The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

1

LELAND WEVILL told me he was a lawyer. Instead of walking away, I asked him what kind of lawyer he was. He said, “I bite people on the neck for a living. That kind.” So I decided to get to know him. He didn't do much lawyering now. “I’ve got plenty of money.” Early on, he said to me, “I beg you to believe that the things I don't have are things I don’t want.” Even after I found out that he was quoting the French aphorist Chamfort, I believed him. That it was plagiarized didn’t make it less interesting or, in Wevill's case, less true. Wevill had everything he wanted.

He was devoted to living in Hawaii and to perfecting his beautiful house. He said, “I want a house that I never have to leave.” He meant an estate, his own world with a wall around it. I had seen it and I had been invited back. I had passed the test. We had another bond — our mutual friend the kindly lawyer Lionberg, who had killed himself. “Long story short, Royce overreached himself,” he said. “Bad decisions have a long tail. Create a lot to untangle.”

Wevill was not the simple cruel man he seemed. He was one of those wealthy men who had made his house into a shrine — a secular shrine, representing his mind and his taste, filled with fetishes and trophies peculiar to his own passions. The house was like an extension of his own body, as his Jaguar was, as was everything he owned: no buffalo heads or zebra skins but many Japanese prints, a rack of samurai swords, and the carved throne — it looked like a spindly leather-seated chair — of a Chokwe chief. “Your Chokwe live in eastern Angola.” The house was off limits to everyone except his family — that is, his mother and his two children. They were on the mainland, so he hardly saw them. He disliked all visitors, for their intrusion and their envy and resentment, for the way they coveted what he had. He loved Rita and Nina, the two women who cleaned his house, the young mother and her attractive daughter who could have been sisters, who were not covetous at all; in fact, the house was richer with them in it.

Like many such men who lived in lovely houses they had furnished themselves — anyway, men I knew, never women Leland Wevill regarded his unwelcome visitors as subjects and his house as the test. He judged people by how they behaved among his possessions. You went there and he watched you react and sometimes he gave you the third degree. He seldom entertained, but because he was a retired lawyer from the mainland, his former associates sent people to him, other lawyers mostly, who happened to be passing through the islands. He resented being on these travelers’ itineraries, a stopping place on their tour, and so out of hostility he put them to the test, judged them by the objects they touched and how they handled them, the details they noticed, the items they ignored — obvious treasures in some cases — what questions they asked, how they responded to his answers, how they reacted when he lied, as he often did.

“It’s just something I picked up in India,” he said of a rare Japanese inro.

“It’s one of Hiroshige’s classic images,” he said of a Hokusai print.

Of his favorite piece, an original Watteau, bought at an auction in New York for a fabulous sum — but he would have paid anything for the large detailed drawing of two disheveled nymphs, their tumbled hair and rumpled low-cut blouses — he said, “I’m told it’s a shoddy reproduction. It’s kind of fun.”

And, “I don’t know much about it. Just a chair, I guess. Shaker, maybe?” of the Chokwe chief’s throne.

Then he waited for the guest to speak. Tribal art so often looked indeterminate, ageless, generic even — a Masai rongo club like a Fijian head-basher, a Papuan highlander’s spear like a Kikuyu’s, Ethiopian icons could pass for crude Byzantine altarpieces.

To the trained eye, to anyone who visited museums, Wevill’s estate was a treasure house.

“Maybe some kind of kitchen implement,” he said of a whalebone slasher, called a patu, used by nineteenth-century Maoris in close-combat battle. “Maybe a false nose,” he said of a highlander’s phallocrypt.

Most people failed his house test — wanted the thing they were most ignorant about, took him at his word when he lied, admired the ordinary picture in the priceless frame or the fake stones in the jade dagger handle, accepted his saying that the beautiful thick-petaled blossom in the painting was by Mary Cassatt when it was an early Mondrian.

Just the way visitors handled objects told him everything he needed to know. Some people would pick up the dagger handle and not want to let go. There was a stare people had that meant they were taking possession of the painting and would have no hesitation in stealing it.

The visitors’ envy exhausted him because it gave him no rest, and he was suspicious — he saw them as potential thieves. They wanted what he had. One visit to his house revealed everything about them.

But here was the paradox. Rita and Nina, the cleaning women, asked no questions. They were as careful with the Tibetan silver-rimmed skullcup as they were with the plastic soap dish in the bathroom — and were careful without being covetous. He was impressed by the lightness of their touch without their having the least idea of what they were handling. Because of this, he knew almost nothing about these two women. He could not test them.

They talked intimately with each other, conversations he could not enter, on subjects that bewildered him, information they got from television programs he’d never heard of. He just listened.

“The Psychic Hot Line is a rip-off. Plus, they keep calling you up after, saying they got something else to tell you.”

“Psychics give you good news, like, ‘A big change is coming.’ But anyone can say that.”

“I actually visited one. I was pregnant with you and I says to the psychic, 'When am I going to have a baby?’ and she says, ‘Not for a few years.’ I was like sticking out and she didn’t even notice.”

“I want numbers from psychics. Like, if they can see the future, why aren’t they rich?”

“Maybe they can only see the past, but what’s so great about that?”

“I’d like to go to Vegas with a psychic. Just to see.”

“Or one of those cruises where you just play slots and eat.”

They often mentioned gambling, which seemed odd to Wevill, because they were two of the unlikeliest gamblers — just pretty island women, all smiles, easygoing, in old clothes, with none of the obsessive behavior and tasteless outfits he associated with gamblers, no superstitious rituals, no strange jackets.

