Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  Will she strip, if it comes to that? As it will?

  The tip of her tongue is against her upper lip as she arranges her cards. Her eyes meet Bruce’s, and she smiles lightly. She has the exhilarated, heightened look that she sometimes has while singing.

  “Cards,” Bailey says. He holds the deck in his left hand and with the thumb and forefinger of his right he riffles the edges. They are new cards, and the sound is peremptory. Like a self-conscious shark, he smiles. “How many, Muriel m’love m’love?”

  Without moving her arms from their cross on her breast, Muriel sticks out three fingers, letting three unwanted cards dribble onto her thighs.

  “Three,” Bailey says. “For your sake, Sister Snow, let us pray they’re good ones.” Deadpan, he inserts the three cards into her extended fingers, and then with a sudden thrust is inside her fingers, under her hands. She shrieks and bends away. “Get out of there, you …!”

  Bailey withdraws. “Oh boy,” he says with utter unenthusiasm. “Hot dog.”

  Furiously Muriel stabs him with her eyes. She holds her cards against her collarbone and is dignified.

  “Brother Mason,” Bailey says.

  “Give me three, Bishop Bailey, and give them your blessing.”

  “Three? Too bad, pal. It pains me to see you brought so low. Here’s some extra-heavy ones.”

  He whacks the cards down on the blanket so hard that two of them jump face up. Before the others have settled back from their startlement at his violence, Bailey is as inert as the Buddha.

  Confirming that the cards which fell face up will not help his hand, Bruce refuses them and demands two more. After an argument, Bailey passes him two, which turn out to be four. They don’t help his pair of nines either.

  “And now we come to Sister Gordon,” Bailey says. “Sister Gordon is sitting there hiding something. What can Sister Gordon need to make her even happier?”

  She gives him a level glance and slides one card onto the blanket.

  Bailey clasps his brow in consternation. “One? Brown-Eyes, what are you doing to us? What have you got there? Two pair? Possible straight? Possible flush? Four of a kind? Oh, Brother Mason, hang on to your pants!”

  Nola picks up the card he conspiratorially deals her, looks at it, and folds it into her hand.

  “It suits her!” Bailey cries. “God, Mason, we’re ruined. She’s sitting there with a Farmer Brown and she’s got designs on our most per-sonal and pri-vate garments.” His black widow’s peak moves down and then back, his eyes are bright and full of glee. He looks over at Muriel’s quivering flesh with compassion. “Kiddo, what are you gonna do when she comes on with a straight flush? We’ll be looking up your old address.”

  Muriel crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue. Bailey reels, and then stiffens with resolve. “Unless the Great Bailey can catch.”

  “What difference does it make who I lose to?” Muriel says. “Anyway, who says I’m gonna lose?”

  “Ah,” Bailey says sadly. “She caught, too, Mason. We’re surrounded. All right, boy, the old spirit. Better death than dishonor.” He consults his hand. “The Great Bailey will take two.”

  With his eyes closed, he lays his cards down on the blanket without discarding any, and gropes until his hand finds the deck. How many cards he takes is not clear-three or four. Keeping these palmed, he picks up the original hand and fuses it with the new one. Immediately he begins to laugh silently, bending his forehead clear to the blanket. His fist holding the cards pounds the floor. In a single motion he comes out of his cross-legged squat. A certain number of cards hit the discard pile, but only Bruce sees them. The girls are watching Bailey leap for the two-by-four above him. His shadow heaves on the wall as he chins himself furiously—three, four, five, six, ten times. Dust shifts down, so that Nola leans away, protecting her hair. Bailey goes on chinning. His biceps bulge, his chest is luxuriant with black hair, spittle comes out of the corner of his mouth, he chortles as he chins.

  Bruce watches, hating what he sees. Three times during the poker game Bailey has exploded into one of his spasms of energy and challenged him to an arm wrestle. Three times Bruce has waved him off. He tells himself that he can beat Bailey at practically anything, from tennis to pitching pennies, but that truth abides in him sullenly and without satisfaction. As Bailey’s legs go up and down, as his swollen neck is hauled up to the brace for the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth time, the old clammy inferiority comes on. He could not match Bailey in chinning any more than in arm wrestling. His chest is ribby and hairless, he has little of Bailey’s wadded muscle. The old cold self-knowledge of the runt suggests to him that as a lover he may not match up either. Muriel, he is sure, thinks so, and somewhere in the middle of her self-contained quiet Nola may suspect it, too. Perhaps she feels protective about him, as he feels about her. The thought makes him die a little.

