The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  I went to the table and laid a large gift next to her handbag, disposing of the question of money beforehand so that it would not ruin whatever moment we might share after the event.

  In the humidity, the standard hotel flowers placed against the panes looked like things made out of a delicate rare stone. The corrugated leaves of geraniums as strange as small cabbages, the petals lying along the sills, and at around three the storm reached a crescendo. I let her sleep for a while.

  On the night table her vanity bag sat with its clips opened, a hairbrush handle and some scented antiseptic hand wipes protruding. She snored lightly. Who was she? Dao-Ming Tang. An invented name, a circus name.

  I wanted to leave, but there was no point running. And I could breathe in young skin, which is a nectar that becomes forbidden around the age of fifty-five. Gandhi sleeping between two young girls.

  When she woke, she opened her eyes and they looked straight up at the lamp. She talked.

  She said, “I thought you were very distinguished when I saw you sitting there with your yellow gloves. I’ve never seen anyone wear yellow gloves in a casino.”

  “They’re my good-luck gloves.”

  “They’re splendid. Only millionaires play in gloves.”

  “Is that right?”

  She nodded.

  We spoke in Cantonese, a slippery language for the white man, and she added, “They have those pearl buttons.”

  “Got them made in Bangkok.”

  “How classy.”

  “Not really. Classy would have been Vienna.”

  “Vienna?” she murmured.

  Because it was just a word, and Vienna doesn’t exist in the Chinese mind.

  “I thought,” she said, “you were a real gentleman. Like in the films.”

  She used the English word, gentleman.

  “Gentleman?”

  “Yes, a gentleman.”

  A gentleman, then.

  “Maybe,” she said very quietly, “you’ll look after me.”

  “Is that what gentlemen do?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned and laid her head against my shoulder.

  “You’re being modest. I know you are a lord.”

  There was nothing to say to this, and I let it go.

  The prostitute and her client: the conversation of millennia. Where are you from? What do you do? The pleasure of lying. The woman, who is from a village in Sichuan called Sando, unknown to the masses. The lord, who is from a village in England where his father runs foxes and where the houses have pointed roofs, just as the films suggest. The lord and the whore.

  “My village,” she said, “has a temple with three stupas. I send money back every month to the monks so they can put gold on their deer. The temple has golden deer on its roof.”

  “You send money every month?”

  She was quiet. I drank from the opened half bottle of wine, sitting on the edge of the bed while she watched me. I was glad that the darkness hid from her the quiet ruin of my body, and that because of the rain we did not have to talk much.

  “You must have a lot of money,” she said later on. “To stay in a place like this. All the other men run out of money.”

  “I win and I lose, like everyone else.”

  “Lord Doyle,” she laughed.

  “It sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” she said. “It just sounds funny. Not silly. I’m sure you win more than you lose.”

  “I practice every day.”

  “I saw how you play.”

  “How is that?”

  “Like a gentleman. Like you don’t care. Like tossing something to the wind.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Careless like a lord.”

  She smiled behind her hand.

  “It’s not what you think,” I protested. “I’m not what you think.”

  “I know,” she countered. “I’m not as silly as you think I am.”

  Who could say where her curiosity about me came from? It was an instant mystery whipped up out of nowhere. You might even call it an instant liking, a sympathy that had blown up in a matter of seconds like the affinity that blossoms between children in the space of a single minute.

  “That’s how I am,” I admitted a bit self-importantly. “I want to lose it all. It’s idiotic, I know. I should be embarrassed.”

  “Then you’re a real gambler.”

  I finished the bottle and rolled it under the bed.

  “That’s me. I’ve always been like this.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I hate gambling. I hate gamblers.”

  Yes, I thought, you probably do.

  “I hate it when they win,” she added.

  And I wondered if I hated myself when I won. It was possible.

  “Well, I am a loser,” I said. “You should like me a bit more.”

  “Shall we sleep?” she said sweetly.

