The Cardturner: A Novel About Imperfect Partners and Infinite Possibilities Read online

  Actually, I didn’t tell Leslie everything. I didn’t mention the pantry.

  Leslie also helped me study my new batch of bidding conventions, and this time it wasn’t just eleven pages. Toni e-mailed me sixty-one pages I had to learn for the nationals.

  If you’re wondering why I had to learn all the bidding conventions, since supposedly Trapp would be telling me what to bid, there were two reasons. Back at the bridge studio, there had been times when I’d had trouble perceiving him. If that happened during the national tournament, I’d have to be able to make the bid myself, without undue hesitation. Also, partners are not allowed to have any secret bidding agreements. The opponents would be allowed to ask me what a bid meant. I had to be prepared to answer.

  Fortunately, all the bidding conventions used by Trapp and Annabel are pretty well known. They all have names. So if somebody asked me about a bid, I could just say “Roman key-card” or “Reverse Drury,” and even if I didn’t know what any of that meant, the opponents would.

  “When you get back from Chicago,” Leslie asked, “will you take me to the bridge studio sometime?”

  I promised I would.

  Two days before our supposed college tour, I still hadn’t told Cliff anything about it. I obviously needed to tell him something, since he was part of my alibi, but how do you tell your best friend you’re going to spend three nights in a hotel with his girlfriend?

  “You don’t have to worry about Cliff,” Toni assured me. “I’ll explain everything to him, in my own way.”

  I didn’t ask for further detail. I didn’t like thinking about the two of them together, or how she might gently break the news. Still, it would have helped to know what she told him. As it was, I stayed clear of Cliff, afraid I might say the wrong thing.

  The night before we were to leave for Chicago, I was unable to fall asleep. I tossed and turned all night. At about three in the morning, I turned on the light and finished reading Cannery Row, the book that had brought Trapp and Annabel together. I found the quote that Trapp had told me about.

  “It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.”

  60

  Not a Wet Sock

  We had a 10:05 a.m. flight. I picked Toni up at seven-thirty. She had baked some cranberry-walnut muffins, using her grandmother’s recipe.

  I ate a muffin on the way to the airport. It was hard and dry. Annabel was a better bridge player than muffin maker. Or maybe it was Toni who couldn’t follow directions, but then again, who was I to complain? It wasn’t as if I had baked any muffins for her.

  We had no surprises at the airport. Toni had no problem using her standby ticket, and the seat next to mine was vacant, as we’d known it would be.

  “So what did you tell Cliff?” I asked as we taxied to the runway.

  “About what?”

  “You, me, Chicago.”

  “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t tell him anything? My parents think he’s with me checking out colleges.”

  “Here, have another muffin.”

  A moment later we were off the ground.

  Cliff is smart, I realized. He’s probably smarter than me, and definitely a quicker thinker. If my mother happened to run into him, I felt pretty certain that he’d figure it out and duck smoothly, like I had done on the phone with Katie. After all, he wouldn’t know I was with Toni. I was fairly confident he’d come up with some good reason why, at the last minute, he hadn’t been able to go with me to look at colleges.

  Toni and I mostly spoke bridge gibberish from takeoff to touchdown as we went over the sixty-one pages of notes, eighty-one pages if you include her previous e-mails. There were three seats in our row. I had the aisle, Toni was in the center, and next to her was a man with a computer who glared at us from time to time because our constant yammering kept him from doing his work.

  Our only luggage was carry-on. We were both feeling pretty excited when we deplaned and went looking for the shuttle bus to the hotel.

  “Can you believe we’re here?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I just hope Trapp and Annabel made it too.”

  Every single person on the shuttle bus was a bridge player. They were going over their bidding systems, or discussing bridge hands, or just talking about the tournament in general. It felt exciting to be a part of it.

  The hotel was abuzz with bridge gibberish as well. It was like some kind of scary sci-fi movie where everywhere you turned, people were muttering weird sentences.

  “… MUD from three small.”

  “… upside-down count and attitude.”

  “She was squeezed in the black suits.”21

  I didn’t know which was scarier, so many people speaking bridge gibberish or the fact that I understood most of what they were saying!

  I had no problem checking into my room, and when Toni used Teodora’s name, the clerk didn’t ask for any ID. He did ask her when she expected a Mr. Lester Trapp to arrive.

  “Sometime soon,” said Toni.

  I hoped so.

  A problem arose, however, when he asked us for credit cards. I didn’t have one. Toni did, but it was in her real name.

  “The rooms are already paid for,” I pointed out.

  The clerk said he needed to have a credit card on file for incidentals, in case we charged a meal to our room, or made a telephone call, or watched an on-demand movie.

  “We won’t do any of that,” said Toni. “We’ll be playing bridge.”

  “And we both have cell phones,” I added, showing him my phone.

  Toni showed him her phone too.

  In the end we each left one hundred dollars cash as a deposit, which we’d get back when we checked out.

