talking to the waiter and pointing at the wine list.
“So, Melu,” he says, handing the wine list to the waiter and turning to her, “I have to go back and sort out my life. What about you? If you could change just one thing about your life when you get back, what would it be?”
She is flummoxed by the bluntness of this question. She had been grappling with her own inner conversation, she is not ready for this new tack.
“Um? I don’t know. I’d like to try to do something creative. I used to want to do so many things. I might take a course at the university or something, I don’t know.” The question depresses her. As if taking a course at university will give her life meaning. But she can’t think of anything that will.
The wine arrives and while it’s being poured, she thinks about her dreams as a girl.
She takes a large swallow of her wine. “This is delicious. Fruity, clean. I don’t know, Gunther. It’s been so long since I even had any dreams of my own. My dreams have been for my child for as long as I can remember. Or I tried to make my parents’ dream for my life come true. But if you ask me what my dreams are, my own dreams, I can’t answer that.”
He puts his arm around her shoulders. “Maybe this discussion will get your subconscious thinking. I know I hardly know you but I feel as if you are capable of doing anything.” He rubs her shoulders and buries his head in her neck and she feels her groin tighten. The slightest touch and her body wakens.
“And you? Do you know what you’ll do?”
He shakes his head. “I just walked through my life to this point, not unhappily, not until now anyway, and I never thought about things one way or the other. I wasn’t suffering from an absence of dreams or a death of a dream. Sometimes you only realize you had a dream in the first place once it’s gone. Such a cliché but it’s true.”
“A family?”
He sighs. “A family. Enough about that. Let’s order some food
or we’ll be drunk in no time.”
The first bottle of wine is already gone and the sun sets and the lights below them explode the Strip into a river of molten jewels; they sit as close to one another as they can and try to pretend that time is not passing.
When they get back to Gunther’s room, Melusine feels quite ill from the rich food and wine. She props herself upright on the bed, supported by pillows while Gunther crashes beside her, snoring loudly. She watches him. She cannot close her eyes because when she does, the room spins — although she notices that she must close her eyes from time to time because the clock radio tells her that she dozes. In this way, she keeps vigil until the early hours of the morning and then she makes the decision to leave. She leans down and kisses Gunther, rubbing her nose lightly on his cheek, and inhaling the scent of him deep into her lungs. She whispers a poem to him:
Mouth, that spent the night in my mouth,
Eye that guarded my own,
Hand —
and those eyes that drilled through me!
Mouth, which spoke the sentence,
Hand, which executed me!
“Will you be Paul to my Ingeborg?” she whispers. “Ivan to Ich? My future broken heart — or didn’t we mean that much to each other at all?”
Then she slips off the bed and puts on her shoes. She quietly gathers her purse and her bags of purchases and eases the door open. She pauses for a moment before closing it behind her. The sound of the door clicking shut delivers a blow to her belly that is staggering. Her body is a leaden cargo of concrete sorrow and she pushes herself forward, hardly able to breathe. For her, the Vegas holiday is over.
12.
THINGS HAD NOT GONE WELL the first day Hans forced himself to go down to the psychics. The stadium-sized hall was filled with what seemed like hundreds of psychics, clairvoyants, mediums and card readers, and each of them was accessorized with statues, charts, effigies, ornaments, charms, jewelry, oils, crystals, feathers, dreamcatchers, ointments, potions, talismans, symbols and water fountains.
Strange sounds filled the air; and it was a different kind of music, and Hans stopped at one table, mesmerized by a man who was stroking a large crystal bowl. The melody was like nothing Hans had ever heard; it was a keening wail, as if the crystal was weeping with him and for him.
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