The Game Player (25 page)

“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 vulnerable 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, P
OKER FOR
F
UN AND
P
ROFIT

T
HOUGH 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 contempt.

“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.”

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.”