The Game Player

by Rafael Yglesias

  I caught the refrigerator door when he yanked it open to get more beer and soda for the players. “We’ve got to stop,” I said.

  His head appeared. “Are you crazy?” He handed me two beers and then bent down again.

  “If this goes on, we’ll lose fifteen hundred dollars.”

  He said something into the refrigerator, making it unintelligible. “What?” I said just as he suddenly reappeared, quickly putting the sodas on top of the appliance. He blew on his fingers. “Boy, they’re cold.” He looked at me. “Why are you freaking out, Howard? It’s not your money. I can cover it. What are you worrying about?”

  “I don’t care whose money it is. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life losing money to these jerks. It’s disgusting.”

  He looked at me, ready to speak, but his eyes noticed something and he allowed himself a longer glance, closing the refrigerator door slowly. I felt like I was about to start trembling when he quickly put a hand on my neck as if he were going to pull me towards him for an embrace. His cold, strong fingers dug into my taut muscles, and his snapping of their tension echoed throughout my body, my eyes closing and my legs weakening. “God, Howard,” he said in a whisper. “You’re a mess. I had no idea.” I opened my eyes and was immediately embarrassed by how I had surrendered myself to his massage. I pulled away. “I apologize,” Brian said seriously. “I thought the fact that it wasn’t your money would just make it an intellectual experience, so I didn’t explain. We’re just having some bad luck.”

  I laughed, but it wasn’t a normal laugh. It had a shriek in it that was close to hysteria.

  “Stop it!” He hit me on the shoulder with his open hand. “Howard, it is a mathematical certainty that we will get a run of cards as good as this was bad.” He looked nervously toward the doorway. “You’ve got to accept defeat, Howard, it’s part of life. Be patient. Our losses aren’t big compared to what hits other partnerships with this bad a run of cards. Just concentrate on the problems the cards set for you.”

  I listened to each word as if it were a foreign language that I had studied years ago. Their meaning filtered in slowly, allowing me to measure the extent of my earlier panic, because they calmed me. Brian continued to look into my eyes and he seemed anxious about them. We heard the other players yell for us to return and he said, “Look, Howard, I don’t have time to figure it out for you. I can’t coach you out of your panic. I’ll give you five seconds to tell me what’s really bothering you.”

  “Are we losing,” I said immediately, ”—and don’t bullshit me!—because of my playing?” Brian smiled with surprise. I had amazed myself with this statement: it seemed to have been created completely while speaking; I had had no thought like it.

  “Good for you.” Brian looked happy. “You’ve cost us about three hundred points, to be absolutely honest. You could have made that four-spade contract and they wouldn’t have gotten the extra two hundred for blanking us in the rubber. That’s about three hundred points.”

  “Well, that’s not much,” I said timidly.

  “No, it isn’t.” He laughed at my expression. “For a beginner, it’s remarkable. Now will you be all right?”

  “Yeah.” And I meant it. We returned to the room with refreshments and I opened a window because entering made me aware of the cloud of cigarette smoke dominating the scene. My back was to the players when I heard Stan say, “We’re up two grand.”

  “Well,” Brian said, “seven hundred of it is ours. Come on, Howard, let’s get it back.” This was meant literally, because we were playing Stan and Bill at the losers’ table. The first two hands were typical of the kind we had been getting all night. We passed at every opportunity. They bid five clubs and went down one and then bid four spades, this time making it.

  While I was shuffling the cards to deal I silently told the deck to come up with big cards for us. I convinced myself that I could influence them to our advantage so thoroughly that it upset me to let my opponent cut the deck since that might disrupt my telepathy. But, sure enough, I picked up a loaded hand. I counted nineteen points and bid one club. Stan passed and Brian bid one spade. (A positive response!) Bill passed and I couldn’t think for a moment because of the rush of adrenaline. We had a minimum of twenty-seven points, and since Brian had at least five spades and I had three topped by the king and jack, we had a suit. I bid one no-trump, an asking bid. Brian: two no-trump.

