Fools die

Chapter 54

Gronevelt had given me a suite, the living room decorated in rich browns, the colors over coordinated in the usual Vegas style. I didn’t feel like gambling and I was too tired to go to a movie. I counted the black chips, my inheritance from Cully. There were ten of them, an even thousand dollars. I thought how happy Cully would be if I stuck the chips in my suitcase and left Vegas without losing them. I thought that I might do that.

I was not surprised at what had happened to Cully. It was almost in the seed of his character that he would go finally against the percentage. In his heart, born hustler though he was, Cully was a gambler. Believing in his countdown, he could never be a match for Gronevelt. Gronevelt with his “iron maiden” percentages crushing everything to death.

I tried to sleep but had no luck. It was too late to call Valerie, at least 1 A.M. in New York. I took up the Vegas newspaper I had bought at the airport, and leafing through it, I saw a movie ad for Janelle’s last picture. It was the second female lead, a supporting role, but she had been so great in it that she had won an Academy Award nomination. It had opened in New York just a month ago and I had meant to see it, so I decided to go now. Even though I had never seen or spoken to Janelle since that night she left me in the hotel room.

– -

It was a good movie. I watched Janelle on the screen and saw her do all the things she had done with me. On that huge screen her face expressed all the tenderness, all the affection, all the sensual craving that she had shown in our bed together. And as I watched, I wondered, what was the reality? How had she really felt in bed with me, how had she really felt up there on the screen? In one part of the film where she was crushed by the rejection by her lover, she had the same shattered look on her face that broke my heart when she thought I had been cruel to her. I was amazed by how strictly her performance followed our most intense and secret passions. Had she been acting with me, preparing for this role, or did her performance spring from the pain we had shared together? But I almost fell in love with her again just watching her on the screen, and I was glad that everything had turned out well for her. That she was becoming so successful, that she was getting everything she wanted, or thought she wanted, from life. And this is the end of the story, I thought. Here I am, the poor unhappy lover at a distance, watching the success of his beloved one, and everybody would feel sorry for me, I would be the hero because I was so sensitive and now I could suffer and live alone, the solitary writer making books, while she sparkled in the glittering world of cinema. And that’s how I would like to leave it. I had promised Janelle that if I wrote about her, I would never show her as someone defeated or someone to be pitied. One night we had gone to see Love Story and she had been enraged.

“You fucking writers, you always make the girl die in the end,” she said. “Do you know why? Because it’s the easiest way to get rid of them. You’re tired of them and you don’t want to be the villain. So you just kill her and then you cry and you’re the fucking hero. You’re such fucking hypocrites. You always want to ditch women.” She turned to me, her eyes huge, golden brown going black with anger. “Don’t you ever kill me off, you son of a bitch.”

“I promise,” I said. “But what about your always telling me you’ll never live to forty? That you’re going to burn out.”

She often pulled that shit on me. She always loved painting herself as dramatically as possible.

“That’s none of your business,” she said. “We won’t even be speaking to each other by then.”

I left the theater and started the long walk back to the Xanadu. It was a long walk. I started at the bottom of the Strip and passed hotel after hotel, passed through their waterfalls of neon light and kept walking toward the dark desert mountains that stood guard at the top of the Strip. And I thought about Janelle. I had promised her that if I wrote about us, I would never show her as someone defeated, someone to be pitied, even someone to be grieved. She had asked for that promise, and I had given it, all in fun.

But the truth is different. She refused to stay in the shadows of my mind as Artie and Osano and Malomar decently did. My magic no longer worked.

Because by the time I had seen her on the screen, so alive and full of passion I fell in love with her again, she was already dead.

– -

Janelle, preparing for the New Year’s Eve party, worked very slowly on her makeup. She tilted her magnified makeup mirror and worked on her eye shadow. The top corner of the mirror reflected the apartment behind her. It was really a mess, clothes strewn about, shoes not put away, some dirty plates and cups on the coffee table, the bed not made. She would have to meet Joel at the door and not let him in. The man with the Rolls-Royce, Merlyn had always called him. She slept with Joel occasionally, but not too often, and she knew that she would have to sleep with him tonight. After all, it was New Year’s Eve. So she had already bathed carefully, scented herself, used a vaginal deodorant. She was prepared. She thought about Merlyn and wondered whether he would call her. He hadn’t called her for two years, but he just might today or tomorrow. She knew he wouldn’t call her at night. She thought for a minute of calling him, but he would panic, the coward. He was so scared of spoiling his family life. That whole bullshit structure he had built up over the years that he used as a crutch. But she didn’t really miss him. She knew that he looked back upon himself with contempt for being in love and that she looked back with a radiant joy that it had happened. It didn’t matter to her that they had wounded each other so terribly. She had forgiven him a long time ago. But she knew he had not. She knew that he had foolishly thought he had lost something of himself, and she knew that was not true for either of them.

