to get our attention.
“Come on, boys!” he said. His face was flushed and shiny and his voice very quick, with a strained, staccato quality I knew all too well. He had on one of his sharp old Dolce and Gabbana suits from New York but without a tie, the shirt loose and unbuttoned at the neck. “Go comb your hair and spruce up a bit. I’m taking us all out. Do you have anything better to wear, Theo? Surely you must.”
“But—” I stared at him in frustration. This was just like my dad, breezing in and changing the plan at the last moment.
“Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can’t it? Sure it can.” He was talking a mile a minute. “You can put the other thing back in the fridge too. We’ll have it tomorrow for Christmas lunch—will it still be praznyky? Is praznyky only on Christmas Eve? Am I confused about that? Well, okay, that’s when we’ll have ours—Christmas Day. New tradition. Leftovers are better anyway. Listen, this’ll be fantastic. Boris—” he was already shepherding Boris out of the kitchen—“what size shirt do you wear, comrade? You don’t know? Some of these old Brooks Brothers shirts of mine, I really ought to give the whole lot to you, great shirts, don’t get me wrong, they’ll probably come down to your knees but they’re a little too tight in the collar for me and if you roll up the sleeves they’ll look just fine.…”
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