The Game Player

by Rafael Yglesias

  I was pacing restlessly but I stopped at this, put a hand on my hip, and regarded Karen with disbelief. “Bullshit. She must be hoping he’ll be nice.”

  “Why?” She paused and looked inquiringly at me. “I mean, it made a lot of sense when she explained it.”

  “What did she explain?”

  “She was so Cosmo about it, I loved it,” Karen said laughing, but with a touch of embarrassment. “He’s good-looking, he makes no demands, and he’s very considerate in bed.” Karen read off the list in a vague imitation of Joan’s soft, aloof voice.

  “You’re right, it is Cosmo and it’s bullshit. I don’t believe it. If all that’s true, then she’d want him to be serious even more.”

  “She says no. I asked the same question. I agree with you. But she says she wouldn’t commit herself if he did ask.”

  “Why?” I said the word harshly, almost furiously.

  Karen looked at me fondly. “Howard, that’s sweet. You’re upset that your friend is being put down.”

  “I am,” I said in a tone of both surprise and emphasis. “She’s no prize. She’s an alienated shithead—”

  “Come on,” Karen said indulgently. “You don’t really know her. She’s very smart and nice. And her reasons are good ones. He doesn’t talk about his feelings, he doesn’t even talk about his hopes.”

  “Does she ask?”

  “Of course, she asks. And though she likes the sex, it still makes her uncomfortable.” I screwed up my features at this confusing sentence. “She doesn’t think he enjoys it,” Karen explained.

  “All right, look,” I said, sitting down at my desk. “I’m too young to understand these distinctions. She enjoys it but is afraid he doesn’t.”

  “She feels like she’s a manual he’s following.”

  I began to laugh but still got out my question. “You mean, like he’s studied a manual and is following it to the letter?”

  “That’s right. And that’s the way he plays games, right?”

  I was incapacitated now from laughter. I tried to start a sentence several times, but I would be hit with the image of Brian poring over a sex manual as if it were a poker book, making notes, and memorizing steps on how to fuck. Just as if she had made a ghastly joke about a cripple, I was embarrassed by my desire to laugh, so I giggled uncontrollably with naughty shame. Karen watched this exhibition wonderingly and asked if she had made sense. I finally could answer. “It’s got to be right. God, is that sad,” I said cheerfully.

  “It must be a very thorough manual,” Karen said without irony. “He apparently covers everything.” My head hit the desk while I shrieked with laughter that was almost hysterical. “Come on, Howard, you’re being very cruel.”

  “Okay, okay. But that can’t be too bad for her.”

  “It’s not. She says it’s great. But he never comes.”

  “Comes?”

  “You know, he never has, well, not never, but he very rarely has an orgasm. And when he does, it’s very, um, you know, repressed.”

  This sobered and entranced me. The absurd comparison between games and fucking was remaining consistent. “People have different ways of coming. Maybe he is enjoying it, maybe she’s very passive and feels guilty.”

  “Look who’s being Freudian,” Karen said with a look of self-love.

  “Will you give me a break? I apologized.”

  She smiled. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “that’s no reason to not want someone.”

  “Well, but he’s very depressed and he doesn’t go out and he’s not warm. You know, he goes through the motions. He holds her hand when they’re walking but she says she doesn’t think it’s genuine.”

  “Well,” I said, my tone ending the conversation. “If he loved her he probably would be happier and go out more. He’s just making casual sex a heavy experience instead of a bang-bang fuck. I think that’s being extraordinary, not repressed.”

  “But, Howard, it sounds like he’s a performance freak. That’s the way he is about everything else. That’s why he’s depressed. He doesn’t let himself feel anything.”

  “Has she done anything to stop him from busily manipulating her to orgasm?” I was annoyed and looked at her with my face serious and intent. “Huh? Has she stopped him and serviced him? Oh, no, on the contrary, she comes back, she takes any amount of neglect and alienation just so that she can get her rocks off.”