They threw him, everything about them foxed him.

Most people walk a certain way in their own house, with a confident nakedness — efficient, unselfconscious, with an economy of gesture, not noticing anything, fixed on the one thing they happen to be doing, undistractible. 'I’m in here,' while stretching out a hand in the darkness to flick a switch, taking the shortest route among the sharp corners of furniture without looking, all the flourishes of ownership. Wevill was like that six days a week.

On Saturdays you would not have believed Wevill to be in his own home, this shrine to his life and taste, his enlarged being, for his distraction and his impatience were obvious. That was the day the cleaning women were at work in his rooms, and in his head Wevill was bereft, he never felt weaker or more superfluous.

Wevill, who told me “I bite people on the neck for a living,” watched helplessly as the cleaners possessed the house, possessed him, the pretty witch, the skinny ballerina, mother and daughter.

The day the cleaning women came was usually the day you went out or made yourself scarce—“The check is on the kitchen counter”—but that was the one day Wevill made a point of staying home, looking like a brain-sick potentate, big and ineffectual, bumping into his own chairs, too numb with desire to do anything but gape at their ungainly grace.

The women cleaned as though mimicking dancers, the same approximations of bending and stretching, sometimes on tiptoe, reaching straight-armed, darting forward and back, bowing to the lowest shelves, often kneeling, crouched like spaniels, showing Wevill their dusty footpads and their pretty buttocks. They wore no makeup, their hair was loose, they favored baggy sweatsuits. They might have just crept from bed, that was their look as they worked, disheveled nymphs.

Wevill — pretending to be busy, shifting vases, squaring-up papers — watched them, the twenty-year-old, her mother not yet forty; young, husbandless, no partners — he had obliquely asked, they had answered directly. “Let’s say you had a boyfriend.” “No thanks!” Knowing he could have been father to one and grandfather to the other, he desired both of them.

Mopping, scrubbing on all fours, lying on their backs to beat a feather duster at cobwebs under the sofa, straining on tiptoe to brush at geckos, they hiked up their shirts and showed smooth honey-colored down on their lower backs. All the demanding postures of housework, which represented the most passionate postures of lovemaking. And still they talked.

“Dwarfs marry each other sometimes, but sometimes they get normal big-sized kids and sometimes they get more dwarfs.”

“Britney and Christina used to be Mouseketeers, and so did Justin. That's why Britney and Justin are dating.”

“What makes a guy lolo is living with his mother.”

This is just a miscellaneous anecdote in the life of Leland Wevill, someone universally acknowledged to be a powerful man — who died a few years ago and has been written about endlessly for his contributions to charities, his shrewd investments, his vast holdings, his career as a lawyer, his role on the boards of several large corporations, his successful innovations, his superb art collection. In almost everything he did he acted from a position of strength — bought weak companies and built them up and sold them, found an inexpensive but ingenious product and represented it for a share of the proceeds, acquired paintings and sculptures years before the artists’ reputations grew and the prices shot up. Even in the case of the Watteau he had been bottom-feeding.

Everything he accomplished was a species of transformation. Even himself, his own life. He was born into an ordinary family in Massachusetts, the city of Cambridge, the unfashionable side. But he was bright. He got into Harvard as a townie, lived at home to save money, earned a scholarship to Harvard Law School and afterward seemed like someone special: Bostonian, Harvard graduate, with a distinguished-sounding name—“Leland” was his own idea, he hated being Fred Junior. In the active part of his life he made a fortune, the sort of lawyer who owns a portion of every case he represents, not taking risks but studying the client’s odds, and winning big when he won. He had moved to Hawaii in his fifties, on the suggestion of Royce Lionberg. He was sixty-one now, just under six feet, a healthy man, and until answering the ad in the Star-Bulletin for the two cleaners, he had believed he was very happy.

Apart from Lionberg — the former personal-injury lawyer who had fallen in love with a woman of twenty-three, was rebuffed, fell into a depression, and died by hanging himself from the door handle of his Lexus with his Hermes tie — Leland Wevill was the most powerful man I knew.

He was a highly intelligent man, which made it all the more interesting to me that he had the capacity to behave foolishly.

Ever since coming to Hawaii, Wevill had been keenly aware of his aging body — he was a big soft man with white hairless legs and a potbelly. He didn’t mind being conspicuous, he hated being a fool. He didn’t swim much, he didn’t play golf at all. A good golf swing would have won him playmates in Hawaii. He did not understand the social scene at all. Now and then when he went to a strip club he was horrified to recognize that many of the other patrons were men who looked exactly like him — bored, sixtyish, desperate, no friends, just rattling around, more lonely than horny.

He would not have come to Hawaii at all except that Lionberg had come. Lionberg’s suicide had nothing to do with living in Hawaii — it was the failed love affair. He had been a friend to Wevill. Wevill felt the loss.

Now and then, Wevill saw a tidy old man in new sandals, carrying his lunch in a bag to the beach, and the man sat on the sand at the center of his own neatness — the beach towel, sunblock, water bottle, the newspaper folded into quarters to show the day’s crossword. The man pretended to be busy, pretended not to notice the loose breasts of girls in bathing suits, the way they pinched and snapped their bikini bottoms — pretended to be content while he was dying of loneliness. At the beach, not swimming. Wevill feared being that man.

Such a man was killing himself with his routines. Having come to Hawaii to live, to escape a routine, he suffered an even more punishing routine and felt his age more sharply. He had no pleasures — he was just conspicuously growing old, a dying man among the living. It alarmed him to think that he would do anything to make things different.

