“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.”
“No, Brian, because nobody folds a seven low, no matter what another player is showing. He”—again I pointed to the hand bluffing—“might have a seven down or he might be paired. That’s the kind of bluff you’re talking about—a hand that goes bust. Why wouldn’t the seven low think that?”
“Because it costs thirty-two dollars to find out.” Brian searched my eyes for understanding. “That’s where all the money is lost. Not in developing hands, but in calling. A good poker player wouldn’t call the last two bets unless his chances are very good, right?” I nodded yes. “That makes him vul
nerable to nutty bluffs.”
“Maybe, but don’t try it.” I refused to back down, meeting a glance that had no humor or reasonableness in it. “You’re a new player and they’ll call you a lot, figuring you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Howard,” he said, rising, “it’s past your bedtime.” He put an arm around my shoulder and walked me to the door. “You saved my life, but I’m in territory only I know how to handle.” We were outside the door and he stepped back, saying, while he closed it, “I’ll wake you in the morning, good friend.”
10
I have seen panic destroy prudence in both skilled and inept players. I have seen it happen to men who had guts enough to face bayonets on the battlefield.
—Irwin Steig, POKER FOR FUN AND PROFIT
THOUGH OUR LAST year of Yale was the easiest and least pressured as to studies, the wait for LSAT scores and the news of graduate school acceptances made it a period of anxious suspense. Brian was not worried. He had taken the LSAT in his junior year and, when he got the form telling him he had scored 798 (out of a possible 800), he asked Mr. Stoppard for more money. Mr. Stoppard wasn’t content with the security of Brian’s score, so, using channels of information available to a distinguished and generous alumnus, he checked on Brian’s situation: Brian was sure to graduate top in his class even with a routine result for his senior year.
Brian set this precedent, asking for money ahead of his father’s schedule, because he not only failed to win money from poker, he actually lost four hundred dollars that spring. He bought all the books in print on poker (there were only five) the day after our first session and the study of them, along with his torturous practice of dealing hands, recreating betting, keeping totals of individual betting and group betting, became his evening entertainment. Brian went so far as to review a mathematics course to relearn a series of algebraic formulas that can be used to predict card probabilities, but he told me it was almost useless for practical application.
The appearance of my second article for the Times led to a book contract, as many of you may know, that I fulfilled towards the end of my senior year. I had no inkling, while at work on the book, of the sensation it would create, but even so it had a tremendous impact on my plans. I dropped any idea of pursuing graduate studies that would lead to a teaching job and the article made me more of a celebrity in the school than Brian. I had my first serious disagreement with my parents over the importance of the book contract—they still insisted I should amass enough academic credentials so that money would never be far from my grasp—and I had my first terrible taste of the anxiety of working for the adult world. It would come over me in a choking fog while writing that this was not going to be scanned by a professor who cared only for good research, clear development of idea, and purity of grammar. I would feel hopeless while I sat at my typewriter, or on the verge of a cold sweat while I lay awake at four in the morning, next to a sleeping Karen with whom fucking had become an increasingly perfunctory and distant act, and tried to convince myself that my prose was more cleverly masturbatory than Mailer, snottier than Tom Wolfe, more dignified and better researched than Edmund Wilson, and as compelling as (though more correct than) Solzhenitsyn. For the first time in the protracted struggle for preeminence with my peers, I was ahead of the pack and I felt like a runner who has made his move too early, and, with his breath catching, his legs failing, sees nothing ahead but hears the stamping feet of his pursuers.
Despite the fact that Brian insisted Karen and I should rent the apartment with him, he and I weren’t close for most of the senior year. Our only shared activity was poker and that was an embarrassment. Josh and I were the consistent winners, with Don occasionally having a big night (that was usually followed by a big loss due to exuberance and a delusion of invulnerability), while Brian, though not one of the two big losers, would lose small amounts and never win more than fifty dollars so consistently that his performance seemed more pathetic than that of the players who would drop three or four hundred in a night. He played very few hands beyond the opening cards, and almost none to the end, and his presence in a hand, especially if he was raising, would immediately cause the borderline hands to fold and the good ones to play cautiously.
He was predictable to an absurd extent. After we had played together for twenty sessions or so (roughly one hundred and twenty hours) we joked openly about his tightness. In three-sub, if he stayed in on a low card, and his next card was a nine or higher, the dealer would comment, “Well, there goes Brian.” And if he stayed in, we would all announce in unison, “Ah, he has an ace in the hole.” All the players’ styles were mocked in this fashion so it was reasonable that Brian didn’t think his was especially prominent; however, the other players’ habits varied not only because of strategy, but because after three hours of disciplined play, all of us were giddier: the winners willing to gamble more and the losers having to. But Brian’s consistency was as impervious to time as it was to scorn.
