I was hoping to like him, but I’ve run out of patience. Poor Carey! It’s not her fault she doesn’t want to marry her drippy English boyfriend. He could have been kind to her. Now she’s feeling wretched and he’s off in another of his self-absorbed little tantrums. And Carey did love him, enough, in her way. But she knew that if she said yes he’d think that was the end. She didn’t want to be his rescuer, his mother, the person who was to blame for his happiness, a bit part in his small life.
Bree would hate him too, I think, if she knew him. Bree, like Sherman, believes we make our own luck. She may be wrong about that. Not as wrong as Sherman, mind – sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. But wrong nonetheless. At least she knows what she’s doing, though. She works. She keeps her head down. She tries to make amends. She has some discipline – now, at least, she does. She even thought she could help Jones.
Alex has none of Bree’s discipline. Carey is suffering, sitting back there in the bar in Treasure Island, crying, while the hard woman who served the champagne and didn’t even get a tip, calls her honey and asks her if she wants to talk. She wants to talk.
This is Alex’s fault. Alex made all of this happen, by doing nothing. By allowing himself to feel only what he thought he ought to feel, by faking it, by truly knowing he wanted her only when she wasn’t part of his story.
Alex made all this happen. And now he’s going to have to suffer through it.
The anger faded from Alex as he walked, and the coldness, and in it a peculiar ache took hold. He looked at all the neon and felt a loneliness that carried, somewhere at the heart of it, its own thrill.
That was that. He walked up the Strip, wondering what to do. He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back to his hotel. And the Strip was so long and so full of people, the buildings so massive. Everything was heavy here.
He walked for a long time, waiting at intersections for the sign to say ‘Walk’ and then walking across, and walking to the next huge intersection and waiting for the sign to say ‘Walk’. He kept going, up out past the big hotels. A guy came forward and tried to give him a free glossy magazine. He ignored him.
On the pavement there were cigarette butts, glossy flyers for shows, glossy flyers for girls. Massage and escort. Glossy orange breasts, white smiles, gaudy typefaces, phone numbers, phone numbers, phone numbers. Fake photographs, real phone numbers.
Up ahead he could see a slim concrete tower, bone white, rising from the other side of the Strip. It seemed to go half a mile into the sky. At the top, some sort of observation deck pulsed with light, and as he looked, tiny wheels rotated and swung over the edge and back again. A red light shot up the spire above the observation deck and shuddered back down. Fairground rides, he realised – people allowing themselves a moment or two of the fear of falling, the fear of acceleration, the fear of surrendering control.
Alex kept walking. Further ahead, another blurt of neon: a pair of hearts knitting and unknitting unceasingly, a white cross: a wedding chapel. He needed to be away from here. He took one of the roads off the Strip and walked down it, away from the people and the lights, and when he saw a shabby-looking bar he went into it and sat down.
There was a long bar, a pool table, a jukebox and a funk of smoke. The walls were entirely covered in beer mats and most of what light there was came from old neon on the walls, a green crown-cap bottle the size of a baseball bat and a red horse with a yellow cowboy on it.
‘What?’ said the barman.
‘Whiskey, please,’ said Alex, and regretted the ‘please’.
‘Up?’
‘Sorry? Oh. Yeah. Please.’
Alex put ten dollars down, and necked the whiskey while the barman brought him his change. It was bourbon, and it gave his throat a sweet scald. He coughed. He put a single dollar bill on the bar for a tip and asked for another.
The barman scratched his neck, poured it, watched Alex drink the second. Alex wasn’t used to drinking shots – he didn’t normally even like whiskey much, and bourbon less – and a swimmy calm descended on him. He was playing at being someone else. Drinking hard was what you were supposed to do, he thought, in these circumstances.
He had a third, more slowly after a moment of reflux made him gag, and then the fourth was on the house. Alex stared glassily across the bar at the bottles, and behind the mirror in which he could see his own dark reflection, and tried to think about what had happened.
He had been shocked. Now the shock was thawing into shame. Why had he been angry at Carey? It hadn’t been her fault. He was mouthing to himself. He’d just sprung it on her. She was shocked. And then he’d reacted instantly, and in the worst way – But the pity, that was what got to him. The look of sadness on her face. That was what had humiliated him. She looked sorry for him. He couldn’t stand to be around her, and that was tough shit on her. What was she thinking of? Coming to Las Vegas with him. She’d come to dump him. That was – Christ, no wonder she’d been embarrassed. What a fucking, fucking idiot. Nice one, Smart. Simpering. The ring. The whole thing. If she’d had any sort of courage she’d have dumped him by text message.
Even in pain, Alex noted, he was still more than capable of feeling the sting of embarrassment.
All that remained to do was to pick up his humiliation and go home. Pay off the car. Pawn the ring – well, he couldn’t exactly recycle it, could he? He barked mirthlessly. And then he thought of going to a pawn shop and handing it over for a few dollars. He liked the hurting tawdriness of it. Or just throw it in a bin.
But he loved her! Some small abject part of him wailed. He couldn’t get round that. And never more so, he thought, than now. Just the thought of her skin made a lump come to his throat. What if he went back? This could be just a row. They could just forget about it. He rehearsed that thought without sincerity.
He ordered another whiskey, and was just leaving the tip on the bar when his phone leaped in his pocket and his stomach fell through the seat of his chair. Carey? He pulled it out. No. Not Carey. A text message.
It was from Rob. The message said: ‘How Green Was My Valet?’ He looked at it blankly. It was like a message from another universe, a time capsule from an age when he had thought stupid jokes were funny. He turned off his phone, settled back at the bar, had another whiskey, went back to feeling sorry for himself. If he drank enough, he reasoned, not only would the truth of his feelings become apparent to him, but the course of action he needed to take would also decide itself for him.
He found himself attending to the background noise of the jukebox. He was reaching just that mood when whatever song comes on will acquire a generalised sense of tragic grandeur. Had ‘Barbie Girl’ or the ‘Birdie Song’ come on, they would have seemed to speak directly to him of the futility of life. As it was, he had mawked his way already through ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, ‘Born to Follow’ and – bizarrely – ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’.
Then, in a ragged tangle of chords, underpinned by a sluggish drumbeat, another song he recognised began, and he rested his elbows on the bar, pushed his cheeks up with the heels of his hands and closed his eyes.
Once I thought I saw you… in a crowded hazy bar…
His lips moved quietly to the words. She was. She was like a hurricane. She was spontaneous and – were hurricanes spontaneous? Never mind – free and… she danced like a hurricane, like hurricanes dance, from one star to another, on the light…
Chugging, chiming, sad-defiant. The song made no sense at all, but it seemed in that instant to mean everything to Alex. There were calms in her eyes. And, like a hurricane, Carey had blown the modest bungalow of his happiness flat.