The Opposite of Love (6 page)

If a gambler could sit on a barstool, drink, order a steak, smoke a cigarette, and play video poker, well he wasn’t likely to move except to take a piss, now was he? But if he had to leave point A to go to point B to get something to eat, well that was inconvenient. Might as well just go to the casino where you can eat and drink and gamble and smoke and take a leak all under the same roof, if not at the same time. So now, on top of the closed kitchens, the neighborhood bars were less busy than before and many of the bartenders lost their jobs too.

And the casinos were happy.

By some miracle, the law was adjusted several years later to allow smoking in freestanding bars but leave the ban in place on smoking in restaurants, but the damage was done. Lots of taverns and pubs had closed, those jobs lost forever. Many of the former customers of the remaining taverns had gotten in the habit of going to the casinos, so those bars still suffered the effects, even now, six years later.

But the casinos were happy.

“What’s got you scowling over there?” Melanie asked.

James shook his head and laughed. “Just work stuff,” he lied. “I forget to turn it off sometimes.” He set his glass down on the coffee table and leaned in, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands beneath his chin. “So tell me,” he said, “what brought you out here from… where did you say you came from again?”

Melanie told him that her parents and her older sister Sarah had moved to Las Vegas in 1975, just before Melanie was born. They had come from a suburb of Chicago and her parents wanted to get away from the cold winters. As a real estate agent, her mother had seen the ground-floor potential of Las Vegas as a blossoming residential market rather than just a vacation destination. Her father was a college professor and UNLV’s enrollment was booming as the valley’s population grew.

James was skeptical about the kind of people who would uproot themselves to raise children in this city, of all places. Even in the late seventies, Vegas certainly wasn’t on the list of safest cities, best schools or nicest parks. In fact, it was kind of an armpit. The smells of defeat and despair were as pungent as piss, and the burgeoning homeless population just added to the paradoxical atmosphere of decay in a city that was only just being built.

“So you were here in the eighties,” he said.

“Yeah.” She shook her head as though dislodging a bad memory. “The eighties were a bit weird for everyone I think. All that bad fashion and big hair.”

James nodded and smiled, but he cringed inwardly at her focus on the fads of the time rather than the city itself. Las Vegas was a living, breathing, growing organism, and, much like an absent parent, he’d missed the city’s adolescence entirely. Although through no fault of his own.

But Melanie had been here through the eighties and James felt a pang of jealousy over that. Vegas locals were harder and harder to come by, to the point that transplants started referring to themselves as locals after only a decade or two of monsoons and dust devils and floods, of slicing cold wind every winter and half a foot of snow on the ground every fourth one.
Damn right it gets that cold here,
they’d say, as though they hadn’t been as surprised as anyone the first time they had to brush snow off a windshield. Melanie was a true local, born and raised, which gave her more clout in his mind, in what way, he didn’t know.

James himself had missed eleven whole years in Vegas when he was living with his grandmother. And when he came back as a man, he’d expected it to seem smaller to him. In some ways, it did. The motel where his mother had rented a room by the week looked like a scale model, so dilapidated he was surprised to find it still open. The first time he saw it after moving back, he pulled his car into the parking lot to sit and look at it for a while, and he was tempted to run around the building to see if he could beat his old time.

But the rest of Vegas had grown. Sure, he’d heard about it, he’d seen the casino openings on the news. They got mail in Orange County all the time from the marketing machine in Las Vegas promising free buffets, shows and bargain-price rooms if grandma would just come park her butt at a slot machine and play for a little while. Of course his grandmother had no penchant for gambling or showgirls, so they never went. And when James came back at twenty-two, it was a different world.

For the first year and a half after he came back to what he considered his home, James struggled to adapt. He’d moved into a small apartment near where he used to live as a kid. Even though it wasn’t the best side of town, it was the part of town he knew, and it was surprisingly unchanged in eleven years. A few break-ins while he was at work were all it took to cure his nostalgia. He moved to a one bedroom at one of the brand new upscale apartment complexes with washers and dryers in the units, dishwashers, garbage disposals, multiple tropical pools and spas on the manicured grounds, a gym, and a guard at the gate at all hours. The apartment buildings in his complex were fourplexes painted different shades of neutral colors and strewn about at odd angles to each other, creating a neighborhood atmosphere rather than barracks.

This was an unfamiliar Las Vegas, but it agreed with him. He could go out to the pool on a weekend and chat with neighbors, pet a dog, throw a ball with a kid, feel like a normal human being. But there was the feeling, too, that he was faking it, that this wasn’t the real him; inside he was really the twelve-year-old kid with a druggie mother who sent him away. But he got used to the fraudulence, embraced it to some degree, and allowed himself to just show the world the person he wanted to be.

“So you came from Chicago, huh?” said James. “I have an uncle who lived there for a while.” He wouldn’t have shared any familial truths under the usual first-date circumstances, or at all for that matter, but there was a celebrity factor that he found irresistible.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, maybe you’ve heard of him. Danny Rains?”

“You’re joking, right? Dan Rains the linebacker? 1985 Bears?”

“Yep, that’s him. Only played four years in the pros. But he was there when it counted.”

“Wow. That’s so cool,” Melanie sat back against the sofa and shook her head. “I’ve been a huge Bears fan since I was eight and my dad taught me about football. Does that mean you’re a Bears fan too?”

“Totally,” he lied. “Ever since uncle Danny made the team.”

The truth was he’d been a fan of the Raiders ever since moving to Southern California. Having never had a football team nearby, he suddenly had two to choose from. He chose the Raiders over the Rams; the Rams were boring. The Raiders were dirty but they got the job done. He could relate to that. His grandmother allowed him to go to games with a friend from school and his father, and the season after he became a fan, the Raiders won the Super Bowl. It was the kind of consolation prize that truly made a difference. If he hadn’t been shipped off to his grandmother, he never would have been a Raiders fan, and he never would have known what watching his team win the Super Bowl felt like. As it was, all these years later, he was beginning to think it might never happen again.

