The house had a fridge with kids’ drawings on it.
That was the second thing. The first thing was Ray, who answered the door in a Dodgers shirt and cargo shorts, shook her hand like she was there to look at a used car, and said “Theo’s friend! Come in, come in, shoes are fine,” and then a woman’s voice from upstairs said “Ray, is that everyone?” and Ray said “That’s everyone,” and a door closed.
The fridge had a drawing of what was probably a horse. Joy didn’t think horses normally had wheels, but there were stranger things out there in the world. She supposed she was one of them now. There was a permission slip under a magnet. There was a bowl of Halloween candy on the counter, in September.
On the dining room wall, in a real frame, there was a photograph, taken from a boat, of something long,dark, and scaly going under the water about forty feet out. It was slightly out of focus.
“That’s Elsie, over in Lake Elsinore,” Ray said, following her eyes. “Second time I saw her. First time I got a picture.”
“Huh,” said Joy, and then the game was in the dining room, so she went in.
Eight chairs, a real table with a real felt topper, and chips that were actual chips, heavy, clay, with numbers on them. Ray took her two hundred, asked if she’d eaten, pointed out the chips and salsa on the sideboard, and gave her a stack that made a sound when she set it down on the felt. She understood immediately why people got attached to the sound.
“So this is Joy,” Ray said to the room. “Theo vouched. Everybody be nice.”
Five heads came up.
Nobody said anything. Nobody smiled. Joy stood in the doorway of a dining room in Culver City and met the gaze of five people she’d have sooner expected to find assembled against a superhero, and all five of them looked back at her without any expression whatsoever.
Besides Ray and Theo there were five of them, and Joy got about four seconds to look before she had to sit down and stop looking.
What, she thought, with some precision, is this.
Vic was the loud one. There was always a loud one. Mid-thirties, gym arms, looking like he was on his third beer already, and a leather vest hung over the back of his chair with enough stitching on the back that she made a point of not reading any of it. He looked at her when she sat down the way the guys in Kevin’s room had, except that he was old enough to know he was doing it and didn’t care. He narrated hands he wasn’t in and explained odds nobody had asked about. He was going to play at her all night. She could see it from across the table.
Walt was seventy if he was a day, and had a grey moustache you could have hung a coat on, and was wearing an actual bolo tie in an actual dining room in Culver City. He said “evenin’” to her and nothing else for the next three hours. He said it without moving anything except his mouth, and then he went on not moving, and Joy kept checking on him, because she had seen that kind of stillness before. Twice, in fact, both times on the fire road above the reservoir, both times about four feet off the trail, and both times she had gone very wide around it as it rattled menacingly.
Sal was about fifty and built like a filing cabinet, in a black shirt buttoned to the collar, with a watch that had cost more than Joy’s tuition and a pinky ring she elected not to think about. He shook her hand. It took a while, and she couldn’t help but notice his knuckles’ scars had scars. Over the next three hours she watched him take in every small thing that occurred at that table, a joke that landed wrong, a misdeal, Vic talking over Ray, and acknowledge each one with the same slight nod, and file it, and she never once saw anything come back out.
Then there was the silent one, who was somewhere past sixty, and small, and had not moved since she came in. He had a glass of water he did not drink.
“That’s Mr. Chen,” Ray said, passing behind him with the salsa. “Don’t worry about him, he doesn’t talk much.”
Mr. Chen inclined his head about a quarter of an inch.
“Everybody here I know from the business,” Ray added cheerfully, in the tone of a man explaining something obvious. “Twenty-some years. You meet people.”
Joy waited for anybody to say what the business was.
Nobody did.
And there was Dana.
Dana was maybe forty, sat directly across from Joy, and had looked at her exactly once when she came in, up, down, up, done, and then gone back to stacking her chips. Dark red lipstick, a black dress, short dark hair, reading glasses pushed up on her head. She looked like the sort of woman of whom a grizzled PI would remark “She looked like the sort of woman who…”. She hadn’t reacted to the skirt. She hadn’t reacted to anything. She watched the table through half-closed eyes with an indifference so total that it stopped being an absence of interest and became a position on it.
