The Game Player

by Rafael Yglesias

  I saw the light go on in our bedroom and I went in to tell Karen what had happened and then to reassure her that there was nothing she could do. She said she couldn’t sleep and asked if I thought Brian would mind her presence. I didn’t know, but I said she should come out if she wished. When I returned to the living room, Brian said his mother wished to speak to me. “Howard,” she said. “Brian has some tranquilizers our doctor gave him in his jacket pocket. Try to get him to take one. He needs to sleep.”

  “I can drive him home and stay—”

  “No, I’m all right. I have people here and I think Brian wants to be alone with you. You’re a good friend.”

  I was horribly embarrassed by that remark and I awkwardly got off the phone. I wanted them to scream or cry. Their calm was confusing: almost as if I was the one who needed comfort.

  Brian had sat down in the chair next to the radiator and I sat on my haunches next to him. I looked into his eyes with their black, unrevealing concentration. “Your mom said that you have some sleeping pills and that the doctor said you should take one—”

  “Only one, eh?” he said with a cackle. “I thought of suicide for the first time in my life tonight. I had no idea what was meant by thinking of it. Incredible barrier to cross. I won’t do it but now I must live my whole life knowing it exists as an option. How incredible! Must everybody do that?” he asked, with real interest in a response.

  “You’re just upset. You don’t want to feel the pain. But go ahead, don’t—”

  He glanced up at the sound of Karen opening the door and entering. “No, kid, you misunderstand,” he said to me while watching her curiously as if we were in a sidewalk cafe and she was a pedestrian. “Hello,” he called to her brightly. “I don’t feel grief. And besides, there was only one tranquilizer. He wouldn’t give me more than that. I threw it away because it makes me think of suicide.”

  Karen looked at me as if I could cue her behavior. I silently returned her inquiry by making a sad face. “Hi, Brian,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have gotten up,” he answered in the casual tone of a happy person.

  “I’m not tired,” she said. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  Brian cleared his throat and caught something in his lungs because he coughed suddenly, with a surprised look on his face, and bent over until the fit passed. I patted him on the back to help and he peeked out at me with a smile. “Thank you,” he said when he could talk.

  Karen, still standing uncomfortably in the center of the room, asked, “Would you rather I leave you and Howard alone? Don’t feel—”

  “God! People really have been telling me, don’t feel, or do feel, all day. I’d like to talk to Howard alone for a little while. But don’t bother to go outside or anything drastic. Do you mind staying in the bedroom?”

  I suggested Karen should take some coffee with her, and, while I watched her carefully close the bedroom door behind her, there was a moment in which I realized that I was glad so much fuss had been made about guaranteeing my presence for Brian. “I see papers on your desk,” he said. “Work on the book is going well?”

  “Yes, it is. It’s a lot of research, though.”

  “That’s good.” He stood up slowly, his hands touching his chest and back as if checking their reality. “I have to figure out what I’m going to do. I know that’s the point of tonight, but I’m having trouble.”

  “What do you mean? What your career is going to be?”

  “Right,” he said, with a look of surprise at my ignorance. “The fuckhead’s dead. I don’t have to go through that crap anymore.”

  I watched him carefully and saw no sign that he was insane. But his words terrified me. “You mean, going to law school?”

  Brian laughed and looked at me with contempt. “Yeah, Howard, I hope this doesn’t come as a big shock to you but I’ve spent six years of schooling with that in mind.”

  “Brian, don’t play games with me. Are you trying to tell me you never wanted to do that?”

  “What!” He smiled and looked around the room at invisible persons to share with them his incredulity. “All these years you thought I did that out of love? You thought I wanted to be a lawyer? Come on, Howard, then why wouldn’t I have been in a state of ecstasy all the time? Because if there’s one thing I’ve accomplished it’s my progress towards being a lawyer.” He laughed, but stopped when he saw my face. He looked sorry for me. “Is that why you’re acting like this room is filled with eggshells?” When I frowned from confusion, he laughed again and did a superb mime of a person walking with intense caution. “You think I’m upset that Daddy died,” he said after the brief performance. “Incredible.”

