No Game for a Woman

BALTIMORE was made habitable for us by all those lovely racetracks. Friends of ours would come down from New York nearly every weekend, and we’d go out to Pimlico or Laurel on Saturday afternoons and then, after dinner, settle down to a nice long night of poker. The games started modestly— fifty-cent limit — but we soon switched to table stakes. It seemed sensible to play it that way, knowingly. In a limit game there was all that nonsense at the end of the evening, “roodles,” where the stakes would be doubled for the final rounds, and the losers never wanted to quit. In table stakes, you knew right from the beginning that the going would be rough and serious — that is, delicious.

I had learned poker the hard way, from a lively, tough Manhattan game where I fast dropped two weeks’ salary. More than by the money loss, I had been scorched by a remark of one of the men. We had been playing stud, and I had stayed for a raise and bought a card which did not help my hand but would have helped his. He spoke bitterly of people who didn’t know when to drop out, adding automatically that poker was “no game for a woman.”

I thought his attitude jerky and unjust. I had paid for the card, hadn’t I? Didn’t I have the right to throw away my own money? Even later, when I was good at the game, I disagreed with his premise. My own poker credo held that when you had a good hand you made the others pay and pay, and if suckers insisted on staying, so much the better. Of course, I did see what he meant: that you might wish to preserve a smaller but surer pot by driving out the inferior hands with raises, and if they were too dumb to leave, it increased the chances that someone might draw out on you. But I still thought it was a niggling, play-safe way of gambling.

We had rented the Baltimore house furnished, for we expected to be there only a year or two. Outside, it was like any other shingled, two-story house; inside, like no other. One’s first impression of the living room was of a jungle, with antimacassars. There were tropical fish and sinister plants everywhere, and cozies on anything that would take a cozy, including the keyboard of the piano. The dining room was dominated by the devil and his wife, a pair of seven-foot statues carved in wood by demented Italians and garishly painted. The statues inspired a lot of bad jokes, for it was at the circular dining-room table, in the cross fire of their malevolent gaze, that we gathered for our Saturday night poker games.

We never had trouble finding a quorum. Sometimes ten players would show up, requiring us to stick to stud, which I preferred to draw, anyway. Among the regulars were two men whose wives always came but did not play. It took me a long time to realize that the homelier wife, the one who wore glasses, was having a blazing love affair with the pretty wife’s husband. There was a third couple, both of whom played, and both abominably. They had three children and could not afford their repeated losses but could not be kept away from the game. They loved each other dearly in those days (later, he fell or jumped, and she did not even go to the funeral). The only times I ever saw them harsh with each other were at the poker table, where each saw, and loudly criticized, the suicidal gambling habits of the other.

Hal was also a regular: he was flashy and erratic, and it was impossible to know when he really had the cards and when he didn’t. He seldom folded before the third or fourth card and always bet heavily if he stayed. As a result, he was usually the evening’s biggest winner or loser. George and Perry were basically more conservative, but nevertheless capable of reckless changes of pace, so you could never rule out the possibility of a bluff or a strong hand. If you saw one of them with a four, six, seven, and eight showing, it could be a straight — he just might have stayed at the beginning with a five and an eight. There was my husband, of course, but I would no more comment publicly on his poker playing than on his lovemaking.

And there was Fritz: steady, successful, the most conservative, and to me the most readable of all the regulars. The reason I understood his game so well was because i followed much the same psychology, the same percentages, that he did. But I felt I did it with some style, a certain amount of dash. I would even let myself be caught bluffing on a hand or two early in the evening, just so that no one could ever be sure of me.

I was, in fact, very proud of my conduct, skill, and acceptance at the poker table. In New York, I had been the only woman allowed in a first-rate weekly game that was something of an institution. Fritz never drank while playing. I despised such ungentlemanly prudence and always had at least four highballs during the game. I was a careful dealer, calling the cards clearly and accurately, never prematurely exposing one. I did not bet or fold out of turn. I never yielded to the temptation to “cry a hand in” or to hold endless postmortems when the hand was over. I was reasonably cheerful and gay but didn’t overdo the conversation either. In short, Fritz was a pretty good poker player, but in my opinion, I was even better.

THEN one night Fritz and I had our big showdown hand. I had a pair of tens back to back; it was pretty clear from the betting that Fritz had wired sixes. My husband and George folded early. Hal and Perry, each with jacks showing, stayed. On the next two cards, no hand openly paired, but Fritz drew a king and I an ace.

