King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “What?”

  She turned and spoke to me in a low, smoky voice, a voice from a dream.

  “It’s true,” she said. “When I met Jeremy, I was a patient at the hospital. I had what is known in our parents’ circles as a total breakdown.”

  “What triggered it?” I asked in a voice that was not my own.

  “I don’t know…. I mean, what are the usual answers to that question. The Colonel? Screaming at me for my lifestyle, spying on me to find out who I was sleeping with?”

  “The bastard.”

  She smiled sadly and ran her fingers through my hair.

  “He thought he was helping,” she said. “He’s military, Tom. He believes in attacking the opposition.”

  “Even if the enemy is his own daughter.”

  “But it wasn’t all his fault. Mother didn’t help much either. She’s an old-fashioned southern girl. For my twenty-first birthday, she sent me a single pair of white panties.”

  “Jesus, talk about right out of the Freudian textbook!”

  “And there were the drugs,” Val said in a dreamy voice. “I was taking quite a bit of peyote in those days. It helped for a while, made things dreamy, a bit too dreamy. I was at a party down at Bolton Hill, at the Marlboro Hotel. I took a couple peyote buttons, and I began to see this figure over in the corner. It was a woman. She looked like a gargoyle, all hunched over and hollow eyed with a strange little wooden staff. Something right out of the fairy books. I was terrified of her face, all ancient and cronelike, until I realized that she was me, and I followed her out of the Marlboro, down onto the street. I saw her go past Maryland Institute and into the train station, and I followed her in there, right out onto the tracks, and I sat down and waited and I realized then that this beaten, mishappened little gnome was really me, and all her fury and sadness were really inside my soul and that seemed too sad to me, so sad and so hopeless and small, that I just sat there waiting for the long black train to come and carry us both home.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “It was Jeremy who found me. About three minutes before the train was due. He got me into Larson-Payne, and he kept the Colonel off my back.”

  “How did he manage that?”

  “He told the Colonel that if he bothered me, he would go to the Sun with the story … of how he hit me, beat me.”

  “You didn’t tell me that. Your father beat you?”

  I held her close. She had started to cry a little, and I cupped her cheeks with my hand.

  “Yeah,” Val said. “Yeah, he did … not all the time. Only when he was upset and drinking.”

  “Decent of him,” I said.

  “I was in Larson-Payne for two months. There were voices, fragments of faces, but that was all. The only face I trusted, the only one I could see whole was Jeremy’s. And that was enough. Gradually, I came out of it, but I felt like a piece of crystal. I was so afraid that if I broke again, I would be finished. But Jeremy didn’t let that happen. He kept me going, even after I got out of the place. Helped me get my little place downtown. Got me working for Identi-Card. Turned me on to the poetry scene.”

  I didn’t say anything. I had always known, known that there was some subterranean pull between the two of them. But this?

  “If you’re wondering if we were lovers, the answer is yes. But you mustn’t think it was because he took advantage of me. It was months after I got out of the hospital. And I wanted to make love to him. I needed to … to make it real; I lived in fantasy for so long—broken little pipedreams. I needed to be with someone physically, someone I could trust. After a few times we both realized that there wasn’t that kind of magic between us.”

  “No, he’d rather just control you. Get you to sleep with anyone he wants you to as long as it helps the business.”

  Anger flashed in her eyes, and for a second I thought she was going to slap me.

  “Jeremy’s not Dr. Caligari,” she said. “You should trust him.”

  “Look,” I said, “I love the guy. Really. But he’s a con artist. I mean … he …”

  I caught myself before I went on. I was about to say something absurd like Jeremy had made some pact with the devil—something I didn’t even believe—and yet, it felt that way tonight. There was some new, dark side to him, beyond all the charm and boyish fumbling. But I could see that there was no point in criticizing him to Val.

  “Tell me more about your father,” I said.

