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Seat 4 was staring at him, like all live players do, in hope of gaining information through some physical tell. The whole idea was laughably primitive to a player of Ray’s proficiency, but that didn’t solve his problem. He hesitated, not for fear of getting called and losing the money but in silent, dreadful anticipation of going over this hand in postgame analysis and finding it flawed, imperfect. Right and wrong were useless old concepts, smelling of sin and judgment and all that sort of nonsense, but optimal and suboptimal terrified him. He reached for three of the yellow chips resting on top of his stack and released them across the betting line. He had bet $3,000, twice the size of the pot.
How he hated himself. Years of playing, millions of hands, endless hours in pursuit of a perfect machinelike neutrality toward outcomes, of a complete, productive concentration on the process of decision-making. Result-oriented poker is the death of a poker player, he used to say; result-oriented thinking is the death of all rational thinking. But as he waited for his opponent to make his decision, to fold and offer him a $750 profit, to call and deliver him a $3,750 loss, there he was, staring blankly into the space in front of him, wondering, hoping, human.
Ray knew better than to feel good. The very idea of playing cash games professionally hinged on the ability to ignore individual wins and losses. No one hand mattered, no one day ever mattered. Everything had to be transient, everything was noise; the game was the only signal, the way his choices fared against theoretical perfection the only meaningful measure. Besides, if you start allowing yourself to feel happy after a good hand, how do you stop yourself from feeling terrible after a big loss? And if Ray was still far from perfect when it came to ignoring the sadness of losing, he was a very accomplished professional at denying himself the pleasure of winning.
“No, man, this game gets boring, you know? I mean, of course you know, you’ve played like a billion hands.” Logan chuckled. “Have you thought about what you’ll do after poker?”
Ray had. He had thought and thought about it. After poker was a void, a humiliating defeat, a dishonorable discharge from the last clear-cut source of validation he had left. It was a leap into an unknown where he would have to prove himself anew, and perhaps fail. He had worried and obsessed over it. He had thought about it enough to eventually lump the whole multifaceted terror under the label of “Tragedy.” The whole point of this morning was not to think about it.
“Not really,” he said.
Ray finished his breakfast. At table 14, the M-starting-named cocktail waitress was going around dropping off little clocktower-shaped Fiji waters. Safely at a distance, Ray could finally look at her, confirming his impression from the day before: she was, in fact, the brand of beauty a guy like him would do well to erase from his mental image folder as soon as she landed there. Her white hand brushing auburn strands from her forehead, her thin lips parting in a smile that sent delicate, lovely waves to the hazelnuts of her eyes, gave her the air of refinement that no doubt had convinced an army of less-rational men that she was a discreet beauty, the kind that requires particular sensitivity to be able to appreciate. Perfect, but approachable, perhaps even attainable. It was a game Ray knew better than to be sucked into. The strains of heartbreak and desire that had plagued his vulnerable teenage years had now been folded like a sweater in the summer and put back in his emotional closet, waiting. He didn’t rule it out as a possibility, love, sex, affection, but until the war against the feel players had been won—the adult world finally conquered, Tragedy averted—the whole thing felt like a particularly suboptimal use of his time, productivity-wise. One day, maybe. And anyway, she was far from perfect. There was a certain precariousness in her stride, not altogether graceless, but more impelled by inertia than one would have hoped. Her figure was too linear. Yes, maybe one day.