  “Brian, I don’t know much about your relationship with your father—”

  “I hate him, Howard,” he interrupted casually. He sat on the arm of our couch and ran his hands through his hair. “Hated.” He laughed quickly with a look of embarrassment. “Do you know the naïveté of the subconscious is astounding? I’m driving in a mad rush down here from Boston and I get this overwhelming feeling that when I arrive, I’m going to be arrested for murder.” He shook his head at me in wonderment. “Literally!” he shouted suddenly. “I mean, I somehow imagined that they would discover he had been slowly poisoned. Of course, there was a snag in that. Opportunity, right? But then my hallucination continued with a tacky flourish: my mother had actually done the poisoning and framed me for it.” He stared at the floor for a moment. “I nearly turned around to head for the Canadian border,” he said quietly, and then laughed uproariously. “Unbelievable, unbelievable,” he said through his amusement.

  I was nonplussed. And when Brian noticed my silence, he said, “What’s the matter? Did you fart or something?”

  “You’re upset,” I said. “And I think you’re doing a terrible thing to yourself. Did you say all this to your mother?”

  Brian crossed his legs and made his pose on the armrest an amazingly precarious perching. He took a long look at me, his face smooth and dark from the half-light. His voice was even and calm. “Howard, you think I’m crazy from grief. Of course, I didn’t say that to my mother. I walked in and said hello to all the relatives with my jaws bravely clenched, and a sorrowful lowering of the head. I touched my mother as if she were a fragile vase. And I asked if I could go into my father’s study for a while to be alone, emerging with bloodshot eyes and a strained face that told of the tears I had wept.” He hadn’t altered the solemn tone or the seriousness of his expression during this speech. But he smiled when done: that fast, self-congratulating smile he awarded himself when winning. He stood up then, in an unraveling that stunned me, and clenched his right hand into a fist. His voice was low and enraged: “I sat in that study, Howard, where he lectured and pushed me to achieve, to achieve according to a madman’s schedule—Yale, Harvard. Bam! Bam! Then a post on a committee, then a seat in the House, in the Senate, and sometimes, sometimes, he would dare to whisper his real hope. I suppose he might even have assassinated someone to give me that ultimate prize. Oh, the man was a pathetic fool.” Brian’s face quivered, his voice breaking, and I saw his eyes fill. “I had cried, Howard, in that room. I needed no technique to fake tears.” Brian relaxed, his body slumping, and he ran his hand over his face, rubbing an eye, covering his mouth, and then feeling his neck, his face stretched forward, like the preliminary to shaving.

