Pocket Kings (15 page)

When Cynthia came home I greeted her with the sort of grunt an overweight ruminant might offer up to its cud.

She had no idea I wasn't working. In the mornings we left the house together at 8:45, as we'd been doing for years, and walked to the subway. She'd stand on the platform for the downtown train, I'd stand on the platform for the uptown train. But now if her train came first, I simply left the platform and returned home. If mine came first, I boarded and took it two stops uptown, then walked back home.

Th
e night I lost all that money, I couldn't fall asleep. Not for a second. I
had
to get that money back. I was still way ahead, but it was the thought of losing, of my possible newly emerging uninvincibility, that gnawed at my psyche. And there was this concern: what if that loss was the beginning of a long disastrous schneid? I had now made over sixty grand; maybe it was time to lose it all. When I first met Toll House Cookie, his stack was up over $100,000; lately, it was hovering around a paltry $45K.

I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep unless I got that money back.

I went into my study at about 2 a.m. and turned on the computer. Nothing but tighty-whiteys on, my belly (those hundreds of Munchkins hadn't helped matters any) jiggling in the darkness lit dimly to turquoise by the flickering hues of Pokergalaxy.com. On the wall over the desk was a still-life—after Derain—of a pear in a bowl; on the opposite wall, a portrait—after Cezanne's
Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk
—of a hungry, homesick, and ridiculously optimistic young man suffering a throbbing headache. (
Th
ese two works, executed in Paris, of course, were the closest I ever came to being any good at painting.) I went to a table with $100-$200 blinds. Lots of Aussies were playing, lots of South Africans, a few people in California and Seattle. I lost a few hundred more. I wasn't going to let this happen . . .
I had to win it back!
Th
en I won a few hands, moved to a table with bigger blinds. More Aussies, a few Japanese, Indians and Pakistanis. Melbourne Loser. Osaka 2 Me. Never Can Say Mumbai. Was it tomorrow on that side of the world or was it yesterday? In one game I smelled weakness and won $800 with two 4s.
Th
e next hand I won a grand with a diamond flush. Chip Zero was on a serious roll; where my brain should have been, a juicy porterhouse was sizzling on a hot grill.
Th
e next hand I got dealt pocket Kings. I raised and other players checked or folded . . . but to my right I heard a rustling and saw the silhouette of naked Mrs. Chip Zero coming toward me in the darkness. A Paul Delvaux painting come to life, on Eighth Avenue and Sixteenth Street.

“What are you doing? It's four-thirty, honey.”

“Writing my book,” I told her. “I couldn't sleep.”

I still had those two Kings. I didn't want to lose the hand.

“But it's late.”

“Uh-huh. I just got hit by a serious bolt of inspiration. You know . . . the Muses, right?”

“Must they sing so late? Just come to bed . . .”

A woman named Lahore With A Heart of Gold raised and I checked. A nice slow-play could net me a lot of money here. I had to get that money back!

“When they sing,” I told Cynthia, “I have to listen.” Now in the past, when I
was
a writer, it wasn't unusual for me to pen my novels at ungodly hours . . . but this was odd, especially since she hadn't seen me writing for many months.

Th
e river card was another King. I had three of those magnificent monarchs now, three of them!
Th
e doomed Pakistani raised and I re-raised.
Th
en I inadvertently let slip the nickname for a hand of three Kings and said: “George Clooney.”

“Huh?” Cynthia asked with a yawn.

“Um . . .” I covered up, “Barbara Bennett e-mailed me from Hollywood tonight.” Barbara was with Egregious Motion Pictures in L.A. and was spearheading the
Plague
movie. “George Clooney is interested now.
Th
e
Plague
flick.”

“And what is it you're writing again now?” Scratching her sleepy head.

Was it Book I or Book II she thought I was writing? At this hour I couldn't remember, and neither would she. So I said, “You know, that trilogy deal.” If she ever asked to see it I could just go to the Chelsea storage facility where it was rotting in airless silent oblivion. (If I could remember where the hell the key was.)
Th
ough she then might ask why something so piping hot off my printer was so yellow and caked with dust.

Chip Zero wins $4,800 with three Kings.

I let out a maniacal giggle, sounding like a cross between an old dot-matrix printer and David Hedison at the end of
Th
e Fly.

“You okay?” she asked me.

“Oh, very much so!”

She went back to bed. Five minutes later she was joined by her loving, content, supersnugglicious husband, who slept like a baby, knowing how incredibly lucky he was.

Whenever you hear a man complaining how gullible, guileless, and oblivious his wife is, keep in mind that this man is secretly grateful. My own suspicion-impaired wife believed I was still going to work every day and still receiving a weekly paycheck. Further covering my mendacious ass, I went to Tiffany one day and purchased an Elsa Peretti necklace for her.
Th
is bauble wasn't cheap, but I figured I could win the money it cost in an hour of solid play. I was wrong about that: it took me only twenty minutes. I went home, stashed the ice in a sock drawer and logged on. I won $600 with two 6s and two Queens, then moved to a higher table; I turned that $600 into $1,500 with three 10s. I took that $1,500 into Ultra-High where I found Foldin' Caulfield, getting in a few hands right before performing some surgery, playing with two others. I played three hands and not only did I have enough for the necklace but I had the money for matching earrings and the taxies to and from Tiffany as well. (I was glad I wasn't the patient whose shoulder Foldin' was about to dismantle.)

Wifey didn't see the jewelry right away, though; I was saving it for a rainy day.

Th
ere was another problem. In the middle of June—by then I was up to eighty grand—the company I'd worked for always began its “summer hours.” I had to be at work—or so Cynthia thought—at eight thirty, not nine. But Wifey's hours were the same: she still always left the house at eight forty-five to get to work by nine. I had to maintain the ruse.

