“Close your eyes,” Sybil says.
Irene does as instructed.
“Relax. Breathe. Listen.”
They sit across from each other without speaking. Perhaps ten minutes go by, perhaps an hour, but in that space of questionable time, Irene feels that for the first time, without drugs, the relaxing sensation of abandoning herself to some greater being.
She opens her eyes for a moment and sees that Sybil’s eyes are still closed, her legs crossed, and her face placid and smooth, when before it had looked so rough and hardened. And when Sybil takes hold of Irene’s hands, she stands and nearly loses her balance. They hug, and Irene thanks Sybil, and as she drives back through the city and over the bridge to the Cape, finally arriving at the house on Main in Wequaquet, she feels she is entering into a second life, where nothing appears the same as it once did, because, here are her children, in the glow of the television screen, and the kitchen is clean and the old furniture has been rearranged, and the house smells of Francine’s floral perfume, and that large, looming threat of Robert returning is finally gone, which changes everything.
FIFTEEN
When Robert first arrives in Las Vegas, he rents a room at the Fly-by-Night Motel near McCarran International Airport and hangs around the casinos along the strip. The action, the lights and sounds of the machines, the smell of smoke and freshly cleaned carpet, the pretty women and barrel-bellied men laughing in their cocktail glasses gives him a spark, keeps his mind stimulated. He drinks a lot of grapefruit juice. He washes his hands ceremoniously in the ornate restrooms. He tries to focus his mind away from his boys, from what he has left behind.
But he’s running out of money fast. He won’t work for anyone, not as a regular employee; he’s already been that man once before, and once is enough. He sits in the coffee shop at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino and searches the classifieds for opportunities, chance, a stake to get him started. Meanwhile, he still believes in luck. Every day he puts five bucks in the giant slot machine with a jackpot for a million dollars at the front entrance of the casino floor. Every day he loses five bucks.
Then, one morning at a coffee shop, he sees an ad in the back of the Las Vegas Sun:
THE ART OF PROFESSIONAL GAMBLING
SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY
THIS IS NOT A GAME
He calls the number on the ad and an automated message instructs him to call another number. He calls that number and a man answers and says, impatiently, his name is Simon, professional handicapper and money manager. Robert starts to inquire. Simon interrupts, says to meet him at the Jack in the Box on Sahara in ten minutes.
Still not used to the layout of the city, Robert shows up ten minutes late and the parking lot is empty save for a black Lincoln town car with tinted windows. Out steps a squat-shouldered figure with a potbelly, wearing an unassuming color combination of tan on tan—coat zipped up and stretched down over the waist of his khakis.
“Simon?” Robert says.
“That’s right.”
Robert holds out his hand, but Simon keeps his hands in his coat pockets.
“You’re in good shape,” he says, and Robert can tell by the direct and unwavering attention in his eyes that Simon takes his work very seriously.
“I run.”
“Well if you ran here on time, you wouldn’t be losing so much money from the get.”
“I didn’t know we’d made a deal already.”
“Why else would you be here? Come on, buy me a taco, we’ll call it even.”
As they eat, Simon explains how he’s not allowed on casino floors anymore. He’s been flagged as one of the few people in the world who can beat the house.
“I learned from my father—they called him the Ghost—he could break a roll just by looking at you, your soul, stealing your luck like a spirit thief. He ended up a cooler for the casinos. He was struck by lightning.”
“Metaphorically?”
“Literally. That’s how he died. Anyway, I learned how to count cards from him when I was young. He wasn’t really a ghost—he couldn’t steal your luck—he just knew more than you did about table games. I’ve never been married and don’t have kids. I made a lot of money counting cards. I wore a suit, and, later, when I was flagged, certain disguises. Then I got kicked out for good, put on a blacklist, you might say. I can’t be on a casino floor, can’t place a bet. So I teach. The fact that I won in this life is enough. Everyone loses in the end, but few are allowed to win or to beat death so long they are made to quit.
