Ramon came every two weeks — weed-whacking, mowing, watering the potted trees. The simple fellow easily talked to the women, usually in pidgin. That made Wevill bolder.
He was trying to talk with Nina one day, not hold a conversation, just mouthing meaningless pleasantries to attract her attention.
“Great weather.”
“Ya.”
“All that rain yesterday.”
“Ya.”
Getting nowhere, he said, “Maybe you could do the rugs next month.”
Anticipating it gave him a foretaste of pleasure, mother and daughter swinging the old beaters like wire tennis rackets, their clothes flying as they spanked dust from the rug.
“Sorry,” Nina said. “Next month we going to Vegas, Rita and me.”
He was thrown. He said, “You were there just recently.”
“Five months ago, ya,” Nina said with a precision that startled him, for he expected her not to know, at any rate not to remember.
He was at first deeply disappointed, feeling abandoned, and he imagined she was gloating — enjoying turning him down. But that was irrational. Then he grew curious. Where exactly? How long for? What to do?
Nina reminded him of their routine, that they went twice a year on a gambling tour — two weeks in Las Vegas.
In his sixty-one years Wevill had never been to Nevada, and when this young woman answered his questions with a casual unintentional rebuff, he was impressed and humbled.
“Leave the kid with Auntie, stay at the California, play the slots, come back broke. The Vegas package.”
This lovely young woman talking such nonsense appalled him, and he was sad for her, almost sorrowful for her loving this ignorant pleasure, grieving for her wasted beauty. Her mother was no better.
“And party a little.” The older woman laughed.
“Vegas,” he said, and wondered if any of this information would kill his desire.
On one of his working weeks, Ramon didn’t show up. Rita said he was sick with a backache, that he had seen a doctor and was taking medicine. The next week Rita said she had seen Ramon's sister at Foodland; Ramon was dead, the muscle relaxer he had been prescribed had shut down his liver.
At the end of a twisting road in the middle of the island Wevill found the chapel and Ramon’s grieving relatives. A clergyman read from the Bible, delivered a homily, quoted Kahlil Gibran. Wevill sat at the back, a stranger, wondering if Ramon’s family had a lawyer for this personal-injury suit, and where were Rita and Nina? They must have gone to Las Vegas. When the time came for Wevill to pay his respects, he stood before the closed casket and a color photograph of Ramon in an aloha shirt, smiling broadly, youthful, the picture of health, confident and vital.
2
The moment Wevill arrived in Las Vegas and tasted bitterness in the hot dust of the air, he felt he was in a corrupted desert city built on sand, one he imagined he might find described in the Bible, the damned rejoicing, worshiping a gilded animal while a godly prophet lamented somewhere on the perimeter. Wevill was out of his depth — humbled was no exaggeration. Since he had never been to Las Vegas, he could not think of it familiarly as “Vegas.” It bewildered him as much as any Third World capital. He was dismayed to be among people who were delighted to be there, so many of them from Hawaii. He learned late what everyone already knew: because Hawaii was heavily taxed, and gambling illegal, tax-free Nevada was full of people from the islands, many settled there, many visiting, he recognized the faces. Two he looked for but did not see.
He did not mind feeling helpless. It was a more accurate reflection of his condition, the big brooding man enthroned in his mansion, for he was now lost in his house.
To understand the women’s lives better, he had asked for the one-week package that included the airfare, the room, and coupons. But: “Been sold out for months!” Was the clerk rubbing it in? The first-class ticket he bought was absurdly more expensive than the package, but at least he had his anonymity. He had no plan other than to be away from his house and near these women, to be here, in this place. But the place was more bizarre than the bizarrest pictures of it.
In his desperation he realized that he seemed more like a stalker than a mere admirer. He excused his obsession by reminding himself that he was helpless, he had time and money, he could have anything he wanted. Where were they?
I just want to look at Las Vegas, he told himself, have a drink, see what all the fuss is about. A place I have never visited. It was a plus that he happened to be near Rita and Nina. What next he did not know. Being close to them would clear his mind and make him happier. But he knew he was kidding himself.
As a lawyer he was able to hold two different, opposite ideas in his head at the same time, the prosecution’s argument and the defense. Happiness was his defense, but he was well aware that he was driven by physical desire, a sort of hunger he had known very few times in his life, most of them as a boy, for he was captive to the feeling and unsatisfied, and what in his life had he craved that he had not enjoyed? He always knew the answers to the questions he asked.
He felt the insecurity and frustration of his early youth, for he had no idea what would happen next. His needing to be near them, not thinking of them as his cleaning women, yearning to satisfy himself, made his mouth dry. The desert heat of this big blighted place didn’t help. In Las Vegas, where money was everything, he could have anything he wanted, because he had money. But his first day showed him the falseness of that proposition, for he was still alone.
He chose not to stay at the California Hotel, because they were there and he had no clear plan. His only pleasure in his room at the MGM Grand lay in his remembering how he had desired the two women in Hawaii — washing his car, mopping the floor, disheveled nymphs. Las Vegas itself he found appalling for its lights and its carnival atmosphere, the mindlessness of its advertised pleasures. The frenzy, built on sand.
With a stranger in the elevator, tapping the poster for the casino, he found himself saying that it was silly to think that anyone actually believed you could get rich by gambling.
“Then what are you doing here?” the stranger said.
The stranger, a white-haired blotchy-faced man, was wearing a cheap shirt and sneakers, but Wevill found it an intimidating question, for his coming here to see the women was a greater gamble than throwing down money.
Still, that first day he located the California Hotel and Casino, where they were both staying. He watched it from across the street but went no closer. He longed to see the mother and daughter, but just to gape, for he was not yet prepared to confront them. His sneaking satisfied him, gave him a way to pass the time — stalker time.
The frenzy evident everywhere in the city was something he could not share. His mood was opposite — the only watchful, cautious person in Las Vegas. He was passionate but he was particular, and there was only one way out. Apart from buying tasteless meals — there were no other kinds for him here — he hardly spent money. Steeling himself, he went into the California’s casino and scanned the faces and saw islanders pushing money into slot machines, others plopping chips onto numbers on the roulette felt, turning over cards at the blackjack tables, always losing. It was a place for children, big old idiot children, a terrible place, and he began to feel the rage of the prophet at his first Las Vegas sighting.
He knew that he was in this defiled and pagan desert just as obsessively, but that his desire was pure.
Bumping into the women would be best — just let it happen. But his wandering in the casino turned to methodical pursuit as he stalked the rows of gaming tables and banks of slot machines, like an anxious father looking for his missing children.