The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  “Mom’s bummed ’cause I’m wearing her dress.”

  They wore each other’s clothes. That he found sexy, as though they were sisters and equals, not mother and daughter.

  “You look like sisters.”

  “Now Rita’s bummed, you saying that.”

  “Nina is so bummed!”

  But their calling each other by first names also proved what he meant. Wevill was holding the menu. He said, speaking carefully, “Is it baby-back ribs or baby back-ribs?”

  They stared at him and Nina seemed to mouth the word “whatever” as the waiter appeared.

  “Offer you cocktails before dinner?”

  Rita said, “Vodka tonic. Straight up. You got Absolut?”

  “Bailey’s Irish Cream,” Nina said.

  Wevill was startled by their promptness. He said, “Beer for me.”

  Stumped for something to say, Wevill studied his menu until the drinks came.

  “We’re ready to order,” Nina said to the waiter.

  “The ribs here, like, melt in your mouth,” Rita said to Wevill, as though hurrying him. He took the hint and ordered ribs, as the women did.

  The food was brought within minutes. Everything happened quickly here, speed was a feature of the place, even the way people gambled seemed speedy, jamming coins into the machines, plopping chips on the grid of the roulette felt, dealing and snapping cards, the whole loud overbright town like the lurid midway of a carnival.

  The women were chewing the meat—Wevill took pleasure in the way they gnawed the bones; but he could not eat, he was too nervous, he felt like a child, a sick patient with two inattentive nurses. He was in their hands. He was astonished at their confidence.

  “Like Ma says, they melt in your mouth,” Nina said.

  “I don’t know why I just thought of this,” Wevill said, “but back in the days when I was seeing a shrink—my wife suggested it, first wife—I saw him four times a week. One day I was at a movie. It was The Godfather. I saw my shrink at the counter buying popcorn. It was very awkward. I mean, seeing my doctor at this movie. He pretended not to recognize me—and he looked different, too. He just walked past me.”

  “Al Pacino looked like a little kid in that movie,” Rita said.

  “I always put mochi crunch in my popcorn,” Nina said.

  “It just came to me, that thought,” Wevill said. His mouth was dry with throat strain from a sorrow that ached like unslaked thirst. “Not important.”

  Meat flecks on their glistening lips, chew marks on the animal ribs in their hands, the two women ate, smiling as they swallowed, their breasts brushing their plates of meat and bones.

  “So how’s the gambling?” Wevill asked.

  “It ain’t real gambling,” Rita said. “It’s just gaming, like a game, mostly just slots. Just feed the slots.”

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Wevill loved the juicy way she said the word “slots,” then he muttered the word himself and was slightly disgusted by it.

  “You win, though?”

  “My machines are junk. Not coming across,” Rita said.

  Nina said, “One wahine from Waipahu won big in slots.”

  She seemed to imply that this woman’s win made their chances slimmer.

  “You got special machines?”

  Nina had finished her ribs and picked up the small dessert menu on the table. “They got this pie with Oreo cookie cruss that is so ono.”

  Meanwhile, Rita was answering Wevill’s question, explaining to him, as perhaps she had once explained to her daughter, that you first played a lot of machines, then narrowed your choice to the luckier ones that paid out, and played those, feeding quarters, two machines at a time.

  “To tell you the truth, I came here after I saw Ramon in his coffin. I was moved.”

  The women half glanced at each other, then checked their glances, reacting like jurors, maintaining poker-faced court etiquette. But he knew he had made his point.

  “How do you spend the day?”

  Rita was at first evasive. Then she said, “Big breakfast buffet, then do some shopping on the Strip, play the slots, bite of lunch at the casino, then play the slots again. Free beer if you keep playing. At night we take in a show, or maybe get a few drinks and ribs, or play the slots.”

  Shtrip and djrinks set his teeth on edge and reminded him of where they were from, where Strip, drinks, slots, ribs, Vegas, and party were their code words for pleasure.

