The Game Player
Page 18
I ignored her urgings to confront him and see if he needed professional help (she suggested this with looks of concern that I suspected only thinly masked a sense of her perceptions of Brian having triumphed over mine) and spoke to him only about things like how to cover what was becoming an embarrassing absence from classes. His attendance record, up till then, was flawless, so there was little difficulty, and I discovered that he had called two of his professors, telling them he had mononucleosis and might be out for a long time. I also arranged to tell this story to his friends, who had begun to hound me with questions of concern that, like Karen’s, were accompanied by a suspicious thrill in their voices. The mononucleosis explanation always resulted in a tone of deflation that clearly showed they had hoped for something more exotic and destructive.
But after two and half weeks, I was frightened. His beard was growing wild, his unwashed hair stood up in bunches; his eyes were framed by a grayish-blue fatigue, and his shirt was black at the collar and sleeves from dirt. Conversation had been reduced to one-word replies, always negative to suggestions that he go out or eat something else besides spareribs and fried rice.
Those few days were very lonely for me. I could consult no one because Brian had extended his trust no farther than myself and I realized I had never had to take sole responsibility for something before. At first I did consider calling his parents, or bringing in some authority, but that would have been treachery. What I did was simply the only thing I could think of and I had no confidence in its chance of success. It was a Saturday night, almost three weeks since our bridge game had collapsed, that I walked into his room, shut off the television, turned on the overhead light, opened a window, and began to gather up the bedsheets on the floor. He watched me without protest or surprise, just amusement, and I smiled at him while folding the sheets. “I’m putting these in the hamper.”
“You could donate them to a leper colony,” Brian said.
“I want you to come to the bathroom,” I said, expressionless, “and take a shower. I’ll find clothes for you,” I said, and moved towards his closet.
He raised his voice to apprehend me. “Why?”
“Because you and your clothes are too filthy to take outside.”
“All right,” he said, his voice choked and tired. “I don’t—I agree that you can confuse me. Just tell me what it is, where it is we’re going.”
“We’re going to a house you’ve never been to. We are going to play poker.”
He looked at me as if I were speaking unintelligibly, his eyes blank and small. “I don’t want to,” he said quietly.
“I’m sure you don’t.” I had rehearsed this and I knew my next sentence would be critical. “I’ve lost five hundred bucks so far. Remember you told me I had innate card sense? Well, what’s happened to it? Is it just luck or does the game have some skill to it?”
“Of course it has skill,” he said with quick irritation.
“Well, that’s what I want you to find out.” I had raised my voice as if we were arguing. I did my best to sound aggrieved. “The books I’ve bought are useless and I cannot make any headway against these schmucks who, in bridge, we took for thousands.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, and, in a hilarious movement, slowly rolled off the bed with a crash.
“Are you okay?” I asked, going over to him.
He waved me away impatiently. “Get away, I’m fine.” He groaned, getting himself first to his knees and then slowly to his feet. He wobbled as if drunk. “Who?” he said as if imitating an owl. He smiled at the sound of his voice and said the following as if it were addressed to an audience, “I can’t talk anymore.”
To pretend a lack of confidence in him wasn’t difficult. “Maybe you’re not in shape to play,” I said, moving to the door.
“Where are you going?” He looked hurt.
“Well, you don’t have much money and these are big stakes. You’ve never played much poker. And I know you’ve never played hi-low. You have to be alert.”
He nodded rapidly, almost spastically, and talked to the floor. “Very good, fuckhead, very good indeed.” He took a deep breath and looked up at me, his face very pale, but attentive. “Go into the kitchen.” He stopped suddenly and crouched a bit in order to rub the back of his thighs with both hands, looking like a bird with its wings retracted. He straightened in a moment. “Make coffee!” he shouted.
I laughed from the shock. “You’re gonna shower?” I asked timidly.
“Will you get off my back? I’ll shower, scumbag, just make me some coffee.”
I dropped the sheets and walked rapidly into the kitchen, where Karen looked at me meekly. “Did it work?” she asked in a whisper. I put a finger to my mouth.
“I have to make coffee,” I said in a normal tone. We were silent, except for occasional laughs we allowed to escape because Brian, apparently in the process of cleaning up, was making loud banging noises that were followed by absurd, vehement curses. The coffee was ready and we had stopped hearing water running when suddenly, just after the most profound silence, the first of the Mozart Quintets started at a loud volume, and Brian appeared at the kitchen doorway as if borne in on the current of its singing, glittering strings. He had shaved, his hair was shining and perfumed from what must have been half a bottle of shampoo, and he had put on a pair of beige corduroy slacks that must have been brand-new, and a navy blue fitted shirt that was perfectly ironed.
“My God,” Karen said, “you’re new born.”
“‘Changed, changed utterly,’” I quoted.
His eyes still had no glint of his cleverness and were saddened and wounded around the edges from sleepiness. “Coffee,” he said, pointing to the pot.
“That’s what it’s called,” I said, and poured a cup for him. He fixed it with milk and sugar, saying nothing, and did not meet our investigative glances. He carried the coffee into the living room, into the full roar of the quintets. He walked slowly, very erect and royal in his posture; he sat cautiously in the chair he selected and sipped steadily.
