Leaving Las Vegas (20 page)

“Yes? What?” The muffled voice sounds strange to her: Al, but not Al.

“It’s me, Al.”

He opens the door, first just a crack, then fully. “Sera,” he says, straightening his back and his face. “It’s…” He looks around, presumably for a clock, but fails to find one. “It’s late,” he asserts, as if the absence of a clock is a sure sign of lateness.

She ducks past him into the room. “Sorry, Al. Good night, lots of tricks,” she lies, digging from her purse the seven hundred odd dollars she has—most of it from the overpriced head—and handing it to him. “I think things are picking up.”

He doesn’t respond, just takes the money silently and puts his finger to his lips, apparently listening for something. She notices a film of sweat on him, and it worries her. She suddenly does not want to be alone with him. She feels weak in the knees.

Standing next to his bed, he looks at her and with one finger still on his lips beckons her with the other. His single ring dully reflecting a forty-watt nightstand light.
Where’s all your jewelry, Al?

Okay. She has no choice. Five minutes ago she thought about
this contingency when she hinted to Ben that her errand might drag on a bit longer than expected. Now she’s amazed at how much she doesn’t want to do this; suddenly she doesn’t feel all that numb. Dropping her purse on the foot of the bed, she begins unbuttoning her blouse.

But he waves her off, shakes his head vigorously, and whispers, “Have you told anyone that I am here?”

Confused, frightened by his strange behavior, and maybe just a little miffed despite herself, she wants to say,
Who am I gonna tell, Al? Who the fuck’s supposed to care?
but she says, “No.” She stands, waiting, unsure of whether or not she should continue to undress, braced for his fury if she guesses wrong.

The sweat is pouring from him. He wants to ask her. He wants to tell her. He really, really wants to beg her to stay and listen with him, to tell him why these strangers in the room next to his are talking about him. It would be so easy:
Do you hear that?
But she wouldn’t. She hates him, he knows, and she would pretend to hear nothing. He is completely alone. Now, of all times, he cannot afford to appear weak in her eyes. “Go, Sera,” he whispers. Then, because he has to, again in a louder voice: “Go, Sera. Stay at home. I will call you tomorrow.”

She stares at him with growing concern, a messy concern for both tormented and tormentor, an amalgamated concern for everyone who is fucked, whether they know it or not. He reminds her of the boy throwing up in the corner of the cheap motel room—a lifetime and some harmless bruises ago. She wants him to hit her, to be himself, but this time she wants it for him instead of for her. “Are y…,” she starts, but is cut off with a frantic motion.

He turns to her and says patiently, in a low voice, “Sera, please go. This is very important to both of us. I am setting up a very big deal. This is about our trick, and I must listen.”

Hit me! Fuck me! Give me something familiar. Please!
Unable to comprehend, her feet feel frozen, until he again waves her away with a ridiculous, almost slapstick gesture, sweat flying from his head as it shakes vigorously. She leaves his room, unwittingly popping a button as she undoes her undressing.

As things happen, with the occasional seemliness of fate, Sera’s one night invitation to Ben evolves into an unspoken arrangement between the two of them. Sera, thirsty beyond even her own reckoning for companionship, has easily taken to his comfortable, accepting manner, his subtle, sincere devotion. By not verbalizing any definite plan, she is able to maintain the confirmed independence of those who live alone, while satisfying the craving for friendship which has gone mostly unanswered in her and is now burning with heretofore unsuspected intensity.

Beyond these universal needs he is functioning as a catalyst of her catharsis. He is a lever with which she is attempting to impel Al from her soul, for she has learned that to run away is nothing more than a quick fix. Ben, hours, days, and nights all blending together for him, is willingly manipulated into the situation; indeed, to him it is a most benign manipulation, and he is inwardly grateful for being given a function to serve.

Sera has not called Al, now to her an unknown quantity, volatile and strange. Nor did she respond two days ago to the ringing of her phone, this an impulse which seized her as quickly as the harsh ring had startled her; they had been sitting on the floor, and Ben had just grabbed her knee as part of a punch line delivery. There were only three rings, one series, nothing since, and she finds this protracted silence terrifying, knowing as she
does that he will soon have to be dealt with. Perhaps even now he lurks, scorned and desperate, outside her window. Ignorant of the menace—she has kept Al a secret—Ben, who is often too drunk to walk, much less fight, still manages to passively impart to her a sort of vanilla intrepidity; or does he simply conjure it from where it sleeps within her?

For three days she and Ben have spent their time in one long, life-reviewing conversation, punctuated by excursions out for food, liquor, and a change of clothes for Ben. They have neither confessed their mutual infatuation nor continued the sexual relationship that might have been started in his motel room on the night of their first meeting. This afternoon, upon waking from a nap and finding him watching her from the corner of her bedroom, Sera chooses to consummate their cohabitation.

“Isn’t your rent coming up at the motel?” she starts.

“Yeah, must be,” he says. “I’ve sort of lost track of time here at Hotel Sera. I’ll go take care of it today, or tonight, or whatever the next available solar segment is. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll find a real room for me? You can pick it out, a tower on the Strip.”

