He gave a long sigh. ‘I thought I was going to be late.’
‘Me too.’
He searched my face, so intensely that it unnerved me, and I looked away.
He put his hand on my shoulder, and then pulled me into an embrace, his arms tightening around me before letting go, and we passed through the tall arch of the doorway into the chapel, where Tallis was already waiting with Brian close to the front. I caught sight of Caroline, Dylan’s girlfriend of half a year or so, her face set and blank, sitting with one of Dylan’s work colleagues, an editor from the publishing house.
Sally had approached me just as I’d been deciding whether or not to go over to talk to Caroline. I’d called her a couple of times over the past week without success.
‘Cremation?’ I asked. Cameron had mentioned it to me on the phone a few days earlier.
Sally glanced over at the coffin at the front of the room. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. She nodded.
‘What are they going to do with the ashes?’
‘There’s a place we used to go on vacation, further north, in Washington … You know the San Juans?’ Her voice was more ragged than ever, soft and thin sounding. ‘I mean, he didn’t leave instructions or anything.’ She squinted at me. ‘I mentioned to Mom and Dad that he might like, you know, you guys to take them to Vegas.’
‘Really?’
She shrugged.
A girl her age in a black dress came up and stood next to her, waiting to talk to her, ignoring me.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sally said, and the girl led her away. The room was filled with people, but the faces of my friends were the only ones I focused on, the only ones I remembered with any clarity.
The day before my flight to Vegas there was a knock on my door sometime in the late morning while I was trying to get through a pile of grading that was supposed to be finished before I left. The night before, I’d sabotaged the effort with a fourth glass of wine and wound up watching old movies on TV until I fell asleep on the couch. I lived on the third floor of a house that had been converted into apartments, and the downstairs buzzers had been broken for as long as anyone could remember. When I opened the door Natasha was there in her black coat, cheeks flushed with cold, mouth shiny with red lipstick. She smiled with her lips closed.
‘Hi. You left this at my house,’ she said, and handed me a button-down shirt I’d been wearing over my T-shirt that night.
I almost said ‘Great,’ wanting to say that it was great to see her, and managed to welcome her inside.
‘I was on my way to campus,’ she said, ‘so I thought I’d bring it over to you. I called but your phone was busy.’
I’d made one brief call that morning, to a student who had left me a message the day before, wanting another extension on the due date for a paper.
‘Well, thanks. Would you like some coffee? Or tea?’ I gathered a pile of papers strewn across the coffee table and put them on my desk on top of other papers. ‘I was grading,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to interrupt.’
‘No, you’re not. Sorry, it’s a mess. But let me make you tea or something,’ I offered, trying to keep her there.
I went into the kitchen, which was just a small corner crammed with sink, fridge and stove through an archway from the living room, and filled the kettle. The gas flame lit with a whoosh.
‘Take off your coat,’ I said, adjusting the flame. ‘It’s hot in here. The heat’s broken.’
The radiators had been making loud banging noises all night and all morning, as though someone in the building were hitting the pipes with a heavy wrench, and it felt like about eighty degrees. Turning the knobs never seemed to make any difference to how much heat came out; they twirled around uselessly in endless circles.
‘Or I can make coffee,’ I said.
Her coat made whispery sounds as she shrugged it off and set it down. ‘Tea would be nice. Thank you. Milk and sugar.’
She was sitting on the couch when I came back in, and I sat at the other end, handing her a mug of tea. I’d made mine the same as hers although I didn’t normally take sugar, and the sweetness hit my mouth hard when I tasted it.
‘There’s your shirt.’
She’d laid it over the back of the armchair by the couch. It had been next to my body, and handled by her. The shape of my arms was still there faintly in the way the sleeves lay, creased around the elbow and soft at the shoulders. It had a deflated, empty look about it, like a dent in a mattress that shows the imprint of a body, or rumpled sheets that tell you exactly the gesture the person used when they pushed them out of the way.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘It’s not a problem,’ she said.
I set down my mug on the table. It was one I rarely used, a gift from my mother with musical notes printed on it. Something famous, something she’d decided was my favorite piece of classical music. It was the only other clean mug available.
‘Aren’t you going to Vegas soon?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Tomorrow, actually.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and was on the verge of asking her if she wanted to go out with me that night, to get a drink or dinner.
‘I’m going down to New Jersey this afternoon,’ she said.
‘Seeing your cousin?’
She nodded.
I thought about telling her about my own Jersey origins but decided it could wait for another time.
She stood and stepped over to examine my bookshelf, mug in her hands. ‘You have a lot of books,’ she said.
It could have been a compliment or a criticism. It didn’t seem to require a response although it made me defensive for a moment. It didn’t seem like a lot to me; they barely filled the built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace. Most of my books were in my office.
‘You like Russian literature?’ Natasha asked me with a smile.
She’d been looking at the three Dostoyevsky novels on a lower shelf, holding her hair away from her face with her free hand. I’d started Crime and Punishment years before with some idea that it was essential reading for anyone in my profession and couldn’t get through it. It was starting to feel as though everything she said or asked was some kind of trick question.
