Fay Weldon - Novel 23 (24 page)

 
          
The
towers and turrets differentiated themselves as they approached: some
turquoise, some silver; the magic diminished, the place looked more like a
gigantic shopping mall than Mickey Mouse’s fantasy of heaven. Still
incomparably vulgar, hopelessly at war with nature, but kind of local all the
same. The Pequod Indians changing their tune, subduing the natural world for a
change, false God as it had turned out to be, for them. A toothless, hopeless
God, when faced by an enemy with a flair for logistics. Commune with nature all
you liked, meld and mystify, worship and magnify, placate and please, in the
end it betrayed you. Nature had sided with the white man, trampling and
crushing through undergrowth though he might, slaughtering animals, burning the
prairie: nature admired him. Talk loud, act tough, win.
The
survival of the cunning, not the valiant.
That’s what nature respects.

 
          
William
and Felicity parked underground in a vast dark concrete cavern, and rose by
lift to glassy, noisy, much peopled levels. Here gathered were the blue-haired
and the bald, the disabled, the quick - not many - and the lame, the fast - not
many - and the slow; united in the wafting smell of junk food cooking, in the
solidarity of a common enterprise, the warmth of companionship, of shared
elation and despair, of instant empathy one for the other. If there was a
common enemy it was the Casino and its profits, yet how they rushed to embrace
it, how friendly they found the foe, how moody and attractive the wall of
noise; the beating pulse of vaguely familiar music, the background susurrus of
a thousand slot machines, tinkling their triumph and their sorrow, generously
disgorging money.
The soft smiles and greetings of
management.
Give us your money and all will be well. We will not let you
come to harm. Trust us. Here was one vast family of choice: here was home,
companionship, support, charged by the agreeable excitement of risk, the
continuation of youth by other means. Challenge for the brave at the blackjack
tables, at craps, brisk male voices acting father, censorious -
Surely for once you can get just this right:
place your counter over the line, please, not on it: over I said, are you deaff
- soft maternal female voices for roulette -
You're sure this is what you want to do, you're suref
And on the
slots in shadowed halls at last the friendly siblings you never had, legion
upon legion of them, row upon row of sharers in delight, hypnotized in concert
at the family prayer wheels: whirling sevens, bars, cherries, jackpots.

 
          
Booths
everywhere: booths for change, booths for cash,
booths
for turning tokens into money, money into tokens: a temple given over wholly to
moneychangers.
Security cameras sweeping back and forth, back
and forth, for your protection not your detection.
Surely.
Punters wandering, gawking and gaping, but knowing what to
do, how to be, what the rules were.
It was obvious to Felicity that she
did not. And William walked ahead: she followed close behind. If she lost him
she would be a time-traveller stranded in a future: she would never get back
home. She saw that she had lived a long life on some other quiet planet,
powered by the rising and the falling sun, but still unnatural. Here in this
Casino was a wholly satisfactory alternate universe, the true one, as provided
by a restless tribal nation obliged to settle down, created out of the male
imagination for the delectation of women, and the furtherance of male power,
the forces of nature quite undone.

 
          
William
realized he was walking too fast, and slowed and took Felicity’s arm. He took
her elbow: the floor was glittery with some unknown substance. She hoped her
feet would stay comfortable: there were women of her age wearing trainers;
she’d sworn never to do so: but you could always change your mind.

 
          
‘This
is nothing compared to Vegas,’ said William proudly.
‘Let
alone
Atlantic City
.
Good taste personified.’

 
          
A
central glass giant, a well-muscled Indian, milky white, in the attitude of
Rodin’s
The Thinker
, towered above
all else, directing the last battle. The white man was tricked, after all, and
wandered lost in woods, and didn’t even know it. This was where victory and
prosperity had led him. He had come to these shores wanting gold, and freedom,
and killing to get it: now what he wanted destroyed him. A Japanese car,
today’s prize, circled gracefully at his feet on an orange plinth.

 
          
William,
however, seemed far from destroyed. Twenty years had dropped away from him as
the lift rose.

 
          
‘Much
better than Vegas,’ said William. ‘I was five years in Vegas, two in
Atlantic City
. This Casino you get a better return on
your money than anywhere else in the States.’

 
          
‘You
said you were a teacher in a
New York
high school,’ she said, sadly. You told
lies to men to get out of trouble, as you had to your father, yet expected them
to be father, and not tell lies in return. Exon was the exception: he didn’t
tell lies: he had no imagination. His fancy never outran his caution. And
though his loss still grieved her, there was no denying he was the most boring
man in the world. The wicked make better company than the good. ‘I was,’ he
said. ‘But gambling paid better.
For a time.
Until I had a run of bad luck.
Margaret went to law to get
the house. It had been in my family since it was built: 1890. That didn’t stop
her. The courts don’t look kindly on a gambling man. They don’t appreciate the
work that goes into it. Now Margaret lives there with Tommy’s
boys,
and they let it fall down around them.’ ‘Why didn’t
you tell me this before?’ It wasn’t a reproach. She wanted to know.

