Lawrence Osborne: The Ballad of a Small Player

“Is that a change of luck?”

“It must be, your lordship.”

We laughed. I was the jolliest loser. I turned in my seat and motioned to the girl.

“Why not ask the señorita if she’d like a glass of champagne?”

He leaned down to my ear.

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Sure.”

I pulled away from his whisper and gripped the neck of the bottle, extracting it from a rustle of ice.

“Why not?”

The waiter spoke to her in Mandarin. She said, “That’s nice” in Cantonese. I spoke to her in the same language.

“It’s vintage, you know, it’s not just any old bubbly.”

In the white noise of the sixty baccarat tables, where a crowd of munitions workers were hurling down their company-secured chips with curses and hoorahs, I thought for a moment that I had gone deaf, and when my hearing returned the girl was talking to me across a pall of smoke. She was saying thank you or some such thing, and her lips moved like two parallel fingers playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. They were overpainted, as was the style there. She wore a small crocus-white dress, and that was all I cared to notice. Not especially pretty, as the boy had been quick to observe. Not especially pretty but not especially unattractive either. She drank the champagne awkwardly, holding the glass with two fingers so that it almost fell, and I half wished I hadn’t bothered.

We played for a while.

“Is it your first time?” I asked her between hands, as the machine shuffled the cards and the dealer twirled his pallet; her nod made him wonder as well.

“Over from Hong Kong for the night?”

“From Aberdeen.”

“Aberdeen,” I said. “I know Aberdeen.”

Everyone does.

“I go there for Jumbo’s.”

“Ah,” she said. “I go there on Sunday.”

“There’s a better place on Lamma,” I went on. “Rainbow.”

“Yes, I know it.”

The Shuffle Master ejected three cards apiece. She handled them in the way that a buyer in a market will handle small fish before buying them. I wondered if she knew what she was doing, but one doesn’t advise the enemy. She looked over the tops of the cards, and there was the crooked, up-country smile, the overapplied paints and creams. I won the next hand. It cheered me after a long hiatus, and the long ebbing of my chips was checked. I drank off the glass of Krug and ordered another bottle. There were two of us drinking now.

After two more winning hands I went to the cashier and bought more chips. The night was turning soft and bitter at the edges, and I wanted to be at the center of it for another hour. The boys winked at me because I was being picked up by a secretary, but even if I was I didn’t particularly mind. Any man can be picked up by a woman half his age and he won’t protest, he won’t go kicking and screaming. He’ll go along with it for a while, just to see what happens. I returned to my seat and as I brushed past the girl from Aberdeen I saw the gold chain resting around the back of her neck and the blue edge of a tattoo covered by her dress strap. The ink looked pretty against her olive skin. She looked up for a second as my gaze swept across her neck — a woman never lets this go — and she turned her cards against this same gaze, as if I might be cheating. The idea that I might made me smile. It would be like fleecing a lamb with a pair of nail scissors. I suppose it was because I had been coming there so long without talking to a fellow player that I felt inclined to be careful with her. I gradually detached myself from the hands I played, although I was winning again, and enjoyed the second bottle, which had been deposited in the ice bucket. The floor manager came by and wished me luck. His Sino-Portuguese eyes filled with cheerful malice and I said I was happy either way, winning or losing. The girl looked up. I could tell that she understood English well. She watched me pick up my cards, shift them, glance down at them without any outward sign of emotion, and I felt, for some reason, that we understood each other.

Iwalked out with her into the casino lobby, and there was the lilt in our walk, the agreement deep down at the level of the body.

“It’s not my favorite place,” I said grandly. “Have you been to the Venetian?” I hate that, too , my tone implied. She tried to smile back, but I could see that she was seesawing internally, weighing it up and down, this venture into a specific form of corruption. We walked out past the statue of Pegasus in the courtyard, and its wings were flapping, smoke blowing out of its nose, and the whores standing about in the parking lot were laughing at us.

I’m too old for you to worry about attraction , I wanted to say. And I am sorry for that. It mortifies me, but I cannot change it .

It was so crowded in this overblown courtyard that there was no room even to exchange a few words. She looked at her watch and said something about the hydrofoil back to Hong Kong, even though the last one didn’t leave for a few hours, and in my experience with Chinese girls, when they are interested in you there is a very obvious slowing of their usual quickness of movement. She didn’t slow. I let the comment melt away and then touched her hand for a moment and she turned to look at me and, in that flashing way, we had agreed upon it.

She spoke very quietly.

“Where can we go?”

“We can go anywhere. Not my room.”

The light around us was a little brighter. Her bracelet was one of those multicolored childish objects from the Piper collection that are endorsed by Paris Hilton. She must have seen it in a magazine and let herself be persuaded into a mistake — the small circles of enamel didn’t suit her at all. At least she wasn’t wearing one of the hideous blue rings from the same maker. In the cab she would not touch me, aware perhaps of the prying eye of the Chinese cabbie fixed upon us in the rearview mirror (a gwai lo is always checked out), and I suggested an older, colonial place near the An-Ma temple where I had not been before and where — for some reason it mattered — I would not be recognized.

It rained along the shore. Along the embankments stand twisted fig trees planted by the Europeans, and they were still faintly visible in that darkness. Opposite, on the far side of the Van Nam Lake, rises a vision of China modern enough to chill the blood: the expressways, the towers, the garbled instruments of rising power. A terrible thing called the Cybernetic Fountain. But on the shore the old villas stand behind their sand-colored walls and the trees drip in the monsoon. There is a memory of ease, of the necessity of grace, white and lemon arches glimpsed between the fig trees. We passed near the temple as a soft thunder rolled in from the open sea. There are goddesses here who protect sailors and fishermen, and who protect the gambler, too.

The hotel lay at the top of a series of steep steps that wound around terrace garden patios with wizened trees and wet tables.

As I closed the door behind us, she said, “I am not the usual prostitute. You think I am. But you may have made a mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“I’m not a whore.”

In the room we sat on the bed. There was the sound of the rain and the smell of flowerpots. I poured her a glass of wine from the mini-bar, but she didn’t take it. Quite the contrary. There was no opening up. She held her legs closely together as her hands lay curled upward in her lap in an attitude of refusal, and perhaps, I thought, darkness was required. It was a venal thought, a crass thought. I went to the bathroom and turned on that light, then brought the bathroom door to within an inch of the jamb. That would be enough light for us, enough darkness to unlock her curious inhibitions. She brushed the water drops from her jacket and shivered. She asked for a towel to rub her hair. I took off my own jacket and then my shoes — it felt impudent, but there was nothing for it. She remarked on the rolling-off of the shoes and there was a disdain in her eyes, a sadness at the lack of imagination. Perhaps she really wasn’t what I had thought.