  Four, I said to myself, he has four controls. Since I had three aces, it meant he had to have an ace and two kings. We had all the aces and kings! A small slam, to be sure, but was it a grand slam? Could we take every trick? I had no queens and Brian could easily have nothing more than his ace and kings. You fool, I said to myself, ask him how many spades he has. “Three spades,” I said.

  “I don’t understand this,” Stan said.

  “You can ask,” was Brian’s response.

  “Forget it,” Stan said. “I don’t care.”

  “So you pass?” Brian asked and, when Stan nodded impatiently, he said, “Five clubs.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Bill said furiously to me.

  “I’ll tell ya,” I said. “Give me a second.” I counted. “He has at least seven spades with two top honors.” I ignored their whistles and bid seven spades—a grand slam. When they had calmed sufficiently to lead and I laid down my hand, they had barely finished commenting on its strength before Brian said, “It’s a laydown.” He put his hand face up on the table and took only a moment for them to see. Seven spades and the ace, king of the three other suits was thirteen tricks. The hand was worth one thousand, two hundred and ten points.

  “Incredible luck,” Stan said.

  “It was lucky to get the hand,” Brian agreed. “But would you have bid the grand slam?” Stan was irritated by this remark and he gave a long analysis of how he definitely would have done so. Brian listened politely and then said, “I don’t think you would have. Anyway, bid.”

  He did and, after a pass by Brian, and a response from Bill, I looked despairingly at my thirteen-point hand because obviously Brian had nothing and there was no point in my taking any action. I passed and watched Stan and Bill become embroiled in a disagreement that I have seen repeated many times, but was new to me then: Stan bid diamonds and Bill, hearts, but Stan insisted on his diamonds, and Bill repeated his hearts. At last, Stan won the argument, but not before I had doubled Bill’s four-heart bid. Stan had looked at Bill as if to say, I told you so, and bid five diamonds. Brian doubled but they stayed with that.

  We set them, doubled and vulnerable, by three tricks for a penalty of eight hundred points. I counted Brian’s high card points while the hand was played and discovered he had ten. We had more than half the high card points, a fact which hadn’t escaped Stan. “Why weren’t you two bidding?” he asked.

  “Did I make a mistake?” I asked Brian.

  “Are you kidding?” Brian said to me, ignoring Stan. “We made eight hundred points. There’s no way we could have made that by bidding.”

  Three bitterly contested hands were played before the rubber could end. We won on the third hand, when they pushed us to five spades and Brian executed a brilliantly clever squeeze play to make the contract. We outscored them by twenty-nine hundred and thirty points, almost cutting our losses in half, and moving us up to the winners’ table. We held it for three rounds and brought out losses down to less than a hundred dollars, before our streak ended, and we were returned to Hades. But for the remainder of the evening we were carried many times by that boatman Luck from Hell to Paradise and back again, so that we ended up losing, after seven hours of lost sleep, neglected stomachs, consuming a pack of cigarettes each, and my nerves jumping from too much coffee, we ended up losing twenty dollars.

  When Brian closed the door behind the last of the departing players, he turned, his hair unmussed, his eyes not bloodshot, or even glazed, his blue Brooks Brothers shirt still neatly tucked in, though I admit a trifle wrinkled in the back, and said, “It
went very well.”

  I managed to open my eyes and I saw the harshly bright room, chairs still poised, like ghosts, for their occupants, glasses fogged by multiple fingerprints and each still having a small pool left of the original liquid, two or three small brown bags on the floor, near the tables, into which the players had emptied their ashtrays—ashtrays that nevertheless were still filled and anchoring the scoring pads on the tables. It was a worse sight than the bright swirling colors I would see when my eyes were shut, so I closed them again, and heard my voice reverberate in my skull because of the sinus congestion all the smoking had given me. “Seven hours,” I was saying, “to lose twenty dollars. I think I’d have a better shot at paying the rent by getting a waitering job.”

