Hard Rain Falling (32 page)

She gave him an odd look. “What are you talking about?”

“Look, if you put a hundred dollars into this machine, it pays you back ninety. If you bet the same hundred, a dollar at a time, on the pass line at craps, you get back ninety-eight fifty. If the odds are working. Either way, you lose money. You can’t,” he said dogmatically, “change losing odds into winning odds. No matter what you do.”

“Oh, nonsense. They must mean that the machines pay off ninety percent
of the time;
that’s entirely different.”

“Horse-frocky.”

“You’re infuriating.” But in a few minutes she moved over to a craps table and religiously bet the pass line, a dollar at a time. Over a period of seven hours, she lost more than three hundred dollars and went to bed with a splitting headache. She blamed Jack for the whole thing.

“I
always
win at the slots,” she said.

She had never been more feminine, and Jack loved her for it. But by the time they woke up again she was the old Sally. “You’re right, she told him. “I was wrong. But hell, we’re here; let’s play the dime slots, just for fun.” They did and it was fun, and they actually won a few dollars.

They were a little drunk most of the time, and it cut into their lovemaking just enough to keep them from overdoing it; yet, when they did come together it was good, and afterward, Jack would lie beside her and never want to leave her. Not ever. He wanted her beside him. He was afraid to tell her about it, actually, afraid she would laugh at him, and he would lose her.

On their second night there had been a floor show that Jack wanted to see and Sally didn’t. She was still in love with the slots, and Jack went ahead in and watched the show, very conscious of himself, very conscious that these were the big-name entertainers, the most famous people in the world, and he might later on be standing right next to one of them out in the casino or in the men’s room or someplace. The fact is, it was thrilling. Later he told Sally how he felt about it, and she scoffed at him and said, “They’re assholes, every last one of them. Believe me. But you go ahead and worship them if you want. That’s what they live on.”

“I don’t
worship
them,” Jack said furiously.

“Of course not.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“Why not? Does it offend your manhood?”

“Balls!” He went to the bar. When he came back to the machines, she was gone. He looked around for her, but she wasn’t anywhere. He went up to the room, and she wasn’t there, either, and he began to get a little nervous. It always made him go a little off-balance when she wasn’t around, and that was irritating. Even so, he undressed and went to bed with a bottle of I. W. Harper and a paperback mystery. Finally he was groggy enough, and he threw the book across the room and turned out the light. But sleep would not come. He lay in the dark waiting for her. He knew she knew other people at the hotel; she was always seeing someone and waving, or being talked to by groups of handsome young men and women whom she airily dismissed as “the television crowd” and never once introduced to Jack. She was probably at a party somewhere. He waited three hours or more, and when she came in, turning on the light as if she did not expect him to be there, or asleep, he said, “Where the hell have you been?”

She turned to him. “Ask me that again and see the last of me.” Her face was hard. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Jack nodded, hating the feeling of relief. “Okay. You’re right. Okay. Come to bed. I want you.”

She undressed slowly, in the middle of the room, dropping her clothing at her feet. “This is where we agree,” she said. “Without this between them, what man and woman can talk to each other?” She laughed, naked, her arms over her head in a deliberately corny pose. “You like me?” she teased.

“Bring that thing over where I can get my hands on it.”

“Come and get it.”

They made love on the floor, in the middle of the small room, and then, after the period of calm timelessness passed, she said, “We shouldn’t let this go. We ought to get married. What do you think?”

“I love you,” he said. “I was afraid you’d laugh at me if I told you. But I love you. I want to marry you.”

“I love you,” she said. “We have to get married. This is too good. I’ll never laugh at you.”

She crawled over on top of him and they kissed deeply, Jack conscious of the need to make this kiss sincere, and after a few moments she sat up and slid down on him easily, her arms out, her body moving slowly, her black hair down over her shoulders, her eyes on his; it began tenderly but moved quickly into the erotic, and Jack felt demonic, as if he had endless power.

