Stripped (48 page)

“Are you saying I should forgive him? How can you say that?”

“I’m not saying that at all,” Serena told her. “I just don’t want this to consume you.”

Claire looked up at the riser, where the politicians and money men were gathered, waiting for her, watching her. It was her world now—Boni’s world—and Stride could see her questioning whether she really wanted it. Whether the prize meant anything at all.

Whether, knowing her past, she was different now than she had been moments before.

“You could have kept this from me,” Claire said.

“That’s true,” Serena said. “But you’re tough.”

Claire laughed and touched her shoulder. Something intimate flowed through their skin. “I don’t feel very tough right now.” She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and added, “Time to do what we do best in Vegas. Bury the past.”

“It’s just a building,” Stride said.

“Maybe, but I’ll be glad when it’s gone,” Claire said. “The ghosts can die with it.”

Serena shook her head. “It’s not that easy.”

“I know that.” Claire approached Serena and whispered, loud enough for Stride to hear, “I’d like you in my life.”

“I’m already in someone else’s life,” Serena told her. “I’m sorry.”

Claire smiled sadly. She looked at Stride. “You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about what it would be like. The three of us together. Can’t we share?”

Serena answered for him. “There’s only one of me.”

Stride knew the truth. Sure, he had thought about it, but it was nothing but a wild fantasy. There would have been physical moments, ecstasy, like a drug, lingering for a few seconds that felt like forever, but in the end, it would have been a cancer eating them up and splitting them apart. Some lines you can’t cross.

Claire knew it, too. She kissed Serena’s cheek and told her, “You’re deeper than Vegas.”

The crowd was restless. Impatient. They wanted a body.

Claire retreated to the riser, climbed the steps, and waved to the crowd, which cheered wildly. She made the rounds on the platform. The mayor. The demolition team. Investors from New York. All of them taking her measure and studying her suspiciously, this
girl
who would oversee the rising of the Orient, a gleaming red tower to replace the old, tainted past of the Sheherezade. Stride could see behind their eyes and toothy grins and knew what they were thinking. It was okay to let her handle the ceremony, but behind the scenes, she would flounder, and others would grasp the real power.

Stride thought they were all going to be surprised. Claire
was
tough.

She didn’t give any speeches. She just placed both hands on the plunger that would trigger the explosion, and the crowd instantly fell silent. The hush lingered for several seconds as faces turned expectantly toward the hotel.
Strange
, Stride thought,
how we’re so fascinated with destruction, with the tearing down of idols
. Maybe because it was so fast. Years to put it up, years to visit, pass by, and play, seconds to bring it all to the ground.

No one was watching Claire anymore, except himself and Serena, who saw the smile fade from her face as she stared up at the sign, SHEHEREZADE. It looked tired in the daylight, not like the multicolored glow that washed over them at night. Tired and ready to fall. Claire’s eyes were wet. He saw her lips moving, whispering silently to herself.

Good-bye.

She pushed the plunger down. Electricity sparked through the wires and made its way to the dynamite packed inside the columns.

There was a long moment when nothing happened, when people held their breaths and wondered if it had all gone wrong.

Then bang bang bang bang, the charges detonated in a staccato rhythm like cannon fire, shooting from top to bottom with flashes of orange flame. The ground rumbled and shook under their feet, as if massive tectonic plates were grinding together somewhere beneath the earth. The hotel stood proudly for another few seconds, defying the dynamite, as if it could stand forever suspended against gravity—but it couldn’t. Deep inside its bowels, the hotel had been eviscerated; its supports were gone, leaving only the crushing weight behind to go down. From afar, as it began, the implosion looked as easy and graceful as a puff on a dandelion, not like the rape of thousands of tons of rock and steel. As if they were of no more substance than paper, the walls caved in on themselves, and the glamorous hotel collapsed like a body that had bled out. The force of the fall caused another earthquake under the street, strong enough that Stride felt they might all be lifted from the ground.