Joy sat down in a suburban dining room, under a photograph of a lake monster, across from a cowboy pulled straight out of some old saloon, a biker who was now on this fourth beer, a man who was certain had “Big” in front of his name, a very small, very silent, very old man with a glass of water, a dame who was nothing but trouble, and thought several things at once.
The loudest of them was: these are not poker buddies.
The second was: Ray does not know that.
And the third, which arrived about a second later and stayed put for the next three hours, was: how many people at this table are armed.
She looked at Dana and thought: that one’s going to be a problem.
She was right, and it took forty minutes to find out how.
The first hour went the way she’d hoped.
Vic performed. He performed constantly, big bets, big talk, checking to see if she’d laughed. She took eighty dollars off him in three hands and he called her “college” and got himself another beer. Sal just gave her money, cheerfully, hand after hand, without ever once appearing to mind. Ray played tight and friendly and folded whenever she showed strength, and she thought that was him being polite until she realized it was him being smart.
Walt was a wall. Theo was Theo.
Mr. Chen played eleven hands in the first hour and won nine of them and did not once appear to be enjoying himself, and nobody at the table said anything about it, and when he raised, everybody folded. Including Dana.
Joy filed that.
But Dana didn’t perform, and Dana didn’t fold when Joy showed strength, and around the forty-minute mark Joy had pocket jacks and bet a low flop, and Dana called, and the turn changed nothing, and Joy bet again, and Dana called again, and on the river Joy had jacks and nothing else and looked at Dana and thought she’s got nothing, she’s just calling to see — and bet a third time.
Dana called and turned over queens.
Joy looked at the queens for a second.
“You bet the same on all three streets,” Dana said, pulling in the pot. “Same size, same speed. Third time tonight you’ve done that with one pair.” She stacked the chips without looking at them. “You’re not playing the cards. You’re playing the table. Which is fine. It works. It’s not going to work on me.”
That was the most anyone had said to her all night, and it was correct, and it stung, and Joy found she didn’t mind the sting nearly as much as she should have.
“Noted,” she said.
Dana almost smiled. Almost.
By 11:00 Joy had three hundred and forty dollars and Vic had a problem.
The problem was that Vic had been losing to her for two hours and had figured out, somewhere in the sixth beer, that it wasn’t an accident. She’d watched it happen. There was a hand — he’d bet big, she’d looked at him, he’d looked back and known she was reading him, and something in his face went from enjoying it to not.
“College,” he said, after she took a pot he’d wanted. “You do this a lot?”
“First time here.”
“Yeah. Bet.” He looked at the skirt. “That’s the whole deal, right? Show up like that, get everybody stupid.”
“Vic,” Ray said, mildly.
“I’m just saying.” He wasn’t just saying. He was leaning. “It’s a strategy. I respect it. I’m just saying it’s a strategy.”
And Joy saw the whole of it at once, the way she’d been seeing things all night.
It wasn’t about the skirt. Vic was losing to a college kid in front of people whose opinion of him he cared about, and he needed it to be about the skirt, because the skirt was survivable and the other thing wasn’t.
And it was right there. All of it. The narrating of hands he wasn’t in. The odds nobody had asked for. The way he said Ray’s name. Joy sat there and understood, with a clarity that arrived whole, that if she said out loud, right now, to this table, how badly Vic needed these people to think he was somebody, he would not recover from it. Not tonight. Possibly not at this table ever again.
She knew just what to say to cut him down right on the spot. She could feel the shape of it in her mouth.
She was still deciding whether to use it when her mouth got there first with something else.
“Vic, if you wanted to tell me I looked nice, you could’ve just said so.”
The smile arrived with it. One so big she had to squint to fit it all in. That was new too.
Vic blinked. He looked at Ray. Ray offered no assistance.
“You look nice,” Vic said finally.
