Nate said to the bartender, “I’ll make him the drink.”
And I thought, That’s good. Nate will take it over to Tony, calm him down, put his hat back on his head, and send him home to the Starlight or the Stardust or the Starglow or whatever it was being called this week, let him sleep off his disappointment and his anger in his bed there in his vast unopened hotel of a thousand rooms in which he’d been hoping to book all the low rollers who wanted to stay in Vegas for five dollars a night.
But after Nate had gone behind the bar to pour the drink, he pushed it across the bar to me and said, “E, give him this, and this,” and next to the glass he slid the bill. Twenty-five dollars. A bill?
I stared at Nate. No matter how many drinks Tony had ordered, drinks were always on the house for gamblers.
Nate smiled at me. “It’ll let him know it’s time to go.”
“Nate—”
“Go on.”
Reluctantly, I took the tumbler with his 7 and 7 and the slip of paper over to the craps table and put the latter under the former, hoping maybe Tony would think it was a cocktail napkin and never even know about Nate’s intent to insult him.
But, of course, that didn’t happen, though I got away with it at first. Tony snatched up the whiskey, drank it down all at once, glittery-eyed and reckless, set the glass on the wooden ledge of the table by the very few chips he had left, the greater mass of them, a massive mass of them, stacked neatly on the other side of the table under the jurisdiction of the croupier. Tony’s face was wet, his eyes a little wild, but he still managed to say to me, gallantly, “Thanks, honey,” before he looked down and saw the soggy bill.
And at that, he started to rant, to scream, to pound his fists on the table, shaking the chips, and then he began to lumber, still yelling, pushing past me toward the bar where Nate stood immobile, watching him—Benny would have gone off like a bomb at Tony’s ferocious approach, if it were Mickey, he would have already shot Tony dead, but Nate was always controlled—and halfway across the casino floor, Tony grabbed his chest, screamed, and fell over, hitting the ground with the thump of the dead, which he was, the second man in my life to fall dead at my feet.
At this, Nate said, “Get out of the way, E,” and I, who had taken a step toward Tony with some thought of aiding the man, cradling his head or taking his hand or checking his pulse, abruptly stopped walking, and Nate, who had been striding toward Tony to do the same, or so I thought, didn’t pause at all, not even for a second, by Tony’s crumpled body. Instead, Nate moved swiftly past him to his goal, the glass that remained on the craps table, a glass he whisked up and took back to the bar, where he washed it and dried it and put it back on the shelf with the hundreds of others and where it became an ordinary glass instead of the poisoned chalice I now understood it was.
The chalice he had had me in all my ignorance ferry over to the luckless Tony Cornero, who lay motionless on the plush carpet of Nate’s casino.
Because a drink delivered by me merited a “Thanks, honey,” but a drink and the tab smacked down on the table by the irritated Nate would have been perceived as insult enough that Tony might have refused the whiskey and the bill and strode from the casino. Only to be faced again some other time. And Nate didn’t want to see Tony again, ever. Hence, Nate’s, Take this over to him, E.
No, it wasn’t the first time a dead man had lain at my feet, but it was the first time my own actions had brought him down.
What if I hadn’t happened to walk into the casino just now?
Or.
Worse, what if Nate had been waiting for me to find him wherever he was, as I did every morning at this hour, had planned ahead in bringing whatever nugget of poison he’d added to Tony’s whiskey at just the right moment, so I could perform this service.
No.
Surely my appearance was a happy accident. For Nate, not Tony.
I sat down on one of the tall-legged leather chairs by the craps table, at a bit of a distance from the dead Tony, who had in one hand, I could see now, the dice he had been making ready to throw. Nate had the croupier and the bartender, who said nothing and who kept their faces deliberately blank, stand by the casino doors. He made two calls while I sat there studying Tony, his purple mottled face, the scraped worn soles of his shoes making pathetic contrast to his fine suit, his tie a fabric arm begging for alms from the plush carpet, the ducktail of hair at the back of his neck that needed a trim. And I smelled his loosed bowels. I looked up at the bar. Nate had his broad back to me. And though it took many long minutes, he never turned around to face me while he made his calls, one to a Los Angeles mortician and the other to Cornero’s physician in Vegas who was Nate’s and everybody else’s doctor out here. Why not.
