Casino and Other Stories

by Bonnie Burnard

  He knew escape was a possibility. There were ways, and he’d had some practice. He could be bravely direct or he could be subtle, clever, cowardly. It wouldn’t matter much. She was braced for anything. He could feel her fingers drifting absently through what was left of his hair. She might have been on Mars.

  “They’re in my mind,” he said. He rubbed his cheek against her. “I’ve got them.” He bent down to her thigh, sank his teeth, gently. He took her firm and shapely flesh between his teeth. He could hear the sharp intake of her breath above him and then a sound that might have been laughter, if laughter is sometimes brutal.

  JIGGLE FLICKS

  The sailboat Heather had been tracking across the bay was small in the distance now, almost gone, so she gave her attention over to the other boats. She counted five moving back in to the shoreline, homing gracefully to the squat, brightly painted boathouses which lined the bay like suburban garages. She didn’t try to imagine the people who sailed the water, their faces given over to laughter or hesitancy or plain brute effort. She didn’t wonder what elaborate skills were needed to control the direction and speed of a sailboat, or what kind of nerve it took to sail on a bright western afternoon out of Vancouver Harbour into the Strait of Georgia. Sitting there, holding her seven-dollar glass of Scotch, trying to put to memory the surprising colour of the sun on the water, she thought the most compelling argument for sailing is that it gives people on the shore something magnificent to watch.

  She was tired. She’d come down to the lounge from the conference rooms with all the others hoping to unwind, hoping for pleasure or, at the very least, distraction. They’d taken the available tables in a fluid five-table rush and ordered their drinks anxiously, as if thirsty, and as they settled they took care of the first order of business, which was to dismiss the last panel discussion they’d heard as not especially useful or incisive. They always did this. And then the stories began.

  Complaints and accomplishments were brought out like baby pictures and passed from one to the other around the tables, the interest expressed sometimes sincere, sometimes not quite. Although they had been together once or twice a year for some time, there was some backtracking to do; people tended to forget what they were supposed to remember. A few pas de deux were under way: a coy or steady glance, devout attention proffered like a gift certificate, a hand on a back, felt, and known to be felt. Married, not married, troubled, trustworthy, pitiful, wild, careless, smart, just about everyone had something to offer. Those who had performed together before were discreet, tolerant of new couplings, ignoring the signs they’d received or sent themselves another time. Insurance people did this, she thought, museum people. Plumbers?

  After she’d got her Glenlivet, Heather had turned a deaf ear to the conversation and swivelled her chair an inoffensive half turn to face the windows. There was a full bank of them, from floor to ceiling, overlooking the wide blue bay. Her sightline across the lounge was interrupted only intermittently by the heads and shoulders of the other drinkers and occasionally by deferential waiters in tight rose jackets bending to deliver drinks. She supposed the drinkers seated closest to the windows were regulars, or real tourists who knew enough to flash a bit of money.

  Tom was already in up to his ears. Heather had talked to him briefly at the first conference breakfast; he’d told her she looked beautiful, he’d asked about the kids. When they came into the lounge she had stalled and watched to see where he was going to sit and had pulled out a chair at another table, but then he’d moved, following in the wake of a happy young woman who smoked, much to everyone’s annoyance. Six feet away, he leaned eagerly forward into the smoke, taking care to catch the young woman’s words, prompting her. Tom listened well in the beginning, although what he remembered later, at least in her case, had been a little distorted, the names of cities and towns got wrong, significant people thoughtlessly dismissed. She had tried once or twice to correct him, but she’d waited too long. Things had set in his mind.

  The happy young woman who smoked had several spectacular bangles on each arm and she was playing with them, pushing them up to her wrists and letting them slide down her forearms again, explaining their origins, the words Africa and New Mexico carrying through the air more forcefully than some of her other words. Tom reached over and slid one of her bangles off and, laughing, attempted to push it down over his own hand. Heather knew it wouldn’t go past his knuckles, and it didn’t. She wanted to call over, Take note, sweetie, of those large hands.

