by Beth Raymer
“Wow,” Jeremy once said, as he watched me prepare for a pay and collect. “You’re so quick at counting money.”
He found my gambling jobs intriguing even though, for a long time, he couldn’t grasp exactly what it was I did. Trying to understand, he bombarded me with questions, but I was so unaccustomed to articulating how the gamblers made money that everything I said sounded like gibberish.
“Okay, let’s take it a step back,” he said. “Tell me what you do. How do you make money?”
“I told you. I get the donuts.”
Unconvinced, he looked at me. “Is that code for something?”
“No. Every morning I get Boston creams. A limo picks me up.”
“But how come you go to doctors’ offices with thick rolls of money?”
“Because I’m paying and collecting.”
“Beth,” he said, switching to his professorial voice. “I’m going to ask you a question and don’t get mad. Will you please let me help you get health insurance?”
Practical, intelligent, kind, and adventurous, Jeremy certainly had a lot going for him. But, to be honest, his positive qualities weren’t what held my interest. What drove me absolutely crazy with determination was his extreme criticalness and aloofness. I never seemed to please Jeremy and it was hard to make him laugh. As our friendship developed, I don’t know how many times I pulled a newspaper from his face or stood in front of the television, blocking The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and demanded his attention.
On the night Jeremy presented Otis with his very own press pass, I went to sleep thinking, for certain, that he was the love of my life.
Then I changed my mind.
We were on the Q train during rush hour, standing clear of the closing doors, standing so close that if I’d lifted my nose, we could’ve kissed.
“I went on a date last night,” I said, over the stagnant smell of urine.
“How was it?” Jeremy said. He admired a young woman softly singing with her iPod.
“Fun,” I said, though it hadn’t been fun at all.
“Did he ask you to go home with him?”
Jeremy’s question took me by surprise. As much as we talked about flings, it was always me asking him about his love life. Until now, he had never asked about mine.
“No,” I said. “We had a late dinner and then he put me in a cab and I went home.”
He looked at me. His blue eyes shined against the monochromatic sludge of shoulder-to-shoulder beige raincoats.
“He put you in a cab? How’d you finagle that one?”
I knew there were things about me that got on Jeremy’s nerves. My intellectual shyness made it hard to have in-depth conversations. I had no interest in politics or current events. He often felt that I laughed at him, as opposed to with him, which was true. But it never occurred to me that he didn’t even find me worthy of cab fare. Something told me he would never have said that to his women friends from Columbia. As I was taught in elementary school, I took a deep breath and counted to ten. Not that it helped my anger subside.
“I didn’t have to finagle it, fuckhead.”
“Beth, calm down.”
“You’re an asshole. You really are.”
Jeremy sucked in his cheeks, hesitating before he spoke. “You’re taking it the wrong way.”
“No I’m not,” I said.
Off the Q and up the steps, back across the platform, trains rumbled overhead, and I dwelled on all the things I absolutely hated about Jeremy. At the apartment, I bad-mouthed him to Carolina. He called the next morning. I would’ve poked my eyes out if he hadn’t.
He asked that I meet him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eating our lunch on the museum’s steps, the smell of honey-roasted peanuts cooking from a nearby street cart, Jeremy didn’t bring up our subway tiff and I was glad. Watching him gently unwrap the snacks he had made for us, it occurred to me that I probably had taken his comment the wrong way. Interpreting it the way I had probably said more about me than it did about Jeremy.
“I had a vision while walking in the subway tunnel between Eighth and Seventh Avenue,” Jeremy said. “I pictured a mad gunman pulling a pistol out and pointing it at someone. Everyone ran, except for me.” He handed me a cupcake.
“You made these? For us?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Jeremy! I love them!”
“Well, why don’t you taste them first?” He continued with his story. “So, I kicked the gun out of the guy’s hand just as he shot it and I saved the other person. The gunman and I fell to the floor and I pried the gun from his hands. Then the cameras came and I was made a superhero. The mayor cut me a check for ten grand and I put it in savings.”
