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“Do you want a seat? Are you thinking of playing?”
For a moment, I had lost myself. I looked up. The fellow was older than I was, midforties, with a distinguishing swath of gray in his temples, but otherwise dark hair that had not yet begun to recede. He had crow’s feet around eyes so dark they were coal colored and cheekbones that were severe. I liked them. He was wearing a black blazer. He was too handsome and too well dressed for the witching hour at the BP. He belonged at a better class of casino.
“No, I’m fine, thanks. Just watching.” I motioned at the table. One of the players I had been following was standing. Based on the purple chips he was stacking, I suspected that he was walking away a winner.
“They’re good players. Note the guy in the hipster-chic porkpie hat,” he said. “Now, I’m not hitting on you, I promise, but you really do look like her.”
He was smiling, and I couldn’t decide if he was in fact hitting on me or just impressed by how much I resembled Diana. So, I decided to test him. Have some fun. It might take my mind off everything else that was flooding my gray matter like sewer water after a hurricane.
“I know,” I admitted. “I look exactly like a British princess. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, wife to Prince William, and very likely a future queen consort.”
“Clearly, I’m not the first person to tell you the resemblance is uncanny.”
“Nope.” He’d passed; he’d gotten the joke.
“You even have her eyes.”
I lowered my head while raising my gaze, one of my practiced Diana-esque coquette moves. It came straight from my act, which came straight from the hours of film I was always studying. “Are you suggesting it’s a mere genetic coincidence that I have a passing resemblance to the late Princess of Wales, not something that I actually cultivate?”
“Oh, you cultivate it, too. Exhibit A? Your hair.”
“Wouldn’t that be rather kinky?”
“It would be kinky, yes, but this is Las Vegas, so kinky is the new normal.” He had a drink in his hands and he took a sip. I guessed it was Scotch. “My younger sister thought Wales was actually whales—you know, big ocean mammals—when she was growing up, and Diana was able to talk to them. Like the Game of Thrones lady with her dragons. Like being a whale whisperer. She had this idea that Diana stood on cliffs looking out at the English Channel and all these whales would come and frolic near the coastline. She thought that until she was nine or ten.”
“I don’t talk to whales,” I said, but already the wheels were spinning and I was certain that I was going to work this new material into my show. It was gold, and I knew just how to write it, especially since casino-speak for the most extravagant of gamblers—those high rollers who lost tens of thousands of dollars a night—was “whale.”
“My name is Gene.”
“Crissy,” I said. “But I have a feeling you already know that.”
“I do. I came here to see your show, but arrived late. The second show had started. I hear you’re an excellent actor.”
“I think actors would take issue with that. I used to be an actor. Now I’m a performer.”
“Well, I’m going to see your show tomorrow,” he told me. “I won’t let work delay me two nights in a row.”
“What makes you think it isn’t sold out and you can get a ticket?” Both shows were in fact sold out, but I also knew there were always ways to get last-minute seats. If he’d asked, I could have gotten him one.
“This is going to sound like male arrogance…”
“But…”
“I’ll get a ticket. Which one would you prefer I came to? First or second? I’d prefer the second, but I’ll defer to you.”
“Why the second?”
“So we can have a drink afterward.”
I thought of my sister and some thirteen-year-old kid packing up their stuff to move to Las Vegas. I saw Betsy buying the child suitcases so she didn’t have to use the foster kid backpack: a thirty-gallon black garbage bag. At some point soon, they were going to appear in my life, and there wasn’t a bloody thing I could do. I had thought that I wanted to be alone that night. I wasn’t so sure anymore.
“Gene, you said?”
“I did.”
“Short for Eugene, I suppose.”
He smiled grimly. “I wish.”