But he couldn’t. Just as he got ready to get up, the dealer dealt him his next hand. His hands instinctively reached for it, making a little hut or shield around the two cards so that he could lift them up by a corner and look at them. Two black kings. There was no getting up now. After the first two players folded, he took a few seconds to fake-think about it (he thought acting too quickly might give away the strength of his hand), then announced “I’m all in.” Immediately, the player to his left called. No suspense there, but a long wait before the cards would be turned over and his fate decided. Five more people had to act. Four of them folded more or less quickly, but the kid in the big blind didn’t move. He was a young professional—or at least looked like one—an Asian kid in black Nike clothes and white Apple earphones who had spent the first orbit of hands barely looking up from his phone. He didn’t move a muscle, just stared intently at the chip stack of the player to Tom’s left, a young, blond, foreign-accented pro (as in most tournaments, the demographics of the field shift dramatically in favor of young wizards in later stages of play). The big blind took what felt like an awkwardly long time, then reached for chips. A lot of chips. More chips than were necessary to call. He slid them past the betting line with deliberation, and the dealer announced “Reraise.” The potential Swede went in what in pokerspeak is known as the tank, the identical, silent state of thinking about a decision that his opponent had only just come out of. Tom felt like an interloper. His measly, hopeless stack, a stack that had no ambition of making it to the money, let alone snatching a good prize, had triggered a clash of the two biggest stacks at the table. Two pros, two great players who had the skills and the chips to see this through to the national-anthemed, eighteen-carat end, were fighting and endangering their tournament life over his sacrificial bet. He wanted to apologize, somehow, for putting them in such distress. For eliciting such deep, clearly complex, and (for him) inscrutable thoughts. He had completely forgotten the fact that he had a great hand, the second-best hand in No Limit Hold’em, in fact, and could be in great shape to not just double but more than triple up his short stack. None of that mattered. He just hoped he hadn’t caused too much trouble, is all.
It had taken about a week of sweltering Las Vegas summer for Tom to decide against stashing his money in mail envelopes in his underwear. True as it is that the desert heat is, as they say, a dry heat, having a tight packet of heavy paper pressed firmly against the skin of one’s ass and/or thighs is hardly a pleasurable experience on a 115°F day (or, rather, 46°C, as it was and would always be for Tom). Summer heat in Rome is a moist veil that covers the city—a wetness that alters shapes and textures, a psychedelic prankster that makes inanimate objects sweat and the world go sticky. The sun in Vegas has no sense of humor whatsoever. It is a hyperefficient oven that leaves the world well done and juiceless. A wallet seemed like a reasonable compromise.
He left the table in a hurried stumble, scanning the room for the familiar pepper red of Trevor’s hair among the hungry tourists crowding the food displays like survivors at a postapocalyptic shelter, or animals at a fresh spring in a drought-stricken savannah. He walked past the meats and the desserts, past the shrimp and far into new uncharted territory, grilled vegetables and salad bars, entire tanks of unspecified white condiments, maybe yogurt or sour cream. There was no way he was staying in Vegas illegally. No way. The optimism Trevor was selling, the standing-up-for-himself, the social market of all human interactions, the wanting, wanting, wanting, it just wasn’t him. Things didn’t happen to him. Trevor wasn’t just a better version of him, no matter how much he changed. There was a fundamental difference, a predisposition to the act of wanting, of taking, something primal, genetic, or too deeply ingrained to fuck with anyway. It was time to stop this daydream and go home. Past the meats and to the left, he discovered an ample bread region, stocked with an overwhelming variety of baked goods: ciabatta, sourdough, baguettes, several types of bread rolls, breadsticks, garlic bread, olive loaves. He realized he was holding his empty plate; he must have grabbed it when he’d stood up to chase Trevor. They had those puffy, soft, shiny buns he would eat as a kid—known in Rome as panini al latte. He picked up five. Go home. Go home to Rebibbia, to his quiet corner, where the world could forget about him, to the calm hopelessness that made his father gasp for air, but where he’d always felt a certain sad sense of safety, the safety of not choosing, of accepting his fate, of just surviving. There was fried rice, sticky rice, brown rice, saffron risotto (he scooped up a good helping). He would go home to his mom. She had always needed him, counted on him all those days when leaving the living room couch was too much to undertake. And yet, if he had to be honest, a case could be made that she was really better off without him. If she could keep renting out Tom’s empty room, she wouldn’t have to go back to washing hallway floors and scrubbing toilets once the school year started. She would have time for herself, get off her couch, maybe pick up painting again. He’d told himself it wasn’t his fault that she would have to give that up, that his tourist visa was expiring and that he just had to go back; but now that Trevor was showing him another way, a way for him to stay if he only had the guts to go for it, was it not his cowardice that forced her to keep working? There was a whole huge sushi corner too! Hectares of nigiri, spicy tuna rolls, California rolls, sea urchin rolls, rolls with fish he had never even seen before, and supple pink slabs of salmon sashimi, and wine-red chunks of tuna, and four different kinds of soy sauce, and he couldn’t find Trevor, and he picked up a lot. And honestly, why not? Why not, really? Why not stay? He rolled out his mental legal pad and began running down a tempting list of pros: (1) Money in his pockets. Enough to pay rent, maybe enough to buy a shitty car, enough to cover the virtually non-existent expenses of living in Las Vegas. (2) A job. A remunerative job, nothing special right now, but in a kind of business Trevor had called “scalable.” (3) A source of income, serenity—maybe happiness?—for his mom. One that was entirely and conditionally dependent on his absence from home. (4) A friend. A friend who cared enough about him to research the really quite easy-looking scenarios of undocumented alienhood in town, and to push him, for once, to make a decision, take a stand, be a man. (5) An improbable, exhilarating streak of good luck. (6) A future? And after fears and changes of heart, fresh omelets and fried fish and mashed potatoes, and Trevor nowhere to be seen, he walked back toward their table with a storm in his head, and a plate so full he had to wrap an arm around it to keep his food from falling off, and wishing the decision would once again not be in his hands. That it would be made for him.
