by Naomi Niles
I acquired my key at the front desk and rode the elevator to the fifth floor to a gray and white room built with Baroque excess. Feeling tired and worn out after my trip, I laid down for about an hour but was unable to fall asleep. I wished Lori was here next to me. I wished I hadn’t fallen asleep during the movie last night, but I had been so tired, and the movie dragged on and on. But I didn’t especially mind the subtitles or the fact that nothing had happened for the first hour because I was with her.
After I had napped for a bit, I unpacked my suitcase and texted her to let her know that I had arrived safely. She texted back within a few minutes:
Okay!! Call me as soon as you get a chance. Sending you all the love
I read the message over twice before returning the phone to my shirt pocket. I had meant what I said the other night about feeling like I had lucked into something good when I met her. We were different in so many ways, but she was kind and enthusiastic, and that made up for a lot.
Still feeling dazed and a bit lost, I returned downstairs to scope out the various restaurants. For someone who had grown up thinking of The Olive Garden as fine dining, I approached the thought of eating here with a feeling of apprehension. There was a Sushisambi that served Asian and seafood, a “gastropub” that offered bone marrow and foie gras, and a pizzeria offering hand-tossed pizzas in the New York style. (I was reminded irresistibly of Lori’s preference for “real” pizza).
I ended up ordering rice rolls and a glass of boba at the Hong Kong café. As hungry as I was after traveling across the country, I barely tasted my food and finished it with embarrassing speed. While I waited for my check, I stared gloomily down into my bowl, wishing I had savored it for a bit longer so that I could feel like I had gotten my money’s worth.
The first round began at one-fifteen. Much of the afternoon passed by in a blur of dealt hands and barely remembered faces. I remembered Sean saying once how it felt to be up onstage playing guitar in a pub, how his surroundings seemed to fall away as he lost himself in the music. That’s how it was now; instinct took over, and I began dispatching opponents with ruthless efficiency. So absorbed did I become in the game that for an hour or two I was almost able to forget about Lori and the longing that throbbed, dully and persistently, in the back of my brain like a physical ache.
The third and final round of the day presented the most difficult challenge. Two spaces to my left sat a young man in a camo vest and a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers t-shirt. He was mostly bald except for two patches of red fuzz-like hair on either side of his head, and his reddish eyebrows arched prominently over two beady and inscrutable eyes. Unlike some of the other players, Nick had no “tells,” and his face was a complete blank. I watched him quietly from behind my hand with a sense of growing frustration.
I must not have been concealing my feelings very well, for his eyes met mine for a moment, and he smirked at me. His face shone with amusement and something like malice. Then he laid down his cards: nine, ten, jack, king, and queen of spades, a straight flush.
Not being as skilled at hiding my true feelings, I glowed with relief as I laid my own cards down: a nine, ten, jack, king, and queen of diamonds. After some brief backstage negotiations, a tie-breaking round was ruled out, and it was determined that we would both proceed to the next round.
When I returned to my room that night after dinner at Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, I saw Lori had called me and left a voicemail. I called her back, and she answered on the first ring.
“Hey, you!” she exclaimed. “I heard a rumor that you’re moving ahead to the finals.”
“Did you watch?”
“I did. We had the store TV turned to the match all day. Everyone here got really into it. One customer tried to change the channel, and the rest of us shouted him down.”
“I can’t imagine it would be that interesting to watch,” I said.
“It was, though. It probably helped that we all know you, and even the customers who had never met you personally knew you as my boyfriend. So they all got really invested in the outcome. There might have been some yelling.”
I told her about Nick and how he had unsettled me. “I don’t know what it is, but something about him made my skin crawl. I think maybe his eyebrows, which seemed to move independently of his body like giant caterpillars. I tried not to let him rattle me, but I’m afraid I didn’t do a very good job of it.”
“No, you really didn’t,” chirped Lori. “I could tell, and I was just watching it on TV.”
“Well, anyway, I’m probably going to sit in front of a mirror for a couple hours tonight and practice my poker face.”
“You want to do it over Skype?” she asked brightly. “You’d have insta-feedback.”
“No, because we’d probably just end up making faces into the camera and laughing. You know how it is when we’re together: not a lot gets accomplished, but we have a good time doing it.”
“Well, okay.” There was a tone of mild disappointment in her voice. “Just know that when you get home on Monday, I’ll be giving you the biggest prize of all.”
“Even if I don’t win the tournament?”
“Shhhh. At the very least you have to beat Eyebrow Guy and his caterpillar army. We’re all counting on you.”
We talked for a few more minutes before she let me go for the night. By that point, I was exhausted and needed sleep, and although I wanted to keep talking, she insisted that I rest. “I’d feel awfully guilty if you lost in the finals because you were too tired. Besides, after tomorrow, you may never have to work again, and then you can sleep as much as you want.
“Thanks, babe,” I said. “See you soon.”
“I’ll be watching. Good night.”
She hung up. I placed the phone on the nightstand next to the amber-tinted lamp, wishing we could have talked longer and that she had been here with me. It was strange: she had entered the relationship with reluctance, and I had been expecting only a fling, but it hadn’t taken us long to evolve past that. By this point, it was hard for me to go more than a few days without her. And she addressed me like someone she had known half her life.