  We were lucky, I think, that the hotel was crowded and there were a lot of people waiting to check in. Otherwise he might have given us a harder time.

  Our rooms were on the twenty-seventh floor. Toni turned right when we exited the elevator, and I turned left. We agreed to meet in an hour, after we’d had time to unpack and freshen up.

  It took me all of three minutes to unpack, and as far as freshening up goes, I took a leak and stuck my hands under the faucet. The hotel soap was too much of a bother to unwrap.

  I turned on the TV, but I felt too restless to sit and watch anything. The National Pairs Championship wouldn’t start until the next day, but I decided I’d go down and check out the playing area.

  I called Toni’s room first, to let her know where I’d be.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’m going crazy just sitting here!”

  If you’ve been wondering whether I was disappointed that Toni and I didn’t have to share a room, I don’t think so. I think if we’d shared a room, it would have been really awkward, and we would have needed to get out to escape from each other. Coming from different rooms, we weren’t escaping from each other but seeking each other out.

  I had also decided it was good that Toni hadn’t told Cliff about this. She obviously didn’t want him to be jealous.

  Based on my very limited experience, if someone is feeling jealous, it is because he has a damn good reason. Before Katie and I broke up, I could sense a certain vibe between her and Cliff. The way they looked at each other. The way she laughed when he teased her.

  Don’t get me wrong. Cliff wasn’t coming on to her. He was just being the boyfriend’s best friend, making conversation, kidding around. Still, I felt jealous, and well, you know how that turned out.

  Put another way, if Toni had thought it was no big deal to tell Cliff that she was going to Chicago with me, then I was about as much of a threat as a wet sock.

  When I turned the corner, I saw Toni waving at me from the elevator. I think I’ve
already told you how it made me feel to see her smile and wave at me. You can have your sunsets and waterfalls. If a piano were to suddenly fall on my head, that’s the image I’d want forever engraved in my mind.

  61

  They Need Us

  The playing area was not just one room. There were two giant ballrooms and seven or eight smaller rooms, all filled with rows and rows of people playing bridge. And that, I found out, was just on one floor. Toni and I took an escalator down a level and found the identical setup on the floor below.

  It was only a little after four o’clock, so they were still in the middle of the afternoon session. Pairs, knockouts, and something called board-a-match were all taking place in different parts of the hotel. I was surprised by how many younger players were there. Many weren’t much older than Toni and I. I even saw several kids who looked about Leslie’s age, playing with a parent or grandparent.

  One of the downstairs ballrooms was designated as the novice area. It was for players with fewer than 200 masterpoints. Just outside that room was a sign announcing various guest lecturers, including Syd Fox.

  “That’s the guy!” I exclaimed.

  The name meant nothing to Toni.

  “Remember when we played against those jerks, when Annabel redoubled?” I reminded her. “As we were leaving the table one of the idiots complained that you had suddenly turned into Syd Fox.”

  We decided we’d go to Syd Fox’s lecture, which was at six-fifteen, and then we’d play in the seven o’clock session. Just us, with no help from Trapp or Annabel.

  We found a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop two blocks from the hotel and grabbed a quick dinner. My sandwich had sausage and peppers on it, and Toni ordered one with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil.

  I only mention what we ate because we both said our sandwiches were “amazing.” That’s pretty funny if you think about it. We were about to enter a national championship, turning cards for Trapp and Annabel, but our sandwiches were “amazing”!

  One of the legs on our table was shorter than the other three, so the table kept wobbling as we ate. “How long has Annabel been talking to you?” I asked.

  “Always,” said Toni. “As long as I can remember.”

  I told Toni about the time I’d first met her, at Trapp’s sixty-fifth birthday party, when she ran up to me and shouted, “Shut up! Leave me alone!”

  She didn’t remember, and felt embarrassed about it. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “I didn’t mind,” I assured her. “I thought you were funny.”

  She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. “You know I wasn’t talking to you, right?”

  “I know that now,” I said.

  It wasn’t surprising that she didn’t remember. It had been a big deal to me because it was the only time I’d been to my mysterious uncle Lester’s house, and then I met this girl who acted so strange. She had been to Trapp’s house many times. To her, it was just another day.

  “I do remember that there were times I wished she’d go away and never talk to me again,” Toni admitted. “I wanted so much to just be normal. Everybody kept telling me there was something wrong with me. I had to go to a psychiatrist. And then I was supposed to take these pills, but Annabel would say, ‘Don’t take the pills, Toni.’

  “But most of the time, I was glad she was there,” Toni added. “It was like having a fairy godmother. I loved her. I still do.”

  “Do your parents know you talk to Annabel?” I asked.

  “No, not really,” Toni said. “My mother just thinks I have special insight. But then again, they do send me to a shrink.”

  I asked her if that was why she was homeschooled, too, but she said she didn’t think so.

  “My parents don’t believe in what they call ‘institutionalized education.’ Something about fitting square pegs into round holes. It’s not like they keep me locked up in a padded cell or something. I have friends.”

