The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  The rooms seemed underwater, the smoke static like fish milk suspended in water that isn’t moving. I remembered them from that fateful night. Instinctively, but not knowing quite why, I looked for the table where I had met Dao-Ming. The room was mobbed but I found it easily. It was table number four. As I sat there quietly, unrecognized by the staff, I played a winning hand and thought back to that night, which now seemed like a part of my distant past. I had forgotten how long ago it was. Weeks, months, it was all the same. A girl sitting quietly by a table minding her own business, and now I was playing, so to speak, with her money. Needless to say I had not sent her back the money I had taken, and the more time went by the less likely it was that I would ever do it. I was like that, but I couldn’t help it. I was like the scorpion in Aesop’s fable who stings the animal carrying him across a river. Sorry, I could say (like him), it’s just my nature. I won a hand, scooped up the usual winnings, and then just sat there lost in thought with a glass of naughty lemonade. A man in a white velvet suit was playing opposite me, losing mightily, his face red with rage. His bloodshot eyes filled with tender sadness. Where was Dao-Ming at that very minute? I was sad not to know. Was she in a room plastered with mirrors with her legs wide open and her eyes clenched shut? Was she at home making miso soup on the gas ring?

  I got up and walked through the wall of smoke. I could see all the flickering numbers at once now. People losing their life savings with a smoldering fag end in one hand, a plastic cup of punch in the other. Old people who must have lived through the Cultural Revolution and its shrill stupidities, who must have known all about pointless gestures. There they were and they should have known better. They were all losing minute by minute, and around them the electronic boards showed the warp of their bad luck. I wanted to shower them with gold to make them stop. They didn’t know what they were doing. Thirty years of miserable slog and labor tossed down the maw of the casino in seven minutes. It was incredible. I went to a second table, number nine in the room, and won again, inconspicuously, picking up a nice windfall that I used to clean out a third table. I went on and on until I was at the back of the casino and the Greeks were walking about with vodka shots on trays, their crests of horsehair shining under the lamps. Here there were a lot of these old mainlander couples with their blue caps and their nylon jackets. They played with watery eyes, their veins popping out. The true proletariat from the workers’ paradise being milked dry by the capitalists of the new age. They knew it and they enjoyed it, because even being milked dry by the capitalists of the new age was more novel, more amusing than not being milked dry by them. It was freedom, and freedom is supposed to fuck you over.

  The last table was number eight in the room (I was keeping track for some reason), and when I had won there I collected my chips and wandered into the next room along. The light from the chandeliers went straight into my brain and I quivered. Then I remembered the number that Dao-Ming had written on my palm and that, despite a few baths, had not washed off. It was still there, as if written in an ink that could bind permanently to human skin. As I read the numbers I began to realize that in some way they corresponded to the numbers of the tables I had been playing at. It did not, of course, seem possible, but I was increasingly sure that it was the case. A sequence of numbers that must be an irregular phone number could not at the same time be a plan of action at the tables, but I thought it all the same, even if I am not one to deny that it might well have been all in my mind, because everything was all in my mind during that time, and I knew it. And since everything was in my mind, everything was equally probable and therefore both possible and credible. I didn’t care if the idea was absurd in the extreme, that for me did not make it untrue. It was a sequence, and I was moving through it.

  I stood stock-still in the middle of the floor, and I felt overwhelmed with hunger and confusion. A telephone, I thought, I need to get to a telephone. I went directly out into the vestibule and found one. I called the number in a quiet spot.

  I dialed the number on my hand, and I was surprised, hearing the dial tone, that it was a phone number after all. I had nothing prepared to say to her, however. I looked up and saw the clock on the wall, with the two hands aligned on the three. My hands were wet with perspiration and I had to wipe the receiver. At last the dial tone was interrupted and I opened my mouth to speak, to launch into an apology. But no one answered. Instead there was a low susurration at the other end, like white noise, a sound of waves breaking on shingle or flowing in and out of caves. Thinking that it might be a message on voice mail, I waited for three or four minutes, but it continued. The sounds of the sea, continuous and strangely bitter, suggesting the presence of an eternal storm.

  I hung up and then, as I was walking back to the tables, I wavered. On a whim, I turned and went back to the telephone and called the number a second time. This time, equally unexpectedly, a voice answered, an irritable old woman.

  “Is Dao-Ming there?” I asked in Cantonese.

  But they can always tell that you are a gwai lo.

  “She’s out having dinner.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Lord Doyle.”

  “Do you want to make an appointment?”

  It had never occurred to me that I could meet her so easily this way. But of course—

  “Why yes, I would. When can I come?”

  “Let me look.”

  The phone was put down and now I could hear Hong Kong pop droning from a radio set.

  When she came back she was curt.

  “I have a spot free at six p.m. next Thursday. Can you make that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t be late.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I’m writing you in the book. One hour?”

  “Two.”