“What does this mean for you?” Simon asks rhetorically. “You’re already betting on a winner.”
Robert is so engrossed, he misses the sales pitch, misses everything that could go wrong entrusting the minimal amount of cash he has to a stranger, someone who posts ads in the back of the Sun.
Simon gives Robert a key to a room at Caesars, along with a bankroll of five hundred dollars.
“You pay interest on that,” he says, taco grease glimmering in the corners of his lips. “Two points a day.”
The next morning, a breakfast of oatmeal, fruit, and two hard-boiled eggs arrives at Robert’s door. A half hour later, Simon enters the room while Robert’s in the shower. He pulls the curtain aside, tells him to dry off and get dressed. His clothes are already laid out for him: a plain striped polo shirt and a pair of jeans.
“You want to look like any other dipshit tourist in the casino,” Simon says. “But today you watch. You learn.”
First, though, a lesson in stupidity. On the casino floor, they stand just outside the ring of players by the roulette table, watching a dozen or so turns, people losing hundreds betting favorite numbers, trying to guess red or black, throwing chips on the double zero.
“Outside of the slots, which is just feeding the animals, roulette is the biggest con ever invented,” Simon says. “Watch their eyes, the hope and desperation, understand what it means to be dedicated to a losing cause, brainwashed into believing you can win what you were never supposed to win in the first place. Internalizing that understanding is power.”
Robert watches the silver ball fall into the numbered slot—23 Black. A subtle smile appears on the face of a man sitting at the table. It’s the face of someone who has lost nearly everything, including hope, and just when the gods are about to put him out of his misery, mercy comes in the form of a weight and a wheel.
“Blackjack has the best odds in the house,” Simon is saying, “but those odds don’t take into account the dopes playing next to you. And casinos are smart to card counters. They got six, eight, sometimes ten decks. And sure, a few masterminds slip through, but again, here, the play is so fast, and that means more losers, so even if they get taken for a few million, they’re still making money, just not making as much, which is why the mathematician mopes get their legs broke every once in a while. The game we’re playing, Kelly, is craps.”
Back in the hotel room, Simon unrolls and spreads a felt on the nightstand between the two queen beds, then picks four dice from his pocket and rolls them up against the wall.
“Now, every hour, there’s one good roll. If you figure there are seven to ten rolls an hour, and you catch one good one, you can sprinkle your money the rest of the time by betting with the house.”
“Won’t that make me look bad?” Robert asks.
“You want to look bad? Lose all your money and play nickel slots down at Circus Circus in your shitty underpants,” Simon says.
On the floor, Robert watches the slick-looking businessmen. “Phonies,” Simon calls them. “Act like they know the game ’cause they smoke a cigar at the table.” He sees them roll and lose, roll and lose. He catches the good roll at the end of the first hour, a meek, perspiring, fat man with stains on his shirt, but with a supple flip of the wrist, gracefully tossing the dice up against the bank, hitting seven twice before making the point, hitting the point three times in a row, a hard four, a hard eight, the point again, then crapping out, eight grand to the good.
That night R
obert falls into the chair in his hotel room. He remembers his boys asleep in the wan glow of the nightlights in their rooms, their lips moving slightly, legs shifting beneath their sheets. The memory lifts his heart a little.
In the morning he eats breakfast with Simon and listens to him tell a story about a man he saw throw himself from the top of the Sands Hotel.
Robert makes a grand the first day. He makes six grand the next. He loses three the following. He returns each night to his room at Caesars Palace with the bankroll, which Simon takes a piece of, slipping the bills from underneath. No women, no shows, no television. The gambler’s life is not unlike the life of any enterprising man whose objective is the enterprise itself.
