xxviii.
THOUGH I’D BEEN IN Las Vegas almost half a year it was only my fourth or fifth time on the Strip—and Boris (who was content enough in our little orbit between school, shopping plaza, and home) had scarcely been into Vegas proper at all. We stared in amazement at the waterfalls of neon, electricity blazing and pulsing and cascading down in bubbles all around us, Boris’s upturned face glowing red and then gold in the crazy drench of lights.
Inside the Venetian, gondoliers propelled themselves down a real canal, with real, chemical-smelling water, as costumed opera singers sang Stille Nacht and Ave Maria under artificial skies. Boris and I trailed along uneasily, feeling shabby, scuffing our shoes, too stunned to take it all in. My dad had made reservations for us at a fancy, oak-panelled Italian restaurant—the outpost of its more famous sister restaurant in New York. “Order what you like, everyone,” he said, pulling out Xandra’s chair for her. “My treat. Go wild.”
We took him at his word. We ate asparagus flan with shallot vinaigrette; smoked salmon; smoked sable carpaccio; perciatelli with cardoons and black truffles; crispy black bass with saffron and fava beans; barbecued skirt steak; braised short ribs; and panna cotta, pumpkin cake, and fig ice cream for dessert. It was by leaps and fathoms the best meal I’d eaten in months, or maybe ever; and Boris—who’d eaten two orders of the sable all by himself—was ecstatic. “Ah, marvelous,” he said, for the fifteenth time, practically purring, as the pretty young waitress brought out an extra plate of candies and biscotti with the coffee. “Thank you! Thank you Mr. Potter, Xandra,” he said again. “Is delicious.”
My dad—who hadn’t eaten all that much compared to us (Xandra hadn’t either)—pushed his plate aside. The hair at his temples was damp and his face was so bright and red he was practically glowing. “Thank the little Chinese guy in the Cubs cap who kept betting the bank in the salon this afternoon,” he said. “My God. It was like we couldn’t lose.” In the car, he’d already shown us his windfall: the fat roll of hundreds, wrapped up with a rubber band. “The cards just kept coming and kept coming. Mercury in retrograde and the moon was high! I mean—it was magic. You know, sometimes there’s a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you’re it, you know? You’re the light? There’s this fantastic dealer here, Diego, I love Diego—I mean, it’s crazy, he looks just like Diego Rivera the painter only in a sharp-ass fucking tuxedo. Did I tell you about Diego already? Been out here forty years, ever since the old Flamingo days. Big, stout, grand-looking guy. Mexican, you know. Fast slippery hands and big rings—” he waggled his fingers—“ba-ca-RRRAT! God, I love these old-school Mexicans in the baccarat room, they’re so fucking stylish. Musty old elegant fellows, carry their weight well, you know? Anyway, we were at Diego’s table, me and the little Chinese guy, he was a trip too, horn-rimmed glasses and not a word of English, you know, just ‘San Bin! San Bin!’ drinking this crazy ginseng tea they all drink, tastes like dust but I love the smell, like the smell of luck, and it was incredible, we were on such a run, good God, all these Chinese women lined up behind us, we were hitting every hand—Do you think,” he said to Xandra, “it would be okay if I took them back into the baccarat salon to meet Diego? I’m sure they’d get a huge kick out of Diego. I wonder if he’s still on shift. What do you think?”
“He won’t be there.” Xandra looked good—bright-eyed and sparkly—in a velvet minidress and jewelled sandals, and redder lipstick than she usually wore. “Not now.”
“Sometimes, holidays, he works a double shift.”
“Oh, they don’t want to go back there. It’s a hike. It’ll take half an hour to get there through the casino floor and back.”
“Yeah, but I know he’d like to meet my kids.”
“Yeah, probably so,” Xandra said agreeably, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass. The tiny gold dove on her necklace glistened at the base of her throat. “He’s a nice guy. But Larry, I mean it, I know you don’t take me seriously but if you start getting too chummy with the dealers some day you’re going to go down there and have security on your ass.”