“Thank you.” Joy nudged the deck toward him. “Now deal.”
Something in Ray’s mouth twitched.
“It’s a poker game,” he said. “Everybody’s got a strategy. Yours is beer.”
Vic laughed. It came out wrong, about a half-second late, and Joy watched him hear it come out wrong.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, no, it’s — hey, college. You want to know what I think?” He was sitting forward again. His chair rocked forward an inch. “I think you walked into a room full of grown men and I think you knew exactly what you—”
Mr. Chen said four words in Chinese without looking up.
Vic stopped talking.
He did it instantly and completely, the way a radio stops when you pull the plug. The chair came back down. He did not look over at the old man, and he did not ask what had been said, which Joy found interesting, because it was extremely clear from Vic’s face that he had not understood a single word of it.
Nobody else looked over either.
Ray laughed, just once, at whatever it was, and reached for the salsa.
“Deal,” Ray said comfortably.
Vic dealt.
What, Joy thought, from somewhere a little behind her own face, the hell did I just do.
A week ago that would have become an argument and she’d have spent an hour proving a point. Tonight, a man who had been actively looking for a fight had ended up complimenting her, and then dealt, and how much of that was her and how much of it was four words in Chinese she was not in a position to say.
She had not planned any of it. It was like she had merely watched herself do it.
And if she had used the other sentence, the true one, she was fairly sure he’d have come over the table. No doubt Nate would have his interesting story then.
She filed all of it.
Around midnight her stack had climbed a little past four hundred. Dana had more and everyone else had less, and then the hand came.
She had ace-king, and the flop came ace-nine-four, all different suits. Top pair, best kicker. It was a good hand. Dana checked to her. She bet it, and Sal folded, and Dana called, and it was the two of them.
The turn was the nine of hearts, and the board had two nines on it now, and Dana bet sixty — not big, not small, the bet of someone who wanted to keep playing.
Joy looked at her.
Dana wasn’t doing anything. Dana never did anything. But the bet was there, and it was the kind of bet Dana had made twice before tonight, and both times she’d had it. Joy knew that. She’d watched both hands. She could see, quite clearly, a version of the next thirty seconds where she folded and kept the three-eighty.
She could also see the other version.
She looked at the pot. It was about two hundred dollars. She counted her stack without touching it. Three-eighty. She looked at Dana, who was looking back at her with no expression at all, waiting, and Joy felt it start — the lean, the hum, the tilt of the room — and it was the same as Tuesday except that this time she could feel that it didn’t care what the cards were. It just wanted the moment. It wanted to find out.
“Raise. Two-forty,” she said.
She pushed everything but one short stack forward.
Dana looked at her for a long time. Long enough that Joy thought, for about four seconds, that she’d been wrong about the read and right about the bet.
“You don’t want to do that,” Dana said. Quietly. Not a taunt.
“Probably not.”
Dana called.
If she had the nine, and Joy knew she did, Joy needed an ace.
Ray dealt the river. It was the seven of clubs.
Dana tapped the felt. Joy checked behind.
Dana turned over nine-eight of clubs. Three nines against Joy’s aces and nines.
The feeling didn’t go away.
That was the thing she noticed, sitting there while Dana pulled in the biggest pot of the night. Joy had a hundred and forty left. The hum didn’t stop when she lost. It had been there before the seven, and it was there after the seven, and it had been exactly the same size both times. It had never been about winning at all.
She’d known Dana had it. She’d made the bet anyway. She sat with that for a second, and found it didn’t feel like a mistake. She wasn’t sure what that meant, and added it to tonight’s weirdness that she’d need to sort through later.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Deal.”
She rebuilt slowly.
It took an hour and a half and she did it almost entirely off Vic, who had decided somewhere around beer seven that he was going to get his money back from her personally, and had stopped being able to see that this was exactly what she wanted him to decide. She played tight. She played the cards. She stopped making the same automatic bet with every one-pair hand, which Dana noticed, and which Dana acknowledged with the smallest possible nod.
