lose. Yet even in the midst of his new laid-backness he still had that crazed and slightly heroic look of schoolboy insolence, all the more stirring since it was drifting towards autumn, half-ruined and careless of itself.
In the house on Desert End Road, which had the super-expensive cable television package my mother would never let us get, he drew the blinds against the glare and sat smoking in front of the television, glassy as an opium addict, watching ESPN with the sound off, no sport in particular, anything and everything that came on: cricket, jai alai, badminton, croquet. The air was overly chilled, with a stale, refrigerated smell; sitting motionless for hours, the filament of smoke from his Viceroy floating to the ceiling like a thread of incense, he might as well have been contemplating the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha as the leaderboard at the PGA or whatever.
What wasn’t clear was if my dad had a job—or, if he did, what kind of job it was. The phone rang all hours of the day and night. My dad went in the hallway with the handset, his back to me, bracing his arm against the wall and staring at the carpet as he talked, something in his posture suggesting the attitude of a coach at the end of a tough game. Usually he kept his voice well down but even when he didn’t, it was tough to understand his end of the conversation: vig, moneyline, odds-on favorite, straight up and against the spread. He was gone much of the time, on unexplained errands, and a lot of nights he and Xandra didn’t come home at all. “We get comped a lot at the MGM Grand,” he explained, rubbing his eyes, sinking back into the sofa cushions with an exhausted sigh—and again I got a sense of the character he was playing, moody playboy, relic of the eighties, easily bored. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s just when she’s working the late shift, it’s easier for us to crash on the Strip.”
viii.
“WHAT ARE ALL THESE papers everywhere?” I asked Xandra one day while she was in the kitchen making her white diet drink. I was confused by the pre-printed cards I kept finding all over the house: grids pencilled in with row after monotonous row of figures. Vaguely scientific-looking, they had a creepy feel of DNA sequences, or maybe spy transmissions in binary code.
She switched the blender off, flicked the hair out of her eyes. “Excuse me?”
“These work sheets or whatever.”
“Bacca-rat!” said Xandra—rolling the r, doing a tricky little fillip with her fingers.
“Oh,” I said after a flat pause, though I’d never heard the word before.
She stuck her finger in the drink, and licked it off. “We go to the baccarat salon at the MGM Grand a lot?” she said. “Your dad likes to keep track of his played games.”
“Can I go some time?”
“No. Well yeah—I guess you could,” she said, as if I’d inquired about vacation prospects in some unstable Islamic nation. “Except they’re not super-welcoming of kids in the casinos? You’re not really allowed to come and watch us play.”
So what, I thought. Standing around and watching Dad and Xandra gamble was scarcely my idea of fun. Aloud, I said: “But I thought they had tigers and pirate boats and things like that.”
“Yeah, well. I guess.” She was reaching up for a glass on the shelf, exposing a quadrangle of blue-inked Chinese characters between her T-shirt and her low-slung jeans. “They tried to sell this whole family-friendly package a few years ago, but it didn’t wash.”
ix.
I MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances—which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn’t beat me up. She was my first inkling that women over forty—women maybe not all that great-looking to start with—could be sexy. Though she wasn’t pretty in the face (bullet eyes, blunt little nose, tiny teeth) still she was in shape, she worked out, and her arms and legs were so glossy and tan that they looked almost sprayed, as if she anointed herself with lots of creams and oils. Teetering in her high shoes, she walked fast, always tugging at her too-short skirt, a forward-leaning walk, weirdly alluring. On some level, I was repelled by her—by her stuttery voice, her thick, shiny lip gloss that came in a tube that said Lip Glass; by the multiple pierce holes in her ears and the gap