My father laughed. “God!” he said jubilantly, slapping the table, so loudly that I flinched. “If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought Diego really was helping at the table today. I mean, maybe he was. Telepathic baccarat! Get your Soviet researchers working on that,” he said to Boris. “That’ll straighten out your economic system over there.”
Boris—mildly—cleared his throat and lifted his water glass. “Sorry, may I say something?”
“Is it speechmaking time? Were we meant to prepare toasts?”
“I thank you all for your company. And I wish us all health, and happiness, and that we all shall live until the next Christmas.”
In the surprised silence that followed, a champagne cork popped in the kitchen, a burst of laughter. It was just past midnight: two minutes into Christmas Day. Then my father leaned back in his chair, and laughed. “Merry Christmas!” he roared, producing from his pocket a jewelry box which he slid over to Xandra, and two stacks of twenties (Five hundred dollars! Each!) which he tossed across the table to Boris and me. And though in the clockless, temperature-controlled casino night, words like day and Christmas were fairly meaningless constructs, happiness, amidst the loudly clinked glasses, didn’t seem quite such a doomed or fatal idea.
Chapter 6.
Wind, Sand and Stars
i.
OVER THE NEXT YEAR, I was so preoccupied in trying to block New York and my old life out of my mind that I hardly noticed the time pass. Days ran changelessly in the seasonless glare: hungover mornings on the school bus and our backs raw and pink from falling asleep by the pool, the gasoline reek of vodka and Popper’s constant smell of wet dog and chlorine, Boris teaching me to count, ask directions, offer a drink in Russian, just as patiently as he’d taught me to swear. Yes, please, I’d like that. Thank you, you are very kind. Govorite li vy po angliyskiy? Do you speak English? Ya nemnogo govoryu po-russki. I do speak Russian, a little.
Winter or summer, the days were dazzling; the desert air burned our nostrils and scraped our throats dry. Everything was funny; everything made us laugh. Sometimes, just before sundown, just as the blue of the sky began darkening to violet, we had these wild, electric-lined, Maxfield Parrish clouds rolling out gold and white into the desert like Divine Revelation leading the Mormons west. Govorite medlenno, I said, speak slowly, and Povtorite, pozhaluysta. Repeat, please. But we were so attuned to each other that we didn’t need to talk at all if we didn’t want to; we knew how to tip each other over in hysterics with an arch of the eyebrow or quirk of the mouth. Nights, we ate crosslegged on the floor, leaving greasy fingerprints on our schoolbooks. Our diet had made us malnourished, with soft brown bruises on our arms and legs—vitamin deficiency, said the nurse at school, who gave us each a painful shot in the ass and a colorful jar of children’s chewables. (“My bottom hurts,” said Boris, rubbing his rear end and cursing the metal seats on the school bus.) I was freckled head to toe from all the swimming we did; my hair (longer then than it’s ever been again) got light streaks from the pool chemicals and basically I felt good, though I still had a heaviness in my chest that never went away and my teeth were rotting out in the back from all the candy we ate. Apart from that, I was fine. And so the time passed happily enough; but then—shortly after my fifteenth birthday—Boris met a girl named Kotku; and everything changed.
The name Kotku (Ukrainian variant: Kotyku) makes her sound more interesting than she was; but it wasn’t her real name, only a pet name (“Kitty cat,” in Polish) that Boris had given her. Her last name was Hutchins; her given name was actually something like Kylie or Keiley or Kaylee; and she’d lived in Clark County, Nevada her whole life. Though she went to our school and was only a grade ahead of us, she was a lot older—older than me by three whole years. Boris, apparently, had had his eye on her for a while, but I hadn’t been aware of her until the afternoon he threw himself on the foot of my bed and said: ?
??I’m in love.”
“Oh yeah? With who?”
“This chick from Civics. That I bought some weed from. I mean, she’s eighteen, too, can you believe it? God, she’s beautiful.”
