I thanked him, though I knew he was lying. When she had called up Victor to ask his permission for me to join their game this month, she hadn’t said quite the player. She’d said good, but not exceptional.
“So you’re an event planner?” he asked.
Ellen had also passed along the biography we’d made up: that I worked as an event planner, and that my family owned several hotels.
“I am.”
“Then I hope you won’t judge my hospitality too harshly—though at least the bar is fully stocked.”
I could feel the tickle in my throat I got when I was nervous, but I made myself smile and say, “A fully stocked bar is pretty much the secret to event planning.”
I was doing okay, even if my voice quavered a little. And why shouldn’t it? This was a high-dollar game. The men were probably banking on these nerves of mine to make me a worse player tonight: less aggressive, or maybe more aggressive. They believed I was out of my element and my league.
“The other apes are in the kitchen,” Victor said. “We’ll collect them on the way to the game room.”
I could fit at least five of my kitchens into this one. I had observed over the years that people with all the cabinet space in the world preferred to display their pots and pans and cutlery and appliances in plain view. A restaurant’s worth of cookware sat on the counters and hung over Victor Flowers’s large kitchen island, everything immaculate, the stainless steel on the pans so shiny I could have used any of them to pluck my eyebrows.
Three men stood by the island holding drinks. From our preparation, I knew each of them before being introduced. Danny Squire, car dealership mogul, with biceps big enough to stretch the sleeves of his black golf shirt; Ian McDonald, hedge fund manager, with the cowboy boots, razor stubble, and carefully messy hair; Jason Panella, thin and fit, surfer hair, closer to my age. I even knew Jason’s drink: vodka tonic with a slice of lemon floating on top. Irrelevant, but Ellen had noticed. She noticed everything.
Victor introduced me to the men, and I endured handshakes that left my wrist sore. Ellen shook hands, touched arms, made references I didn’t understand. They all seemed glad to see her. In the last year she had become a fully embedded member of their poker game, another Midnight Rider galloping home by midnight. Every month they got together, and every month Ellen sat at the poker table and cheated them, these staggeringly wealthy, competitive men, these winners in life, these ignorant, naive puppies.
Victor offered us drinks. Somewhere in this house, I felt sure, was the best Scotch I’d ever tasted. I longed for it to settle my nerves. Or a generous pour of wine. But I had agreed to nurse a single drink and no more. Ellen wasn’t a fool. She saw I drank too much. I felt so revved and jittery, though, that I decided not to trust myself with even the one drink. I would drain it too fast and ask for more.
“Just a Coke, please,” I said, “if you have it.”
Ellen shot me a look.
“Keeping your wits about you,” Jason said, and winked. “Smart!” To the room he said, “We’ll have to keep an eye on the new one.”
I smiled stupidly and clenched my teeth, furious at myself for going off script and vowing not to do it again.
Victor opened his refrigerator and dug around, coming out with a can. “Let me get you a glass,” he said. I accepted the glass of soda over ice with hands that shook a little, and Victor led us all out of the kitchen and into a dining room whose walls displayed a number of large, vibrant paintings.
“I still say that’s one ugly dog,” Ellen said, touching Victor’s arm. It was a marvel, her confidence, or her display of confidence.
“To be honest,” Victor said, “the whole blue dog thing is starting to feel faddish to me.” He nodded to the painting beside it. “Now here’s one worth noting. You wouldn’t normally think of Babcock as representational, but this is a very early work.”
The paintings were all saturated in color. Who cared? This was suddenly real. I had prepared, but preparation and performance were never the same. The ice cubes in my glass were rattling. I had to calm down fast. We left the other side of the dining room and were back in the center of the house, near the front door and main foyer. Seeing the wide stairway on our left that rose and turned, leading to an upstairs hallway, I forced myself to say, with as much cheer as I could muster, “Looks like the British are coming.”
On the wall above the staircase hung a tall painting of a frantic man riding an equally frantic horse through a narrow, dusty street. One of Paul Revere’s hands clutched the reins; his other was keeping his hat from blowing off.
“I’ve always liked that one,” Victor said, “even if it never happened that way.”
“How do you mean?” I could do this. I could hold a conversation. And this was my job right now. To be interested in whatever Victor had to say. To make him enjoy talking to me, and then to make him want to sit beside me at the poker table.
“Paul Revere’s mission depended on secrecy,” Victor explained. “So it made no sense to shout, ‘The British are coming’ or anything else. That’s just a legend. It’s interesting, actually.”
It wasn’t interesting. I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans and ran through the chain of events that needed to go perfectly: the seating arrangements, the game play and chip management. I needed to play tight and stay in the game long enough for Ellen’s signal. Then came the stacking of cards followed by the Greek deal that would give Ellen the winning hand.
While
