Carlo had always wanted to visit Las Vegas during Christmas. The place wouldn't be as crowded as in other seasons. Hotels would offer bargain rates. Lenore's kids were long gone-they didn't want to come home for Christmas. This seemed the time. Lenore didn't voice any enthusiasm for the idea, but she went along with it in the absence of a better plan. But she didn't feel altogether okay on the streets of Las Vegas at Christmastime. "I feel virtual," she said.

"What does that mean?"

"It's something the kids say. Whatever it means, it means the opposite of virtual. It means on the bogus or phony side of the spectrum."

"Well, if it means you don't feel down-to-earth, I don't feel down-to-earth, either. This isn't a place to feel down-to-earth. Vegas is another planet. The planet of glitz and giggles."

"Glitz and giggles," she said. She seemed delighted with this expression.

"I don't want to gamble," she said. "I hope we're not going to."

"I haven't gambled except for four times, and that was during my very first tour in the service," Carlo said. "Twenty-two years ago." Carlo had the numbers ready because this was a conversation they'd already had many times in consideration of this trip.

That first night, the twenty-third, they had a very good and very inexpensive dinner downstairs at the Sands Hotel and turned in early, and he and Lenore watched a movie on the big-screen TV. Lenore ate two small packs of M&M's while the film played. She'd brought them all the way from Cincinnati. Her innocent joy in the taste of M&M's was one of the things that made Carlo feel sentimental about his wife.

On the twenty-fourth, they woke to blue skies over Las Vegas. They'd had blue skies since the day before the trip began. The whole country was on a break from winter. They'd had an easy flight over, literally "clear sailing"-Carlo had taken the windowseat and had not counted one cloud in the air between Ohio and Nevada.

They searched in the paper for a good show. They didn't find one. The big names were all on vacation. They'd expected that. It went with the discount prices and the sparse crowds of the Christmas season.

"Choose one for yourself," Lenore said. "Choose one with plenty of titties and rumps. They'll make me feel like dieting."

She and Carlo didn't have to go farther than right downstairs again, where they sat through a skateboarding extravaganza, a dozen helmeted and padded athletes jumping around impressively to the canned music of Star Wars, plus a small parade of extraneous undressed females. The drinks were cheap, and Lenore got halfway wrecked. She wasn't entirely serious, but she didn't let up: "What are we doing here? What are we doing here? We might as well gamble. I guess if we went broke, we could go home."

"Do you really want to go home?"

"Not really. I'm just looking for a reason why we're here. We came a long way, and it's not all free."

Later, Carlo woke briefly in the middle of the night. Beside him Lenore slept propped up on pillows, one hand resting on her stomach and holding the TV's remote control device. Beyond the foot of the bed the TV played without sound, and a readout in the screen's corner read 12:17 AM, which meant Christmas had come. Lying there in the silent room, Carlo watched a scene from, he guessed, a movie, in which a young woman hung white laundry on a clothesline. Suddenly a look of utter shock transfixed the woman's features. She let go of a white shirt. A man walked into view, dressed in sooty rags. Meanwhile, the white shirt blew down a hill. The man and the woman embraced. A brief kiss-then lovingly they studied one another's faces. A long view now: The man laughed as he bounded down the hill, chasing the white shirt. Carlo took the remote control device from his wife's fingers. He had to pee. He wanted a bite of cold fruit. He wanted to smoke a cigarette. He didn't want to get sick, or have accidents, or be dead. He turned the television off. Holding the control device in his fingers, he fell asleep.

Christmas morning they woke up absolutely without any plans. Carlo felt apologetic about that, but he didn't apologize. He waited to see what Lenore had to say. What she had to say about it was nothing. Completely unconcerned. A day like any day: he woke up, and there was his wife beside him, watching the all-news channel with the sound off.

"Well," he said, "Merry Christmas."

"Same to you."

In a minute he asked her, "Do they ever say 'Xmas' anymore?"

"'Xmas?' I don't know."

"They used to abbreviate it down to 'Xmas.'"

"Hmm-you know what? I don't think I've seen a lot of that lately. I think they stopped. I think they decided it was offensive."

Carlo showered and stepped out and dried off with a white, fluffy towel. There were side-by-side sinks in the bathroom, with fixtures of gold plating, or fake gold plating-whichever, the gesture was appreciated. He turned on both faucets. Both gave out identical streams of water. He turned one off, and brushed his teeth at the other. The toothpaste was something new Lenore had gotten. He'd never heard of this brand. Very pleasant, it was alive, it gave him a fantastic tingling sensation in his mouth. He rinsed and finished with some mouthwash, also new. It was horrible, like gargling gasoline. It jammed in his throat. He spat it out and rinsed his mouth, croaking, "Yuck! Ptooey! Ridiculous!"

Lenore must have heard him suffering, because she called from the bedroom, "Carlo? Hon?"

He found her sitting up, wearing a complimentary bathrobe, reading the hotel's bedside literature. "What is this crap?" he said, holding the jug in his hand. "This stuff is poisonous."

"I just grabbed it," she said.

"Well, do you mind if I throw it out?"

"Sure," she said. "It's just something I grabbed."

"Good. I don't want it around. I don't want to make the same mistake twice. There oughta be a law against this one. God!" he said. "I thought there were regulations." He replaced the cap tightly and threw it in the bathroom wastebasket. And he felt good thinking that in two or three hours, somebody paid to do it would come and take it away. He was crazy about this hotel. He got dressed and told her, "I need coffee."

He headed downstairs, still swallowing a bit of unpleasant taste. He sat at the lunch counter overlooking the main casino. He washed away the bad flavor with a cup of coffee poured for him by a redheaded waitress.

The main casino wasn't hosting much action currently-nobody at the craps or the roulette, only a couple of lone blackjack players at separate tables, and several diehards giving the slots a workout. One of the blackjack dealers, a young woman, sported a red elf's hat with the white ball on its peak. The casino seemed to be snubbing the holiday-maybe from spite, because it cut into their trade. Carlo saw no seasonal décor around the place. The elf's cap was perhaps the result of a personal decision.

Wow, he thought, forget about Christmas-they don't even have Xmas here.

Meanwhile, he wasn't sure the coffee tasted quite right. The horrible mouthwash must have maimed his tastebuds.

He couldn't really blame Lenore for just grabbing things off the supermarket shelves and hurrying off on more important errands. Neither of them had time to do any serious shopping. They both worked eight-hour days, and in fact Lenore worked a bit more than that, also did a fair amount of traveling. When it came to the home front, they both contributed what they could.

They'd been married six years, and they got along fine with each other. He'd been single until he was forty years old, and now he liked being married. You hate the mouthwash, and there's somebody beside you to register the complaint. You don't go with it into the darkness of the grave.

Lenore had a good job, and she was an intelligent woman. She trained new employees for the Illinois-Indiana-Ohio region of Kinko's, the nationwide photo-duplication outfit, a quite sizable corporation. Carlo worked for Motor Vehicles.

What Carlo knew but hadn't told her, what he sensed about himself, was that on this trip at some point he was going to have sex with someone he wasn't supposed to.

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