Part of the reason the line was so slow was that they had to check everyone’s ID, which made no sense, given the crowd. He shifted from foot to foot, looked to the ceiling for patience. The waiting was giving him a headache, and then when he reached the counter, incredibly, all they had was light beer, they were ten dollars apiece, and he could only buy two.
He didn’t tip his server, then felt guilty, which pissed him off even more. He took a sip from each beer so they wouldn’t spill and hustled across the concourse, skirting the steady stream leaving the arena. The band was playing another new song no one cared about. As he made his way down the aisle, he passed dozens of people texting on their glowing cellphones.
Back at the seats, Marion was doubled over, her head twisted, one cheek pressed against the seat in front of her. A woman he’d never seen before knelt beside her, shining a flashlight app around like she was trying to help. He thought Marion had passed out, and blamed himself for leaving her, and then she straightened up, smiling goofily, pinching something tiny and glinting between her fingers. The woman cupped a palm to receive it, tilted her head and refastened her earring. “Oh my God, thank you so much,” she said, hugging Marion like a long-lost friend. They were both completely stoned. She was from the row ahead of them, and bumped him as she slipped past, nearly spilling the beers.
“You were gone awhile,” Marion said, taking hers.
“I heard ‘Crazy on You.’ What else did I miss?”
“Nothing too exciting.”
“All they had was Bud Light.”
“That’s fine.”
It was a waste. By the next song, his beer was gone. Marion swayed along to “Alone,” but for him the mood was ruined. His back hurt from standing. It had to be nine-thirty. No way they would go two hours. He counted the songs they’d played, thinking they must almost be done. He imagined they were saving “Magic Man” for the encore. As they ran through their later, lesser hits, he expected every song to be the last. He pictured the casino teeming with people, the blackjack dealers calmly revealing their hands, servers bustling between tables with free drinks.
Between songs, as Nancy was switching guitars in the darkness, Ann strode to the front of the stage.
“We know it’s not Valentine’s Day, but we’re not here tomorrow—sorry. So we’d like to wish everybody a happy Valentine’s Day, all right? All right. This is a special night, and Niagara Falls is a special place, so before our last song we’d like to bring two people up here for something special.” She checked her cheat sheet. “Please welcome Tom Rutkowski and Alison Spagnotta—I hope I got that right. Tom here has something he wants to ask Alison.”
The crowd cheered as the couple walked on, and for a moment Art felt as if he’d been robbed. He rubbed a hand over the bump in his pocket to make sure the box was still there. Why hadn’t he thought of it? It seemed obvious now. A simple phone call and they could have been up there instead of these two—hefty, even beside Ann Wilson, and weirdly familiar. As the man lowered himself to one knee, knightlike, in the spotlight, Art recognized the orange Harley bandanna and leather vest.
“Holy crap. You know who that is?”
“Who?” Marion said.
“They were sitting right across from us on the bus.”
“Yikes. Don’t remind me of that bus.”
The woman said yes, and the couple embraced to a standing ovation. A gracious hostess, Ann Wilson kissed them each on the cheek and sent them off, waving to their new fans. As the lights dimmed, then died, Art imagined the congratulations awaiting them, and the happy place this memory would have in their married life, and thought that once again, through his own lack of imagination or foresight, he’d blown another chance.
From the darkness, softly, lilted a synthesizer riff he associated with something bobbing in water, and behind it, revolving like the scratchy edge of a record, the crash and hiss of surf washing ashore. Gradually the lights came up, bathing the stage a marine blue. A guitar joined in, and another synth, their twinned, single notes descending slowly, sweetly. He knew the song but couldn’t quite place it in their catalog—because it wasn’t one of theirs, he realized before Ann sang a word. It was the Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me,” disorienting here, a complete surprise. As a teen he’d been skeptical of the anthem, too inexperienced and self-conscious to buy the idea. Now, on the far side of romance, he wasn’t sure it was realistic, or was he unworthy of the sentiment, split as he’d been? It made him think of Wendy and the beach, the lunch hours they’d sat at the chained-down picnic tables, necking and planning a future that never happened.
Marion tugged at his arm, and he leaned down. “I love this song! I didn’t know they played this song.”
“They don’t,” he shouted. “It’s probably because it’s Valentine’s Day.”
He wasn’t sure she heard him, because she didn’t respond, just swayed by his side as Ann overpowered Roger Daltrey.
At the end, both Wilson sisters came forward, arms over each other’s shoulders. “Thank you,” Nancy said. “And good night,” Ann said. They bowed and threw a Dating Game kiss. “We love you!” The stage went black, the synthesizer riff and the crashing waves still circling, softer and softer, until they were lost in applause.
All around him people held up their phones, a ghostly phenomenon he’d only seen on commercials and disliked on principle. The few surviving smokers raised real lighters, blatantly violating the law. He wished he had one.
They clapped in rhythm—“We want Heart! We want Heart!”
As expected, the band returned for an encore, taking their places again. Cynically, he thought it was all choreographed, as slick and shallow as Vegas. Why did it bother him? Everyone sold out to survive. It was the price of getting old. He’d tried his best, just no one was interested.