  I listened to Brian laugh and begin collecting glasses. “I guess you can’t know how remarkably well we did,” he said, his voice dimming as he went into the kitchen and then growing louder as he re-entered. “This was the worst run of cards I’ve ever gotten in bridge. And we survived!” I heard him gather cards and begin to fold up the table. “I don’t think we misbid a single hand, you know that? You know how incredible that is? Except, I think we may have been better off in three no-trump rather than five clubs—”

  “What?” I said, and opened my eyes to see the room almost cleared of bridge debris but still hazed by smoke. “God, open another window.”

  “It’s nearly freezing out there, are you crazy?”

  “What hand are you talking about?” I asked, slurring the words like a drunkard.

  “Uh, I think it was the third rubber we played, remember? We started looking for a four-four fit in hearts and ended up in five clubs.”

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  He laughed and I heard his voice diminish again as he made another trip to the kitchen and started running water. “I don’t blame you,” he shouted. “It’s nearly six hours ago. Anyway, apart from that hand, we were perfect! Perfect!” He began to sing a rousing piece of classical music that I didn’t recognize.

  “Brian,” I yelled, waking myself up. I groaned and got up, going to the kitchen. “Brian, I’d like to remind you that we lost. Stan and Bill won fourteen hundred dollars. We lost twenty.” I leaned against the doorway and watched him, still singing, rapidly rinse glasses and put them in the dishwasher.

  “Kiddo,” he said, almost singing the words, “basically we won fifteen hundred dollars tonight.” He closed the heavy dishwasher door and it whooshed from the force. He shut off the water and turned to me, his sleeves rolled up and part of his shirt wet. “The Times should be told about this! A novice”—he held his hands out towards me as if introducing me to an audience—“playing against some of the top bridge players in the United States, with a horrendous run of cards, the pressure on to make every bid perfect, not to blow a single contract for fear of losing the few precious points God saw fit to give us, doing it!”

  I was wide awake now. I had never seen him in a mood anything like this one. “You’re jubilant,” I said. “That’s the word for it. Jubilant. I can’t believe it.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “Oh yes, I get it. I’ve been well trained. Even though our result was poor, we got the maximum out of our opportunities.”

  He clapped his hands, his face perfect for a portrait of the ecstasy of victory. “Right!”

  “Big fucking deal,” I said, in a good humor, however.

  “Kid, I’m too pleased with you to care if you give yourself credit. When you’ve played longer, you’ll appreciate it.” He opened the refrigerator door. “You want a soda?”

  “Any juice?”

  “I’d have to make it.” I told him to forget it. He emerged with his Coke and slammed the door shut. “My God,” he said to the appliance. “We’ll win thousands with good cards. How did you know to make that deep finesse?” he asked suddenly.

  “Brian, your capacity to recall any play at will isn’t shared by me.”

  He walked up to me, his eyes glistening, magnetic, and grabbed my shoulder to squeeze it. “You’re a natural at this game. Give up writing! Give up school! We’ll win the championship, we’ll—” He stopped and went past me towards the living room, but still talking as if I were in front of him, “My God, maybe cards are your forte. Have you ever played poker?”

  I laughed and followed him, my legs wobbly. “No,” I managed to articulate through my laughter.

  “That’s no good, anyway. There’s no legitimate way to guarantee making big money. You have to handle mob people, guns—ah! it’s un-American. But we could go all the way with bridge.”

  “Are you trying to sucker me into playing again, is that it? You’re worried I’ll refuse to play anymore.”

  He flopped onto the couch and took a long drink from his can of soda. He grabbed his crotch and rubbed what I presumed was his penis. “Howard, you’re not a person who should ever be given an opening, you know that? I should celebrate in private.”

  “Don’t get angry. I’m glad you think I played well.”