A month goes by like this, until one morning Robert slips two one-hundred-dollar chips on a hard four—a bet a tourist might make, someone who crosses his fingers behind his back, a man who has a cocktail waitress blow on his dice. The hard four hits—paying 7 to 1—and two five-hundred-dollar chips, and four one-hundred-dollar chips are pushed his way. The eruption around the table jolts his brain, the same as a line of coke once did. But he doesn’t press his luck. He plays the point, then runs with the house until the table clears. He is alone, trading glances with the surly pit boss and the overweight dealer. He remembers the story of Simon’s father, wonders if this is what Simon had done, taken a chance, shown himself from the shadows, a ghost reborn? He flips the dealer two one-hundred-dollar chips, the same he had begun the day with. Tokens, he thinks, to balance the scales of luck.
On his way back up to the room, he thinks of how America loves, envies, despises, emulates, and resents its winners. The same can be said for its losers. Elgin Baylor, Pete Rose, Mike Tyson come to mind. But the steady hand, the long-game player, who, in middle age, has achieved a level of peace, comfort, and stability that most people wish for but will never have, America feels nothing for them, making sure that when those lucky few die, they go unremembered.
Whether or not Robert can articulate such grandiose ideas doesn’t matter so much as feeling that truth in his heart.
The next day, he plays recklessly, placing bets on the pass line, tossing chips in the field, and, once he’s up, he goes for more, throwing a thousand bucks on a yo-eleven that comes up a soft six. Later, he tells Simon that he felt lucky.
“Luck has nothing to do with it!” Simon shouts.
But Robert is primed for the action on the floor, urged on by the mere emotion of the win, or, he realizes later, sitting up in his bed staring at the blank television screen, the loss. Regardless of what he walks away with from the table, he feels the same sting of guilt, like a child standing at the exit of a county fair, looking back at all the opportunities for pleasure he might have (must have!) missed.
Finally, after three months, Simon has to cut Robert off. Beneath the painted sky above the Forum Shops, Simon hands Robert a one-hundred-dollar bill, like a cheap parting gift, and follows with a firm handshake. He says he can’t fault Robert for his lack of restraint, but he can’t support it either.
“Trust me, I know, the life of a gambler is one of extreme tedium and detachment from human nature. I haven’t had a woman since 1982,” he says.
Robert moves into a daily-weekly on Tropicana, where he begins searching the classifieds for any kind of start-up available. He wakes to the nightshift employees playing Metallica or Iron Maiden on their stereos, and jogs in the cool desert morning, just before dawn, imagining himself at some future time in the gated luxury of Spanish Trail, sipping coffee on his patio, looking out at the large palms surrounding the second tee of the private golf course. He runs toward the Strip, where old hotels and casinos have been imploded and the guts are being driven out.
This is how things start, he thinks, at the very bottom.
In a hole.
SIXTEEN
On the first day of spring, March 21, 1993, three months after Robert has left her, Irene Kelly hosts the inaugural meeting of the Single Mothers Club of Wequaquet, Massachusetts. She has invited ladies she’s befriended at the A&P and at her boys’ basketball games. She knows the eyes of sleepless nights, no sex, and maybe too much liquor. She knows how their heads ache from the relentless and inane questions their children ask—“Where are my socks?” “In the fucking sock drawer!”—and the redundant battles they fight with their children to pick up after themselves, help out around the house, give Mom a break, “Can’t you see I’m all you got?”
Betty, Stella, and Gwen. Among them, only Gwen has a daughter—from a previous marriage. Irene suspects she’s here just for the wine. Betty and Stella have five boys between them. “I can’t believe how bad they smell,” Betty jokes, though her laugh is tempered by the reality of how beautiful all of the women’s children once were, how sweet they smelled, the powdery scent of their heads, the dampened sounds of their little breaths as they slept in their arms.
Irene serves Swedish meatballs and guacamole and tiny quiches with ham and spinach and onion, along with several decadent desserts from the Portuguese bakery in Orleans. The women wait to see who will be the first to pick up a dish. They consume the appetizers and desserts like knowing alcoholics, at first dainty and discreet, and then, a few glasses in, without abandon, not even bothering to use a napkin. Irene wonders if they purge, too. She serves wine and plays Tom Waits on the stereo. Stella takes a sandwich bag of pot from her purse. “My son’s,” she says.