When he was finished, he came and stood beside me in his own five-hundred-dollar suit, silk tie swinging giddily, took my hand, and said, “Don’t look at him, E. A heart attack is an ugly thing.” And there was that ping in his voice again, the ping I recognized. He jerked his chin at the barman and pantomimed that he should grab a towel and lay it over Tony’s head, which the bartender did and which somehow made everything worse, Tony a macabre spaceman in his helmet, with dice. And as the bartender backed away, Nate said, “I’m sorry you had to see this, Esme.”
I turned now from Tony’s white-sacked head to look at Nate. So. He was going to deny, prevaricate, pretend. With me. I’ve never had a poker face. It used to infuriate my mother when she was up to one of her capers to see on my face the contrary emotions coursing there—anger, shame, incredulity—emotions I could not seem to bleach away. She’d look right into my face and say, “I didn’t do that,” when she clearly had. But worse was when she made me an operator in her trickery, as in, “Go tell Mr. Taylor you need to run lines with Mickey Rooney.”
In those situations, I became the golem my grandfather had told me about, the monster made out of mud who couldn’t speak for itself but could only lurch around. To make it move, you wrote the Hebrew word for truth on its forehead and then you wrote what you wanted it to do on a piece of parchment and put the paper in the monster’s mouth and the golem would do what you told it to do. And when you were finished with it, you erased the word and the golem and the parchment turned to dust. And that’s how Nate had used me, too. Except that I hadn’t turned to dust. And I wasn’t sure there was any truth here between us.
Nate let go of my hand.
The doctor Nate had called arrived within a half hour with a death certificate and a medical bag, for form’s sake, I suppose, because he never opened it, and he told the security men by now stationed at every door to the casino that there was no need to call the Clark County coroner, Mr. Cornero had clearly suffered a massive heart attack, no need for an autopsy, and the doctor himself then called for an ambulance to take the body for transport. Maybe Tony did have a heart attack. Maybe the bill for the drinks and not that last drink itself was the catalyst for Cornero’s plummet to the floor, dead on arrival there. Maybe, as Nate told me after I overheard him threaten that Negro boxer, his threats were just talk. Just theater. For effect. But something had had an effect here.
And once Tony had been lifted from the carpet and laid on a stretcher, Nate followed the body, making, I imagined, a ghoulish processional through the kitchen and from there out the back of the hotel, the industrial, all-business part of the hotel, with its metal roll-up doors where deliveries were made and its blank locked doors where back-of-the-house employees arrived for their shifts and where the counting-room cash made its exit. In that back parking lot by the delivery trucks and the laundry trucks the ambulance waited, motor running, and I’m sure Nate made certain Tony’s body was loaded, hurriedly, into the back of this particular delivery truck with its big red cross.
It was only after Nate left the casino, with a terse instruction to the doctor, “Give her something,” that the doctor turned his attention to me. Like Tony, I had to be lifted off the casino chair and half-carried, to the bar, though, not to an ambulance, beca
use, like Tony, I seemed to have been robbed of my ability to walk, my legs going this way and that. I was instructed to take some of the tranquilizers in the bottle the doctor pulled from his black bag, a bag that made itself useful in some way, after all.
I sat on my barstool while the doctor opened the vial of Miltowns and broke one of the tablets in half. I swallowed it with some warm water the bartender gave me. Soon, I would be helped to my bed, bottle of Miltowns in my pocket. Yes, Baby E would have to be carried. Behind me, a small crew was wiping and vacuuming away all traces of Tony Cornero, spraying something sweet into the air and onto the carpet fibers. It was almost noon and the casino needed to be reopened, the players and their fresh, green cash admitted. There were two hundred and twenty-nine rooms in the hotel, with men and women in and out of each one, each night, two hundred different people every night, three-hundred and sixty-five days a year, seventy thousand people a year, each one with his own story. Of that number, I wondered how many brought with them shame, guilt, disgrace, humiliation—or acquired these here, as I had.