The mother and daughter, Rita and Nina, murmured and giggled together like sisters, usually about gambling or psychics or both, while Wevill watched with the complacent horror of a man surrendering to being sucked into a vacuum. He could not be still, he felt like a stranger in his own house, he dropped things, and defying the logic of the house owner at home, he bumped against his own furniture. The two women seemed more at home to him than he was. That also fueled his ardor. They did not talk to him, though now and then they had a laugh with Ramon, the gardener.

Wevill lusted for them both, he did not differentiate, they were so similar, Rita and her fine flesh, Nina and her slender solemnity. Both were divorced, Nina had a small child — Rita a grandmother! — they worked hard, they were strong. Their strength was part of their beauty, their alluring untidiness. They had no idea how lovely they looked or how Wevill desired them, which made it possible for him merely to gape at them while they unselfconsciously cleaned his house.

He had made his life by resisting fantasy, yet, captivated by the women, he found himself one day on the verge of making a wild suggestion to them: paying them to work naked. Knowing the penalty, he was able to resist. He was well versed in sexual harassment settlements, the vindictive juries, the severe punishments, the awarding of costs; he knew how much he would claim were he their lawyer and this fantasist employer their stalker. The knowledge made him circumspect, almost passive. The women were so innocent of his desire he went on watching them mop and dust, the multimillionaire in his fabulous house reduced to an unsatisfied voyeur.

Life had once been so simple. Long ago, a touch told him a woman was willing, a smile said the answer was yes. “We could share a taxi,” he might say to a woman he had just met. The merest hug in the back seat, his hand on her leg, or hers on his. At her house, if she said, “Want to come in?” it meant yes to everything.

Rita and Nina sometimes looked so at home there he pictured himself approaching them and delivering lines he had carefully rehearsed. The lines were ambiguous enough to dissolve in any possible lawsuit.

“I've been studying massage with a practitioner,” he imagined himself saying. He would discuss the details of his progress, stressing the health benefits. And then, casually: “Want one?”

You did not mention sex. A massage was a respectable medical procedure, but of course a woman willing to be massaged — to be touched — was open to other suggestions. But you could say, “Don’t worry — strictly an R-rated massage,” to emphasize the point that there were other kinds. Hyperbole helped. Such a proposition was impossible without innuendo.

Wevill said nothing. He was judicious, but his caution was not all that restrained him. “Seduction” was the inaccurate word for what he planned, “invitation” was better, but whatever it was called he could not initiate it in his own house. He told himself that it was not really his fear of a lawsuit, or even snobbery on his part, but just bad timing — a sunny morning in his huge house on the North Shore was wrong for what he had in mind. He could imagine meeting either of them after dark in a bar or one of the cheaper tourist hotels in Waikiki and taking her upstairs. But something told him that it was wrong in his house, while they were cleaning, making the beds, dusting the sofas. He could not imagine them sleeping on those beds or sitting on those sofas. It seemed a kind of defilement.

He stared at them like a big hungry boy looking at hunks of homemade cake, his fingers damp, and he talked to them, stupid questions about the weather, or holidays, or their jobs in town, how they worked in Housekeeping in one of the hotels in the Ohana chain. He was only making plausible noises to detain them, so that he could rest his eyes on their bodies as they worked.

A woman in repose did not interest him. He loved to see women being active, engaged in something strenuous, stretching, bending, carrying heavy loads, dealing with an impediment — anything that made their bodies contort with effort and their hair shake loose. Tight tensed knees, clenched buttock muscles, elbows working, the neck stiffened with concentration, the tongue clamped between the teeth — he watched with his own tongue clamped that way.

Rita was the pretty witch, Nina the skinny ballerina, and Wevill imagined that he had his pick.

His neat, dusted house irritated him, for it represented a job done, no reason for these women to deal with it. He preferred a room that needed attention. He had been a very messy husband with a pretty housekeeper and an impatient wife. “Someone to pick up after you!” his second wife had scolded. Yes, that was just it. He had slyly watched the exertions of the young dark woman. When his first wife had been alive, her sitting had bored him; her perfect hair and her way of picking at lint had killed his desire.

Nina the ballerina cleaned his car, she got dirtier as the car got cleaner, got sweatier and wetter with suds on her bare toes as she squeegeed the windows and dried the door handles, got damper and duller as the car got shiny and dry; and finally she was dirty and the car was clean, and he desired her that way and hated the car for being done.

Ramon came every two weeks — weed-whacking, mowing, watering the potted trees. The simple fellow easily talked to the women, usually in pidgin. That made Wevill bolder.

He was trying to talk with Nina one day, not hold a conversation, just mouthing meaningless pleasantries to attract her attention.

“Great weather.”

“Ya.”

“All that rain yesterday.”

“Ya.”

Getting nowhere, he said, “Maybe you could do the rugs next month.”

Anticipating it gave him a foretaste of pleasure, mother and daughter swinging the old beaters like wire tennis rackets, their clothes flying as they spanked dust from the rug.

“Sorry,” Nina said. “Next month we going to Vegas, Rita and me.”

He was thrown. He said, “You were there just recently.”

“Five months ago, ya,” Nina said with a precision that startled him, for he expected her not to know, at any rate not to remember.

He was at first deeply disappointed, feeling abandoned, and he imagined she was gloating — enjoying turning him down. But that was irrational. Then he grew curious. Where exactly? How long for? What to do?