  Karen was shaking her head. “You’re wrong,” she said earnestly. “You’re wrong.”

  “She has? Is that what you mean?”

  “No, I don’t know what she’s done about sex, but she’s tried to get him to talk about feelings and—”

  “Look,” I interrupted. “It’s very easy to tell yourself that the reason a person is a top student and can win at everything is because he’s a nut. That’s what it amounts to. You can put fancy words to replace that judgment—he’s repressed, he’s compulsive. Or you can minimize that achievement by saying it makes him unhappy. The fact is everybody is trying to cover up their feeling that he’s better. That’s all. He’s better. I think the reasons he’s unhappy have nothing to do with the existence of his skills. They may have something to do with the extent to which he develops them. If he were happier, he probably wouldn’t waste his time studying games, but that does not explain why he is good at them.”

  I had wanted to yell that truth, to stop her from pecking at Brian’s purity, and to stop the creep inside me that was saying he was through, that he couldn’t complete any project, that his talents had broken down as I could prove with poker, that his approach to life was too one-dimensional for adulthood. She reasonably refuted my speech, denied that she had meant his personality explained his talents, but insisted that his discipline was harmful and obsessive. I pretended to agree (I suppose part of me did), because I no longer expect people to genuinely resolve differences: I became a writer so that I could always have the last word.

  But since Brian’s three-week depression, he did seem wounded and dysfunctional. His poker playing had been vague, timid, even becoming inconsistent as he slowly began to play less tightly, and his average loss doubled, without a complementary rise in winnings. The change wasn’t due to more bluffing, he was just staying in a little longer on each hand before folding. If he played to the end, as before, he had a dynamite hand. Nine times out of ten, his hand would win, and people rarely called him, going high if he was playing low, or vice versa, making his winning hands worth much less than other people’s.

  And he no longer took care of himself or the apartment the way he used to. He would shave every three or four days, stopped ironing his shirts, and would wear torn clothes. Though his friends tried to visit with the same frequency as in the past, even more desperate for his advice on papers and tests, he rarely agreed, and became openly contemptuous of their brain picking. “I prefer the old days,” he said to one while letting him out, “when we poor white trash would be paid to cheat on the tests for you gentry.” He ended his closest friendship among the law students over the phone by saying, “Fuck off! Why don’t you spend three days and nights looking it up like I did. Your father bought you into this university and I’m tired of bailing you out for free.”

  These fits presumed a position of oppression that was incomprehensible to the others: who or what had ever oppressed Brian? They thought he had gone mad. And, for once, Brian became a loner, involved in school only to the extent that was absolutely necessary. His free time was dominated by an imaginary poker game, a poker game that allowed him a flamboyant style of play the real one didn’t.

  During the fall and winter, while I found myself emerging as the big winner in the game, Karen and I had our major crisis. She laboriously picked away at my attitudes and behavior, convincing me first that male chauvinism was more complicated than women not having jobs, and then, having established the abstract principles, was merciless in her pursuit of the devils in my unconscious. Though this process has ma
de our relationship a happy and easy one, I still resent that period. I was humiliated most by the discovery that I was so naïve and incomplete a person as I approached my majority; I blamed it on never having a sister. Her influence did have one effect I regret: it killed my natural instinct to admire Brian. Though she stopped using him as an example early on in our talks, the point was made. He was the ultimate product of a sexist society. Emotionally selfish and closed, concerned only with the awards, marks, and signposts of accomplishment, and never with the quality of the achievement, a person obsessed with possessions and status symbols whose ability to express love extended no farther than saying good night with the remorse of a dying man.