But if I could just keep my wits about me until tomorrow night, I’d win that money for her. I knew she wasn’t expecting it and wouldn’t ask for a dime of it, but I wanted to give it to her. After that, we could move wherever we wanted, and we’d never have to worry about money again.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Lori
“So what are you going to do with all that money?” asked Sam.
“What are you talking about?”
It was Sunday night, and we were standing together in the kitchen cooking dinner. Jamal had just returned from the store with a bag of onions, which were now deep-frying while we waited for the pizza to finish baking. Sam had made an elegant-looking pizza chicken with pancetta, mozzarella, and spicy tomatoes. The two of them were now seated at the dining room table drinking mojitos while I stood watch over the deep fryer to make sure it didn’t catch fire.
The final round of the tournament was going to air live in about half an hour, and we were having a small dinner party to celebrate. All through the day, I had been sending him encouraging text messages, though he had responded only intermittently. He had fallen asleep right after we got off the phone the night before, without getting the chance to practice his facial expressions, and now he was worried that Nick was going to get the better of him.
“Don’t let him get to you,” I had warned him. “He wants to get under your skin; that’s how he wins. Remember the words of Kipling: ‘If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…you’ll be a man, my son.’”
“Well, thanks for that vote of confidence,” Marshall had texted back. “Anyway, I think I’ll do fine as long as I know you’re watching me tonight.”
“Promise,” I replied. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
Sam, however, felt better about his chances of winning. All day long, she had been commen
ting on my good fortune in dating a man who would soon be the recipient of several million dollars.
“You know very well what I mean,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “After tonight, you may never have to work again.”
I knew she was only kidding, but the suggestion annoyed me. “First of all,” I said, “it’s not my money. Second, even if we were married and he won the tournament, I would still work. I can’t imagine there being a time in my life when I’m not baking.”
“You could expand the bakery,” she pointed out. “Haven’t you always wanted to start a mobile library? Now you would have the funds. If you wanted, you could even combine the two ideas: have a food truck that serves sugary confections but also lends books.”
“Hmmm, tempting.” I reached into the refrigerator for a wine cooler. “What would you do with all that money?”
“Probably go backpacking in Europe for the rest of my life,” said Jamal with a shrug.
“I can’t really argue with that,” said Sam. “Though I would like to own the entire Frasier collection on DVD.”
I shot her a dubious look. “You could do a lot more with ten million dollars than buy freaking Frasier, which is on Netflix.”
“I know, but it would be nice to own.”
I loaded the onion rings onto plates while Jamal pulled the pizza out of the oven. Just to make sure there were no problems with the TV, we had turned it to ESPN an hour ago. Currently, contestants were filing into a large vaulted room that resembled a seventeenth-century French palace while a couple of old men spoke monotonously in voiceover. As yet, there was no sign of Marshall, though his nemesis with the caterpillar eyebrows was seated at a table with his hands folded in front of him and a look of resolute purpose.
“Marshall was right,” said Sam, dipping a ring into the dipping sauce, “that guy is seriously creepy.”
“He looks like he was designed by someone who had only ever seen sketches of another human,” said Jamal. “And his eyebrows look like bushes that were accidentally transplanted onto his face.”
“You guys are mean,” I pointed out. “He’s just there to win, the same as anybody else.”
“Yes, but does he have to be so creepy about it?” replied Sam.
Just then, Marshall’s bulky form appeared at the corner of the screen. He looked haggard and worn, but still handsome, as he took a seat at the table directly across from his adversary.
As someone who had played a fair amount of poker on my aunt’s computer when I was little, I was able to follow the game without much difficulty. However, Jamal, who had never played any card game more complicated than Go Fish, kept interrupting to ask questions about what was happening onscreen. “See, now he can either fold or raise,” Sam would say, or, “It looks like Marshall is going for a royal flush, which is basically unbeatable.”
“I didn’t realize this game was so complicated,” said Jamal. “If I had known I was going to be so lost, I would’ve downloaded an app before I came over.”
“We ought to play sometime,” suggested Sam. “Maybe when Marshall gets back. Except I don’t know if I want to play with him because he would destroy us easily. It’s no fun playing with someone who beats you every time.”
“I think it makes the game more of a challenge,” I replied. Again, Sam rolled her eyes. I turned back to the TV, where Marshall was sitting staring at his cards with the same intense focus he sometimes had when he looked at me. Was it possible to beat someone like that? Would I even want to?
By the end of the game, the four other players had folded, effectively surrendering their chances of winning the money. None of them looked particularly happy as they were escorted out, surrounded by reporters. Marshall and Nick were the only two that remained. Nick had apparently decided that his best chance of winning was to fix Marshall with an eerie, unblinking stare, and it almost worked; Marshall called a sudden timeout and rose from the table, his face doused in sweat.
“Is he allowed to do that?” asked Jamal, sounding alarmed.
