Casino and Other Stories

by Bonnie Burnard

  “Her hair,” he said, “was the colour of coal.”

  She got back into bed, keeping to her own side, but he rolled over, wrapped his arms around her, held her with his perfect pressure.

  “She had a really magnificent back,” he said. “Long. And long legs. Although she wasn’t very tall standing up.”

  He threw his leg over hers, the way a twin would in the uterus.

  “Could we finish this another time?” she asked.

  “She had buttocks like a boy’s,” he said. “And perfect high breasts, as white as clouds.” He traced his palm over her own. “Her waist came in from her hips really sharply, like this.” He put his hands in the air just above her face, formed a shape. “And all of it held in the most impeccable skin I’ve ever seen. Even the soles of her feet were flawless.”

  “Did you get a chance to look in her mouth?” she asked.

  “She had no flaws,” he said.

  “I’d have to call that bullshit,” she said.

  “I’m trying to tell you,” he said.

  Heather knew what her moves were. She should ease herself out of the bed, whisper something that would hold a cutting edge for years, then dress, pack and leave. But she stayed where she was, pissed off at the sheer inconvenience of such a course of action, apparently too dulled in middle age for even a little bit of half-decent theatre.

  “There is no one else to tell this to,” he said. Soon he dozed off, deeply saddened and apparently exhausted from his telling. She watched the dark hair on his chest rise and fall peacefully beside her.

  She propped her pillow up behind her back and looked toward the television, and when she could see again she saw Tina Turner madly gunning an armoured jeep through some kind of desert war zone, sitting at the wheel in a suit of chain mail. Her glossy white hair was high in the wind and wild, but the set of her jaw implied the calm that comes from wit, from skill, and her eyes were clear and focused. She was as beautiful as any woman could hope to be and she was having a fine time gunning the jeep through that desert, hanging on hard, hellbent. Watching from the bed, Heather wanted, as much as anything she’d ever wanted in her life, to be Tina Turner in that jeep, courageously outrunning a monstrous enemy. Or was she burning up all that energy to save someone else? Not likely.

  She threw Tom’s leg off and lifted her own leg high into the air above the bed, contemplating the length, the shape, the bulky knee, the tough casing of skin over muscle and fat and blood and bone. When she let it drop down onto the bed, heavily, his large hand reached for her forearm and squeezed.

  In the morning, they had breakfast together before she arranged for the cab and left him. When their coffee had been refilled, she said, “Do you know about your hands?”

  “What about my hands?” he asked.

  “They’re too large for the rest of your body,” she said. “It’s the first thing I noticed about you. As if some chromosome was out of whack when you were just a wee embryo. As if a madman cut them from someone else’s arms and attached them to yours.” She reached across the table. “I’ve never looked at your wrists really closely,” she said. “There might be marks. Let me check.” She tried to take one of his hands in her own but he yanked it away, tucked it under the table.

  “This is simpleminded retaliation,” he said. He bit the skin from his lower lip as he talked, a habit she’d noticed only once or twice before. “I didn’t say you aren’t beautiful. Although you’re not, not this morning.”

  He wrote to her later that he didn’t think her leaving solved anything, and that he didn’t think she was being particularly fair to him. He didn’t think her leaving was very original either, or profound. He said he was only trying to understand love and its relationship to beauty, and that he didn’t see this as a necessarily despicable undertaking. He said he did love her, he couldn’t imagine not loving her.

  When the Vietnamese dinner was cleared, and it had been delicious, the best she’d ever had except for the one time in London with her ex-husband, the waiters brought fortune cookies, which were passed around to everyone and opened. Her fortune read, “Your future success will depend on your kindness.” Good news, she thought, rolling it up like a spitball and dropping it into the onions she’d left in her bowl. Someone decided the fortunes should be read aloud and beginning with Jim on her left, moving around the table away from her, each person shared his fate. “Much success in words and music,” they began, “Avert misunderstanding by calm, poise and balance,” “A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.”

