Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  If anyone were to play Cynthia/Wifey in the movie version of this Caribbean getaway, it would not be, despite what she would tell you, Ava Gardner in her delicious prime—for Cynthia just isn’t nearly that beautiful (oh, your wife is?)—but Ava Gardner’s body double’s body double. Wavy black hair, dark olive skin, bright green eyes. As Gérard Depardieu’s French accent is too thick for him to pass for a native Jersey Boy, James Gandolfini, circa Season One of The Sopranos, gets the role of me without an audition (he would need to don a rug, however). Although the Joan Collins of Land of the Pharaohs and Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? might play the younger Artsy Painter Gal/Victoria Landreth in some sexy flashbacks, the adult role would have to go to Liz Taylor right when she was on the wane, post–The Sandpiper, in her Boom and The Only Game in Town days. The part of Mr. Artsy Painter Gal goes to one person and one person only or this movie doesn’t get made: George Clooney.

  I’ll press the PLAY button now and the action resumes.

  It is the next day, my final full day at the Nirvana. I wake up, after three hours of card-haunted sleep, knowing that today Artsy and I will meet, must meet. Cynthia hasn’t slept that much either: my ragged nerves seem to be contagious and she is on edge and the bags under my eyes are also under hers. Even during our breakfast (Jacks and 2s, Bet Midler, Stuey Hunger, $50) on the patio, which I charge to the room, she’s biting her nails and shaking her legs as she sips her Bloody Mary. I’m looking around for APG and family, but they don’t seem to be there.

  “I must look like hell,” Wifey says, unable to eat another bite of mango pancake. (It’s a line I can hear Ava Gardner saying.) Her pea-green shades, however, mask most of her hell. The morning sun is relentless . . . this is a place to come to in January, not the summer.

  “You don’t,” I tell her.

  An hour later we’re at the pool, sunning and sweating gallons, and replenishing with ice water, Coronas, and margaritas.

  “How close are we to the equator?” she asks me several naps and dips later.

  “Close. I just felt it move under my back. They change it every day about this time.”

  After a few drinks Wifey asks me, “You’re really writing a book, right? You don’t just sit around and play poker all day long?”

  “I only wish,” I say, “life were that easy.”

  I signal for my next Corona.

  Wifey falls asleep just before noon and the sun beats right down upon her pricey Rosa Cha bathing suit (three 7s, Raise The Lawd, Bumbershoot Bob, $300) and amethyst necklace (two 9s, Gentile Ben, Playing Mantis, and Chips Ahoy, $450).

  I walk around our pool, reeling slightly. The sweating bodies, some sunning and reading, some sleeping, are stacked in rows of beach chairs five deep. The air smells of chlorine, rum, cologne, and coconut. Female buttcheeks dapple the mise en scène, round ones, pale ones, tan ones, dark ones, buttcheeks of all variety sheathed in swimsuits of every color. There are all sorts of breasts, too, plump ones, flat ones, pointy ones, freckled ones, and too-good-to-be-true fake ones.

  No woman fitting APG’s description is around the pool.

  I walk past some palm trees, tall potted plants, and long, scuttling chartreuse and lime green lizards to the next pool over. The sweat on my neck is trickling down my back, down my shirt, which is underneath my silk robe. The next pool is the largest: there are children, some with water wings, at the near end, and at the deep end a few adults swim unremarkable laps. There is a poolside bar and also a few stools in the pool where some bathers sit and drink or nod off under the blazing sun. I walk around the pool three times looking for my secret iLove. There are many women in red bathing suits and maybe one of them is her . . . I just cannot tell. When I abandon this pool and make for the next one—walking around a large Jacuzzi filled with giggling adults holding glasses and bottles—I feel a combination of relief and frustration.

  The third pool is the smallest and the most kidney-shaped. Walking only a few inches from the edge of the pool I begin my circumnavigation; I’m so close to the chaise longues I pass that I scrape my calf four times against their metal ends. As it is now after one p.m., some people are eating lunch or at the bar or are back in their rooms recovering from the flesh-loathing summer sun. Only half the chairs are filled.