  Someone had ordered her another Scotch. The waiter was smiling down at her, lifting her empty glass from her hand. She heard talk about dinner. Vietnamese, someone said. She thought she might skip out, an aunt to call, an old friend. But then again. She looked out once more over the water. The formation of the sailboats had changed. The one she’d been tracking was lost entirely and three new ones, recently set sail, drifted close to the shoreline, anxious for the wind. The colours over the bay had deepened, almost imperceptibly.

  She turned back to her companions and threw herself wholeheartedly into the middle of a discussion about municipal bylaws. There were seven people around the table. She gave her attention to a quiet, balding man she’d sometimes seen but never talked to, who had never, as far as she knew, shown much interest in her or in any of the others. His name was Jim. She thought perhaps he was deliriously happy with someone none of them had ever heard about. She thought perhaps he was loyal to someone. She wondered if this loyalty signified moral stature or if he’d just had himself some blind luck. It certainly made him worth talking to.

  One of the other women at the table, Sheila, from New Brunswick, had begun to talk earnestly about being hungry and so it was arranged that the drinks would soon stop and they would meet in the lobby in half an hour and get cabs to a restaurant on East Hastings. As she was digging in her briefcase for her share of the bill, Heather noticed that the happy young woman who smoked had stood up and was moving to another table to talk to a colleague from Calgary, a too-young corporate lawyer who looked a bit like Donald Sutherland had looked when he was young. When the young woman approached him he wrapped his arm around her waist as if all along he had been simply waiting for her to finish up with the other guy, as if he had waited before for other women and didn’t mind at all. Tom looked a tad dejected, but then who wouldn’t?

  Heather had met Tom three years earlier at a subcommittee meeting in Thunder Bay, when she was still subject to a childlike shame at being so obviously on her own in the world. After an initial, fairly aggressive session in his room, they’d had another, quieter go in hers. Near the end he’d casually wrapped his arms around her and held her with a steady, easy, perfect pressure, and he’d said the word beautiful. And then they’d rented a car and taken off, to Kakabeka Falls. They got a cabin and he hurried away to talk to the management about renting a canoe, he was very excited about getting a canoe. He soon returned with one, carrying it like a woodsman over his shoulders, grinning. She stood on the dock watching as he lowered it to the shore, pushed it into the water and walked it out along the dock with a paddle. Then he stepped down into it and held it steady for her, his free hand extended. She shook her head. “Thanks anyway,” she said.

  “I thought you liked the water,” he said. “Why don’t you like the water?”

  “For the same reason fish don’t like land,” she said.

  “You told me your family always went to a lake,” he said. “There must have been boats.”

  “Motorboats,” she said. “My brothers skied.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Motorboats. And sunglasses and bikinis and cases of beer and very loud music.”

  “And convertibles,” she said.

  “Ontario,” he said, chuckling, pushing off. He paddled with some expertise out into the cold northern lake.

  She sat at the end of the dock, her legs dangling over the edge, and when she looked down through the water she could see that good-sized rocks had been piled around support posts to hold the
dock in place. She could see small dark fish hovering near the rocks, moving as if chased from one crevice to another. A few tangled plants appeared to be rooted to the rocks’ smooth surfaces and they drifted with the water’s movement, untangling. There was no wind that she could feel and she wondered what made the water move like that, below the surface.

  She heard, intermittently, the quick plop of fish, pike, she supposed, coming to the surface for food, and one other sound, surrounding her, composed like orchestral music from dozens of smaller sounds. Some of the insects were in the air above the water, some hovered on the surface, snacks for the pike, but most of them were behind her, tight to the earth or in it. Although she couldn’t hear any animal sounds, she assumed there would be several species not very far away, which, if she didn’t disturb, she could comfortably ignore.