  When it got back around to their end of the table, Heather unrolled her soggy bit of paper and licked the sauce from her fingers. She could hear the smile in Tom’s voice as he read, with all the effect he could summon, “You will live long and well, beloved by many.” This brought hearty laughter, he’d known it would.

  Then it was her turn and she read aloud, “Your future success will depend on your kindness.” More laughter, first from Tom and then from the others. In Tom’s laughter she could hear just an edge of the vicious, as if he’d been waiting with his laughter, not impatient but ready, for a while. And all this time she’d thought at least that part was over.

  When she looked up, people were involved again in whatever conversations they’d left, they were waving pieces of fortune cookie around in the air, breaking and eating them. Tom was leaning across the table talking in a low voice to Andy. Jim nudged her arm and said he didn’t think she had anything to worry about, she looked pretty kind to him.

  Cabs were called again, and when Tom followed her and climbed in after her with Andy in tow, she took his hand in the dark back seat and drove her thumbnail as deeply as she could into the thick flesh just below his knuckles. He shook her off, his face a quick and honest mask of shock. She checked her nail for blood, disappointed.

  “I’m only trying to understand love,” she said quietly. “And its relationship to bruises.”

  “What did you say?” Andy leaned forward, smiling.

  They rode back through the park again, Jim and Sheila in the front seat chatting up the cab driver, who gave them all the touristy facts and all the oblique mockery anyone could be expected to absorb. Jim didn’t much like the mockery, and after the cab driver said he didn’t think they’d like living in Vancouver, Jim slugged him playfully on the shoulder, laughing only slightly.

  When they were out of the park approaching the bridge, to include her in a vision of the city lights reflected off the water, Tom put his hand on her knee and shook it, as if to waken her.

  In the hotel lobby she walked to the front desk with a question about check-out time to which she already knew the answer, waiting until Tom and Andy had excused themselves before she rejoined the others. Jim and Sheila had decided to go for more drinks. She said she thought she’d pass, and yes, she’d meet them for breakfast at eight-thirty, that sounded fine. Jim shrugged his shoulders and smiled, happy that a decision had been made for him.

  The elevator doors were just about closed when a fist, and then a bangled arm, blocked them, forcing them to open again on the lobby. The young woman in the floral dress giggled her way in, followed by the lawyer from Calgary. They were holding hands. “Hello,” he said, grinning. “Done for the night?”

  He hit a button and then moved to stand unnecessarily close to her and, with no warning, slipped his free hand into the pocket of her dress. He said he loved the dresses. He said it was good to see women wearing clothes that belonged on women again. He said good for her, what the hell, she could still get away with a dress like that, so why not? She pulled his hand out of the pocket and placed it on the delicate shoulder of the happy bangled young woman, who was now enclosed in his other arm. “How very kind,” she said. She read the neon indicator, hit a button and got out three floors early.

  In her room she took off the dress and hung it in the closet. She thought when she got home she’d offer it to her neighbour, an energetic young woman with four kids and an artist husband. Maybe she c
ould get some use out of it. In the bathroom she brushed her teeth and pulled her pyjamas on, pitched the stockings into the garbage. She walked out to the television set and sat down on the carpet in front of it, pulled the off/on switch. She turned the channels knowing there would be no news, it was too late, but hoping for a movie. She got lucky. She found Russia House, with Sean Connery, who had earned, since he’d allowed himself to age and let his hair go, a very secure spot on her shortlist. The kids had deduced this small lust through her video preferences at home and they had teased her without mercy the first time they’d seen an old James Bond film. And Bette Midler was on, in something obscure that she’d once half thought of seeing but missed. The other movies were restricted and she was offered only samplings. Jiggle flicks, Tom called them. She tried one of the samples. On the screen, just a few inches from her hand, a thin young woman panted loudly into the ear of a man whose dark hair was either very greasy or wet. He was going at her attentively, with discipline and control and his eyes wide open, as if she were some kind of machine with a seized motor. It looked like it would go on for quite a while, and then it stopped and the screen faded. A message came on telling her that she should push seven on the control panel on top of the set if she wished to watch the movie in full, that the cost would be billed automatically to her room. She found Sean Connery again. He was playing a reprobate, a drunk who’d known better times, but he was nonetheless enticing and Michelle Pfeiffer, who was fated to fall in love with him, was wasting her time resisting. Heather thought it would have been much nicer if Connery had turned up in the jiggle flick. Michelle Pfeiffer could have the guy with the greasy hair.