  I walk . . . I pass a flabby man on his stomach and hear him snore, I see two empty chairs, I pass a woman in a red bikini reading an Eckhart Tolle book and improving her life, I see a guy in the next chair slurping a frozen drink, I pass two empty chairs, I pass a muscular stud with a Wall St. Journal lighting up a cigar, I see a woman in the next chair in a black bikini spray her shoulders with oil, I pass a chair empty but for a Stieg Larsson paperback, I see an attractive Hispanic couple fiddling with their cell phones, I pass a woman with black hair reading the book Love: A Horror Story in paperback, I see an empty . . .

  I sit down in the empty chair.

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  Artsy Painter Gal puts the book on her negligible midriff bulge. Not only had my novel been providing a quick fun summer read but also excellent protection against the midday sun.

  “Yes?”

  “That book you’re reading?”

  “Yes?”

  “I happen to have written it.”

  “No way!”

  “Swear to God.”

  She takes off her sunglasses, revealing a pair of hazel eyes so intelligent that I feel my SAT scores diminishing retroactively, turns the book over and looks for the author photo.

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth? There’s no picture.”

  “I’m not bluffing, I promise.”

  “This is good,” she says, smiling. “But The Missing Chums was better.”

  I notice that my robe is starting to separate around my chest and I pull it closer together even though my shirt is on underneath.

  “A robe?” she says. “In this heat?”

  “I’m . . . I’m a bit . . .”

  I cannot find le mot juste to tell her what I am.

  Suddenly she puts her sunglasses back on and whispers, “Hub coming! Play blackjack with me tonight. Ten-thirty. The five-dollar tables. Be there, Chip!”

  A shadow comes over me, then two smaller ones, then the shadows join to engulf me.

  You have to imagine the improbably cast movie scene: George Clooney, his rugged tan body in a black bulging banana hammock, and his two daughters (Abigail Breslin in a dual role) stand over James Gandolfini, who slouches forward in his sweat-drenched silk robe and talks to Elizabeth Taylor circa Boom and The Only Game in Town while, two pools away, Ava Gardner’s Body Double’s Body Double, circa The Night of the Iguana, bakes flat on her stomach atop a chaise longue—under which the ice of Margarita Number 3 melts and a pair of Christian Louboutin sandals (9-high heart flush, Bjorn 2 Win, Minnesota Phat, Steve McQueens, $500) seek shelter from the sun.

  “Aaron,” Artsy/Victoria/Liz says, “you’re not going to believe this . . . the book I’m reading? This man says he wrote it!”

  “You did?” Mr. Artsy/Aaron/George says, insultingly void of any suspicion.

  “Yeah, I guess I did,” I say, standing up quickly. Too quickly. The sun’s blurry yellow, the pool’s shimmering blue, the sky’s paler blue, the terra cotta and saffron yellow of the hotel’s tripartite façade, the many Coronas and all those encircled Nirvana N’s hit me at once and I fall back down to the chaise longue . . .

  Five or ten or fifteen minutes later Chip Zero/I/James Gandolfini comes to, courtesy of some smelling salts and a few shoves, in the same spot. I hear splashing, I hear swimming, I hear a smattering of applause (for me being recalled to life). People I’ve never seen before are standing right over me. Artsy and her family are gone but Wifey/Cynthia/Ava Gardner’s Body Double’s Body Double is right there with her loving, caring smile and Thierry Lasry shades (two Aces, Trey Scalini, Raisin’ Bran, $350), asking me: “Are you all right? Can you get up?”

  “Yeah,” I mu
mble as I shield my eyes from the light. “I think so.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was walking and . . . I saw someone reading my book. I saw that and I guess I fainted out of shock.”

  Wifey and I head back to our room (three 10s, Bjorn 2 Win, Unlucky Lindy, Tally Ho, $2,800) to recover.

  I ate a few grains of rice for dinner, then threw up into the toilet and showered. “It must be the water here,” Wifey said. “Although I drank it too and nothing’s happened to me.”

  I played poker in the room until ten, got an e-mail from Barbara Bennett in Hollywood telling me she wouldn’t be able to make it to New York in September, then went into the bathroom and sat in the empty bathtub for ten minutes.

  I told Cynthia I was going down to the casino, she told me she didn’t want to go; she wanted to pack for tomorrow morning, watch TV, and read. She kissed me and wished me luck.

