By the time we got to the Bellagio we were a mess. We were spilling drinks and secrets. I tried not to lie too much. I told her my marriage had fallen apart. “It was just the fighting,” I said. “We were like two wild dogs fighting over a piece of meat. Our marriage was the meat. Do you know what I mean? The meat!”
“That’s not healthy,” said Valka. “That’s unhealthy.” She thought she had it all figured out now. She had been trying to get the truth out of me for a while.
I held my tongue pretty well, but I was new at having someone to talk to. My secrets still felt important to me. Valka was ready to spill all of hers and I wanted her to feel better. It would make her feel closer to me, to tell her story to me. But then I was afraid I would have to do the same. I was trying to hold off. Telling the truth would hurt. I had been holding onto these secrets so long it almost felt like it all had happened to somebody else. And I would have to reach down pretty far inside to dig them all out. I was not sure if I was ready to do that.
Valka told me the Bellagio was where all the rich men were, but also the women looking for them. “Not that I need anyone else’s money,” she said. Valka was an independent businesswoman, with her very own flower shop. “I own prom season,” she said. “It’s mine, and I’d like to see someone take it from me.” She straightened her wig and plumped up the top of her dress. “I don’t know how to talk to teenagers though. Or kids. Or whatever. I just want to shake them. Prom. Those kids think it’s the most important night of their life. I want to tell them there’s so much more out there, they have a whole life of mistakes to make ahead of them.”
I thought of my own prom, me staring in the bathroom mirror in the lobby of a Best Western near Lincoln, putting on lipstick. All of the other girls—the girlfriends of Thomas’s buddies—were standing next to me in a row, putting on their own makeup. How much mascara did they really need? They applied it so carefully at the beginning of the night; sloppier, boozier, as time went on. Their eyes were sooty clumps by the end, smeared beneath as if they had slept in their makeup. We did everything together the whole night, me and these girls. They would not let me out of their sight. Everyone had to laugh at all the same jokes. Everyone had to comfort Margaret when she started crying about her cousin who accidentally died during the tractor pull last fall. Everyone had to wait in the bathroom when Paula started puking up peppermint schnapps. The room had smelled like Christmas. They were sort of my friends at the time, but I guess not really at all. I did not have many friends then. I had Thomas. I had my mother. I had Jenny. I did not have any friends these days actually, when I really thought about it. Just a lot of secrets instead.
“Let them have their dreams,” I said. We clinked our drinks. We were at a bar by then. I had lost three hundred dollars on the slots. I was not lucky, not at all. I had been tempted to lose every last cent of that $178,000 but I knew it was better to keep it safe for now. So Valka was buying everything, and I did not stop her. She was a good friend. We both got wistful, thinking about prom. We could not get out of it.
“I had dreams,” said Valka.
“Me too,” I said. “I was going to be married forever.”
“I almost got married,” said Valka. “To Peter Dingle.” She looked down at her drink miserably.
It was not going to take much prodding. There was a tiny part of me that still wanted her to hold back. I knew whatever I was going to hear had been said a million times before. It was a real story that had happened to her. I knew she would not lie to me. But it was going to be something she had practiced. And then I thought: maybe she will need to tell it a million times more just to get over it. And secrets were what girlfriends shared with each other. This is how we would become friends. Someday I was going to tell her my whole story. Maybe just some of it. Either way, I would need her to listen.
“What happened with Peter Dingle?” I said.
“Peter Dingle is a fine person,” she said. “I should say that. First. It’s not his fault he’s a man.”
Oh Lord, I thought. I did not know if I could take a night of man-hating. I liked men just fine.
“Here’s what happened,” she said. She pointed to her breasts. “It all went downhill from here.”
I looked at them. I wondered if they were the best that money could buy. They seemed very impressive: they were at the perfect point in her chest.
“My doctor kept finding lumps in my breasts,” she said. “Like every few months there was another lump. All over, both breasts, on the outside, deep inside, all different shapes and sizes. And I was having biopsies every time, and mammograms and sonograms. Everything they could do to a tit they were doing to mine. Needles, wires, the works. And my grandmother had breast cancer, both of them actually. One died young, one’s still alive. I had to do these tests to see if I was going to get it. I had the gene. This bad gene. Because I’m Jewish. I have the bad Jew gene.”