“You put money in savings even in daydreams?” I said.
An affectionate couple with a radio sat beside us. Overhearing the last licks of a Led Zeppelin rock block, I felt no desire to go inside the museum and admire still lifes with apples and oranges.
“It’ll be boring inside,” I said. “Let’s stay out here and talk about hopes and dreams.”
“We can’t,” Jeremy said. “There’s someone I want you to meet. Zoe. She’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Zoe?” I said with a wince. Thinking if that was not the most obnoxious yuppie name on the face of this planet, I didn’t know what was.
“I think you’ll like her,” Jeremy said. “I hope you’ll like her.”
Then came Zoe, in newsboy cap, emerging from the windy afternoon with puckered kisses. I pulled myself to my feet as Jeremy introduced us. Like Jeremy, Zoe was underweight and lightly freckled. In the gray light of the winter sky, her northeast-pale complexion reminded me of oyster meat. Her teeth were sharp.
“Zoe’s in design,” Jeremy said, initiating conversation.
“Like, T-shirts and coffee mugs?” I said.
“Uhm … no,” she said.
“Beth has some great logo ideas for T-shirts,” he said to Zoe. Then to me: “Tell her about your ideas.”
I would never understand him, I thought. “I have no ideas,” I said.
Jeremy smiled numbly. An actor working alone. I did not sympathize.
“Beth works for a professional gambler,” Jeremy said to Zoe.
“Yikes,” Zoe said.
A prolonged silence followed. Zoe in design cocked her head to the side and brushed Jeremy’s bangs from his eyes. Something I’d wanted to do all day.
Goose-bumped from the cold, I untwisted the scarf from my throat and sank helplessly into my work chair. Bernard whirled an electronic nose-hair clipper inside his nostril. His long, loose cheeks wavered from the vibrations.
“I’m running away,” he said over the gadget’s faint buzz. “I’m getting the fat person’s surgery then I’m running away.”
Bernard had just returned from Curaçao, an island in the Caribbean, which he jetted off to every few weeks to work as a bookie-in-residence at Pinnacle, one of the most successful offshore sports books. During the visit, Bernard had made a mistake while setting odds for a college basketball game. At tip-off, the owner of Pinnacle angrily realized that if Columbia happened to beat Penn, a 26-point favorite, he would lose half a million dollars. At the first score of the game—2 to 0, Columbia—Bernard got so scared he ran out of the place. Penn ended up winning by thirty, but the owner, infuriated with Bernard for leaving, punished him by moving him to the NASCAR department.
“NASCAR!” Bernard said, switching the clipper to the other nostril. “Trading NASCAR is, like, the biggest snub in the face ever! I can’t work for that guy anymore.”
But Bernard reveled in the carefree Caribbean lifestyle, and was looking for any excuse he could find to stay in Curaçao. So the plan he came up with was this: after undergoing gastric bypass surgery, he would open an offshore sports book of his own. In Curaçao, right down the street from Pinnacle’s headquarters. For an investment of six hundred thousand dollars, he had already secured computers, bandwidth, and a license. He’d rented a ranch house f
or the American employees, complete with a maid and cook.
“I’d like you to be part of the venture,” Bernard said. “Part of the team.”
I looked at Bernard as though I had just witnessed a lion jump through a hoop of fire. Life! One minute you’re lovesick and a little queasy from the early morning commute. The next, you’re offered a job in the Caribbean. Six grand a month, under the table, all expenses included.
With the mention of money, everything became possible again. It wasn’t Ipanema Beach, but I was getting closer. Immediately, I decided I’d buy the most expensive, shimmery Brazilian-cut bikini I could find to celebrate my good fortune. And as far as New York was concerned, I was happy to leave. More and more I saw the city not as a place where big dreams come true and no one sleeps, but as an exceptionally diverse prison under constant riot control. I hugged Bernard with the enthusiasm of a criminal who had just beaten a life sentence on a technicality.
