To See You Again

by Alice Adams

  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?

  In fact, I was thinking two contradictory things at once: one, if I got into a bath, David would surely come back early, to find me looking a little silly in that tub. And, two, he would be down there for several hours. Weighing those possibilities, I pulled the draperies apart, more heavy pink velvet, and looked out into the still-bright late afternoon sunshine.

  Close up, just outside the window, that filagreed concrete looked barely stuck together, and I had the San Franciscan’s familiar thoughts of earthquakes. Beyond all that dangerous lace stretched miles of casinos, giant signs that advertised casinos, miles of jammed thoroughfares, people, cars.

  I closed the draperies and started my bath. Of course the tub filled very slowly, such an enormous volume; after what seemed a long time there was only about half an inch of water on the bottom. I rushed through with washing, somehow, thinking that actually I should have lingered; I would look much less foolish if there were a lot of water (maybe David would join me in the tub?) and besides, I probably had a lot of time to kill.

  But I didn’t, no time at all: I was out of the tub and wrapped in a towel, deciding what to wear, when David burst into the room, grinning and exhilarated. “I knew it, you bring me luck!” he almost shouted, among welcoming swift kisses on my neck. “You’re wonderful—I may have to keep you around.”

  Well, great. I would have liked to ask how much money he won, just out of interest, but I did not, and it didn’t matter; I was so pleased that he felt lucky; he was lucky and attributed it to me. And mostly I was terrifically pleased that he had come back so soon. And I thought, maybe that would be enough? No more machines and tables?

  David had gone over to the telephone; he was dialing and getting room service. I heard him order champagne and a plate of hot Chinese hors d’oeuvres. He said, “They’re terrific here. I’m starving, aren’t you?”

  I smiled, but I thought that since we were expecting room service we could not, just then, make love. No siesta. Also, I wished that I had brought something to wear other than the pink sweater tidily folded up in my bag, since David was feeling so festive. However, I saw no point in regrets on either score, or not for long. I got dressed, as modestly as I could, and David said how clever I was to bring a sweater that matched our pink velvet room, and we both laughed—in love, having a good time together.

  The champagne arrived, and the hot Chinese hors d’oeuvres, which somehow made us hungrier; we reminded each other of all the San Francisco jokes about being hungry after Chinese food. We decided to go on down to dinner, to something called the Bacchanal Room.

  Our high mood continued through dinner, in that crazy room which almost exceeded my fantasies of camp, of tackiness. The waitresses had obviously been selected for the size of their breasts—huge breasts bursting from the tops of their miniskirted “Roman” tunics, as they bent down to pour out wine from great round green glass bottles. I finally saw a wine label on one of the jugs: Californian, fairly good and very cheap. David and I laughed at all that, amiably. I saw that we were having the fifty-dollar dinner, and I thought again how nice that everything was comp.

  David said, “Do you realize that we’re celebrating two weeks of knowing each other? Two weeks ago tonight.”

  I was very touched by his saying that; it was not something that many men would say, or even think of. I would have liked to tell him that I couldn’t believe it had only been two weeks, but that seemed too trite to say.

  We smiled, and leaned together in a kiss, and whispered words of love to each other. “I am crazy about you,” I murmured to his ear, and at that moment I surely was.

  All the wine, or simply the heady excitement of love, had made even the gaming room look better. Walking toward a roulette table, I felt a sense of possibility. Maybe we would go on being lucky, in dollars as well as love. Sometimes a few thousand can really improve your life, and it’s silly to think otherwise.

  Several turns of the wheel later on, maybe fifteen minutes later, I caught a very unhappy look from David, which I took as a cue that maybe I was not, just then, Lady Luck; maybe it was time to walk around on my own for a while. I went over and whispered to him that I’d be back soon, I wanted to explore. He nodded distractedly, with the smallest smile.

  Walking through those rooms, I was suddenly in an underworld of weird lights and unfamiliar, discordant and disturbing sounds, of money and machines. And faces: pale and harried, anxious underwater faces, all frighteningly alike. And I remembered something strange: some years ago, having heard that mescaline was fun, lots of laughs and great sex, my then husband and I took some, and it wasn’t fun at all, or sexy; I went off into a nightmare of plastic buttons, weird clothes, plastic, everything distorted and ugly, wrong. I didn’t know the man I was with—my husband. Of course, at that moment in Las Vegas, I was not nearly as terrified as I was on mescaline, and at least I knew where I was, but I hated it, I was frightened.

  I walked for as long as I could, trying, and failing, to find the wonderful tackiness that I had imagined. Also, I was afraid that David, losing money, would want to go on playing for most of the night. I was braced for that; I was perfectly ready to say, in a good-sport voice, that I didn’t mind at all, and to go up alone to our crazy fantasy room.

  However, when I came up to him, touching his arm in a fairly tentative way, although for a moment he looked unsure about who I was (well, by that time I was not too clear about him either), in the next moment he looked relieved. He nodded good night to the people just next to him; he took my arm and we headed toward the elevator.

  On the way up he said, “Well, I guess you can’t win every time.”

  “I guess not.” I did not ask how much he lost, of course not.

  Then at last we were in bed, finally making love. But even as we went through the familiar gestures, as we kissed and touched, as our rhythms meshed and accelerated, I had a crazy sense that we were not ourselves. We were any two people at all, tired people, straining for pleasure, in a room whose fantasy was not their own.

  I had a thin sleep, disturbed by violent dreams that I could not remember in the morning. I looked over at David, already awake, just barely smiling, and saw how pale he looked, how suddenly old. He must not have slept well either, and I hoped that was not a sign that we did not sleep well together. More likely we were disturbed by the unfamiliarity of the place, and David was unhappy about however much money he lost. We did not make love; we got up and dressed very hurriedly.

  We had breakfast in a too bright cafeteria sort of place, where everyone looked as anxious and unrested as we did. On one wall there was a big flashing keno board, so that no one would have to miss one minute of the thrill of gambling. I asked
David how keno was played, and he explained, minutely, but I found it hard to listen, much less to understand what he was saying.

  At last we left that depressing room and walked out into the netherworld light that never changes, although it was actually about nine-thirty in the morning. With a meager smile David said, “Well, back to work,” and sinkingly I understood that he would probably be at the tables all day (“comp” doesn’t come exactly free). I thought I could go out and spend some time at the swimming pool; I wondered if he would even come out for a swim.

  Suddenly, then, we were standing in front of a mammoth, double-sized slot machine, a giant, and David was saying, “Do you have any singles, by chance? This baby really pays, and you can put in up to three one-dollar bills.”

  I had three singles in my change purse (and five twenties in my billfold; I knew exactly how much money I had which is how it is when you’re more or less broke, I’ve found—in flusher times I don’t precisely know, and rich people never know). I was getting my dollars out of my change purse, obligingly; I was about to start putting them into the maw of the machine when out of nowhere a tall gaunt woman strode up to it. She was dark brown, sun-withered, with startling, ferocious bright blue eyes; she was wearing purple, with pounds of silver jewelry, an expensive old desert rat. With a challenging look at the huge machine she expertly slipped three dollar bills into its slot; with one heavily braceleted arm she reached for the lever and pulled it down. And a clanking cascade of silver fell into the trough.