  “He’s pure army. Every single thing in his life is a battle plan. Do you realize once when I was a kid on the girls’ soccer team, he came to a few practices, which I liked, but then he sat me down one night with a chart he’d rigged up, which had on it every single girl’s name and her weakness as a player. He told me how I could win the wing position I wanted by beating out this other girl. More than that, he expected me to do it. I thought it was horrible of him. I was trying to make friends for Godssake, and he said that the other girls weren’t friends. They were competitors and the object was to whip them all. Finally, I rebelled. Rather than do it his way, I just quit the team. He beat me, called me a coward, locked me in my room, from which I escaped by climbing out onto the roof. I ran away seven times before I was fifteen. They’d come and find me and take me to their shrink friend.”

  I held her tighter and kissed her forehead.

  She turned and put her hand on my cheek.

  “So how do you like your little rebel poet now, Tom? Pretty fucking pathetic, huh?”

  “I love you,” I said. “Don’t doubt that.”

  “You love Jeremy, too,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’m not sure I understand anything anymore. I only know that I love you and that I want you to love me.”

  I buried my head in her arms, and she rubbed my neck with her long white fingers.

  “I do love you, Tommy,” she said, “but we’re not going to live like our parents. We’re not going to see love as some little bank account. If you take too much out, you’ll be broke. We’re just starting on a journey to become completely new people. Jealousy, holding onto things, in the end we’re going to sweep all that way. I know you understand all this, or why else would you be here?”

  “You’re assuming too much, Val,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m here. I mean you’re talking about some new breed of man. Jesus, I don’t even barely know who the old me is yet. I only know I need you. I want you.”

  “You’ve got me,” she said, putting my fingers into her wet cunt. “Right now, you’ve got me.”

  I wanted to argue, to say, “But right now … isn’t enough.” But her mouth was on mine, my cock was hard again, and my words were drowned in her kisses.

  Still, there was much more that I wanted to say to Raines himself, but I had to wait again, because in the morning we all gave Hogg a great send-off. Raines mixed the strongest Bloody Marys I had ever tasted, we smoked gold hash, and Lulu Hardwell dressed in her black lacy nightgown, which revealed most of her two fabulous Ripleys. By the time Hogg was ready to leave, he had a very large smile on his face.

  “Absolutely nothing to worry about, my boy,” he said to Raines as the hallucinatory yellow cab pulled up in front of the house. “I’ll get you a temporary grant. It’s a two-week loan-out, enough to bail you out of existing difficulties. And once you’ve shown that you can cut it there, we’ll talk about getting you more substantial financing.”

  “Dr. Hogg, my friend, you are a gentleman and a genius,” Raines said, hugging him.

  Hogg hugged him back, then gave Lulu Hardwell a long, serious kiss and collapsed into the cab. I stood on the front porch with Val, Eddie, and the Babe in utter silence.

  As soon as Hogg’s cab had disappeared, the three of them rushed down the steps to embrace Raines.

  “Congratulations,” Babe said, hugging him. “We’ve got the backing we need.”

  “It does look that way,” Raines said, smiling craftily. “It most certainly doe
s.”

  “Thanks to the good deeds of Miss Lulu Hardwell,” I said with serious, square disapproval in my voice.

  This stopped the celebration a little, and Raines gave me a sharp little glance from the side of his eye.

  The others started humming to him again as if nothing had happened. But Val looked at me and shook her head slightly as if to say “pathetic” or “take it easy,” I didn’t know which.

  “I’d say this calls for a little celebration,” Eddie said. “I think I’ll go downtown and get fitted for my hand today.”

  “An excellent idea,” Raines said. “You’ll look distinguished in the extreme.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but am I the only one that thinks we might have bitten off a little more than …”

  “Doubting Thomas,” Raines interrupted.

  “Yeah, hon,” the Babe said. “You need a little gold hash, and you’ll feel better about the whole used car lot.”

  She handed me a small pipe right out there in the street, and I was so confused, so torn, I thought she might be right. Why not fly a little, put myself above the whole damned struggle. So I took three long tokes, sat down on the old cracked cement steps, and felt my head spin off my shoulders.

  A second later, I stood up and announced to them all that I was headed off to class.

