Oh, well, I thought, as some introductory music started to play on a piano, their loss—or maybe their winnings?—was my gain. I’d just slip into a seat at one of the tables, just so, right when the announcer was announcing the performer, just so. Surely, the cocktail waitress wouldn’t bother me while the show was going on, would she?
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Las Vegas and THEhotel at Mandalay Bay are proud to present…Tom Jones!”
And there he was, in his black tux and crisp white shirt, hair still thick and bushy. True, a tux wasn’t totally out of place in Las Vegas on a Saturday night. I mean, wherever Wayne Newton was playing, he was probably wearing one, too. And Billy, too, come to that, wherever he was now. But somehow a tux on Tom Jones looked different. He was just so Tom Jones. He was so…Welsh. Plus, his bow tie was bigger.
“I’d like to open tonight—” Tom Jones seduced into the microphone “—with an old favorite of mine. But, first, I’d like to ask the question I always ask. Is there anyone here named—”
Oh, no. He wasn’t going to do this…was he?
“—Delilah?”
I craned my neck around the room to see if anyone else was going to raise their hands, but it looked like I was the only one in the bunch. Timidly, I twinkled my fingers in the air.
“You?” he boomed, his bejeweled fingers grasping the thick microphone as if it was, well, something else.
And then before I knew it, he was serenading me, “My, my, my, Delilah” and “Why, why, why, Delilah?” and telling everyone how he loved me and how I deceived him and how “I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more.”
Great, I’d been killed off in a song. At least I wasn’t boring.
Before I could get over that one, he was launching into, “It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone…”
Yes, it is, I started to think, my thoughts turning maudlin. It’s very unusual for me to be loved by anyone. Oh, sure, I’m loved by my dad and by Hillary, maybe even by Elizabeth Hepburn. But I thought I was loved by Billy and look where that ended up.
And then it was time for “What’s New, Pussycat?” and whoever knew that “What’s New, Pussycat?” was such a sad, sad song? Oh, sure, it starts out all innocent enough with all that “whoa, whoa, whoa” stuff, but by the time Tom got to the last verse and chorus—“Pussycat, pussycat/You’re delicious”—I was bawling—“…you and your pussycat nose!”
I mean, who wouldn’t want someone to love them enough that the lover would even love the lovee’s nose? I wanted to be loved like that.
“Back in five,” I heard Tom Jones say into the mic. “It looks like we’ve got a bit of an emergency here. I think we’ve got a crier on our hands.”
And then he was at my little table, sitting right there with me.
“What’s wrong, luv?” he said, very Welshly. “Tell Uncle Tom what’s going on.”
It all came out in a flooding gush.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here!” I cried. “I mean, I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I came for the shoes. I thought I came for Billy. Maybe I came for the gambling? I don’t know. But now the money’s gone and Billy’s gone…and I don’t even have the shoes! I swear, I don’t even know what I’m doing here!”
“Easy, luv, you’re starting to move into what’s known as the refrain in my business. Look, you’re main problem seems to be that you don’t know what you’re doing anymore. Have I got that right?”
I nodded.
“Here’s what you need to do then. Find what you love to do and just get out there and do it. I’ve been singing the same songs for forty years now and occasionally some grandmother still throws her panties on stage. Honestly, it’s not a bad life.”
“But what if I don’t know what I want to do? What if I don’t know who I want to be or who I want to be with?”
He leaned over and patted my knee. Considering that the patter was Tom Jones, it was a surprisingly avuncular pat.
“Then that’s what you need to find out, Delilah.” Then he rose to his feet. “Now, then, if that crisis is over for the moment, I think I’d better go sing ‘Sex Bomb.’ Or possibly ‘Mama Told Me Not to Come’? Who knows.” He winked. “I’ll decide once I get back up there.”
“Mr. Jones?” I called after him.
“Tom,” he said.
“Tom. Did you ever know an actress called Elizabeth Hepburn?”
“God, yes.” He smiled fondly. “Everyone knows Lizzie. Sinatra introduced us.”
I pushed the button for the elevator and as I was about to board, Chris stepped off. He was still in uniform.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” he said. “I tried to run after you, but the crowd got in the way. And by the time I pressed through, I couldn’t find you anywhere. I asked everyone. Then one of the front-desk people said some woman in a silver dress had been riding the elevator up and down for a half hour, so I figured I’d ride it, too, and maybe you’d come back.”
“You left your post for me?” I said. “Won’t you get fired for that?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’ve never done anything like that before. It was the first time I’ve ever walked off the job. Do you think they’d fire me for that?”
Stella probably wouldn’t fire me for walking off on a job, but then I was The Golden Squeegee and Stella wasn’t a Vegas pit boss. They’d probably break Chris’s legs.
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
He thought about it for a minute. “If they do,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Maybe they’d be doing me a favor.”
“Not if they break your legs when they fire you, they won’t.”
“Huh? Never mind. What I want to know is, what happened down there before?”
“Well, first there were these shoes, see. It all started with these shoes.”
Having told my story once to Tom Jones, sort of, I was now ready to tell it to the world.
