Casino and Other Stories

by Bonnie Burnard

  The girl stared out her window, watching the bush fly by. “Don’t ever expect me to say good morning to some boyfriend of yours.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t be expecting that.”

  They drove on. She could think of nothing light and harmless to say, nothing would come.

  “I saw this TV show,” she said, hesitating.

  The girl waited.

  “There was a woman standing in front of a mirror and she was very unhappy. It was just a dumb mini-series. Anyway, she was standing talking into this mirror, to someone behind her, and she said when she was a kid she’d been driving with her father in a car, at night, like we are, and it was winter, there was a lot of snow. And they saw a deer draped over a fence. It looked dead. She said she began to cry and her father told her it was all right. He told her that deer have a trick. When they’re trapped like that they don’t have to wait to die. They can make their hearts explode.”

  “A trick,” the girl said.

  “I think it would be fright,” she said. “I think it would be a heart attack brought on by fright. That would be the real explanation. But it means that our deer could be out of its misery before that man even gets to it with his gun. It could have been dead before we left it.”

  Even as she recited this she knew it was unlikely. She assumed the deer was back there, not far from the ditch, dying the hard way. It would watch him approach, hear the soft “Easy now. Easy.”

  And she knew that one of them would hold the deer forever in her mind, not dying, but fully alive in the bright shock of the headlights, and that the other would hold it just as long cold and wide-eyed, after the hunter.

  NIPPLE MAN

  John McLarty’s furniture, in his office in the History Building, his old teak desk and the two extra chairs and the filing cabinets and the bookshelves and the potted plants, had been rearranged over the years into every conceivable configuration. And he’d replaced the drapes, at his own expense, twice. He believed there was a perfect arrangement, something conducive to clear thought and to an overall peace of mind for himself and everyone who entered his office. He’d had some help, initially from his reluctant wife, and then from two or three of the others, and recently even his daughter had spared him a Sunday afternoon. They’d shared a bottle of wine as they hauled things around and argued amicably about what looked best where.

  His window, which he liked directly in front of him when he sat at his desk, overlooked the largest expanse of grass left on the campus since the building program of the seventies. The grass, a dozen shades of green on any day of the week from April through October, was usually spotted with the small bodies of students wandering purposefully from one lecture to another. A narrow sidewalk connected John’s building to Talbot, farther up the hill, where the economics people plied their trade. He’d never been there. Seventeen years on this campus and he’d never even thought to walk over. Everything he needed was on his own floor and the floors beneath him: colleagues, support staff, archives. He did, of course, use the main library at the base of the hill, but none of the other faculties overlapped his own. Except socially, for those who could endure it. He wasn’t one of those who could endure it.

  They’d given their share of dinner parties when they’d first arrived, or Carol had, he’d simply been there to pour the Scotch, and they’d continued for a few years to make appearances at the gatherings orchestrated by his fellows in the history department. And then they’d eased out. Carol had eased them out. She’d said, one spring evening, standing in her panty hose and camisole at the bathroom mirror applying her blush, sucking in her tummy, that she couldn’t go. He thought she might be sick, or premenstrual, or maybe just exhausted from the kids, who were all at the age when they had to be lifted and carried and fed and buckled up and wiped clean and tucked in, but she said no, she was fine, everybody else was sick. And she paraphrased some of the dirty, cynical gossip she’d heard exchanged by warm little groups in kitchens, and she told him about the clammy hands tracing her rear end when they were crowded around pianos in living rooms, supposedly singing, and about the rigorous, nerveracking effort needed to keep the whole thing in perspective. And the clincher, which had been a whispered longing expressed in their own backyard by a dull-witted Yank, who had long since departed for greener academic pastures, to see her nipples. She said she’d wanted to strip off her blouse and bra right there at the barbecue and say, There you go darlin’, and aren’t they as plain as plain can be, and you will notice they are not erect under your gaze and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell they ever will be, and now will you please just pass me that jar of mustard.

  John was astonished, but he knew better than to accuse her of exaggeration. The thought occurred to him that maybe she wasn’t exaggerating at all. “You didn’t say that,” he said, plugging in his shaver. “What did you really say?” “Nothing,” she said. “I said nothing. Nothing at all. I walked over to you and Jenny and interrupted some inane discussion you were having about a cactus.”

  They’d skipped the dinner party. They’d gone instead to a dismal Bergman film and seen Liv Ullmann’s nipples, which, if he remembered correctly, and he did, were not as plain as plain can be. That night, after the film and the coffee and the talk about everything but the film, when they climbed into bed, when he should have been his most attentive, he fell sound asleep and dreamed. And from that night his dreams began, habitually, to welcome other women. He couldn’t remember dreaming about other women before, not habitually.

  The marriage lasted only four more fretful years and then off she’d gone with the kids and her nipples and most of the best family photographs. She’d finished her stalled degree at John’s expense, tit for tat, she’d said, at another university and began teaching computer science. She was a respected member of one of the hottest faculties in the country, or so their old friends told him, whenever they could work it in. And she’d married a moderately successful architect. They lived with the kids who were still at home in a house overlooking the Pacific, which they’d built on a great slab of smooth brown rock. John had been welcomed there often, for the sake of the children. He’d never once manoeuvred the preposterous slope of the driveway without feeling like an impotent uncle, but he’d endured, he’d wanted to hold his kids as they grew. And everyone understood. There were lots of books on this kind of stuff.

