“But I would have had to break it for the rent check anyway,” Fred argued to Karl’s bathroom mirror. “It’s ridiculous,” he answered the imagined rage of Marion. “We have fourteen thousand dollars and you’re making me feel poor.”
He heard his name called from the dining room, where Karl had set up the game. He stared into the mirror and said, “Wake up!” and then yanked open the bathroom door and stormed down the long narrow hallway. He saw a bubble of paint at the end of the hall. Karl lived in a pre-World War II building on West End Avenue. And though many elegant details remained — marble fireplace, elaborate moldings, sliding wood doors that separated the large dining and living rooms — the building wasn’t being kept up, and Karl’s place had many patches of peeling and cracked paint. Karl was the big winner that night, up over two hundred dollars, and as Fred made the turn out of the hallway, he hit his fist against the bubble of paint, shattering it into pieces that fell on the floor.
Entering the room, Fred could see a cloud of cigarette smoke that hung like an evil ghost over the table. There were several cups and plates swollen by mounds of ashes. The dead butts lay in them like drowned insects. The blue, red, and white poker chips blared their colors in this fog, either arrogantly stacked for precise counting by winners, or slumping, disheveled, in front of losers. Fred had a messy pile, a very small one, in front of his empty seat.
The other players were all writers he had met casually once or twice before at dinners with Karl or at publication parties Marion had been invited to. They were, in order of prominence, Sam Wasserman, the former investigative reporter who, with the publication of a bestselling book on the murder of a middle-class young woman, had become more than a reporter and less than a novelist, and, while writing additional factual but very melodramatic books on other fancy murders, wrote a regular column for Town magazine that had a broad range from political commentary to complaints about the service at Bloomingdale’s; next down the ladder of success was Tom Lear, also a former reporter, who had sold a piece on a crack New York city detective to the movies, wrote the screenplay — while several carping stories appeared claiming the detective in Lear’s article had taken credit for other people’s achievements — and it was now being shot on location in New York; a rung farther down was Paul Goldblum, who had published two highly praised but unprofitable novels, but had received a National Endowment grant and a plum creative-writing teaching job at Columbia University; staring up at his rear end Was Richard Trout, a New York Times Metro reporter and nothing else, but he talked ceaselessly of a book he planned to write on the recently notorious murder of a local congressman who was rumored to be gay; and, last, William Truman, a childhood friend of Karl’s, who was a poet — publishing mostly in academic journals no one read — and supported himself with the aid of an enormous trust fund whose source was his grandfather’s investment in real estate (Fred had been told that Grandpa Truman once owned half of Ohio).
“Bong!” Sam Wasserman said on Fred’s entrance. “Final round.”
“Come on!” Paul Goldblum said. “You’re not quitting at midnight.”
“I gotta get home and finish my column,” Sam said in a grave tone, like a surgeon announcing he had a patient on the table waiting for an emergency operation.
Tom Lear, the only writer present who felt himself equal in stature to Wasserman, let out a loud Bronx cheer.
Karl smiled nervously. “It’s your deal, Fred.”
“Those of us who still have to write prose, instead of that stuff with skinny margins—” Sam Wasserman began to say angrily to Tom Lear, the reporter turned screenwriter.
William Truman, the poet, interjected quietly, “Don’t forget, poetry has skinny—”
But Lear was already answering Sam: “I’m sorry, Sam, I forgot. You’re still a serious writer. You haven’t sold out like me.”
“Damn right—” Sam began.
But Lear rolled on, “What’s your column this month? Comparing lambskin rubbers to ribbed rubbers? Or maybe you’re gonna take on somebody heavy, like another attack on Joe Garagiola?”
Fred guffawed, opening his mouth and leaning back with enjoyment. Wasserman looked at him: it was a cold and angry look. Sam’s attitude toward Lear was combative but friendly. When he spoke now to Fred, it was with the contempt people reserve for irritating inferiors: “Deal the cards. Or don’t you know how to do that either?”
This comment silenced everyone — it was too openly hostile, cruelly dismissive, exposing Fred’s vulnerability. Everyone knew that an attack on Fred’s playing was really a statement directed at his being a social interloper. At least Fred thought everyone believed it was.
“Okay, okay,” Fred said, his face reddening.
“That’s what I like about you, Sam,” Tom Lear said. “You win so gracefully.”
Fred shuffled and dealt in silence. Most of the game had been that way. The dialogue was limited to macho exchanges referring to the strategies or outcomes of hands. But it was the just-completed exchange, until it was suddenly directed at him, that Fred had hoped would dominate the evening. He loved being with these guys. Even Sam’s contempt for him didn’t lessen his desire to hang on to this group. If anything, it whetted his desire to stay.
He found himself up against Sam in the hand he dealt, as if a writer were controlling the events. As he raised and was raised back at the climax. Fred convinced himself that he would win simply because Wasserman had been unfair. But he didn’t win, and Sam let him know he thought Fred entirely merited his bad luck.
“I’m showing a boat, I’m betting a boat. Haven’t bluffed a hand all night. What the hell you doing staying in — and raising at that?”
Karl spoke softly. “All right, Sam. You won the hand. That’s plenty. A lecture isn’t necessary.”
“Let him go on,” Tom Lear said. “Maybe it’ll be his next column.”
“Don’t you know,” Sam said to Fred, “that you don’t raise a possible lock hand? You shouldn’t’ve been in there, but if you were in there, you shouldn’t’ve been raising.”
“Yeah,” Paul Goldblum said, “you got some nerve, Fred. Making Sam’s winning hand really pay off. He was actually trying to let you win.”
“Look, don’t listen to these assholes,” Sam said. “I’m trying to help you out a little bit. It’s basic poker. You don’t raise a possible lock.”
“Okay,” Fred said earnestly. “Thanks for the advice.” What he didn’t say was that he didn’t understand Sam’s terminology, didn’t know what a lock hand was, or what he was supposed to avoid in the future. But he behaved contritely, hoping to make himself so docile that Sam would feel he was too pathetic to attack. Fred knew he couldn’t face him down directly, but he swore to himself that he would someday. Get a book contract, write a bestseller, a bigger bestseller than Sam’s was.