“Wait a second,” Chris said, pushing the elevator button. “Let’s go outside for this. I’ve been cooped up in here for hours. Wouldn’t you like to just go outside and get some fresh air?”
“Well, it’ll probably be freshly polluted air, but sure. Why not.”
Before I knew it we were on the elevator, off the elevator, across the lobby, and then…
It felt odd to be outside in Las Vegas.
Sure, I’d gone to Red Rock Canyon with Billy earlier in the day—God, that seemed so long ago now, another lifetime—but with the exception of the walk from the limo to the hotel when we’d first arrived, this was the first time I’d been outside. And despite everything that had gone wrong with the day and night, it felt terrific to escape the hermetically sealed confines of the casino. It was like being liberated.
As we walked down The Strip, Chris took my hand. It wasn’t a girlfriend-boyfriend type of hand-taking, more like two gal pals linking arms in an old-fashioned storybook or maybe he could just tell I needed whatever support I could find.
“It all started with these shoes,” I started to say again.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me take you to my favorite spot on The Strip and then you can tell me.”
His favorite spot on The Strip turned out to be the exploding volcano in front of The Mirage hotel.
“Damn!” he said, looking at his watch. “I forgot, it’s after midnight.”
“And that’s a problem, Cinderella?”
“Well, yeah. The volcano stops exploding then. You should see it when it’s going.” His eyes got all excited, just like a little kid. “After a few moments of foreboding silence, the cascading water begins to churn and a low rumble emerges from the heart of the once-dormant volcano. Then, the eruption kicks into high gear as bright orange flames leap about one hundred feet above the water, illuminating the night sky. As the fire spreads across the lagoon, those standing close enough can feel the temperature rise. Several smaller explosions erupt, and eventually the volcano goes quiet once more.”
“And this is you
r favorite spot on The Strip?”
“Well, yeah,” he said again, as if his reasoning should be obvious. “It’s not every day you get to see a volcano erupt in the middle of the desert.”
Huh. “Well, when it is working, how often does it erupt?”
“Every night at thirty-minute intervals from 8:00 p.m. until midnight.”
“So then actually you can see a volcano erupt every day in the desert.”
“Well, no, actually you can only see it at night.”
“But every night.”
“Well, yeah.” He ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture that said his hand expected to find more hair there. “I guess I’m not really very good at this sort of thing,” he admitted.
“What sort of thing?”
“Talking, in general. Talking to damsels in distress, in particular.”
I wanted to tell him he was doing fine, that all the talking about the nonerupting volcano had distracted me from my own problems, had distracted me from Billy for at least five minutes.
“Well,” I said instead, “I suppose we could just stand around here and watch it not explode.”
“Tell me about the shoes, Delilah.”
“See, I was washing windows for this wealthy fading movie star—”
“Is that what you do for a living, wash windows?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s good. I was worried you might be a professional gambler. I do keep running into you in casinos. And at least you do something that makes people happy.”
“Clean windows makes people happy?”
“Of course. It’s almost as good as being a donut salesperson. Everyone loves a donut salesperson.”
“They do?”
“Well, sure. What could be better than being the person who gives other people a dozen assorted donuts?”
“I don’t know. Washing windows?”
“Exactly! Their windows were dirty, now they’re clean, you’re the one who did it for them. What could be better? But getting back to the shoes…”
“Right. Those shoes. Those damn Jimmy Choos. So, anyway, I was cleaning Elizabeth Hepburn’s windows—”
“The Elizabeth Hepburn?”
I nodded.
“One time, during the years that John Travolta’s career was in the crapper, my mom took me to see him do a dancing exhibition. His partner was Ms. Hepburn and even though she was already pretty old at the time, man, could she dip.”
“Anyway, she gave me this Chick Lit book, see, High Heels and Hand Trucks: My Life Among the Books—”
“Great title.”
“And I started reading the book…”
I proceeded to tell him my story, getting as far as Billy following me to Atlantic City…
“His talisman? Isn’t that a little…hokey?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Well, yeah.”
“And that didn’t bother you?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I mean, I was flattered. He seemed so suave, so debonair and even though most of what we ever talked about was gambling, I felt as though he was really interested in me. You know. As a woman.”
“Who wouldn’t be interested in you as a woman?”
The list was so long, I wouldn’t have known where to start, so instead I barreled on.
“Then Billy started to pressure me into going to Vegas with him after admitting he was a professional gambler—”
“You mean to say he told you he was a professional gambler and still you kept on with him?”
“I guess that was stupid, huh?”
“Well, yeah. Why did you do that, Delilah? Why, why, why?”
“Because my mom stuck by my dad? Because he was exciting? Because I wanted those damn shoes?”
“Go on.”
“I’d done well at Atlantic City…” I continued, ending with, “then my dad got involved with a woman who made him go to Debtors Anonymous.”
“I think you must mean Bettors Anonymous.”
“That’s what she said. Plus, Stella was worried about Elizabeth Hepburn’s evil servant, Lottie—which, truth to tell, so was I—and Conchita and Rivera weren’t talking to each other anymore—”
“Wait a second. Stella? Conchita and Rivera? I don’t think you’ve mentioned any of them before.”
