Rick Moody - The Diviners

“It was very nice of them to present us with these complimentary chips,” Ranjeet says in the elevator. “Have I mentioned to you that I am a very good gambler?”

“You haven’t.”

“Your embraces will create in me the desire to gamble. I’ll order champagne and food for the room, and then you’ll bathe, and I’ll watch you bathe, and there will be a gentle and spiritual embracing, and these things will make me want to gamble.”

“What kind of gambling do you do?”

“Please guess. If you should guess correctly, you will receive a deluge of embraces.”

“I guess blackjack.”

“Exactly correct.”

The elevator launches them onto their floor, and they make their way down an endless corridor in search of the correct numerical digits. This is the storage bin of the desperate, and, should they open the door to their room, it’s as if an agreement has been reached. Their last chance to resist the spectacle will have evaporated.

The room is sweet and quiet, and in it there’s no hint of the madness that lies below, except perhaps in the oxygen-rich air. Jeanine is feeling a little better, though every minute alone in a room with Ranjeet reinforces the fact that he is avoiding making love with her. While she doesn’t exactly think that a married man should be making love with her, he did embrace her by the subway station, and she did stay late in the office with him watching television that one night, and she could feel that he was aroused then, that she caused a stirring in him and does still, so why should there be this unanswered question? He seems to want to make love sometimes, and then other times he seems not to want to, and this is how it goes again, when he starts the water for her and pours the capful of bubble bath under the open tap. He says that he is going to telephone for champagne and he closes her into the bathroom.

After she has taken off most of her clothes, she makes the decision to entice Ranjeet, in her lingerie, and this is perhaps more evidence of the oxygen-rich delirium of the place. She’s a woman covered with burn scars, and she is in her lingerie, and she’s hypnotized into believing that this is the moment when she will be known in her complexity as a woman who is loyal and a woman who is covered with scars, a woman who is a little turned on, a woman who wants to make love at least once in a while in the arms of someone enthusiastic and caring, in the arms of someone who wants her in return, and who, in wanting her, creates the same in herself, the condition of wanting, which is who she thought Ranjeet was when he first appeared in the office, when he first began unreeling his strophes as though they were written on scrolls. This is the moment, and Ranjeet can make what he wants out of it, and what he makes out of it will be an indicator of the state of play, and the water is thundering in the tub, and the water turns her on a little bit, actually, she has occasionally used it in the project of self-satisfaction, and she looks at herself in the mirror, which is beginning to steam up, and she determines that she is not fat, that she is genuinely attractive, if not perfectly beautiful, and any guy would be lucky to have her, and she determines that yes, she is going to go out and seduce him, because that’s the kind of place this is.

The door to the bathroom eases shut behind her, and the rush of the bathwater recedes. She finds that her Indian lover is sitting on the edge of the bed in nothing but his socks, and he is attempting to touch himself in impure ways, and this might be good, this might be part of the contagious sin of Las Vegas, except there’s a problem. If he were aroused, he might be touching himself with abandon and delighting in it, and she might think it was okay, even with the socks, because he was maybe planning on sneaking into the bathroom or something, leaning her over the sink, but here he is, trouble twice over, because he’s not sneaking into the bathroom, and he can’t seem to get himself aroused at all, and also he is crying; Ranjeet is trying to masturbate, and he’s wearing only black socks, which is the biggest fashion faux pas ever, and he’s saying something about praying to God and that the true Sikh shall make “an honest living by lawful work,” and he is saying that “all food and water are, in principle, clean, for these life-sustaining substances are provided by Him,” and he’s saying that love is the state of a “single soul in two bodies” and that the woman should “ever harbor for her husband a deferential solicitude and regard him as the lord and master of her love.” And after saying all these devotional things, he adds, “Please tell me what it is we are doing here.”

Jeanine kneels by the side of the bed, against his leg, looking up at him. And what happens is that he sees the scars, the scars that he, like everyone else, seems to forget about, because of the long sleeves, and he grabs her arm roughly and he looks at the scars. “You are a woman who has been injured. I have another woman at home who is injured, and that woman is devoted to me, for her I performed matrimonial circumambulations, and I have not honored the marriage that I said I was going to honor. Now what is to become of me?” But instead of pushing her away or telling her that she must dress, he begins to kiss the scars and he says, “I must kiss these scars, because if I kiss the scars then I will have paid back what I have plundered.” And he begins to kiss the scars, and she lets him kiss the scars for a while, and it’s okay, although sometimes when people kiss the scars it reminds her of the burn ward.

In the long run, nothing is going to happen just from the kissing of the scars. He has to kiss her somewhere besides the scars. She pushes Ranjeet back on the bed, and she removes the socks from his feet, and she now gazes upon what turn out to be his incredibly beautiful feet. Most guys have bits of sock fuzz nestled between the toes, and most guys don’t clip their toenails enough, or their toenails are mottled with fungus. But Ranjeet’s feet look as though he’s spent his life walking on pillows. How could he have worn socks over feet so beautiful?

“I’m going to. . let me. .”

Ranjeet says no, no, no, but he’s still lying on his back, covering his eyes, and she takes the little shriveled thing into her mouth, as if it’s string cheese, and she tries to make something happen, and the minutes pass, and she gives it all the determination she can give it, but maybe she’s just not so good at this kind of thing or maybe he’s thinking of his wife. She has heard that adultery is meant to be electrifying, but it turns out to be tawdry and dull, like life in a casino, and so she just kisses him once softly on the thigh and then gets up and retreats to the bathroom.

By now, the bubbles are halfway up the wall. It’s a big tub and it still hasn’t filled. All of this romantic failure is revenge for her foolishness. Her foolishness for coming out here, for driving eight hours across the desert, like all the other people who came across this desert, believing there was anything genuine here. The people who came to enrich Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano or their heirs. The people who came because a flamingo is good luck or who came because Frank Sinatra performed here and bullied a dealer who dealt from a shoe. She’s more foolish, because she knows better.

She leans back in the tub and steadies herself with one hand, and she walks her feet up the wall a little bit, trying not to eat any soap bubbles, until the tap is trickling down upon her, and she’s in some grotto of moisture and disillusionment, where she belongs, for all her foolishness, and if she comes, she’ll just feel worse about it, but that seems like what she deserves. When the door opens, she doesn’t turn to look, she just lets the tap do what the tap will do, and she lets her fingers knead her, and so there are two of them there, with their dashed hopes, in some casino out in the middle of nowhere, trying to come up with a story that they can sell to the television executives in Los Angeles, and the two of them can’t even get an arm around each other where it means anything, she thinks, feeling her legs trembling, but she shouldn’t think about it at all, she should concentrate on thinking about nothing, she should concentrate on the sound of water, if she thinks about him, she’ll just get distracted, so she just keeps at it, and she thinks that there’s nothing to look forward to at all and that the whole story is built on lies and misrepresentations, the miniseries, and the office in New York, and her friendships there. She hasn’t made a good decision in three months. She thought she was being prudent, and it turns out she wasn’t prudent even once. She was always getting ready to do what she is doing right now, which is to blow everything in such a spectacular way, and this is when she hears Ranjeet at the sink, saying her name, blessing her a thousand times and promising all kinds of crazy things, saying that she is the One Timeless Being, promising that he will give her a half dozen children and that he will jump into a fire for her, and what he’s saying sets off some kind of chain reaction in her head, and when that part is over, she flings herself backward into the bubble bath, so that her feet are periscopes and the rest of her is immersed.