“You have weed?”
Playfully, he lunged and caught me by the shoulder; he knew just where I was weakest, the spot under the blade where he could dig his fingers and make me yelp. But I was in no mood and hit him, hard.
“Ow! Fuck!” said Boris, rolling away, rubbing his jaw with his fingertips. “Why’d you do that?”
“Hope it hurts,” I said. “Where’s that weed?”
We didn’t talk any more about Boris’s love interest, at least not that day, but then a few days later when I came out of math I saw him looming over this girl by the lockers. While Boris wasn’t especially tall for his age, the girl was tiny, despite how much older than us she seemed: flat-chested, scrawny-hipped, with high cheekbones and a shiny forehead and a sharp, shiny, triangle-shaped face. Pierced nose. Black tank top. Chipped black fingernail polish; streaked orange-and-black hair; flat, bright, chlorine-blue eyes, outlined hard, in black pencil. Definitely she was cute—hot, even; but the glance she slid over me was anxiety-provoking, something about her of a bitchy fast-food clerk or maybe a mean babysitter.
“So what do you think?” said Boris eagerly when he caught up with me after school.
I shrugged. “She’s cute. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well Boris, I mean, she looks like she’s, like, twenty-five.”
“I know! It’s great!” he said, looking dazed. “Eighteen years! Legal adult! She can buy booze no problem! Also she’s lived here her whole life, so she knows what places don’t check age.”
ii.
HADLEY, THE TALKATIVE LETTER-JACKET girl who sat by me in American history, wrinkled her nose when I asked about Boris’s older woman. “Her?” she said. “Total slut.” Hadley’s big sister, Jan, was in the same grade with Kyla or Kayleigh or whatever her name was. “And her mother, I heard, is a straight-up hooker. Your friend better be careful he doesn’t get some disease.”
“Well,” I said, surprised at her vehemence, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. Hadley, an army brat, was on the swim team and sang in the school choir; she had a normal family with three siblings, a Weimaraner named Gretchen that she’d brought over from Germany, and a dad who yelled if she was out past her curfew.
“I’m not kidding,” said Hadley. “She’ll make out with other girls’ boyfriends—she’ll make out with other girls—she’ll make out with anybody. Also I think she does pot.”
“Oh,” I said. None of these factors, in my view, were necessarily reasons to dislike Kylie or whatever, especially since Boris and I had wholeheartedly taken to smoking pot ourselves in the past months. But what did bother me—a lot—was how Kotku (I’ll continue to call her by the name Boris gave her, since I can’t now remember her real name) had stepped in overnight and virtually assumed ownership of Boris.
First he was busy on Friday night. Then it was the whole weekend—not just the night, but the day too. Pretty soon, it was Kotku this and Kotku that, and the next thing I knew, Popper and I were eating dinner and watching movies by ourselves.
“Isn’t she amazing?” Boris asked me again, after the first time he brought her over to my house—a highly unsuccessful evening, which had consisted of the three of us getting so stoned we could barely move, and then the two of them rolling around on the sofa downstairs while I sat on the floor with my back to them and tried to concentrate on a rerun of The Outer Limits. “What do you think?”
“Well, I mean—” What did he want me to say? “She likes you. Sure.”
He shifted, restlessly. We were outside by the pool, though it was too windy and cool to swim. “No, really! What do you think about her? Tell the truth, Potter,” he said, when I hesitated.
“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully, and then—when he still sat looking at me: “Honestly? I don’t know, Boris. She seems kind of desperate.”
“Yes? Is that bad?”
His tone was genuinely curious—not angry, not sarcastic. “Well,” I said, taken aback. “Maybe not.”
Boris—cheeks pink with vodka—put his hand on his heart. “I love her, Potter. I mean it. This is the truest thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”
I was so embarrassed I had to look away.