She stopped putting on her makeup. She was tired and she had a headache. She also felt very depressed, but she always did on New Year’s Eve. It was another year gone by, another year that she was older, and she dreaded old age. She thought about calling Alice, who was spending the holidays with her mother and father in San Francisco. Alice would be horrified at the mess in the apartment, but Janelle knew she would clean it up without reproaching her. She smiled thinking of what Merlyn said, that she used her women lovers with a brutal exploitation that only the most chauvinistic husbands would dare. She realized now that it was partly true. From a drawer she took the ruby earrings Merlyn had given to her as a first gift and put them on. They looked beautiful on her. She loved them.

Then the doorbell range and she went and opened it. She let Joel come in. She didn’t give a shit whether he saw the mess in the apartment or not. Her headache was worse, so she went into the bathroom and took some Precedent before they went out. Joel was as kind and charming as usual. He opened the door of the car for her and went around the other side. Janelle thought about Merlyn. He always forgot to do that and the times he remembered he looked embarrassed. Until, finally, she told him to forget about it, relinquishing her own Southern belle ways.

– -

It was the usual New Year’s Eve party in a great crowded house. The parking lot was filled with red-jacketed valets taking over the Mercedes, the Rolls-Royces, the Bentleys, the Porsches. Janelle knew many of the people there. And there was a good deal of flirting and propositioning, which she courted gaily by making jokes about her New Year’s resolution to remain pure for at least one month.

As midnight approached, she was really depressed and Joel noticed it. He took her into one of the bedrooms and gave her some cocaine. She immediately felt better and high. She got through the stroke of midnight, the kissing of all her friends, the gropings, and then suddenly she felt her headache come on again. It was the worst headache she had ever had, and she knew she had to get home. She found Joel and told him she was ill. He took a look at her face and could see that she was.

“It’s just a headache,” Janelle said. “I’ll be OK. Just get me home.”

Joel drove her home and wanted to come in with her. She knew he wanted to stay hoping that the headache would go away and at least he could spend a nice day tomorrow in bed with her. But she really felt ill. She kissed him and said, “Please don’t come in. I’m really sorry to disappoint you, but I really feel sick. I feel terribly sick.”

She was relieved that Joel believed her. He asked, “Do you want me to call a doctor for you?”

And she said, “No, I’ll just take some pills and I’ll be OK.”

She watched until he was safely out the door of her apartment.

She went immediately to the bathroom to take more Percodan, wet a towel and wrapped it around her head like a turban. She was on her way to the bedroom, going through the doorway, when she felt a terrible crushing blow on the back of her neck. She almost fell. For a moment she thought someone concealed in the room had hit her, and then she thought she had hit her head against something protruding from the wall. But then another crushing blow brought her to her knees. She knew then that something terrible was happening to her. She managed to crawl to the phone beside the bed and just barely made out the red sticker on which was printed the paramedic number. Alice had pasted it there when her son had been visiting them, just in case. She dialed the number and a woman’s voice answered.

Janelle said, “I’m sick. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m sick.” And she gave her name and address and let the phone drop. She managed to pull herself up on the bed, and surprisingly enough she suddenly felt better. She was almost ashamed that she had called, there was nothing really wrong with her. Then another terrible blow seemed to strike her whole body. Her vision diminished and narrowed down to a single focus. Again she was astonished and couldn’t believe what was happening to her. She could barely see beyond the stretches of the room. She remembered Joel had given her some cocaine and she still had it in her handbag and she staggered to the living room to get rid of it, but in the middle of the living room her body was struck another terrible blow. Her sphincter loosened, and though the haze of a near unconsciousness, she realized she had voided herself. With a great effort she took off her panties and wiped up the floor and threw them under the sofa and then she felt for the earrings she was wearing, she didn’t want anyone to steal the earrings. It took her what seemed a long time to get them out, and then she staggered into the kitchen and pushed them far back on the roof of the cabinet where it was all dusty and where no one would ever look.

