Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Out there on the desert it was terribly hot, I could see that, could almost see the heat in the shimmering blue air, but inside the car it was cold—too cold, but I hated to complain, and for all I knew it was comfortable to David.

And very soon it got monotonous, all that gray sage. And frightening: I began to think of missiles, ballistic ranges, nuclear tests. I wondered why there were no rabbits around, it had so much the look of rabbit country; and then, as quickly as I wondered, I thought that probably they had all been killed, war victims, dying of guns and cancer.

David could have been reading my mind, for at the moment that I had my sinister rabbit thoughts he said, “Well, actually it is a little grim, isn’t it. Think we might as well head back?” And he turned off the air conditioner and rolled down a window. We were instantly warm—hot, really—but that seemed preferable to the unnatural cold, in the menacing gray desert. We turned around, and headed back toward Las Vegas—going much faster, I noticed, than when we were headed out.

Caesar’s Palace: it must cover several city blocks. Acres of white filagreed concrete, rising in towers, in endless curved archways—much more Indian than Roman in appearance. In fact, in moonlight or a heavy dusk it could be miraculously mysterious. Close up, in the harsh sunlight of midafternoon, in spring, it was just violently tawdry, a monumental excrescence.

Which should have prepared me for the interior, but it did not. David and I walked into a series of enormous rooms that could have been subterranean, so dim and unreal was the light. And in those rooms were a million slot machines , at least a million; every space for walking was an aisle between those consummately garish, volcanic machines. Everywhere people feeding in money, jerking handles, scooping it up. Everywhere money, and smoke; everyone was smoking, and most of them drinking something. That afternoon could have been the middle of the night, been anywhere at all—the middle of hell.

I whispered to David, “It’s unreal.”

“Oh no, baby. It’s real, all right.”

David seemed to know where he was going, and I followed his not quite familiar shoulders; I behaved as though it were perfectly okay, the tacky-funky place of my imagination. I could not wait for us to be alone, to touch and kiss, familiarly. And a great fear seized me that he would want to start gambling right away; at any moment he could have put our bags down beside a machine, or one of the black tables where cards were being dealt, chips thrown out, along with dollars. He could have stopped there and smiled at me and said, “Well, how about it?” and I would have had to smile back and say okay—a good sport, a friendly lover. I could almost see and hear him saying that, but surprisingly he did not; he continued past another roomful of machines (that I could see was labeled “Salon di Slots”) until we were at a check-in desk, and then a few minutes later, after a quick encounter with the computer, we were standing at a bank of elevators.

“We’re in what’s called the New Fantasy Tower,” David said to me, and we smiled at each other in the private way of happy lovers.

The other people who went up with us in the car, to the fantasy tower, were large and pale, Midwestern-sounding. I paid very little attention to them; they seemed quintessential Las Vegas visitors.

We got out and went down a red-carpeted hall to our room, and David opened the door. At first glance it was a fantasy room, a very sexual fantasy. A round bed covered in pink velvet, with a round mirror on the ceiling, and not far from the bed, an elevated pink tiled bath, also round, and as large as the bed. Well . How super, is what I thought, at first. But right away quick second thoughts leapt forward. For one thing, new lovers, so far confined to sneaking around in the dark, David and I were not used to so much naked exposure to each other. Even the washbasin was out in full sight of the bed, no way to brush your teeth without the other person watching, much less to take a bath—and bathing together, at such an elevation, in the middle of the room, seemed somehow too forward a step for us, just then. It was a room for just sex, a man coming into a hooker’s room, or she into his for an hour or so, and then leaving, no brushing teeth or washing faces. No breakfast together.

Looking at David, I thought I saw or felt the same conclusions on his face; he looked shy, slightly taken aback. And as I started to open my bag he said, “Well, I guess you’d like to wash up? This may be a good time for me to go downstairs and roll a few. Keep up my comp status.”

He smiled and I smiled back, and we kissed in a friendly way as I thought how sensitive he was, how delicate his instincts. But then as he smiled again, and left the room, I thought, Dear God, he could stay down there for hours. I panicked; what would I do?

In fact, I was thinking two contradictory things at once: one, if I got into a bath, David would surely come back early, to find me looking a little silly in that tub. And, two, he would be down there for several hours. Weighing those possibilities, I pulled the draperies apart, more heavy pink velvet, and looked out into the still-bright late afternoon sunshine.

Close up, just outside the window, that filagreed concrete looked barely stuck together, and I had the San Franciscan’s familiar thoughts of earthquakes. Beyond all that dangerous lace stretched miles of casinos, giant signs that advertised casinos, miles of jammed thoroughfares, people, cars.

I closed the draperies and started my bath. Of course the tub filled very slowly, such an enormous volume; after what seemed a long time there was only about half an inch of water on the bottom. I rushed through with washing, somehow, thinking that actually I should have lingered; I would look much less foolish if there were a lot of water (maybe David would join me in the tub?) and besides, I probably had a lot of time to kill.

But I didn’t, no time at all: I was out of the tub and wrapped in a towel, deciding what to wear, when David burst into the room, grinning and exhilarated. “I knew it, you bring me luck!” he almost shouted, among welcoming swift kisses on my neck. “You’re wonderful—I may have to keep you around.”

Well, great. I would have liked to ask how much money he won, just out of interest, but I did not, and it didn’t matter; I was so pleased that he felt lucky; he was lucky and attributed it to me. And mostly I was terrifically pleased that he had come back so soon. And I thought, maybe that would be enough? No more machines and tables?

David had gone over to the telephone; he was dialing and getting room service. I heard him order champagne and a plate of hot Chinese hors d’oeuvres. He said, “They’re terrific here. I’m starving, aren’t you?”

I smiled, but I thought that since we were expecting room service we could not, just then, make love. No siesta. Also, I wished that I had brought something to wear other than the pink sweater tidily folded up in my bag, since David was feeling so festive. However, I saw no point in regrets on either score, or not for long. I got dressed, as modestly as I could, and David said how clever I was to bring a sweater that matched our pink velvet room, and we both laughed—in love, having a good time together.

The champagne arrived, and the hot Chinese hors d’oeuvres, which somehow made us hungrier; we reminded each other of all the San Francisco jokes about being hungry after Chinese food. We decided to go on down to dinner, to something called the Bacchanal Room.

Our high mood continued through dinner, in that crazy room which almost exceeded my fantasies of camp, of tackiness. The waitresses had obviously been selected for the size of their breasts—huge breasts bursting from the tops of their miniskirted “Roman” tunics, as they bent down to pour out wine from great round green glass bottles. I finally saw a wine label on one of the jugs: Californian, fairly good and very cheap. David and I laughed at all that, amiably. I saw that we were having the fifty-dollar dinner, and I thought again how nice that everything was comp.