  “I think most people,” he said suddenly, his voice normal, offhand, “with a father whose emotional capacities are barely up to the level of a Hollywood movie can afford to disobey, or even, greatest relief of all, to laugh.” He walked casually along the length of the couch, a stroll that gave no hint of the gesture he next made. He brought his fist straight down on it, the puff of the pillowed edge and the bang of its legs tilting back and then forward, punctuating his words: “But he had thousands, millions to bribe me with! I think he wanted me to fail once, just once, to be caught with grass, or to fail a test. He waited for any mistake.” Brian turned to face
me. “Whenever I had the misfortune to spend time with him he would go in for an endless itemization of the failures of his friends’ sons. Failures? They protested against the War, failed to cut their hair, dropped out of school. Failure! How easy it was to fail him. If you needed to see a shrink, or if you were overweight, or if you couldn’t hold your liquor, or if you were refused entrance into an Ivy League college. Failures all! The slobs who thought they could be artists—you! You, you poor uncoordinated Jew with your pathetic literary pretensions. Even writing a best seller didn’t impress him. God, how he teased me about my friendship with you!” Brian bent over to have his eyes level with mine. “You think I’m insane not to grieve this idiot’s death?” He straightened. “I don’t hear your Freudian urgings for me to stop repressing my sorrow. I hated him.” He spoke the words in a slurring, growling rage. “He made me squash every opponent I faced. He made me loathe every talent I had, because they became nothing but smug points of satisfaction for him.” Now his tone became polite, casual: “I don’t know why I was saved, why I was spared the fate most people suffer from this kind of egotism. By rights, I should have, as I got older, found testing and competition more and more loaded, more terrible and intense than anything. But I found winning was nothing. Just a chore for Daddy, like mowing the lawn.” He smiled at me. His friendly smile of kind, paternal love. “I knew that you and everyone else were waiting for me to choke on the tasks set for me. But it was really simple to win as long as I cared nothing for the achievement. It was the rest of you who wanted first place. It would have pleased you to win, and your anxieties were obvious malignancies to watch and feed on. I tried countless times to explain that to you, but you thought it was a kind of modesty. I played every game for defense, I waited and waited for the moment when my opponents, anticipating the taste of victory, would move too rashly, and then I’d squash them. If I had ever played chess against another selfless opponent, it would have been an endless draw. Haven’t you ever noticed that my whole strategy at poker involves using the exuberance, the life of other players’ prejudices. I have no style, I have no standards, I have no feelings, no hopes, no lust for self-expression. I am there only to judge your faults, to usurp the Fates: I was the clock that runs out, the arbiter ruling against your mistakes. If other people didn’t attempt winning a game against me, I would never win. I have no offense. Everything I do is a reaction against daring, against creativity, against hope.” He coughed in an odd way and then gagged, his face turning red.

  I went over to him to help, asking, “Are you okay?” but he pulled away, nodding vigorously.

  “I nearly vomited,” he said in a moment, when the fit had passed. “I get so angry that my stomach turns over and I feel like it’s going to come spilling out.”

  I have a horror of vomiting and the accuracy of his description sent a thrill through me that provoked a moment of nausea. I forced it down. “That’s horrible,” I said.

  He laughed. “Indeed.”

  “Why don’t you lie down?”

  “I’m not lying down, or calming down, or anything until you believe me about this. I cannot stand a life of no one knowing or believing the truth.” Brian’s forehead and scalp had broken out into light sweats, so that the edges of his hair were black, damp, and pressed flat. He looked like a feverish, sickly child, his eyes glowing from the intensity of his plea. “Howard,” he said, his voice choked into a whine. “For God’s sake, believe me. I was never any good at those things. I had no business winning, I didn’t care for the prizes. I just had to, to survive. My father,” and now the smallness of his voice closed completely and he was crying, moaning and crying, his body jackknifing, his hands covering his head, like a flower closing, hiding. I stood and watched, as if he were a madman on the street whom I couldn’t pass, while his moans became sobs, his back quaking, his body sinking to the floor.

  I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move. I felt no pity or compassion; the only emotion I could see on the horizon of this paralysis was anger. I didn’t want him like this. “Brian,” I said, and stopped, hearing irritation in my voice. I went over to him—he was almost flat on the floor—and touched his bowed head with my hand, his hair as soft as a little boy’s. “Brian, come over to the couch. You need to rest.”

  His ghastly sobs had quieted and he began to breathe evenly and deeply, spreading his legs out so that he was lying flat. We stayed like that for a while, the silence of the night soothing the echoes of the memory of his agony. I even thought, at one point, that he had fallen asleep, but he suddenly sighed like a bellows and rolled himself over, his face relaxed and stained with tears.

  “Hi,” I said to his eyes, large and solemn.

  He smiled and held my glance with a mixture of curiosity and insistence. “Do you understand now?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said quickly.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, and he backed away from me by dragging his body with his hands, holding his legs stiff. When he reached the back of the couch, he leaned his head against it. “You don’t. You think I’m just upset. I’m not, damn it! Think. Think about it! Did I beat you at poker? Did I actually do it?” He waited for my answer, his head thrust forward pugnaciously, his mouth in a tense frown, his eyes angry. “Think about it,” he said in a low voice. “Did you do it? When I began to act like I knew more about the game, when I began to make little criticisms when I’d win a hand from you? Did you decide to play differently? To concede hands to me.”