  “What I need,” I said, “is to read. Get back on the old high-lit track.”

  Everyone smiled and agreed and looking at their beatific faces, I felt like a spoilsport and a cur. They were decent and happy, and just because they weren’t as conflicted and neurotic and confused as me was no reason for me to go around judging them.

  I walked over to Jeremy and offered him my hand.

  “Congratulations on the Kodak deal,” I said. “I have only one question. How the hell did you buy a goddamned building in one day?”

  “Hey, who said anything about buying it?” Jeremy said. “I just rented the roof.”

  At that, Eddie smashed his stump into his own forehead.

  “What?” we all screamed.

  “Yeah, from my good friend Mr. Antonelli. Leased the sign, installed it, turned on the juice. Only thing we own is the rooftop and our lease up there expires in a month. But by that time we’ll have the Kodak deal sewed up, and then we can really rent office space.”

  This killed everybody, and I found my resistance to mad Raines had once again disintegrated.

  “You rented the roof,” I said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  “Hail Jeremy, full of gas,” Sister Lulu said as she threw her arms around him.

  The subject in class that day was point of view in Henry James’s The Ambassadors. As usual Dr. Spaulding was brilliant. He explained to us James’s center of consciousness technique: Though the novel was written in third person, James wrote every scene through Strether’s point of view.

  “Thus, by limiting us to knowing only what Strether himself can know, the novel takes on a density of psychological impact. The aesthetic excitement of the book is not so much on what happens next, but rather upon a gradual unfolding of Strether’s maturing sensibility.”

  Yes, I thought, this is undoubtedly true, and ordinarily, I, as a budding young scholar, would have been thrilled by the good doctor’s words, but stoned as I was, it occurred to me suddenly that Dr. Spaulding was not actually in control of the situation (AS IT FUCKING WERE). No, in my hash-addled mind, it seemed to me that Dr. Spaulding was nothing more than a bright parrot: Oh, Lord, I knew this was wrong—very, very wrong—and yet the very idea of a Jamesian point of view (POV) seemed to bisect, as it were, with my New Understanding, which was that the aforementioned and highly touted POV could be highly misleading. Yes, misleading in the extreme, because in order to have a bona fide POV, as it were, one first had to have a BFS, that is a bona fide self; this seemed absolutely a necessity. But what if one had a “self in transition,” or to put it more negatively, what if one’s self had been Blown Down to Zero by Dad in the Bathroom, Mom in the Kitchen blotting her Kissable Lips, by deep-seated confusion about women, friends, Jeremy Raines, what one wanted to do with one’s life in the (ha, ha) future, more and more pictures of American soldiers marching, marching, marching through some jungle called Vietnam, and, let us not forget, by this gold hash that was sending whispy shimmering waves of sweet paranoia over every single molecule of air? On top of all that, what if one wasn’t sure if the voice of one’s formerly idolized teacher was not actually his voice at all but was in all actuality the voice of some monstrous fat-cheeked English aristocrat who was throwing said voice into the frail body of Dr. S? Yes, that was a distinct possibility. What if … Oh, Lord, Dr. Spaulding was right this second being played for a fool by none other than some Evil Hand Puppet? And what if the Evil Hand Puppet had made sensibility slaves out of everyone who ever read old fake Englishman Henry James?

  Sitting there, stoned and worried and confused, I thought, yes, yes, yes, it could happen. The Evil Hand Puppet might have his giant fingers this very second stuck up the asshole of good, kind, gentle Dr. Spaulding, making him walk that walk and talk that talk and tap his glasses. What if the fact that his voice was coming out of his mouth just a millisecond after the words were formed by his oh so refined lips? What if that little glitch was the only dead giveaway clue that he wasn’t master of his own destiny nonono, but a victim of the VILE and EVIL ARISTOCRATIC HAND PUPPET Who Secretly Controlled the WHOLE LITERARY WORLD?

