The Ballad of a Small Player (2 page)

“Over from Hong Kong for the night?”

“From Aberdeen.”

“Aberdeen,” I said. “I know Aberdeen.”

Everyone does.

“I go there for Jumbo’s.”

“Ah,” she said. “I go there on Sunday.”

“There’s a better place on Lamma,” I went on. “Rainbow.”

“Yes, I know it.”

The Shuffle Master ejected three cards apiece. She handled them in the way that a buyer in a market will handle small fish before buying them. I wondered if she knew what she was doing, but one doesn’t advise the enemy. She looked over the tops of the cards, and there
was the crooked, up-country smile, the overapplied paints and creams. I won the next hand. It cheered me after a long hiatus, and the long ebbing of my chips was checked. I drank off the glass of Krug and ordered another bottle. There were two of us drinking now.

After two more winning hands I went to the cashier and bought more chips. The night was turning soft and bitter at the edges, and I wanted to be at the center of it for another hour. The boys winked at me because I was being picked up by a secretary, but even if I was I didn’t particularly mind. Any man can be picked up by a woman half his age and he won’t protest, he won’t go kicking and screaming. He’ll go along with it for a while, just to see what happens. I returned to my seat and as I brushed past the girl from Aberdeen I saw the gold chain resting around the back of her neck and the blue edge of a tattoo covered by her dress strap. The ink looked pretty against her olive skin. She looked up for a second as my gaze swept across her neck—a woman never lets this go—and she turned her cards against this same gaze, as if I might be cheating. The idea that I might made me smile. It would be like fleecing a lamb with a pair of nail scissors. I suppose it was because I had been coming there so long without talking to a fellow player that I felt inclined to be careful with her. I gradually detached myself from the hands I played, although I was winning again, and enjoyed the second bottle, which had been deposited in the ice bucket. The floor manager
came by and wished me luck. His Sino-Portuguese eyes filled with cheerful malice and I said I was happy either way, winning or losing. The girl looked up. I could tell that she understood English well. She watched me pick up my cards, shift them, glance down at them without any outward sign of emotion, and I felt, for some reason, that we understood each other.

I
walked out with her into the casino lobby, and there was the lilt in our walk, the agreement deep down at the level of the body.

“It’s not my favorite place,” I said grandly. “Have you been to the Venetian?”
I hate that, too
, my tone implied. She tried to smile back, but I could see that she was seesawing internally, weighing it up and down, this venture into a specific form of corruption. We walked out past the statue of Pegasus in the courtyard, and its wings were flapping, smoke blowing out of its nose, and the whores standing about in the parking lot were laughing at us.

I’m too old for you to worry about attraction
, I wanted to say.
And I am sorry for that. It mortifies me, but I cannot change it
.

It was so crowded in this overblown courtyard that there was no room even to exchange a few words. She looked at her watch and said something about the hydrofoil back to Hong Kong, even though the last one didn’t leave
for a few hours, and in my experience with Chinese girls, when they are interested in you there is a very obvious slowing of their usual quickness of movement. She didn’t slow. I let the comment melt away and then touched her hand for a moment and she turned to look at me and, in that flashing way, we had agreed upon it.

She spoke very quietly.

“Where can we go?”

“We can go anywhere. Not my room.”

The light around us was a little brighter. Her bracelet was one of those multicolored childish objects from the Piper collection that are endorsed by Paris Hilton. She must have seen it in a magazine and let herself be persuaded into a mistake—the small circles of enamel didn’t suit her at all. At least she wasn’t wearing one of the hideous blue rings from the same maker. In the cab she would not touch me, aware perhaps of the prying eye of the Chinese cabbie fixed upon us in the rearview mirror (a
gwai lo
is always checked out), and I suggested an older, colonial place near the An-Ma temple where I had not been before and where—for some reason it mattered—I would not be recognized.

THREE

I
t rained along the shore. Along the embankments stand twisted fig trees planted by the Europeans, and they were still faintly visible in that darkness. Opposite, on the far side of the Van Nam Lake, rises a vision of China modern enough to chill the blood: the expressways, the towers, the garbled instruments of rising power. A terrible thing called the Cybernetic Fountain. But on the shore the old villas stand behind their sand-colored walls and the trees drip in the monsoon. There is a memory of ease, of the necessity of grace, white and lemon arches glimpsed between the fig trees. We passed near the temple as a soft thunder rolled in from the open sea. There are goddesses here who protect sailors and fishermen, and who protect the gambler, too.

The hotel lay at the top of a series of steep steps that wound around terrace garden patios with wizened trees and wet tables.

As I closed the door behind us, she said, “I am not the
usual prostitute. You think I am. But you may have made a mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“I’m not a whore.”

In the room we sat on the bed. There was the sound of the rain and the smell of flowerpots. I poured her a glass of wine from the mini-bar, but she didn’t take it. Quite the contrary. There was no opening up. She held her legs closely together as her hands lay curled upward in her lap in an attitude of refusal, and perhaps, I thought, darkness was required. It was a venal thought, a crass thought. I went to the bathroom and turned on that light, then brought the bathroom door to within an inch of the jamb. That would be enough light for us, enough darkness to unlock her curious inhibitions. She brushed the water drops from her jacket and shivered. She asked for a towel to rub her hair. I took off my own jacket and then my shoes—it felt impudent, but there was nothing for it. She remarked on the rolling-off of the shoes and there was a disdain in her eyes, a sadness at the lack of imagination. Perhaps she really wasn’t what I had thought.

She threw down the towel and decided to laugh her way out of this oncoming horror, because after all she could sense that I was not the usual customer. I wanted to apologize, and a woman can sense the imminence of a male apology. It’s like a storm cloud on its way to hose you down.

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.

I
n 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.