  And, of course, his failure at poker and his inability to sustain interest in something that he had mastered, were really results of the same disease, I realized. His disconnected relationship between the emotionally crushing, hard work he put into succeeding and the amount of satisfaction it gave him, inevitably led to repeated disappointments—and that had to create a terror of victory. Victory meant death, victory meant the anesthesia of study and preparation were over. He was disappointed in people for resenting and begrudging his wins, but wasn’t that an unnatural demand: to demand love because of success? He had nothing for his ambition to feed on, except for itself, and when opposition disappeared there was no genuine desire to create a valuable human truth out of his talents. He was a dynamo that supplied no warmth or light, a skyscraper without doors, a supersonic plane that is too destructive to use.

  When Don told me he had added up the sheets we used to keep track of how much money each player owed to the bank—which meant that, at the end of each game, when players cashed in their chips, there was an exact total of who had won what—I listened to the figures with a feeling of sad triumph. I was the leading money winner at the end of twenty sessions, counting from the previous year, with a score of two thousand, five hundred and eighty dollars; Josh was second with a little over two thousand; Don was the only other winner at eight hundred; and Brian was fourth with a total of three hundred in losses. “That’s all?” I asked when I heard Brian’s figure. “I thought he was doing worse. That’s not bad at all.”

  Don let out his version of a laugh: a high-pitched grunt. “He’s only losing three hundred because he hardly plays. If he did, he’d be losing more than anybody.”

  I protested that his problem was that he played too few hands, that if he changed he would win more. But, I thought to myself, when I considered how much more effort Brian put into the game than we did, how especially pathetic his result was.

  “No,” Don said in his telegraphic tone of speech, words bursting out and stopping suddenly. “Not true. He’s the most readable player in the game. I just look at him and I know what he’s got.”

  Our conversation occurred during my weekly phone call to Don, two or three hours before game time, to check that we were indeed playing. Since my winning had been consistent, I was now a liked, talkative, and feared player. When Josh and I faced each other in a hand, we bantered in an excellent imitation of Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson; the other players would lean back and laugh, ask us how we knew certain subtleties, and listen to our explanations raptly. Poker is a very fluid game, however, and even the biggest loser among us would have his big winning night, not only getting a fair share of good hands, but many long shots coming in, something that always disturbs a good player more than anything else; but the game blindly rewards bad strategy on occasion, seducing a poor player, the following week, to continue hoping for lucky pulls and leading to his losing even more than usual. We sat down for our twenty-first session in a typical mood of trepidation, waiting to see which one of us would start out hot.

  The first round’s pots were small and twice I lost on good starts that soured on the final cards. Typically, Brian won these hands often and tonight was no exception. “You got it, Brian,” Josh said with mock horror when Brian turned over a six low (a superb hand) that he hadn’t bet strongly. “I was hanging in there with a jack low.” The table laughed. Josh was famous for playing horrible hands and somehow bluffing his way through, or reading another player for a bluff, so the laughter was admiring. “He can have these chintzy early pots,” Josh said while shuffling the cards. “I just stayed in to make him feel good.” Again the enjoyment of Josh’s arrogance was full; he often mocked Brian without there being retaliation.

  But tonight, Brian, dressed in a black silk shirt that I hadn’t seen before, his pale face bleached from a recent shave, said in a rumbling voice, calm only because it was heavily sarcastic, “Tonight, Josh, the joking ends. You’ll find me dogging every move you make.”

  “Oh?” Josh smiled at me while I cut the cards. “You mean, Brian, you’ll actually call me? You can’t mean you’re gonna bluff?”

  “Is this three-sub?” Brian asked as he got his hole card.

  “Only game I play, my friend,” Josh said.

  “If you know what’s good for you,” Brian answered, tossing a white chip into the pot. “One on the ace,” he said before looking at Josh, “you won’t bluff any more four-flushes.”

  I thought, He’s terrible at this, he’s ugly when he tries to banter, but Josh’s reaction was oddly constrained. “I never do,” he mumbled.

  “Really?” Brian said. “Amazing that you get twice as many flushes than are statistically possible.”