He only nodded yes or no to our occasional questions about how he felt. He drank five cups of coffee and asked when we were due to arrive. I told him that the game was already going and we were expectedly immediately. “Let’s go,” he said, and I kissed Karen good-by. Brian put on an overcoat and I told him that it was quite hot out. He looked blank and said seriously, as the information was new and important, “That’s right, it’s late spring 1973.”
He opened his window all the way and would stick out his head while I drove fast, the way a dog does, closing its eyes, its ears flapping in the wind while it soaks up the refreshment. “I gather,” he shouted at some point over the noise, “that we will be playing against some of our old foes?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s how I heard about it. Josh, Stan, and a couple of others play in it.”
“Hmm,” he said, in a low voice to himself. “So they think the bridge was a fluke.” I asked him if he wanted an explanation of hi-low rules, but he said no, that he’d get it from the others. He said nothing except hello to the five other players at the house when we arrived. We knew everybody but the host, a plump, bearded, Bloomingdale’s attired, graduate psychology student, who talked while biting down on the filter of a Marlboro. Don, the host, explained the stakes and rules: ante, a dollar; the limit, a dollar until the third upcard or until a pair showed; then the limit jumped to two dollars; after the last card had been dealt, it went to five dollars, and they allowed a lock hand to bet after the declaration; each pot was split between the high hand winner (which were normal winning hands in poker) and the low winner, which were the worst hands (six, four, three, two, ace being the best of the worst). A lot of hubbub followed this, everybody explaining at once about their special rules for different variations, but Brian stopped them by saying he would find out the particulars when they came up. “But that’ll hurt you,” Don protested. “Because we can figure out what you have from your questions.”
“That’s a sensible attitude,” Josh said.
“Well, so far,” Stan said, “Howard’s been making duffers out of us.”
“He’s won fifty bucks,” Josh said contemptuously. “That’s like breaking even.”
Brian, seated across from me, took a long look at me, his eyes smart and alive for the first time in weeks. “Well done, Howard,” he said. “I believed you.”
When we were sold a hundred dollars worth of blue (five-dollar), red (two-dollar), and white (one-dollar) chips, Brian said, “This’ll last forever.”
“It can go in two hands,” I told him. “There are three raises per round, and with the possible winning hands doubled, they’re almost always taken.”
They decided to play a round of seven-card stud, the basic hi-low game, to acclimatize Brian. He folded his hand after the first round of betting and carefully watched our endgame procedures: the three remaining players took a few chips from their piles and put both hands beneath the table, before coming up with a closed fist that they opened simultaneously with the other players; an empty fist showed that the player was low, one chip that he was high, and two chips (a rarity) when he intended to play against both the high and low players—a desire that demands clear victories for both high and low, or else the player loses the whole pot. There were two high players and one low this time, an illustration of lock betting. Despite the fact that the low player was unopposed and therefore guaranteed half the pot (a lock hand), he was allowed to bet five dollars; the insecure high hand raised a dollar to waste one of the three raises; the confident high hand raised another five; and the lock low hand took the last raise for another five. “So the last two rounds of betting,” Brian asked, “usually end up costing thirty-two dollars?”
“No, no,” Don said, his voice squeaking from talking quickly. “Most endings are with four people, two of them killing raises for a dollar. So that holds it down to twenty-two dollars for the last two rounds.”
I watched Brian calculate those things that are apparent to any clever person on first playing hi-low: you can only win about as much as you have bet (if a hand costs you fifty dollars, you’ll probably win between sixty and seventy-five dollars on the average) as opposed to hi-only poker, in which you would win four or five times the amount you risk; since lock hands are allowed to bet, it is madness to enter the final round of betting unless your chances are better than fifty-fifty; and since a number of hands, composed of low cards, who would normally fold early in a hi game, stay in, there are more straights and flushes (that develop incidentally from a low hand). He reacted predictably: folding early and often. The variation we played most often was a five-card stud game that, after each player received his five cards, allowed for three exchanges of cards. Each player decided which card he wished to be rid of and then everyone would point to the unwanted cards simultaneously, paying five dollars for the exchange, and would get another card in its place. There were still bets between the three exchanges, so that this variation increased the cost of the game by fifteen dollars in exchanges and by three rounds of betting that usually averaged six dollars a round. This game, called three-card sub, could cost seventy-five dollars a hand. For the first two hours of play, Brian never reached the substitution rounds, folding at least four hands he shouldn’t have.
“You can’t win unless you play,” Josh said to him after one such fold.
“That was a mistake?” he asked with stunning humility.
“I could make a steady living off of the hands you’re folding,” Don broke in with, laughing with a cigarette speared between his teeth.
“Is that true, Howard?” he asked me meekly.
“By and large the hands you’ve been folding,” I answered, “are good to fold. But that last one you should have stayed in on.”
“The blind leading the blind,” Josh said.
“Fuck off,” I said.
