absence. (Actually, it’s not so bad. My TLS and LRB come in the mail every week, regular as clockwork, and just the other day, I took down my grandfather’s Cicero and read for nearly an hour without anyone breaking down my door and forcing me to listen to Wayne Newton.)
This deficiency of haut bourgeois perks, I should note, also confuses visiting Easterners whom I have docented down the Strip. So attentive are they to signifiers of status and exclusivity that they become restless and frustrated. The long, lateral blend of Vegas iconography unrolls before them, and they are looking for the unmarked door through which the cognoscenti pass. They want the “secret Vegas.” But Vegas is about stakes, not status—real action, not covert connections. The “high-roller” rooms with satin walls are secure areas for high-stakes gambling, not hideouts for high-profile dilettantes. If Bruce Willis and Shannon Doherty just want to get their feet wet, they shoot dice with the rest of us. This seems to confuse my visitors, who don’t, of course, believe in celebrity, but still, the idea of People with Names gambling in public offends their sense of order—and mitigates their aspirations as well, I suspect.
In any case, when visiting culturati actually start shivering in the horizontal flux, I take them to one of the restaurants in town where tank-tops are (sort of) discouraged. This is the best I can do to restore their sense of propriety, because the “secret of Vegas” is that there are no secrets. And there are only two rules: (1) Post the odds, and (2) Treat everybody the same. Just as one might in a democracy (What a concept!), and this deficiency of secrets and economy of rules drives writers crazy! They come here to write about Vegas. They are trained in depth-analysis. They have ripped the lid off seamy scandals by getting behind the scenes, and Las Vegas is invisible to them. They see the lights, of course, but they end up writing stories about white people who are so unused to regulating their own behavior that they gamble away the farm, get drunk, throw up on their loafers, and wind up in custody within six hours of their arrival. Or they write profiles of the colorful Runyonesque characters they meet in casinos, oblivious to the fact that such characters populate half the barrooms in America, that, in truth, they need only have driven a few blocks for their “colorful characters,” had they been inclined to transgress the rigid stratifications that (in their hometowns) stack the classes like liqueurs in a desert drink.
America, in other words, is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize—and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. Thus the whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.
Moreover, since I must regularly venture out of Vegas onto the bleak savannas of high culture, and there, like an aging gigolo, generate bodily responses to increasingly abject objects of desire, there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert—of coming home to the only indigenous visual culture on the North American continent, a town bereft of white walls, gray wool carpets, ficus plants, and Barcelona chairs—where there is everything to see and not a single pretentious object demanding to be scrutinized.
I remember one particular evening in the spring. I was flying back from Washington, D.C. after serving on a National Endowment for the Arts panel. For four solid days, I had been seated on a wooden chair in a dark room looking at racks of slides, five at a time. Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, ad infinitum. All hope departed somewhere near the end of the second day, and I started counting popular iconography: skulls, little houses, little boats, altars, things in jars, etc. By the end of the third day, despair had become a very real option, but we finally selected the correct number of winners—and a number of these actually won. The rest won the privilege of having their awards overturned by a higher court on the grounds of propriety.
The moment I stepped off the plane, I sat down in the terminal to play video poker. Basically, I was doing the same thing I had been doing in Washington: looking at banks of five images, one after another, interpreting finite permutations of a limited iconography, looking for a winner. Sitting there at the slot machine, however, I was comfortable in the knowledge that Vegas cheats you fair—that, unlike the rest of America (and Washington in particular), the payoffs are posted and the odds easily calculable. I knew how much of a chance I had to win. It was slim, of course, but it was a real chance nevertheless, not some vague promise of parental benevolence contingent on my behavior.
In the reality of that chance, Vegas lives—in those fluttery moments of faint but rising hope, in the possibility of wonder, in the swell of desire while the dice are still bouncing, just before the card flips face-up. And win or lose, you always have that instant of genuine, justifiable hope. It is always there. Even though we know the rules governing random events are always overtaken by the law of large numbers, there is always that window of opportunity, that statistical crazy zone, before this happens, when anything can happen. And what’s more, if you win, you win! You can take it home. You cannot be deemed unworthy after the fact—as we all were in Washington, where we played our hearts out and never had a fucking chance. So right there in the airport, I could make a little wager, and there was a real chance that luck and foolish courage might, just for the moment, just for a couple of bucks, override the quagmire of status and virtue in which we daily languish. And if I got really lucky, I might move up from food to cocktail. Hey, don’t laugh. It could happen.
SIMPLE HEARTS
In the autumn of 1875, Gustave Flaubert suspended his Herculean labors on Bouvard and Pécuchet to write three stories about saints. They were published together in April of 1877 under the title Trois Contes. The finest and strangest of these stories he wrote for his friend George Sand, who never stopped pleading with him to mitigate his customary bleakness a little and write “a work marked by compassion”—and “A Simple Heart” (Un coeur simple) is certainly so marked, although not in any way that George Sand would have recognized. Set in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the bleak, provincial milieu around Pont-l’Évêque and Trouville (only a few miles from Flaubert’s home at Croisset), “A Simple Heart” tells the story of Félicité, an isolated, illiterate, Catholic house-servant; it narrates her life from birth to death as a poised, sotto voce litany of labor and loss, of emotional neglect and wasted time that dissolves, suddenly, in the last sentence of the story, into this dazzling image of mercy—a vision of grace as gaudy and permissive as a Tiepolo ceiling.
Eighty years after Flaubert finished writing “A Simple Heart” in provincial France, I finished reading it in provincial Texas, sitting in the wooden swing on the shady porch of my grandparents’ house in south Fort Worth, and, having finished it, Flaubert’s story, which had transported me out of the present, delivered me back into it with sharpened awareness. I can still remember the hard angle of the morning light and the smell of cottonseed in the lazy air as I sat there on the swing with my forearms on my knees and Trois Contes between my hands, amazed that writing could do what it had just done.
Since I was reading not just as a reader, but as a reader who wanted to be a writer, I also felt a glimmer of insight into a question that had troubled me since I had read Madame Bovary and Salammbo in quick succession, as Flaubert wrote them. Why, I wondered, would the cold-eyed master of Madame Bovary, the scourge of provincial ennui (whose consequences I felt qualified to judge) have abandoned that worthy project to write a romance of Mediterranean antiquity? Why would he have barricaded himself with books and dreams in the study of his mother’s house, out there amidst the fields of mud and vegetables, to reimagine the oriental glamour of ancient Carthage?
To what end? I wondered, and, now, in the tiny apotheosis at the end of
