The Game Player (24 page)

“That was a mistake?” he asked with stunning humility.

“I could make a steady living off of the hands you're folding,” Don broke in with, laughing with a cigarette speared between his teeth.

“Is that true, Howard?” he asked me meekly.

“By and large the hands you've been folding,” I answered, “are good to fold. But that last one you should have stayed in on.”

“The blind leading the blind,” Josh said.

“Fuck off,” I said.

“Come on, you're both playing too tight,” Josh protested. “What did you do with the twenty thousand or so you won at bridge? You guys act like fifty bucks is gonna kill ya.”

“You can't play this game on percentages,” Don said as if someone had already disagreed with him. “You can't sit back like in high poker. You've got to gun.”

These informative spats could become quite complicated; they would bring the game to a halt while the players argued over strategy and odds. There was no unanimity of opinion about anything, and the discussions irritated me, but Brian seemed to encourage them with his questions asked in the naïve tone of an ingenue. He would watch and listen carefully to their opinionated speeches. He won a few hands of seven-stud with dynamite cards that he didn't bet the maximum on, causing outrage. “You only took one raise on a full boat,” Josh said, aggrieved because he had been the fooled loser.

“He was sandbagging,” Don said with faint contempt.

“Yeah,” Stan said. He spread out Brian's full house on the table. “Brian, you don't have to conceal the strength of your hand like that. It was well disguised. Josh would have called, you could have taken all your raises.”

“I thought he might beat me,” Brian said in a bewildered tone. “I wasn't sandbagging.”

“What could I have that would beat you?” Josh whined.

“Four eights,” Brian said.

Laughter, hands hitting the table. Brian looked about timidly while Don treated him to a ten-minute lecture on the odds against four of a kind and a full house appearing in the same hand. I couldn't understand what Brian was trying to accomplish. I knew he knew the odds of high poker, so this was an act. But as soon as Brian began to play well, these players would no longer believe his pretense of ignorance. If this was a sucker play, it was really for suckers.

After three hours, the play settled down to a steadier, more intense flow. I got a hot streak that put me up one hundred and fifty dollars. The big winner was Josh—most of it, Don's money—and Brian, who had played to the end no more than ten hands, was losing a small sum. We had agreed to a one o'clock quitting time and it was eleven-thirty when Brian started to play almost every other hand to the finish. I was wary immediately, sure that he had set them up for a killing. But he ran into bad luck. He pulled way ahead a few times while going for low in three-sub, and stood pat for the last substitutions, getting outdrawn by either Don or Josh, both of whom hardly ever folded a hand unless their chances were nought. Brian would ask if he had been wrong to stand pat, and, incredibly, Josh would tell him he was, earnestly arguing the point with Don, who would repeat over and over compulsively, “He's got to be pat. He's got to play it. You're gunning on the hand. You've got to beat
him.
He's got to be pat.” They patronized him, they bullied him about his slow betting and long, embarrassing contemplations of fairly obvious problems. I had seen Brian lose before, but never incompetently or meekly. He was polite and passive about their advice, not arguing even when, from knowledge he must have had from studying probability, he knew they were wrong.

At the session's end, the players milled about the table, looking at their checks with pleasure, or at their stubs with disgust, while Don banged the chips into their plastic holders and Brian stood quietly next to him, listening respectfully. “You'll do all right, Brian, if you mix up your play a little. You see, you're too obvious. You have to try and bluff a little.”

I wanted to scream and tell Don Brian's record of victories. Victories that I had come to feel were triumphs of modesty and discipline, that were, unlike everyone else's, richly deserved. But Brian spoke: “It's raining. Let me bring the car around to the front.” And he left quickly, leaving them with the impression that he was crushed and humiliated by the defeat.

“He lost a lot, huh?” Stan asked.

“He didn't do bad for a beginner,” Josh said. “A hundred bucks is nothing. I lost four hundred before I knew what I was doing at this game.”

Don squinted at me. “You think he'll keep playing?”

