Marceline loved the way the swollen, pale vintage green of each lush olive barely breached the cloudy liquid in a good dirty martini. They could pass for lunch if there were enough of them shoved into the delicate deep V glass, speared like an arrow through a heart. Dinner even, if they were stuffed with blue cheese. She loved the slick shock of the cold brine when it hit the back of her throat, the fragile glass that could shatter with ease if she bit down hard enough. The sloshing if she didn’t hold it steady enough. And when she had too many, she loved the dizzy faraway nausea that came on fast, and then was quickly replaced by a warmth that made decisions for her. Sometimes it took her to bed. Sometimes it took her other places. Marceline never knew which way it would go. Martinis were all so careful and intentional and delicate and unclear and chaotic all at the same time.
It was 4:45 pm, and Marceline had just downed her second very dirty martini from room service.
“It’s like Lost in Translation, but make it Vegas,” she quipped, on the phone.
“I think the movie was called that because it took place in Japan,” Cat said. “Because like, they all spoke Japanese and she didn’t and she couldn’t communicate with anyone. So unless you befriend an old dude who is as charming as Bill Murray, I don’t see the connection.”
Cat was a graphic designer Marceline worked with on start-up branding projects. Cat worked in-house at a small creative agency that used Marceline as a freelance copywriter from time to time. They met in person sometimes, but mostly had developed a fun phone rapport that kept them talking long enough for Marceline to invoice a few extra hours of work per week.
“Wasn’t ScarJo there because her husband was working?” Marceline asked. She stared at a lukewarm bottle of Smartwater across the room, the squeezy kind, half full. The olive juice made her parched, but she felt too lazy to walk across the carpeted floor to satisfy her thirst. “And she was all lonely, and no one understood her? It was a metaphor. Vegas is a wholly foreign place all its own. It’s dark, Cat. It’s real dark.”
“Well, you’re not married yet anyway,” Cat said, and yawned. It was almost Friday, 8 pm New York time, and Cat was likely more than eyeing the clock.
Marceline watched her feet float above her head, pale from the torrid Manhattan winter she and her fiancé had escaped from for his software company’s annual conference. The hotel bedding was marshmallow soft and just as white, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a streaming view of other sprawling buildings flanked with glittering marquees and swaths of dusty air. If you squinted, way in the distance, through the cigar-thick smog, was nature. Mountains. Clouds. A true deep breath was so far away.
Marceline and her fiancé were staying at Mandalay Bay, the site of the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. In 2017, Stephen Paddock opened fire from his hotel room window on a crowd of festival concertgoers, killing 58 people and injuring 413. Marceline’s fiancé’s company was always on the hunt for a good deal, Marceline thought, shivering, wondering which room Paddock had stayed in. A few years before, 2016, his company had put everyone in The Trump Hotel. Marceline spent that week angrily ordering turkey club sandwiches from room service, keeping track of each expense so she could send double the amount to Planned Parenthood when she got home. He hadn’t told her until they arrived. “You wouldn't have come,” he said flatly, while she seethed.
“So you have what, two days left?” Cat asked. “Three? What are you going to do?”
“Ugh, I don’t know,” she said. “Besides pickling my liver and sitting in secondhand smoke while judging strangers?” They said goodbye and hung up.
Marceline almost never saw her fiancé during these conferences. He left before dawn and returned deep into the night. Sometimes she would return to the room to find he had been there, a thrown backpack at the foot of the bed, or some promotional pens placed like roses on her pillow. It was like being on a vacation with a very corporate ghost.
Marceline luxuriated in getting ready. There was so much freedom in being in a new place. She could exaggerate things. Glitter was more than acceptable. So were push-up bras and lollipop lip gloss. Marceline’s fingers hovered over the bottles and liquids and pots and bottles, eventually landing on her usual tasteful, natural choices. She’d go all out on her last night, she promised herself. But she was only going downstairs.
Marceline soon found herself belly up to a bar deep into the cavernous mouth of the Mandalay Bay casino. The moment you stepped out of your room, windows, time, and the outdoors cease to exist. It was no secret that casinos pump oxygen through the vents to keep the zombies awake, but it was unsettling the way Marceline’s martini and pajama lethargy had been immediately replaced by an alert euphoria.
“You’re back!” a jovial voice boomed from down the deep wood grain bar top. “Grey Goose martini dirty, yeah?”
“Sean, right?” she said. The bearded bartender nodded and winked at her. “I’m actually kind of feeling like an espresso martini.”
“You got it, babe,” he said, and disappeared down the bar. She pushed in, feeling the stoic discomfort that comes from a bar stool and high-waisted jeans. It didn’t matter what your body type was, they always felt like someone was sawing you slowly in half. She took shallow breaths.