Stella had a date last week. The guy was a lawyer. He wanted her to put a finger in his ass.
“Did you do it?” Gwen asks.
“Of course she did,” Betty says.
“Fuck you, whore,” Stella says, then smiles. “Of course I did.”
“I’ve done it,” Betty says. “I think all men are secretly homosexuals.”
“Oh, Lord,” Irene says and cleans the platters of appetizers and desserts from the table.
Gwen takes three books from the bookshelf. She promises to return them, then tells a funny, though somewhat depressing, story about her five-year-old daughter, Samantha, finding her vibrator and using it to brush the dog’s teeth.
Irene can’t let this club only be used for gossiping. She has faith in the power of women together, and so she breaks the circuit of naughty stories by dimming the lights and striking a match, holding it to the candle at the center of the table.
“What is this?” Gwen asks.
“Are we going to cut our fingers and drink each other’s blood?” Stella says.
Irene rolls her eyes.
“Please,” she says. “Have an open mind. I’d like to try to bring us together for something bigger than appetizers and sex talk.”
Still, the women feel compelled to trust each other, to try, because they have not tried anything new in so long.
They sit in the low light of the candle flame and hold hands. There is a kind of giddy church silence, a quietude that cannot be contained among stoned girls. Someone’s stomach gurgles. Another quiets a burp, and the others laugh. Irene tries to stay true to what Sybil had taught her about slowing down everything inside and out. It has worked for her. She has seen, in practice, certain images she cannot relate to a specific genesis—running water buffaloes, a young couple singing opera in an alleyway in Florence, a room decorated to look like a tropical garden with flowers made of small, corrugated cardboard pieces.
“I think our dear Irene is becoming unhinged,” Irene overhears Betty saying to Gwen later that night while she’s filling the dishwasher.
Hearing this, Irene feels as if she’s about to snap, that she has been woven into human form by invisible strings that have begun to loosen and break, and where one is connected from her elbow to her ear, now she can no longer move as fast or hear as well.
But she has to believe in something. She has to believe that when, over the next few years, the Bettys and Gwens and Stellas of her world have finally been snatched up by middle-aged men with big cars and small dicks, she will have her faith in something larger than herself.
The next morning, after she sees the boys onto the bus, Irene drives to the town hall and asks about any job openings.
“You want to work here?” the secretary replies, surprised.
The town hall, built in 1899, is three levels with high ceilings and poor ventilation, which gives the inside the look and feel of a mortuary. Any monies allocated by the town council go to repairing the brick facade and copper tile roof, or the flower garden, which many aging, homeless vets use as a toilet.
The jobs available to Irene—given her lack of schooling, training, and work history—are Wequaquet Elementary custodial services or property tax appraiser.
“One, a monkey can do,” the secretary says. “The other, not even a monkey would do.”
But spending more time around kids when she doesn’t have to sounds like torture, so she accepts the position as a property tax appraiser for the town. The work is menial but necessary. She lists, from the map of the town on the side wall of the office she shares with Bill Houseman, the street names that have yet to be marked, and where any number of houses need to be appraised and recorded in the town’s database.
The trouble with her job is that someone needs to be home in order for her to walk the property. Usually, when there isn’t a car in the driveway, it means the owners are at work or out, and she makes a note to come back to the house when she has a similar route planned the following month. These notes and plans are time-consuming and her second attempts are usually the same as her first. She doesn’t like to disturb people during dinner. She has already had a number of doors slammed in her face.
But by the end of her second week, she has covered most of the west end of Wequaquet and is prepared to move on toward the many homes along the beach in Southbay.
“You need to take your time,” Bill Houseman says the following Monday morning. “This is government, Irene. We don’t do things fast. That’s why it works.” Then he puts his hand on her shoulder. The hand feels foreign but not intrusive, like a bird has perched there and she doesn’t necessarily want it to fly away.
The Outer Cape Page 11
