28 Summers: The gripping, emotional page turner of summer 2020 by 'the Queen of the Summer Novel' (People) (20 page)

Is Jake jealous of Anders? Well… “Oh, okay,” Jake says. He
is
jealous, but he won’t succumb to this base emotion, he’s hardly innocent himself—and besides, to act jealous of Anders will only make Anders appear bigger and Jake smaller. “Enjoy. Get some sleep.”

“Why don’t you come here next weekend?” Ursula says. “I think you’d actually like it.”

When Jake lands in Vegas, it’s 111 degrees. He flew coach because he didn’t feel right using Ursula’s miles to upgrade to first class when he was contributing exactly zero to their household income. He arrives tired and foul-tempered and therefore finds nothing to appreciate in either the desert landscape or the skyline, which looks, from a distance, like some kid forgot to pick up his toys. Jake’s taxi cruises past the iconic
WELCOME TO LAS VEGAS
sign and within moments they are on the Strip. Jake’s taxi driver, Merlin, takes it upon himself to act as Jake’s personal tour guide. (Merlin can tell that this particular fellow will be difficult to impress. Merlin concedes that Vegas isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t stop him from flexing his powers of persuasion. He points out the Stratosphere with the roller coaster at the top; Circus Circus; the Mirage, where the white tigers live; Treasure Island, with a pirate show out front every hour on the hour; the Venetian, which has canals winding through it and singing gondoliers; Caesars Palace; Paris; New York–New York, with a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop inside; Excalibur; Luxor; and Mandalay Bay, which has a Four Seasons Hotel in one of its towers. Merlin pulls up to the Bellagio. “This is the jewel in the crown,” Merlin says, and he believes it. Sometimes he smokes a joint and watches the dancing fountain show out front three, four times in a row.

He hands the fellow a card. “Fifty percent off Cirque du Soleil,” Merlin says. “Call me.”

“Thanks,” the fellow says. His voice is flat but that doesn’t mean he won’t call, Merlin thinks. It can take time for Vegas to grow on you.)

At check-in, it’s discovered that Ursula has forgotten to put Jake’s name on the room, so the front-desk clerk, Kwasi, can’t give him a key.

“But I’m her husband,” Jake says.

“I understand your position,” Kwasi says. “And I hope you understand mine.” (Kwasi’s position is that maybe this guy is Ursula de Gournsey’s husband, maybe he’s not—but even if he
is
her husband, she might not want him in her room.) Kwasi slides a ten-dollar poker chip across the desk, which Jake accepts before he even realizes what it is.

He says, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

(Kwasi thinks,
If you have to ask
…
) He smiles. “I recommend the roulette wheel.”

Jake finds a pay phone and calls Ursula’s cell. He gets her voicemail and hangs up. The point of her cell phone, he thought, was so that people could reach her night and day. But likely she’s cloistered with her team in meetings—except that it’s six o’clock and Ursula told him that morning, which now feels like three days ago, that she would wrap up at four because Silver needed to catch a flight back to his family.

Jake decides to sit on the banquette by the main elevators and wait. He has a book with him—
Plainsong,
by Kent Haruf, which is spare, haunting, and precisely the opposite of what he should be reading when he’s already feeling abandoned. To pull it out and read amid the exuberant go-for-broke atmosphere of the lobby, with its lights and sound of raining coins, its smoky haze and smell of rye whiskey, would make him seem hopelessly square. He has a ten-dollar chip. He should use it.

He doesn’t know the first thing about gambling and he’s worried about making an ass of himself if he sits down to blackjack or tries to throw craps. The slots don’t interest him in the slightest. What did Kwasi say? The roulette wheel.

It’s as easy as placing the chip on a number, right? He watches the ball drop and wheel spin three times—twenty-three, four, thirty-five. What number should he pick? He thinks about Mallory’s birthday, March 11, but he’s never been with her on her birthday or, per their arrangement, even called her on it.

He chooses nine for their month, September; he sets his chip down on the red nine and thinks,
All or nothing.
It was free money, anyway.

And guess what.

Nine wins.

It wins.

Jake lets out a whoop as his one chip turns into a pile of chips. That was incredible, right? Ha! His very first try, he won!

“I won!” he says to the woman next to him. She’s older, smoking a cigarillo. Her lipstick has bled into the lines around her mouth. “And that was the first time I ever gambled!”