  And this is another element of his complexity. He no more wants to strip in front of Bailey and Muriel than he wants Nola to. He wants no comparisons. Mason, his survivor, watching from the doorway, shares his inadequacy and self-contempt. They understand, as the strong and beautiful do not, that though clothes may serve important functions of warmth, ornament, and modesty, their principal function is that of disguise.

  Bailey crashes down, blowing, and without comment sweeps up his hand. He has a face like a Hawthorne Mephistopheles—not a face, a visage, gleaming with wicked delight. In his whole life it has never occurred to him to doubt himself for a second, which means that both memory and thought are short-circuited. Yet Bruce feels sullenly that confidence like Bailey’s, however inferior morally and philosophically to his own self-doubt, is probably attractive, perhaps irresistible.

  He wishes passionately that they were somewhere else—anywhere else, even in her apartment with her featherbrained roommates around, even parked on Wasatch Boulevard with the cloud of his departure growing darker between them. Anywhere.

  “And now, Brothers and Sisters,” Bailey says, “everybody should be getting ready to lay down.” He raises a finger. Everything about his face is pointed—eyebrows, cheekbones, chin, the sporty little mustache, ears, the light reflected in his eyes. Glee grows in his face like flame in kindling.

  “It isn’t fair,” Muriel says with her cards held against her chin. “If you guys lose, you just lose a sock. I’d lose everything.”

  “You’ve already lost everything, baby.” He pats her thigh, but his eyes are on Nola, and he is saying to her silently: You too, kid. Don’t pretend around me. You lost it and liked losing it. “Everybody set?”

  A knot has gathered under Bruce’s breastbone. He has to break this up, but how? Bailey will never let them forget it if they back down. But if they don’t back down, there goes Nola’s skirt or brassiere. Bailey sits there with a straight, a flush, a full house. With all those cards, he has to have something good. For a second he wishes he had cheated as wildly as Bailey, and yet, as Muriel says, what difference would it make? He can’t beat Baily without beating Nola, too. The only way she can get out of this is to beat Bailey herself, and she isn’t going to do that with the two pair she probably holds.

  Expose Bailey’s cheating? He hasn’t been the only one. Still, that may be the only way. Let it break up in accusations and denials. He lights a cigarette, takes a drag or two, and passes it to Nola. The fog around them is thick and blue.

  Muriel is still grumbling. “I don’t care! You get all the good hands. You’ll beat me and say I should take everything off, and I’m not going to be the first.”

  Bailey can discern an injustice when one is called to his attention. “Two to one, I’ll bet you. How’s that?”

  “Two socks against my pants!”

  “Two socks and my pants?”

  The look of a sly bargainer comes into her eye. “You’d still have your shorts, and I wouldn’t have anything.”

  Bailey, after a moment of thought, smacks his knee. “All right! I’m ahead, like you say. I’ve got the biggest stack.” M
irth convulses his face and is at once wiped away. “Here’s what we’ll do. This is the last hand. Everybody bets whatever he’s got left. Brother Mason shoots his wad, Brown-Eyes risks her all, Muriel hangs her last rag on the line, the Great Bailey puts everything at hazard.”

  He says it to all of them but he is talking to Nola. Bruce can see her face settling into stubbornness, resentment, and determination. She thinks she has a chance. But why is he staying? What does he expect to do with his pair of nines?

  Abruptly he throws down his cards. “Not me. I’m out.”

  Bailey is scandalized. The honor of the company. The code of the sportsman.

  “No,” Bruce says, shaking his head. “I fold.”

  He will not look at Nola. He looks at Muriel instead, and Muriel is as scandalized as Bailey. “Well, all right! If that’s the way you …”

  She makes a gesture of throwing in her hand, too, and Bruce’s hope leaps up. But Bailey has grabbed her wrist. For a moment a pink nipple-eye goggles free and is clapped under again.