Sean placed the adult chocolate milk in front of her, next to a tiny bowl of mixed nuts.
“Rosemary,” he said, gesturing to the sticky herbs coating each nut. “So what’s the plan for tonight?”
“I dunno, what do you think I should do?” she said.
Marceline liked the safety that came with bartender flirting. There was a physical barrier between them. It was mostly their job to be nice and ask questions.
Sean pointed down the bar, to a gaggle of men loosening their ties and sucking down oysters.
“You could hang out with them,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.
Marceline rolled hers. “Yeah, totally,” she said. She liked being in on the joke, liked knowing that some people could see how different she was. She sipped her cool, creamy drink, soothing her stomach from the salt and vodka from earlier.
Marceline pulled a book out of her purse, something nondescript and vague and thriller-y. The word “girl” in the title. A man once told her that women only read books in bars for attention, and ever since then, she felt a heightened sense of awareness whenever she cracked one open in public. Like it was a green traffic light. She made sure her sparkling engagement ring was facing outward. She knew it was big; she saw women eye it discreetly sometimes on the subway.
Marceline knew she was attractive, but nowhere near the cartoonishly stunning of the Vegas-employed. She wasn’t the breath-taking kind.
Being the in-between kind of pretty was almost worse, and that’s the kind that Marceline was. She was approachable. She had the kind of look and taste in clothes that made men think “maybe she’s a little out of my league, but I can afford top-shelf scotch. My watch is nice. This girl will at least talk to me.” And they were right, because girls like Marceline were taught that being rude was the worst thing she could be. So she let men on airplanes scroll through their camera rolls to show her the rock stars they’d met. But she would grumble and shoot arrows from her eyes the whole time. They just never noticed.
Mandalay Bay was labyrinthine and dark. Having been there a few days already, she recognized faces and bodies that never moved from their slot machined stations. A cigarette threatened to burn through their finger bones, a plastic bucket of dirty coins, a watered down drink next to their quickly tapping shoes. They’d be there tonight, and they would be there in the morning when Marceline wandered down for a ham and cheese croissant. She tried not to look into their eyes. She quickened her pace, ordering an Uber as she scurried past.
The driver’s name was Andi, a petite woman with a closely shaven head and long pink claw fingernails with gold and silver gemstones glued to the ends. Marceline admired them as Andi handed her a bottle of water. Her stomach rumbled. She looked at a list on her phone of places she wanted to go while she was in Vegas.
“Could you take me to Frankie’s Tiki Room?” She was suddenly ravenous, and the air freshener was dizzying in its cloyingness. They had to have food.
Andi nodded.
They promptly hit light traffic. A chasm of silence opened.
“My mom was stabbed 27 times over there when I was little,” she said, looking at her in the rear view. “Sorry, I know that’s a lot, but it’s true.” She paused. “She lived.”
“Oh my God, I am so sorry,” Marceline said. “That must have been awful for you.”
“It was. I moved to LA as soon as I turned 18.”
“How come you came back?” Marceline asked. They were pulling into a dark parking lot, a neon pink sign that said “Frankie’s” illuminated the side of Andi’s face.
“My ex-husband pressured me into it,” she said. She parked in front of the sign and turned around in her seat. “Six years together and within a week here, he cheats on me. I’m telling you, Vegas is some weird shit.”
Frankie’s Tiki Room did not have food, but it had enough garnishes for a kindly bartender to arrange a bunch of them on a plate for Marceline. She sat sucking on the warm pulpy strings of an orange and sipping a sweet rum punch in a thick ceramic mug shaped like a human skull. She scrolled through her phone, suddenly bored and sleepy again.
The bar was lively, with groups of sauced tourists huddled in corners under the voodoo decor. She eavesdropped on a couple next to her on a first date while she pretended to read an article about climate change.
“You’re on your phone too much,” came a deep voice from the other side of her.
Marceline turned to see a man in his late ‘40s, dressed in a suit, a tad over-tan, nursing a whiskey neat. She felt a muted annoyance and a tiny bit of flattery. He smelled like the inside of a mahogany chest left out in the rain.
“So?”
“Your generation misses out on so much by being on their phones.” His face was expressionless.
“Who cares?” she asked again. “I’m here alone, I can do whatever I want.” The slurry of fruit and booze in her belly was warming the rest of her, giving her a boldness.
“Well, would you want to talk to me instead?” he asked, then smiled a little. There was nothing inside of Marceline that found him attractive, but she liked following things. Stories, experiences. Her mother always said there was a deep difference between “nice” and “kind.” She couldn’t tell which one this man was yet and she kind of wanted to find out.
His name was Steven, and he hated being called Steve. And he immediately began commenting on her looks.