(The woman’s name is Glynnis. She wants to tell this kid that beginner’s luck isn’t just a Santa Claus myth. It’s more predictable than death.) “Do yourself a favor,” she says. “Cash out.”

But Jake doesn’t cash out. Instead, he takes half his chips and places them on five, for May, which is the month of Ursula’s birth, and twenty, which is the day.

The number that wins is, again, nine.

Jake blinks. Nine again? His money is swept away.

Glynnis exhales a stream of cigarillo smoke and says, “This town runs on fools like you.”

It has taken Jake less than five minutes to experience the highs and lows that Vegas has to offer. He returns to the pay phone, tries Ursula’s cell again—voicemail. He supposes the natural next step is to go to the bar and wait. The Bellagio is actually quite lovely. There’s a Dale Chihuly glass ceiling,
Fiori di Como,
that he could be very happy staring at as he sips a bourbon.

But his present state of mind is one of exasperation. He came all the way here to see his wife and not only is she not answering her phone but she neglected to add his name to the room. Her consideration for him is nonexistent. It has always
been
nonexistent. Why has he tolerated it for so long?

Well, no matter now. He’s leaving. He’ll catch the redeye home.

But he can’t find the exit. He can’t even find the front desk to ask where the exit is. He must have made a wrong turn and now he has been engulfed by the casino proper—rows and rows of slot machines, acres of blackjack and Texas Hold’em and craps and the now-dreaded roulette wheels. There are cocktail waitresses wearing black satin bustiers gliding around like they’re on skates. Three of them ask what he’s drinking. He says he’s looking for the nearest exit and they turn and glide away.

I give up,
Jake thinks. How about a bar, then, just a good old-fashioned bar? But in this part of the hotel, those seem to have disappeared as well.

Miraculously, he finds his way back to the main elevator bank and that’s it, he’s staying put. He pulls out his book, wondering exactly what Ursula thought he would like about this place.

“Jake?”

It’s his wife, standing before him, wearing a pale pink suit and nude patent-leather pumps. Her hair is down; it’s longer than he remembers, or maybe that’s because she blew it out today, and it’s parted on the side. She is so stunning that there can’t possibly be a man on this earth worthy of her, himself included.

“Hey,” he says. He stands to kiss her and tastes tequila on her lips. “Have you been…drinking?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Mark, Anders, and I went to Lily Bar after we finished today. It’s our Friday tradition.”

“So just now…you were at a
bar?
” Jake says. “Having a drink with Mark and Anders when you knew my flight landed an hour ago? I’ve been sitting here waiting for you, Ursula, because you forgot to put my name on the room. I tried calling.”

“Yes,” she says. “I saw that.”

“If you saw that, why didn’t you answer?”

“I was finishing up my workweek,” Ursula says. “And I figured I’d see you in the room. I made us reservations at the Eiffel Tower for tonight.”

“I couldn’t get into the room,” Jake says. “Because you forgot to add my name.”

“I heard you, Jake,” she says. “I’m sorry but I’ve been busy. It’s not a big deal, is it? You survived, right?”

Her tone is chiding. She knows she was negligent but she wants him to shake it off, just as he’s shaken off all her self-absorption the past nineteen years.

“Not a big deal at all,” he says. “But, Ursula?”

“What?”

“I’m leaving,” he says. He hoists his bag over his shoulder and heads in what he now knows is the opposite direction of the infernal casino. In a few seconds, he sees the unmistakable beacon of natural light beckoning him like the entrance to the afterlife. He steps out the front door into the baking sun.

Back at the Las Vegas airport, Jake hears his name being called. It’s a man’s voice, not Ursula’s. Ursula has undoubtedly gone up to the room, poured herself a glass of wine, and drawn herself a bath, where she will wait for Jake to return.

But this time, Jake isn’t running back. Ursula can stay in Vegas the rest of her life if she wants. He’s going home.

“Jake! Jake McCloud!”

There’s a man slicing through the crowds of people who are trying to make their redeyes. It’s Cody Mattis, an acquaintance from DC, and Jake feels uneasy because he listened to Cody’s voice message weeks ago when he was sick but never got back to him.