Nina reminded him of their routine, that they went twice a year on a gambling tour — two weeks in Las Vegas.

In his sixty-one years Wevill had never been to Nevada, and when this young woman answered his questions with a casual unintentional rebuff, he was impressed and humbled.

“Leave the kid with Auntie, stay at the California, play the slots, come back broke. The Vegas package.”

This lovely young woman talking such nonsense appalled him, and he was sad for her, almost sorrowful for her loving this ignorant pleasure, grieving for her wasted beauty. Her mother was no better.

“And party a little.” The older woman laughed.

“Vegas,” he said, and wondered if any of this information would kill his desire.

On one of his working weeks, Ramon didn’t show up. Rita said he was sick with a backache, that he had seen a doctor and was taking medicine. The next week Rita said she had seen Ramon's sister at Foodland; Ramon was dead, the muscle relaxer he had been prescribed had shut down his liver.

At the end of a twisting road in the middle of the island Wevill found the chapel and Ramon’s grieving relatives. A clergyman read from the Bible, delivered a homily, quoted Kahlil Gibran. Wevill sat at the back, a stranger, wondering if Ramon’s family had a lawyer for this personal-injury suit, and where were Rita and Nina? They must have gone to Las Vegas. When the time came for Wevill to pay his respects, he stood before the closed casket and a color photograph of Ramon in an aloha shirt, smiling broadly, youthful, the picture of health, confident and vital.

2

The moment Wevill arrived in Las Vegas and tasted bitterness in the hot dust of the air, he felt he was in a corrupted desert city built on sand, one he imagined he might find described in the Bible, the damned rejoicing, worshiping a gilded animal while a godly prophet lamented somewhere on the perimeter. Wevill was out of his depth — humbled was no exaggeration. Since he had never been to Las Vegas, he could not think of it familiarly as “Vegas.” It bewildered him as much as any Third World capital. He was dismayed to be among people who were delighted to be there, so many of them from Hawaii. He learned late what everyone already knew: because Hawaii was heavily taxed, and gambling illegal, tax-free Nevada was full of people from the islands, many settled there, many visiting, he recognized the faces. Two he looked for but did not see.

He did not mind feeling helpless. It was a more accurate reflection of his condition, the big brooding man enthroned in his mansion, for he was now lost in his house.

To understand the women’s lives better, he had asked for the one-week package that included the airfare, the room, and coupons. But: “Been sold out for months!” Was the clerk rubbing it in? The first-class ticket he bought was absurdly more expensive than the package, but at least he had his anonymity. He had no plan other than to be away from his house and near these women, to be here, in this place. But the place was more bizarre than the bizarrest pictures of it.

In his desperation he realized that he seemed more like a stalker than a mere admirer. He excused his obsession by reminding himself that he was helpless, he had time and money, he could have anything he wanted. Where were they?

I just want to look at Las Vegas, he told himself, have a drink, see what all the fuss is about. A place I have never visited. It was a plus that he happened to be near Rita and Nina. What next he did not know. Being close to them would clear his mind and make him happier. But he knew he was kidding himself.

As a lawyer he was able to hold two different, opposite ideas in his head at the same time, the prosecution’s argument and the defense. Happiness was his defense, but he was well aware that he was driven by physical desire, a sort of hunger he had known very few times in his life, most of them as a boy, for he was captive to the feeling and unsatisfied, and what in his life had he craved that he had not enjoyed? He always knew the answers to the questions he asked.

He felt the insecurity and frustration of his early youth, for he had no idea what would happen next. His needing to be near them, not thinking of them as his cleaning women, yearning to satisfy himself, made his mouth dry. The desert heat of this big blighted place didn’t help. In Las Vegas, where money was everything, he could have anything he wanted, because he had money. But his first day showed him the falseness of that proposition, for he was still alone.

He chose not to stay at the California Hotel, because they were there and he had no clear plan. His only pleasure in his room at the MGM Grand lay in his remembering how he had desired the two women in Hawaii — washing his car, mopping the floor, disheveled nymphs. Las Vegas itself he found appalling for its lights and its carnival atmosphere, the mindlessness of its advertised pleasures. The frenzy, built on sand.

With a stranger in the elevator, tapping the poster for the casino, he found himself saying that it was silly to think that anyone actually believed you could get rich by gambling.

“Then what are you doing here?” the stranger said.

The stranger, a white-haired blotchy-faced man, was wearing a cheap shirt and sneakers, but Wevill found it an intimidating question, for his coming here to see the women was a greater gamble than throwing down money.

Still, that first day he located the California Hotel and Casino, where they were both staying. He watched it from across the street but went no closer. He longed to see the mother and daughter, but just to gape, for he was not yet prepared to confront them. His sneaking satisfied him, gave him a way to pass the time — stalker time.

The frenzy evident everywhere in the city was something he could not share. His mood was opposite — the only watchful, cautious person in Las Vegas. He was passionate but he was particular, and there was only one way out. Apart from buying tasteless meals — there were no other kinds for him here — he hardly spent money. Steeling himself, he went into the California’s casino and scanned the faces and saw islanders pushing money into slot machines, others plopping chips onto numbers on the roulette felt, turning over cards at the blackjack tables, always losing. It was a place for children, big old idiot children, a terrible place, and he began to feel the rage of the prophet at his first Las Vegas sighting.

He knew that he was in this defiled and pagan desert just as obsessively, but that his desire was pure.