“I’ll blow you through the roof,” he said between his teeth.

“Blow me through the roof,” she answered. Slowly she increased her tempo until they were both bucking and writhing like animals, and when it finally happened he clutched her to him so hard he almost cracked her ribs. “
Oof!
” she said.

Now she was gone again. He wandered through the casino, the coffee shop, out by the swimming pool. Everywhere he went it was noisy with people, a continual din that he associated with the lower but similarly constant noise of San Quentin. But these people were not in prison, not even in a metaphorical prison. Jack had known convicts who said that everybody was in prison, that life was a prison, or society a prison, even being stuck with your own identity was a prison; but Jack no longer believed that: prison was prison, nothing else. People might be in
trouble
, or feel stifled or restricted, or even trapped, but they weren’t in prison. It just wasn’t the same thing at all. The hotel might be a “glittering trap” for the bored and lonely, but that was a hell of a lot different from being sent to prison.

Just to prove it, Jack left the buildings and walked out into the desert. The transition was dramatic; the desert afternoon was blistering hot, and the purple mountains in the distance wavered in the heat, almost invisible through the thermal density. There were sounds, but not human voices. He could hear cars on the highway behind him, and he walked across the hot baked desert ground rapidly, away from the sounds of the cars and toward the mountains. It was a lot like the eastern Oregon country, but much lower in elevation, and somehow dirtier. Nature here was not more beautiful than the works of man, because nature had forgotten to air-condition the place or clean it up, and only the distant view was attractive. After a few minutes, Jack no longer believed in air conditioning—it did not seem possible that any place could be cool when it was so hot.

Even so, he was glad to be alone, and he felt satisfied that he was paying for his aloneness by absorbing the terrible heat. He turned, and he could see cars wavering along the highway like mirages, and he could see the high-voltage electrical towers crossing the sands, wriggling in the heat. He would have to walk miles to get away from it entirely, to be in a place where he wouldn’t see the buildings, the cars, the power derricks; and even then he would probably come across tourists on horseback, enduring the heat so they could say they didn’t spend all their time in the casinos and had the bad, black, blistering sunburns to prove it. Jack turned back, feeling immediate buoyancy from the air conditioning as he stepped inside. But he had enjoyed being alone; he had even forgotten, for a few minutes, to worry about Sally. He began looking for her again, now that he was used to being cool.

His loneliness was complemented now, he was no longer really alone, he could no longer stand to be alone, which is to say, without
her
. He needed
her
. It made him think of Billy Lancing, and how much he had needed Billy, and how much Billy had needed him. If it had not been for Billy, Jack would not have been able to understand how he really felt, or understood that he was alone without
her
. He could say to himself now, coldly, that Billy had died for the love of him; he could take pride in it. He had been loved
that much!
He did not worry himself with the thought that he never would have died for Billy; he had not loved Billy as much as Billy had loved him, and he knew it, admitted it, and was not ashamed of it. But now he loved Sally that much, and Billy had showed him what it meant.

He looked around the casino. No, not one in sight. No Negroes at The Sands. Only fat white businessmen faking the nigger talk over their cold dice, acting out something they had seen in a movie, or read about in a cheap magazine, but had never seen or felt. Twenty-five-grand-a-year incomes, and blowing a little of the surplus in order to feel like a sport. And gosh, you know who was standing at the table, right next to me?
Frank Sinatra!
And you should have seen the bets he was fading! Made my three hundred look like nothing. I says to him, “Frank, what do you think about...“...Yeah, like shit you did. You lost your three hundred, or shall we say, hundred and a half, dying over every silver dollar just a little more, sweat running down from your armpits to the place where your belly is cinched in too tight by your belt; your crotch so hot from nervous fear you think you have the crabs; calling out, “Tennessee Toddy, all ass and no body!” to a pair of dice so wet they almost slip out of your fingers; and then go back to your room black with despair because you lost instead of won and last night you put your hand on your boss’s wife’s knee or fucked your secretary, and now wondered if it had been such a hot idea after all, the way she thrashed around and said she loved you and your wife home thinking it was stag only. Or maybe you got yourself a call girl and now wondered when your pecker would start to drip greenish pus the way it had in Germany when you were in the Army. Or maybe you won a lot of money, really a lot, and your wife was with you and you were coming on hip with sunglasses and talk about the odds and what games Scarne recommends, and drinking milk at the tables like a pro, wondering deep inside how you could keep your wife from spending this dough (it was dough or bread, but not money) you had just won and wanted desperately to take out of your pocket and kiss greedily and scream out that you had
won
, and never wanted to spend because you had nightmares about money...