  “Wait, wait,” Bailey says. “You can’t, Mason.”

  “Why can’t I? Why should I stay with a pair of nines?”

  “Because this is the last hand. If you back out now you’re a welsher.”

  “You’re darn right,” Muriel says. “You get me practically naked and then you quit. I’m not undressing unless the rest of you do.”

  “Somebody won’t,” Bruce reminds her. “Somebody’s going to win this pot. Guess who. He called it the last after he saw he had it cinched.”

  “Who says he has it cinched?” Muriel says. “I’m still playing, if the rest of you are.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Bailey says. “I’ll strip anyway, even if I win. Whoever wins has to strip, too.”

  “Then what’s the use of playing the hand?” Bruce says.

  To his dismay, Nola says in her husky whisper, “Come on. Are we playing?”

  Bailey is galvanized. “Now you’re talking! You’re damn right we’re playing. I’ll bet you, by God. Everything against everything. Showdown. Brown-Eyes, I think you’d like to see me put up or shut up.”

  “Just once in your life.” Nola says.

  She gives Bruce an unreadable sidelong look. Anger glows in her temple. She twists to free the ends of her hair from under her, and pulls a sheaf of it forward over each shoulder. Perhaps that is what she is counting on, like Lady Godiva. She has more nerve than Bruce has. He feels desperate and put in the wrong, and it gives him a pang to see her there, proud, erect, stubborn, sure to lose.

  “Let’s see,” he says, and leans against her to look at the cards she spreads slightly to show him. What he expected. Two pairs, kings and sevens.

  “Mmm?”

  He shrugs, carefully noncommittal, hoping that his lack of enthusiasm will warn her. But his mind has seized on a fact: in the hand he just threw away there is a king.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and picks up his cards again. “Maybe I ought to stay in.”

  Muriel squawls in outrage. “After you’ve looked at her hand? Oh, no sir, I’m not going to …!”

  “Keep your shirt on,” Bruce says, and looks at her and snickers. He throws down the cards, but now the king is in his palm. Again he leans against Nola to look. He takes the cards from her, dropping a kiss onto the point of her shoulder, and studies them and passes them back with a shrug. Bailey might still have her beaten, but at least now she has a chance. Leaning back and stretching, he manages to scuff under the blanket the five of clubs he has removed from her hand.

  “Are you ready, finally?” Bailey says. “Christ sakes, Mason, she’s already said she’s in. She doesn’t need your chicken advice. Are you betting us, Brown-Eyes?”

  “I’m betting you.”

  “Yahoo!” Bailey says, and lifts his pious eyes. “This may be the greatest unveiling since they took the sheet off Brigham’s statue and found the coconuts. What’ve you got you’re so proud of?”

  “What have you got?”

  “I dealt. Here, we’ll do it in order. Muriel, lay it down.”

  She lays it down, leaning far forward and endangering herself at several points. “Three eights?”

  Bailey shakes his head sadly. “Too bad, kid. Nice try.”

  “You haven’t won yet. What’ve you got?”

  “Wait. First Miss Coverall.”

  “Two pairs,” Nola says.

  “Two pairs? Is that all?”

  “I guess it’s enough.”

  “Mason, Mason,” Bailey says. “Why didn’t you instruct this innocent Sister better? Your two pairs don’t even beat Muriel’s three eights.”

  Nola’s eyes fly to Bruce’s. The color in her temples spreads slowly into her cheeks. “Don’t they?”

  For some reason Bruce leaves her exposed. She has put down her cards, face up, but not spread, so that not everything shows clearly. He compresses his lips and shakes his head, trying to read in her wide eyes what she will do if she loses, as she thinks she has, and may yet. Or what she would do if she won, and Bailey started stripping off there, six feet away. But he can’t read her. Her eyes tell him no more than an animal’s would. They glisten, that is all.

  Bailey is weaving back and forth like a cobra. “What a pity, what a pity! Oh, Sister Gordon, if you had only sought the right counsel. Because … I’ve … got … here … in … my hand …” He lays down the nine of hearts, then the ten, then the jack, then the queen. Their eyes are on the withheld last card. Bailey’s eyes bug out, his mouth opens, he slams the card down with a yell. Deuce of hearts. “A flush,” Bailey says.