Bumping into the women would be best — just let it happen. But his wandering in the casino turned to methodical pursuit as he stalked the rows of gaming tables and banks of slot machines, like an anxious father looking for his missing children.

They were nowhere in that crowd, or any crowd he searched on his second day of being in Las Vegas. He was embarrassed to seem so serious and sad as he walked among the shouting, laughing people on the sidewalks and in hotel lobbies. He looked everywhere, the hunt made him sadder. His only satisfaction was that he saw no one who even remotely resembled them in the whole riotous city. The trouble was, by lingering as he did, and looking uncertain, he was pestered by hookers, who seemed to understand that here was a lonely man with a hole in his life.

Am in town for some meetings — just thought I’d stop by, he practiced to himself, trying to strike the most casual tone in the note he eventually wrote and left at the front desk of the California Hotel. Then he went and hid in his room.

Rita called that night.

In the lobby of the California he was approached by a dark woman in a green dress. Her tight pulled-back hair gave her foreign face a gleaming largeness and a fierce beetling confidence. She said, “How’s it?” and he stepped back. Even after he sized her up he did not recognize her. Then another, smaller woman appeared, with the same hair, the same peering face, and tapped the first one on the shoulder. Now both women were smiling, so Wevill smiled uncertainly back at them — he did not have a clue — and his anxious suspicion was that they were both hookers, not soliciting sex but working a scam whereby one bimbo would hold his attention while the other picked his pocket.

“So how long you been here?”

The first woman was still smiling in the familiar way of a con artist.

“He don’t get it,” the other said.

And he almost objected — Excuse me, I’m here to meet some people — when he realized it was them.

They were much taller in their stiletto heels, and they were darker but in the same towering and stylish way — almost as tall as him. Their new dresses gave them bosoms and cleavage. Their legs were long and in flesh-toned tights seemed bare. He had never seen their legs, for they had always worn sweatpants and slippers. No baggy clothes here, not disheveled at all. Their hair was perfect, they wore makeup, mascara, red lips, nail polish. He was still stepping backward when he saw who they were.

“Sorry!”

He was dreadfully embarrassed and off balance, with an odd toppling sense of being in the wrong.

The Hawaiian housecleaners looked poised and prosperous in the lobby of their Las Vegas hotel. They looked prettier and better dressed than the other women there, more self-possessed.

“For a minute there, I didn’t…”

Didn’t know what to say, for though he now knew they were Rita and Nina, now that the two women were the same height, he was not sure which was which.

He was still backing up, gabbling, trying to cover his embarrassment. He said, “I made a dinner reservation at my hotel.”

“You’re staying which place?”

“MGM Grand. It's very nice. Excellent kitchen.”

One of the women laughed and the other said, “She wants ribs.”

He was lost again. Hadn’t she heard “I made a dinner reservation”? It was the height of bad manners, he was thinking, and then realized how glad he was to see them. But he was thrown by the awkwardness of the meeting, and put off by the way they were dressed — intimidated as much by their stylishness as their sense of being so at home here.

“There’s this place — Tony Roma’s. Famous for ribs.”

He had no idea; but this woman’s voice was Rita’s. He glanced at the other woman and recognized Nina by her eyes and her smile.

“Three for dinner,” Rita was saying into her cell phone. “Ten, fifteen minutes. Under ‘Nelson.’”

This Filipino-Chinese haole’s name was Nelson?

The restaurant was a block away. Wevill felt small and conspicuous as they walked, some passersby staring at them, seeing the gray-haired man with the two young dressed-up women. But in the restaurant he felt like King Farouk — other diners glanced as they made their way among the tables, following the waiter.

“Mom’s bummed ’cause I’m wearing her dress.”

They wore each other’s clothes. That he found sexy, as though they were sisters and equals, not mother and daughter.

“You look like sisters.”

“Now Rita’s bummed, you saying that.”

“Nina is so bummed!”

But their calling each other by first names also proved what he meant. Wevill was holding the menu. He said, speaking carefully, “Is it baby-back ribs or baby back-ribs?”

They stared at him and Nina seemed to mouth the word “whatever” as the waiter appeared.

“Offer you cocktails before dinner?”

Rita said, “Vodka tonic. Straight up. You got Absolut?”

“Bailey’s Irish Cream,” Nina said.

Wevill was startled by their promptness. He said, “Beer for me.”

Stumped for something to say, Wevill studied his menu until the drinks came.

“We’re ready to order,” Nina said to the waiter.

“The ribs here, like, melt in your mouth,” Rita said to Wevill, as though hurrying him. He took the hint and ordered ribs, as the women did.

The food was brought within minutes. Everything happened quickly here, speed was a feature of the place, even the way people gambled seemed speedy, jamming coins into the machines, plopping chips on the grid of the roulette felt, dealing and snapping cards, the whole loud overbright town like the lurid midway of a carnival.

The women were chewing the meat — Wevill took pleasure in the way they gnawed the bones; but he could not eat, he was too nervous, he felt like a child, a sick patient with two inattentive nurses. He was in their hands. He was astonished at their confidence.

“Like Ma says, they melt in your mouth,” Nina said.

“I don’t know why I just thought of this,” Wevill said, “but back in the days when I was seeing a shrink — my wife suggested it, first wife — I saw him four times a week. One day I was at a movie. It was The Godfather. I saw my shrink at the counter buying popcorn. It was very awkward. I mean, seeing my doctor at this movie. He pretended not to recognize me — and he looked different, too. He just walked past me.”

“Al Pacino looked like a little kid in that movie,” Rita said.