“Little skinny witch!” He sighed, happily. “In my arms, she’s so bony and light! Like air.” Boris, mysteriously, seemed to adore Kotku for many of the reasons I found her disturbing: her slinky alley-cat body, her scrawny, needy adultness. “And so brave and wise, such a big heart! All I want is to look out for her and keep her safe from that Mike guy. You know?”
Quietly, I poured myself another vodka, though I really didn’t need one. The Kotku business was all doubly perplexing because—as Boris himself had informed me, with an unmistakable note of pride—Kotku already had a boyfriend: a twenty-six-year-old guy named Mike McNatt who owned a motorcycle and worked for a pool cleaning service. “Excellent,” I said, when Boris had broken this news earlier. “We ought to get him out here to help with the vacuuming.” I was sick and tired of looking after the swimming pool (a job that had fallen largely to me), especially since Xandra never brought home enough chemicals or the right kind.
Boris wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It’s serious, Potter. I think she’s scared of him. She wants to break up with him but she’s afraid. She’s trying to talk him into going to a military recruiter.”
“You’d better be careful that guy doesn’t come after you.”
“Me!” He snorted. “It’s her I’m worried about! She’s so tiny! Eighty-one pounds!”
“Yeah, yeah.” Kotku claimed to be a “borderline anorexic” and could always get Boris worked up by saying she hadn’t eaten anything all day.
Boris cuffed me on the side of the head. “You sit too much around here on your own,” he said, sitting down beside me and putting his feet in the pool. “Come to Kotku’s tonight. Bring someone.”
“Such as—?”
Boris shrugged. “What about hot little blondie with the boy’s haircut, from your history class? The swimmer?”
“Hadley?” I shook my head. “No way.”
“Yes! You should! Because she is hot! And she would totally go!”
“Believe me, not a good idea.”
“I’ll ask her for you! Come on. She’s friendly to you, and always talks. Shall we call her?”
“No! It’s not that—stop,” I said, grabbing his sleeve as he started to get up.
“No guts!”
“Boris.” He was heading indoors to the phone. “Don’t. I mean it. She won’t come.”
“And why?”
The taunting edge in his voice annoyed me. “Honestly? Because—” I started to say Because Kotku is a ho which was only the obvious truth but instead I said: “Look, Hadley’s on Honor Roll and stuff. She’s not going to want to go hang out at Kotku’s.”
“What?” said Boris—spinning back, outraged. “That whore. What’d she say?”
“Nothing. It’s just—”
“Yes she did!” He was charging back to the pool now. “You’d better tell me.”
“Come on. It’s nothing. Chill out, Boris,” I said, when I saw how angry he was. “Kotku’s tons older. They’re not even in the same grade.”
“That snub-nosed bitch. What did Kotku ever do to her?”
“Chill out.” My eye landed on the vodka bottle, illumined by a clean white sunbeam like a light saber. He’d had way too much to drink, and the last thing I wanted was a fight. But I was too drunk myself to think of any funny or easy way to get him off the subject.
iii.
LOTS OF OTHER, BETTER girls our own age liked Boris—most notably Saffi Caspersen, who was Danish, spoke English with a high-toned British accent, had a minor role in a Cirque du Soleil production, and was by leaps and bounds the most beautiful
girl in our year. Saffi was in Honors English with us (where she’d had some interesting things to say about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) and though she had a reputation for being standoffish, she liked Boris. Anyone could see it. She laughed when he made jokes, acted goofy in his study group, and I’d seen her talking enthusiastically to him in the hall—Boris talking back just as enthusiastically, in his gesticulating Russian mode. Yet—mysteriously—he didn’t seem attracted to her at all.
“But why not?” I asked him. “She’s the best-looking girl in our class.” I’d always thought that Danes were large and blonde, but Saffi was smallish and brunette, with a fairy-tale quality that was accentuated by her glittery stage makeup in the professional photo I’d seen.
“Good looking yes. But she is not very hot.”
“Boris, she is smoking hot. Are you crazy?”