Tony would be buried in Los Angeles before nightfall.
42
When I woke in the afternoon, upstairs in Nate’s Hollywood Suite, all alone, it was almost four o’clock. The half Miltown I’d swallowed had turned me into a corpse, though only for six hours, not for eternity like the unfortunate Cornero. If I’d been given a whole pill, I’d probably have been out for twelve, which I’m sure Nate was counting on, busy as he was vacuuming up all the celestial particles Cornero had left behind. Better for Nate to have me unconscious for a while, strapped into some metaphoric Viking rocket, temporarily spinning in some outer orbit where, at least for now, I could make no trouble. In what heavenly orbit did Cornero circle?
I still felt too drugged to move, so I simply shut my eyes again. Goodbye to a sunlight so brilliant it hid the stars and planets right there in plain sight. This must have been what my mother had felt like, the version of her that had been unable to get out of bed our last summer together, and who, when I had tried to talk to her, simply rolled away from me without opening her pretty eyes, unable to utter a syllable or to lift a heavy arm even one inch, no matter how much I pulled at her hand or put my little mouth to her ear and shrieked for her attention. “Wake up!” Yes, I understood now what I couldn’t possibly have understood then, that my mother had been swallowing tranquilizers to obliterate all the days and all the hours within them that now held nothing she wanted, nothing she’d been wishing for on a star since she was a child led by her first-grade teacher from one classroom to another throughout Sheridan Elementary School so that all the other teachers could admire the extraordinary beauty of Dorothy Wolfkowitz, certain to grow up to be something out of this world.
And then she’d grown up.
Well, I’d grown up, too, though not in Boyle Heights. I’d gone to the Desert Inn to do it. So I was grown up, now, Vegas-style. And if there was something I wanted to obliterate, well, there was a pill for it.
Maybe Nate didn’t think what he asked of me this morning would bother me much, given that I was a burlesque act, a tawdry one, and a half orphan, the daughter of a stooper, a failed one, and a hoofer, a common one.
I opened my eyes.
I wanted to see my father. If my legs now worked.
They did.
I got up and drew the curtains against the massive hotel parking lot and the eighteen-hole golf course beyond it, someone else’s wish on a star, one that had actually manifested itself. Slowly, carefully—how had my mother sprung with such alacrity from her bed the day of her inexplicable resurrection?—I navigated the room, my body remembering itself, my limbs remembering their functions.
I washed my face. I dressed.
Before I left, I took my manicure scissors and sat on the end of the bed I’d shared with Nate this past year, where I could almost feel our shades cavorting at my back. This is how adults fuck, little girl, what do you think of that. Here’s what I thought. I used the scissors to cut off all my hair, a long painstaking process with such a tiny tool, but I persisted, working the small blades very close to my scalp so the hair fell from me in the longest possible strands, covering the foot of the bed and the carpet at my feet, and when I was finished, I laid the scissors on the bed over the strands of my blond hair for Nate to see. Because eventually, reluctantly, he would have to come back here, and then he’d discover I’d left behind only all that long hair of mine he loved so much, the troublesome remainder of me having vanished.
43
Winters are cold in Las Vegas. Ten thousand years ago, the climate had been more temperate. This desert had been mild and black at night and by day a lush place of green grass and blue lakes, of mammoths and camels and saber-toothed tigers, if you can believe it, and then nature did an about-face and ravaged the valley with heat, and the oven it became burned away all life, leaving behind animal bones and mesquite and creosote, and a disorganized mesh of rivers that didn’t know which way to go, and sandstorms, after which shone the endless sun. And it stayed this way, an abandoned wasteland, for centuries, until Rafael Rivera wandered with a scouting party off the Old Spanish trail and stared into the valley at Christmastime 1829 when the weather was cold and the winter grasses were blowing and he named this spot the Meadows—Las Vegas.
Those meadows and marshes were fed by springs so powerful a man could not even dive into them without being repelled immediately to the water’s surface. By 1950, Las Vegas had pumped those springs dry.