“I always put mochi crunch in my popcorn,” Nina said.

“It just came to me, that thought,” Wevill said. His mouth was dry with throat strain from a sorrow that ached like unslaked thirst. “Not important.”

Meat flecks on their glistening lips, chew marks on the animal ribs in their hands, the two women ate, smiling as they swallowed, their breasts brushing their plates of meat and bones.

“So how’s the gambling?” Wevill asked.

“It ain’t real gambling,” Rita said. “It’s just gaming, like a game, mostly just slots. Just feed the slots.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Wevill loved the juicy way she said the word “slots,” then he muttered the word himself and was slightly disgusted by it.

“You win, though?”

“My machines are junk. Not coming across,” Rita said.

Nina said, “One wahine from Waipahu won big in slots.”

She seemed to imply that this woman’s win made their chances slimmer.

“You got special machines?”

Nina had finished her ribs and picked up the small dessert menu on the table. “They got this pie with Oreo cookie cruss that is so ono.”

Meanwhile, Rita was answering Wevill’s question, explaining to him, as perhaps she had once explained to her daughter, that you first played a lot of machines, then narrowed your choice to the luckier ones that paid out, and played those, feeding quarters, two machines at a time.

“To tell you the truth, I came here after I saw Ramon in his coffin. I was moved.”

The women half glanced at each other, then checked their glances, reacting like jurors, maintaining poker-faced court etiquette. But he knew he had made his point.

“How do you spend the day?”

Rita was at first evasive. Then she said, “Big breakfast buffet, then do some shopping on the Strip, play the slots, bite of lunch at the casino, then play the slots again. Free beer if you keep playing. At night we take in a show, or maybe get a few drinks and ribs, or play the slots.”

Shtrip and djrinks set his teeth on edge and reminded him of where they were from, where Strip, drinks, slots, ribs, Vegas, and party were their code words for pleasure.

“We saw that guy that's on TV George Carlin. Funny comedian.”

“In a show?” Wevill asked.

“No. He was eating one ice cream,” Nina said. “On the Strip.”

“We went to Le Cirque with a group. Kind of a group from home.”

What he had anticipated as vicious turned out to be like camp for adults — organized, devoted to games and friends, with regular meals and even the circumscribed campsite of the Strip — the sort of vacation he had never taken himself, pure mindless fun, spending every penny you had, drinking yourself silly, gorging on rich food, then going home to your ordinary life after this harmless binge.

They knew their way around, they were familiar and unafraid — quite different from the two diligent women who sweated at his house every Saturday. And now, after the meal, they were a bit tipsy, too, a condition he had never seen them in.

Rita said, “I’m going to check out the slots.”

Was she more than tipsy — drunk, maybe? She simply got up, gave her daughter a kiss, and waved goodbye, murmuring.

Adding to Wevill’s bafflement was the fact that neither of them, so far, had used his name. With Rita gone, there was a silence, Nina gnawing at a fingernail until she became self-conscious.

“I broke it — on a machine. Stud poker. Gotta glue it,” she said, picking at the nail. “So how’s business?”

“Fine,” Wevill said, thinking, What business? Then he remembered his lie. He said, “To tell the truth, I’m kind of lonely.”

“You’ll be okay once you get back home,” Nina said, and reached for the dessert menu.

He winced, not at being patronized by a twenty-year-old but at the thought that he would not be okay back home; he would be miserable.

Summoning all his psychic strength, he leaped into the darkness, saying, “I could use a massage.”

Nina laughed and said promptly, “You sure came to the right place. Vegas has billions of ladies for that.” She smiled fondly at the dessert menu, as though she had just recognized an old friend. “I am such a chocoholic.”

Wevill persisted, saying, “You wouldn’t be interested?”

With the dessert menu in her hand she was confused by the question at first. She squinted as his proposition sank in, but she didn’t look up. Her finger rested on Oreo cookie crust, and she said, “You serious?”

Her tone told him she took the question to be preposterous, and he was embarrassed, not so much because he had exposed his yearning to her but because she was so strong. The mother, too; they were powerful here. He had suspected it from the beginning. They even had money — they didn’t need him. Nina was young, he had been rash, but if he hadn’t asked the question, he would have cursed himself for his hesitation.

“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t regret it: he had needed to know.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Nina said.

But her saying that infuriated him — his housecleaner patronizing him again. He called for the check.

“I’d like to see your slot machines,” he said after he signed the credit card slip.

“Be my guest.”

Her casual way of saying that, with such confidence, aroused him, and all he regretted was that she was uninterested in him. Walking out of the restaurant behind the young woman, being stared at, he thought, This is my housecleaner and she has just turned me down.

The casino in the California Hotel was just off the Strip — bright lights on the marquee advertising the music and magic shows, a red carpet at the entrance, and mirrors on the walls framed by glitter and more lights. But for all the sparkle, the place was filled with shabby older people, heavy smokers, shufflers in windbreakers and baseball caps, old men in big white sneakers, a drabness that depressed him.

“There’s Ma.”

Rita was feeding dollar tokens into two machines, side by side, not paying much attention but being conscientious, even laborious, as though priming a pump, which in a sense was exactly what she was doing. While Wevill watched, Rita lost thirty-two dollars.

Nina smiled at him and, as though late for duty, went to the cashier and got a bucket, took her place on a stool, and began to press coins into the slots. She made it seem strangely like work, just as joyless. Even when they won, got a payout in a clatter of coins, they didn’t count them but instead scooped them out of the metal dish and, without looking, dumped them into the buckets of tokens they were feeding into the machines.