“Let’s be honest, you’re a New York 8, but a Vegas 4. We both are! We’re both alone, aren’t we?” he quickly tempered it, when he saw Marceline’s eyes widen.
Steven liked to talk a lot. He smiled and sipped his drink like he thought he was the most interesting man in the world. And Marceline drank while Steven talked. Tiki bars always had that really satisfying, crunchy ice. So she crunched while he talked. And...talked.
You know a lot of women sit alone at bars in Vegas because they’re prostitutes. Not saying you look like one notttttt saying you look like one, but you just sitting there in those tight pants with your phone and no book? Just your phone? And then a man like me is sitting right next to a girl like you and well...assumptions could be made.
Oh, now I was supposed to have a book, she thought. You couldn’t win. You were always asking for it. She smirked.
Yeah, I’m here on business, obviously. I own an architecture firm in LA and come here quite often actually to take meetings. I go to Austin a lot, and down to San Diego. I’m on the road a ton. Yes, thank you, I’ll take another one. You good with your fancy drink? Those can kill ya. I saw you sitting there alone on your phone and just thought...this girl misses out on everything that could be good around her. We could be having this great conversation, she’s out here to have a good time and she’s just stuck on her phone, it’s so sad. Like my daughter. Maybe I’m just old, though. I don’t get it. Ha, it’s not like you were reading the news.
They put me up in a shitty hotel this time, The Mondrian? It’s fine, it’s fine. There’s a kitchen, thank God. It’s just well...I am used to a certain level of decor because of what I do.
She barely had to speak. She just sipped her drink deeply. Like a boozy brunette bobblehead.
We, yes, my wife. She’s really obsessed with decorating the new house, I’m not allowed to make any decisions at all. You built it, I decorate it, she says. But really now it’s all she does. You’d think it’s her paying job haha.
Marceline was starting to feel a little dizzy from nodding. She bit down on a pineapple slice and tasted blood bloom on the back of her lip. The woman next to her was sobbing now, her date anxiously moving from foot to foot glancing at the door.
Oof, yeah, I see that ring on your finger. Don’t do it haha. No, but seriously, don’t. Why ruin a perfectly good thing? Here she is, this was us and her two kids (not mine) on vacation in Palm Springs last year. Not bad for 45, right? She used to be a lot more fun, though. She used to be ca-razyyyy.
What’s he doing, your guy, where’s he? Yeah, I’ll bet he’s behaving, off with a bunch of dudes in Vegas. No one comes here to behave, I’ll tell you that much.
Marceline was drunk now. She was on this ride, mildly amused, mildly annoyed. She wanted to see which side eventually won out.
Oh well, she’s my second wife. Yeah, here look. Stunning, right? Keeps it tight, does a lot of that Pilates, hiking. She’s fit. A little too into the bullshit that’s around LA, if you know what I mean. The green juice. The hills, the cars, all that. But I gave all of that to her so I guess I’m at fault huh? Created a monster.
And we, yeah I mean. You know what they say. That whole, you show me a beautiful woman and I’ll show you a man who’s sick of fucking her. Hey, hey I didn’t make up that saying. We’ve talked about bringing in a third but, I don’t know. Don’t look at me like that, I’m not hitting on you. You’re not even my type, really. You know how much sugar is in those tiki drinks you keep sucking back? A lot of you kids, your age, are opening up their relationships which I don’t know….must be nice….
At some point, they moved to another bar. She didn’t really remember agreeing to it, or getting into a car, and Uber, what even was it? She blinked the stalks of bamboo and the looming voodoo faces had melted and now they were sitting in an oxblood velvet booth facing each other, and a dirty martini sat in front of her, sweating onto the table.
Her feet were propped up on the bench next to Steve, and he was rubbing her calves. She felt separated from her body, which is a nice thing that being drunk does sometimes. The annoyance won out from the amusement and was growing, like hives in her belly. Like bees.
She had to be careful, she thought. That club in London. Blackouts could be dangerous for girls. She licked the smooth rim of the glass, knowing that her fingers would swell like stuck baby pigs from the salt the next morning. Was he still talking about interior design?
Modern minimalism is about open air and choosing pieces that are expensive and take up a lot of space emotionally without actually taking up a lot of space. You don’t know about that eh, New York girl? What, do you guys sleep on bunk beds? We were actually in Architectural Digest for the Malibu house, hold on, let me show you.
A blurry phone screen. Two blonde teenagers, a willowy woman in linen pants and beige hair, Steve, leaning against a wooden railing standing in a row in front of one of a clearly very expensive beach house.
“That’s so nice, Steve,” she said.
Steven. We were featured again actually, but in a much smaller article. The bathroom. You ever experience one of those rainfall shower heads? I bet you’d like that. We used to fuck in that shower, when we first bought it. I’m telling you, it goes away. Like, I look at her, and I know she’s beautiful, but I don’t feel it in my body anymore, you know? Like she became a separate thing. Like an armchair.
