“Take a walk,” the words having a devastating effect. Maybe it was a switch from complete sympathy and respect he showed them before he became ugly, and maybe it was because to the girl there was no reason for him to turn ugly. Or that he used it quite cruelly for shock when the charm didn’t work.
– -
Yet given ail this, still Jordan ’s death affected him. He was terribly angry at Jordan. He took the suicide as a personal affront. He bitched about not having taken the twenty grand, but I could sense that it didn’t really bother him. A few days later I came into the casino and found him dealing blackjack for the house. He had taken a job, he had given up gambling. I couldn’t believe he was serious. But he was. It was as if be had entered the priesthood as far as I was concerned.
Chapter 7
A week after Jordan ’s death I left Vegas, forever I thought, and headed back for New York.
Cully took me to the plane and we had coffee in the terminal while I waited to board. I was surprised to see that Cully was really affected by my leaving. “You’ll come back,” he said. “Everybody comes back to Vegas. And I’ll be here. We’ll have some great times.”
“Poor Jordan,” I said.
“Yeah,” Cully said. “I’ll never in my whole life be able to figure that out. Why did he do it? Why the hell did he do it?”
“He never looked lucky,” I said.
We shook hands when my boarding was announced. “If you get jammed up back home, give me a call,” Cully said. “We’re buddies. I’ll bail you out.” He even gave me a hug. “You’re an action guy,” he said. “You’ll always be in action. So you’ll always be in trouble. Give me a call.”
I really didn’t believe that he was sincere. Four years later he was a big success, and I was in big trouble appearing before a grand jury looking to indict me. And when I called Cully, he flew to New York to help me.
Chapter 8
Fleeing Western daylight, the huge jet slid into the spreading darkness of the Eastern time zones. I dreaded the moment when the plane would land and I’d have to face Artie and he’d drive me home to the Bronx housing project where my wife and kids were waiting. Craftily I had presents for them, miniature toy slot machines, for Valerie a pearl inset ring which had cost me two hundred dollars. The girl in the Xanadu Hotel gift shop wanted five hundred dollars, but Cully muscled a special discount.
But I didn’t want to think about the moment I would have to walk through the door of my home and meet the faces of my wife and three children. I felt too guilty. I dreaded the scene I would have to go through with Valerie. So I thought about what had happened to me in Vegas.
I thought about Jordan. His death didn’t distress me. Not now anyway. After all, I had known him for only three weeks, and not really known him. But what, I wondered, had been so touching in his grief? A grief I had never felt and hoped I never would feel. I had always suspected him, studied him as I would a chess problem. Here was a man who had lived an ordinary happy life. A happy childhood. He talked about that sometimes, how happy he had been as a child. A happy marriage. A good life. Everything went right for him until that final year. Then why didn’t he recover? Change or die, he said once. That was what life was all about. And he simply couldn’t change. The fault was his.
During those three weeks his face became thinner as if the bones underneath were pushing themselves outward to give some sort of warning. And his body began shrinking alarmingly for so short a time. But nothing else betrayed him and his desire. Going back over those days, I could see now that everything he said and did was to throw me off the track. When I refused his offer to stake me and Cully and Diane, it was simply to show my affection was genuine. I thought that might help him. But he had lost the capacity for what Austen called “the blessing of affection.”
I guess he thought it was shameful, his despair or whatever it was. He was solid American, it was disgraceful for him to feel it was pointless to stay alive.
His wife killed him. Too simple. His childhood, his mother, his father, his siblings? Even if the scars of childhood heal, you never grow out of being vulnerable. Age is no shield against trauma.
Like Jordan, I had gone to Vegas out of a childish sense of betrayal. My wife put up with me for five years while I wrote a book, never complained. She wasn’t too happy about it, but what the hell, I was home nights. When my first novel was turned down and I was heartbroken, she said bitterly, “I knew you would never sell it.”
I was stunned. Didn’t she know how I felt? It was one of the most terrible days of my life and I loved her more than anyone else in the world. I tried to explain. The book was a good book. Only it had a tragic ending and the publisher wanted an upbeat ending and I refused. (How proud I was of that. And bow right I was. I was always right about my work, I really was.) I thought my wife would be proud of me. Which shows how dumb writers are. She was enraged. We were living so poor, I owed so much money, where the fuck did I come off, who the fuck did I think I was, for Christ sake? (Not those words, she never in her life said “fuck.”) She was so mad she just took the kids and left the house and didn’t come back home until it was time to cook supper. And she had wanted to be a writer once.
My father-in-law helped us out. But one day he ran into me coming out of a secondhand bookstore with an armload of books and he was pissed off. It was a beautiful spring day, sunshiny yellow. He had just come out of his office, and he looked wilted and strained. And there I was walking along, grinning with anticipation at devouring the printed goodies under my arm. “Jesus,” he said, “I thought you were writing a book. You’re just fucking off.” He could say the word pretty well.
A couple of years later the book was published my way, got great reviews but made just a few grand. My father-in-law, instead of congratulating me, said, “Well, it didn’t make any money. Five years’ work. Now you concentrate on supporting your family.”
Gambling in Vegas, I figured it out. Why the hell should they be sympathetic? Why should they give a shit about this crazy eccentricity I had about creating art? Why the fuck should they care? They were absolutely right. But I never felt the same about them again.
The only one who understood was my brother, Artie, and even he, over the last year, I felt, was a little disappointed in me, though he never showed it. And he was the human being closest to me in my life. Or had been until he got married.
Again my mind shied away from going home and I thought about Vegas. Cully had never spoken about himself, though I asked him questions. He would tell you about his present life but seldom anything about himself before Vegas. And the funny thing was that I was the only one who seemed to be curious. Jordan and Cully rarely asked any questions. If they had, maybe I would have told them more.
– -
Though Artie and I grew up as orphans, in an asylum, it was no worse and probably a hell of a lot better than military schools and fancy boarding schools rich people ship their kids just to get them out of the way. Artie was my older brother, but I was always bigger and stronger; physically anyway. Mentally he was stubborn as hell and a lot more honest. He was fascinated by science and I loved fantasy. He read chemistry and math books and worked out chess problems. He taught me chess, but I was always too impatient; it’s not a gambling game. I read novels. Dumas and Dickens and Sabatini, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and later on Joyce and Kafka and Dostoevsky.
I swear being an orphan had no effect on my character. I was just like any other kid. Nobody later in life could guess we had never known our mother or father. The only unnatural or warping effect was that instead of being brothers, Artie and I were mother and father to each other. Anyway, we left the asylum in our teens, Artie got a job and I went to live with him. Then Artie fell in love with a girl and it was time for me to leave. I joined the Army to fight the big war, WW II. When I came out five years later, Artie and I had changed back into brothers. He was the father of a family and I was a war veteran. And that’s all there was to it. The only time I thought of us as having been orphans was when Artie and I stayed up late in his house and his wife got tired and went to bed. She kissed Artie good-night before she left us. And I thought that Artie and I were special. As children we were never kissed good-night.