  It was nicely timed and the table laughed. I remembered then, as I’m sure the others did, that Josh often did pull apparent flushes on the last substitution; and, since it made so little sense for Josh to buck strong hands with only a possible bluff, when he hit for a card, people assumed he had made the flush and they folded. In any case, when Josh began to develop a flush in the very hand after Brian’s accusation, the table was in hysterics. After we had received our first five cards and had done one substitution, the hand was down to four players: Brian, who was showing eight, seven, three, ace; Stan, a bad player, who had a pair of kings; me, trying for a low against Brian, holding a two down, and three, five, eight, jack up; and Josh with his three diamonds and a spade, trying for a flush. We substituted and Brian made one of his overcautious plays that I unhappily felt contemptuous of: he got rid of his eight and received a deuce, so that, when I got a bust card, I folded quickly, knowing Brian must have a great low hand. Stan got another pair to go with his kings and Josh got his fourth diamond, giving him an apparent flush. “Your two pair isn’t going to be enough,” he said to Stan.

  There was a lot of talk about whether Josh was bluffing, inspired by Brian’s comment, and Josh wilted on the last sub, because he took a card down, an admission he had been bluffing. Stan also took a card down, hoping for a full house, but it was Brian’s play that stunned us. With a lock for low, he threw away his seven and got another ace, giving him a pair. “He could have three aces,” someone said.

  “Horseshit,” Josh said. “He was trying for a straight. And now I’ve got him for low.”

  “A pair of aces is lower than any other pair,” Brian answered. “So you’d better check that that card didn’t pair you.” After Stan bet five dollars on his two pair, Josh raised five dollars, saying to Brian, “I’ve got ya low.”

  Brian looked sadly at Josh’s cards. “I have to see,” he said, calling the ten dollars and raising one. Stan took the last raise for five but the expected call from Josh didn’t come. He looked at his hole card. “What a bitch,” he said. “If I’d hit for that flush, I’d have the whole pot.”

  “That’s right,” I said, laughing, “but I see you must have hit for a pair.”

  “Yep,” Josh said cheerfully. “And since this scumbag plays too few hands to fold this one, I’m gonna save some money.” He turned over his cards.

  “Let’s split it,” Stan said to Brian, reaching for the pot.

  “How about the formality of declaring?” Brian asked.

  “Okay,” Stan said angrily, picking up a chip and waving it in the air. “I’m high.”

&nbs
p; “Me too,” Brian said. “I have three aces.” The table moaned while Brian took in the pot made huge because it was all his. I don’t think the others thought anything about Brian’s victory in this hand was special except that a person winning a pot by himself was always considered remarkable. But I took a good look at him and the symptoms, for me, were obvious. He was dressed to kill and he had played that hand to the hilt. And though he had opened the attack against Josh, I was also an enemy—for the first time in our friendship my winnings stood in his way.

  It wasn’t long, however, before the others knew that something was up. Brian began to push each hand, taking every raise that came his way, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes hard, with their secret lids that seemed to cover them even when they stared most directly at you. He would be raising mercilessly, and he could fold a moment later, without shame, or he might push on to reveal a good hand, but not nearly as good as the hands he used to play cautiously. Luck was his handmaiden for the first two hours: though his opponents were shocked by his raising, they called out of curiosity at first, and lost at the same rate they were used to when he played tightly. When you lose nine hands out of ten to a player taking maximum raises, it isn’t long before you begin to fold and not call him.

  Josh helped it along. “Stop calling him,” he would scream at the others. “The guy is practically turning over his hole card and you fools keep calling him.”

  Brian sat silently during these analyses of his playing. He counted his chips and would ask who was dealing as if Josh’s imprecations were the sirens of engines in the street, calls of distress that he couldn’t aid. He met my glances as he would a stranger’s and despite all my experience of play, I began to watch his cards, as they were dealt to him, fearfully, sure that each one would be a perfect hit, terrified that my hand and his were on a collision course. We reached the midpoint of the game with Brian up over three hundred dollars, the usual amount when someone was on the way to a once-a-year big win.