  And what if … what if (open window, bird on window sill, leaves blowing right by the dusty glass, tits of women in alpaca sweaters looming like snowballs on dripping wet Baltimore back alley cherry snowball summer afternoons) … what if I was myself a Hand Puppet? Yes, first to my parents and now to Jeremy, and who can know for sure but that we aren’t all some hand puppets? somebody’s fingers up our ass, the dad who isn’t there (but his fingers still are), the mom who lives in Fantasyville, the invisible government in the night washed away.

  I shook my head, and the room seemed to swim back into focus. I was gone, wasted, whacked out. Then, to my horror, I realized that the entire class was staring at me, like the burning children’s eyes in The Village of the Damned, and at first I thought, with the logic of pure, doped-out madness, that somehow the class had heard my thoughts, though perhaps we shouldn’t dignify such rampant paranoia with the classy title “thoughts.” No, perhaps, we would have to call it a mass of swarming, paranoic, but maybe also even profound impressions. For even now, as a man in my forties with an identity established, I still often feel that someone else has their finger up my ass and is making me move here and move there, and only the cushion of money and the ravages of time make it more bearable, but how far, how far indeed we still are from freedom.

  Then, in my blinking, bright confusion, I realized that Dr. Spaulding was calling on me, and I looked up at him, like a newborn babe, so confused and unable to make out a human face, but heard him say, nonetheless, “So, Thomas, I wondered if you would like to explain to the class the role of the confidante in The Ambassadors.”

  And I smiled and smiled and thought of the Evil Hand Puppet (EHP) walking and talking and acting like he was running the show and thought that in the end the EHP gets us all. But not wanting to be incarcerated in nearby Larson-Payne Mental Hospital, I didn’t say any of that, but instead answered: “The role of the confidante is, technically speaking, a way to enter the hero’s mind … learn his thoughts. Since James isn’t telling the story in first person, he can’t have the protagonist, Strether, talk directly to the audience … but by Strether confiding in the confidante, James is able to advance the plot and advance Strether’s moral awareness at the same time.”

  “Very good,” Dr. Spaulding said. He began to say something else, something about Conrad and Nostromo, but the bell went off and the class silently packed up their books and their pencils and trundled off out to the hall. I tried to follow suit, wanting to finish my drug-induced “insights” outside on the great green sward of grass, but Dr. Spaulding
, who never spoke to me unless spoken to first, picked this very day (to my sweaty horror) to call me aside: “Thomas,” he said, “may I see you for a second?”

  “Yes, certainly,” I said, falling into our old literary nineteenth-century formality (which now, now that I was out and about and acting bad in the world, seemed silly and pretentious).

  “Thomas, I don’t know quite how to ask this, but are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m fine, fine, fine.”

  “You’re sure?” he said, and his eyes bore into me, like two hollow point bullets.

  “Yes,” I said. “Was my answer wrong or what?”

  “No, your answer was fine,” he said. “And it’s none of my business, but you seem distracted of late. Very distracted.”

  My heart beat rapidly, and I felt my stomach lurch a little.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had a rather long night.”

  “I would imagine, Thomas, that you have had quite a few long nights where you’re living.”

  He stared at me with an almost unbearable intensity. I looked down at the floor, but then suddenly, without knowing why exactly, his remark began to irritate me.

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “It means,” he said, “that I’ve heard you’ve moved in with Jeremy Raines and his crowd.”

  The written word will not capture the amount of disgust in his manner when he said “Raines and his crowd.” It was as if he was talking about a pack of filthy road beggars.

  I felt something ugly rising in my throat.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to keep the rage bottled inside. “I am living there. That’s true.”

  Dr. Spaulding sighed and tapped his glasses in his palm. He got up stiffly from his chair and did his usual dramatic walk toward the window (and I thought, uh-uh, this don’t work so well anymore, I’ve seen it before, my boy).

  “You remember, don’t you, Thomas, our talk about your potential?”

  “Yes,” I said, staring at the swirling dust motes by his head.

  “I’ll reiterate. I happen to think you have real potential as a thinker, and I hate to see you squandering your efforts on a bunch of, well, you know what I mean, I’m sure.”