They surprised him with another cover, Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll,” which he danced to, feeling faintly embarrassed while Marion flung her hair around. Been a long time since I rock and ro‑olled. It was true. He had no moves, and was already pondering which of the two tables they should play. He bopped along, nodding in time, but finally gave up during “Magic Man,” standing quietly beside her, constrained and impatient, as if waiting to be released.
Odds of a black number coming up in roulette (European):
1 in 2.06
Maybe what she needed all along was to get stoned, because walking through the high-stakes tables of the Lord Stanley Club, surrounded by players losing thousands of dollars every second, the whole place seemed unbelievably, laughably fake, and for the first time since Art unveiled the plan, she thought she saw the logic of his thinking. The money wasn’t real, so why not have some fun with it? It was like Monte Carlo night at church, a riskless thrill for the timid, which, despite what he might say, included both of them. They would have never been there if they hadn’t already lost everything.
Unlike the wide-open, gaudily decorated galleries downstairs, the club was a high-ceilinged room the size of a private library, separated from the main floor by an imposing black marble reception desk and paneled in what appeared to be teak. The atmosphere was serious, even stuffy. There were no slot machines plinking, no hidden speakers blaring classic rock, no revolving LED screens promoting the in‑house restaurants and shows. The entryway might have been a stage set. Below a full-length portrait of Lord Stanley himself, a fireplace lined with river stone blazed, attended by a pair of substantial wingback chairs. The design aspired to an exclusive businessman’s club, a civilized retreat, except for the baize-topped tables jammed with older, chain-smoking Asian men in suits. At a glance, she understood that she and Art were the foreigners here.
She was also certain that everyone knew she was stoned. When a server came by offering champagne, she took one from the tray and quaffed it, both for cover and to settle her nerves.
There were no open seats at either of the two roulette wheels, and rather than forfeit whatever slight advantage Art thought they would have here,
they waited, sipping and dispassionately watching the action, as if they might learn something from it. The croupier looked Chinese as well, possibly Korean, a husky pie-faced guy with a brush cut who kept the wheel lazily spinning while the players placed their bets. He plucked the ivory ball from the winning slot and, backhanded, sent it zipping around the rim, its orbit magically resisting decay—magnets, she suspected. The players reached across one another, adding impulsive last-second bets, pushing him stacks of chips to put on the numbers at the head of the table.
“Pick a number,” Art said.
“Seventeen.” Emma’s birthday.
“I’ll take thirty-one.” Jeremy’s. “How much you want to put on it?”
“How much do we have?”
“Right now, a thousand.”
“Five hundred,” she said.
“Look at you, going big.”
They didn’t actually bet, they were just passing the time till they could get a seat. It was more fun with something to root for, even if it was imaginary.
The croupier rubbed his palms together and silently passed a hand over the board, preventing any further betting, and by some hidden mechanism the ball dropped, spiraling down around the banked, polished bowl and across the circling numbers until with a woody knock it struck the raised gates of the tray, popped up onto the bowl and rolled down again, clattering from slot to slot until it finally lost all energy and settled. From where they stood, she could see only half the wheel, and had to wait till it came around—now just a passenger along for the ride—to see the ball had landed on 17.
She squeezed his arm. “How much would that be?”
He looked up, as if watching his brain do the multiplication. “Straight up, thirty-five to one, that would be seventeen thousand five hundred dollars.”
“Scheisse.”
“Minus the five hundred I lost.”
“Seventeen thousand.”
“Pick a number,” he said.
“Why?”
“To prove it wasn’t just beginner’s luck.”
“Okay—twenty-three.”
It didn’t hit. Neither did any of the other numbers they chose, no matter how intently she focused her mind powers. It was a fluke, as random as the wheel. They were doomed to lose, to be taken by the house like the pigeons they were.
And yet the players at the table were winning, the croupier counting out stacks of different-colored chips after each spin. It was the same at the other table, where a pierced loudmouth in a hipster’s stingy brim was crowing, “It’s all skill, baby.” No one played just one number straight up. They played five or six at a time, and the white lines and four corners between numbers, hedging their bets. The most common strategy seemed to be to haphazardly scatter your chips to cover as many numbers and combinations as possible, rather than Art’s plan of simply playing black, except, as they waited, she noticed some of the winners were actually getting back less than what they’d put down, the odds gradually wearing away their stakes.
That was what happened to a wizened, slick-haired man to their right wearing bifocals with one dark lens. Down to his last stack, he bet everything and lost. He nodded as if he’d expected it, gathered his empty glass and napkin, and, without a word, stood and offered her his seat.
“You ready?” Art asked.
“No, you go. Show me how it’s done.”
He’d brought a single thousand-dollar chip, which he slid across the table. Before the croupier could make change, a server—also Chinese, slim and miniskirted—appeared to take their order.
Art deferred to Marion.
“Some champagne?” she asked, as if it might not be available.
“The same, please,” he said, trying his best to be debonair, which she thought hilarious.
He received a hundred maroon-edged chips, ten stacks of ten, five of which he set aside before he made his first bet—twenty dollars on black.
