As a matter of fact, Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés looked a lot like the bistro at the Paris Hotel in Vegas. The tables outside with the same checkered cloth, the menus in dainty cursive, the waiters in black vests and white shirts. It had that same air of manufactured ambience, the same postcard Parisian flair, almost fake. It was the real thing, and still it wasn’t. Mary Ann had been too harsh on Las Vegas, or maybe she just had a talent for ending up in places like these. Maybe she was attracted to artifice.

[...] What Tom began to understand now was that the same wanting that had looked to him like a sign of confidence really made Trevor a slave. He was a single-minded machine of desire, a straight arrow of want. He had an urge for something outside himself, constantly, endlessly. He’d wanted people, of course (and what was there more explicitly telling of an unquenchable thirst for people than the life of a pick-up artist?), he’d wanted places, he’d wanted recognition. Maybe that hunger, that need to engulf more life within himself that had seemed foreign and blissful to Tom, maybe that hunger wasn’t good. Maybe it wasn’t even pleasant. It made him shiver to say it—especially since it seemed to imply the opposite was true of himself—but for a brief, lucid moment it sounded undeniably true: people like Trevor would never be happy.