  She lay and folded her hands together under her chin, and I thought there was something pleased and secure in the way she closed her eyes and let herself drift off without any fuss.

  My mind filled with mathematical images and scores as I dozed against her and the sex was expended. The cards flipped by a cheap spatula, a thousand plays streaming through the dark and my eye calculating them all. A man who cannot love, but who can scan the statistics of the laws of chance. It was too late to regret how I had turned out.

  But all the same I felt differently this time, and in small, aggravating ways. I couldn’t say why it was. Something about her had made me feel ashamed and I felt myself spinning out of my orbit, wondering to myself whose daughter she was and where she had come from, questions that never troubled me usually. I felt ponderous and accused, and something in me retreated and tried to hide. For the first time I wondered to myself what I looked and felt like to a woman of her age, a woman in her late twenties, I imagined; how repulsive I must be, how oppressive and pitiful. I knew those things before, of course. One is never that self-deluding. It’s the other way around: a man knows everything inferior about himself, but there’s nothing to be done. He grits the teeth and gets through it. I picked up one of these girls once a month, and it was like a duty, a visit to the confessional. There was nothing else in Macau. The gambler who lives here is not going to find a normal wife. It’s a life sentence for some and I had lived like this for years, stumbling from one encounter to the next and never caring because I knew I had nothing better to look forward to. But now, suddenly, the known system had stopped working and I was forced to look at the invisible mirror, and the shocking image there made me want to be blind. It was the way she slept against me, trustingly, and never showed her disgust, which must have been so deep that it could not express itself. I was not used to that.

  I could never have told her my real reasons for being there, my long, rather comical flight from the law after a certain unpleasant incident in England long ago. One learns not to reveal a single thing to anyone, not even to a woman who is sharing one’s bed for a while, and after a time this secrecy becomes second nature, an unchallenged mode of behavior. There cannot be any slip-ups. One doesn’t fancy being shipped back to Wormwood Scrubs to serve one’s time. Not at all. One wants to be free in the world of money, or even chained inside it so long as its marvels are available.

  I half-slept curled against that sad little back, and I could smell the talc on her shoulders and the after-scent of pork buns. I dreamed of the river Ouse and the church in Piddinghoe. Thunder from out at sea rolled in and shook the placid little garden outside the window, and I tightened my grip around her and wondered if she would remember me this time the following night, or any of the following nights, or whether she would even remember the room itself when she was old. It would all be lost. When I woke up the shutters were still closed and a cat had appeared on the outside sill, nosing the gap between them. For a moment I thought I was in England and my fingers gripped the edge of the bed in a panic. Then I remembered everything about China, which was now my home.
Dao-Ming was gone, as they always are. The sheet had not gone cold, however, and slightly oiled hairs stuck to the pillowcase that, when picked out, fell limp across my fingers like things that had just died. They smelled of patchouli and storms, and I thought how serious and stilted our chats had been and how unlike the usual chats I have with my purchased roses.

  The rain continued as if nothing had happened, and deep within myself I was sure that I would see her again, because although the city is a reef where the confused fish never meet twice unless a goddess intervenes, intervene she sometimes does. Solitude and loss are the rule, and years go by before one realizes it, but one can always meet a woman twice in a city. It’s not like living on the mainland, lost among the billions. There are hundreds of Dao-Mings, and thousands of Tangs, but a connection made is a connection never forgotten, or almost not forgotten, and one day, I was sure, I would once again find the girl who generously gilded the deer of Sando.

  FOUR

  The following night at eight exactly, I put on my darkest suit and took the elevator down from the seventh floor of the Hotel Lisboa. It was the hour of the “second shift” in the world’s most profitable casino, and the revolving doors turned like turbines as crowds poured through them and hurled themselves toward the labyrinth of casinos scattered throughout the hotel. Seven million dollars a day in revenues and a pall of smoke that never moved, that hovered near the tops of the tangerine trees from which hung a thousand red New Year envelopes like venomous fruit. Smoke that hit the throat like sawdust mixed with powdered metal.