“I suppose he is,” said Sam, “since they haven’t counted him out yet.” As we watched, Marshall stumbled forward with shaking hands and reached for a water bottle. “Oof. Poor guy.”
“Looks like he needs a Marshall Plan,” quipped Jamal.
Instinctively, I reached for my phone, though I knew it was no use texting him; he had turned his phone off and wouldn’t be able to turn it on again until the match was complete. Still, I didn’t take my eyes off the screen even for a second as he fell to his knees and began vomiting right there in the middle of the hotel.
“Oh my God, he’s throwing up,” said Sam in a tone of perverse fascination. “Lori, I think this might be the end.”
“Never,” I said quietly.
Marshall’s vomiting had created a stir in the hotel. All around him, audience members and former participants stood to their feet struggling to hide their excitement. I wished they would all go away and let him alone. He needed a few minutes to himself in the open air, away from the bright lights and the crowd pressing in and the cold stare of Nick.
A referee handed him a white washcloth, which he used to wipe down his neck and face. He looked like a boxer who had just been brutally pummeled, but who was gathering his courage for one last go in the ring.
“Don’t you wish you could be there?” asked Sam. “I feel like if I was watching Jamal get trounced on TV, I would want to run over there and throw my arms around him.”
“He’s not getting trounced,” I said indignantly.
“I wouldn’t get trounced,” said Jamal at the same instant.
Sam sat back in her seat with a scathing look, the sort of look that said, Sorry I tried to have a conversation; I won’t make that mistake again. Meanwhile, in Vegas, Marshall was slowly rising to his feet.
Nick raised one eyebrow with a perfectly dubious expression as Marshall resumed his seat and picked up his cards. Only this time, he seemed to have learned from his past mistakes: rather than looking into Nick’s face, he kept his focus fixed on the hand in front of him.
“Good one, Marshall,” said Jamal—who, although he didn’t understand poker, at least grasped the psychology at play. “Don’t even look at him. Just pretend he isn’t there.”
“It’s going to be difficult,” said Sam. “I’m sure Nick will think of ways to get his attention.”
And he did. Nick began to cough, first quietly as though he had an itch in his throat. But when that failed to capture Marshall’s attention, he developed a loud hacking cough like a smoker’s cough.
“That’s the fakest damned cough I’ve ever heard,” said Jamal heatedly. “He’s just trying to get attention!”
“Don’t listen to him, Marshall!” I nearly shouted at the TV. “Ignore him!”
“Lori, he can’t hear you,” Sam pointed out. I glared at her, and she lapsed into silence once more.
Onscreen, Nick continued to stare impassively at the deck in front of him. In a transparent attempt to heighten the sense of drama, the camera slowly closed in on his face. He squinted at Marshall with brows knitted as though trying to read his mind.
But Marshall, having expelled his lunch all over the plush carpet, had regained a measure of calm. Realizing that he couldn’t embarrass himself any worse than he already had seemed to have liberated him. He sat contemplating his cards with all the placidity of a man reading a book on a park bench.
Somewhere, a clock began ticking, presumably inserted by the producers, but it was hard to feel nervous when Marshall looked so sure of himself.
Finally, with a face from which all trace of human feeling seemed to have been scrubbed, Nick laid his cards out on the table for Marshall to see. He had a straight flush: nine, ten, jack, king, and queen of diamonds. There was a stir of commotion in the room around him as the cards flashed on a large screen. It would be difficult for Marshall to top that. Barring some miracle, Nick had won.
I sat up straight in the recliner, gripping the armrest. Even the
normally loquacious Jamal fell silent as we waited to see how Marshall would react.
But if he felt defeated or resigned, Marshall didn’t show it. In fact, it was hard to tell exactly what he was feeling as he laid his own cards matter-of-factly out on the table in front of him.
Ten, jack, queen, king, and ace of hearts. A royal flush.
Less than a second passed before the audience rose to its feet and a chorus of cheers echoed through the hotel. Yet a whole lifetime seemed to pass at that moment as Sam and Jamal turned to look at me with faces of utter surprise. None of us could believe his good fortune, still less that we knew someone who had been blessed with such fortune.
As tears flooded my face, I found myself mouthing the words of Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit: “We have all heard of great surprises of joy. They are not at an end, sir. They are rare, but not at an end.”
But the surprises weren’t over. Sam, of all people, Sam who hardly ever so much as touched me, ran over and hugged me.
“Don’t you kind of feel like you won the lottery?” she breathed into my neck. “These sorts of things never happen to us. Other people, yes, but not us.”
“And it won’t be the last good thing that happens in our lives, either.” I felt giddy, almost drunk, like I had downed four wine coolers instead of just one. “The future is going to be full of more good things than we can imagine. And some of them might even involve money.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Marshall
It was such an astonishing stroke of luck that for a full minute after the game ended, I sat there in disbelief. I was dimly aware that a commotion had broken out around me and that Nick had risen from his chair, extending his hand in congratulations. I returned the handshake with a numb feeling. The camera lights were bright on my face, and I wanted nothing more than to get back to my room where I could think over what had just taken place.
“Mr. Savery,” came a woman’s voice, “what do you intend to do with your winnings?”