living with my mother again, and I had already resolved to stay only as long as it took to save up for my first month’s rent and security on a new place back in New York. By my math, if I scrimped, I could be back in the city by September. I tried not to imagine where I’d end up—a dingy sublet, a windowless closet, mice scrabbling in the walls. But I thought that even the worst of my options would feel like a small success.
I signaled for my check, and as I thumbed through my cash I stopped to finger the two-dollar bill I kept behind the plastic pane that held my driver’s license. I took it out and laid it on the bar. My father had always carried it, claimed it gave him good luck.
The edges of the bill were velvet between my fingers, though now one of the corners was missing. On the back, where it showed the Trumbull painting of the Declaration being signed, my father had drawn a lightning bolt above Ben Franklin’s head, though now it was covered with a splotch of dried glue. The guy did a lot for electricity, my father used to say. I owe him. When I was little it had made me so proud—to look across the water from our town three miles to the south and know that my father helped make Atlantic City glow.
I loaned the bill to Matthew for good luck before his last interview with Artforum four months ago, and I didn’t see it again until it turned up in the center of a collage in his last show. I was charmed that it seemed to mean something to him and pleased with my own magnanimity. But underneath it all, maybe I felt a change in my grip on him. Maybe I thought that two-dollar bill bought me what I shouldn’t need to purchase: His loyalty. His love.
In the collage, he had included it among a recent dry cleaning ticket, an electric bill, a hair tie, a grocery list on the back of an index card: bread avocado butter lettuce detergent. Layered underneath were slices of a photo of us. I recognized it right away—it was the first picture we had ever taken together as a couple, on the rooftop of a new hotel in DUMBO, the lights of the city sparkling behind us. I found a sliver of the image that contained my eye, another of Matthew’s mouth, my fingers on the stem of a glass, a slice of Matthew’s forehead. All the meaning and glitter obscured by the drudgery of daily life. It was a bad, crude piece, which only added to the insult—it only became art after I tore the bill away, hands shaking with rage, leaving just a corner, a single filigreed 2, behind. I read later that it was one of the first pieces to sell. People said I must have been in on it.
If only that was true.
I slapped a ten on the bar top and slid the two-dollar bill back in my wallet, climbed down from my stool. A woman at a slot machine behind me mumbled a curse as she watched the numbers spin and, one by one, roll to a halt. Her expression shifted, her dumb, openmouthed hope contracting into grim disappointment. She shoved more coins into the machine like she was trying to teach it a lesson.
I hadn’t been inside the casino since the new tower had been completed. The ground floor of it was made up of a long, tunnellike hallway that curved around a swimming pool, which was capped off by a glass dome that was filled with rattan cabanas and lounge chairs, lush with imported palm trees and hibiscus. The casino had named it the Swim Club. Even from the outside, it reeked of something saccharine and something chemical: piña colada mix and chlorine, suntan lotion and canned pineapple. The cocktail waitresses wore aqua bikinis and delivered brightly colored drinks on wicker trays. The spa was just across the hall, the entrance a metal door installed in floor-to-ceiling plate glass. Maybe it was the effect of that quick drink, but between all the glass of the Swim Club and the spa’s façade I was reminded of an aquarium, and I had the slightly unnerving, claustrophobic feeling of being underwater and being watched. I looked up to the ceiling, found the glossy eye of the nearest security camera, jerked my gaze away.
The spa