  “We saw that guy that's on TV George Carlin. Funny comedian.”

  “In a show?” Wevill asked.

  “No. He was eating one ice cream,” Nina said. “On the Strip.”

  “We went to Le Cirque with a group. Kind of a group from home.”

  What he had anticipated as vicious turned out to be like camp for adults—organized, devoted to games and friends, with regular meals and even the circumscribed campsite of the Strip—the sort of vacation he had never taken himself, pure mindless fun, spending every penny you had, drinking yourself silly, gorging on rich food, then going home to your ordinary life after this harmless binge.

  They knew their way around, they were familiar and unafraid—quite different from the two diligent women who sweated at his house every Saturday. And now, after the meal, they were a bit tipsy, too, a condition he had never seen them in.

  Rita said, “I’m going to check out the slots.”

  Was she more than tipsy—drunk, maybe? She simply got up, gave her daughter a kiss, and waved goodbye, murmuring.

  Adding to Wevill’s bafflement was the fact that neither of them, so far, had used his name. With Rita gone, there was a silence, Nina gnawing at a fingernail until she became self-conscious.

  “I broke it—on a machine. Stud poker. Gotta glue it,” she said, picking at the nail. “So how’s business?”

  “Fine,” Wevill said, thinking, What business? Then he remembered his lie. He said, “To tell the truth, I’m kind of lonely.”

  “You’ll be okay once you get back home,” Nina said, and reached for the dessert menu.

  He winced, not at being patronized by a twenty-year-old but at the thought that he would not be okay back home; he would be miserable.

  Summoning all his psychic strength, he leaped into the darkness, saying, “I could use a massage.”

  Nina laughed and said promptly, “You sure came to the right place. Vegas has billions of ladies for that.” She smiled fondly at the dessert menu, as though she had just recognized an old friend. “I am such a chocoholic.”

  Wevill persisted, saying, “You wouldn’t be interested?”

  With the dessert menu in her hand she was confused by the question at first. She squinted as his proposition sank in, but she didn’t look up. Her finger rested on Oreo cookie crust, and she said, “You serious?”

  Her tone told him she took the question to be preposterous, and he was embarrassed, not so much because he had exposed his yearning to her but because she was so strong. The mother, too; they were powerful here. He had suspected it from the beginning. They even had money—they didn’t need him. Nina was young, he had been rash, but if he hadn’t asked the question, he would have cursed himself for his hesitation.

  “Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t regret it: he had needed to know.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Nina said.

  But her saying that infuriated him—his housecleaner patronizing him again. He called for the check.

  “I’d like to see your slot machines,” he said after he signed the credit card slip.

  “Be my guest.”

  Her casual way of saying that, with such confidence, aroused him, and all he regretted was that she was uninterested in him. Walking out of the restaurant behind the young woman, being stared at, he thought, This is my housecleaner and she has just turned me down.

  The casino in the California Hotel was just off the Strip—bright lights on the marquee advertising the music and magic shows, a red carpet at the entrance, and mirr
ors on the walls framed by glitter and more lights. But for all the sparkle, the place was filled with shabby older people, heavy smokers, shufflers in windbreakers and baseball caps, old men in big white sneakers, a drabness that depressed him.

  “There’s Ma.”

  Rita was feeding dollar tokens into two machines, side by side, not paying much attention but being conscientious, even laborious, as though priming a pump, which in a sense was exactly what she was doing. While Wevill watched, Rita lost thirty-two dollars.

  Nina smiled at him and, as though late for duty, went to the cashier and got a bucket, took her place on a stool, and began to press coins into the slots. She made it seem strangely like work, just as joyless. Even when they won, got a payout in a clatter of coins, they didn’t count them but instead scooped them out of the metal dish and, without looking, dumped them into the buckets of tokens they were feeding into the machines.

  Wevill was fascinated for ten or fifteen minutes, and then utterly bored to the point of annoyance and wanted to leave. Between them in that time the women had lost a couple of hundred dollars, not a lot to him, but to them a day’s pay. Pure folly.

