5

‘Will that be one bed or two?’ The registrar at Bally’s Casino wore a friendly smile and name badge that read Cathy.

I said, ‘One bed. If we don’t get along he can sleep on the floor.’

Her friendly smile didn’t waver a bit. People in corporate customer-service jobs rarely understand when you joke with them. But then, it wasn’t really a joke. I didn’t like the wild way my heart raced at a hundred and twenty beats a minute and then skidded all four chambers down to no beats at all. Half the time I couldn’t breathe fast enough and the other half I felt drugged.

On the casino floor below, roulette wheels clattered, slot machines shrieked out the big winners and everywhere hummed the machinery of dreams. Two hours earlier the sun had set but inside the casino the lights blared as brightly as they had at noon or at midnight or at any time since the power switch had been thrown. Next to Hollywood, which exists only in the imagination, Las Vegas is the most surreal city in America. I’d just survived five years of cold-steel reality. I loved the twenty-four-hour artificial dream-time of six-foot showgirls, $7.95 all-you-can-eat buffets and million-dollar slots and most of all I loved the idea that in another day or two almost everyone would vanish into lives that had no connection to the place.

‘No matter what happens tonight, we’re still free,’ Gabe said when we rode the elevator up to the room. ‘Even though we’re married, we have no obligation to each other except to be truthful.’

Free. I loved the sound of the word so much I didn’t consider what he meant by it. I watched him bounce from the bed to the window, where he drew back the curtains to a view of carnival lights below. It had been so long since I’d made love to a man that I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to move. I wasn’t courting a man so much as disaster.

Then before I could stop or even slow it down we were in each other’s arms and I’m lying to you because I didn’t want to stop or slow it down, I wanted it here and now. I ached inside from emptiness and longing. We held each other so fiercely that in moving toward the bed we tripped over the armchair and nearly sprawled to the floor. He slid his hands underneath my v-neck sweater and wrestled with the twin hooks of my bra, vanquishing them upon the third assault. I stripped off his black cotton T-shirt and flung it arm over arm across the room. His chest was thin and smooth as a young boy’s. He gasped and then laughed when I took my teeth to it. Gabe was ticklish in body as well as mind and he most naturally inhabited a zone between the erotic and the amused. I’m not a woman of much experience but, compared to the limited number of men I’d known, Gabe was not an accomplished lover. He was the funniest man I’d ever sacked and did not lack enthusiasm for the act itself even if he had the endurance and technique of a hundred-metre sprinter; ten seconds after the gun sounded he’d take his victory lap and head for the showers. He wasn’t intentionally inconsiderate of my pleasures, just fast and at the end of his run, too exhausted to help me across the finish line. His humour made him fun to be around despite this but a laugh is not a substitute for an orgasm.

Gabe differed most from other men I’d known in his ability to talk, sometimes for hours about absolutely nothing, and this kept us in bed together as much as the sex. We talked mostly about our childhoods and families – typical new-lover stuff. I told him I was the youngest child of a machinist and a woman who had worked a series of retail jobs throughout her life, most recently at K-Mart. I didn’t tell him any of the bad stuff about my family. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t seen or talked to my sister since my sixteenth birthday, wasn’t even sure she was still alive. That my brother Ray was the only one of five children who stuck around, either out of loyalty to Mom or because he was too weak to make his own life. That my dad thought I was a devil-child and was proud to say so whenever he could. Maybe I was guilty of projecting a false history of myself, but I didn’t like to talk about the violence and hatred that coursed through my family like a disease. ‘What about you?’ I asked.

‘One brother, Nigel. Absolutely mad about football. Arsenal’s greatest fans, we were. As kids we were close as cleats on a football boot. He’s too respectable for football now. A barrister, very solid sort, wears the wig in the Queen’s court. Not like me at all.’

‘Yeah? And what are you like?’

‘A complete rotter. Haven’t told the straight truth about anything for twenty-two years and counting. Every time I try, the silver spoon gets in my way. My family is frightfully UMC you know.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Upper middle class.’

‘Does that make you a Lord or something?’

‘God, no. Grandfather had the rotten luck to be illegitimate. Father’s never got over it. Tries to compensate all the time. Dresses in tweeds, speaks as though he has a mouth full of marbles. What a bore. But dear mother had a wild streak in her youth. My middle name is Keith because she was so daft about the Rolling Stones she shagged my namesake once. She’s respectable now so let’s not mention it to anyone and certainly not to father, but she’s the one I take after.’

‘How does Rose fit into the family picture?’

‘Who?’

‘Rose Selavy, you know, your cousin.’

‘I don’t have a cousin named Rose – whatever.’

‘Of course you do. My cellmate. The one who set this up.’

‘That’s just a figure of speech, you know, “Our American cousins”. The marriage was arranged through my lawyer, Harry Bendel.’