Still conscious when the paramedics arrived, she was dimly aware of being examined and one of the medics looking in her handbag and finding her cocaine. They thought she had overdosed. One of the paramedics was questioning her. “How much drugs did you take tonight?”

And she said, defiantly, “None.”

And the medic said, “Come on, we’re trying to save your life.”

And it was that line that really saved Janelle. She went into a certain role that she played. She used a phrase that she always used to scorn what others value. She said, “Oh, please.” The Oh, please in a contemptuous note to show that saving her life was the least of her worries and, in fact, something not even to be considered.

She was conscious of the ride in the ambulance to the hospital and she was conscious of being put in the bed in the white hospital room, but by now this was not happening to her. It was happening to someone she had created and it was not true. She could step away from this whenever she wished. She was safe now. At that moment she felt another terrible blow and lost consciousness.

– -

On the day after New Year’s I got the phone call from Alice. I was mildly surprised to hear her voice; in fact, I didn’t recognize it until she told me her name. The first thing that flashed through my mind was that Janelle needed help in some way.

“Merlyn, I thought you’d want to know,” Alice said. “It’s been a long time, but I thought I should tell you what happened.”

She paused, her voice uncertain. I didn’t say anything, so she went on. “I have some bad news about Janelle. She’s in the hospital. She had a cerebral hemorrhage.”

I didn’t really grasp what she was saying, or my mind refused the facts. It registered as an illness only. “How is she?” I asked. “Was it very bad?”

Again there was that pause, then Alice said, “She’s living on machines. The tests show no brain activity.”

I was very calm, but I still didn’t really grasp it. I said, “Are you telling me that she’s going to die? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“No, I’m not telling you that,” Alice said. “Maybe she’ll recover, maybe they can keep her alive. Her family’s coming out and they’ll make all the decisions. Do you want to come out? You can stay at my place.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t.” And I really couldn’t “Will you call me tomorrow and tell me what happens? I’ll come out if I can help, but not for anything else.”

There was a long silence, and then Alice said, her voice breaking. “Merlyn, I sat beside her, she looks so beautiful, as if nothing happened to her. I held her hand and it was warm. She looks as if she were just sleeping. But the doctors say that there’s nothing left of her brain. Merlyn, could they be wrong? Could she get better?”

And at moment I felt certain it was all a mistake, that Janelle would recover. Cully had said once that a man could sell himself anything in his own hand and that’s what I did. “Alice, the doctors are wrong sometimes, maybe she’ll get better. Don’t give up hope.”

“All right,” Alice said. She was crying now. “Oh, Merlyn, it’s so terrible. She lies there on the bed asleep like some fairy princess and I keep thinking some magic can happen, that she’ll be all right. I can’t think of living without her. And I can’t leave her like that. She would hate to live like that. If they don’t pull the plug, I will. I won’t let her live like that.”

Ah, what a chance it was for me to be a hero. A fairy princess dead in an enchantment and Merlyn the Magician knowing how to wake her. But I didn’t offer to help pull the plug. “Wait and see what happens,” I said. “Call me, OK?”

“OK,” Alice said. “I just thought you’d want to know. I thought you might want to come out.”

“I really haven’t seen her or spoken to her for a long time,” I said. And I remember Janelle asking, “Would you deny me?” and my saying laughingly, “With all my heart.”

Alice said, “She loved you more than any other man.”

But she didn’t say “more than anybody,” I thought. She left out women. I said, “Maybe she’ll be OK. Will you call me again?”

“Yes,” Alice said. Her voice was calmer now. She had begun to grasp my rejection and she was bewildered by it. “I’ll call you as soon as something happens.” Then she hung up.

And I laughed. I don’t know why I laughed, but I just laughed. I couldn’t believe it, it must be one of Janelle’s tricks. It was too outrageously dramatic, something I knew she had fantasized about and so had arranged this little charade. And one thing I knew, I would never look upon her empty face, her beauty vacated by the brain behind it. I would never, never look at it because I would be turned to stone. I didn’t feel any grief or sense any loss. I was too wary for that. I was too cunning. I walked around the rest of the day, shaking my head. Once again I laughed and later I caught myself with my face twisting in a kind of smirk, like someone with a guilty secret wish come true, or of someone who is finally trapped forever.

Alice called me late the next day. “She’s all right now,” Alice said.