“My boss and the other two window washers who work on our crew, respectively if not respectfully. Conchita and Rivera are lesbians, by the way.”
“Well, of course. Why wouldn’t they be?”
“So—” big finish “—I finally came to Vegas with Billy and it was wonderful! At first. But then he kept wanting to gamble and for some reason I really didn’t, so I talked him into going to Red Rock Canyon with me this morning, and that was a bust, and then when we returned the car John Belushi claimed we put a dent in it—”
“The real John Belushi?”
“Well, no. So then Billy said maybe I wasn’t such a great talisman after all, because he had to forfeit his hundred-dollar deposit and I realized I had to put up or shut up, so we hit the casino and won big—you saw us do it—which was great and afterward he took me shopping and bought me these clothes and these shoes, which are pretty even if they’re not Jimmy Choos, and he told me we’d get married in the Sunrise and Sunset Chapels tomorrow—”
“He asked you to marry him? What did you say?”
“I don’t exactly remember saying yes, but I didn’t say no, either. And then he said we’d get married the next day, but that first we needed to double our winnings—”
“And that’s when I saw you again, when you lost all your chips.”
“It was everything I had, except this.” I produced the crumpled fiver from my cleavage.
“And then Billy just took off?”
“Uh-huh. He said I wasn’t his talisman anymore.”
“And you haven’t seen him since?”
“Nope.”
“I’ve got one question for you, Delilah—did you love him?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I thought I might have. Sort of.”
“‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’”
“You know Shakespeare?”
“Doesn’t everyone? And I know one other thing, too, Billy’s a creep.”
“Oh, I guess we all know that by now. Me more than anybody. If the names The Rat and The Weasel weren’t already taken, he’d be those, too.”
“I think you need to be sure you’re over him.”
“How do I do that?”
He didn’t say anything. He just leaned down slowly, pressed his lips gently to mine. His lips tasted just like something fresh, with maybe a hint of lime.
Oh, boy.
“It’s a start,” he said. “How long did you say you’re in town for? When do you go back home?”
“I didn’t say, but I go back on Monday. I’m stuck here until Monday with just my plane ticket back and this five-dollar bill. I don’t even know how I’ll eat. Not that I feel like eating.”
“You have to eat. I’ll talk to the guys in the kitchen, make sure room service brings up a few meals to you, on the house.”
“What if you’re fired after running out on the job like that?”
He shrugged. “I can always drop off meals for you myself. What do you like to eat?”
“Cocoa Krispies for breakfast, Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket for lunch, Michael Angelo’s Four Cheese Lasagna for dinner. For drinks, I like Diet Pepsi Lime and Jake’s Fault Shiraz.” I shrugged. “You know, the kind of stuff everyone likes.”
“Done.”
For good measure, he kissed me again. No pressure, just something light with a hint of promise in it.
“I can’t believe you did all this,” he said, “and you never even got your Choos.”
“Me, either.”
“What will you do with the rest of your time here?”
“I don’t know.” My last full day, Sunday, was already here. “Maybe go to church and watch other
people get married all day.”
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. He took out his wallet and from there produced a business card. It said Las Vegas Library with an address.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Just be there tomorrow at two. Look for the Storytime Room. And dress casual.”
After Chris walked me back to the hotel, giving me one more kiss just outside, I took the elevator up, made the long condemned-girl’s walk down the corridor to the room I’d shared with Billy.
On the bed, so well made up by the housekeeper it looked sterile, he’d left my plane ticket and a note:
Baby,
Sorry to leave you in the lurch like this with just a plane ticket, but I’m sure you’ll understand that I just had to leave town early. There’s no point in me staying in Vegas when you’ve caused the cards to run cold on me. I’m sure that by now you also understand that our engagement is off. I simply can’t have a talisman that only works for me some of the time. I’ll be returning the white suit and shoes on my way out, but I suppose you can keep the silver things. Since you’ve already worn them, I can’t imagine they’d give me my money back.
See you in the casinos! Or perhaps I should say I hope I don’t see you in the casinos. At any rate, happy gambling,
Billy Charisma
I got the silver dress and shoes off me quicker than you can say “a natural Twenty-one beats everything else,” and tossed the offending clothes in the garbage. Then I climbed into bed naked where I dreamt of nothing but Furthest Guy. Only now he was center stage and he wasn’t dropping any of his yo-yos.
22
The Las Vegas Library looked nothing like the libraries back home. Instead of wood or brick, it was off-white painted stone, presumably protection against the desert heat, and there wasn’t a Doric or Ionic or Corinthian column in sight.
I had no idea what to expect there.
I’d smiled while eating the room-service breakfast of dry Cocoa Krispies that had been delivered to my door with a Diet Pepsi Lime chaser. Sure, it had been too early in the day for soda, but I’d forgotten to mention to Chris about the milk. And I’d smiled even more when lunch came at noon, Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pockets, with yet more Diet Pepsi Lime, only this time there was an added treat on the tray: Men Are Not The Only Heels, the latest brand-spanking-new Shelby Macallister Chick Lit novel.
Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Page 22
