Lucky at Cards

3

Again, the same dream. This time there was a slight variation—I was dealing poker in the same Chicago backroom, there were six of us around a green, felt-topped table, a shaded light bulb hung some eighteen inches above the center of the table, and the room was thick with smoke. I dealt five-card stud. I gave cards to the players—ace of clubs, ace of hearts, ace of diamonds, ace of clubs, ace of hearts, ace of diamonds.

Everyone was staring at me, eyes angry. I took the pack and riffled through it, and every card in the pack was the ace of spades, the death card. Someone drew a knife, and someone else drew a gun, and I ran through cold dark streets with half the world chasing me—

The telephone eventually woke me. Before it did, though, I tried to weave the ringing into the pattern of the dream. The telephone kept on ringing until I came up for air and sat up in bed. I was sweating, and I couldn’t manage to catch my breath as I picked up the instrument.

“Hello?” I said.

Soft laughter, first. Then: “Did I wake you, Bill?”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s me. Weren’t you expecting me?”

“I suppose I was.”

"You’re a good subway dealer, Bill. How did you wind up last night?”

“Ahead.”

She laughed again. “I want to see you,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“A block from your hotel. Can I come up?”

I took a breath. “Give me ten or fifteen minutes,” I said. “I’m not awake yet.”

I hung up, rubbed my eyes, moved out of bed. My cigarettes were on the dresser. I smoked a butt part way and stubbed it out in the ashtray. Then I picked up the phone and told room service what to send up for breakfast. I grabbed a fast shave, washed up, dressed. I put on a tie and a tweed jacket and tried combing a certain amount of order into my hair.

The doorbell rang. A waiter brought in a tray loaded down with orange juice, corned beef hash, toast and coffee. I signed the tab and slipped him a buck. I was finished with the food and working on the coffee when the phone rang and somebody told me that a Mrs. Rogers was there to see me. I told the voice to send her up.

I finished the coffee, started a cigarette. There was a knock at the door. I opened it and the room became perceptibly warmer.

Joyce wore a tan sweater and a dark brown skirt. Her green eyes were hard and soft at once—emeralds one moment and card-table felt the next. She drew the door shut behind her, then stepped past me and crossed the room to the bed. She sat on it, tucking a long leg beneath herself, while I wished I had taken the time to make up the bed. But she didn’t seem to mind. She had a lot of class, and yet you got the impression she was accustomed to unmade beds.

“You look puzzled,” she said.

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know who you are,” I said. “You’re supposed to be Murray Rogers’ devoted wife, young and lovely and sweet. You sat down at the table last night and watched a few hands and spotted some of the smoothest card manipulation anybody’s likely to see anywhere. You called me on it in gambler’s argot without letting anybody know you tipped to me. And you let me take close to three yards out of the game without saying a word. I don’t get it.”

She opened her purse, withdrew a flat silver case. She took out a cork-tipped cigarette and put it between her red lips. Just sitting there, she managed to give off more sexuality than a stripper in Baltimore. I struck a match to give her a light and she took hold of my wrist to steady the flame. Her fingers pressed harder than they had to and her eyes held mine. Something happened, with electricity in it. I couldn’t look away from her.

Joyce said, “Who do you think I am, Bill?”

“I’d like to know.”

“Take a guess.”

I crossed to the dresser and stared at her reflection in the mirror. They say every man has a weakness. They say that for every man there’s a woman somewhere in the world who can make him jump through fiery hoops just by snapping her fingers. They say a man’s lucky if he never meets that woman.

All of a sudden I knew what they meant.

“Bill?”

“I think you used to sleep with a gambler,” I said.

“I used to sleep with lots of men.”

“Maybe.” I turned to face her. “You got out of it. You latched on to Rogers and married him. Evidently you’ve been playing it straight since then. Last night you watched me cheat and didn’t say a word. You could have queered things. You didn’t.”

“Honor among thieves?” she said.

“More.”

“What?”

“You could have just ignored me. You didn’t have to let on that you saw the bottom deal. You sure as hell didn’t have to come here today. You want something.”

“Oh? What do I want, Bill?”

“You tell me.”

