Of course, I was doing something wrong. I was always doing something wrong, whether in the eyes of my boyfriend, my family or myself. I knew enough to be blithe, in the last instance, especially.
“Have you seen Bruce?”
Oliver shook his head. “He won’t come out of his office.”
“Why not?”
This was rhetorical. Bruce had trouble showing himself whenever there was a transformation at hand.
“Look.” I lobbed Oliver’s phone back to him. He caught it in cupped palms. “Bruce invited us here.”
“Your mother did.”
“He still wants us to see something.”
Oliver shrugged. We were crossing the casino floor. It was half-empty, as you’d expect on Christmas Eve. A pair of Hasidic Jews were over by the slots; the middle-aged Asian cluster babbled amongst themselves in high tones that made it impossible to tell if they were winning or losing. Some wayward Italian-Americans, the sort you would’ve been sure were in on the action — Bruce’s ‘partners’ — if there’d been a film crew nearby, stood over by the blackjack tables, nursing glasses of Cutty Sark. This was Vegas in a nutshell, to me. You couldn’t tell the winners from the losers, anymore. You couldn’t even tell the management from the help.
“We’ve seen too much already.” Oliver sighed. “I can’t imagine Bruce surprising us with anything.”
“You never know.”
“You do know.” He punched the elevator button with his thumb. Incredibly, he kept texting even while he did this; he’d been frantically rattling out an epic message ever since we paid for our drinks and I’d returned his phone to him. “He’s gained weight, lost weight, found a new doctor or a new IP. Those are our options.”
“Are you writing a novel?”
“Glen just sent me a picture of his mother, weeping.”
“So you’re writing a self-help book?”
The elevator doors opened. No one told me anything. My own boyfriend communicated better with my gay brother than he did with me. I stepped into the elevator ahead of Oliver, and almost tripped over something on the floor.
“Twink??”
For a second, I’d been relieved. I like elevators, which give you a feeling of going somewhere without any of the anxiety associated with travel. Usually, I have to take a klonopin just to cross the 405. The air in the casino was heavily oxygenated. It smelled like freesias, and like the song they were playing, ABBA’s “Winner Takes it All,” cheap and cakey. I sucked in the cloud of urine without missing a beat. For a second I was over in the parking structure by the Santa Monica Promenade. Then I looked down and saw my niece.
“Hi Aunt May.”
“Sweetheart!” I couldn’t exactly embrace her, sodden as she was. My voice was glottal, as I’d stopped breathing through my nose. “That is a beautiful dress.”
“Thank you.” I have no idea, who taught her manners. Not Bruce. “Do you think you can fix my necklace?”
I bent down and adjusted the Hello Kitty loop around her neck. The geisha look had its limits, but at least she was hemispherically consistent.
“We need to get you out of that thing. And…what are you doing in here? Where’s your mother?”
She shrugged. She may have been the most feral child on the planet, but she was also the most self-sufficient and relaxed. Even when Bruce opened his club in West Hollywood — the one that got shut down after the IRS audited his books — he could just park her car seat under a table and leave her there for hours. That was two years ago.
“Have you been drinking?” Oliver said.
The doors closed. I took a last look at the Hasids, whose curls bobbed every time they pulled the slot levers. There was something encouraging about this sight, weirdly innocent. After all, it was Christmas.
“Nope. Just cocoa.”
The elevator surged upward. It was unnerving, too, having a niece who could handle herself in a casino, even while you still had to cut up her food for her. Then again, you had to do that for our mother too, when things were bad.
“This elevator’s fast,” I murmured. It’s true: it was one of those you felt in the pit of your stomach when it took off. Twink coughed. No wonder she was in here. I felt something warm go dribbling onto my shoes.
“Oh—
I looked down. My niece had thrown up. You would, too, alternating liftoff and freefall in this thing for close to fifteen minutes. Twink looked dizzy, but then she always did: she had the wall-eyed look of a born paranoid, and the stubby little physique of Bamm-Bamm. Her hair was platinum, even if both of her parents were brunettes. This child could not have been more of a mystery.
“Sorr-ry.” She said it in that teasing way that was almost as if she’d done it on purpose.
“It’s OK, lovey.” I fished in my bag for the Hermes scarf that was now definitely going to be my sister-in-law’s present. “It’s only a little bit.”
I bent down and daubed my ankles. For a second we rode in whooshing silence. Bruce was the one with the problems. In his own way, he carried all the neuroses for the rest of the family: they broke out in his life as violent symptoms, while the rest of us were all more-or-less quietly tormented. Gambling, binge-drinking, binge-eating, binge-spending: all the socially-permissible forms of criminality concentrated themselves in our brother, and we never knew which version we were going to find. My sister-in-law once caught him with three prostitutes, an eight-ball and a UPS truck driver all scattered in strange positions around his office; he’d had his first heart attack at the age of thirty-two. To my mother, it didn’t matter. He had a heterosexual mate and a child, simultaneously. No matter if the child was marinated in her own fluids and was quietly singing Celine Dion under her breath. It was still an offspring.
The elevator slowed. I could feel the blood racing back to my scalp, which prickled. It was like the sudden onset of flu. The elevator stopped and Oliver looked over at me and smiled. This was where it started, with Bruce’s new club. He looked down at Twink and mouthed her a kiss, and then the doors flew open.