  Tom had moved directly to the centre of the lake and some tension on the surface of the water kept him there. He’d lifted the paddles and was lying back in the canoe, stretched out. On the surrounding shoreline, boulders which had been deposited in half-submerged clusters held the lake in place, reflected the wet light. Substantial trees, mostly spruce and pine, pulled back from the shore and grew dark and thicker in the distance, which was clear enough under the stars. She waved to him, in case he was watching, but he didn’t respond. She guessed he was looking at the sky.

  From the dock, it appeared perfectly safe out there and she thought she’d likely made a mistake, refusing. She thought perhaps it would be smarter to welcome something new, something never tried, never trusted. There was lots to be replaced, many things she had once done well, often with panache and some grace, that were out of the question now: the long jump, the jive, giving birth, falling in love.

  Although she couldn’t have put an exact time on it, before her divorce or during or after it, before one miserable, middle-aged cancer death or during or after another, somewhere along the line she’d come to believe that beauty was nothing more than a man-made distraction, an anxious imperative, that much of what was called beautiful was only cruel and raw, barbaric: rocks, for instance, and rivers, the wind-tempered growth of a tree, the black sky and the secluded stars that sometimes seemed to fill it, certainly mountains. Once, shortly after her divorce was finalized, she was sitting alone in her backyard with her face turned up to the sun and a Monarch butterfly took rest on her bare shoulder. She was breathless, amazed, thankful. But it stayed too long, longer than seemed possible, and when she turned her head to look she saw that it had been partially dismembered. It couldn’t leave. Through those years she’d never stopped hearing the word beautiful, it’s a word people frequently say, but she’d come to understand the word the same way she understood the sound of a whip used on a circus lion, as the sound needed to enforce distance, to create an illusion of calm.

  Sitting on the dock, watching Tom float at the centre of the lake, surrounded on all sides by the shadows and the sheen, the haphazard, moving patterns, the oblivious confidence of even the mindless pike, she understood the word differently. It bounced off the water like light, like crystal. It was absorbed by the dense growth of trees along the shoreline and re-emerged to hover softly over the drifting canoe. It pushed across the lake toward the dock, toward her, not a trick word at all, just a word like any other, used to describe things which could not be otherwise known.

  Later in bed, with her face comfortably tucked into Tom’s fleshy shoulder, she could smell the lake still on his skin, she could see with her eyes shut tight the trees and the boulders and the light. When his casual arms enclosed her, with their perfect pressure, as if some dreamed of perfect coupling had been achieved, she tried to tell him how things had looked from the dock.

  Sheila stood up and was asking was she coming for dinner, so she finished the last of her drink and followed her through the lobby past the fake statuary to the elevators, resisting the urge to run a hand through her dishevelled hair as they passed the inevitable mirrors. They were joined in the elevator by a young bellman in a grey and rose uniform who carried, at shoulder height, a silver tray of drinks and cocktail food covered by a white cloth. As the elevator rose he slipped his hand under the linen to get a cracker spread with smoked salmon pate, and when Heather laughed out loud he got one for her too.

  At her room, she walked out of her shoes before the door closed behind her and made for the bed, thinking about fresh sheets and room service and the recommended book of stories she’d bought written by a guy named Hodgins, set on Vancouver Island. She dropped onto the bed and curled up on her side, closed her eyes. She wondered briefly if this more than occasional preference for solitude, for the absence of sound, this choosing sometimes only the dimmest of lights, was some kind of gradual backhanded practice for the hereafter, and then she thought she could likely have done without the last Scotch.

  Her third conference outfit hung on the closet door. Two down, two to go. It was a floral print dress, long and loose and bright. Stockings the exact shade of the chrysanthemums were in the pocket. Stockings to match the mums, she thought, no one could say you aren’t trying. She’d bought the dress in a brief fit of post-divorce confidence, the same week she’d bought an expensive new mattress and decided to have the sofa recovered in chintz. She’d read in the New Yorker that divorced women should avoid chintz furniture like the plague and she’d thought, Chintz would be nice. The dress was still good four years later; she was still sure of the dress.

