Coral spoke: “My father brought me to her in a basket. He was Daddy’s friend. But he wouldn’t tell her anything about my mother.”
She could feel the question in the air, feel how they wanted to ask about her father, but she didn’t want to say his name. She had carried the secret so long. It was too much. They all sat there, wrapped up together like one unit: Althea petting her cheek, and Ada holding her hand, and Ray’s head on her knee. Nobody asked Coral for anything more, not tonight, and Coral didn’t say anything more. And then Trey called out in his sleep, and Lynda leaned over to kiss Coral’s head before checking on him, and Ray said again, “You’re a one-hundred-percent Jackson, Coco,” and they sat like this, quiet and entwined, for a long time.
18
A man wearing a jacket that said “El Capitan” met them at the Las Vegas airport. They rode in a limo that was as long as a tourist bus; it reminded Honorata of a black cat. In Manila, she had often fed a cat with a particularly long body. At the El Capitan, the man who greeted them said, “Welcome Mr. Wohlmann, Mrs. Wohlmann. Let me take you to your suite.”
The suite, on the seventeenth floor, had a living room, a den, a bar, a bedroom, and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Las Vegas Strip. There were fresh flowers, champagne in a bucket, a plate of cheese and grapes. Everything in the room was gold or black or mirrored.
Jimbo was effusive. He called the man Denny, clapped him on the back, handed him a small roll of bills. Honorata assumed they would have sex. Instead, Jimbo told her to put on the green dress and the gold sandals; he had some things to show her. When she was ready, he pulled out a long white box in which a necklace with a large emerald nestled.
“The hotel gave this to you to use for the weekend.”
She put it on.
Jimbo leaned forward and kissed the stone of the necklace.
They left the room and took the elevator to the casino. Honorata had never experienced anything like it. Lights twinkled, glowed, flashed, there were machine sounds of dings and whistles and whirrs, coins clanking in trays, voices calling numbers, people talking, the whish of air moving: cacophonous, psychedelic, disorienting, galvanizing. Beside her, Jimbo seemed to expand; she could feel the transformation as he lifted on the balls of his feet, his chest swelling, eyes lifting. He took her to the back of the room and walked casually through an entryway where a woman stood at elegant guard; they nodded to each other slightly. This room was quieter, there was more space between the tables, and the people playing sat in concentrated silence. Jimbo introduced her to someone named Richard, who smiled. Then he pointed to the people playing and said the game was baccarat. There was poker too, behind the curtain. A woman brought him a glass of scotch, which he drained quickly. He told Richard that his wife would have a gin and tonic; the woman brought it immediately along with another scotch for Jimbo.
Honorata did not react to the word wife, as she had not reacted to Mrs. Wohlmann. Jimbo had said nothing about marriage. It was conceivable that he would surprise her with the once-promised wedding, but she doubted it. The conversation about the letters, the act of having gone directly to the airport hotel when she arrived from Manila, told Jimbo that the wedding itself was no longer necessary. He could call her his wife when he liked, he could present himself as a married man when he wanted, but the marriage itself would not happen.
This made as much sense to her as it did to him.
Jimbo had said he would show her around, teach her how to play some games, but he couldn’t resist stepping up to a table when someone left. He told Richard to give Honorata some tokens, so Richard handed her a bucket filled with a hundred or more heavy gold coins marked with the El Capitan logo. It made her almost dizzy. She hadn’t held money since arriving in America.
“Do you know how to play?” Richard asked.
He had a lovely voice, slightly accented.
“No.”
“I can have someone show you. Perhaps roulette?”
“No.”
“As you wish.”
“Can I walk around? Can I go out there?” Honorata gestured to the casino floor.
Richard looked at her. Honorata saw something flash in his eyes. Then he smiled and said, of course, she could do anything she liked. Mr. and Mrs. Wohlmann were guests of the hotel, and she could go anywhere, she could order anything she liked, she need only say her name.
My name is Honorata Navarro, she thought.
“Thank you. I think I’ll just walk around.”
Honorata kept the bucket of coins with her for three days. She put a few coins in some slot machines, pulling the long handle and staring as the spinning figures spun into lines of color and then slowed . . . and stopped—never giving back even a single coin. She liked the feel of the bucket in her hand, the shake of the coins, so she stopped throwing them away like this. She supposed someone would give her more coins if she ran out; at least they kept giving her other things: drinks, round glasses filled with shrimp, a private table at the buffet. She never had to say who she was. They all seemed to know her, and many of the workers were kind.
She saw Jimbo only when someone from the casino came to get her, politely indicating that Mr. Wohlmann was looking, and would she mind returning to her room? When she did, he undressed her or bathed her or offered up various parts of his body to her. His moods varied. One time he talked rapidly, the next time he was distracted—sullen, even. Honorata lost her sense of time quickly. She came back to the room thinking that it was time to go to bed, and was startled to see from the windows that the sun was just setting. Jimbo seemed hardly to sleep at all. From time to time, she wandered by the exclusive area of the casino where he played. She would see him sitting there, oblivious to anything but the cards, or once, laughing with a woman bringing him chips. The woman wore a skirt of gold metal that barely skimmed her bottom, and she had the largest breasts Honorata had ever seen.
During the fourth night, Honorata could not sleep. Her body had begun to rebel, and she turned restlessly in the king-sized bed. She thought that Jimbo would come in; she hadn’t seen him in hours, and when she had, he’d said they might be going back to Chicago in the morning; she should be ready to go if he decided to leave.