  She went back to the bathroom and brushed her teeth again, and her tongue, trying to get rid of a taste from dinner that had been better the first time around. Standing at the window, she wished she’d agreed to pay the extra for a room overlooking the bay. Below her there were only cars, rows and rows of them, dull and similar.

  Suddenly tired, she pulled back the covers of the bed and climbed in, taking the heaviest of the pillows and placing it over her feet, as was her habit. Perhaps because she already knew the plot of Russia House, she was nearly out when she heard his knock.

  She got up and turned the movie off and walked to the door, peering through the glass in the small security hole. The glass worked like the side mirror on a car, it made his face look more distant than it actually was, and slightly malformed. She opened the door.

  “She’s heard I’m a bit shallow,” he said. He walked past her into the room, but not too far. “She says she’s been burned before.” She let the door close. “Imagine that,” he said. “Burned.” He moved tentatively to the chair beside the television and sat down. He put one of his massive hands on the channel changer and turned it all the way around, clunk, clunk, clunk, although the set was dead.

  “She was quite lively,” Heather said. “Doesn’t she believe in quick involvement?” She was parroting the phrase from telephone conversations overheard at home.

  “Is there any other kind?” he asked.

  She climbed back into the bed. She turned from him and shifted around to find the place she’d made for her body just a little while before. “Did you come to tell me how much it hurts?” she asked.

  “She was just good company for the night,” he said. “I wasn’t really trying.” He was taking off his shoes. She heard them drop, one after the other, to the floor. He hated shoes. He would be rubbing his feet now, working his toes. “She’s too young to be expected to…”

  She interrupted him. “Tell me how much it hurts,” she said. “And put your shoes on.”

  “You want me to agonize?” he asked. “You want me to agonize over one sweet young thing who won’t have me? Because I’m not cock-of-the-walk any more? Because I no longer have quite enough of whatever it is it takes? That’s nothing,” he said. “That’s life.”

  She lifted her head from the pillow. “You’re so brave,” she said.

  He extended his hand toward her. “I’ve got your bruise,” he said. “It’s small but it’s going to be a good deep purple.” He smiled.

  She smiled back.

  “You lie there,” he said, “grieving for yourself and for me because you won’t accept the way things are. Everyone else has to. You waste all this damned energy resisting what can’t be resisted. And for what?” He went on, more gently. “We’ll be a long time dead. But we’re alive now, and we could have…”

  “This isn’t grief,” she said. She turned again, this time onto her stomach. The sheets were still cool and they smelled slightly of something she couldn’t name, something close to lemon.

  “So it’s not grief,” he said. “Whatever you want to call it, it’s not worth…”

  She decided if she wasn’t asleep before he finished his rant she would pretend to be, she would pretend to be in some other place entirely, beyond avoidance, safe. She willed herself to dream peacefully, conjuring the images that worked: each kid, separately; a dock in a dark Northern Ontario night; the desert. She hoped against hope that in the morning when she woke up he would be gone, gone and grateful for her kindness.

  She did fall asleep. Oblivion came and was eventually overtaken by a dream. She stood in the middle of a luxuriant vegetable garden, a neighbour’s, which she was supposed to tend during some absence. She surprised herself with knowledge she’d assumed she was without; she was able to recognize and identify each buried vegetable by its tough surface growth, she was able to trap the various bugs which were hidden under the leaves and pinch them off, flick them from her finger. She danced along the vegetables, stepped from row to row, a good neighbour.