“Come on, you’re both playing too tight,” Josh protested. “What did you do with the twenty thousand or so you won at bridge? You guys act like fifty bucks is gonna kill ya.”
“You can’t play this game on percentages,” Don said as if someone had already disagreed with him. “You can’t sit back like in high poker. You’ve got to gun.”
These informative spats could become quite complicated; they would bring the game to a halt while the players argued over strategy and odds. There was no unanimity of opinion about anything, and the discussions irritated me, but Brian seemed to encourage them with his questions asked in the naïve tone of an ingenue. He would watch and listen carefully to their opinionated speeches. He won a few hands of seven-stud with dynamite cards that he didn’t bet the maximum on, causing outrage. “You only took one raise on a full boat,” Josh said, aggrieved because he had been the fooled loser.
“He was sandbagging,” Don said with faint contempt.
“Yeah,” Stan said. He spread out Brian’s full house on the table. “Brian, you don’t have to conceal the strength of your hand like that. It was well disguised. Josh would have called, you could have taken all your raises.”
“I thought he might beat me,” Brian said in a bewildered tone. “I wasn’t sandbagging.”
“What could I have that would beat you?” Josh whined.
“Four eights,” Brian said.
Laughter, hands hitting the table. Brian looked about timidly while Don treated him to a ten-minute lecture on the odds against four of a kind and a full house appearing in the same hand. I couldn’t understand what Brian was trying to accomplish. I knew he knew the odds of high poker, so this was an act. But as soon as Brian began to play well, these players would no longer believe his pretense of ignorance. If this was a sucker play, it was really for suckers.
After three hours, the play settled down to a steadier, more intense flow. I got a hot streak that put me up one hundred and fifty dollars. The big winner was Josh—most of it, Don’s money—and Brian, who had played to the end no more than ten hands, was losing a small sum. We had agreed to a one o’clock quitting time and it was eleven-thirty when Brian started to play almost every other hand to the finish. I was wary immediately, sure that he had set them up for a killing. But he ran into bad luck. He pulled way ahead a few times while going for low in three-sub, and stood pat for the last substitutions, getting outdrawn by either Don or Josh, both of whom hardly ever folded a hand unless their chances were nought. Brian would ask if he had been wrong to stand pat, and, incredibly, Josh would tell him he was, earnestly arguing the point with Don, who would repeat over and over compulsively, “He’s got to be pat. He’s got to play it. You’re gunning on the hand. You’ve got to beat him. He’s got to be pat.” They patronized him, they bullied him about his slow betting and long, embarrassing contemplations of fairly obvious problems. I had seen Brian lose before, but never incompetently or meekly. He was polite and passive about their advice, not arguing even when, from knowledge he must have had from studying probability, he knew they were wrong.
At the session’s end, the players milled about the table, looking at their checks with pleasure, or at their stubs with disgust, while Don banged the chips into their plastic holders and Brian stood quietly next to him, listening respectfully. “You’ll do all right, Brian, if you mix up your play a little. You see, you’re too obvious. You have to try and bluff a little.”
I wanted to scream and tell Don Brian’s record of victories. Victories that I had come to feel were triumphs of modesty and discipline, that were, unlike everyone else’s, richly deserved. But Brian spoke: “It’s raining. Let me bring the car around to the front.” And he left quickly, leaving them with the impression that he was crushed and humiliated by the defeat.
“He lost a lot, huh?” Stan asked.
“He didn’t do bad for a beginner,” Josh said. “A hundred bucks is nothing. I lost four
hundred before I knew what I was doing at this game.”
Don squinted at me. “You think he’ll keep playing?”
“I guess so,” I said, my voice tight with fury.
“He should,” Don said. “He’d be a pretty good player.”
Josh shook his head broadly. “Do you think so, Howard? I was sure, see, that he wouldn’t do well.”
I pretended interest, even tacit agreement. “Really? That’s interesting. Why?”
Josh moved his two hands back and forth to emphasize. “He’s too intense to roll with the punches. You gotta do a lot of losing in this game. You know? I think it bothers him too much to lose at all. And besides, a lot of it, unlike bridge, is talk. Throwing people off their game, you know, by talking up your game.”
I heard a car honk and said good-by after my offer to drive people home was declared unnecessary. “Do you want to drive?” I asked Brian in the car.
“Yeah, I’m full of energy. I haven’t lived in three weeks.”
“Did you like the game?”
He groaned. “It’s hard to like the players. At least in bridge, or chess, you can shut up their stupid opinions because they’re not allowed to talk.”
“But the freedom to talk and lie makes it more interesting.”
He glanced at me, his face suddenly back to the masterful amusement he exhibits when people speak arrogantly about games. “Why the tentative tone?”
“Tentative tone?” I repeated skeptically. “Doubtfully alliterative.”
“But why this cautious urging? Is that better?”
“It is, but I don’t know what you mean.”
He grunted and we drove in silence for a few minutes before he said, “You didn’t expect me to win the first time I ever played, did you?”
“What? No, I don’t care how well you do.” My tone was hasty and false.
“How unkind!” he said, his voice full of pleasure and an English accent. “How unsympathetic!”