King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “I don’t see how it happened,” he said, pulling out a white handkerchief and wiping his eyes. “I just don’t get it. I thought we had everything perfect. God, now we’ll have to reshoot. There goes the profit in this batch. Ah, but live and learn. The next batch we shoot …”

  I turned to him and stared with great eyes.

  “Don’t say ‘we,’ “ I said. “Don’t ever say ‘we’ around me. I’m going home. I hate it there, but after seeing this nutso scheme of yours, it’s looking better all the time.”

  Raines didn’t answer me, and for a while we drove quietly down elegant leaf-strewn Charles Street, during which time he nearly hit a golden retriever, a cyclist, and a nun who crossed the street at St. Mary’s Convent.

  I sat still, afraid that if I moved, if I spoke at all, I would erupt in either a towering rage or begin laughing like a mental patient. After only one maniacal afternoon with this madman, my entire emotional center had been displaced.

  Finally, we pulled into my parent’s gravel driveway in Towson. The house looked like a morose little pile of green shingles. My father, Happy Jim himself, sat on the front porch glider, a paperback novel in his hand. In his customary way, he looked up, saw that it was me, and immediately went back to reading his book. Though I feigned indifference to this slight, it was as though an arrow had stabbed my heart.

  My stomach tightened as I started to get out of the car.

  “Your father?” Jeremy said.

  “Mr. Wonderful himself,” I said, feeling the tightening spread to my chest.

  Raines shook his head and his eyes took on a surprising compassion.

  “Yes, he does look miserable. He has, if you don’t mind me saying so, the same kind of pain in his face that you do, my friend.”

  That insight irritated me all over again, even more so because I recognized its truth.

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re the Misery Guys. They’re going to do a television series about us soon.”

  “It’s sad,” Jeremy said. “I see it all the time in my work out at Larson-Payne.”

  “Larson-Payne Mental Hospital?” I said. “What kind of work do you do there? Con the patients into buying I.D. cards?”

  “Nasty, nasty,” Jeremy said. “As a matter of fact, I work with schizophrenics, catatonics, the A-3 ward for the deeply distressed. Having a little luck with them too.”

  “Right,” I said. I had heard just about enough of this whacko’s jive. “You succeed where the mere doctors fail.”

  “Well, sometimes yes,” Raines said. “See, I have this theory …”

  “Spare me,” I said.

  “I’ll give you the short version. Most modern psychology concentrates on early family life and the damage done there, which is all well and good.”

  “I’m sure Freud is relieved that you think so,” I said.

  “But I’m more interested in what makes the person happy right now. Take your father, for instance. What would make him happy right now? This second.”

  “News of my death for starters,” I said, then wished I hadn’t.

  From the car window I looked up at my father and felt guilty talking about him. Indeed, for a second I felt that he had heard everything we were saying and the thought made me sick inside. But he was still sitting there reading his book as though I were a ghost in some old Topper movie.

  “I’m serious,” Raines said, and I had to confess that he seemed serious. The charming con man was gone, and there was a gravity and concern in his voice that I found moving in spite of my best efforts to resist him.

  “He used to like to paint,” I said. “But he gave it up and I think he’s hated everything else ever since.”

  “Ahh,” Raines said. “Well then in your father’s case, all therapy, short or long term, should be aimed at getting him painting. Once he’s doing that, chances are he’ll be happy again.”

  “That sounds moronically simpleminded,” I said, unwilling to give in to Raines’s glibness again.

  “Yes, doesn’t it?” Raines said. “But I’ve had some fairly amazing results. Sometimes the answer is simple.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Well, it’s been interesting. Good luck with your quest for riches and happiness.”

  “Wish you were going to share it, partner,” he said, offering me his hand.

  Reluctantly, I reached across the seat and gripped his hand. Though his hands were small, he had a grip of steel.