“Aren’t you excited?” I said, sinking into his hot, soft body. “You’re going to be skinny! Why didn’t you tell me any of this earlier? Why are you so secretive? It’s not like you.”
“My mind-set’s a little different these days. It’s set on a ledge, my mind.” He talked quickly and looked anxious. I flattened myself against the wall so Bernard had more room to pace the floor of our tiny office. “I don’t know if I’m going to make money, lose money. If I’ll be able to enjoy fat-free, sugar-free pudding. I haven’t told my wife that I’m going to Curaçao and I don’t think I’m ever going to.”
As the countdown started to his surgery date, Bernard called gambling clients. “I’m going to be the new MGM,” he said. “Anything you wanna bet, any amount, you bet with me. I’m gonna have the best, most juicy odds in the business.”
He blackened the boxes on his desk calendar. Ten more days until the new you. Nine more days until the new you.
It would be easy, here, to simplify my relationship with Jeremy by saying I was infatuated with him, he ignored me, and then all of a sudden, we fell in love. What’s missing in that narrative is that I never knew what he saw in me. But as the time grew closer for me to leave, we began quarreling like the lovers we weren’t and making up with impulsive kisses like the lovers we were slowly becoming.
“I am so fucking bored with the women I’m dating,” Jeremy said during an atypical moment of self-disclosure. “I could never be friends with them. All I do is compare them to you. I’m always interested in what you have to say.”
“Jeremy, that’s kind of weird,” I said, nervously, feeling that perhaps at some point I had accidentally misrepresented myself. “I’m not smart.”
“I don’t know why you say that,” he said, pulling me onto his lap. “Maybe you’re not book smart, but I don’t think book smart is appealing. You’re wise. Not about everything. But when you’re an old woman you’ll be wise about a lot of things.”
He made me feel intelligent and interesting! I loved him! We held hands along the river and through Chinatown’s dingy alleyways. At tables for four we sat side by side exchanging childhood stories and confessing every secret. I brought up the subject of my in-house stripping at Nightmoves. Beginning the conversation delicately enough, I got a bit carried away while explaining the intricacies of performing for one of my favorite customers, a polio victim.
Finishing my story, I looked up from my shrimp dumplings just in time to see the blood race from Jeremy’s face.
“That, I feel, is very disgusting,” he said.
“You said you liked my detail-oriented stories,” I said.
“Well, not that one.”
“It’s not disgusting, Jeremy. If you ever got polio, wouldn’t you like to call someone and have them come over and hang out with you?”
“I just didn’t know that about you, Beth. I didn’t suspect that about you. But, I guess it’s always good to have your assumptions challenged.”
“Much better. I hated you and now I like you again.”
“It was insensitive, I’m sorry. I’m very confused by this whole topic. Let’s order more dim sum.”
And this was very typical of Jeremy and me. One second, love fest; the next, love dispossessed. Quick, fiery overreactions closely followed by apologies. No grievance that couldn’t be laughed or kissed away. I’d never felt as happy as I felt with Jeremy and the feeling wasn’t leaving. Three whole weeks of being romantic with the same person and the feeling was not leaving.
“I’m worried you’re going to be arrested,” he said, looking forlorn on the morning of my flight. “You’re going to go out one night and have fun only to be arrested in the morning.”
“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen,” I said, packing my suitcase.
“I’m worried your car is going to go off a cliff. Are there cliffs where you’re going?”
Killing time as we waited for the taxi, Jeremy played me a bluegrass song on his guitar. He sang in a voice high and lonesome. Something about a sad good-bye and a maiden longing for a home that is no longer there.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
All Serious Action Players
The air was so moist you could drink it.