  Downstairs, Artsy was sitting by herself at a fifty-dollar minimum table. She had a rich husband and had won over $75K online by then—these stakes were nothing for her.

  “I thought you said the five-dollar tables,” I said as I took a seat next to her.

  “I did. But when I got here I realized how truly short life is.”

  “Where’s Mr. Artsy?” I asked.

  “Upstairs with the kids,” she said. The dealer busted and she won. I pictured her husband putting the kids to bed, doing three hundred push-ups, gargling with Drano, and calling it a night.

  On my first hand I got a nine and a two and doubled down. Then I pulled a nine and APG said, “Nice, baby.”

  She told me she couldn’t stay long.

  “So I fainted, huh?” I said.

  “I must look pretty terrific in a red maillot!”

  “Well, you do.”

  Her thighs were a little chubby, there were two tablespoons of flab under each arm, but that’s nitpicking. She was a fine-looking woman for her age. Nice sturdy rack, piercing eyes, her butt hadn’t yet fully collapsed. Here’s a coarser way of putting it: if there’s such a Web site as losangelesmilfs.com, she’d most likely make the top thousand.

  On the next hand we both hit blackjack.

  “Sweet,” she said, tossing the dealer a five-dollar chip.

  She told me she had to get going and we gathered our chips and stood up.

  “Well, Chip . . .” she began as we started walking. The place wasn’t that crowded. The holiday weekend was over, people had gone home.

  “Yes?” I was ready for her to tell me that it was fun being with me but that she saw no reason for us to ever meet again. In a way, that’s what I wanted to hear.

  “I’d like to see you again some time,” she said. “This isn’t going to be enough.”

  “Sure . . . okay.”

  We walked to the cashier and got our money.

  “How are things with Mrs. Zero?” she asked me as we walked toward the casino entrance, the warble of slot machines almost drowning out her words.

  I sighed and told her that it was so complicated that it defied explanation, and we walked out.

  There were a few people in the lobby, there were a few at the lobby bar. Her floor was in a different elevator bank than mine and we had to separate.

  “We’ll say good-bye here,” APG said.

  I stuck out my hand but she put her arms around my neck and kissed me, slipped me the tongue . . . there were about ten people out there who might have seen it but she didn’t care.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had a tongue in my mouth other than my wife’s or my own.

  Alone in the elevator, as the in-flight flat-panel TV touted the hotel’s restaurants, sun, sea, and spa and plasmically flashed the time and temperature and Dow Jones, I wondered if all the people I’d been spending so much time with lately online were sad, unfulfilled, lonely, and more than just a bit strange and if it was this and not cards, good luck, bad luck, and winning and losing that bound us so closely together. Were we all in it for the collective insanity and not the money? In my dark hotel room, hushed and chilled with air conditioning, Cynthia was curled up and asleep . . . she looked so untroubled and angelic in the deep blue darkness. She was—and is—all I ever wanted. It took a while but after playing three holes of golf at Pebble Beach, each green ringed with an undulant halo of hearts, diamonds, Aces and 8s, I joined her in the spectral, stately clubhouse in Dreamland.

  Back in New York a few days later I e-mailed Harry and told him that I just wasn’t the man to work with him on the screenplay. I was way too busy, I told him, with my own writing.

  But I wished him luck with it.

  10

  Dónde Está Big Lou?

  One day, two weeks after I returned from the Caribbean, I rode a winning streak so absurdly lucky that I was sure something calamitous was going to happen just to atone for it: I’d be walking to get my lunch and a Great Dane would rear up and rip my throat out, or a leather sectional would fall out a window and crush me, or a manhole cover would electrocute me. On Monday I had won $3,500; the next day I won twice that. Wednesday morning I didn’t even start off at the low tables—I went straight to the top. The pixelated menace SaniFlush was there, so was Bjorn 2 Win, a few other high rollers. I took my seat and watched the cards as they were dealt to me. A King of spades, a Queen of spades. SaniFlush raised, Bjorn called, I called, two others stayed in. The flop was a Jack, 10 and 9, all of spades. Insane luck. I knew this pot was mine. When I showed my hand I won an amount so high that I am embarrassed to tell you, but I will say it was by far the easiest $7,500 I’ve ever earned. I could almost see SaniFlush flinching behind his mirrored Psycho Killer aviators.