  I got out of the car, and he gave me a little wave, then pulled out into the traffic. I watched him go, driving in his loopy way down the street, nearly hitting three parked cars within a hundred feet of my house. Watched him and somehow already missed him, though I told myself that I was lucky to be rid of him. When he had disappeared from sight, I walked up to the porch, feeling like George Raft walking the last mile to the electric chair.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  “You didn’t cut the lawn yet,” he said, then looked back down at his book.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “So get going on it,” my father said, “And don’t forget to edge. Last time you didn’t edge the front walk, and we had grass hanging over the cement.”

  “Gosh,” I said, “that’s terrible. Did the neighbors call the cops?”

  My father looked up at me and narrowed his eyes. I narrowed mine back, but felt a terrible pain in my lower bowels.

  “Funny,” he said, “very, very funny. Listen, if you don’t like it around here, you can move out.”

  “Which is exactly what I’m trying to do,” I said.

  We stared at each other some more. I wondered if his heart hurt as badly as mine.

  “As long as you still grace us with your brilliant presence, you should edge,” he said. “I edge and you should edge.”

  “Right, Dad,” I said. “Edge. Got it.”

  I turned and headed for the door. He gave me a parting glower, then picked up his novel. It was Kipling’s Light That Failed. About an artist who lost his sight. Absurdly obvious, I thought, then thought of Raines’s absurdly obvious theory. In my domestic zombie daze, I went to my room and changed into my old Levis and headed out the back of the house to get the lawn mower. In a way, I thought, it would be a relief to lose myself in the mindlessness of lawn cutting. At least I would be out of reach of either of my parents. But I didn’t make it past the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the Formica-topped table, listening to Bobby Vinton warbling on the old maroon portable Philco (my father’s Philco, and seeing it, I felt another little sharp sense of panic, what if Big Jim came in from the front porch and saw her “running down his batteries,” a crime in our house second only to “bothering me in the bathroom”). She was doing something odd with a bunch of small party-sized white paper napkins.

  “Hi, hon,” she said, smiling at me as she blotted the napkin on her red lips.

  “What are you doing, Mom?” I said.

  She smiled shyly; it was my favorite smile of hers. Often she was in a rage, and I would forget that just beneath the surface, she was a sweet, funny person.

  “Well, your father thinks I’m crazy, hon,” she said in a near whisper. “But what do I care what he thinks?”

  She blotted her lips carefully and put the napkin down on the tabletop, along with six other napkins that she’d finished.

  “Which one do you think looks most like my lips?” she asked with a slightly perplexed look.

  “Mom, they all look like your lips, but this one is the cleanest.”

  I reached down and picked up a napkin, and she took it gently from my hand.

  “That one? Let me ask you a question, Tom. Do you think that one is the most kissable?”

  “Geez, I don’t know,” I said. “Kissable? What’s going on here?”

  “Well,” she said, “Johnny Apollo, you know, the disc jockey on the radio? He’s sponsoring this Miss Kissable Lips contest. You blot your lips on the napkin, and you send it in and if you’re picked out of the first contestants, then you get to com
e down to the studio, and you get to be Miss Kissable Lips. Maybe. If you win, I mean.”

  “Miss Kissable Lips?” I said. “What’s that? You get a prize?”

  “Oh, yeah, hon,” she said. “I mean I wouldn’t do it if it was just for hubris. That’s a word I learned last week out of my word power book. That means having too much pride.”

  “I know what it means, Mom,” I said and immediately wished I hadn’t spoken with such a condescending edge.

  “Well, Mr. Chips Goes to the University,” she said. “As a matter of fact, there are a lotta surprises … clothes and kitchen stuff and best of all free tickets to the Lyric Theatre to see a Broadway show.”

  “Sounds good, Mom,” I said.

  I shook my head and headed out back, but she reached up and grabbed my wrist.

  “I know what you think,” she said. “You think I’m a dink for thinking I have a chance to win. Fat lady in a muumuu going down to see Johnny Apollo. Well, maybe my shape isn’t what it used to be, but I have always been told, by more boys than your father I might add, that I have very kissable lips.”

  That melted my heart, and I stooped down and kissed her forehead.

  “I know that, Mom,” I said. “I think you have the most kissable lips in the world.”

  She smiled and kissed me back on the cheek.