  Rita saw him looking agitated. She said, “Try your luck. Them ones and them ones are pretty good payers.”

  Each of these flashing goggling money-gobblers held for her a distinct personality.

  Wevill said, “I think I’ll have an early night.”

  “In Vegas?” There was contempt in her incredulity.

  Wevill said, “Unless you want to do something later? Catch a show?”

  “Nina and I are seeing someone.”

  Another rejection. Their indifference back in Hawaii had been bad enough, but this rebuff was terrible. They were still like Watteau nymphs, just as selfish, hovering, teasing, forever slipping out of his grasp, so self-contained, so independent, but tidy and strangely efficient. They did not see his interest, or if they did, they took no interest themselves in him, in his feelings, in anything he owned. They laughed and agreed with anything he said, which was their way of not listening, not agreeing, hardly caring.

  Standing there in the casino among the slots, he saw them turned away from him, dressed up, even stylish, and he desired them and wanted to possess them. As a wealthy man, a successful lawyer, he was not used to being rebuffed and, unused to it, had trouble dealing with it. Crushed and wounded, his desire was raw and on his mind. He had not imagined rejection to be so painful.

  So, what could have been something trivial, a lack of interest, a pair of unresponsive women, was a goad, and they obsessed him.

  He was used to being needed. They didn’t need him. That made him want to possess them, either one, or both.

  Wevill could never have admitted that he envied them, yet he did envy them in the worst and most shameful way. He was hungry and helpless, and they defeated him with half-smiles and evasions—as he had done so often with envious visitors in his house. That was what shamed him. That he recognized the feeling, the experience of envy and defeat, seeing someone more powerful than he was.

  In his room, he fell asleep watching a made-for-TV movie about a schoolgirl persecuted for being new to the school and friendless, and he was moved by it, saddened by its pathos, the weak and isolated girl, her insensitive parents (“You have to face up to them!”), the beasts who teased her until she was in despair, the one teacher who understood and defended the girl. His eyes dampened and he was further moved by his own almost-tears. He woke sorrowing that he had not seen the ending, but hating the thought that lonely people found meaning in such movies. He had been susceptible. It had to be crap.

  The following day he made plans to leave Las Vegas. He was humiliated, the worst possible outcome, for now he had to fire Rita and Nina—how could he face them?—and would have to find other housecleaners.

  “All our flights today are full,” the airline clerk said on the phone.

  “I’m holding a first-class ticket.”

  “I’m looking at first class. I’m not seeing any seats. You want me to wait-list you?”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Nothing in first class. I have a coach seat on the seven-ten.”

  A coach seat among half-wits returning to the islands, having flung all their money into slot machines. But he took it, because the indignity of the seat wasn’t as hurtful as the humiliation of staying in Las Vegas. He resolved to kill the day in his room. He found the city excruciating for its crass appetites and confidence tricks, and he suspected a greater, hidden debauchery. He went without breakfast, he sat glowering, cursing the place, mumbling denunciations, feeling lightheaded and virtuous because of his hunger.

  Around noon the phone rang, startling him. Who knew he was here?

  “It’s me.”

  Who? Then he knew, it was one or the other, slightly drunk, making no sense, like the grubby gamblers bingeing here in this carnival freak show.

  “Gotta talk.”

  “Maybe we could arrange to meet somewhere—go out for coffee.”

  “I’m downstairs,” she said, and sounded to him like a cop.

  He hurried to the lobby and saw Rita. He easily recognized her because she was wearing slacks and sneakers and a T-shirt lettered Vegas. Her hair had come loose. She looked as she had some Saturdays when she arrived with Nina to clean, and that pleased him and gave him hope and put an edge on his desire.

  The hotel coffee shop was called the Cactus Flower Terrace, a sign at the entrance saying, Please Wait to Be Seated. Rita muttered something and walked past the sign and seated herself at a booth. Wevill followed, feeling he was trespassing and wondering if the waitress who appeared with menus would reprimand him.