Trade winds stirred the fronds of tall, leaning palms and whipped through the rolled-down windows of our company car, a Lincoln Town Car, long and white as a speedboat. Bernard navigated the washed-out roads lined with cacti and I found it hard not to stare at him. His pillowy chest and the loose flesh of his face and neck had vanished. He was almost thin! Yet he seemed only dimly aware of his body’s resized dimensions. Still assuming a seat belt wouldn’t fit, he didn’t wear one. To accommodate a doubling stomach that was no longer there, he had the seat reclined as far as possible and the steering wheel tilted to its highest angle. He hadn’t even bothered to buy clothes that fit. His oversized T-shirt slipped off one shoulder and he kept his shorts up by gripping the waist in a bunch.
Tanned Dutch girls in bikini tops zoomed by in rental cars. In the shadow of a dilapidated Colonial mansion, paint shedded from the fluted columns like bark from a tree and Rastafarians played dominoes. “My favorite nail salon!” Bernard said, pointing to a sun-scorched bungalow. “Wish we had time for a mani pedi.” He held out his hand to check on his cuticles. “Are you seeing how skinny my fingers are? This surgery’s been good for me. Except for last night. I blew a game and couldn’t eat anything to make myself feel better. Just had to sit there like a normal human being. Torture! But I notice I have more stamina for gambling, so I can’t complain.”
The road curved and I caught my first glimpse of the Caribbean Sea. Its glistening turquoise roused me like a forceful, unexpected kiss. “I can’t believe we live here!” I said. Then, louder, over the wind: “How do I get to the beach?”
“No idea,” Bernard said. “But I’m sure you’ll find it.”
Bernard had been on the island for nearly a month. Except for his left arm, glowing crimson from hanging out the driver’s-side window, his skin was as white as a fresh Ronkonkoma snowfall.
“I want you to enjoy your life down here,” he continued. “There’s a lot of bosses out there who want you to be miserable. It’s a bit of their strategy. Like when I sold the candy business in ’93, I went to work for this company selling gourmet nuts. My boss couldn’t stand that I was happy. And I wasn’t even happy! Oh my God, look. The animals.”
I thought Bernard was being racist until I looked over and saw wild goats grazing a church parking lot. Bernard locked the doors.
“I know you like your adventures. You’re like my first wife. As long as there was some degree of thrill she was happy. Just make sure you’re at work by eight o’clock. I depend on you to get everything set up. Other than that, there’s really no whaddayacallems.”
“Rules?”
“Yeah, no rules. Girl Friday, dream therapist, thrill seeker. That’s you.”
Bernard named the sports book ASAP, for All Serious Action Players. For months I’d heard the acronym being tossed around in abstract ways. As in: A
-sap is going to deal very thin, with special emphasis on alternate spreads. Or, Where most sports books deal a money line three hundred, come back two-fifty, A-sap will deal it two-eighty-nine, come back two-sixty-one. I thought of ASAP more as a pattern of firing synapses in Bernard’s brain than an actual place of business. So it took me a few moments to respond to the charming two-story house covered in bougainvillea that was, in fact, ASAP.
Up the quarried marble stairs and through the French doors, I followed Bernard into an outbreak of nervous fluorescent lights, a dizzying number of ringing telephones, and high-definition blue emanating from dozens of flat-paneled computer screens. At ten minutes to post, it was the busiest time of day. Wiseguys scrambled to protect their bets and squares wanted action on the televised games. News broke of a thunderstorm in Florida and Bernard dashed for his desk. Briefcase bouncing at his side, free hand gripping his waistband, flip-flops falling off his feet, he made low buzzing sounds as he lowered the Marlins total. Keeping true to his nickname, the Industrial Sander increased his voltage.
Behind a long curving desk lined with keyboards and monitors sat the “Italian crew,” a moody, thickset, elbow-to-elbow syndicate of Tonys, Vinnys, Genos, and Jimmys from Philly and far Long Island. In front of them stretched rows of Afro-Caribbean clerks sitting at individual desks. Sufficiently tall—the Dutch genetic imprint—with the upright postures of aristocrats, the clerks gracefully switched from one phone to the other. They shouted questions and the frenzied Italian crew shouted back. The rushing and the accents led to some confusion.