  “You know,” she said, “You are a very, very nice boy when you aren’t being a pretentious little intellectual.”

  She said it softly, though, and there was an adoring mother’s smile on her face.

  I patted her on the arm and said: “Keep blotting. And when they call you down there, I’ll be the one who takes you.”

  “Uh-uh,” she laughed. “That would be too embarrassing. There’s some things us adults need to do on our own.”

  I started to laugh, then my father came walking into the room.

  “You’re wearing down the batteries on my radio,” he said. “And why aren’t you out back?”

  “Edging,” I said. My tone was less than respectful.

  “That’s right, Mr. Henry James,” he said. “Edging. And I’ll be out to check how neat a job you did, you can be sure of that.”

  I started to come back with a snappy, hate-filled line, but my mother interrupted us: “How kissable do you think these lips are, James?” she said.

  My father looked at her and shook his head.

  “You and him,” he said. “You’re a couple of hopeless, foggy dreamers, I swear.”

  He shook his head, turned, and walked toward the bathroom.

  “Have a nice wash,” my mother said.

  I laughed a little, but she sighed deeply, her eyes glazed over, and she returned to blotting her lips.

  After cutting (and edging) the lawn and eating what my father called one of my mother’s “bouncing meatball dinner” (so called because they were burned black and bounced on the plate when served), I went back to my room and lay on my bed. I heard my father wander into the bathroom and turn on the faucet. I thought again of what Raines had said. If my father could only somehow begin painting again, perhaps he would be happy. I remembered his early watercolors—scenes from the Chesapeake, haunted line drawings from the lime pits out at Texas, Maryland. There was a lonely nighthawk, Hopperesque feeling to those paintings. Of course, they were derivative, but they had soul, the first letters of his own signature.

  I twisted and turned on the bed, remembering the time I had tried to put his work up on the wall. He’d forbid it, saying quietly that the paintings were second-rate, an embarrassment. But what he really meant, I thought as I lay there, listening to him gargle through the wall, was that seeing them, his only completed works, was too painful to bear. Better to lock them away, forget about what might have been.

  If only he hadn’t given up; if only he hadn’t had a child. That was the inescapable logic of it; I turned over on my belly, then back again to my side, like an insect pinned to a mat.

  Why kid myself? He had given up his art, spoiled his promise, primarily for me. And what was I? A self-conscious, stick-in-the-mud intellectual. A literary poseur.

  I thought of Raines then. He might be mad, he might be a con, but he was going to go out there and succeed in the fast-buck world. With a son like Raines, a man might be able to brag to other men, “Hell, yes, I gave up my art, but it was worth it. That boy might end up being governor.”

  But Tommy Fallon—ex-high school fuck-up—was now headed toward some kind of new folly. A barely middle-class Baltimore boy pretending he was going to end up a Man o’ Letters. God, the sheer pathos of it all turned my stomach, and I suddenly wanted to rush into the bathroom and scream at him: “All right, I know I’m nothing. I know it. Just tell me what would make you happy, proud? Name it and I’ll do it. A doctor, a lawyer? Is there anything in the goddamned world I can do to make you happy?”

  Ah, but that wasn’t me either. That was a scene from “Kraft Theatre,” weekly middlebrow television plays that my mother faithfully watched. Of course, in these sterling melodramas, the father would at last see how he has maligned his sensitive son and would hold him in his arms as the scene faded and the melted cheese poured so warm and comforting down the screen.

  But there would be no such easy resolution here. We were, it occurred to me as I lay there sweating from the overheated house, too much alike, too frail, too sensitive, too introverted, to ever make our mark on the world.

  In the morning, eating my poached egg, I again found myself thinking of Raines, and again, to my surprise, I began to laugh. God, I thought, yesterday had been fun, even if it had been at my expense. Then I thought of Professor Spaulding, with whom I had a meeting in just an hour, and my stomach twisted into knots. I was going to discuss my paper for Contemporary Novel. I had an idea that I would write something comparing Kafka with Edgar Allan Poe. It was a thesis I’d been working up for some time, that they were both artists of paranoia and pain, that they both found psychic release in horror. In all my critical readings, I had never seen anything comparing the two men and I had felt that I was onto something unique, even—God help me—sophisticated.