Wevill was fascinated for ten or fifteen minutes, and then utterly bored to the point of annoyance and wanted to leave. Between them in that time the women had lost a couple of hundred dollars, not a lot to him, but to them a day’s pay. Pure folly.

Rita saw him looking agitated. She said, “Try your luck. Them ones and them ones are pretty good payers.”

Each of these flashing goggling money-gobblers held for her a distinct personality.

Wevill said, “I think I’ll have an early night.”

“In Vegas?” There was contempt in her incredulity.

Wevill said, “Unless you want to do something later? Catch a show?”

“Nina and I are seeing someone.”

Another rejection. Their indifference back in Hawaii had been bad enough, but this rebuff was terrible. They were still like Watteau nymphs, just as selfish, hovering, teasing, forever slipping out of his grasp, so self-contained, so independent, but tidy and strangely efficient. They did not see his interest, or if they did, they took no interest themselves in him, in his feelings, in anything he owned. They laughed and agreed with anything he said, which was their way of not listening, not agreeing, hardly caring.

Standing there in the casino among the slots, he saw them turned away from him, dressed up, even stylish, and he desired them and wanted to possess them. As a wealthy man, a successful lawyer, he was not used to being rebuffed and, unused to it, had trouble dealing with it. Crushed and wounded, his desire was raw and on his mind. He had not imagined rejection to be so painful.

So, what could have been something trivial, a lack of interest, a pair of unresponsive women, was a goad, and they obsessed him.

He was used to being needed. They didn’t need him. That made him want to possess them, either one, or both.

Wevill could never have admitted that he envied them, yet he did envy them in the worst and most shameful way. He was hungry and helpless, and they defeated him with half-smiles and evasions — as he had done so often with envious visitors in his house. That was what shamed him. That he recognized the feeling, the experience of envy and defeat, seeing someone more powerful than he was.

In his room, he fell asleep watching a made-for-TV movie about a schoolgirl persecuted for being new to the school and friendless, and he was moved by it, saddened by its pathos, the weak and isolated girl, her insensitive parents (“You have to face up to them!”), the beasts who teased her until she was in despair, the one teacher who understood and defended the girl. His eyes dampened and he was further moved by his own almost-tears. He woke sorrowing that he had not seen the ending, but hating the thought that lonely people found meaning in such movies. He had been susceptible. It had to be crap.

The following day he made plans to leave Las Vegas. He was humiliated, the worst possible outcome, for now he had to fire Rita and Nina — how could he face them? — and would have to find other housecleaners.

“All our flights today are full,” the airline clerk said on the phone.

“I’m holding a first-class ticket.”

“I’m looking at first class. I’m not seeing any seats. You want me to wait-list you?”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Nothing in first class. I have a coach seat on the seven-ten.”

A coach seat among half-wits returning to the islands, having flung all their money into slot machines. But he took it, because the indignity of the seat wasn’t as hurtful as the humiliation of staying in Las Vegas. He resolved to kill the day in his room. He found the city excruciating for its crass appetites and confidence tricks, and he suspected a greater, hidden debauchery. He went without breakfast, he sat glowering, cursing the place, mumbling denunciations, feeling lightheaded and virtuous because of his hunger.

Around noon the phone rang, startling him. Who knew he was here?

“It’s me.”

Who? Then he knew, it was one or the other, slightly drunk, making no sense, like the grubby gamblers bingeing here in this carnival freak show.

“Gotta talk.”

“Maybe we could arrange to meet somewhere — go out for coffee.”

“I’m downstairs,” she said, and sounded to him like a cop.

He hurried to the lobby and saw Rita. He easily recognized her because she was wearing slacks and sneakers and a T-shirt lettered Vegas. Her hair had come loose. She looked as she had some Saturdays when she arrived with Nina to clean, and that pleased him and gave him hope and put an edge on his desire.

The hotel coffee shop was called the Cactus Flower Terrace, a sign at the entrance saying, Please Wait to Be Seated. Rita muttered something and walked past the sign and seated herself at a booth. Wevill followed, feeling he was trespassing and wondering if the waitress who appeared with menus would reprimand him.

“Just coffee,” Rita said without glancing up.

She looked darkly assertive, with her head down and her elbows out, not looking at Wevill, even when the coffee was poured and she was holding her cup in two hands and blow-sucking at the steamy surface.

“Shoulda had some of this before. As a rule, I don’t normally drink nothing at lunchtime.” Now she looked up, her red eyes on him. “But I was stressed.”

“That’s understandable,” he started to say, thinking, Shtressed?

But she cut him off. “My money’s pau, and plus all that other stuff too, besides.”

He had no idea what she was saying, but he was aware of another creeping sensation that was binding him to his seat, making him wait, holding him captive. It was not for him to negotiate. She was proceeding at her own speed. He recalled being in his room, at the window, denouncing Las Vegas, and the phone ringing, and I’m downstairs. He had been summoned to this meeting. Something unsaid disturbed him.

“Give me a minute,” she said.

“I was just wondering,” he said.

“Try wait. I’m drinking my coffee.”

He leaned back as though she had scooped him with an uppercut.

“So what’s this I been hearing about one massage?” she finally said.

His dry mouth would not allow him to He, yet he tried, saying, “I don’t know what you mean. I was just upstairs getting ready to leave. I’ve got a flight back to Honolulu first thing tomorrow.”

“Nina said you hitting on her about one massage.”