At first, I gave myself no credit for winning. I assumed my calm about the money, my common sense, my good cards, and Brian’s strange passivity were the cause. His timidity and incompetence were the calm before the storm, I thought, since whenever I peeked in on his experimental hands, they involved bluffs and long shot maneuvers that were the forte of Don and, to a lesser extent, Josh. I would listen, amazed, to the endless taunts and lectures of the other players towards Brian: “You have to bet a hand like that stronger,” Don would say. And Josh, who would fold nine times out of ten when in a showdown with Brian, saying, “Oh, no, Brian, I don’t play against people who never drive a car over forty miles an hour.” He would sop up our laughter while Brian intently split the small, conceded pot with another player and add: “One day I’m gonna call him. Next time I get four aces, I’ll do it.”
Brian was silent, intense, uninvolved, and unable to sleep after the sessions. He would only say yes or no if I asked what his intention or holding had been in one of the hands, and then change the subject, saying good night as soon as we were home, making hot chocolate and carrying it to his room to deal out another night of cards. He had stopped his daily acquisition of women, only seeing a girl once a week and never letting her spend the night, often going to her place and returning home towards dawn. My curiosity about this change was marvelously satisfied by Karen. She became good friends with Joan, who was one of the two women Brian still saw, and after an evening they spent together while Brian and I played poker, Karen returned home late and answered my question about where she had been by putting a finger to her lips, shushing me, and motioning me to follow her to the bedroom.
“I found out heavy gossip about Brian from Joan. She kept me until just now talking about it.”
I watched her take off her coat and hang it up. I felt ashamed that I wanted to hear something scandalous about Brian’s sexuality. “Do you want something to eat or drink?” I asked, to pretend disinterest.
“No, no. Unless you don’t want to hear the gossip.” She smiled at me mischievously.
I sighed. “I do. But—”
“What?” she said impatiently.
“It’s not something horrible, right? I mean, nothing like his penis having fallen off.”
“God!” she said, shaking her head incredulously. “That’s really interesting. That’s what you would imagine?”
“Oh, come on! Jesus, I wish you had never taken psychology.”
“Howard, don’t start that crap that everything I say is a Freudian cliché.”
“All right,” I begged, putting up a hand.
“It’s very insulting, do you realize that?” She stared at me, frowning, and I sheepishly went over to kiss her. But she pulled away at the last minute so it landed awkwardly on her cheek. “You are such a sexist,” she said, not angrily, but rather wearily, as if I were a hopeless case.
“Because I kissed you?”
“Right. Because you think I’ll calm down if you pat me.” She said, “pat me,” with tremendous con
tempt.
“Okay,” I said, my tone suggesting that I was through kidding around with her. “That really pissed me off. I made a typical exaggeration about male sexual fear. I was trying to be ironic. Have you ever heard the word? And you take it at face value, ready to analyze me as having castration fears. I need that?”
She listened to me with her mouth tensely closed, nodded sarcastically when I questioned her knowledge of irony, and answered calmly. “You see? You just got angry without asking why I commented on it. The answer, if you had the decency to ask, is that I know you can’t figure out why he’s losing at poker, right?” She raised her eyebrows. I made a face of bewilderment. “So what do you imagine to be his sexual problem, without, mind you, my having said he had one? That he lost his power, his penis.”
I sighed and sat down, trying to settle my ruffled feelings enough to think out her analysis. She watched me eagerly, hopefully, and I said at last, “You’re probably right. But I think you exaggerate the importance of those kinds of things. I am worried about his performance powers, you’re right, but—” I stopped and laughed, and she laughed with me, pleased. “You’re right,” I admitted, and quickly changed my tone. “So he doesn’t have a problem?”
“You’re not gonna say you’re sorry?” she asked coolly.
“I’m sorry,” I said honestly. “You were right.”
She smiled and walked over to kiss me primly on my forehead. “Now I’m being sexist,” she said.
“So what did Joan say?”
“Well, I was very nosy. I just asked her why she bothered to see him. I mean, she has nothing to say about when they get together. They don’t go out, apart from sleeping together. They don’t do anything. And how often does it please him to see her? Once a week at most, right? And he’s quite open about the fact that he sees other people.”
“She does know that?”
“Oh, yeah. She made a joke about it. So, when I asked why she bothered, she said that there wasn’t anybody else whom she was serious about, and she enjoys sleeping with him.”
The Game Player Page 19