Or maybe you were just having a good time. Shit.

Jack felt contempt for his patronizing attitude. He had lost his temper at the casino. That was stupid. So there were no Negroes at the hotel. So what? What do I care? It’s not my problem. Why blame it on the customers? They were just assholes, like everybody else.

When Sally finally showed up after having been gone two days and nights, Jack did not ask her where she had been. He shaved, showered, and took her downtown and married her. Just as quickly as he could. She was very quiet, almost wifely, and suggested they fly back to San Francisco right away. On the plane she told Jack she was now just about broke. Her money had been alimony, and now she wouldn’t be getting any. For the last two days and nights she had been in Los Angeles, talking to her lawyer and her ex-husband’s lawyer, trying to get a settlement. But they couldn’t do it, and so she was broke. She looked surprised when Jack laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“I have a job waiting for me. It looks like I’m going to need it.” To himself, however, he admitted that he was bitterly disappointed. He wanted to ask her why didn’t they just
live
together, and keep the alimony coming in. But he knew the answer: Sally wanted to be
married
. All right, they were married. Jack knew it had all been a false dream, the idea of being rich, and he was not really bothered. Still, she should have asked him, or at least told him.

She snuggled up next to him. “My husband and protector,” she said. “My breadwinner.”

“My balls,” Jack said. They laughed.

Sally’s first husband was an actor; they had met while she was a twenty-year-old junior at Mills College—a scholarship student among the sloppily dressed, shaggy-haired rich girls —and he had come out to take a part in one of the school plays. There was something about him that cut deeply into her, a drawn look of constant hunger—for food, for acceptance, for love, for fame, she did not know what. But one thing she was certain of, after she had seen him act: if there was any justice in the universe, this young man was going to become rich and famous. He had talent, the kind that makes you love its possessor, yet at this point it was visible only to Sally. Most of the girls thought he was cute, but funny-looking. They did not know he had talent as an actor, because they did not know what talent was. They only knew that he slopped around at rehearsals, was shy, did not smoke, and secretly picked at his nose. They laughed at him for forgetting his lines and for the way he would frown and place his thumb and index finger on his nose when he was trying to remember something. Most of the girls belonged to the smooth-flowing-grace school of amateur acting, and thought that he moved jerkily. Everyone but Sally thought he was the weak point of the production. They were all afraid that when the play was on he would stop in the middle of the action, hold his nose, and snap his fingers for someone to throw him his line.

But of course he did not. After she had finished her work backstage, Sally went out and around to the back of the hall to watch the performance, and
he
was the only one onstage. The subtleties, the graces of the other performers were washed out by the lights and the presence of the audience, and only
he
seemed natural, real, and yet even more distinct than reality; when he said a line you could hear it sharply, even if it was supposed to be a mumble, and when he began a movement you could predict its course, sense it with him, actually participate in the action. And of course he was the only one whose makeup was not grotesque. Sally could tell at the end, when the cast lined up for their curtain call, that she had been almost the only one in the house to recognize his beauty, and it made her bitterly angry; she rushed out of the building with tears in her eyes and ended up wandering alone through the eucalyptus groves, full of hate for the people who could not, would not, recognize his talent, and full of love for him and for herself.