“That’s real sad, Steve.” Another martini appeared in front of her. Her fingertips started to itch, and the backs of her knees and inside.
Steven. I know what you’re doing with that. I know what kind of girl you are. You need someone to knock you upside the head then fuck you raw, every once and a while. Your attitude, I can tell no one has done that in a while. Jesus, relax. I’m kidding.
Anyway, here’s a picture of the bathroom. Those light fixtures? We had them imported from Iceland.
She wasn’t stupid. She knew what he was doing. He was trying to convince himself he wasn’t trying to sleep with her, while very actively and pretty aggressively, trying to sleep with her.
You don’t gamble, do you? One time my buddy and I (he actually plays for The Lakers, we built his house, I can’t actually say who he is), spent three days gambling, doing blow, and partying with these super-hot Belizean women who were staying at The Venetian. Whoo, that was a wild weekend. I almost had to get fucking tested after that shit, you know?
Marceline blinked, and they were in a hotel room. The room was stunning, the kind you see in rap videos or big budget films about...hangovers. Huge and sprawling, with a sunken white leather couch and a golden chandelier. Did she hear a babbling brook somewhere? She shook her head, trying to shake the deep dizziness that came from inside.
And her fingers, they wouldn’t stop itching. And he wouldn’t stop talking. Just a constant, nonstop stream of words. What in God’s name was he like during sex? She could imagine wet, sloppy, pointy kisses and deep thrusts that threatened to break through her cervix. She felt a bubble of bile and brine slide up into her mouth from her stomach. And she was so thirsty. She would have done anything for some water. And the itching. It was almost unbearable with the talking.
Should I slip into a robe and we can play a little Weinstein? Haha, obviously I’m just kidding, relax. Yes, I know he’s a creep, obviously. You’re not one of those girls who can’t take a joke, are you? Jeez, you can’t say anything these days.
Oh, don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to have sex with you. You’re just here. You’re the one that followed me. I barely suggested it. You can go. I don’t care. You don’t think I’ve had more chances in my lifetime to cheat on my wife?
I’ll make us a little something from the mini bar. Even though it’s insane how they charge you for even lifting a mini bottle of champagne. Oh nice, my company actually worked for them once. We literally built their offices. Nice guys. Jeez, you look so stiff. Take your coat off, make yourself comfortable. That look on your face….Jesus, you’re not one of those girls who overreacts about everything, are you? You can’t say anything anymore. You can go. I told you, I have zero interest in fucking you. I wouldn’t be mad if I saw you naked right now, but... Haha, joke, Jesus.
Marceline let out a giant, deep breath that shook her from head to toe. She had blinked and moved again, but this time, she was still in the hotel. Just on the other side of the room, behind the couch. Her fingers weren’t itching anymore. Just...tingly. Like the end of a yoga class, after you lay in corpse pose and slowly wake your appendages up.
And the noise… it had stopped. Her ears were ringing. The pins and needles pricked and deepened, and she looked down to realize she was holding something. Silver. Serrated. And razor sharp. A steak knife that had been thrown onto a room service tray by the TV when she last saw it. And her hand was….dripping.
She stared over Steve’s jerking body with the wash of feeling you get after getting a really productive massage. A release, the feeling of letting go and being in control all at once. Her ears were ringing, and she realized it had been so long since she had heard silence. His hand reached out for her leg, but she just stared at him until he stopped moving.
She thought of the plump meat that lived inside the wilting white dress shirt before her. Firm and filled like the olives she loved. She wondered how much time it took for all the life to drain out of each organ. How long until the white carpet turned crimson.
Marceline stretched and wiggled a little, an elation filling her. She smiled, a slow and languid peace sliding over her like a weighted blanket.
Marceline let her tongue snake up the river of sticky rubies that was quickly staining the web between her thumb and forefinger. It was warm, and deep, and would dry slowly. She felt visceral, sexy, and very deeply alive. Like she had exorcised something, released something, that had been lurking inside of her for a long, long time. She couldn’t wait to take another bubble bath when she returned to the room. And this time, she would feel guilty about nothing. And she wouldn’t feel a shred of nervousness walking alone down the Strip. We can be dangerous too, she thought.
Golden strands of sunlight that could be mistaken for fine jewelry dangled through the thick Mandalay Bay hotel curtains when Marceline got back to her room. She luxuriated in a bath that quickly turned the color of cranberry tea, then passed out in the swathing, bulging mountains of her comforter, lulled to sleep by the dulcet tones of some reality show on her laptop.
She only barely noticed when her fiancé tiptoed in, gently closed her screen, and crawled inside to kiss her good night.