And for a minute I thought she meant it, that Janelle had recovered, that it had all been a mistake. And then Alice said, “We pulled the plug. We took her off the machines and she’s dead.”

Neither of us said anything for a long time, and then she asked, “Are you going to come out for the funeral? We’re going to have a memorial service in the theater. All her friends are coming. It’s going to be a party with champagne and all her friends giving speeches about her. Will you come?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll come in a couple of weeks to see you if you don’t mind. But I can’t come now.”

There was another long pause if she were trying to control her anger, and then she said, “Janelle once told me to trust you, so I do. Whenever you want to come out, I’ll see you.”

And then she hung up.

The Xanadu Hotel loomed before me, its million-dollar marquee of bright lights drowned the lonely hills beyond. I walked past it, dreaming of those happy days and months and years I had spent seeing Janelle. Since Janelle’s death I had thought of her nearly every day. Some mornings I’d wake up thinking about her, imagining how she looked, how she could be so affectionate and so furious at the same time.

Those first few minutes awake I always believed she was alive. I’d imagine scenes between us when we met again. It took me five or ten minutes to remember she was dead. With Osano and Artie this had never happened. In fact, I rarely thought of them now. Did I care for her more? But then if I felt that way about Janelle, why my nervous laugh when Alice told me the news over the phone? Why, during the day I heard of her death, did I laugh to myself three or four times? And I realize now perhaps it was because I was enraged with her for dying. In time, if she had lived, I would have forgotten her. By her trickery she would haunt me all my life.

When I saw Alice a few weeks after Janelle’s death, I learned that the cerebral hemorrhage came from a congenital defect which Janelle may have known about.

I remembered how angry I was when she was late or the few times she forgot the day on which we were supposed to meet. I was so sure they were Freudian slips, her unconscious wish to reject me. But Alice told me that this had happened often with Janelle. And had gotten worse shortly before her death. It was certainly linked to the bulging aneurysm, the fatal leakage into her brain. And then I remembered that last night with her when she had asked me if I loved her and I had answered her so insolently. And I thought if she could only ask me now, how different I would be. That she could be and say and do whatever she wishes. That I would accept anything she wanted to be. That just the thought that I could see her, that she was someplace I could go to, that I could hear her voice or hear her laugh would be the things that could make me happy. “Ah, then,” I could hear her ask, pleased but angry too, “but is it the important thing to you?” She wanted to be the most important thing to me and to everyone she knew and, if possible, to everyone in the world. She had an enormous hunger for affection. I thought of bitter remarks for her to make to me as she lay in bed, her brain shattered as I looked down upon her with grief. She would say, “Isn’t this the way you wanted me? Isn’t that the way men want women? I would think this would be ideal for you.” But then I realized she never would have been so cruel or even so vulgar, and then I realized another odd thing. My memories of her were never about our lovemaking.

I know I dream of her many times at night, but I never remember those dreams. I just wake up thinking about her as if she were still alive.

– -

I was on the very top of the Strip, in the shadow of the Nevada mountains, looking down into the huge, glittering neon nest that was the heart of Vegas. I would gamble tonight and in the early morning I’d catch a plane for New York. Tomorrow night I would sleep with my family in my own house and work on my books in my solitary room. I would be safe.

I entered the doors of the Xanadu casino. I was chilled by the frozen air. Two spade hookers went gliding by arm in arm, their heavy curly wigs glistening, one dark chocolate, the other sweetly brown. Then white hookers in boots and short shorts offering pearly white thighs, but the skin of their faces ghostly, showing skeleton bones thinned by chandeliered light and years of cocaine. Down the gauntlet of green felt blackjack tables a long row of dealers raised their hands and washed them in the air.

I went through the casino toward the baccarat pit. And as I approached the gray-railed enclosure, the crowd in front of me broke to spread around the dice pit and I saw the bacarrat pit clear.

Four Saints in black tie waited for me. The croupier running the game held up his right hand to halt the Banker with the shoe. He gave me a quick glance and smiled his recognition. Then with his hand still up he intoned, “A card for the Player.” The laddermen, two pale Jehovah, leaned forward.

I turned away to watch the casino. I felt a rush of oxygenated air and I wondered if the senile, crippled Gronevelt in his solitary rooms above had pushed his magic buttons to keep all these people awake. And what if he had pushed the button for Cully and all the others to die?

Standing absolutely still in the center of the casino, I looked for a lucky table on which to begin.