  Sweet, wonderful triumph has replaced the tension in Bruce’s insides. He is in no hurry. He stays leaning back on his hands while Bailey stops his weaving and says, “Now, ladies and gentlemen! See it here! See it all! Spectacular, revealing, first time in the Western Hemisphere!” Beatifically he smiles. “Losers first.”

  Nola looks at Bruce, then at Muriel. Muriel looks at Nola. Muriel sets her mouth and stares with dislike at Bruce and hugs herself tighter. “Not me. Not in front of him. He backed out. He has to leave.”

  Disgust makes Bruce move more violently than he planned to. He jerks forward onto his knees and with his fingers spreads Muriel’s hand, three honest eights. He spreads Bailey’s dishonest but undeniable heart flush. Then he spreads Nola’s full house, and his eyes find Bailey’s and hold them. He says nothing.

  Bailey leans and stares. “You stacked them!”

  “The hell I did. She just misread her hand. Ha, ha, you old bugger, you walked right into it. Off with the duds, Bailey old boy. Off with the last rag, Muriel. We’ll run it up on a pole as a signal of distress.”

  But Muriel, sitting angry among her inner tubes, spits out, “I’m not undressing in front of you!”

  “You stacked them when you looked at her hand,” Bailey says.

  “Horsefeathers, Bailey. You lost. You called me chicken, what are you?”

  Promptly Bailey tears off a sock, then the other. “Don’t call me chicken!”

  “Oh hell, who cares whether you peel or not?” Bruce says. “Come on, Nola, let’s get some air.”

  He pulls her to her feet, suddenly shocked at seeing her in her underwear. She grabs up her blouse, then his shirt and sweater, and comes along. Barefooted, they go out into the mountain night, so clean and cold after the shack that he feels his first lungful as a sword swallower must feel the steel. The stars are blue-white and brilliant, the sky is narrowed by the dark spiked tops of firs. On the doorstep they struggle into their shirts. He hands her his sweater and she pulls it over her head. He kisses her as her head emerges.

  “Wait.”

  Reaching back inside, he picks the flashlight off the bench by the door and slams the door shut. Following the path that leads out to the road, they walk behind the yellow puddle of light.

  “Why did you put that king in my hand?” she says.

  “Because he’d have beaten you if I hadn’t.”

  “
I thought two pairs was a good hand. I wanted to beat him so bad he’d crawl.”

  “You couldn’t have beaten him. He was cheating.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I saw him.”

  “Why didn’t you call him?”

  “Because I’d been helping him. The whole game was crooked.”

  She says nothing. Hunting smooth ground for their bare feet, he squirts the flashlight ahead. As they come out on the road the big old abandoned Silver Lake Hotel looms in the starlight, and beyond it, like a watermark on the sky, the dim granite of Mount Majestic. A meteor streaks down the sky and leaves a living blackness where it was consumed. He feels sad, old, guilty, and misunderstood.

  “Why?” Nola says tightly. “Were you that anxious to see Muriel?”

  “Why would I want to see her?” he says violently. “That cow. I don’t know why. I ought to have my head examined. Bailey can get you doing things you’d never do. I wish we hadn’t come up here.”

  “So do I.”

  “Would you have undressed, if he’d won?”

  “I suppose I’d have thought I had to.”

  “Even though he was cheating.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No,” he admits, and then, overwhelmed by guilt, “I was the one who knew that! Oh, I’m sorry, Nola! Why did I get us into this? I hate to take you back in there.”

  “I know.”

  They stop at the edge of the clearing to cling and kiss. Her hair is clean and slippery under his hands. All around the cirque the mountains stand high and dim. There are only a few lights, and no sounds. It is late. Mason, who has followed them here, feels how love, which was first a wonder and an awakening, has brought them already to a kind of desperation, a kind of pollution, a kind of woe. Innocence would have been their happiest choice. In the dark path he rocks her body against his and feels the hot stir of desire and knows that they have brought death into the world.

  At last she says, “We’d better go back. I’m cold.”

  “Why don’t we just get in the car and go home?”