  In the shower she remembered home, the kids. When she was away from them they came to her more concretely than when they were in her arms. Some kids they’d made. Worth every fight, every humiliating session with the divorce lawyers and the judges, all the regretful separation tears. Once she had gathered the kids together in the chintz living room and tried to tell them how they filled her. It was a stupid idea. The language she’d needed to use was too rich for them, they resisted mightily, shrugging, saying that they only wanted her to be happy, that they were fine. I know that, she said, that’s the whole point, how very fine you are. And then she’d backed off and one of them cracked wise and it was over.

  In the dress, in the stockings, she stood at the mirror lifting her hair up and letting it down again. It should be up, she thought and I should be young, and there should be a saucy hat to match the dress, but there isn’t, so there you are.

  The cab ride to East Hastings was long, detoured through Stanley Park, because everyone wanted to see it again. Sheila rolled her window all the way down and the wet air moved through the cab, lifted hearts. It was dark and the smell of the bay in the air and the lights from the city and the bridge and the moving stream of cars sent Heather into the inevitable Vancouver spin. I’ll move here, she thought, I’ll live here and drive through this park every night, drive over that bridge, up and down those streets. She never would, she knew, but she let herself play with the details: call a realtor in the morning, find out about high schools, ask a couple of colleagues about possible openings, discreetly.

  At the restaurant, there was one long table already set up for them, it filled half the room, and they moved around it and began to find places. Just as she found a seat there was sudden loud laughter from the other end of the table, and when she looked down she saw the bangled young woman who smoked standing in her own floral print dress, mums and all, waving and grinning, what a coincidence, what a funny thing. The others clearly wanted to enjoy this so she gave it to them, graciously. What the hell, she thought, and then Tom was at her arm, pulling her chair out. She thanked him and they sat down.

  She picked up the menu immediately but Tom pushed it down to the table and took her hand, introducing her to another young woman, who sat across from them. Andrea something was her name. Andy, she wanted to be called. She was shy and reticent at first but Tom drew her out and then she had lots to say, and no one stopped her. Those at the table who were older, which was most of them, looked suddenly tired, the meetings, the talking, the wine, but they listened and smiled occasionally, and sh
e wasn’t half bad, this one, pretty bright as it turned out. Heather watched Tom wonder if his luck, after all, had held.

  The last time she’d been with Tom, in Ottawa, in winter, sitting in an East Indian restaurant eating tandoori chicken, he had steered the conversation deliberately, which was unusual for him, coming finally to his point by inviting her to open up about her ex-husband and any other past loves. She wouldn’t do it. That was then, she’d said. This is now. As it turned out his curiosity had been only a courtesy, a chance for reciprocity; he had something he wanted to tell her.

  Later, in bed, he began the real telling by saying that he’d turned fifty-five since they’d last been together. Happy Birthday, she said. What should I get you? What do you want? He told her that he’d had a new will drawn up and that he’d lost fifteen pounds, jogging, and she said, Oh, yes you have, of course you have. He told her he’d decided there was enough deterioration in middle age without extra weight to compound the problem and she laughed and said, Don’t I know, although weight had never been that much of a problem for her. She did say, I used to have a chicken pox scar as big as a dime on my forehead, and now it’s in my eyebrow. She did say, Where do you think it’s heading? And when he told her he’d culled his wardrobe and his personal files, filled three bags for the Sally Ann and as many again for the dump, she said, I should do that.

  Then he asked did she believe in one true and perfect love. Not any more, she said, but he didn’t hear. This was to be a telling, not a talk. She laughed at him, already afraid, and then a fog settled in around her, as thick as the fog in a field of icebergs.

  “When I was forty-seven,” he said, “there was one perfect woman.”

  “More than one,” she said. “Surely.”

  “No,” he said. “Just one.”

  She got up to turn on the late news, hoping for war, famine, earthquake, anything, but there was only insipid weather, and it didn’t stop him.