“Ah, she works too hard,” said Boris, dropping down beside me with a beer in one hand, reaching for my cigarette with the other. “Too straight. All the time studying or rehearsing or something. Kotku—” he blew out a cloud of smoke, handed the cigarette back to me—“she’s like us.”
I was silent. How had I gone from AP everything to being lumped in with a derelict like Kotku?
Boris nudged me. “I think you like her yourself. Saffi.”
“No, not really.”
“You do. Ask her out.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, although I knew I didn’t have the nerve. At my old school, where foreigners and exchange students tended to stand politely at the margins, someone like Saffi might have been more accessible but in Vegas she was much too popular, too surrounded by people—and there was also the biggish problem of what to ask her to do. In New York it would have been easy enough; I could have taken her ice skating, asked her to a movie or the planetarium. But I could scarcely see Saffi Caspersen sniffing glue or drinking beer from paper bags at the playground or doing any of the things that Boris and I did together.
iv.
I STILL SAW HIM—just not as much. More and more he spent nights with Kotku and her mother at the Double R Apartments—a transient hotel really, a broken down motor court from the 1950s, on the highway between the airport and the Strip, where guys who looked like illegal immigrants stood around the courtyard by the empty swimming pool and argued over motorcycle parts. (“Double R?” said Hadley. “You know what that stands for, right? ‘Rats and Roaches.’ ”) Kotku, mercifully, didn’t accompany Boris to my house all that much, but even when she wasn’t around he talked about her constantly. Kotku had cool taste in music and had made him a mix CD with a bunch of smoking hot hip-hop that I really had to listen to. Kotku liked her pizza with green peppers and olives only. Kotku really really wanted an electronic keyboard—also a Siamese kitten, or maybe a ferret, but wasn’t allowed to have pets at the Double R. “Serious, you need to spend more time with her, Potter,” he said, bumping my shoulder with his. “You’ll like her.”
“Oh come on,” I said, thinking of the smirky way she behaved around me—laughing at the wrong time, in a nasty way, always commanding me to go to the fridge to fetch her beers.
“No! She likes you! She does! I mean, she thinks of you more as a little brother. That’s what she said.”
“She never says a word to me.”
“That’s because you don’t talk to her.”
“Are you guys screwing?”
Boris made an impatient noise, the sound he made when things didn’t go his way.
“Dirty mind,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes, and then: “What? What do you think? Do you want me to make you a map?”
“Draw you a map.”
“Eh?”
“That’s the phrase. ‘Do you want me to draw you a map.’ ”
Boris rolled his eyes. Waving his hands around, he started in again about how intelligent Kotku was, how “crazy smart,” how wise she was and how much life she had lived and how unfair I was to judge her and look down on her without bothering to get to know her; but while I sat half listening to him talk, and half watching an old noir movie on television (Fallen Angel, Dana Andrews), I couldn’t help thinking about how he’d met Kotku in what was essentially Remedial Civics, the section for students who weren’t smart enough (even in our extremely non-demanding school) to pass without extra help. Boris—good at mathematics without trying and better in languages than anyone I’d ever met—had been forced into Civics for Dummies because he was a foreigner: a school requirement which he greatly resented. (“Because why? Am I likely to be someday voting for Congress?”) But Kotku—eighteen! born and raised in Clark County! American citizen, straight off of Cops!—had no such excuse.
Over and over, I caught myself in mean-spirited thoughts like this, which I did my best to shake. What did I care? Yes, Kotku was a bitch; yes, she was too dumb to pass regular Civics and wore cheap hoop earrings from the drugstore that were always getting caught in things, and yes, even though she was only eighty-one pounds or whatever she still scared the hell out of me, like she might kick me to death with her pointy-toed boots if she got mad enough. (“She a little fighta nigga,” Boris himself had said boastfully at one point as he hopped around throwing out gang signs, or what he thought were gang signs, and regaling me with a story of how Kotku had pulled out a bloody chunk of some girl’s hair—this was