The Tell (20 page)

“Sounds like an urban myth to me,” she said.

“No. I saw the woman's eyes and she couldn't fake that.” He recalled her deep black Haitian face locked in a permanent gloss of shock. The men had come to save themselves, she'd said, but it hadn't worked out. Or had it? She'd come in to talk about her daughter's grades and had spoken of this instead, because she couldn't get it out of her mind. “When you check in to the hotel, do you think you can ask for a nonsuicide room just like you can ask for a nonsmoking room? Which ones have the better views? Do you want a view of the woods when you're about to off yourself, or do you want to look over the parking lot and the service entrance and smell the exhaust from the kitchen fan?”

Mira looked at him. “I'm so glad you're keeping an open mind.”

She led him to the waterfall that flowed over turd-colored rocks. Drinkers faced it at the bar as if it were one of the world's greatest wonders and not something much closer to a burst water pipe. It reeked of chlorine. This seemed the worst of all possible hours to show him the casino; what good could ever be happening? How much despair could he take in? But none of it seemed to faze Mira. It was as though she saw things entirely differently.

“This is where I sit with Wilton,” she said, and touched two stools. The glass bar showed streaks from a dirty rag, and the bartender gave them a bored look. Mira said that sometimes she had water or a diet soda, and Wilton had a glass of wine. Sometimes there were peanuts, but other nights there were pretzels. You just never knew. She was making fun of him now with her details. Here people recognized and fawned over Wilton, she explained. Some wanted to talk to him, tell him about their lives, and he listened as though it were all fascinating stuff. He made people feel important and heard; he made himself feel loved that way. Sometimes a woman grabbed his elbow and clucked at him while her husband stood off to the side like an embarrassed little boy. None of this meant that his fans had his name, or the name of the show, right. He posed for photos with them, his hands squeezing their thickened waists to make them blush and feel pretty. Sometimes Mira took the picture, waving the reluctant husbands in. Sometimes Wilton zeroed in on a single woman, his long figure bent over hers for hours, his face hopeful.

“And then? After your drink and pretzels and photo ops? Show me what
you
do,” Owen said. “I want to watch.”

“You sound like some kind of pervert,” she teased. “
Show me what you do. I want to watch
.”

Mira took him onto the floor. Owen thought they looked like a couple of shoplifters, still in their coats and sloppy clothes. Brass and neon reflected in her glasses as she changed twenty dollars. The slot machines were shiny and buffed, grouped in clusters like grazing cattle. Players were randomly scattered, but he suspected there was nothing random at all about where they'd chosen to sit. Animals, humans, slot machines, Wilton at the bar—no one ever wanted to actually be alone, though what could be more lonely than this picture? Is this what his wife liked? Old women were as bright-eyed as raccoons. A few old men smacked buttons with the heels of their hands. They stared at the machines with bitter underbites. Mira ran her hand over the backs of the red plastic seats. Her mood was subdued, but he also thought she was playing too hard at being cool and untouched. She led him to another herd of machines. Here, each looked like a temple, wider at the bottom, built in piled units, peaked at the top. They were shrines of metal at whose feet you sat and whose illuminated belly displayed your fortune. She sat down in front of one.

“Do the machines understand you? Do they talk to you?” Owen asked. “Do you talk to them?” He'd read that the compulsive players believed in their own magic—where to sit, how to count, what to intone. If they won, it was because of something they'd done, and losing was only a distraction. It was not about money after a while; it was about the rush, the action. The brain chemistry changed and took over; they were helpless then. He'd read about it all, and he got none of it.

“I'm not delusional, O,” she laughed, and made sure he noticed the ancient woman at one of the machines. Her spine was arched, her face practically in her lap as she fed a plastic card that was attached to the strap of her bag by a pink coiled leash into the machine.

“Oh, that's kind of sad,” Mira said.

She took off her coat and hooked it over the seat next to her. She liked the slots with the reels, she said, and looked into the machine's bright face. Owen fed a coin in for her and watched her fingers curl around the ball at the arm's end. She pulled, and the reels spun and clunked into place.

“What are you feeling?” he asked.

“What am I feeling? Are you a shrink now?”

“Just tell me.”

She tapped at her bottom lip. “I guess it's like when you're waiting for someone to come home and you finally hear a car door shut. There's that second before you know if it's the right door, the right person. It's all about that instant of expectation.” She pulled the arm again and the reels spun unprofitably. “And then it's over.” She shrugged. “And that's it. Harmless as hoping. See? There's nothing to it.”

Owen had waited many times for her to come home from here and had listened for that flawless sound that was her determined footsteps on the gravel. It was a moment that could fall to disappointment or rise to enchantment. She was right: that instant of expectation was brilliant and always, necessarily, fleeting. It was what made you come back for more of everything. But hope wasn't harmless.

The man on Mira's left and the woman on her right were enthralled by their own motions of hand to coin to slot to arm or button. They watched the spinning wheels but seemed almost not to notice or care what was happening. Mostly, they looked bored. Their expressions reminded him of the dreams he'd had when he was sick as a kid, repetitive and indistinct, of trying to work something out but not getting there and not really caring. One man sucked at a drink through a straw and put in another coin.

Owen sat down at the end of the row to watch Mira from a distance. Her attention was poised on the action, and her hand reached to pull the machine's arm. When her winnings clanged into the tray, she snatched them back and played again. It was too easy to simply hate the place for all the obvious, elitist reasons, but he hadn't understood what his unease was made of until he saw Mira wrapped in pure solitude at that noisy, concentrated moment. She didn't notice anything around her, not even that he'd moved away. And this is what she wanted, what she liked. He had the chilling sense then, one that froze him to the seat, that he loved his wife more than she loved him, and if need had anything to do with it, he needed her more, too. He might collapse without her.

