So he, Jordan, had agreed to everything his wife wanted. He had sold his business and given her all the money. His lawyer told him he was being too generous, that he would regret it later. But Jordan said it really wasn’t generous because he could make a lot more money and his wife and her husband couldn’t. “You wouldn’t think it to watch me gamble,” Jordan said, “but I’m supposed to be a great businessman. I got job offers from all over the country. If my plane hadn’t landed in Vegas, I’d be working toward my first million bucks in Los Angeles right now.”
It was a good story, but to me it had a phony ring to it. He was just too nice a guy. It was all too civilized.
One of the things wrong with it was that I knew that he never slept nights. Every morning I went to the casino to work up an appetite for breakfast by throwing dice. And I’d find Jordan at the crap table. It was obvious he’d been gambling all night. Sometimes when he was tired, he’d be in the roulette or blackjack pits. And as the days went by, he looked worse and worse. He lost weight and his eyes seemed to be filled with red pus. But he was always gentle, very low-key. And he never said a word against his wife.
Sometimes, when Cully and I were alone in the lounge or at dinner, Cully would say, “Do you believe that fucking Jordan? Can you believe that a guy would let a dame put him out of whack like that? And can you believe how he talks about her like she’s the greatest cunt built?”
“She wasn’t a dame,” I said. “She was his wife for a lot of years. She was the mother of his children. She was the rock of his faith. He’s an old-time Puritan who got a knuckle ball thrown at him.”
It was Jordan who got me started talking. One day he said, “You ask a lot of questions, but you don’t say much.” He paused for a moment as if he were debating whether he was really interested enough to ask the question. Then he said, “Why are you here in Vegas for so long?”
“I’m a writer,” I told him. And went on from there. The fact that I had published a novel impressed both of them and that reaction always amused me. But what really amazed them was that I was thirty-one years old and had run away from a wife and three kids.
“I figured you most to be twenty-five,” Cully said. “And you don’t wear a ring.”
“I never wore a ring,” I said.
Jordan said kiddingly, “You don’t need a ring. You look guilty without it.” For some reason I couldn’t imagine him making that kind of joke when he was married and living in Ohio. Then he would have felt it rude. Or maybe his mind hadn’t been that free. Or maybe it was something his wife would have said and he would let her say and just sit back and enjoy it because she could get away with it and maybe he couldn’t. It was fine with me. Anyway, I told them the story about my marriage, and in the process it came out that the scar on my belly I had shown them was the scar of a gall bladder operation, not a war wound. At that point of the story Cully laughed and said, “You bullshit artist.”
I shrugged, smiled and went on with my story.
Chapter 5
I have no history. No remembered parents. I have no uncles, no cousins, no city or town. I have only one brother, two years older than me. At the age of three, when my brother, Artie, was five, we were both left in an orphanage outside New York. We were left by my mother. I have no memory of her.
I didn’t tell this to Cully and Jordan and Diane. I never talked about those things. Not even to my brother, Artie, who is closer to me than anyone in the world.
I never talk about it because it sounds so pathetic, and it wasn’t really. The orphanage was fine, a pleasant, orderly place with a good school system and an intelligent administrator. It did well by me until Artie and I left it together. He was eighteen and found a job and an apartment. I ran away to join him. After a few months I left him too, lied about my age and joined the Army to fight in WW II. And now here in Vegas sixteen years later I told Jordan and Cully and Diane about the war and my life that followed.
The first thing I did after the war was to enroll in writing courses in the New School for Social Research. Everybody then wanted to be a writer, as twenty years later everyone hoped to be a film-maker.
I had found it hard to make friends in the Army. It was easier at the school. I also met my future wife there. Because I had no family, except for my older brother, I spent a lot of time at the school, hanging out in the cafeteria rather than going back to my lonely rooms in Grove Street. It was fun. Every once in a while I got lucky and talked a girl into living with me for a few weeks. The guys I made friends with, all out of the Army and going to school under the GI Bill, talked my language. The trouble was that they were all interested in the literary life and I was not. I just wanted to be a writer because I was always dreaming stories. Fantastic adventures that isolated me from the world.
I discovered that I read more than anyone else, even the guys going for PhD’s in English. I didn’t really have much else to do, though I always gambled. I found a bookie on the East Side near Tenth Street and bet every day on ball games, football, basketball and baseball. I wrote some short stories and started a novel about the war. I met my wife in one of the short-story classes.
She was a tiny Irish-Scotch girl with a big bust and large blue eyes and very very serious about everything. She criticized other people’s stories carefully, politely, but very toughly. She hadn’t had a chance to judge me because I had not yet submitted a story to the class. She read a story of her own. And I was surprised because the story was very good and very funny. It was about her Irish uncles who were all drunks.
So when the story was over, the whole class jumped on her for supporting the stereotype that the Irish drank. Her pretty face contorted in hurt astonishment. Finally she was given a chance to answer.
She had a beautiful soft voice, and plaintively she said, “But I’ve grown up with the Irish. All of them drink. Isn’t that true?” She said this to the teacher, who also happened to be Irish. His name was Maloney and he was a good friend of mine. Though he didn’t show it, he was drunk at that very moment.
Maloney leaned back in his chair and said solemnly, “I wouldn’t know, I’m Scandinavian myself.” We all laughed and poor Valerie bowed her head, still confused. I defended her because though it was a good story, I knew she would never be a real writer. Everybody in the class was talented, but only a few had the energy and desire to go a long way, to give up their life for writing. I was one of them. I felt she was not. The secret was simple. Writing was the only thing I wanted to do.
Near the term end I finally submitted a story. Everybody loved it. After class Valerie came up to me and said, “How come I’m so serious and everything I write comes out sounding so funny? And you always make jokes and act as if you’re not serious and your story makes me cry?”
She was serious. As usual. She wasn’t coming on. So I took her for coffee. Her name was Valerie O’Grady, a name she hated for its Irishness. Sometimes I think she married me just to get rid of the O’Grady. And she made me call her Value. I was surprised when it took me over two weeks to get her in bed. She was no free swinging Village girl and she wanted to be sure I knew it. We had to go through a whole charade of my getting her drunk first so that she could accuse me of taking advantage of a national or racial weakness. But in bed she surprised me.
I hadn’t been that crazy about her before. But in bed she was great. I would guess that there are some people who fit sexually, who respond to each other on a primary sexual level. With us I think we were both so shy, so withdrawn into ourselves, that we couldn’t relax with other partners sexually. And that we responded to each other fully for some mysterious reason springing out of that mutual shyness. Anyway, after that first night in bed we were inseparable. We went to all the little movie houses in the Village and saw all the foreign films. We’d eat Italian or Chinese and go back to my room and make love, and about midnight I’d walk her to the subway so that she could go home to her family in Queens. She still didn’t have the nerve to stay overnight. Until one weekend she couldn’t resist. She wanted to be there Sunday to make me breakfast and read the Sunday papers with me in the morning. So she told the usual daughterly lies to her parents and stayed over. It was a beautiful weekend. But when she got home she ran into a clan fire fight. Her family jumped all over her, and when I saw her Monday night, she was in tears.
“Hell,” I said. “Let’s get married.”