“I was not hitting on her,” Wevill said. Some of the time he was just a civilian, but certain words, actionable language he heard with his attorney ears, set his attorney mind in motion.

“She say you was.”

Why, he wondered, was bad grammar so much more threatening than proper English?

“I mentioned that I was thinking of getting one, not that I expected her to give me one personally. I mean, my asking her there and then — that would be ridiculous.”

Saying this, denying what he had done, and trying to laugh, he understood his guilt and saw how foolish he had been.

The waitress returned and said, “Would you like me to tell you what’s on special today?”

Rita said “No!” with such ferocity the waitress stepped back and hurried away.

Wevill said, “Why did you react when I mentioned Ramon? Were you impressed?”

“I was trying not to laugh,” she said. “Ramon didn’t like you. One day he says, 'I dig holes for a living. I could dig one big enough for that bugger to fit in.’”

And still she was not through with him. Alert, despite her drunkenness, she said, “So when you go, Are you interested?’ you don’t mean Nina, you mean someone else?”

It was diabolical how her drunken alertness made her more intimidating than a trial lawyer, for her pounce and probity were unexpected. She was a deadly combination of gruffness and barely articulate intelligence.

“Try give me some kine answer.”

He felt old and weak and breathless and whatever was the opposite of desire — fear more than repulsion — and all this had destroyed his will. He was trapped like a felon on a plastic cushion in the Cactus Flower Terrace. He could now understand a mumbling and terrified man being cross-examined on a witness stand. He was defeated. He was dreadfully embarrassed by what he had attempted, and the attempt was an act. The words she had quoted were almost verbatim. He could not deny saying them.

“I’m sorry. I made a mistake. An inexcusable error of judgment.”

“She just a kid, Nina.”

Rita was right. He had taken advantage of the girl, yet everything he had experienced in this loud hellish-hot city proved that he was weak. Sitting here he felt powerless, his head bowed under the scolding.

“You coulda asked me first,” she said, swallowing coffee.

This was ambiguous to him. She might have been saying, “You could have asked me instead of Nina,” or, seeking permission, “You could have asked me if you wanted Nina.”

“What would you have said if I had asked?”

“I woulda said,” she murmured, drinking from the cup, “I woulda said, 'Try explain.'”

“I admit it was a mistake,” he said.

“So you don't want nothing?”

Her staring, her scolding, forced him to be particular, and to endure the final humiliation in order to clear himself, he said, “Yes. I wanted a massage.”

She would not accept this. She said, “You don't mean massage when you say massage.”

He just closed his eyes and prayed for someone to yell “Fire!” or for a fight to start or an earthquake to hit and topple the whole miserable city.

Rita said, “Okay, pay the bill. Let's go.”

He left money on the table — too much, so that they could leave swiftly — and in the lobby he said, “Where?”

She said in a gummy way, phlegm clotted in her throat, “You know where.”

He did not desire this unstable, unfamiliar woman, not even in the irrational way of lust. He was never at his best in the afternoon in any case. He would have preferred a meal or a drink at dusk, a prologue, a beginning, a middle. This was all end, not simply abrupt but cold captivity. In the elevator she stood apart but confident, less like a jailer than a kidnapper, and in his room he felt like a hostage. No, not at all like a hooker and a john.

“Okay, get naked.”

Wevill said, “I've changed my mind.”

“No,” she said loudly, as she had in the restaurant, sounding crazy, but here her voice had the gnawing ferocity of a big cat. Her irrationality made her confident, and she watched without interest while Wevill undressed, pulling off his shirt, stepping out of his pants and folding them.

“You try tell Nina I come here and I cut your balls off.”

That did it. He had been having trouble locating desire within himself, but hearing those words he felt giddy terror and used his hands to cover himself.

“Look at you,” Rita said in a mocking way, flicking her fingers.

He said, “How much do you want?”

“Coupla hundred.”

“Done.” He gave her the money gladly, paying her to go, which she did, seeming to swagger, slamming the door.

When it came time for him to leave Las Vegas, Wevill did not feel he was fleeing a scene of failure to one of greater failure. Did they know they had a case against him? Stalking. Harassment. Mental and emotional distress. He did not even consider firing them, though he wanted to. He told himself he was not afraid of them, but in his own house he was. He should never have left his house in the first place.

The women returned, not so much disheveled nymphs as slatterns, but no less attractive. Wevill was disgusted and afraid. He was on the point of saying, “The check’s on the counter,” when Nina left the room and Rita looked straight at him and smiled.

“We was in Vegas.”

Wevill began to back away.

“It was a blast.”

Wevill smiled insincerely.

“I met a great guy.”

Wevill was surprised, then confused, finally sad.

“The check’s on the counter,” he said, and left his house.

How was he to know the woman was capable of such subtlety? It was weeks before they spoke again, months before she told him what was on her mind, that the man she had met in Vegas was him; that she was going back alone; that there was still time for him to get the Vegas package.

They flew separately. They met discreedy. While Rita played the slots, he read on the terrace. Together, in the room, they were passionate. She was the stronger here, the more confident; he delighted in her teasing him with demands. The week of delirium and exhaustion was over before he was ready. He returned reluctantly to Hawaii, where he was, just as reluctantly, the boss and she the good mother and grandmother. The arrangement continued for several years — six trips to Vegas altogether — until Wevill died, only sixty-four. As his executor, I had the pleasure of telling Rita of her substantial share of his estate. But she hardly seemed to care about the money, and was devastated, unlike his ex-wife, who by the way got a lot less.