The crowd gasped and then cheered nervously, as if it were a litde dangerous to spit in the face of so much power. They knew what was coming, too. Fearsomely, a mammoth white dust cloud billowed up from the earth, growing like fallout from a bomb. People began backing up, wondering how far it would spread, and Stride was anxious for a moment that there would be panic. In the towers across the street, voyeurs scurried nervously inside from their balconies, shutting their glass doors against the wave of dirt. Forty years of it, an accumulated exhalation of grit, detritus, and skin. There was probably a little bit of Frank Sinatra in the cloud. Amira, too.

The dust began to rise long before it reached the crowd, bubbling up toward the sky. As it climbed higher, wind off the mountains caught it and carried it northward, sprinkling its ashes in particles over the city. The haze on the ground began to clear, revealing the remnants of the hotel—a fiftyfoot jagged pile of rubble, walls, roof, floors, tiles, porcelain, wood, and gold leaf, all of its elements jumbled together. Earthmovers and dump trucks were waiting a few blocks away, engines thundering, to begin picking at the mountain arid hauling it away.

The party began to disperse. The show was over. Curtain down.

Stride took a last look at the tower of debris and saw that a little piece of the hotel sign had somehow wound up on the top of the heap, a bent fragment of neon. He couldn’t even identify the letters. Something made him think of the old days, of the faded newspapers he had read, of the photographs of young people back then who had since lived their lives and died. Of 1967. The sun glinted on the lost fragment, and for an instant, it was as if the neon flashed one last time, giving up a burst of color that came and went, winking at him.

They left the demolition site along with thousands of other people, struggling through the crowded streets. Haze lingered in the air. Serena suggested that they take the afternoon off—go back home, relax, swim, make love, and then lie in the shadows of their bedroom and talk through the evening and the night. About nothing. About everything. She seemed aglow with his presence, and he felt it right down to the bottom of his soul.

He turned right on Las Vegas Boulevard, along with half the city, heading north. The Stratosphere tower loomed ahead of them. There were only two types of traffic jams on the Strip, bad and worse. Today was worse. They crawled forward, watching pedestrians make faster progress on the sidewalks. The street was a ribbon of steel, stretching through the stoplights. Horns blared, accomplishing nothing. When they reached the Stratosphere after what seemed like endless time, he looked up through the windshield, seeing the saucer of the tower more than a thousand feet above them.

When he had come back here from Minnesota in the summer, he had found Serena there in the middle of the night, staring at the city. The cool wind had enveloped them, and the neon everywhere had been dazzling. They had embraced. Kissed. He had thought then how their relationship was homeless, how it could never survive in this place, how sooner or later they would be forced to choose. At that moment, it hadn’t mattered. The future held no sway over them. Nothing had been real then except how they felt for each other.

This was a different moment.

Real and dirty and crowded, with no escape. The future wasn’t the future anymore; it was the present. It was here and now.

He left the Stratosphere behind them. The traffic eased a bit. He drove another block and then swung the car into the vacant driveway of a motel, shutting off the motor. His hands lingered on the steering wheel. He didn’t look at Serena, but he felt her looking at him. Felt her anxiety grow the longer they sat there in silence.

How to begin. Just say it.

“They’ve asked me to come back to Minnesota.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath. Then, calmly, slowly: “You want to go, don’t you?”

He turned and looked at her finally, and the pain in her face made him feel as if the weight of the Sheherezade were falling on him. “Yes.”

She got out of the car. Just like that, she was gone, slamming the door behind her, hurrying down the sidewalk with her arms tightly folded across her chest. He got out, too, and chased after her.

“Serena, wait!”

She didn’t want him to catch up with her, but he did, and he spun her around and saw the river of tears on her face. Her black hair stuck to her skin. She was angry at herself. Blaming herself.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I cheated on you. What the hell did I expect?”

“You didn’t let me finish,” Stride said.

“I always knew you would leave. That you would wake up one day and say you were going away. Don’t you think I know you’re not happy here?”

“You’re right. I’m not.”

“I knew you’d wind up going home.”