Jake gives Cody his best effort under the circumstances.
Hey, Cody, how you doing, what brings you to Sin City?
The answer is a bachelor party, the Spearmint Rhino, never seen women like that before in my life, blah-blah-blah. Jake blocks this last part out. He doesn’t want to think about women.

“Sorry I never returned your call, man,” Jake says. “I’ve been busy…”

“Oh yeah? Did you find a job?”

“No, not yet, still looking.”

Cody hands Jake a business card. “You know I’m working as a lobbyist for the NRA, right? When I mentioned to my boss that you left PharmX, he basically issued me a mandate to bring you in for a meeting.”

“He did?” Jake says, taking the card. NRA—the National Rifle Association. “This is Charlton Heston’s gig, right?”

“Protecting the good old Second Amendment,” Cody says. “We’d love to have you on board.”

Jake must be angry, because for the entire six-hour flight back to Washington—out of spite, he upgraded himself to first class—he turns over the possibility of lobbying for the NRA in his mind.

“Protecting the good old Second Amendment”:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The amendment was ratified in 1791, back when a person might have had any number of reasons to own a gun. Now, however, with the new millennium on the horizon, Jake believes there are too many guns, and a lot of them are in the wrong hands.

But then Jake plays devil’s advocate. He spent enough time in Michigan growing up to know that a lot of good people, his friends’ fathers, for example, hunt, and they shouldn’t have a hard time getting rifles or ammunition, should they? And what about keeping a gun around for self-defense? If Jake were the one traveling for work all the time and Ursula were home in the apartment by herself, wouldn’t he want her to have a gun, just in case?
Maybe,
he thinks, although if she had a gun, she might be tempted to use it in a situation that didn’t warrant it, and if she used it, someone would get hurt or maybe even die.

He’s not going to work for the NRA.

Still, it’s nice to be wanted and he does need a job and the pay is probably excellent, which would be good for his self-esteem. Something’s got to give.

On Monday, Jake calls Cody’s boss, a man named Dwayne Peters, and sets up a meeting for the next day. Even over the phone, Dwayne Peters is a good salesman—“The NRA gets a bad rap here in the East, we need a public relations overhaul, Jake, and that’s where you come in. We need these mommies and daddies and the intelligentsia who wouldn’t know a forty-five from a thirty-aught-six to understand that
we
are the ones keeping America safe. Don’t you want to help keep America safe, Jake?”

Jake nearly responds,
Yes, sir, I do—
that’s how persuasive Dwayne Peters is. The Second Amendment is as ironclad as the right to free speech or freedom of religion. The nation’s forefathers weren’t wrong. But they
were
wrong, Ursula would point out. Because back then, only white men had the right to vote.

So instead, Jake says, “I’ll see you tomorrow, sir. I look forward to learning more about the NRA.”

That night, Jake is sitting at the coffee table eating a bologna sandwich—even with the AC running, it’s too hot to cook anything—when Ursula walks in. She’s in her travel clothes—linen pants and crisp white shirt.

“Hey,” she says. She drops her suitcase and her briefcase and drapes her garment bag over the railing. She looks sad. Or maybe just defeated. The bubble over her head is…empty.

Jake doesn’t care. He returns to his sandwich, cracks open the beer that’s sweating in front of him. He’s sitting around in his boxers just like she predicted he would be. He resents Ursula showing up without warning; if he’d known she was coming home, he would have put on pants.

“I’m not going to apologize for leaving,” he says. “And I’m not going to apologize for making you leave Vegas, because that was your choice.”

“You didn’t make me leave,” she says. “The deal is done. We closed.”

“Oh,” Jake says. He knows he should feel happy about this but he wants to believe that Ursula left Las Vegas because she’s putting their marriage first. “Well, you’ll be pleased to know I have a job interview tomorrow. With the NRA.”

“The NRA?” Ursula says, and she makes a noise that sounds like a cough or a laugh. Her expression is incredulous. “You might want to cancel that. Haven’t you seen the news?”

That very afternoon, in the town of Mulligan, Ohio, a seventeen-year-old boy whose name was being withheld walked into his summer-school class with an AK-47 and killed twelve students, his teacher, and himself. It’s all over the news. The boy purchased the gun at a Walmart. No one asked him for ID. He paid in cash, walked out of the store with the gun and thirty rounds of ammo, and drove to his high school to show everyone just how much he hated summer school.