  I had fantasized that Dr. Spaulding would be dumbstruck by my ideas, that he would nod his head and give me a sliver of a smile. And both of us would know, at that exact moment, that I was on my way, headed up the yellow brick road to the suddenly wide-open doors of the Great Golden Palace of the Mind.

  As I finished my breakfast that morning, however, I found it difficult to concentrate on my thesis. I kept seeing Raines striding across the Hopkins campus like he owned the place. I remembered his easy manner with the secretary, how he addressed the president of the great institution by his first name as if they were equals.

  I also remembered his patronizing attitude toward Spaulding. He treated my intellectual hero as if he were nothing more than an interesting, lovable, but slightly dotty old eccentric, someone’s faintly ludicrous uncle. I had detested his arrogance, and yet, I thought to myself as I showered and shaved, there was some truth to it. If one looked at it from a certain perspective, Dr. Spaulding was slightly absurd.

  The thought both amused and startled me. For, logically, if Spaulding was absurd, then what was I? An imitation Spaulding?

  I ran cold water over my face, combed my hair, and looked at my books. No, I couldn’t afford such thoughts. To hell with Raines and his crazy notions. I had to stick to the straight and true. With some effort of will, I put Jeremy Raines out of my mind, grabbed my books, and headed out of the house toward my appointment with my mentor.

  Ah, how I recall the pain of that meeting. To this day it remains engraved on my soul.

  Professor Spaulding listened politely as I explained to him in hushed tones how Kafka and Poe were on parallel tracks on the Great Train of Literature. Then, when my fifteen minutes of halting, stammering “brilliance” were finished, he looked at me and said the words I most dreaded.

  “Yes, Tom, somewhat interesting.”

  You must understand that this
was the comment he made to students who wanted to write “Bravery and Cowardice in The Red Badge of Courage” or “The Short, Choppy Sentences of Ernest Hemingway.” It meant that my ideas were obvious, hackneyed, tenth-rate.

  “Then you don’t like the idea?” I mumbled, blushing.

  “It’s not a matter of me liking it,” Dr. Spaulding said, taking off his glasses and tapping them on his palm. “It’s simply the kind of observation that doesn’t bear close scrutiny.”

  I slapped my hand to my head and blew wind from my cheeks.

  “Well, of course not,” I said. “Of course not. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You see,” Dr. Spaulding said, “that while there is a superficial similarity between the two writers in that they both deal with extreme mental states, Kafka is always cool, understated, whereas Poe is an hysteric, a melodramatist.”

  And here Dr. Spaulding’s voice reached a new low as he whispered in my ear: “Poe is a sensation monger, the forerunner of Rimbaud and contemporary triflers like Allan Ginsberg, whereas Kafka comes out of a great modernist European tradition. Of course, the two men have certain superficial similarities but only at the most obvious level.”

  “Oh, well, of course,” I said, devastated. “I guess I didn’t think it through. Look, I’m sorry I wasted your time. I’ll have to work on something else. I mean, I have a lot more ideas. Better ideas.”

  “Fine,” Dr. Spaulding said. Then he turned and picked up a pen.

  “Come in again, Tom, when you’ve firmed up your thesis. Now I’ve got some Kafkaesque paperwork to attend to.”

  “Right,” I said, backing out the door and bowing like a slave.

  I gave him a little salute as I left and then turned and walked down the hallway. There were other students there, but I stumbled by them like a drunk. I felt as though I had been branded an idiot, a moron, one of the countless students who “betrayed their potential.”

  Oh, Lord, I was washed up at nineteen. I would never be a literary scholar. No, I would end up in a bathroom somewhere, a madman washing away the stink of failure, of mediocrity, from his skin. I vowed to race directly to the library and spend time there until I came up with an unassailable thesis, one so critically bold and yet so solid that Dr. S. would be flabbergasted. I would stay in there night and day if necessary, but I would, by God, be a serious scholar in the end.