The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2

DISTRACTED IN BEVERLY HILLS

DISTRACTED IN BEVERLY HILLS A gambler, I'm not. I get distracted. Something else always arrests my attention: the way the players hold their cards, the tension in the set of their faces; or worse, ambient noise, the whirring of a fan that fills the whole room. I was a guest at a high stakes game. The regulars were the legendary offspring of Hollywood thiscs and thats: half-god third generation Tarzans; simulators of animal voices cursed by the cartoon limits on language— or of men who knew their way around money. I had seen squalor and privilege in a dizzying geography of cities in a zigzag existence that kept any main drag from dragging, but this—this wasfar, far from the nowhere I always came back to— If I didn't see repetitionas horror, I could set this beforeyou plainly; but this isn't about me. It's about a town about which America knows too much; craven for the hard facts beyond life and care and dreams of elsewhere. . . . Not to pass judgment: no one was fully out of their teens; the war was vociferous; everyone was scared— not of the plague-death that has taken its place in the lists of fears, but of death by bomb, gun, grenade, or mine in rice-paddies in a climate so humid you'd forget to step lightly, or warily every weary self-conscious step of the—way. Was the perfect annihilation of thought on those waterways and in those screens of reeds 18 an unknown, an unsuspected grace? The pot mounted, a mound of bills and coins; a watch; a ring; several traveler's checks . . . (mine . . .)• No one had pulled more than three of a kind through the afternoon's eternal limbo; impacted; frozen like Disney; waiting for the genie—or whatever could release its arrested spirit—. On the surface of it everyone was having a good time. I was; almost; or mostly—but the unease that rarelyleft me was in high gear. Neither animus or want of hard cash made me lock horns with the boy my host looked up to most on this planet: the unflappable Mel Caesarian, whose bangs and pudgy exterior concealed, I'd been assured, a killer; a kid so tough his low-key, subdued, yet steely manner made Hell's Angels break out in goose pimples, get back on their bikes with excuses about havingto be elsewhere.. . . The room had heated up considerably by now. I needed to be outside, as I often do and started down the driveway, long as the Main Streetsof many small towns, to lie on the depilated lawn where overhead the house lights of Beverly Hills combined to eclipsethe faint, domesticated stars. Who cared if the haze was aura or flawed sight? Any whiff of the infinite bringsperspective. I laughed out loud at my own . . . heaviness. And brought the gardener out of the hedges, brandishing a fined rake. "It's all right," I said, "I'm with them." "Oh," he said, "I thought you might be someone else." I had said the right thing! It was time to go back in. 19 I was ready to—PLAY CARDS! There's a rhythm to shuffling that's almost hypnotic; the cards make aninfinitesimal fluted whistle that accompanies the scud over a hard surface; and the two together, if you let yourself listen, are lethal if what you want to get out of the game is to win when loss, love's shadow, being infinite, holds an altogether vaster vastness. Emptiness. I'd been poker-faced before out of fear. Now I feigned my non-expression to make the others think 1was thinking real hard, about whether to stay in or go out, when, feigning recklessness, I raised Mel's raise— "Call," he said. I pushed my three of one suit and two of another toward the center, Real slow like, Caesarian spread out his hand. "Ten high." Something waswrong, but I'd no idea what. I forced myself to reach for the mound. "Hey, what are you doing?" voices whined; chimed. No one knew my name. I was no one to them. "I don't think you understood," Caesarian said, in the heralded hoarse, under-the-table voice. "We were playing low card." "Do you think 1 would have stayed in and played out my full house if I'd known? I was outside when the game...