“What part of town did you live in?” he asked.

“The southeast side. Over by Sunset and Eastern.”

“That was pretty close to the edge of town at the time, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was a new neighborhood. Green Valley area. Not much around at the time, but that didn’t last long. Within ten years the whole community was developed.”

They traded stories about Las Vegas, and James imagined the city was a friend they had in common—the guy who could be the cheerful, tipsy pal draping his arm over your shoulders and slurring into your ear how much he loved you. Or the kind of guy who could just as easily get himself into a meaningless fistfight with the bouncer, but whom you were fond of just the same.

At the end of the date, James walked her to her SUV. He asked her if he could see her again without being specific as to where and when, and she agreed. When he leaned in, she allowed him a peck on the lips. This was a good sign. She wasn't going to be one of those women who had all kinds of rules about what they would allow and when. She wasn't going to make him wait until the third date to kiss her or three months to get in her pants. Melanie was likely the kind of woman who did what she wanted when she wanted, and her kind were easier to get into bed. You just had to make them want it.

Melanie thought a lot
about what her mother had said, what Derek had said.

There was a book she’d read in her twenties called
Any Woman’s Blues
. It was a lesser known book by Erica Jong, not as revered as
Fear of Flying
and written almost two decades later. A college roommate gave it to her saying the relationship in the novel was just like her own relationship with her boyfriend. The book’s main theme was obsession, which was interesting only in that it was foreign and complicated and dark, like, say, Afghanistan, and similarly not a place she’d care to visit. But there was something that resonated with her in the novel that was surfacing again now: the concept of control.

In the book, the heroine is struggling between the desire for control and the desire for love, as if the two are mutually exclusive, at opposite ends of one spectrum. As if to have one, you must give up the other. And so to have control over one’s self, one’s feelings and desires, is to reject love, to close it off and preclude a place for it. This was problematic for the heroine, and if true, would prove equally so for Melanie. To her, control was a skill to be respected, to be cultivated until it was as strong and protective as a shield. Self-control was a virtue. To give this up for love seemed like complete recklessness, especially when one considered that the result, as in the novel, might be nothing more than obsession. That just seemed counterintuitive to her.

But there was clearly a payoff, which was the only reason people took the risk. And perhaps she was underestimating its importance, its magnitude.

Originally, she’d taken James up on his offer of a date feeling confident that it would not work out in any long-term way. He was a cop after all, a career notorious for its danger, not to mention one that was blue-collar. And even if the class of his occupation mattered only to Melanie, she felt confident that her mother would not approve of the danger. He was older than her by five years, but she couldn’t be sure what kind of spin her mother would put on that. He did own his home, but Melanie suspected he’d bought it during the bubble, and might be upside-down.

In the weeks since they'd met, and in spite of her mental tally of his shortcomings, there hadn’t been any actual deal-breakers. She discovered she liked James, quite a lot in fact. He was brutally handsome with his Italian skin and light eyes, his close-shaved hair that felt like velvet under her fingers. He could shave his face or go without, as his stubble grew in evenly and framed his face as though he trimmed it that way. He was charming, made her laugh, and a Bears fan? Her father would definitely approve. James had started to take on that shininess that men did when she found herself taking them seriously as a potential mate. But most importantly, there was chemistry. She was aware of her insides when she was with him, of a pulsing electricity she hadn’t felt in years and didn’t know she still could.

It was three weeks into their relationship—their seventh date—when she took James to bed. He’d started getting physical with her on their third date, stealing touches of her breasts and squeezing her behind when they made out on the sofa, but then he stopped trying around the fifth. It wasn’t that she worried he’d give up and go away—she was prepared for that. And if he wasn’t the kind of guy who was willing to wait a little while, he’d save her a lot of time and energy if he bailed out early. When she decided it was time, it wasn’t that she was desperate for sex; Derek had her needs covered. She simply wanted James. Bad.

The way he touched her as they walked from the car to the house, one hand barely grazing her lower back… it made her tingle. When he kissed her goodnight, his lips betrayed his desire, his breath was hot on her neck, and he trailed small kisses from her ear to her chin. Honestly, it was all she could do not to pull her blouse off and say, “Keep going.” Every time she felt his erection through his jeans, she craved his hardness in her hands, her mouth, and yes, deep inside her. But sex was not something she would decide to have in the moment, when hormones raged or alcohol lowered one’s inhibitions. She'd been less impulsive since Derek had come along. Whether that was because she was getting older or because she was having sex regularly, she couldn't say.

One Saturday in May, she and James left her house to go to a show, and she’d already decided. Later that night when she stopped the make-out session on the sofa to ask whether he’d like to go upstairs to her bedroom, he smiled, nodded, and led her upstairs without a word, as if he might screw up ‘yes.’

The first time hadn’t been exceptional, but then it rarely was. The tempo was too fast and the way he buried his head in her hair and pressed his entire weight on her made her feel claustrophobic. He spent the night without discussion and in the morning she lay with her back to him as he ran a hand lightly over her side, making her aware of her own curves. His touch on her naked waistline and his lips on her shoulder made her squirm. He traced his fingers over her rear end, then over her hip and to her hip bone, where he teased the ridge with a feather-soft touch and she sighed. “I love your hips,” he said, and he gripped her hip bone like a handle, digging his fingers up to the knuckle under the ridge, pulling her behind to his groin with a quick burst of force. The remains of sleep left her and she gasped, froze for a moment, waited for his next move. He released her hip and moved his hand between her legs, and his erection against her backside stoked her desire.