When he looked away, he spotted Walter, the chemistry professor he knew from the pool at the Y, wandering alone between the machines just like the way he swam—slow, heavy, an old, perseverating manatee. The man clearly wasn't happy to have been spotted, and he gave Owen a fully blank look that went beyond embarrassment or even acknowledgment, before he walked in the other direction. This place at two in the morning was a vector for bad news and sad stories, and everyone just wanted to be alone. Owen was aware of how unobserved and almost invisible he felt, though he also knew that he and everyone else were closely watched. You were never fully on your own here, though your ruin was entirely yours.

Finally, Mira looked up and waved Owen over to take her place at the machine. The seat was temperate from her body. He remembered how she'd told him one night that she liked the seat to be warm because it was like the whisper of someone else still with her. At the time, it had seemed like the loneliest idea; now he understood the need for another presence, even the fleeting suggestion of one. The most public act here was also the most private. The machine was a gleaming Buddha, clearing its throat. Hopeful fingerprints smeared the glass. If I touch it once or touch it twice, if I leave the whorls of who I am, will I win? Will I understand what drives my wife? Mira fed in a coin for him. With her hand over his, she pulled down. The resistance was just right, the resistance of pond water and of that first instant when they fucked. His prick twitched in confusion. The arm sprung back and the reels spun and dropped into place. It felt like promise, but he also knew that a computer had already decided the outcome by the time the reels were set spinning. Mira had to know that, too, but what was any knowledge worth here? It was only a liability to think too much. Mira dropped in another quarter. This time, she took his hand and placed it on the glass belly to feel the reels in motion—at the base of his skull and spine. Another quarter, then another, and with her hand still over his, she pulled until the money was gone. She was the one playing. He was just the body on the seat.

“You see, O?” Mira said, her eyes strangely unfocused. “It's nothing. Everything's fine. I'm fine. A few dollars and some luck—or not.” She seemed to take his silence as collusion and shrugged. “Tell me that you've never felt you wanted to step out of your life for an instant. Life is too real for me sometimes. Everything I see, and such unbearably sad stories everywhere I look, the whole world suffering. If you take it in, you'll explode.”

“But you have to take it in, Mira. That's what being alive is about. You can't act like it doesn't exist.”

“But it's too much for me sometimes,” she said. “I'm not tough like you. I can't live with it all the time. I can't carry it around.” Her lower lip began to tremble, and he thought she was about to cry.

They left the slot machines and wandered past the coffee shop just opening. On their way to the elevator, they passed a man on a bench who sat like a refugee, with two sleeping children. They were a living cautionary tale, bad public relations. At the parking garage's first blast of cold air, Mira realized she'd left her coat behind. She said he should get the car and meet her at the front entrance. A few minutes later, he pulled into the circular drive at the main entrance. A man in an Eagle Run uniform knocked on his window and asked if he needed any help.

“I'm waiting for my wife.” Owen said.

“Okay, but you're going to have to move your vehicle.” He bent down to take advantage of the warmer air coming from the car.

Vehicle. The man was really a kid, probably fresh out of high school, acne running next to his sideburns, stuck with this shitty job and shittier shift. “When she comes, I'll move.”

“I'm sorry, sir, but you're going to have to move now.”

“Give me a fucking minute, okay? I'm not blocking anyone. There's no one else here. Look around. I told you my wife would be right out—and she will.”

The kid straightened and all Owen could see of him were his fingers flexing in his shiny black gloves before he bent into the warmth again. “It's just that a lot of people are waiting for their wife or husband or whatever. Do you see what I mean?” He glanced over his shoulder and then appeared to take stock of Owen's troubled face. “And they don't come out, not for hours sometimes. You look upset. A few minutes, then you're going to have to move.”

Owen was struck by the patience a job like this must require to assuage many more losers and assholes than winners. The boy slapped his arms to keep warm. To his left was the too bright casino entrance with a few blinking people coming and going. To his right, just past the circle, was the dense and oddly comforting stand of tall pine trees dusted with the first falling of snow that he seen from the garage. Mira was taking too long. She couldn't be lost in a place she knew so well. The boy nodded and resolutely waved him on. To him, Owen had become another pathetic story, another hopeful spouse, but he was wrong, wasn't he? Wasn't Mira simply looking for her coat?

Owen drove around the complex that spread farther than he'd imagined, past the garage and the hotel's back entrance, the busy service end of the operation, the parking lots, and the lit-up shuttle bus making its rounds like a demented animal. He drove in circles. He took great gulps of air. Being inside had made him feel like dying—and sometimes dead already. Snow fell in his headlights. He drove up to the front entrance again, but still Mira didn't appear. The next loop around began to tangle him up in confusion. He didn't know if he should go in and look for her, and he couldn't call her because she didn't have her phone, as usual. But more than that, it was clear she didn't want to be found. He sped through the turns and watched the snow fly off the hood of the car. What was she doing? His single, panicked gulp returned with a frustrated bark. It wasn't her notion of this trip, or the trip itself, or the time they'd spent at the machines, or what she'd shown him that meant something; it was these precise minutes when she was inside and he was not. These minutes when she was deciding not to come out just yet. Was she trying to decide if she'd tell him the truth? And what was the truth anyway? Was she in trouble? Was she a liar? He knew nothing, he understood less than that. Misery fogged the windshield and the inside of the car was humid with cold sweat. He banked too fast on the next loop, nicking the back tire on the curb and sending the car fishtailing in the snow. He felt himself veering toward danger too easily, and he slowed down. Almost thirty minutes later, Mira appeared at the front and got in the car, as if nothing had happened.

A mile away from the casino, Owen pulled to the side of the road and turned ferociously to his wife. “Where the hell were you?” he demanded.