“Minimum bet is fifty dollars,” the croupier reminded the table at large, and Art added three more chips. He sat back while the other players craned over the board, loading up the few unclaimed numbers until only 19 red remained, her eyes naturally drawn to the empty square. As the croupier waved his hand to close the betting, she weighed the possibility that the wheel was fixed. It didn’t have to be, she reasoned, but was still relieved when the ball came to rest on 11 black.
She patted Art’s shoulder. The croupier balanced a clear plastic cylinder atop the chips on the winning number and with both hands raked the losers into a hole before doling out the winnings. Art kept the stack he gave him and let the fifty ride.
He lost the next one, and doubled his bet. The server returned with their champagne—drier than her first glass—and she realized she’d been so engrossed in the game that she’d forgotten how wasted she was. She thought it was the anxiety of having money on the table. Just watching him, she was jittery, her blood riled up. She didn’t think she’d care so much. From the beginning she’d thought it was a crazy idea; now each time the ball dropped, she was pulling for him to win.
34 red came up, then the green zero, the house number skunking everyone.
He kept doubling on black, as if it had to hit eventually. She could see the adrenaline working on him too. As soon as he lost, he grabbed another stack, impatient to get the next bet down—fifty this time, as if he’d given up on his plan. She wanted to lean in and tell him to mix things up, to bet on red, or bet more, spread it around, but stood quietly behind him. As if to prove her point, the man beside him hit big on 5 red, hauling in a dozen stacks of yellows topped with a trio of brightly striped thousand-dollar chips he casually pocketed—and then a few spins later won again and cashed out, tipping the croupier a hundred.
“I guess this is the lucky seat,” she said, taking the empty chair.
“It’s not mine,” Art said. “That’s for sure.”
Their server appeared to see if she needed a refill.
“How about a Jack and Coke?”
“Better make mine a double,” Art said.
She started with the minimum. She didn’t bet with or against him, going instead for a mix of straight numbers, splits and corners. She had a piece of the winner, 33 black, and earned back her stake plus thirty dollars.
“Nicely done,” he said.
“Nicely done yourself.”
“I just needed you here.”
“Aww.”
They both lost, then, incredibly, she won again, a split this time, collecting an impressive double stack just as the server delivered their drinks. They toasted each other, the whisky, like the Coke, sweet and immediate, making her think how strange it was, after all their careful budgeting and Sunday coupon-clipping, to be tossing around money like it was a game. Yet instead of terrifying, their recklessness was weirdly exhilarating, like the fights they’d waged over Wendy Daigle, elemental, all pretense of normal life abolished, the false past gone, the future purely uncertain. She could see why people became addicted to the feeling, throwing away their savings chasing the high not of money but of sheer possibility.
She used some of her winnings to cover more numbers, hoping for a big score, but lost when 16 red came up. The next spin they both lost, then one of her corners won, another red. She noticed that having her own chips on the table relegated Art’s winning or losing to an afterthought, which, if unavoidable, felt wrong.
He needed a win to replenish his bank. She offered him a hundred but he declined, putting the last of his chips on black. He won, staving off the inevitable, then lost as she hit 27 red straight up for three hundred fifty dollars.
“Well done.”
“It’s all luck,” she said with a shrug, yet arranging her stacks in front of her gave her immense satisfaction.
Again, she offered him a hundred. This time he accepted. He lost again, and still he put his last fifty on black.
“I should be doing better than this,” he said.
“Should be like a wood bee.”
“Th
at zero screwed me.”
The croupier passed his hand over the board. The ball rattled and hopped, stopping on 5 red.
“Jesus,” he said. “That just came up.”
She’d lost too. She offered him another hundred.
“No, you go ahead. The universe is definitely against me.” He pushed back and stood, took his empty glass and pointed to hers. “Want something else?”
“Another one of these?”
He scanned the room for the server, then headed off toward the bar. He was trying to be a good loser, but this was supposed to be his game, and she could see his pride was hurt. She hadn’t meant to show him up. She’d wanted him to win as much as he did, maybe more. For a moment she wondered if she should purposely lose the next couple to make him feel better. It would be easy enough. All she had to do was put a few hundred on a number and it would disappear. I don’t know what happened, she’d say when he got back, I guess my luck turned. She could hear him saying it was okay, his sympathy masking secret relief, but when it came time to bet, she forgot him completely. She rose from her seat and reached across the board, greedily covering whatever looked good to her.
Odds of a couple making love on Valentine’s Day:
1 in 1.4
He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t been standing right behind her, counting the payouts. In less than an hour, following no logical system whatsoever, she won well over six thousand dollars. He hadn’t done badly. With a larger stake, which he’d have tomorrow, he could see the Martingale method would work, it just took patience and the nerve to lose big. It was actually better that she’d won.
They celebrated at the bar of the Lord Stanley Club, toasting her luck with shots of Patrón, then weaved their way back to the elevators, leaning on each other. He’d left a ten for the turndown service, so there was chilled champagne waiting for them. The cork bounced off the ceiling and disappeared, the mouth foaming over, making her shriek. Halfway through the bottle, he ordered another of the good stuff and tipped the room service guy a twenty. Tonight of all nights they could afford it.
Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357) Page 9