  Tom watched her sleep. It wasn’t what he’d come for. He tried not to think about crawling into the warmth he knew she made, in any bed, or about offering up, just one more time, the conviction of his need. He tried not to think about her arms around him, or her legs. He muttered the word “bitch,” once, hardly meaning it. If she heard, she didn’t respond.

  He settled into the chair and waited, unwitnessed, cold and sharply awake, wondering what earthly goddamned good it did, this celibate watching through the night. Toward day-break he heard her speak several disjointed words from a very deep sleep. One of the words sounded impossibly like turnip.

  TEN MEN RESPOND TO AN AIR-BRUSHED PHOTOGRAPH OF A NUDE WOMAN CHAINED TO A BULL

  The photograph was originally an eight-by-ten glossy, taken, developed and held for a time in a file with other similar photographs in the expectation that it could be sold.

  The woman in the photograph is a toughened twenty-something. Her long hair is platinum blonde with just a slight growth of dark roots at the skull, and deliberately wild; it surrounds a delicate face reminiscent of Tuesday Weld’s when she was young and fresh. Her breasts are wide and bulbous but the rest of her body is quite thin, particularly her arms and her neck. She looks healthy except for the few small bruises on the flesh of her upper arms and thighs.

  The young woman is standing in a corral with her back partially turned to a full-sized Black Angus bull. Her hands grip the top board of a rail fence. There’s a bit of sparse grass outside the fence, and a few weeds, thistles, but the earth in the corral is muddy grey and barren. The bull is about five feet away from her. He is well groomed but glassy-eyed. His thick tongue hangs from his mouth as if it is finally too heavy to hold in, as if he is extremely thirsty.

  The woman and the bull are connected by two sturdy chains which extend from her wrists to a leather collar around the bull’s neck. She is implicitly but clearly susceptible to any movement the bull might make. If he takes off, if he is spooked, she’ll have to try to keep up. If he charges, she’s got the rail fence. She’ll have to get over it fast, trust its strength. The expression on her face is one of high excitement; anything can happen.

  The photograph has been reproduced in a magazine with very good distribution and surprisingly classy ads.

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER who captured the image and sold i
t to the magazine works freelance and lives alone, for the moment, in a medium-sized city. He’s been married, once, and has a daughter in another province. The kid’s eleven. His ex-wife wanted her and he was easy, one way or the other. He figures it wouldn’t be much of a life for a kid living with him. He’s away quite a bit.

  Recently, he’s been attending night classes in computer science. He thinks that’s what the future holds. His ex-wife makes noises about money every time he hears from her, she’s got stats on how much money it takes to raise a kid and she reads them to him over the phone, long distance. When she says, “Do you hear what I’m saying to you?” he laughs and says, “It’s your dime, talk all you want.”

  The investment in the camera and the darkroom equipment has paid off. He sells photographs whenever and wherever he can. He takes all kinds: city streets, houses, shopping centres, animals, cars, sports, women. The market’s there for nearly anything if you can make the connections, although some are easier to move than others. He sends his ex-wife a hundred bucks here and there, when he can, no questions asked. At Christmas, on a whim, he dropped a red fifty-dollar bill into the clear plastic Salvation Army bucket in the mall where he does most of his browsing. He hangs out in malls a lot, studying the walks and stances and faces and overall physical attitudes of spoiled middle-class teenagers.

  He didn’t know the blonde at the farm. He didn’t know the bull either. A friend of a friend set it up. His friend drove him out to this farm in a rented van and they met the blonde there; she’d driven out with another guy, a manager type, who was quite a bit older. The farmer who owned the bull and the local vet were waiting for them at the house, on the porch. Before they started the shoot they each downed a light beer from a case on the porch step. Money was paid and then the guy who owned the bull disappeared somewhere in his truck.