Chapter Twenty-Eight
In the face of love and death, courage is useless.
(Spanish proverb)
The convivial Tequila Bar at Bally’s Hotel is the twenty-eighth bar in Las Vegas that Arnie Garth has visited in the past few hours, in an increasingly fruitless search for his errant soulmate.
He has precious little idea why he should be looking for Noreen Millburn in hotel bars at all.
There has been no prior evidence of predilection for alcohol, and it is hardly likely that Vegas hostelries have suddenly opened a franchise for dandelion tea (although he wouldn’t actually put it past them).
He can only think that a tiny hint was dropped when he passed one of those cleverly changing advertising sites on the strip and thought that he might just have caught a glimpse of my good self beaming out at him with a rather delicious cocktail in my hand.
He might have done, he might not – who knows in this city built on sand and illusion?
By the time he pushes his way through the rabble to the busy Bally barman (excuse the alliteration – blame Bally’s for boasting a busy bar), all he really knows for certain is that he desperately deserves a drink. But he supposes that he has to persist in making the same hapless enquiry.
“Bourbon, rocks. Biggie. Hey, don’t s’pose you’ve seen a weird-looking English broad with lousy fashion sense and built like a truck?”
The woman sitting next to him at the bar slowly turns towards Arnie.
He knows that it will be just one of those irritating persons with all her PC, ultra-liberal, feminist bullshit, although he is surprised to sense that, for once, even he is offended by the words that just flew out of his ignorant, chauvinist, filter-free mouth.
Go figure. Well, whatever; he’s not going to give this particular sweetheart the pleasure of taking righteous umbrage right into his face. So, he turns the other way.
“That is very rude!” comes the inevitable reply. Yet not in the expected accent.
This time, it is Arnie’s turn to revolve slowly towards his neighbour. What he sees inspires in him a sudden and pretty urgent need to sit. He pushes the little guy on his other side off his barstool onto the floor and manages to plonk himself down before his legs completely give way.
“N-Noreen?”
The woman says nothing. Probably because she feels that a full Vegas makeover, big hairstyling, brand new, clingy designer frock and strappy Jimmy Choos speak with infinitely more eloquence than words.
Especially when that fresh frock reveals attributes hitherto buried beneath several different and possibly even historic layers of Cumbrian wool.
“Where’d you get those – I mean that? I mean, all of it?”
“Well, Arnie,” begins Noreen, unable to stop a smile from pulling those newly ‘Autumn-Plum’ed’ and actually rather lush lips apart. Even what’s behind them looks better, but surely she can’t have had dentistry since they last met? Or added more teeth. “You’ll never believe this—”
Arnie doesn’t get the opportunity to put his credulity to the test, as he is halted by what even he would consider to be the most attractive male voice he has ever heard in his life.
“Noreen!” says Lyle, ignoring the podgy, balding guy in the tacky shirt newly arrived beside her. “Your winnings, my English rose.” Handing his newly transformed companion a huge roll of twenty-dollar bills, he announces, “Time to paint the town a deep, deep red. My favourite color!”
“Who the hell are you?” asks Arnie, unsurprisingly.
Lyle doesn’t lose a single millimetre of smile. In fact, it broadens, as his rich chestnut eyes sparkle even more noticeably.
“And you must be Arnie. I’ve heard so much about you, you rascal. How could you have let this incredible creature escape?”
For a moment, Arnie can say nothing, although he has to admit, if only to himself, that Noreen does indeed look like a different woman. Not your routinely, all-American gorgeous, yet somehow… how come he never noticed, he for whom the surface is everything?
He realises that he has to stand his ground.
“Huh?” he says.
Arnie would admit to some difficulty in looking away from this clearly beautiful man. He even wonders for a moment if the guy would ever consider a starring role in one of his— No! Focus!
“Noreen!” he chides. “I am shocked!”
“Shocked?” she responds, raising her voice. “Arnie Garth, you make sex films!”
“Only to pay my way through medical school!”
“Let’s go, Lyle,” says Noreen, throwing Arnie a last sorrowful, withering look.
She snatches up her trusty handbag and a bulging carrier containing her discarded walking boots and cardigans old and new.
Pausing only to hand the barman, whose family pictures are on a shelf behind him, some serious money for his partially deaf daughter’s further education, she slips a lacy arm through that of the taller, infinitely more handsome man, and they glide gracefully out of the bar.
Lyle turns at the door to offer Arnie a comradely farewell wave.
“Noreen!” cries Arnie, watching his spiritual meal ticket – well, his Last Supper ticket – stroll obliviously away. “Don’t leave lonely, orphaned, friendless me here on my own. Flying solo. Kindly Saint Noreen! What about the curse?”
“Hey, fella,” admonishes the barman, “this is a family town!”
Arnie sighs. The jig would appear to be very much up. Before any serious jigging has even been attempted. How can he, Arnie Garth from lowly downtown Pittsburgh, compete with – that? Urbane, sophisticated, tall. And drop-dead gorgeous; you should pardon the expression.
As he nurses his bourbon, Arnie mulls on where he might have gone wrong in his life. Looking at the whole situation, clinically and totally dispassionately, he reckons that the objective answer is ‘every-fucking-where’.
He downs his bourbon in one.
Every man has a defining moment in his life.
This is the moment Arnie Garth decides that he can’t just sit here on his own in the swish Tequila Bar at Bally’s, staring hopelessly and morosely into an empty glass, his one hope of avoiding extinction newly departed on fetchingly high heels into the neon mist. He didn’t get anywhere in this life staring into an empty glass. Not Arnie Garth. No sirree.
He signals the barman for a refill.