The Tell (19 page)

You slip the key into your own pocket next to the earring that pokes into your thigh like a nettle. You hold your wife's clothes to your nose hoping to detect a combination of her almond soap and her own sweet smell, but the denim stinks of smoke at the knees. Why the knees? Has she been kneeling in an ashtray, scrounging for filthy quarters? You drop the pants back on the floor and stop talking to yourself; you don't want to wake up again in the middle of the night, a boulder on your chest trying to tamp down your panic. You look next door at the house that's predictably dark; her crime still has an accomplice in Wilton.

Owen burrowed through a bag of Mira's hanging on the closet door, and found a fireball candy, ticket stubs from a movie they'd seen months before, decomposing tissues, a scallop shell, a tampon, a lipstick. Mira was all around him in particles and breath and details, everywhere in this house but still elusive. He was a thief now, stealing trust. He went to the bedroom at the rear of the house that had been Mira's as a child. It looked out onto the backyard. At first, he couldn't figure out why she'd lived back there for so many years in one of the smallest, coldest rooms, with a pipe standing duncelike in the corner, when there were other rooms that were brighter and bigger. But he understood now that it was farthest from where her parents slept and argued and made each other unhappy. Being back here without the ubiquitous wallpaper must have felt like entering another country, one without an overblown, assaulting aesthetic. What if he told Mira he'd move back here himself unless she stopped going to the casino? What if he left their bed? Would it even make a difference?

The walls were scarred where tape had pulled off the paint. She'd hung up terrible posters as a kid, vivid photographs of nature with inspirational commands on them—
Soar high! Explore! Celebrate!
—simply because they drove her father crazy. He didn't understand her sense of humor. He offered to move real art into her room, give her something worthwhile to look at instead of that garbage. She was smarter than that, he'd said. Owen pictured Mira lying on the bed reading in the same way she did now, a book resting against her bent knees, her glasses slipping down her nose. At sixteen, she'd had sex here for the first time.

The bed sagged when he sat on it, but the springs met resistance from something underneath, and he pulled out a box the size of a phone book covered in cream-colored fake leather with a small bent gold clasp. The inside of the lid was furred in balding red velvet that surrounded a blemished square of mirror. There were chunky clay beads in the compartments, thick plastic bangles, smooth black stones, and notes on lined paper folded into tight quarters, which he unfolded:
I like you. She wasn't invited. I am so bored
. He'd stumbled upon—no, he hadn't stumbled anywhere, he'd gone looking—the few things in this house that were truly Mira's. Stuff that had no value to anyone but her. In this house, Mira had seen how swiftly life passed. She'd seen generations die under this roof and then lived among their immortal things, their coats still on hangers in the downstairs closet, their hand towels still waiting. He pictured her at the slots at that moment, time completely forgotten, stopped. “When I'm there,” she'd told him last week, “everything is right then. There's no earlier or later.” He imagined her mesmerized by stimulation, stuporous even in the rush of it. He'd read that some women had orgasms when they played the slots. He pictured Mira with the tip of her tongue on her upper lip, her feet balanced on her toes, her mind numb with rapture in front of a machine. It was like watching her kiss her lover, watching her lover put his hand up under her shirt, put his mouth on her breasts, spread her legs. It was a sickening, dead-end feeling.

When he put the box back he saw another one, similar in shape but covered in real brown leather. It had a heftier clasp that had also been pried open and bent. The key he'd found was not to this lock. No girlish, papery stuff here, but gold bracelets, pearls, platinum pins. Ridiculous pirate booty. He'd never seen anything like it. It was dazzling. The chilled pearls slithered across his palm. He touched his tongue to an emerald's facet, bounced the heft of a ring. It was all boastful stuff, a means to display your wealth, that Mira had pushed under the bed like old shoes along with the dust balls and the missing socks. It must have belonged to a line of Thrashers, and then, in an instant, it had belonged to Mira. He would have closed the box, slipped it back and left the room with only an unsettled sense of being a stranger in this house, if he hadn't spotted the sunburst earring's match. She'd been here recently, digging around in this treasure chest. She'd brought it into the bedroom. Was she seeing what she could pawn or sell to fund her time on the slots? How else was she doing it? Their joint account was intact. Wilton had said he didn't give her money, but he had also agreed that morning in the carriage house two weeks before that he wouldn't go with her to the casino anymore, and how had that worked out? Wilton needed his fix of recognition and fawning as much as Mira needed to play.