She played boring.
At about one in the morning a woman in a bathrobe came down the stairs, crossed the dining room without hurrying, and went into the kitchen.
Every man at the table stood up.
Walt got his hat off. Sal was out of his chair before she had reached the bottom step. Mr. Chen rose all the way to his feet, slowly, and stayed standing until she had gone past, and said something to her that made her laugh and pat him on the arm. Vic said “evening, Mrs. Ocampo” in a voice Joy had not heard him use at any point in the preceding four hours.
“Don’t get up,” said Mrs. Ocampo, to men who were already up.
She came back through with a glass of water, asked Joy whether anybody had offered her anything, established that they had, told Ray not to let Vic yell, and went upstairs.
Ray said, “I never let Vic yell.”
Joy sat back down with everybody else and did not say a single word, and understood, very distinctly, that she had just watched something remarkable and had no idea what it was.
By 1:30 she had three hundred and ninety dollars, Vic was on his third buy-in and out of beer, and Ray was making the noise hosts make when they’re about to say last hand.
Dana cashed out first. She stood, tucked the glasses into her shirt, and came around the table, and on her way past Joy’s chair she stopped.
“You’d have folded that if you wanted the money,” she said.
Joy looked up at her.
“I know,” Joy said, and realized she was smiling as she thought about it
“Yeah.” Dana nodded once. “Figured.” And then she was in the hallway, and the front door opened and closed, and Joy heard a car start.
Ray walked her to the porch. Theo was already down at the curb, hands in his jacket.
“Come back next Thursday,” Ray said. “Same time. Vic’ll be over it.”
“He seemed pretty sure I’d cheated.”
“Vic thinks anybody who beats him cheated. It’s how he keeps playing.” Ray shrugged. “You didn’t cheat. You read the room. That’s the game.” He held out his hand, the used-car handshake again. “Bring more than two hundred. You’ll want it.”
“Ray,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
She thought about how to ask it. There were several versions. Who are those people.Is Vic in a club.What business, Ray.Does your wife know. She turned each of them over and put each of them down, because every one of them was a question that would tell Ray she had been asking it all night.
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry. Long day.”
“Sure,” said Ray, entirely untroubled, and went in and shut the door. Through the window, Joy watched him start stacking plates.
The Corolla was one house down, engine off, driver’s seat reclined. It was 1:40. Nate had been early.
She stood on the porch with three hundred and ninety dollars in a bag, under a porch light, next to a lemon tree, and did the thing she’d been avoiding all night. Accounting.
She’d come with two hundred. She was leaving with almost double. Against a hundred thousand dollars, it was nothing. Against Nate’s list, it was shoes. It was pants that went all the way down. It was everything she immediately needed and a little left over, and she should have been…something. Relieved?
She held the money and it was just money.
The hum was gone now. It had faded sometime after the seven came. It had been the biggest thing in the room for about ninety seconds, and it had still been there while Dana pulled away her chips, but it had not come back once in the ninety minutes she’d spent carefully winning.
She stood there and thought about that, and then didn’t think about it, and went down the steps.
Nate sat up when the passenger door opened. He looked at the bag, and at her, and at the clock on the dash.
“Well?” he said.
“Three-ninety.”
“Okay.” He started the car. “And?”
She buckled in. The heels came off.
“Nate.”
“Mm.”
“I think I might have just spent four hours playing cards with the mob.”
Nate pulled away from the curb, carefully, with both hands, thinking about it.
“Might have.”
“Nobody said anything. Ray’s wife came down for water and everybody stood up. There was a guy in a bolo tie.” She put her feet on the dash. “I don’t know. Maybe they were just poker buddies.”
“Were they?”
“Not a chance.” Joy said.
They got to the end of the block. Nate signaled, which nobody in Los Angeles does, and turned.
“Okay,” he said. “So that was your one time doing that.”
Joy turned to look at him, eyes bright, grinning so hard her cheeks hurt.
“I’m going back next Thursday!”