 
          
She
stood still in the crowd, which flowed gently by like a river, parting without
aggression. Everything lacked definition: seen through a vision darkly, like Dr
Rosebloom in the mirror. She remembered her mother’s dressing table, when she
was a child. Rodin’s
The Thinker
in
Lalique glass, milky blue, a Chinese ceramic powder bowl, a hairbrush and
mirror set, silver-backed. Her father moved nothing after her death. A month
later the brush still held a single red hair: the puff stayed in the powder
bowl, as if one day her mother would just come back and continue. But how could
she: she was dead. There was a little pile of hairnets behind the powder bowl,
made of a delicate mesh of finest brown silk within an elasticized circle of
ribbon. Women slept in hairnets in those days, so as not to muss their hair.
Every time you washed your hair you removed the grease but left a fine film of
soap behind. You put vinegar or lemon juice in the rinsing water but still you
couldn’t get it out, still it refused to shine, she remembered her mother
lamenting. You could buy hairnets at Woolworths, her mother said, cheaper but
just as good as anywhere else. Little Felicity would choose to stretch the nets
between her hands and look at the world through them: a fine crisscross of
brown between her and reality, distorting it but softening it.

 
          
‘Careful,’
her mother
said,
when she was alive. ‘Don’t break it.
It’s so delicate.’

 
          
Now
why had she remembered this after so long? What was her mother’s name? How
could you forget your own mother’s name? She’d died and gone away and left her
child without
protection, that
was why. Sylvia, of
course, that was her name. Then Lois had taken over and within a day the
dressing table was cleared and there was a stepmother in her mother’s bed. Felicity
felt tears in her eyes. William sat her down on a fluorescent yellow bench. ‘If
it upsets you I’ll take you home at once,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you because
I didn’t want to put you off me.’

 
          
‘It’s
not that,’ she said, ‘I understand that. It’s nothing. I’m crying because my
mother died.’

 
          
They
went and sat down in a fast-food restaurant, without caring what it served. He
told her about the death of his mother, when he was ten, in a car crash. His
twin brother had died too: he himself had been thrown clear. Luck of the draw.
They were all on the way back from hospital: William had trodden on a needle:
it had gone right
in,
the doctor had to extract it
with an electro-magnet. Yes, it felt like his fault, of course it did: if he
hadn’t trodden on a needle they’d all be alive today.
And why
them, not him?
All that.

 
          
‘Perhaps
that’s why we get on,’ she said.
‘Because our mothers died
when we were small.
We recognize each other.’

 
          
The
waitress, in pert pleated blue shirt and red and white blouse, brought them
coffee and bagels. Perhaps they’d ordered them, perhaps they hadn’t. ‘I never
think about it,’ he said, ‘if I can help it.’

 
          
‘They
say we ought to,’ she said. ‘But it’s so long ago, and no-one understands what
it was like then. It doesn’t fade: so you blot it out.’

 
          
‘Perhaps
you have to be strong enough,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we make each other strong.’

 
          
But
soon he began to look restless: she lost his attention: he wanted to get to the
tables: they filled up early and sometimes even when it got crowded management
didn’t open up all the available craps tables. Understandable, craps being
least profitable from management’s point of view - which meant it was best for
the punters. He preferred craps anyway, said William. The sense of others in
the game with you: he liked that.
One for all and all for
one.
Blackjack was a loner’s occupation. He’d won so much at blackjack
last month they’d be keeping an eye on him. (He boasted: cock of the
dung-heap.) No Casino liked its patrons to be too lucky, but this one was both
the most relaxed about it and nearest to home. Why should the Casino worry? It
didn’t pay taxes. Death and tax, the two great certainties of the white man’s
life, halved at one stroke.

 
          
He
wasn’t stupid like some people: he kept money aside from his pension for the
Rosemount: he never mortgaged that, never risked it. Of course his fortunes
were up and down. At first you hoped to even out in a day, then a week, then a
month, then a year.
Last week he’d evened out about two
years’ worth of enjoyment.
Felicity would bring him luck, he knew she
would. She already had. The new shoes had an extra level on the heels, she
noticed. He walked tall and proud: eyes followed him.

 
          
* * *

           
She hovered behind him at the
crowded craps table. He tried to explain to her what was going on. She tried to
focus, but it was like listening to traffic directions. You stopped to ask
strangers the way, but when they spoke you didn’t hear them. There were two
croupiers, darting, stretching,
raking
. Each player
waited his turn, rolled two dice directly down the centre of the table to hit
the low wall at the other end. It bounced back and stopped. People sighed or
rejoiced as their interests were affected. William explained that the player
threw for the whole table. You could have sequence bets or roll bets. He lost
her there. Could she have understood even in the old
Savannah
days? She doubted it.

 
          
‘A
six or an eight is most likely,’ he said.
‘A four or a ten
least likely.
But then the rewards are higher. The greater the risk, the
higher the reward, that’s the principle. Jesus, it’s like life.’

 
          
There
was some disagreeable confusion and delay at the table. Someone had declared
that his winnings had not been paid out properly. Of course they had been:
punters tried to cheat the Casino, not the Casino the punters. The Casino’s
confidence trick was so vast as to go unnoticed. Security men gathered: gently
the offender was eased away. William occupied the interval instructing Felicity
further. She appreciated his efficiency. He didn’t like wasting time. Money,
certainly: time, no. She had been trained for years in disapproval, she
realized: she had never been a willing pupil, but some had rubbed off. She, the
one-time hooker, had learned the pleasures of moral superiority: she didn’t
like it in herself; it chafed like a too-tight shoe.

 
          
She
had never in her life thought of herself in those terms.
A
hooker.
But that was long ago, so long it didn’t count.