  For a time, he’d attributed their marital disaster to the dull-witted Yank at the barbecue, but then he’d relented and acknowledged the debilitating habits, many of them his own, and the hard knots of temperament that appeared and reappeared like rocks thrown up by a field. On really good days he was content simply that they’d made it as far as they had, and that the damage, if his accounting could be trusted, had been minimal. He’d never told her what he dreamed of, habitually, only that he dreamed. And she’d had the decency to keep the worst of her secrets to herself. He had watched her keeping them.

  He’d sold the house; he had no interest whatsoever in screwing her around financially, although his lawyer indicated, with some enthusiasm, that it could be done. She’d worked as hard as he’d worked and what she had with the kids wasn’t exactly tenure. And no one else really knew or cared how great the kids were turning out, no one else knew or cared that she’d laughed them all through more than one rough spot.

  He’d found an apartment and was no sooner into it and lonely than they started to show up in his office, the women from his dreams, with their nipples. Not the exact women, but very close. In retrospect, those years, seven or eight of them, would run in his mind like a long raunchy film, one naked young body following another. Not that they weren’t fine women, some of them. Occasionally, more than occasionally, he remembered their fineness.

  Most of them were simply young. They didn’t talk in sentences. They wouldn’t eat anything, wouldn’t cook or sit still to eat a decent dinner. They wore T-shirts and only T-shirts with their jeans. And they expected him to make love to them with a wisdom he
couldn’t count on all night long and half the next day. They were enthralled by nakedness and long stretches of time and their own capacity to enjoy skin and nerve endings and they lied to him about his virility, not huge lies, but lies just the same, and necessary.

  They installed in him a status which was false, although flattering beyond anything he’d ever known. They looked up to him, literally, with sweet smooth cheeks.

  He consoled himself with the conviction that he’d freed them all to go after what they wanted, and most of them did. Some had returned to his office boasting degrees better than his own and two had come back to show off babes in arms and fuller hips and breasts relaxed into a new purpose. Given the chance, he would have carefully set the infants on the floor beside his filing cabinets to nap inside their downy sleepers while he jumped their still familiar mothers.

  The victorious visits had more or less stopped when he found Marion. He was marching alone down the library steps one balmy Indian summer evening, gazing up through the trees, and he might actually have fallen over her if she hadn’t spoken. “Careful,” she’d said, and he’d excused himself, feeling clumsy, certainly potentially clumsy. She sat near the bottom of the long flight with eight or ten books piled beside her on the step, exposed by one of the high new lights installed for campus security. He noticed immediately that her cheeks were wet. She wasn’t young. A young woman in tears on the library steps would not have slowed him down.

  He assumed that a public display from a woman this age did not indicate anything personal, he guessed she was in some kind of physical discomfort, that she’d been hurt, and he was right. She said she was just back to work and was likely pushing it too hard but she was so damned tired of waiting to feel herself again. She said she supposed she should get the books back inside and then go home and watch David Letterman or something. He told her he didn’t see that such drastic action was necessary, and he began to load her books, economics texts, two geography, one Welty and one Hardy, into his briefcase and then into his arms.

  “Can you stand?” he asked. “My car is just over in the north lot. I’ll bring it around and then I’ll take you home.” And he hauled her books across the cool grass to the north lot. It didn’t occur to him until he was back and helping her into his car to ask her who she was. She said she was Marion Alderson; she taught economics, had done so for three years on this campus and for many other years on other campuses across the country. Maid Marion he’d called her and she’d raised her eyebrows, smiling only slightly. She said she was just getting over a little bit of surgery and that she lived in one of the high rises on the other side of the bridge. After he got her home, up the elevator and into her suite with her books settled on an elegant glass desk in her living room, he saw, when her back was turned, that she had a set of those perfect calves that actresses from the fifties used to have, with heavier thighs, he could read them under her dress as she walked. He accepted her graceful thanks and took his leave, feeling a little bit the hero, feeling decent and light on his feet.

  He didn’t phone her, didn’t even think of phoning her until one cold morning two months later when he was marking a particularly fine paper on the Boer War. He found his directory and there she was, name, rank and telephone number. He told her he wanted to know only if she was feeling herself yet and she said yes she was and thanks again for the gallant assistance, and when he didn’t take the conversation to its natural close she asked if she could buy him lunch in the Talbot faculty dining room as a token of her gratitude. Sure she could, he said.

  So they met, properly, surrounded by economics people he recognized but didn’t know. And she was much better, much stronger. She wore an expensive shirtwaist, paisley, Carol had wanted such dresses when they couldn’t afford them, and very fine leather shoes with narrow high heels. The shoes, he knew, were worn to show off the legs. Her hair looked especially clean and full, it was a dark grey blonde and it swayed around her head as she talked. Only her eyes, a guarded deep brown set off by rays of crow’s-feet, disappointed him. As he ate his grilled cheese he imagined them unguarded and bright, throwing off a phrase or two from the accumulated vocabulary of experienced eyes.