“I guess so,” I said, my voice tight with fury.

“He should,” Don said. “He'd be a pretty good player.”

Josh shook his head broadly. “Do you think so, Howard? I was sure, see, that he wouldn't do well.”

I pretended interest, even tacit agreement. “Really? That's interesting. Why?”

Josh moved his two hands back and forth to emphasize. “He's too intense to roll with the punches. You gotta do a lot of losing in this game. You know? I think it bothers him too much to lose at all. And besides, a lot of it, unlike
bridge,
is talk. Throwing people off their game, you know, by talking up your game.”

I heard a car honk and said good-by after my offer to drive people home was declared unnecessary. “Do you want to drive?” I asked Brian in the car.

“Yeah, I'm full of energy. I haven't lived in three weeks.”

“Did you like the game?”

He groaned. “It's hard to like the players. At least in bridge, or chess, you can shut up their stupid opinions because they're not allowed to talk.”

“But the freedom to talk and lie makes it more interesting.”

He glanced at me, his face suddenly back to the masterful amusement he exhibits when people speak arrogantly about games. “Why the tentative tone?”

“Tentative tone?” I repeated skeptically. “Doubtfully alliterative.”

“But why this cautious urging? Is that better?”

“It is, but I don't know what you mean.”

He grunted and we drove in silence for a few minutes before he said, “You didn't expect me to win the first time I ever played, did you?”

“What? No, I don't care how well you do.” My tone was hasty and false.

“How unkind!” he said, his voice full of pleasure and an English accent. “How unsympathetic!”

“Brian,” I said, my voice irritated, unpleasant, and my feelings hurt, “you think you're so important that I worry about your winning.
You're
the one who cares about your winning. You're the psycho. When you lose, you act as if I'm the one who cares. Does that make sense?”

“Howard.” His voice was clipped and his face still. “Forget it. I meant nothing. You're right. I lost and it bugs me and I thought you had the bad taste and bad judgment to think I should have won. I was making excuses, albeit they were
through
you, which only makes it more contemptible. I'm sorry.” He glanced at me with a questioning, contrite expression and I felt squeamish, so I avoided his look. If he had treated me with the casual arrogance my lying deserved, as in the past he would have, my acute petulance could have deluded me into thinking I
was
right; but to leave me alone with my lie was devastating. “I didn't thank you,” he said after it was clear that I was speechless. He spoke quietly. “I didn't thank you for getting me out of my—I don't know what to call it—my breakdown, I guess.”

“It wasn't a breakdown. God, this generation exaggerates! It was a simple depression.”

Brian laughed. “Jesus, you're being rough on me tonight. I'm trying to be grateful and you're castigating me.”

I laughed too, with relief. “I'm sorry, it's just that Karen—I probably shouldn't tell you this, but she meant well, don't—”

“All right! I won't. Any damage is already done, so go ahead.”

“Well, she was acting like you were cracking up and so I have this stockpile of resistance to the idea you were having a breakdown. You weren't. I knew you weren't.”

He laughed. “I can see you really had faith.” His lightness of tone disappeared and he spoke these next words intensely: “You were great, Howard. I mean it. I wouldn't have made it without you.”

This was the first emotional gift he openly gave to me and he did it with the same purity and directness that he did everything. The present was a ghastly embarrassment: I had wanted it for so long and still felt I deserved it so little. “Okay,” I said in a tiny voice, almost choked from my multiple feelings, each one going in conflicting directions—the frothy surf of reversing, rushing waters making me voiceless.

He must have known I could bear no more gratitude or even conversation, because he was silent the rest of the way. When we arrived home to find Karen in her blue bathrobe, drinking tea and watching television, I was glad to have a clinging lover not for good reasons, but simply because I needed a partner who, unlike Brian, when superior wasn't as demanding, and when dependent wasn't so helpless and grateful. I didn't like the way Brian behaved with Karen. He was polite, vaguely formal, and tentative, very much like his deportment towards my mother. I loved his quick, easy, even contemptuous, manner with women, and his unnatural considerateness seemed to be an imitation of my mannerisms with the other sex—his imitation, though unintentional, increased my self-disgust.

