David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

That girl looked like his ex, but more exotic. He had half a mind to go back and try to talk to her again. Like his ex, she had a palpable prickliness about her, but that was the kind of wall he liked breaching.

His ex. Thinking about her now made him feel shitty. He’d really messed that one up. What if you got only one chance at something like that? What if you made enough poor choices that your life was going to suck no matter what? What then, self-help guy? Five minutes of thoughts like that began to have a worrying cardiac effect — like the muscles of his heart were snapping; like his blood was becoming thinner. Surely, that was not happening? When you had anxiety attacks, the first rule was Tell No One About Them. Or at least, if you did, describe them in such a way that others were left with the impression that the condition was the result of your being a very sensitive and intelligent person. What you did not want to do was make the complaint so that the solution — do not smoke, do not drink — was plain.

The second rule — or the first, really — was Don’t Forget to Breathe, which Mark now saw could really be Steps One through Ten.

What was going on in his upper chest? If he cardiac-arrested right now, would that ace steward zip over and defibrillate him? A couple of minutes of controlled breathing while looking out the window at the beautiful planes, and he became less aware of his splashing heart. There was a 747 parked — parked? — outside. The swannish head of that plane is so graceful, he thought. Mark let himself sink into the leather of the seat, apologized to his body, made it certain promises.

He did not need another drink. Actually, ice water was the way forward. He returned to the bar.

This time, she spoke to him.

“How’s the edit?” she asked. She had a nice smile.

Step Seven: Put Yourself Forward. “Well, you know, I wasn’t really copyediting anything. I was doing the Jumble. You know what the Jumble is?”

“No.”

He showed her the folded page, which had gotten crinkly and shroudish from his efforts with it.

“That thing? I thought that was a cartoon.”

“Well, it is, kind of. But you have to solve it.” The barman had approached them and Mark asked for a glass of water. “I didn’t want to tell you that before because it’s not a very high-minded game, the Jumble. That’s probably pretty stupid, huh? To lie to a stranger about something like that.”

“I don’t know that it’s stupid to lie,” she said. “It seems weirder to cop to the lie.”

Mark smiled and nodded in a touché kind of way. Then he said: “Well, will you help me solve the Jumble?”

She smiled and said sure. He sat next to her and was pleasantly aware of her proximity. He thought at first she smelled like peanuts, but then he realized that that was the little dish of peanuts on the bar. She made short work of the Jumble answer: A Hack Saw.

He didn’t like it. “What’s he supposed to do with a saw? Saw those books in half?”

“No. Saw, like a saying — you know, an aphorism. A hack saw would be, like, a poorly made aphorism.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Mark said petulantly, “but there’s supposed to be more of a…a linkage between the picture and the answer to the riddle thing. Like the guy should need the other kind of saw, a wood saw. Or it should have been, ‘What the lazy carpenter aphorist needed to finish the job.’ I think that’s unfair.”

She laughed at him and said, “Well, it’s way down on the list of unfairnesses, you have to admit.”

Fuck, another zinger. He liked her. See, he was not a vain idiot; he didn’t mind being made fun of. “I’m Mark,” he said, and when he asked her name, she said, “Leila, no, I mean Lola,” which was really very suspicious. She was a choreographer. Where was she traveling?

“You know, I’d rather not talk about it,” she said. “What about you? What do you do?”

“I’m a consultant,” he said. “I have a meeting with a big client today, but I don’t know whether it’s canceled or what. I’ve been here for hours. I’m just supposed to wait to find out if the meeting’s off or been rescheduled. What’s the longest you think someone’s waited in an airport lounge?”

“You can’t just go home? Have them call you when they know where you’re going?”

“Go home? No. No way. Too big a client.”

They both just sat there for a few beats. Strangers at a bar.

“Do you have any cards?” she asked him.

“Business cards?” He patted his pockets in that too-elaborate way that cheap people do to convey their wallet-lessness.

“No. Playing cards. Maybe they have cards here.”

Did he have playing cards? Usually at least two decks. Sometimes a Svengali deck or a forcing deck. He went back to his corner and dug in his valise. He pocketed a forcing deck and returned to the bar waving a legit one.

He let her choose the game. She liked a simple nine-card kind of rummy he hadn’t played in years. She said she’d played it with her dad when she was young.

He let her win a couple of hands to suss out her game play, baited some discards to see whether she favored the knock or the hoard. She was a decent player; handled her cards with little fuss and displayed no obvious tell when he threw her a card she was after.

“I hope you don’t consult on card games,” she said to him, her pretty sloe eyes twinkling. So he ordered a beer and took the next three hands.

The man asleep in the corner was listing now and harrumphing pachydermishly at regular intervals.

After Mark had beaten her soundly a third time, he noticed that Lola’s or Leila’s eyes had gone from twinkly to annoyed.

“Want to play something else?” he asked her.

“No. It’s your deal,” she said. “I’m going to use the bathroom.” She took her shoulder bag with her. Which might mean that he hadn’t cleared sociopath yet. But her little rolly suitcase was still beneath her stool.

Mark took a card from the forcing deck in his pocket, a deck composed entirely of jacks of spades; he wrote his name and his New York mobile number across the face of the jack and slipped the card, jack out, behind the little plastic window on the top of her suitcase, the place meant to frame an ID. Once she was rolling that suitcase around again, the jack would be hard to miss.

When she came back from the bathroom, he taught her Conquian, a Mexican game from which rummy games are descended.

“Okay. You actually know a lot about cards,” she said. “Were you hustling me?”

He had always liked the term hustler, with its confused connotations of hard work and underhandedness. “I think that would require money bets,” he said. Answer and don’t answer.

“Do you know any tricks?”

“I do not like the term,” he said archly.

She smiled at that. “Come on. Show me what you got.”

What should he give her? The Dunbury Delusion? The Chicago Opener? Or something showier, like a cascade control? The real trick he had already accomplished. That’s how it always is.

He started his patter. “I mean, the thing with cards is, they all have these incredible stories behind them, you know? The numbers, the characters. Like the seven of clubs. You wouldn’t want to be alone with a seven of clubs.”

She gave him a yeah, right face, but he widened his eyes and rocked his chin slightly. “I’m serious, Lola,” he said. “You don’t wanna fuck with a seven of clubs. Excuse my language.”

“Excused.”

He riffed and riffled and shuffled and shenaniganned. He was still using the legit deck, so he let her hold and handle the cards. She was obviously confirming that these were the same cards she had just played with.