  It was September and the air had cooled and that night I took a subway up to a Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side. I had seen in the paper that a writer named Cody Marshall would be reading from his first collection of short stories, recently published to much acclaim (to much acclaim in newspapers and magazines for which Cody Marshall had reviewed other writers’ first collections of short stories). The name Cody Marshall didn’t just ring a bell—it banged a deafening gong right near my ear, for it was this same Cody Marshall who’d shoved Plague through a high-speed shredder in the Sunday Times when it came out; it was his voice that had made me shave half the skin off my face.

  I simply had to see this guy in action.

  Besides, he owed me a pint of blood.

  The reading began at seven. There were metal folding chairs, posters with Cody Marshall’s book and his portrait on them, a small makeshift dais with a microphone and pitcher of water. Cody was of average height and wore thick glasses and had dainty, well-crafted hair. There were about fifteen book lovers present, not including me as I no longer was such a thing.

  When he began to read I asked myself: Do you really have the courage to embarrass this person and destroy one night of his life since he destroyed countless nights of yours?

  He read two stories (each time he ended, he had to tell the crowd that the story was in fact over) to a minor spasm of applause, and immediately hands shot up, people began asking questions, and my hand rose as though yanked by someone on the next floor up.

  “Yes?” the author said after fielding a few softball queries, looking at me and swigging some water.

  “How could you have done that to me?” I heard my voice say.

  “What did I do?” Cody said.

  “I think you know.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Of course he didn’t. He had no idea. People all over the country didn’t buy my book because of his review, but once he had written it, he was through with me. He didn’t even have to wash his hands of the matter: it had happened so quickly, no blood could collect.

  “You even gave away the surprise ending,” I said, sitting back down miserably.

  That was not to be my comeuppance for winning so much money so easily earlier in the day. My great Dane, leather sectional, and electrified manhole cover were still out there. But it would come soo
n enough.

  When I got home Wifey was very excited and told me that someone had called and left a message. It was, she told me, a publisher. “I think it’s good news,” she said.

  Good news? Had Clint Reno come through for me? Finally? After nine months of silence? I imagined the message: “Frank, it’s So-and-So from Such-and-Such Books. We want to publish your novel.”

  Dead on Arrival was going to be published! I would get tens of thousands of dollars that I didn’t need, but my reputation would soar. I could write more books, which is all I wanted to do. One book every three years for the rest of my life. Books that mattered to people. I would be somebody and finally would be satisfied, perhaps even happy, with my life.

  “Frank, Deke Rivers at Last Resort Press,” the message went. “I had lunch with a friend of yours yesterday—Beverly Martin. I’m a huge fan of your first book, by the way. Huge fan. Anyway Bev told me you had something that might interest me and gave me your number. I’d love to take a gander at it, I really would. My number is . . .”

  I deleted the message before it finished.

  “So what was it?” Cynthia, still tan but peeling now, asked.

  “It was just some guy. Deke Rivers. A publisher.”

  “But that’s good news, right?”

  No, it wasn’t. I wasn’t going to pay someone to publish me. There was putrid, uncooked animal-waste matter I’d rather swallow whole than do that. For a second I was furious at Bev, then I was mad at Deke Rivers, then furious at Cynthia (for being the nearest available human being), but I finally settled on me. The proper target.

  “Which book was he talking about?” Cynthia asked me.

  “The last one.”

  “The one I couldn’t finish?”

  “Yeah. That one.”

  When I began writing the Trilogy I felt invulnerable. There was a force field around my body: a Cloak of Invincibility had been draped over me, the Muses would protect me. I’m certain that when Joyce was writing Ulysses he felt the same way. The book, he knew, had to come into the world, so what terrible fate could possibly befall its author? There’s no way, Michelangelo thought while painting the Sistine Chapel, that this scaffolding is going to collapse and I’ll fall to my death and not finish this thing. No way. He probably hopped up and down on the platform, maybe even sawed a few pieces off, or dangled off it from a pinkie nail. And I bet Marcel Proust felt the same way when he went looking for lost time, although I believe he never once left his bedroom for fourteen years to seek it out, so maybe he didn’t.