  “Just coffee,” Rita said without glancing up.

  She looked darkly assertive, with her head down and her elbows out, not looking at Wevill, even when the coffee was poured and she was holding her cup in two hands and blow-sucking at the steamy surface.

  “Shoulda had some of this before. As a rule, I don’t normally drink nothing at lunchtime.” Now she looked up, her red eyes on him. “But I was stressed.”

  “That’s understandable,” he started to say, thinking, Shtressed?

  But she cut him off. “My money’s pau, and plus all that other stuff too, besides.”

  He had no idea what she was saying, but he was aware of another creeping sensation that was binding him to his seat, making him wait, holding him captive. It was not for him to negotiate. She was proceeding at her own speed. He recalled being in his room, at the window, denouncing Las Vegas, and the phone ringing, and I’m downstairs. He had been summoned to this meeting. Something unsaid disturbed him.

  “Give me a minute,” she said.

  “I was just wondering,” he said.

  “Try wait. I’m drinking my coffee.”

  He leaned back as though she had scooped him with an uppercut.

  “So what’s this I been hearing about one massage?” she finally said.

  His dry mouth would not allow him to He, yet he tried, saying, “I don’t know what you mean. I was just upstairs getting ready to leave. I’ve got a flight back to Honolulu first thing tomorrow.”

  “Nina said you hitting on her about one massage.”

  “I was not hitting on her,” Wevill said. Some of the time he was just a civilian, but certain words, actionable language he heard with his attorney ears, set his attorney mind in motion.

  “She say you was.”

  Why, he wondered, was bad grammar so much more threatening than proper English?

  “I mentioned that I was thinking of getting one, not that I expected her to give me one personally. I mean, my asking her there and then—that would be ridiculous.”

  Saying this, denying what he had done, and trying to laugh, he understood his guilt and saw how foolish he had been.

  The waitress returned and said, “Would you like me to tell you what’s on special today?”

  Rita said “No!” with such ferocity the waitress steppe
d back and hurried away.

  Wevill said, “Why did you react when I mentioned Ramon? Were you impressed?”

  “I was trying not to laugh,” she said. “Ramon didn’t like you. One day he says, 'I dig holes for a living. I could dig one big enough for that bugger to fit in.’”

  And still she was not through with him. Alert, despite her drunkenness, she said, “So when you go, Are you interested?,’ you don’t mean Nina, you mean someone else?”

  It was diabolical how her drunken alertness made her more intimidating than a trial lawyer, for her pounce and probity were unexpected. She was a deadly combination of gruffness and barely articulate intelligence.

  “Try give me some kine answer.”

  He felt old and weak and breathless and whatever was the opposite of desire—fear more than repulsion—and all this had destroyed his will. He was trapped like a felon on a plastic cushion in the Cactus Flower Terrace. He could now understand a mumbling and terrified man being cross-examined on a witness stand. He was defeated. He was dreadfully embarrassed by what he had attempted, and the attempt was an act. The words she had quoted were almost verbatim. He could not deny saying them.

  “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. An inexcusable error of judgment.”

  “She just a kid, Nina.”

  Rita was right. He had taken advantage of the girl, yet everything he had experienced in this loud hellish-hot city proved that he was weak. Sitting here he felt powerless, his head bowed under the scolding.

  “You coulda asked me first,” she said, swallowing coffee.

  This was ambiguous to him. She might have been saying, “You could have asked me instead of Nina,” or, seeking permission, “You could have asked me if you wanted Nina.”

  “What would you have said if I had asked?”

  “I woulda said,” she murmured, drinking from the cup, “I woulda said, 'Try explain.'”

  “I admit it was a mistake,” he said.

  “So you don't want nothing?”

  Her staring, her scolding, forced him to be particular, and to endure the final humiliation in order to clear himself, he said, “Yes. I wanted a massage.”

  She would not accept this. She said, “You don't mean massage when you say massage.”