lol
She was still in her street clothes, dark blue Levi’s over white Keds, a white sleeveless top, but already wearing full, heavy makeup for her Friday-night shift. Past the soundproof glass, swarming little visitors trekked silently along the tables and slots in groups of two to six, their drunken laughter and the obsessive ringing of the machines on mute. The town was theirs. Without sound, the idling and backtracking of the tourists by the boat-shaped twelve-seat Treasures of the Mediterranean Jackpot Bonanza! 3D slot, or by the lantern-lit blackjack tables with seashell-brassiered dealers at the Siren’s Cove, looked positively insane. Young men and women dressed for a night out walked alongside European families in shorts and sandals, seniors in short sleeves and walkers, hotel guests in spongy white complimentary slippers. All looked ahead and around. A choreography of silence. The ballet of a madhouse.
It’s what they want, isn’t it? To get lost. Stretch themselves to the corners of the city, grow large, shapeless. Engulf more life than a single self can contain.
Her uniform glittered and clinked as she put it away. Modeltainer, thought Mary Ann, maybe a dancer. The pretty face and barely clothed body of some nautical-themed pageantry or other. A reminder that things could always be worse.
“I can tell you, if I won that kind of money, I wouldn’t need any help,” Gabrielle said.
Mary Ann bit the inside of her cheek. “Yeah, I could use a jackpot too.” She forced a smile.
“Maybe you should start playing the slots.”
“I should get better shifts, is what I should do.”
Gabrielle, now fully dressed, adjusted the straps of her tray. “Oh, you’ll get there soon.” She sized Mary Ann up with a full-on NYC-model-agency stare. “You’re Friday-night-tables material all right. But come to a meeting sometime.”
characters interacting with and assessing other characters in a way that hints at a more fully developed subjectivity than the reader can imagine - yes!
There was absolutely no doubt she was a horrible person. She had driven another devoted, adoring boyfriend to desperation through her utter inability to even pretend to love someone (the first one, back in high school, had coped using acoustic guitar breakup songwriting as a gateway drug to the opiates of his college years, eventually graduating from prescription to street, which surely, she could tell herself, she had nothing to do with, but the evidence was incriminating and who did she think she was fooling, really?). Sloppily, she had missed him (this last one, John, a full-stack developer at Google NY), and gone back to him in August, just a month after breaking up with him, only to find that the sheer act of him walking into the same room made it hard for her to breathe and made her forehead sweat, which he noticed and privately cried about, all the while letting her stay at his place while Vika looked for an apartment, even when it was clear she didn’t love him, probably never had, and had no inclination to have sex with him or anybody else anytime soon. So maybe she hadn’t really missed him. But she had eventually snuck out of his studio in the middle of the Hell’s Kitchen night and never answered his calls again, because the truth was, she really didn’t care about him. He was a lovely, good-hearted man, and she had hurt him so much, and so deliberately, and she didn’t care at all.