  Now that she was well, her voice was clipped and businesslike and funny. She was one of those women who wear no rings but talk without apology about their grown-up children. Her breasts seemed full and solid although he couldn’t begin to find her nipples; they were lost beneath the swirling blue paisley. After two hours they counted between them, with some guilt, five students left waiting in the halls outside their offices.

  He liked her, he decided he liked her tremendously, and by the time the woman came to clear their plates he felt a potent urge to be in love again. As he walked back across the grass to his office he very deliberately resurrected everything he knew to be true and ridiculous and daunting about this urge. He lined it all up, chose what he wanted to believe, and dumped the rest into the bunkers long since dug at the back of his brain. He was going to get into her pants and he was going to fall in love, in whichever order was necessary. She could decide the order.

  It didn’t take him long to fall in love. She was available and game. They went to concerts in the city park put on by a youth orchestra and to a fall fair thirty miles out of the city and once to the horse races, where he lost forty dollars and she came away even, and smug. They talked about her ex-husband and about Carol over Caesar salad and beer, and about books she’d had a chance to read that year and about recent economic theories he’d wanted to comprehend. And she said one evening, while putting down a twenty for her part of the dinner, that she had no credit cards. She said she thought unnecessary debt was very unwise. That night he’d stood in his kitchen in his boxers and cut his Visa card into pieces with his nail scissors. The next day he transferred enough money out of his savings account to pay off every cent owed to everyone for everything.

  They even had a short Sunday afternoon at her apartment with two of her children and one of his own, all gathered in the city for their own youthful, compelling reasons. The young visitors eyed each other tenuously as they threw back beer nuts and pretzels and they circled their parents warily, as had been predicted, but they did give brief, spontaneous lip service to companionship and fun, for anyone. The companionship line, full of good cheer, had come from his own long-legged son, gratis. “Just drink your beer,” he’d told him.

  He expected by this time, quite honourably, he thought, to be into her pants. She was friendly almost beyond bearing, she touched his arm or his back whenever there was even the mildest excuse to do so. But she’d said no twice to his offer to tuck her up and she kissed him chastely.

  Because he knew no other way, he asked her flat out one night, over a late dinner after an economics lecture which he’d enjoyed and agreed with, why they weren’t making love. “I want to bite those thighs,” he said. He didn’t broach her nipples; he wasn’t entirely without discipline.

  She plopped sour cream over her baked potato and loaded it with chives. “I’m forty-seven years old,” she said. “I would bet you’ve never been with a forty-seven-year-old woman.”

  “No,” he said, grinning.

  “It’s no joke,” she said.

  He knew what had to be done. He was sure he could match her. He listened to her go on about Dostoyevsky over dessert, and as soon as they were into the car in the parking lot he pulled his shirt out of his pants and let his stomach hang out over his belt, although it wasn’t as disgusting in the dark as he’d hoped. He took her hand and placed it on his soft, hairy pot.

  “There,” he said. “Isn’t that nice?”

  She took her hand away.

  He hiked up his pant leg and pointed to a long lumpy vein just under the skin. He’d been watching its steady movement to the surface for years.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Like an old log bobbing up.”

  She watched his excitement calmly for a minute and then she lifted her bum off the seat and pulled her dress up to exp
ose her thighs.

  “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I’d recognize them anywhere.” He started the car and got them on their way, sticking to the passing lane of the main thoroughfare from the city core out to the campus.

  “There’s more,” she said.

  He turned off onto a quiet side street, continuing home at a steady fifty kilometres an hour. She had unbuttoned her shirtwaist, this one a soft green print, and was pulling her arms out of it as he drove. He saw, glancing as often as he could in the intermittent light from the street, what she wanted him to see. Her lacy black bra was filled with something other than flesh, something similar in texture and shape to the kids’ old beanbags. She reached around and unhooked her bra, letting it fall heavily into her lap. He was looking at a war zone.

  He slowed and pulled the car over to the side of the road. As soon as his hands were free he turned and used them to cover the two nearly healed slices. His thumbs moved involuntarily, up and down, up and down, over the rough dark texture.

  Her eyes were bright, finally, but not with the sulky passion he’d put there in his dreams. Her smile looked empty, and raw.

  “They don’t hurt much any more,” she said.

  He leaned over and buried his face in her. The scars felt tough and final against his cheek, as if the cells had hardened and said, This is it, don’t ever cut here again. He was astounded by their warmth, scars as warm as flesh can be.

  “You might have told me,” he said.

  She put her hand into his thinning hair, lifted it between her fingers and let it fall back into itself, soft and orderly. She said, “I’m telling you now.”

  He could hear her heart as clearly as he’d heard his own when he’d been alone and listening for it. He took what he could into his mouth, the thick layers of tissue where the needle had gathered the skin, the sturdy ridges rising like a mountain chain where all other land had disappeared.