His squid pen was gone. He'd blamed his own chaos for it, but now he wondered if Mira had taken it when he didn't think she'd even known it existed. But of course she'd known; she knew every single thing in the house. He put the earring back in his pocket, leaving its forlorn twin alone in the box, which he slipped under the bed. Mira's car crunched down the driveway and he watched the headlights sweep over the backyard, then shut off. Her keys jangled hesitantly at the back door. She must have noticed the light on in this back room and sensed he was right above her. They waited for the other to move first. He held his breath, felt her heart beating in his, and detected her presence more powerfully than he had in months. It was all calculation between them. How to move, what to say, what not to say. Who would take the first step.

Her key slipped into the lock. He knew exactly what she was doing: dumping her bag on the floor, pulling her arms out of her coat, leaving the sleeves inside out, prying off one shoe at a time with her other foot, pretending this was their old routine. Dinner, an evening together alone. No Wilton. She called for him, but he didn't answer. She banged through a couple of cabinets. When she called again, he came down the back stairs and met her in the kitchen. They kissed breezily. She didn't ask him why he was using the back stairs, or why he'd been in the back room. She had the urge for a baked potato and chattered about her day at Brindle while he sat at the table, dumb and droopy. Did he want a potato, too? He shook his head; he'd lost his appetite. She fluttered around the room, clumsy with distraction.

Later that night, she made him a startling naked offer, stepping out from the shower and only half drying herself, her body beaded with water. She stood over him where he'd been watching her from a chair, unable to be anywhere but where she was but still unable to say anything. She dripped onto his knees, kissed his neck, let her wet breasts rub his chest. He thought of his tongue against the emerald and how cool the gem had been. Her skin would be too hot for him, too revealing. He was cold; he didn't want her. He didn't move as she snaked off his pants. She smelled like chamomile. He wanted to push her off, but his erection betrayed him, and she took his prick into her mouth. He was powerless with her, always had been, and came in a rush of sorrow.

He wanted to crouch down with the memory as the firemen clomped out of Spruance. Teachers corralled the students back inside. Owen touched the single earring in his pocket, frigid against his fingers. He considered putting it into Kevin's shallow hole, filling the hole with a clod of tired dirt and a few stubborn strands of grass, and tamping it down with his foot. But in the end, he couldn't.

On Friday night, Owen woke to find Mira standing at the foot of the bed, the bloom of moonlight behind her. He wasn't sure if she was in some kind of an insomniac daze at midnight, but when he inched up on the pillow, her eyes followed him. She took a blanket from the back of a chair and put it around her shoulders. Outside, it was only black and white.

“I can't sleep,” she said. “I was just watching you. To see how it's done. Hoping to maybe get some pointers.” She gave him a rueful smile.

“Come back to bed. You're shivering.”

“Wilton told me what you said to him about not going to the casino with me anymore. I was so angry at first, O, and insulted, I didn't even want to see you. I'm not a child.” She sat on the edge of the bed and swept his hair from his forehead. “I was thinking about how terrible it is—for both of us—that you don't trust me. I don't want to make you unhappy.”

“Then stop. It's so simple.”

“Take me.”

“Take you?” He laughed at her dirty talk.

No, she said, smirking, she meant he should take her to the casino. “You're awake now. And I'm clearly and permanently awake. You've said no every time I've asked you to come, but you have no choice tonight. I'm going to show you everything so you'll stop worrying. Let's call it a date.”

