He had just sat down with a rumpled ten to worship at a nickel slot machine when a hand on his shoulder and a voice hazy with travel said: ‘Hey.’
He turned round and stood up and there was Carey, in the old Dead Kennedys T-shirt she used to sleep in, jeans frayed at the hip, hair down, brown-armed and smiling.
‘Hey,’ said Alex, and felt as happy as he ever had. ‘You’re early.’
‘So are you,’ said Carey. Her arms were warm on his neck as he hugged her.
He pulled back and said more or less without drawing breath: ‘It’s so good to see you. Look! Vegas! I’m playing a slot machine. What’s up? How was your flight? Enough about you, let’s talk about me. My God, I’ve had this weird road trip, I swear, every lunatic in America has tried to kill me or make friends with me. Where’s your stuff?’
Carey lifted her pink vinyl shoulder bag by its strap. ‘Travelled light. Underwear, change of T-shirt, lipstick in case I need to go hooking to earn back what I lose at poker.’
‘Want to go back to my hotel and put it in the room?’
‘Hell no! This is Las Vegas. Let’s hit the town. Waitron! Bring me… a daiquiri.’ There was no waitress anywhere in sight. She waved her arm as if twirling an invisible baton, then shouldered Alex out of the way and slammed the palm of her hand onto the fat SPIN button in the centre of the machine’s console. It quacked and blurted, shuffled its numbers.
‘I win!’ said Carey.
‘No, you don’t,’ said Alex.
‘Oh,’ said Carey. ‘No, I don’t. Does it make that noise when you lose? Imagine the noise when we win. OK. Cash out. Let’s hit the town.’
‘Hang on,’ said Alex. He pressed the button again. The reels moved. There was a simulated cascade of falling coins.
‘Magic hands,’ said Alex, waggling his fingers.
‘We won,’ said Carey. ‘Jackpot!’ Three oranges. They were thirty-five cents up.
‘We won!’ Alex repeated. ‘Go, us. OK, let’s cash out and explore the’ – his hand moved towards the CASH/CREDIT button but Carey swiped it away – ‘town -’
‘Are you crazy? We’re on a streak.’
‘There’s only ten dollars in there…’
‘Shhh.’ She pressed the button again.
An hour and a half later, having never been more than $4.85 up, and having finally gone down to zero, they left to go into town.
Carey and Alex were doing what you do in Las Vegas. They sat at one of the bars in Circus Circus – Carey had demanded that they go in, claiming without a hint of sincerity that she had been frightened of clowns as a child and that it would be good aversion therapy – and played the video poker game embedded in the actual bar. Alex had won $100 on his first go, and Carey had then spent fifteen minutes losing it while they drank their watery screwdrivers.
Then when they got hungry they looked for somewhere to eat and realised that everything was either a cheap chain restaurant or an expensive chain restaurant, so they went to a cheap chain restaurant and had fajitas. The restaurant was dimly lit and noisy with pop-punk music with Mexican lyrics. Teenagers with glow sticks round their necks hip-swayed between tables, taking orders as if they had trains to catch and returning to drop the food off with casual violence.
The meat came on lethally hot metal skillets. The tortillas came in a plastic simulacrum of a wicker basket, accompanied by a plastic simulacrum of a saucer containing a plastic simulacrum of grated cheese.
They bought long, bulbed plastic horns containing pre-mixed margaritas dispensed by a machine, which were only drinkable because they were so tooth-hurtingly cold that you couldn’t taste how sweet they were. They took the remains of them out onto the street and walked down the Strip.
When? Not now. Not now. Not now.
They continued to walk until their aimlessness started to become something palpable, an awkwardness between them.
Even ordinarily, Alex would be anxious in this situation. Nothing made him more anxious than the need or expectation of having fun. Vegas was a place devoted to the idea of fun. Everyone, everywhere you looked, was trying to have fun.
Alex had brought Carey here under the pretence of having fun. He worried he wasn’t having fun. He worried even more that Carey wasn’t having fun, or, at least, that whatever fun they were having – the food was OK, wasn’t it? They hadn’t lost all their money gambling – was deprived of sunlight and water by the enormous shadow of the fun they should have been having, by comparison with which their own meagre portion of fun was a wretched failure.
Oh God. What was he thinking of?
He looked over at Carey to see whether it looked like she was having fun. It was impossible to tell. She wasn’t hooting with laughter and throwing her head back. She was just sort of walking down the street looking at stuff. She had a drink in her hand, at least. Good.
Alex had finished his own drink. Ever since he had started worrying about the aimlessness – that is, he had an aim, obviously, but the more he wound up to it the less he was able to communicate with the outside world, and until he had done so his companion would be left with the overwhelming impression of aimlessness – he had been sucking away on his margarita so as to be doing something even if he wasn’t saying something.
It was a margarita in a brightly coloured plastic cup, a foot long. It said so on the side of the cup. Foot-long margarita. With a foot-long straw. That was fun, surely. That was drinks plus fun. Alex felt utterly adrift.
It was probably ages since he’d said anything. Had she noticed? Was she bored?
He knew he should say something. Say something. That was the thing. But the only thing he could think of to say was ‘Will you marry me?’ and even though that was the exact thing to say the moment was wrong. You couldn’t just come out of the blue with it, could you? Just abruptly? She’d think he was a loon. Or, worse, joking.
Here? Not here. Not in the street. Yes. Why not? In the street. This is your life. This is your life, going by, and you’re going to look back on this moment as the moment when you didn’t take the decision that would have made you happy for the rest of your days on earth. With this American girl you love wholeheartedly.
You know you love her wholeheartedly. You have said so to yourself, and had you a diary you would have written it in your diary. You cannot always, when called on, feel the love as a wave of emotion – not in the way you could when you watched her sleep, before you were a couple, or the way you can when she’s somewhere else and you miss her. But you know it’s there. It’s just – it’s something you take for granted. Something you’re so quietly sure of you barely examine it.
Action. For goodness’ sake. Action. That’s all. Just do it.
Alex thought about how he used to trick himself into jumping into swimming pools. You ran up to the edge promising yourself that this was just a practice run and that you were going to stop, and then when you got to the edge you simply kept running and took the view that you would apologise to yourself later for the white lie. Always, a great body-shocking spout of cold water to the chest and crotch, bubbles of air foaming up around the ears and neck, and limbs paddling at once, spastic with surprise.
‘Carey,’ said Alex. He looked past her shoulder. There was nobody there. The Strip was empty as far as the next corner and the sky above was a perspectiveless blue-black. It was warm, and away behind him he could hear the hiss and swish and flop of the fountains outside the Bellagio dancing their exhausted dance.
‘Mmm?’ Carey was distracted. She took another sip of her margarita and Alex admired with a little wave of desperation the way her cheek pulsed inwards as she drew on her orange straw.
Alex felt the ring, in its square box, digging against his hip. He was on the verge of action. He felt a little dizzy. He remembered that once he had tried the swimming-pool trick, a little drunk, in the shallow end of a pool with submerged steps. He had driven the little toe of his right foot into the corner of the lowest step, and gulped a lungful of water. Saul had pulled him out in time for him not to drown. For the next fortnight, his broken toe had been so painful that simply hopping downstairs on the other foot had, with every step, sent an inertial throb of blood into the digit that had caused him to gasp.