  I went down to the hotel’s main mass-market casino, the Mona Lisa, where the games are endless in their diversity: pai kao, fanton, cussec, Q, and stud poker, and of course punto banco baccarat, that slutty dirty queen of casino card games. The boys brought me a cognac and sausage rolls, and I ordered a buttonhole from the street. Cut a figure, O my brothers, and have them believe that you really are a lord. But I lost again. I played fish-prawn-crab dice for an hour, forgetting myself completely, then moved off down the elevators to the Crystal Palace, which is like descending into an ice grotto. Waves of glass shards fall from the ceilings in shades of green and orange. A place where the rational mind comes apart. From there I navigated in total solitude to the Club Triumph and the Lisboa Hou Kat, a place that has a secretive feel to it, like a buried palace in Crete from the time of Linear B, with a circular room of leather sofas and tangerine trees with New Year envelopes. How can such places exist?

  The hours passed. The money slipped away. A bead of sweat at the base of the spine, and my sweet vertigo. After a long losing spree I went back to my room to freshen up, then took the elevator down to the casinos for a second try. It was eleven and the night shift was just in. Brutal, cynical men with red faces and cheap suits, smoking continuously, their eyes little lusty slits that sucked everything in and spat it out again. On the ground floor they stood by the Throne of Pharaoh, a reproduction chair from Tutankhamen’s tomb, and a large vertical oil painting with its title provided: La Mère Abandonnée. A woman with a lyre sighing over a baby sleeping in a wheeled carriage. This scene of rural misery from nineteenth-century France did not arouse their curiosity at all, and they turned their backs to it as they waited for the elevators. They carried bags of gaming chips and cans of winter melon tea. Their breath smelled of oyster sauce. I bought a cigar in the underground mall and went back up to the VIP rooms, where Renoirs loomed on the walls. Here in the four innermost rooms the bets were a minimum of ten thousand up to a maximum of two million. Three plays at a time, usually. There was a separate entrance leading into the hotel to encourage the high rollers to roll right out of bed and into the VIP rooms with sleep in their eyes. Bright red armchairs had dropped out of the surrounding Alma-Tadema paintings of ancient Rome. Laughing maidens gamboling down flowery slopes. Air and light and lust. Scenes from the second century, or the first century, or the fourth century, or the never-never century. So many centuries reduced to a mural. So many centuries of pointless pleasure. And here the factory managers who had never read a book about Rome, much less visited, sat and lounged and tensed their minds as they threw themselves like disoriented moths against Luck’s candle flame. They didn’t know where they were. Eastwest.

  I played side baccarat for a while, and I was impressed by the way the staff brought me my supply of chips, like men stoking an engine fire in a train. I cheered up as my luck improved; I won three hands out of six. Four hundred back in. The myth paintings grew pinker as the hours went by. I became jolly again and won two hands more. I felt a stab of sadistic vitality.

  With a modest profit I retired to the armchairs, in the décor of Paris 1900, and marveled at the gold mosaic floors of the elevators, which shone for a moment as the doors opened. I had made about $600 HK—it was nothing to brag about, but it wasn’t a loss. Peanuts add up.

  An hour later I migrated back to the Crystal Palace, where the air was sweet and heavy with female perfumes. Teenage girls aplenty. Hong Kong men in blue suits. I lost it all and then some. It’s the way it goes, and I didn’t care. It was well after midnight by the time I got down to the new Sands and strode through that monumental hall whose din makes you feel mad and happy at the same time—not exactly the same time, but close.