Joyce didn’t answer with words. Instead, she stood up, that perfect body unfolding gracefully from the bed. I watched her while she tugged the tan sweater free from the waistband of her skirt, then pulled the sweater over her head and tossed the knit aside. My mouth became dry and my throat knotted up. She took off her skirt and her bra and her slip, her stockings and her panties. She did a sweet little strip and wound up standing there by the side of my bed, bare as the truth, and she smiled like an oversexed version of the Mona Lisa.

With clothes on she had been almost beautiful.

Now, nude, she was a goddess. The tips of her flawless breasts were stiff with preliminary passion. Her hips flared in an obscene invitation to Paradise. Her eyes were all fog and smoke.

“What do I want, Bill?”

Joyce walked toward me. Gears locked within me. I didn’t move toward her or away from her. I stood very still and she came closer. Her breasts jutted out like mortar shells. I could smell her perfume mingling with the hot animal scent of her body. She came closer, and I felt her body heat, and her lips were inches from mine. If I raised her face or lowered mine I could have kissed her. I didn’t.

“Bill—”

Then I did.

At first our lips just touched. Then a few bombs exploded and a few bells rang and all bets were off. I crushed her close, felt her breasts press hard against my chest, tasted her bittersweet mouth. Her arms were about me and I felt her and smelled her and tasted her and ached for her. My hands moved over her flesh. She was soft and sweet and warm.

Somehow I slipped out of my clothes. Somehow we steered ourselves to the bed where I filled my hands with the bounty of her breasts and she made little animal sounds from somewhere deep in her throat. I kissed her and her nails dug into my shoulders and the world took off on a joyride.

I ran my hands all over Joyce’s body like a skeptic searching for a flaw. No flaws, just perfection. I touched her legs, her thighs. I brushed my face over her flat stomach and she took my head in her arms and cradled it between her breasts.

Her voice was far away, husky, deep. “What do you think I want, Bill?”

We answered the question in the unmade bed with the lights on and the shades up. The room was on a high floor, so no one could have seen us, but we never thought about that at the time one way or the other. The lovemaking was too fast, too furious, too compulsive. There was deep need and dark hunger, and flesh merging with flesh, and an orchestral swell out of Tschaikovsky that led to a coda of pure Stravinsky. That vital dissonance was always there. That harsh and bitter beauty that tossed the conventional harmonies out the window…

The world took a long time coming back together again. Joyce lay back and smoked a cigarette. I curled up beside her warmth and took the pins from her hair. She smiled like a cat while I took down her hair and spread it out over the pillow. Fresh chestnuts on new snow.

“How did you start, Bill?”

“You started. You called me up and—”

“No. How did you start cheating at cards?”

I hadn’t told the story in a long time. When you live your life according to a certain pattern and when you fit part and parcel into a certain world, it’s hard to remember another living pattern and the other world you used to inhabit. When one world is law-abiding and the other is the gray world of the card mechanic, the two spheres are especially far apart. I remembered the first world, of course, but I seldom thought much about it.

Well, I hadn’t told the story in a long time, and Joyce had asked, so I felt talkative. I told her the story of a young guy named Maynard the Magnificent who had done magic tricks. Sleight-of-hand with cards and matchboxes and silk scarves. A batch of pretty decent bits tied together with some easy patter and a certain amount of stage presence. Add some mentalist routines, toss in the white tie and the tails and a supposedly debonair moustache, and you had Maynard.

I had never been big. For one thing, I hadn’t been that good. For another, there aren’t a hell of a lot of big magicians around. Can you name four magicians offhand? And don’t name Thurston or Houdini or Blackstone, because they were all a long time ago. They played vaudeville houses then and they were big draws. A magician isn’t a big draw nowadays. He’s something to fill up the card at a burlesque house, something only slightly more amusing than the shop-worn blackout bits. He’s an added unattraction in Miami Beach hotels and borscht belt resorts. He’s something they pay twenty-five bucks to for entertaining a batch of snotty kids at a ten-year-old’s birthday party.