“What I meant was that you should bring your stuff over here. What the fuck! We’re spending all this time together as it is. There’s no reason to blow all your money on a hotel room. Face it: we’re having fun here. I think we can dispense with formality at this point. You know, Ben, if anything, I trust in your integrity completely. I want you here now. I’m not too concerned with long term plans, and as far as I can see, you don’t seem to have any. Are we gonna screw around like kids? This is what I want. Why don’t you go get your stuff?”

Ben wants her to be right, but he also knows that he’s been drinking carefully, very measured, and she hasn’t seen him at his
worst; that can’t go on. The closer he gets to her, the deeper he falls for her, the more he thinks that this might be a mistake. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he shouldn’t start anything with this girl. Things are set nicely for him to curl up and die as a stranger in Las Vegas, just like he planned. Why should he do it in this girl’s lap. She shouldn’t have to see that.

“Don’t you think that you’ll get a little bored living with a drunk?” he tries. “You haven’t seen the worst of it yet. I knock things over. I throw up all the time. It’s a miracle that I’ve felt so good these last few days. You’re like some sort of antidote that mixes with the liquor and keeps me in balance, but that won’t last forever. You’ll get very tired of it very quickly.” His eyes fix on a black dot, just a few feet from his corner. It is a spider, suspended on a single strand of either an old or future web, swaying with the currents of the room. This appears to be its only movement, so the spider may in fact be dead. He returns to her, mouth set defiantly:
wake up, sister.

But she is determined. “Okay, so
then
you can move to a hotel, and I’ll go back to my glamorous life of being alone. The only thing that I have to come home to now is a bottle of Listerine to wash the taste of come out of my mouth. I’m tired of being alone… that’s what I’m tired of. Jesus Christ! Look at you! You look like you’re about to drop dead. I want you here with me, and all you want to do is crawl off into a dark motel room. I can’t face worrying about you. We gotta decide this right now, before we go any further. You either stay here with me, or I can’t see you anymore.” She wonders if she should tell him about Al. She’s hoping to deal with him in his suite, and let it all become just a story to be told later, but part of her insistence with Ben might be motivated by plain fear; she owes him more.

The room is silent as he burns under her demanding gaze. He must respond, and he hates this kind of pressure. As the quiver
starts in his neck, he picks up his shaking hand and empties the cup of vodka, which he has been nursing, down his throat.

“What you don’t understand is…,” he begins, wanting to come clean with her, to tell her not to worry about the cost of the room because it will all be handled by his plastic estate; in other words, to tell her that he not only wants to crawl off into a dark motel room, but that he really does want to die there as well. But it is too much, too unkind. This isn’t what she wants to hear, and it certainly isn’t what he wants to say. No, he’s still alive and he wants to be with her. She apparently wants to be with him. So what’s the problem? He’ll spend some time here; then, when things get really bad, he’ll move to a hotel. She’ll probably be glad to get rid of him. He starts again. “You can never hassle me about drinking,” he warns.

“I understand that,” she says, nodding. “I really do understand that.” Now she is smiling. “I want to do some shopping alone. You go out for a few drinks and then get your things. Don’t hurry, and I’ll be back before you to let you in. I’ll have a key made while I’m out.”

Having thus penetrated this barrier, Sera springs from the bed and pounces on him with an uncharacteristic exuberance, catching him in a fervent embrace that is fueled by years of untapped emotion. She herself is caught off guard by her passion, and the room darkens happily to her eyes as his face fills her vision. Her kisses flow unchecked, uncounted, unmeasured, from his cheek to his chin to his eyes and again; so many fast kisses, each one a veritable possession.

Ben stands for the last time in the Whole Year Inn. Freshly showered and changed into his black suit—just out of the cleaner’s
plastic—and collarless white parson’s shirt—slightly dirty, still smells okay—he is feeling pretty sharp, though walking a little unsteadily. Resolutions always ease his mind, and this one gets more pleasing to him the more he thinks about it. Sera’s emotional outburst convinced him that he had said the right thing, made the right move.

Into his suitcase he is collecting the full and mostly full bottles of liquor that litter his room. The few nearly empty bottles that he finds—there are not many, he always tends to polish them off—he pours into a single cup, a sort of very Long Island iced tea. More like a Long Three-Mile Island iced tea, he thinks. Repeatedly he circles the room, until, with the bottles all packed—one in his jacket pocket—and the suitcase full, he remembers what he has forgotten and frowns at the heap of clothing and related items that he assembled on the bed. Already about as burdened with baggage as he intends to be, yet unwilling to leave his estate of so many personal threads to the administration of strangers, he is growing weary of the whole project. Then, recognizing a sterling opportunity, he takes all the plastic liners from the bottoms of the wastebaskets in the room and fills them with his clothes, all the things from LA, all the non-liquid things he has left to him. He ties off each bag, carries them all out to the trash bin at the rear of the motel, and dumps them out of his life. Returning to the room, he thinks how great this is. Now he has saved himself the embarrassment of physically moving in; he can simply
walk in
to her apartment. Also, she’ll be saved the trouble of cleaning up a lot of junk should he ultimately not make it to a hotel. They’ll have fun later shopping for a pair of jeans and a few shirts. Maybe he’ll buy two dozen pairs of underwear and sox and never have to wash them again, just throw them out and wear new ones each day: one of the privileges of the ebbing class. Jamming his money
deep inside his left front pocket, he calls a cab, drains his cup, and with some effort, lifts his suitcase and clinks happily out the door.