I bet heavily, and he called. Hal and Perry dropped out. The final card was dealt: to me another ace, to Fritz another six. With a pair of aces showing, I bet fifty dollars, hoping he would think I had three aces. With a pair of sixes showing, he hesitated, looked again at his hole card. Then he called my bet and raised me a hundred dollars.

I was a long time deciding. A lot of things flashed through my mind, not all of them relevant. I remembered having told a friend who could not understand the gambling fever, “There’s no more exciting way in the world to spend a hundred dollars. You’re not betting it on a horse, or a card — you’re betting it on yourself. What really baffles me is the kind of person who’d spend it on a useless piece of china like a Chelsea lettuce leaf.” I also remembered some outstanding household bills and the run of bad luck we had been having at the track. 1 thought of a red tweed dress I had liked but had not bought because it cost ninety dollars.

But mostly I thought about Fritz, and the absolute certainty that he had three sixes and the winning hand. Why not just fold, then? I simply couldn’t. For the first time (and this hadn’t happened even during my disastrous beginner’s game) I felt fear that was close to panic. Whatever I did would be irrecoverably wrong. If I called, I’d be throwing away a hundred dollars. But I pictured myself refusing his raise and his smug expression as he neatly folded his cards into the rest of the pack and raked in the pot. He would succeed in convincing me, convincing everybody, that safe, careful Fritz had bluffed me out of the pot. If only it had been Hal or Perry or George — they would possibly have kings up, or even just a pair of sixes. To win from them was a pleasure, to lose to them no disgrace, for no one could ever be sure what cards they held. With Fritz, though — The worst of it was to know so positively and to be the only one to know, to know from the inside. The others were too easygoing. They underestimated his caution. Not I. So what was I to do?

Well, what exactly was at stake? Money, of course. But more than that. Pride. Judgment. The public and private image of myself as a poker player.

I looked across at Fritz, and there was something in his eye, in his typically stodgy expression, in the faint tremble of his fingers on the table that convinced me that, this once, Fritz was trying to bluff his way to a pot.

“I call,” I said, and pushed in the hundred dollars — not so certain of my intuition that I would raise him with the fifty dollars I had left.

He showed me his hole card — the third six. We both smiled as he leaned forward to gather in the chips. His smile was relieved, prissy, triumphant. Mine, I hoped, was gallant.

I finished out the session, and even played several more times in Baltimore and back in New York. But it was really all over for me. I was the pilot who is not cured by walking away from a crash and taking up another plane. With that night, that hand, I lost my poker nerve totally and forever and with it all joy in the game, or in any form of gambling.

But I never quite understood it till the other day, when I ran into Fritz on Fifth Avenue. We had a drink at the Louis XIV bar and caught up on what had become of everyone. The man with the pretty wife was now remarried, and so was she.

The homely wife was still with her husband but,

I gathered from Fritz’s giggle, still playing around. We lamented the death of the bad poker player and clucked at his wife’s lack of grief. George and Perry were partners in a firm making some tiny electrical gadget. We agreed that they might be overextending themselves. Hal had gone into politics and was now involved in an investigation of alleged election fraud.

Fritz offered these tidbits with undiscriminating enthusiasm. They interested me, but it made me uneasy to hear a man gossip so. We assured each other that we were looking marvelous. For my part, I lied. Fritz looked like an old woman.

That was it, of course! He was a womanish sort of man, and a womanish sort of poker player too. And so, for all my pride, had I been myself. Secretly thrifty, jealously conservative, avoiding risks, willing to bet heavily only on a sure thing — all that is a woman’s way, not a man’s. (I exclude professional gamblers, who seem nearer to machines than to men or women.) The honest-toGod good poker player is a man, with a man’s reckless temperament, his sense of humor on the edge of a precipice, his unguessable courage, his mystical personal feelings about the wooing of luck. Those are the ingredients, and Fritz didn’t have them, and neither did I.

We are what we are; it’s the only way to be happy. Oh, once in a while I miss the chills and theater of those evenings with the devil and his wife standing guard above the poker table. But, being a woman, I’m pretty realistic about things. And there is something I keep on the mantel as a sort of reminder. It’s a little Chelsea lettuce leaf.