Strangely hopped up, she whipped the covers off him. He was reluctant to go for every reason, but he'd been resistant for too long. How could he explain why he hated the place when he'd never even been? They dressed and left the house, whispering in the driveway as if the hour were illicit. The heat was slow coming on in the balky car, and Mira covered up the bottom half of her face with her scarf. Her eyes had that flash of intensity and purpose, but it was her mouth Owen needed to read her by. He pulled down her scarf, and she pressed her fingers to her bottom lip. She would be someone else tonight. After an hour, Eagle Run rose up from nowhere—enormous, metallic, and startling in its ugliness. Mira directed him to drive to the top level of the parking garage where she and Wilton always parked. In the wind, two empty plastic bags chased each other across the frigid expanse of concrete. The glare from the buildings was a wall. Beyond it was a stand of rangy, compelling pine trees. In the other direction there was a faint, sulfuric illumination, like a landing strip.

In the elevator, a female voice asked them if they'd remembered to lock their car.

“It's the voice of God,” Owen said. “This is a religious experience. People lock their cars, change their money, and pray for the best.”

“Something like that,” Mira mumbled.

When the elevator doors opened, Owen followed Mira down a hallway wide enough to decompress hundreds of bleary-eyed gamblers on their way out. At this hour, though, there were only a few dazed stragglers intent on avoiding eye contact. They watched their feet leading them home. Soon Owen got his first assaultive whiff of air freshener and money and heard the incessant chiming.

Mira led him past the crowded playing tables where people perched on their seats. There were cages where you could change your money, and behind the bars, women who looked like disheartened grandmothers. Everywhere, eagles were carved into fiberglass tree trunks, and bright yellow suns rose a hundred times. Owen found it difficult to put the spaces together; he couldn't draw a map of the place in his head. He didn't know where the center was, but he also knew that disorientation was exactly the point. They encountered pockets of noise—and always that rolling, burbling chiming—and greater noise, but never any silence, not even in the bathrooms, where music was piped in over the urinals. Slipping in and out of the shadows with angelic bearing were women in baby blue uniforms and sneakers pushing cleaning carts loaded with sprays and brushes. They were quick to mop up spilled drinks and ugliness.

It was hard to tell the seasoned casino-goer from the novice, or even the winner from the loser. Women stuck together, while the men were more often alone. A young couple dragged their three miserable children behind them. Misshapen bodies ruled—bellies straining against cowboy shirts and tees, flesh bulging at necks and wrists and under chins. Big, flat feet. Even thin people looked distended, and the pale looked paler. Mira said the light distorted on purpose so that nothing was entirely familiar; it was why people came back and back again. Her face looked boneless and flat, her hair spiraling crazily. Her red down jacket was garish. Above them, a giant eagle the size of a Corvette was ready to pluck its fatty snack from the crowds. To Owen, the place was immaculate and filthy at the same time, opulent and cheap, exclusive and indifferent. It was a lure and a lie, a waste where desolation was made shiny. Hope and desperation were the only real things about it. Who were these people who came here? His ability to imagine the lives of others shut down. How could Mira stand this? It made him feel already dead.

She showed him the line of restaurants, and the display tank of enormous lobsters in the window. The people eating, even at this hour, were single men mostly seated at tables meant for two. On the lower level, they looked into the day-care center that posted its rental rates for kiddie socks, its price list for diapers and juice. You paid by the hour, like a motel. The days of leaving the kids in the car, the window cracked just enough, were over, Owen said. The word “experience” was everywhere.
Enjoy the experience! Live the experience! Experience the experience! It's an experience!
It seemed like the right word to Owen, the experience, whatever it was, was something done and passed through. Unless you came back for more.

“I had a student whose mother worked here for a while,” he told Mira. “Housekeeping in the hotel. Twice she found someone dead in a room. Once an OD, the other time the man had hanged himself from the shower rod. She said it happened all the time.”