Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Meanwhile, Rita was answering Wevill’s question, explaining to him, as perhaps she had once explained to her daughter, that you first played a lot of machines, then narrowed your choice to the luckier ones that paid out, and played those, feeding quarters, two machines at a time.

“To tell you the truth, I came here after I saw Ramon in his coffin. I was moved.”

The women half glanced at each other, then checked their glances, reacting like jurors, maintaining poker-faced court etiquette. But he knew he had made his point.

“How do you spend the day?”

Rita was at first evasive. Then she said, “Big breakfast buffet, then do some shopping on the Strip, play the slots, bite of lunch at the casino, then play the slots again. Free beer if you keep playing. At night we take in a show, or maybe get a few drinks and ribs, or play the slots.”

Shtrip and djrinks set his teeth on edge and reminded him of where they were from, where Strip, drinks, slots, ribs, Vegas, and party were their code words for pleasure.

“We saw that guy that's on TV George Carlin. Funny comedian.”

“In a show?” Wevill asked.

“No. He was eating one ice cream,” Nina said. “On the Strip.”

“We went to Le Cirque with a group. Kind of a group from home.”

What he had anticipated as vicious turned out to be like camp for adults — organized, devoted to games and friends, with regular meals and even the circumscribed campsite of the Strip — the sort of vacation he had never taken himself, pure mindless fun, spending every penny you had, drinking yourself silly, gorging on rich food, then going home to your ordinary life after this harmless binge.

They knew their way around, they were familiar and unafraid — quite different from the two diligent women who sweated at his house every Saturday. And now, after the meal, they were a bit tipsy, too, a condition he had never seen them in.

Rita said, “I’m going to check out the slots.”

Was she more than tipsy — drunk, maybe? She simply got up, gave her daughter a kiss, and waved goodbye, murmuring.

Adding to Wevill’s bafflement was the fact that neither of them, so far, had used his name. With Rita gone, there was a silence, Nina gnawing at a fingernail until she became self-conscious.

“I broke it — on a machine. Stud poker. Gotta glue it,” she said, picking at the nail. “So how’s business?”

“Fine,” Wevill said, thinking, What business? Then he remembered his lie. He said, “To tell the truth, I’m kind of lonely.”

“You’ll be okay once you get back home,” Nina said, and reached for the dessert menu.

He winced, not at being patronized by a twenty-year-old but at the thought that he would not be okay back home; he would be miserable.

Summoning all his psychic strength, he leaped into the darkness, saying, “I could use a massage.”

Nina laughed and said promptly, “You sure came to the right place. Vegas has billions of ladies for that.” She smiled fondly at the dessert menu, as though she had just recognized an old friend. “I am such a chocoholic.”

Wevill persisted, saying, “You wouldn’t be interested?”

With the dessert menu in her hand she was confused by the question at first. She squinted as his proposition sank in, but she didn’t look up. Her finger rested on Oreo cookie crust, and she said, “You serious?”

Her tone told him she took the question to be preposterous, and he was embarrassed, not so much because he had exposed his yearning to her but because she was so strong. The mother, too; they were powerful here. He had suspected it from the beginning. They even had money — they didn’t need him. Nina was young, he had been rash, but if he hadn’t asked the question, he would have cursed himself for his hesitation.

“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t regret it: he had needed to know.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Nina said.

But her saying that infuriated him — his housecleaner patronizing him again. He called for the check.

“I’d like to see your slot machines,” he said after he signed the credit card slip.

“Be my guest.”

Her casual way of saying that, with such confidence, aroused him, and all he regretted was that she was uninterested in him. Walking out of the restaurant behind the young woman, being stared at, he thought, This is my housecleaner and she has just turned me down.

The casino in the California Hotel was just off the Strip — bright lights on the marquee advertising the music and magic shows, a red carpet at the entrance, and mirrors on the walls framed by glitter and more lights. But for all the sparkle, the place was filled with shabby older people, heavy smokers, shufflers in windbreakers and baseball caps, old men in big white sneakers, a drabness that depressed him.

“There’s Ma.”

Rita was feeding dollar tokens into two machines, side by side, not paying much attention but being conscientious, even laborious, as though priming a pump, which in a sense was exactly what she was doing. While Wevill watched, Rita lost thirty-two dollars.

Nina smiled at him and, as though late for duty, went to the cashier and got a bucket, took her place on a stool, and began to press coins into the slots. She made it seem strangely like work, just as joyless. Even when they won, got a payout in a clatter of coins, they didn’t count them but instead scooped them out of the metal dish and, without looking, dumped them into the buckets of tokens they were feeding into the machines.

Wevill was fascinated for ten or fifteen minutes, and then utterly bored to the point of annoyance and wanted to leave. Between them in that time the women had lost a couple of hundred dollars, not a lot to him, but to them a day’s pay. Pure folly.

Rita saw him looking agitated. She said, “Try your luck. Them ones and them ones are pretty good payers.”

Each of these flashing goggling money-gobblers held for her a distinct personality.

Wevill said, “I think I’ll have an early night.”

“In Vegas?” There was contempt in her incredulity.

Wevill said, “Unless you want to do something later? Catch a show?”

“Nina and I are seeing someone.”

Another rejection. Their indifference back in Hawaii had been bad enough, but this rebuff was terrible. They were still like Watteau nymphs, just as selfish, hovering, teasing, forever slipping out of his grasp, so self-contained, so independent, but tidy and strangely efficient. They did not see his interest, or if they did, they took no interest themselves in him, in his feelings, in anything he owned. They laughed and agreed with anything he said, which was their way of not listening, not agreeing, hardly caring.

Standing there in the casino among the slots, he saw them turned away from him, dressed up, even stylish, and he desired them and wanted to possess them. As a wealthy man, a successful lawyer, he was not used to being rebuffed and, unused to it, had trouble dealing with it. Crushed and wounded, his desire was raw and on his mind. He had not imagined rejection to be so painful.

So, what could have been something trivial, a lack of interest, a pair of unresponsive women, was a goad, and they obsessed him.

He was used to being needed. They didn’t need him. That made him want to possess them, either one, or both.

Wevill could never have admitted that he envied them, yet he did envy them in the worst and most shameful way. He was hungry and helpless, and they defeated him with half-smiles and evasions — as he had done so often with envious visitors in his house. That was what shamed him. That he recognized the feeling, the experience of envy and defeat, seeing someone more powerful than he was.