For the first few weeks, I left before she did, went down into the subway, boarded and took it uptown two stops before I got off and headed back home. But it was hot and humid and there are few places more unpleasant to be in the summer than on a New York subway car, especially if you don't really have to be. So I began a new routine.
Th
e hell with the subway . . . I'll just take the
Times
to the Starbucks across the street and kill the time till Wifey leaves.

And that is what I did. Every weekday morning I'd get dressed for work, head across the street and park myself on a stool, where I'd nurse an iced latte and attempt the crossword, all the time keeping one eye on the entrance of my apartment building. Like clockwork, every day at eight forty-five Cynthia would leave the building, striding with that long purposeful gait of hers, a Fendi handbag swinging from her right shoulder. She'd walk two blocks, make a left turn, head for the subway. By this time I'd given up on the crossword and switched to reading the daily book review. Every other sentence I'd glance back up, just to make sure Cynthia wasn't on her way back, having forgotten her cell or needing to take an emergency pee.
Th
e coast clear, it was back to the book reviews. By the time the iced latte was finished, the paper was a crumpled, mottled mess, especially if the book of the day had gotten a thumbs up. If I saw the words “brilliant,” “searing,” “hysterical,” “amusing,” or “reasonably compelling,” a shot of corrosive coffee-scented stomach acid would surge back up into my gullet.

After that, I'd go back upstairs and start playing again.
Th
e system was safe: she and I only called each other's cell phones and when we e-mailed we used our Yahoo accounts. For all she knew, I was on Pluto.

(Our new 60-inch plasma TV, a brand new laptop, the new coffee table, her iPad, and our pride and joy, the $1,000 Sleep Number Mattress—we'd even shopped for these items together, but never once did she ask me, “So where's the money coming from for all this?” Had she done so, I would've responded, “Poker.” After all, poker had gotten her her magnificent new chinchilla coat, presently being boarded for the summer at a fur kennel. She knew poker was a source of income; she just had no idea it was my only source.)

One day toward the end of June, Wifey woke up with a fever and a sore throat.

“I'm going to have to take a sick day,” she told me.

I'd been dreading the possibility of such an event and denying it so much that I'd never fully developed a contingency plan. I kindly offered to take the day off to stay home and take care of her, but she said no, it wasn't necessary, that I should just go to work.

One of these days,
I thought,
I'm going to find that key and get the
Trilogy
in case she asks to see if it really exists.

“I'd really, really like to stay though. You don't look well.”

Fifteen thousand poker players were waiting for me to play with them; Artsy Painter Gal was waiting for me in Los Angeles; all my Poker Buddies were waiting.

“No, really. I'll be okay.”

I kissed her forehead good-bye and headed out.

After fueling up on an iced latte I walked around. It was already 90 degrees out and by the time I got to the Barnes and Noble on Union Square I was gasping for breath. I had little interest in literature anymore but usually stopped in once a month there to check up on
Plague
and
Love. Plague
was often on the ground floor, in a stack of ten or so, on the Urban Fiction table;
Love
usually was wasting away upstairs in the fiction section. My usual routine was to sign the books, then have someone there slap a
SIGNED BY
TH
E AUTHOR
sticker on the cover—anything, anything at all, for a sale.

On this sweltering day I saw that there were no
Plague Boy
s on the Urban Fiction table. I headed up on the escalator to the fiction floor and looked down and saw the Paperback Favorites table.
Corrections, Infinite Jest, Absurdistan, Extremely Successful and Incredibly Rich,
the Eggers masterwork . . . they were all there.
Th
e enemy redoubt. All the clever, coy, convoluted, self-conscious, postmodern, post-post-ironic books the
Times
finds fit to love, books not about human beings but about their own cleverness. You had to squint through the pyrotechnics just to read the words.
Th
e only thing more intolerable than reading books about writers is reading a book about itself. To my right I saw beneath me the New Fiction shelves—never again would my name and words besmirch its particle board—and there it was:
Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen.
It had recently gotten a rave review—written by a chef who probably hadn't ever read anything but cook books—in the Sunday
Times.
I also saw the stacks of books on the Have You Read a Memoir Lately? table.
Th
e absolute fabulist James Frey, the truth-stretching, untalented Augusten Burroughs, and the archfiend of all archfiends, the King of Plop, the Supreme Czar of Lite FM Smooth Jazz Soft-core Comedy: David Sedaris.
Th
ere were books by other writers who had screwed up their lives and then decided to unscrew them by writing about it. Whiners, public nuisances, nudges, whores for literary fame.
Th
e nerve of these people . . . mining every little scrap of their private lives, no matter how uninteresting, and making it public. (And no one had asked them to!) And if the facts weren't tragic enough, make a few up. Add something, multiply, spice it up, stretch and hang-dry it, lift and separate and toss the works into a blender and puree.
No way I'll ever resort to this,
I promised myself.
If I ever sink that low then please dear God just let me drown in a vat of my own self-pity instead.
I'd rather work at Friendly's again.
Th
ese books shrunk to postage stamps as I ascended. As long as Frey's book was in print, poor Lilly would forever be sucking off a drug-ravaged scumbag in the rat-infested Crack Dens of Eternity, only to be rescued just before the money shot by our fearless and gallant hero-narrator (who a few years later would need to bring his mommy onto
Larry King
with him.) If Sedaris were to read his grocery lists of the last twenty years at Carnegie Hall, I reflected as the novmoirs and memvels faded from view, not only would every seat in the house be filled but everyone present would be pissing themselves with laughter. Yep, a goddam yukfest. Why?
Because they were David Sedaris's grocery lists! Awww.