  He smiled at me. A long, knowing grin that took many seconds to dawn. “You see how much more reasonable and pleasant you are when I discipline you? I have no reason to sucker you. If I wanted you to play again, you would. And I would hardly want to play again unless you did do well. You see, I only have two thousand dollars left in the bank and my arrangement with my father is that that has to last until the summer.”

  Since this was a November night, I could easily calculate that Brian not only couldn’t afford to lose at bridge, he had to win in order to last the year. He nodded at me while I silently took in this shocking fact. “Oh, come on,” I said finally. “He’d give you more money.”

  “You don’t know my father,” he answered in a low voice. “I’m supposed to live on this money. Period. I’d have to get a job until the summer if I ran out and then he’d give me more money. He’s an orderly man. A deal is a deal. I go to Yale, and then I get into law school, and he keeps giving me money. Otherwise, zero. Nothing. Forget it.”

  “So why the big life-style? Why offer to pay half my rent? The money you spent on furniture, everything, all that, why not live within its limits? You can’t say he didn’t give you enough.”

  “Oh,” he said, drawing the word out, and shaking his head from side to side, “no amount of money is sufficient payment for controlling my life. I refuse to allow him to make my life safe.” He stood up and put his head all the way back to be able to drain the can of all its liquid. “He can’t decide what it’s worth,” he said, once he had swallowed. “He doesn’t know what it’s worth to make me perform beyond my capacities.”

  8

  Love, like singing, is something to be taken spontaneously.

  —Alex Comfort, JOY OF SEX

  BY 1972, OUR third year of Yale, Brian and I had become known throughout those parts of the university that cared about any of the following things: gambling, literature, meeting people for sex, listening to a fifteen-hundred-dollar stereo system, watching color television, and seeing one of the hardest workers (and most successful) that Yale had ever had, relax at home. Brian took the maximum number of credits possible for his sophomore year, careful to select the most rigorous courses (law schools are not as impressed by A’s in Western civilization as they are by A’s in quantum mechanics or anatomy) and managed to rout, by this cavalry attack of educational earnestness all the obstacles but one—the Law School Aptitude Test—to his entrance into Harvard Law.

  His friends were almost exclusively oriented to law; occasionally a future medical student would invade the group, but, just as my friends were all headed towards graduate work in comparative literature, or related fields, his were all scheduled for that nightmare judgment of the LSAT’s. Our apartment had the distinction of integrating students from these two distinct areas of study, life-style, and expectations. The grubby literature student who, under the pretext of discussing with me the connection betwee
n Walter Scott’s romanticism and the elaborate paranoia of Thomas Pynchon, would come over to make it with one of the girls; and the endlessly “outward” conversations of the small, muscled, dapper law students, confused as to whether this weekend would be better for skiing or for tennis. The law students, unlike my friends, would not keep an eye on one of the women while having an extended conversation with Brian about their common area of study. God, no, they would genuinely concentrate on the subject for a half-hour or so and then forget it completely to get up and bear down on the object of their lust with an almost sullen straightforwardness.

  A typical day would begin with Brian waking me for my first class. No matter how much later he had gone to sleep, he was capable of instant rousing on hearing the alarm, and he would begin the coffee, wash up, and then come into my room, never reacting to what he found. If a girl was awake and naked and she screamed on his entrance (this did happen once) he would ignore her and tell me what time it was; if he found me alone after I had retired to my room with a girl, he never asked what happened to her. (Once I asked him why he hadn’t been curious and he said, “I presumed that you murdered her.”) If he found me sitting at my desk writing, my eyes bloodshot, the room full of stale tobacco smoke, he wouldn’t ask whether I wished to sleep or what I’d been doing; any more than I, after more than a year of it, felt uncomfortable at breakfast because the girl who emerged from Brian’s room had, up till then, always come as the serious, steady girl of one of our friends. If I’m giving the impression that there was a different girl in our beds each night, forgive me, my fucking was not that frequent and certainly not that diverse. But Brian’s was. If he went to bed alone, it was because he had a decided aversion to company.