  “No, I know,” I said. “You quilt together.”

  “You think that’s funny, don’t you?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, really,” I said. “So what do you suppose they’re doing right now?”

  “Who?” asked Toni.

  “Trapp and Annabel,” I said. “You think they’re going over their bidding systems, like everyone else around here?”

  “They’re not doing anything,” said Toni. “They need us.”

  Syd Fox was about sixty-five years old, with wild Albert Einstein hair, and he wore glasses with heavy black frames. Behind those glasses, you could catch a mischievous, almost childish gleam in his eye.

  His lecture was surprisingly entertaining. You were supposedly playing bridge with some king. Fox used a whiteboard, where he’d put up different card combinations. He’d show you what cards were in dummy and what cards were in the declarer’s hand, and then tell you how many tricks you needed to take.

  If you succeeded, the king would let you marry the princess, or prince, depending. But if you failed, the royal executioner would chop off your head.

  Here was one:

  You had to choose a line of play that was guaranteed to win three heart tricks no matter how the remaining hearts were divided between East and West.

  Syd Fox called on several people. I was afraid to raise my hand, and just whispered my answer to Toni.

  The first two people got it wrong and had their heads chopped off. One of them had given my answer.

  “Too bad, you’re dead,” Toni said to me.

  A woman finally got it right. She said she’d lead dummy’s ace. Next she’d lead dummy’s three, and if East played low, she’d play the eight.

  “Congratulations,” Syd Fox told her. “You may marry the prince.”

  “I’ll take the princess, if you don’t mind,” the woman said, and everyone laughed.

  He gave us four different diagrams. I lost my head on each of the first three, but on the fourth one, I got to marry the princess.

  Toni smiled at me.

  Going back to what I said earlier, I don’t think she would have dared to smile at me like that if we’d been sharing the same room.

  62

  Twenty-five Percent Slam

  Syd Fox’s lecture got us fired up and ready to play, and no novice game for us! We wanted to take on the big boys.

  We entered something called a side game. The main pairs game was a two-session event that had started in the afternoon. The side game was only one session. It was mainly for those who had been knocked out of a KO in the afternoon, or for people like Toni and me, who had only just arrived.

  We were in one of the large ballrooms on the lower level. There were several different events taking place in there. We used our real names and ACBL numbers. Our table assignment was KK-8, North-South. The two Ks are not a typo. There were a lot more than twenty-six sections in the tournament, so they had to double up on letters. Somewhere else in the hotel, another pair was sitting North-South at table K-8 with only one K.

  Two women sat in the East-West seats. West stared at me a moment, then said, “Alton, right?”

  I was shocked.

  She and her partner introduced themselves as Lydia and Renee.

  I didn’t introduce Toni to them. She’d be using three different names at the tournament, Toni, Annabel, and Teodora, and I didn’t want to have to remember which people knew her by which name.

  “We met Alton at a sectional,” Lydia told Toni. “He was helping his blind uncle.” She turned to me. “Is he here?”

  I hesitated. “I think he’s coming later,” I said.

  “He’s an amazing player,” said Lydia. “And I’d say that even if he wasn’t blind.”

  “I didn’t know you played too,” said Renee.

  “I’m just learning,” I said.

  “So am I,” said Renee. “And I’ve been playing for twenty-five years.”

  “The time you quit learning is the time to qui
t playing,” said Lydia.

  Okay, I realize you didn’t come all the way to Chicago to watch Toni and me play in a side game. That would be like a sports reporter who’s supposed to be covering the Super Bowl going on and on about the pregame charity touch-football match between the players’ wives. It was bad enough I made you sit through Syd Fox’s lecture.

  The thing of it is, Toni and I played great! We used a lot of the new bids I had learned, but it was more than just that. I no longer thought of bidding as a bunch of rules to be memorized. It was a conversation. I imagine it’s like learning a foreign language. After a while you stop translating every word in your head and start thinking in that language. This was a language based on symbols and logic instead of words and phrases. Every bid Toni made, and even the bids she didn’t make, like the dog that didn’t bark, gave me information about her hand.

  Syd Fox’s lecture helped too. None of those exact card combinations came up, but he had gotten me thinking along the right lines, and I made all but one of my contracts. When the scores were posted with one round to go, Richards and Castaneda were in fifth place with a 53 percent game.

  Toni was worried about our last round, however. “They bid that lucky slam against us,” she griped. “I bet no one else bid it.”

  It turned out she was right. When the final results were posted we had fallen to 49 percent.

  She complained all the way to the elevator, using language I usually hear from Cliff. “All because of that spade slam!” (Adjective deleted.) “It took two finesses!” (The same adjective deleted.) “A twenty-five percent slam!22 If you’d had the king of spades, or if I’d had the queen of clubs, instead of the other way around, we would have set it. Switch our hands and he would have been down two.”

  I looked at the hand record. “How could East jump to three spades on that garbage? He has nine points, and flat distribution.”