And then Karen embarrassed me by squealing with delight on hearing that I had won eighty dollars. “That's a small win,” I explained.

“I bet you won big, Brian, right?” Karen asked. “Howard says you're the best games player in the world.”

He laughed with theatrical exuberance, his white, sharp teeth framed by his pale, dark-haired clever face. “Not tonight, my dear. I lost one hundred and seven dollars.”

Brian never approximates, I thought to myself, while Karen flubbed her response. “Oh, my God, that's horrible. I'm sorry.”

Brian leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head, and kept smiling, his eyes creased with amusement as he looked at me. Questioning me, challenging me. “It's a small loss, Karen,” I explained. “Really. Brian has to get used to the game, set up his strategies—”

“Oh, come on, Howard,” Brian protested. He righted his chair with a bang and stood up. “You make it sound like I'm Patton. Or worse, a person with superhuman powers. I may never play poker well.”

“I must say,” Karen joked, “he doesn't look like either George C. Scott or Steve Reeves.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But he's better than both of them no matter what he says.”

“Howard's right, Brian,” Karen said. “After three weeks of television how could anybody be awake enough to play poker? I couldn't do it even after my brother coached me for two days.”

“Do you have his phone number?” Brian asked. “I could use his help. Which reminds me, Howard, did you really buy any poker books or was that—?”

“No,” I said sheepishly. “I didn't.”

“All right, shithead,” he said lightly. “I'll get ya in the morning.” He said good night to Karen and retired to his room. We stayed up late, after fucking, and at four in the morning, because I had been hearing noises from Brian's room, I peeked into the hall and saw a thin strip of light between his doorsill and door. But the television was still in the living room and, when I couldn't resist checking out whether he had cleaned his bathroom—it was brilliantly scrubbed—his door opened. “Pardon me,” he said. “Intruders? Or am I the one being investigated?”

“You did a good job on the bathroom.”

He smiled with his eyes brimming from incredulous amusement. “Thank you.”

I went to his door and looked over his shoulder. “What are you doing up this late?”

“My God,” he said, and swung his door open to my
view.
“I finally have a Jewish mother.” He pointed to his neatly made, gray-blanketed bed. “See, Ma, all clean.” The room, lit in only two isolated, bright spots, by the bed and by the desk, was clean, freshly aired from the two wide-open windows, and above all, serious, cold, lonely. On the desk, laid out for the empty four-hundred-dollar executive leather swivel chair, were seven poker hands and a huge yellow legal pad, black and indented with calculations.

“I can't believe it,” I said walking like a somnambulist to his desk. I heard him laugh as he quickly moved to the chair ahead of me, sitting down. I watched him deal a round of substitutions to the hands and then whisper bets to himself, folding one of the hands, and then marking in a column how much the round would cost per player, and the amount it would total in the pot.

“These many people wouldn't stay in,” I said, almost angry.

“Are you sure?” he said quickly. His tone was rhetorical. “In any case, I'm checking on what would happen if almost everyone did.” He checked the hole cards of each hand in rapid motions, slapping the cards down on the table. He did another round of substitutions and again I was amazed. “He”—I pointed to the hand I meant—“can't stay in. He needs two straight hits for a decent low.”

Brian's voice was a mumble, offhand and snotty. “He only needs one hit for a bluff.”

“Bluff? This guy—I touched the hand dealing—“is standing pat on a seven low. He couldn't be bluffed.”

Brian twisted his head to look at me with a half smile. “You've confirmed my theory, Howard. Surely the player with the seven low is thinking the same thing. So when the bluffer hits for a five or six low, it would never occur to the seven low that the player was bluffing. It's too crazy. People at the game, at least as far as I could see, only bluff when they're going for a real hand and it goes bust. But his hand has no hope for a real hand. He's
playing
for the bluff. You think that's crazy. So would everybody else. And you and everybody else would fold.”