  I couldn’t help but be pulled into this preposterous conversation. “Of course, I was the one who changed my own style. Of course, I decided not to challenge you on certain hands. For a simple and good reason: every time I did, I lost.”

  He smiled and shook his head, looking inward with both his thoughts and his amusement. “When you and I were partners at bridge, how did we win?” He looked up quickly as if he had set a trap.

  “We won because we studied Precision and we executed perfectly.”

  He shifted to a kneeling position. “Now, come on, we did not execute perfectly. You know that. We went over our mistakes after every session. We blew finesses, we would place contracts in the wrong hands, come on! The list is endless.”

  “Okay, not perfect. But we were much more perfect than they were.”

  “Yeah, but, Howard, we didn’t make any great plays, we didn’t approach perfection. All we did was make sure that we reached a high percentage of the contracts that we should have. We hit the norm. You know what I mean? We achieved mediocrity with stunning regularity. And our opponents were proud players. They didn’t want to play just to do as well as the cards would allow them. They tried to get the maximum from every hand. And as long as every partnership played that way, only the most creative and intelligent partners would win. But, no, I had to prove that routine, that consistency would beat genius. To make up the difference that our steady, plodding method created, they drove themselves further into extravagance, rather than retaliating with another brand of mediocrity. And that, that was the cause of their defeat. Their arrogance, not our skill.” He had talked himself to life again, his face flushed, and his eyes glittering.

  “Okay.” I put out my hands in surrender.

  “I don’t get it, Howard,” he said, standing up. “Why doesn’t this convince you?”

  “I’m convinced.”

  “Howard, you don’t—look”—he sighed. “I have been trained to live this way. To win this way. And I’ll have to go ahead like this. I refused to become terrified of success and turn into a Buddhist, or go to EST, or go into therapy so that I can be taught to be reconciled to losing. I don’t have talent like you, so I can’t support this appetite for brilliance by developing my capacities. I must win off the anxieties and mistakes of others. That’s ugly. I know it’s ugly. I don’t want to lie to myself about that, and I don’t want the entire world to believe the lie I’m going to force on it: that I deserve my winnings. I want one person—you, my brother—to know the truth, to believe the truth.
”

  He’s insane, I thought. His father has made him feel nothing proves that he is a worthwhile human being. Failure is unthinkable, an oblivion impossible to accept or imagine. And success is mean, the cowardly act of survival in the face of brutality. Thousands of years of struggle, of development; benefited by years of the best education; pampered in every detail; a rich, healthy, brilliant young man incapable of love for anything, even himself. This is America, I thought.

  “Tell me one thing, Brian,” I asked, knowing that my lie had to be prepared. “Explain how you can be a top law student without real intelligence?”

  He giggled, showing a few teeth, his eyes full of mischief. “Howard, you believe the press releases as much as anyone. Do you honestly believe that it’s that hard? That it requires an enormous amount of intelligence?”

  “Yes, I think it must require quite a bit of intelligence.”

  He laughed. “Well, I suppose it does take a good memory. I’m convinced, though, that if one has no nervousness about succeeding, if you have a sort of breezy confidence that the area of study is nonsensical, that memory, almost total recall, is a natural gift. If you search for it, you will find that every human being has some hobby or particular love, in which they have accidentally memorized astounding amounts of trivial facts. My only real interest in life is scoring and I found it easy to remember vast amounts of information needed to be a top student.” His face was calm and masterful now, his emotional collapse had left no traces. “And surely, Howard, every student knows that teachers can be manipulated. Everyone recognizes a flatterer except when he is being flattered.” He looked at me earnestly. “I don’t have to go on about that, do I?”

  “No,” I answered, and meant it. “I believe that. I believe you. However, I don’t think it matters how one succeeds. Will you allow me that?”

  He nodded slowly, pleased at my acquiescence. “I’ll allow that, but you’re wrong.”

  “Okay. But I believe you. My only wish is that you don’t quit.”