Nick’s face remained impassive as he saw the raise and kicked back again. But behind his poker player’s mask, Nick was grinning from ear to ear. Elmer was such a milkable little patsy. Sometimes Nick even thought that Elmer was grateful to him in some strange way for cheating him out of his money. It was a real temptation for Nick to take even greater advantage of Elmer than he did. But Nick resisted the temptation. He didn’t want to scare the fish off. He wanted to keep him coming back. And so he only invited Elmer to one out of every three or four games—-and he only set him up for one or two hands each session.
Nick was neither a professional gambler nor a professional cheat. Card-sharping was strictly an occasional line with him. He wouldn’t have dared try it on most of the other men with whom he played poker. He wouldn’t have dared try it on Manny Warden or Irv Jones, the other two men at the table now.
Manny and Irv were a contrast. Manny was thirtyish and looked forty, while Irv was over eighty years old and looked younger. Manny’s nervousness and look of perpetual harassment was just the opposite of Irv’s calm and almost sleepy attitude. Manny’s face was an open book responding to each card he was dealt, while Irv never varied the twinkle in his eye. Manny couldn’t bluff and didn’t try, while Irv would bluff out one, sometimes two hands a night, picking his time very carefully, and usually getting away with it.
The difference between them had a great deal to do with why they played poker in the first place. Manny played because he was married, much married, too much married. His wife was a nag and a clinging vine, an unbeatable combination when it comes to motivating a man to get out of the house. She resented his poker playing and expressed her resentment loudly and often. This only strengthened Manny’s motivation to play.
Still, it wasn’t easy for him to invent excuses for being away from the house for an evening. Only very occasionally could he get away with saying he had to work late as he had tonight. And even then his spouse was suspicious. Indeed, few adulterers went through such torments of conscience in arranging their affairs as Manny did.
One of the reasons that he felt so guilty was that his wife had tried to fit herself in with his penchant for poker. In the early days of their marriage, when she had become aware that the pasteboards constituted a rival, she had made an earnest effort to merge her appeal with theirs. “Lots of women play poker,” she’d chirped to Manny. “So why shouldn’t I? The next time you play, I’ll take a hand, too.”
“The boys wouldn’t like it,” Manny had told her truthully.
“For goodness sake, why not?”
“It’s just the way real poker players feel,” he’d tried to explain. “They don’t like dames at the table. It’s distracting. Women chatter when they play cards. And they make mistakes and then laugh about them. And they take too long to bet. Poker just isn’t a woman’s game. It’s better stag.”
“Well, it’s not going to be stag,” his wife told him firmly. “That’s absolutely the most medieval attitude I ever heard. For men only! In this day and age. That’s ridiculous!”
“Maybe. But that’s the way it is. That’s the way the fellows feel about it.”
“Then the hell with the fellow!” She was really angry, and Manny, as was his way, cowered before her anger. “If I can’t play with them, then neither can you. I know what!” She clapped her hands as sudden inspiration washed away her anger. “We’ll have a poker game for married couples. I’ll call some people and . . .”
Manny had heard her out with a deep sense of foreboding. Like a bit of helpless flotsam Manny found himself carried along by the mounting wave of her inspiration. Finally, one night about a week later, the wave broke and Manny was dropped into a poker game with his wife and two other married couples.
The tumultuous surf of that session is perhaps better avoided. Some idea of its storminess can be formulated from a look at the scene between Manny and his wife after everybody else went home. The scene opened with Manny softly closing the front door behind the departing guests and was immediately followed with his wife loudly slamming their bedroom door in his face.
“What’s the matter?” Manny had opened the door and followed her into the bedroom.
“What’s the matter!” She slammed a bureau drawer. “You know damn well what’s the matter! You insulted me! You insulted my friends! You behaved like a perfect ass! That’s what’s the matter!”
“Me?” Manny feigned innocence. “What did I do?”
“Oh, nothing! Nothing at all! Ooohhh! Where would you like me to start? We hadn't been playing five minutes when you called me an idiot in front of everybody.”
“Well, you were an idiot. Who else but an idiot would stay in against a one-card draw and a two-card draw with a nine-high hand?”
“I was bluffing. You said that was allowed. So I tried a bluff, that’s all.”
“Well,” Manny said placatingly, “it was ill-advised; that’s all I meant.”
“Then that’s all you should have said! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, you had to go and call Irma a damned fool. And you’re not even married to Irma!”
“What else would you call a woman who drops out of a hand when she’s holding three sevens and a pair of treys?”
“Irma’s simply cautious. That’s all! She’s very careful about money. I’ll bet if you were married to her you’d appreciate it all right.”
“Maybe so. Maybe I’d appreciate it like crazy. But I know one thing I wouldn’t do if I was married to her. I wouldn’t let her within a hundred miles of a deck of cards. But then if it was up to me, I wouldn’t let her husband within a hundred miles of a poker game, either.”
“Oh? And what did he do wrong? Come on, you’re the expert. Tell me.”
“All night long he was picking his teeth with the cards. That’s what! He ruined the deck.”
“Big deal. A seventy-nine cent deck of cards and you’re making a vendetta out of it.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. Do you know that some pro gamblers mark cards that way? He’d never get away with it in a decent poker game.”
“Manny, you are flipping! Are you implying that our friends would cheat at a penny poker game?”
“Them cheat? Never! They’re too damn dumb to cheat. Four born losers if I ever saw one. And that’s another thing. The way what’s-his-name carried on, you’d have thought he dropped the second mortgage on his house, instead of a dollar sixty-nine. Now there’s a real sport for you!”
“That’s not fair. Nobody likes to lose. He’s just the kind of fellow who plays to win, that’s all. It wasn’t the money involved.”
“If he’s the kind of fellow who plays to win, then he ought to play some other game. Any man who draws two cards to fill an inside straight and then complains because he doesn’t fill it ought to stick to tiddlywinks.”
“Well, I’m sure he doesn’t have a very high opinion of you, either. Not after the way you spoke to his wife!”
“She had it coming! Where does she come off looking at everybody else’s discards before she calls for cards? In a real poker game they’d lynch her.”
“For God’s sake, Manny, I thought we were supposed to be playing for fun.”
“Oh yeah? Well, it sure wasn’t any fun!”
That had summed it up. It wasn’t any fun and the evening was never repeated. Manny preferred no poker at all to poker under such circumstances with such poor players. So, for a long time, he just hadn’t played. But, lately, he’d taken to sneaking off to a game occasionally and to lying to his wife about where he was going.