Maynard the Magnificent. I had had to fight like hell to snag lousy billings, and it was a nothing road to nowhere. From time to time I thought of junking magic and finding a job in a widget factory. This never happened. For one thing, I didn’t know or care very much about widgets. For another, I was still a young guy who pulled a kick out of magic tricks. I didn’t need the big money or the comfy security.

Then there had been a girl named Carole—the woman I sawed in half, the girl who brought out the wagon of props and enchanted the audience with her mammary development. She was fifth in the series of my assistants. They come and they go. This one stayed awhile; she was prettier than the others and warmer than the others and I was twenty-eight instead of twenty-two. I taught her special tricks at night and we made special magic in dark rooms, and we wound up standing in front of a justice of the peace to make it all legal.

There had been a big change. Two can’t live as cheaply as one. Two can’t live as cheaply as one plus one, either. The whole is monetarily greater than the sum of its parts. Two can’t go too far on apple pie and coffee in roadside diners and one-night stands in sleazy resorts.

But it had been good at first. It became a little less than good, then worse, until there was that night at a waterfront motel in Miami when a dark-eyed man approached me after I’d finished entertaining my captive audience.

“Wizard,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”

I told him to go ahead.

“Someplace private. I got a car outside, Wizard.”

So I told Carole to wait for me, and I accompanied the dark-eyed man to his car. It was that year’s Caddy, long and black. He sat behind the wheel and I sat next to him. He gunned the car north on Collins Avenue, made small talk while we passed through Golden Beach where the millionaires live in oceanfront mansions. He gave me a cigarette, took one for himself, and started talking through smoke.

“Wizard,” he said, “how much money do you make?”

“Not much.”

“You got a valuable talent,” he said. “You need training, but you got a valuable talent.”

“If you’re trying to sell me correspondence courses—”

He laughed. “Wizard,” he said, “you ever play any cards?”

Thurston once said he never played cards—if he won they would accuse him of cheating, if he lost they would say he was a lousy magician. I had never played much. The dark-eyed man talked about cards, and about what you could do if your fingers were clever. Then he talked about money. I told him I would have to think things over. He drove me back to the motel—Carole and I had a room there during the engagement and he gave me a card. His name, his phone number.

Nothing else.

The next day I called my agent. The motel gig was due to end on Saturday and he didn’t have us booked for anything until the following Thursday. I put the phone on the hook and asked Carole if she felt like going for a swim. She whined something to the effect that she couldn’t wear the same damn bathing suit day in and day out. I told her to buy a new one. She said a decent bathing suit cost twenty bucks minimum and we couldn’t afford it.

That night I called the dark-eyed man. A girl answered. He took the phone from her and asked who I was.

“Bill Maynard,” I said. “Maynard the Magnificent.”

“What do you say, Wizard?”

I said, “I’ll play.”

We played ten hours a day for the next two weeks. We played in a suite at a hotel. There was the dark-eyed man, a heavy type named Guiterno who was bankrolling the operation, a long-fingered Cuban and a nervous little blond girl. They taught me how to play straight and crooked, showed me the moves for false-dealing and palming, taught me to hold the deck in the mechanic’s grip with the index finger in front and the other three fingers around the side of the deck, thumb poised to do little tricks. They taught me gin rummy and poker and blackjack and pinochle and by the time they were finished I was good enough to roll.

The start was in a solarium on top of a big strip hotel. There was a character from New York, a paunchy bastard who came down to the beach twice a year for three weeks to sit in the sun, and screw call girls and play gin rummy. We played for two dollars a point. In three days I had eight thousand dollars of his money. Sixty-five hundred went to my trainer and I was fifteen hundred to the good.

That had been just the start.

Carole hadn’t known about it at first. Somewhere along the line she found out, and somewhere further along the line she left. Whatever it was we’d had, it didn’t work in the new world I’d managed to find for myself. Somewhere along the line the mob split. I found a partner and played ocean-liner bridge on the Queen Mary. We sailed to Le Havre and back and let the opposition pay for the trip. Somewhere along the line I soloed. And somewhere along the line, in Chicago, I hung myself up on a bottle-blonde and looked to pick the wrong kind of people. They caught me and broke my teeth and dislocated my thumb and told me to get the hell out of town…