  “Ah, much better.” She was suddenly polite. “Thank you, sir, we’ll see you then. It’s ninety-two Queen’s Road East near Pacific Place. Take care la.”

  I was so elated that I could only stammer something incoherent. I went back to the tables halfheartedly but then felt enormously hungry and decided instead to dine. I went to Lei Garden and ate urchins and drank rice wine.

  As I sat there in that crazy décor with my bag of unused cash I felt bottomless in some way, as if all the urchins I was eating could not fill me. Indeed, I ordered plate after plate and it seemed to make no difference. I was still hungry and ordered more.

  As I gorged, I thought of Dao-Ming working from a small room in a tenement on Queen’s, cool and businesslike, laboriously grooming her hair every day, sealing a little cash in an envelope on Friday afternoons and sending it back to her village. She must have paused in front of the mirror and looked hard, perhaps puzzled by what stared back at her, since we have no way of predicting what we will actually become. Time takes us over and does what she wants with us. Even inside our own lives we find ourselves discarded. She pulls a hairbrush through her long mane and criticizes the melodrama of her own mascara. She remembers a boyfriend from long ago, one of the few who mattered, or maybe the only one who did—but they rarely pan out. She wonders where he is now. Married to a proper girl, halfway happy. He will never inquire about her, afraid of the disgrace of finding out where and who she is now. It’s better not to know.

  She listens to the romantic songs on her radio, waiting for clients. She has not become cynical in the slightest, she is even-keeled and realistic, and her sadness is also even-keeled and realistic. She has passed the halfway point, the point at which realism outruns hope. Her savings are modest but rational. She walks all the way to Jardine’s Bazaar to eat in the street and she eats alone, among the lovers and the families and the back-slapping businessmen, self-contained and absolutely quiet. She is defeated, but she is not divorced from her pride. She oversalts her food, covers it with hot pepper, and wipes away the tears with paper napkins. She walks through Wan Chai at night with her doggie bag from the restaurant, pausing by the windows
of the furniture stores and the pet shops with their cages of brilliantly colored birds. It is not impossible that one day she will own a room that looks like the one re-created in the display, rich with misapplied gold leaf, and that she will fill it with birdcages. One day her luck might turn, as the casinos have taught her.

  Night by night, however, her expectation diminishes. She is not waiting for me, or for anyone else. She has given up the extravagant hope that someone might do something impartial for her—or that she might just go home.

  So I ate. Scallops made no dent in me, nor did orange duck. For that matter, I was starving for the next two days even though I ate nonstop, night and day. I continued going out, too, yet strangely no one at the Venetian recognized me any longer. It was as if they were watching me from the wings and no one dared interrupt me, or even tap me on the shoulder, but at the same time none of them came up to me and asked if I would like a glass of naughty lemonade, as they had done so assiduously before. I raked in huge winnings night after night, always playing at the same table at the Venetian, I think it was table number four, and after a week there at table number five, just next to it. I took to wearing sunglasses during those nights, those quiet nights, and my dandy kid gloves that nevertheless gave me the air of a fussy bank teller afraid of getting germs on his fingers. I played cocooned in this way and unaffected by the body odor and the bad breath and the sudden gusts of cold air and the sound of the jongleurs and minstrels weaving their way through the crowds. I played and after I had won I went to McSorley’s Ale House, Morton’s of Chicago, Madeira and Portofino and Fogo Samba and Lei Garden and Imperial House Dim Sum and gorged myself on steaks, bamboo-pressed noodles, Hakka salted chicken, mui choy kau yuk (vegetables with pork belly), noh mi ap (rice-stuffed duck), or linguine with clams. Even seated at the table, and only an hour after eating a whole plate of ngiong tofu or kiu nyuk (sliced pork with mustard greens), I would feel my stomach growl and I would look forward to racing to one of the Venetian restaurants and ordering a meal for three.

  I was waiting for Thursday to come, and on that very day, before taking the ferry over to Hong Kong for my appointment with Dao-Ming, I called a cab to take me to the Paiza. As far as I was aware, it was the easiest high-roller place in which to place a high bet, and I had made up my mind to give all my money to Dao-Ming, as I should have done long before. So why not triple it all and make of it a stupendous gift?

  When I arrived, the staff recognized me, but with some difficulty, and from their embarrassed smiles I could see that they were perturbed by the drastic change in my appearance that my bouts of fever and hunger had brought about. They bowed nevertheless and one of them took me to the private elevators, even alleviating me of my awkward-looking Adidas bag. We talked about the weather. Inside, the bag was whisked away and I was told the chips would be brought to one of the private rooms.

  I asked if these were numbered.

  “Not strictly,” the girl said.

  “If you count counterclockwise,” I said, “could you number them up to ten?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then—I am sure you’ll understand—I would like to be in the ninth one.”

  She smiled.

  “Don’t worry, sir. Players ask for that one all the time, as you can imagine.”

  “Yes, I can imagine!”