‘What you see there is the extent of my Russian literature collection,’ I said. She had moved on already.
I found myself rehearsing in my mind the conversation I would have had with Dylan about her. He was the only one of them I actually talked to about women, about heartbreak and loss, and the times when things worked out, as they sometimes did. He would have listened attentively and then convinced me in only a few words that she was waiting for me to make the first move. I got that far with it before I remembered. At that moment he appeared in my peripheral vision, leaning against one of the bookshelves with his ankles crossed and arms folded, smiling apologetically, and then was gone.
‘Elliot?’
Natasha was looking right at me and I guessed from her expression that I was acting like a person preoccupied with loss. Even at moments like those, when I could see that my behavior was coincident with documented symptoms of grief, my actions weren’t quite convincing to myself; I somehow doubted their authenticity. Because I wasn’t preoccupied, not in a constant way. Sadness was not an ever-present foreground hum; it faded in and out and took its place alongside all the other usual anxieties and desires. Days went by when I wouldn’t think about him at all, and then I would, and the sadness would slink out from the background mix and envelop me.
I know it looks like grief, I wanted to confess, but it’s something else.
Something else — what? Less deep, or more? Something more shallow, or more complicated, or just somehow lacking? I was probably resistant to the idea that my own emotional processes could conform to any conventional diagram, any predetermined structure of feeling. I wanted to believe I was exceptional, that I had individual elements of interesting unpredictability th
at meant what I felt wasn’t like what everybody else felt. But at some level there was also the suspicion that I was missing some fundamental psychological piece, the idea that other people, who were better adjusted, or better friends, or simply better people, would feel the proper, authentic stages of grief.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘How’s Eamonn?’
‘Oh.’ She rolled her eyes and turned to the shelf again. ‘Forget it.’
I couldn’t tell whether she meant that I should avoid the topic, or that it was a hopeless situation, or that she ought to forget him. All of the above.
When she turned back to me I could see pity vying with other feelings. She frowned, as though I was a problem she was trying to solve. I wondered whether her brain, with its scientifically trained ways of thinking, traveled entirely different paths in its approach to problems than mine did. I felt strangely paralyzed in that way that you feel in dreams sometimes, wanting to move and yet unable to take a step. Was this another symptom of grief, I wondered, catalogued and tagged somewhere? Or just my own typical inability to act on impulse?
‘Good luck with this trip of yours to Vegas,’ she said. ‘I hope your friends behave themselves.’
I walked her to the door and she buttoned her coat and pulled on a hat, a loose black beret. Her skin was pale against all the dark clothes, faintly luminous in the dim light of the hall. She reached her face up to mine when she was right at the door, standing close to me, and kissed my cheek briefly, her hand on my shoulder. When she stepped back I gave into one impulse — I smoothed the pieces of hair away from her eye, and her brow was warm under my fingers for a second. Her eyes closed and opened in a long blink. She smiled and said goodbye.
I closed the door and took the shirt from the armchair, reluctant for a moment to wash away whatever imprint of herself she’d left on it.
6.
We stayed at a different hotel each year in an attempt to inject some kind of variety into the experience. They were always decent ones on the Strip after the time Cameron screwed up and put us in a really bad hotel at the wrong end of downtown and we all had to arrange somewhere else to stay after we found bedbugs in every room. There were only two real requirements: the hotel had to have at least four stars and we had to have rooms that didn’t look out on an air shaft. Tallis was a little more precise in his personal requirements and routinely complained his way into an upgraded room (farther from the elevators, a better view, a higher floor).
We followed a routine, of sorts, that never varied: each night of our visit we would all meet at 7 p.m. at the bar in the centre of the gaming room at the Flamingo. In the mornings if we were up by eleven then we met at the buffet of whatever hotel we were staying in, but this was a looser arrangement. The rest of the time we usually ended up spending together in any case, more or less, but the rendezvous at the Flamingo was the one place and time we were guaranteed to meet at least once a day.
It started out that way because the Flamingo was the first hotel we stayed at, our first visit in the mid-nineties. Back in those days there was a nervous edge around the place; other old-school Vegas classics, like the Sands, had been demolished to make way for newer, flashier casinos, and no one expected the Flamingo to hold on the way it did. It had never been the classiest or the cheesiest or the biggest or the best, but it managed to hang on anyway, flying somehow under the demolition radar, with its cast of loyal, unstylish gamblers. The nervous edge gave way to laid-back confidence.
When I walked up the shallow steps in the hot, tired air of the evenings, the giant lotus flower suspended over the entrance never failed to make me think of an enormous electric vagina, with its rows of pulsating light globes in shades of pink turning on and off in a carefully timed pattern to create the effect of undulating waves. If you stared at them for long enough the effect of wavelike motion stopped, and you saw only a collection of single globes, alight, then not alight. On, and then off.
It had crossed my mind that it might be somehow appropriate for us to stay at the Flamingo again this time, to commemorate that first visit when we were all together. I mentioned it to Tallis when he was in the first stages of organizing the trip but he hadn’t been enthusiastic.