He shook his head. “Minnesota isn’t home. When I lived there, home was Cindy. I was restless for years after I lost her.”

He reached out and took her hands.

“Until I found you. Home is
you
now.”

“But you still want to go back to Duluth,” she said softly.

“That’s true. I’m a snowman here. I melt.”

She summoned up her courage, ready to set him free. “I don’t want to keep you where you don’t want to be. Not even forme.”

He said the words he had been longing to say for days. “Come with me.”

“To Minnesota?” she said. She looked down at herself, as if she were taking stock of who she was. She looked around at the Vegas street, the traffic flowing back and forth, the big sky, the lights. “Jonny, you know that would never work. I’d be as much a fish out of water there as you are here.”

“I don’t think so. Claire said it, too. You’re deeper than Vegas.”

“But this is my—” Serena began, but then she stopped. He knew she had been about to say
home
. Maybe she was thinking about what he had said. Or maybe she had begun to realize the depth of what he was asking her to do: to uproot herself, to commit.

People were passing by them on the sidewalk, but they were alone.

“What do you want us to be, Jonny? Partners? Lovers?” She had a quiet intensity in her face, feeling her way, as he was. “Or something else?”

He was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Every word felt like a land mine. “I’ve been married twice,” he reflected. “One was a perfect match. The other was a terrible mistake. I’m not scared of trying again, but I want us to be ready.”

“I have a long way to go,” Serena said. “Not because of you, but because of me.”

“I know that.”

“And you still want me to come with you?”

“That’s what I want.”

He watched the emotions battling behind her eyes and knew he had thrown her into a deep pool and asked her to swim. He knew what he was asking her to give up, the chance he was asking her to take.

It had been easy for him. At the moment he had chosen to leave Duluth a few months ago, his life had been in transition. His identity had been spirited away. In his short time in this electrified city, he had been forced to reexamine everything that had made him who he was—and who he was not.

Suddenly, he had a chance to rebuild what had been stolen from him. To go home again and make it something new.

Serena wandered away from him, back toward his truck. She stood there, with her hands jammed in her pockets, staring southward at the chaos on the Strip. He wished he could be inside her mind. He wondered if, as she absorbed the madness of the city through her green eyes, she was staring at her past or her future.

She shook her head, as if laughing at an old joke. Then she opened the truck door, got in, and leaned back out the window. “Hey, Jonny,” she called to him. “You coming or what?”

Stride smiled and went to join her. He took a glance at the warm blue sky and thought that on the shores of the great lake in Minnesota, the colored leaves had already fallen. Winter would be shouldering down from the north. Soon, the snow would fly.

My thanks as always go to the five amazing women who have been so instrumental in my career: my agents, Ali Gunn in London and Deborah Schneider in New York; my editors, Marion Donaldson in London and Jennifer Weis in New York; and my wife, Marcia.

There are many others, too, who have made this journey possible: Carol Jackson, Diana Mackay, Kate Cooper, Stephanie Thwaites, and the entire team at Curtis Brown; Beth Goehring, Gary Jansen, Victoria Skurnick, Carole Baron, and their colleagues at Bookspan; Brigitte Weeks; Sally Richardson; Peter Newsom; the tremendous sales and publicity staff at both Headline and St. Martin’s; and the creative Web team at Designstein (Nathan, Rob, Cat, Ed, and Mark).

I have also worked with many wonderful overseas editors and salespeople at publishers around the world. Thank you all for being early and enthusiastic supporters.

This life would be impossible without great friends, such as Barb and Jerry, Keith and Judy (and the entire Bath mafia), Janean, Janice, Kris, Cindi, our friends at HSCA and Faegre & Benson, and many more.

I’m blessed to have parents who have always supported and believed in my dream, along with a great family of supporters. We may not always be near each other, but you’re all close to me in spirit.

Finally, I must thank the many booksellers who have embraced my work and the thousands of readers who have joined me, Jonathan Stride, and Serena Dial on their adventures. (Special thanks to Gail F., Bonnie B., Tim S., Eric S., and Ed K.)