  “One minute. Can I seat you here and have you served a cocktail while I see if the room has a place?”

  I nodded and sat. I felt quite warm in there, and when the dry martini came I dried my face with the paper napkin. I could see the enormous lantern suspended solemnly in the semidark, the replicas of the Xin terra-cotta army and paintings recessed into the walls. Everything was familiar and yet everything was also subtly altered since the last time I had been there. I felt smaller, shabbier, even though in reality I was in far better shape than I had been, at least from the perspective of the casino. I drank the martini in three even gulps. After fifteen minutes the girl returned.

  “There is a place in that room, sir. There are two other players. Would you like to know who they are?”

  “It’s nothing to me.”

  “Very well, sir. Follow me. There’s no maximum bet here.”

  “I am glad to hear it.”

  “Your chips will be here shortly.”

  It was one of the rooms upholstered in red leather, similar to the ones I had seen and played in before. The walls were papered with pale green fleur-de-lis. There was a tall vertical painting of two English noblemen posed with hunting rifles next to a brace of slaughtered pheasants. As in other paintings, their eyes were very slightly Asian and they looked down at the players with an uncanny precision. A ruined abbey peeped up from behind the painted willows of a nonexistent England, and beneath this painting a real log fire gently flickered between iron dogs, pokers and hearth brushes slung from a polished brass tree. A basket of wood lay there as well, lending a faint perfume to the whole room. Along the mantelpiece stood sponges and insects encased in glass balls. At either end were two blocks of books simply painted onto the walls as a trompe l’oeil, the collected works of Dickens. I came in and saw my chips assembled neatly at the far end of the table. The two Chinese players there looked up quickly and shifted their eyes to accommodate a foreigner who looked like he had TB. They nodded. They were well-heeled, obviously, dressed in the city way, in navy blue and gold ties, with voluminous stockpiles of chips at their elbows. A bottle of Haut-Brion stood opened on a castered service, with the cork laid ceremoniously on a saucer. It looked like some kind of wine-stained insect lying there on a white doily. I felt warm and bothered as I sat.

  We were all introduced and they shook my hand. Mellifluous English of the British variety, school-induced.

  “We were waiting for you,” one of them smiled. “Can we offer you a glass of claret?”

  “Why not?”

  I took off my claustrophobic jacket.

  The wine was served, we raised our glasses and sipped. Haut-Brion ’81: a fine hospitable touch.

  The dealer let us find our own moment to get started, and then asked me very quietly how much I was thinking of laying down for my first bet.

  “Well,” I said, equally quietly, “I am making only one bet tonight.”

  There was a small stir.

  “One, sir?”

  “Yes, I had a dream last night that I could make only one bet tonight. I am superstitious about my dreams.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “I see,” the dealer said. “And how much were you thinking of placing on your bet?”

  “All of it.”

  They looked down at the mountain of chips.

  I was not sure how this would go down, but the two players were obviously delighted. They broke into jaded grins. I had, apparently, spiced up a dull evening. The dealer noted this and didn’t bother asking them formally if this was to their taste.

  “Very well,” he said. “All of it on one play. Gentlemen?”

  We put down our wine and settled in. I was aware—in the next few moments—only of the slight displacements of the burning logs as they shifted and hissed in the hearth, and the heat eating into my right calf. There was a clarity and concentration that I had not felt in some time, an opening of the senses that the approach of danger had provoked. I wore my customary gloves and accepted the traditional privilege of drawing the first card. The dealers moved to the others with a tactful deliberation, a slowness that was mesmerizing to me, and the room was suddenly extraordinarily quiet apart from the fire, like a chamber suspended hundreds of feet underwater. From some distant place I picked up the soft ticking of a wall clock. The second cards were dealt and we turned them simultaneously. I had scored a five. One of the Chinese had an eight. I had lost everything.

  I sat back as the chips were taken from me and the great cobwebs of thoughts that had hung inside me for days began to tear apart and fall down. I stopped sweating; I became, on the contrary, completely dry and stationary and composed as I watch
ed my money evaporate into another man’s maw. He was congratulated by all present, including myself. The staff were clearly a little sorry for me, or embarrassed at the consequences of my recklessness, and they waited for me to react, to move. When I did, they quietly asked me if I wanted to play again, but so quietly that it was inferred that it would be better if I didn’t. Luck was not with me.

  As I went out into the vestibule I soaked up the soothing quietness, which was however immediately broken by a loud cheer emanating from one of the other pits. I felt a stab of jealousy, and I was sure that I caught the shrill alto of Grandma’s exultant war cry. Perhaps she had won the same amount that I had just lost. I walked on, asking the staff to dispose of the Adidas bag that was handed rather sorrowfully back to me. No matter. I went silently down to the gaming floors and then up again to the Sands casino buffet, where I ordered a rum and Coke and a roast beef sandwich. The floor show that night was a circus from Harbin.