The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [61]
The house refused to look her in the eyes.
She pressed a buzzer at the gate. In a moment, the gate buzzed back and she pushed herself onto the Jameson estate.
“On the clock now, I guess,” she said.
Nada was sick about the way she’d left Las Vegas. She really couldn’t have botched it worse. She thought about the last night there, slipping from sheets she no longer owned, padding to the black and chrome galley kitchen in David’s sweatpant shorts and oversize T-shirt, pouring cereal from a cardboard box. Like an alcoholic the morning after a relapse, she hated herself for coming back to Amoyo’s apartment—at one time their apartment—and feared he might mistake intimacy for forgiveness. Amoyo could be charming and relentless, and she had, too many times, surrendered to his white smile and persistence.
Peering through the kitchen window, Nada could just make out the uppermost details of the Strip—the towering Stratosphere, the half-scale Eiffel Tower of Paris Las Vegas, the faux Chrysler Building of New York New York, the reflective gold edifice of Mandalay Bay. For a time, those places had been both a playground and office to them, and for a time David and Nada took cash away from the casinos, not in wallets and purses but in duffel bags and wheeled luggage.
The casinos had put a stop to that life eventually, and Nada’s personal relationship with David also ended with an inquiry of sorts when Nada finally pieced together the life Amoyo was enjoying away from their bed.
Like all bad relationships, this one survived as long as it had because memory convinced her it hadn’t always been so terrible, and Nada’s good memories were measurably more detailed than most. She could replay their early dates with the toggle in her head and she could repeat every touch and smell and taste from those nights: the fine sandpaper starch of the restaurant tablecloth, the cold melon in the wine, the shiver all the way to the top of her thigh when David’s foot touched hers under the table. Earlier that night in the Ghost Bar at the Palms, with the blinking Strip out the windows both CinemaScope wide and Technicolor bright, she had allowed herself to replay such a date from months ago, and it was sense memory that triggered her desire, nostalgia that led her back to his bed. No doubt she was also staying clear of her own apartment, where English Judson’s revolting thugs had pawed through her drawers and pissed in her toilet. Still, there had been a time when she had been so certain of her love for David. That life now seemed long enough ago that it must have been lived by another person, one of many different people who had worn Nada’s skin in succession.
She’d had an epiphany two nights before. Gary Jameson, a man she had just met, had shown more trust in her than David ever had. Would David have slapped that girl’s drink to the ground only on her say-so? The idea was a joke. In that moment, she’d realized how much more David was like the drunk frat boy, dispensing knockout poison in the form of hollow charisma, than he was like Gary Jameson, who’d had the strength and trust to snatch that poison away.
The bad sex with David Amoyo established the fact that she no longer loved him. Nada could have sex if it were meaningful, and she could have sex if it were meaningless. Since David had made it clear that it was no longer the former, her willingness to sleep with him one last time proved that he meant nothing to her.
The tunnel out of David’s prison, she’d rationalized, just happened to run under his sheets.
She had sighed as she ran her fingers over the back of the