Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“When will she be back?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Lord Doyle.”

“Do you want to make an appointment?”

It had never occurred to me that I could meet her so easily this way. But of course—

“Why yes, I would. When can I come?”

“Let me look.”

The phone was put down and now I could hear Hong Kong pop droning from a radio set.

When she came back she was curt.

“I have a spot free at six p.m. next Thursday. Can you make that?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be late.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’m writing you in the book. One hour?”

“Two.”

“Ah, much better.” She was suddenly polite. “Thank you, sir, we’ll see you then. It’s ninety-two Queen’s Road East near Pacific Place. Take care la.”

Iwas so elated that I could only stammer something incoherent. I went back to the tables halfheartedly but then felt enormously hungry and decided instead to dine. I went to Lei Garden and ate urchins and drank rice wine.

As I sat there in that crazy décor with my bag of unused cash I felt bottomless in some way, as if all the urchins I was eating could not fill me. Indeed, I ordered plate after plate and it seemed to make no difference. I was still hungry and ordered more.

As I gorged, I thought of Dao-Ming working from a small room in a tenement on Queen’s, cool and businesslike, laboriously grooming her hair every day, sealing a little cash in an envelope on Friday afternoons and sending it back to her village. She must have paused in front of the mirror and looked hard, perhaps puzzled by what stared back at her, since we have no way of predicting what we will actually become. Time takes us over and does what she wants with us. Even inside our own lives we find ourselves discarded. She pulls a hairbrush through her long mane and criticizes the melodrama of her own mascara. She remembers a boyfriend from long ago, one of the few who mattered, or maybe the only one who did — but they rarely pan out. She wonders where he is now. Married to a proper girl, halfway happy. He will never inquire about her, afraid of the disgrace of finding out where and who she is now. It’s better not to know.

She listens to the romantic songs on her radio, waiting for clients. She has not become cynical in the slightest, she is even-keeled and realistic, and her sadness is also even-keeled and realistic. She has passed the halfway point, the point at which realism outruns hope. Her savings are modest but rational. She walks all the way to Jardine’s Bazaar to eat in the street and she eats alone, among the lovers and the families and the back-slapping businessmen, self-contained and absolutely quiet. She is defeated, but she is not divorced from her pride. She oversalts her food, covers it with hot pepper, and wipes away the tears with paper napkins. She walks through Wan Chai at night with her doggie bag from the restaurant, pausing by the windows of the furniture stores and the pet shops with their cages of brilliantly colored birds. It is not impossible that one day she will own a room that looks like the one re-created in the display, rich with misapplied gold leaf, and that she will fill it with birdcages. One day her luck might turn, as the casinos have taught her.

Night by night, however, her expectation diminishes. She is not waiting for me, or for anyone else. She has given up the extravagant hope that someone might do something impartial for her — or that she might just go home.

So I ate. Scallops made no dent in me, nor did orange duck. For that matter, I was starving for the next two days even though I ate nonstop, night and day. I continued going out, too, yet strangely no one at the Venetian recognized me any longer. It was as if they were watching me from the wings and no one dared interrupt me, or even tap me on the shoulder, but at the same time none of them came up to me and asked if I would like a glass of naughty lemonade, as they had done so assiduously before. I raked in huge winnings night after night, always playing at the same table at the Venetian, I think it was table number four, and after a week there at table number five, just next to it. I took to wearing sunglasses during those nights, those quiet nights, and my dandy kid gloves that nevertheless gave me the air of a fussy bank teller afraid of getting germs on his fingers. I played cocooned in this way and unaffected by the body odor and the bad breath and the sudden gusts of cold air and the sound of the jongleurs and minstrels weaving their way through the crowds. I played and after I had won I went to McSorley’s Ale House, Morton’s of Chicago, Madeira and Portofino and Fogo Samba and Lei Garden and Imperial House Dim Sum and gorged myself on steaks, bamboo-pressed noodles, Hakka salted chicken, mui choy kau yuk (vegetables with pork belly), noh mi ap (rice-stuffed duck), or linguine with clams. Even seated at the table, and only an hour after eating a whole plate of ngiong tofu or kiu nyuk (sliced pork with mustard greens), I would feel my stomach growl and I would look forward to racing to one of the Venetian restaurants and ordering a meal for three.

I was waiting for Thursday to come, and on that very day, before taking the ferry over to Hong Kong for my appointment with Dao-Ming, I called a cab to take me to the Paiza. As far as I was aware, it was the easiest high-roller place in which to place a high bet, and I had made up my mind to give all my money to Dao-Ming, as I should have done long before. So why not triple it all and make of it a stupendous gift?

When I arrived, the staff recognized me, but with some difficulty, and from their embarrassed smiles I could see that they were perturbed by the drastic change in my appearance that my bouts of fever and hunger had brought about. They bowed nevertheless and one of them took me to the private elevators, even alleviating me of my awkward-looking Adidas bag. We talked about the weather. Inside, the bag was whisked away and I was told the chips would be brought to one of the private rooms.

I asked if these were numbered.

“Not strictly,” the girl said.

“If you count counterclockwise,” I said, “could you number them up to ten?”

“Of course.”

“Then — I am sure you’ll understand — I would like to be in the ninth one.”

She smiled.

“Don’t worry, sir. Players ask for that one all the time, as you can imagine.”

“Yes, I can imagine!”

“One minute. Can I seat you here and have you served a cocktail while I see if the room has a place?”

I nodded and sat. I felt quite warm in there, and when the dry martini came I dried my face with the paper napkin. I could see the enormous lantern suspended solemnly in the semidark, the replicas of the Xin terra-cotta army and paintings recessed into the walls. Everything was familiar and yet everything was also subtly altered since the last time I had been there. I felt smaller, shabbier, even though in reality I was in far better shape than I had been, at least from the perspective of the casino. I drank the martini in three even gulps. After fifteen minutes the girl returned.

“There is a place in that room, sir. There are two other players. Would you like to know who they are?”

“It’s nothing to me.”

“Very well, sir. Follow me. There’s no maximum bet here.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“Your chips will be here shortly.”

It was one of the rooms upholstered in red leather, similar to the ones I had seen and played in before. The walls were papered with pale green fleur-de-lis. There was a tall vertical painting of two English noblemen posed with hunting rifles next to a brace of slaughtered pheasants. As in other paintings, their eyes were very slightly Asian and they looked down at the players with an uncanny precision. A ruined abbey peeped up from behind the painted willows of a nonexistent England, and beneath this painting a real log fire gently flickered between iron dogs, pokers and hearth brushes slung from a polished brass tree. A basket of wood lay there as well, lending a faint perfume to the whole room. Along the mantelpiece stood sponges and insects encased in glass balls. At either end were two blocks of books simply painted onto the walls as a trompe l’oeil, the collected works of Dickens. I came in and saw my chips assembled neatly at the far end of the table. The two Chinese players there looked up quickly and shifted their eyes to accommodate a foreigner who looked like he had TB. They nodded. They were well-heeled, obviously, dressed in the city way, in navy blue and gold ties, with voluminous stockpiles of chips at their elbows. A bottle of Haut-Brion stood opened on a castered service, with the cork laid ceremoniously on a saucer. It looked like some kind of wine-stained insect lying there on a white doily. I felt warm and bothered as I sat.