  I was feeling more reckless than I usually do, and the losses that I sustained on the slot machines did not serve to deter me from getting into deeper water. When did losses ever do that? I went to the first-floor buffet restaurant and sat there calculating my losses and my remaining reserves. The math was simple, but sliding. The fact was that after several months of playing the tables almost nonstop every night I had burned through the greater part of the money I had saved up over the years and had brought to Macau. A small fortune that had been supposed to last me a fair while, assuming that on average I would win almost as much as I lost, or maybe even more. But it had not worked out that way. It never does.

  After a glass of Lello Douro, I made my way past the floor show and the Jade Monkey slot machines to the entrances of the separate private gaming rooms. I was guided by staff dressed in the yellow uniforms of the witch’s guards in The Wizard of Oz, who took me right to the door, assuming, I suppose, that I was a high roller. I was certainly tempted by the nearby roulette tables, with names like Lucky Seals and Fairy’s Fortune, but since I was now resolved upon risking a much bigger sum of money, I let myself be escorted upstairs to the Paiza Club, at that time the most exclusive private gaming room in Macau. Besides, everyone knows that roulette lends a 2.7 advantage to the house, no matter what you do. For baccarat it’s a mere 0.9.

  The staff upstairs were in black and gold uniforms with gold buttons. I was surprised to hear that they already knew my name.

  “Lord Doyle,” they said, swinging a welcoming hand toward the rooms called pits, which were arranged around a circular structure only half revealed by a luxurious dimness.

  The atrium was cavernous, with a huge tasseled lantern suspended at its center. The style was very Chinese. Terra-cottas in niches and dragons everywhere. The world’s biggest chandelier, my escort said, indicating it with her hand. I was then given a choice of private rooms, some of them with fires in grates, bloodred panels, and gray tables. I chose a room where I could play against the bank alone with $10,000 HK hands.

  I sat myself down there and waited for a bottle of wine to be brought up from the cellar. I took off my gloves and the banker bowed to me and announced his name, which was unusual. We relaxed into some anticipatory banter and then I was given my chips.

  It was by now nearing dawn and the other rooms had their occupants, wealthy punters from the Territories in sleek suits, with briefcases of money laid at their feet like waiting dogs.

  I settled down with a cigar courtesy of management and played a few hands at a more relaxed pace than I am used to. I had to admit to myself that the game was much more enjoyable played like this, without the hustle and bustle of a Chinese mob around me, at my own pace and without the internal tension t
hat usually drove me forward. I thought a little more carefully about what I was doing. These are the ideal conditions for gaming if the individual doesn’t want to lose a lot of money quickly on a series of small, fast bets. The game is the same, but the ambience is not.

  It was now that I felt the compulsion that always drives me from within as I see the pallet turn the cards and I feel them slipping like skin under my finger pads. A sensual moment, empty but charged with anticipation. The mind emptying out like a drain, or else scurrying like a small, wingless bug.

  There are a few moments of this total calm before I start to move, like the moments that I imagine precede jumping off a cliff. Even in these exclusive rooms the dealer will tell you the table’s “luck numbers” if you ask him, and there will be a place in your mind that wrestles with the superstition.

  The gambler is a man finely tuned to the supernatural. He is superstitious, wary of portents and omens. He is on edge for this reason. I wear kid gloves at the table, a habit in which I had indulged those past two years, and this was also a superstition. I put them on at the last moment after I have felt the cards, and through their supple material I feel the laminated surfaces all over again. I feel ready to win or lose.

  Lose, in this case. It didn’t matter so much this time because I had written off any losses that night in advance. I did not sweat it as the first ten grand hit the dust. I poured myself another glass of wine. The dealer rolled back on his heels and asked me if I felt confident enough to go up to fifteen thousand, and perhaps provoked by the undertow of his tone, I said that I would.

  “Good for you, sir. Courage often wins.”

  Does it? I thought. Does it really play a part in outcomes?

  “It’s a superstition,” I replied.

  A manager came in then and shook my hand. He was beautifully dressed and he asked me if everything was to my satisfaction.

  “Lord Doyle, isn’t it?”

  “Well, if you say so.”

  He laughed.