That was when the clock struck midnight and my grand coach of a romance began to turn into a pumpkin. That Rose had lied shouldn’t have surprised me. A junkie prostitute can’t be expected to tell the truth when money can be made with a lie. Maybe the lawyer had offered a finder’s fee. No harm done, except that I’d just married a man who wasn’t exactly who I thought he was. Most brides have a similar experience.

When we rode the elevator down to the casino I asked him why he needed a green card. I didn’t get an answer. The moment the elevator doors opened he sprang toward the nearest blackjack table. Sometimes people are too tied up in their own thoughts to listen to you and sometimes they just don’t want to answer. I tossed a five-dollar bill on to the box next to his and split two tens. Gabe drew a three and a two with the dealer showing four. I tried again. ‘Do you need one to work, or do you have some hidden desire to become an American?’

‘God, no! I’d just as soon be Australian.’ He asked the dealer for a card. The dealer tossed him a king. Gabe glanced up at me.

‘Stay,’ I advised.

He hit, drew an eight and busted.

‘Bloody luck.’

‘The way you play, luck’s got nothing to do with it.’

The dealer hit a face card on fourteen and busted. The hand exposed the red plastic marker at the end of the decks and we waited while the dealer loaded a new shoe.

‘I’m not drunk enough to play. Hell, I’m not drunk at all. Nobody has any luck stone sober. Want a beer?’ He glanced around for a cocktail waitress but instead of calling for a beer shouted, ‘Bloody wanker!’ Before the epithet cleared his lips he sprang from the table. As we were surrounded by Mid-westerners who had no idea what a wanker was, much less a bloody one, his curse didn’t attract much attention. Even his sprint through the blackjack tables didn’t draw more than a few glances from faces hypnotized by the click of cards. Well ahead of Gabe, past the roulette wheels and breaching the sharp-elbowed grandmother section of slot machines, I spotted a bird’s-nest of bare skull and hair bobbing rapidly above the crowd. I pulled our chips from the table and chased after, partly out of loyalty to Gabe, who might need my help if he actually caught the guy, and partly to learn what the hell was going on.

Gabe was little better at running than he was at fighting. I caught sight of him through the wall of glass doors at Bally’s entrance, so badly winded he bent at the waist to rest his palms on his thighs. Whoever he had been chasing was long gone. The figure had been too tall to be the one who had attacked us outside the chapel yet Gabe clearly knew him. I didn’t see a need to let him know I followed and retreated to the blackjack tables.

‘Your partner, he have friends in town?’ The dealer’s eyes were a faded blue, as though left too long in the sun, and her face had tanned to the colour of leather. By the pale band of skin on her ring finger I could tell she had her share of man troubles.

She dealt me an ace-ten blackjack so I answered, ‘Who knows? Whatever goes on in the little minds of men is a mystery to me.’

She paid me three for two and dealt me two face cards. ‘Men. Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.’

‘Sure you can. You just go to jail if you do.’

I played through my string of cards until five losing hands in a row proved the deck ran against me. I tipped the dealer ten of the two hundred I carried away and found Gabe at the nearest roulette table, tossing chips at random boxes. His system didn’t make any sense but then neither did Gabe half the time, which I thought to be one of the secrets to his charm, something it had just occurred to me to distrust.

‘Who did you just chase out of here?’

‘The scalp collector.’

‘Who?’

The steel ball shot around the rim of the wheel, bounced like a wild hubcap and wobbled into the number seventeen slot, about the only bet he hadn’t covered. The dealer raked his chips from the table with the air of a bored bank-teller.

‘A bloody thief, worse than this wheel. He must have followed us all the way from Los Angeles.’

I began to fear I’d just married a guy who had more troubles than I did. ‘Why would he want to do that?’

‘Lack of imagination. I’m on a hot streak at the moment and as a result he’s been following me around. He’s a poacher. Probably thinks I’m in Vegas to shoot a big celeb.’

‘He’s a competitor?’

‘In his wildest fantasies.’ He tossed the last of his chips on seventeen, a bet he liked because nobody else would think of betting on the previous winning number.

‘I know I’m a little late saying this, but the kind of marriage we have would be a violation of my parole if anybody was able to prove it.’

He could see I wasn’t going to let the subject drop. ‘I have a Type One visa. I can photograph and report here as much as I like.’

‘I thought the whole idea of a green card was so you could work.’

‘I’m already working. I need insurance. What would happen if someone convinced an immigration officer to yank my visa the next time I enter the country?’

‘Why would somebody do that?’

‘Because I caught him with his knickers down, shagging a hooker in his Ferrari, and published the resulting photograph in newspapers around the world.’

‘You really did that?’

‘Just an example.’

‘So the guy that attacked us, maybe he didn’t come from nowhere?’

The dealer called an end to betting and made his toss. Gabe watched the steel ball race against the spin of the wheel. ‘He’s nothing. I don’t worry about thugs. The person who sent him, he’s the one who scares me.’

‘You know who sent him?’

The ball hit the 00 slot and stuck.

‘No. But most of the people angry with me earn twenty million dollars a picture and that much money can buy the ability to make a lot of trouble.’