‘I looked into it,’ he told me. ‘They’re renovating. The old rooms are shit. The new ones won’t all be ready yet, they won’t be able to guarantee it, and we’ll get stuck somewhere with a crap bathroom and stains on the couch.’
I didn’t tell him that my rooms in Vegas over the years had almost invariably had problems of exactly the kind he’d mentioned; it seemed to be part of the deal if you didn’t book the more expensive suites.
Tallis hadn’t been in charge of organizing for a long time, and he was determined to do a good job. ‘It won’t be all over the place like it was last year, when Brian totally fucked it up.’
Brian had left it until the last minute — he never should have been put in charge of arranging anything for the group, since he still wasn’t talking to Cameron and resented having to include him at all — and we ended up not being able to all stay in the same place. Brian and Dylan were parked up at the Venetian, in rooms full of velvet cushions and tassels, and Cameron, Tallis and I had rooms miles away at the Luxor. We could have got rooms together at the Excalibur, Brian explained, but no one wanted that, not after the previous year when we had all stayed there and hated it.
On this trip, we were staying at the MGM Grand, a place we hadn’t been to before. Tallis had spent hours online comparing the various kinds of available deals and had ended up booking us one that included free entry to one of the hotel nightclubs and a discount on a poolside cabana. On our last trip Tallis and Dylan had split the ridiculously high cost of renting one of these little tents for a day, and Tallis liked the experience so much that he was determined never to go to the pool without one again. It was true, what he said, that it was impressive to girls. And provided necessary shade.
The airport was the usual nightmare of crowds and endless waiting for luggage, the walk from the gate to the exits impossibly long, filled with rows of slot machines that nobody played. I stepped out into the dusty heat, and two giant men in matching Elvis costumes — one black with clear crystal rhinestones, the other white with ruby-colored stones in an identical pattern — pushed past me with their Ray-Bans and sideburns, unsmiling. The queue for a taxi was long and the afternoon was hot and glary. Already my jeans were sticking to my skin. I bought a ticket for a shuttle and climbed on board to wait while it filled up. A bride-to-be traveling with her family, flat Midwestern vowels all around, were already on board, each of them on cell phones to a different member of the bridal party. An elderly Indian woman in an olive-and-gold sari climbed on, followed by a young girl who might have been her granddaughter, solemn-faced in T-shirt and jeans too short for her long, thin legs. They sat in front of me. I shut my eyes and leaned my head against the window. The bus filled up within ten minutes and drove away.
The bride-to-be and her entourage got off at the Excalibur. I’d heard Marcia, the bride, explaining to someone on the phone how the place was really family-friendly, that the kids would be hanging out at the pool all day. The low point of our stay at the Excalibur last year had been the short time we spent at the pool one afternoon, which was crowded with a gang of undergrads who were smoking, drinking, practically fucking, and vomiting both into the potted palms and the water at one end of the pool. I wondered whether I should have warned her but couldn’t think what I would have actually said. It was all booked by now, and they had a bargain, as I’d heard her and her uncle and aunt discussing on the way there. Her gown was medieval style. It had a medieval veil. I knew far more than I wanted to about her wedding outfit and everything to do with her wedding after fifteen minutes on the bus with them.
It always amazed me that people actually came to Vegas with the intention of getting married — it wasn’t just drunk people being impulsive and going on down to the chapel with their boyfriend or girlfriend or someone they’d picke
d up the night before; it was actual engaged people who planned it all and came here for the entire package with their extended families. I suppose it wasn’t that weird — they came for much the same reasons that I and my friends did: it was accessible, inexpensive.
The shuttle arrived at Hooters Casino Hotel, across from the MGM. The Indian woman and the little girl with her rose from their seats and went slowly down the steps. I followed them. They collected three large suitcases from the baggage compartment of the bus, each one held together with pieces of knotted rope. I offered to help them but the woman just shook her head, her face a mask of contempt and disbelief as she looked at the hotel. The little girl’s eyes were wide as she glanced around, gripping the handle on one huge wheeled suitcase.
I crossed the busy road to the MGM and entered the lobby. The smell wasn’t too strong just inside the entrance. That smell was my strongest sensory memory of Vegas, the thing that told me I had really arrived: old smoke and sweat and stale air-conditioned air recycled a thousand times. I never got used to it, no matter how many days I stayed. The farther I moved inside the hotel, the stronger it became.
The lobby was a massive expanse of golden polished granite with a disproportionately low ceiling. Each check-in counter had a line of at least twenty people snaking away from it. I made my way over to the shortest one and recognized Brian in the queue next to me, his arm around a woman with light brown hair cropped close to her head. She was small, slim, boyish-looking, wearing a short denim skirt. So this was Cynthia.
‘Brian,’ I called.
He turned around. ‘Hey, man! Good to see you. Come on over here.’
I wheeled my suitcase over and joined them in the line. The overweight couple behind us, dressed identically in orange T-shirts and beige shorts, sun visors and sunglasses, shifted noisily. She said something to him in a language that sounded like German, or possibly Dutch. He repeated the same four or five words back to her, but with a different intonation. I gave them an apologetic smile.
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