And now in that spot lay the extraordinary impudence of the Strip.
I stepped out onto it. The Flamingo was a mile away, and it would take me maybe a half an hour to walk there. In my state. In the cold.
I left, hatless—a mistake, given my shorn head that made me doubly vulnerable to the low temperature—wearing fur-lined winter boots and the mink coat Benny had given me, around my neck the diamond esme pendant big as a doorknob—I was still not that many years from my overadorned childhood self. Or maybe, just in case I froze to death, I wanted the passersby who found me to know I was a person of value to someone, Send this frozen corpse to the Desert Inn, care of Nate Stein, giver of this necklace, even if I didn’t feel very much valued by him right now. Quite the opposite.
On this late, late afternoon, the Strip had not quite yet met the dusk that roused the hotel neon. Vegas always looked so stark and plain by day, a little embarrassed to be seen, its neon melted away to tubing and poles, its lightbulbs sheepish glass shells. Despite the raucous neon brawl, it was so easy to feel alone here. Even into early 1953, the Strip was still nothing much but motor courts. All you had to do was turn from the hotels and casinos of the Strip, look over any wall that surrounded any one of the hotel swimming pools, and gaze at the vast empty sand-strewn valley, which we were slowly taking over, bit by bit.
To the north of me lay the El Rancho, the Thunderbird, the Sahara, and the construction sites of the Riviera and the Stardust of contention, on its site the wooden tracks for carts, the cranes and tractors and ladders and wooden planks demarcating the areas left to be finished. And near that site, another, completely empty but for a battered sign that read:
On This Site Will Be Erected
the 1000-Room El Morocco Hotel.
Opposite me at the end of the Desert Inn drive stood the Last Frontier, where in 1947 Adolph Schwimmer came from Palestine to say the Irgun needed machine guns and got fifty-eight crates of them from the Vegas big boys, and from Schwimmer’s pitch to the Los Angeles big boys, which put Louis B. Mayer and Mickey Cohen in the same banquet room for an evening, millions of dollars. Then Cohen had held a fundraiser of his own for the Irgun in Los Angeles at his Slapsy Maxie’s, because once Mickey heard that there were Jews in Palestine fighting for independence, for survival, Jews? Real Jews with guns?, he raised money for them from every mobster and mogul he knew. South of me stood the newly opened Sands, its façade desert-dirt red.
I started walking. Long undeveloped acres of land e
xtended themselves beside the highway. I passed tumbleweed after tumbleweed, each of which always seemed to find some edifice, however small—a post, a wire, a plank, a creosote bush, a cactus—to halt its otherwise endless sojourn. I passed an abandoned boat, its provenance a mystery, broken and cooking in the sun. I passed a For Sale sign:
Hotel Site
Three Million Dollars
Enquire at the El Rancho
Sand and grit, cacti and creosote, concrete and lawn chairs, cinder-block motels and blue-painted swimming pools, some of those pools, like the El Rancho’s, right by the highway.
Cars whizzed past me, in a hurry to bring their occupants to the casinos, in too much of a hurry to worry about a girl walking by the side of the highway in the winter cold, in too much of a rush to lose money with a gaiety men never normally expressed when losing money, in a rush to the beds, where these men could make love to their wives, or if they desired, to a stranger, in a rush to the bars where they could drink, incessantly and uncensored, to the clubs, where they could feast on flesh and color.
Around the bend in the highway ahead of me rose the construction site of the partially realized Dunes and shortly thereafter the lushly landscaped site of the fully realized Flamingo. But now it seemed the Flamingo was to be reinvented; plans had been drawn up, my father told me, to build an addition, a tower of rooms—in fact all the extant hotels were drawing up plans to abandon their old-style motor courts and embrace new many-storied towers, blocks of guest rooms stacked one on top of the other up to the night sky. Beyond the Flamingo and the Dunes, too far in the distance to see, reared the billboard advertising the Tropicana Hotel soon to come, with its Three Hundred Luxurious Rooms, and its Desert Oasis theme.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 22
