“Do you know where Michael is playing poker?” I said.

36

Michael had two sets of friends. This was his poker set. There were seven players. First there was a hunchback in a checkered vest. He was a lay analyst. There was a thin nervous one with a green eyeshade. He was a patient of the lay analyst. There was a woman with bleached hair who wore flowered hostess pajamas and smoked her cigarettes in a long ivory cigarette-holder. She was married to the lay analyst. She sat next to a Hungarian who played the violin in a Viennese coffee-house on 72nd Street. There was a New England girl with a leg deformed in childhood by osteomyelitis. She was married to the violinist. She was shy. Michael sat beside her. There was one who was fat, asthmatic and bushy-browed. He sat beside Michael. He was dealing. The poker game was a weekly institution.

“Jacks or better,” the fat, asthmatic, bushy-browed one said as we came into the apartment, and riffled the cards.

Aurora and I came in out of the cold snow. Snow was on us. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Michael. I was going to denounce him. He needed denouncing. But as what? A thief? That didn’t seem quite the definition of the crime. He looked up from the table.

“Well,” he said. “Baby’s out of bed.”

The snow melted in the apartment’s heat. Smoke lay above the green cardtable. I think, now, that Michael expected us. Aurora would look into the manila envelope. She’d be furious. I think he expected her to tell me. It wasn’t the money he wanted.

I didn’t have to denounce him. Aurora stormed to the cardtable.

“Where is it?” she demanded.

“What?”

“Are we playing poker?” the fat, asthmatic one said. He wheezed. “Jacks to open.” He started to deal the cards.

“The money, you rat,” Aurora said.

The cards splayed out across the table. They had anted. The girl with the deformed leg looked unhappy.

“Asher doesn’t need it, do you, Asher?” Michael said. He looked about the table. They had picked up their cards. The stakes weren’t high. It was a weekly game. “Do you know,” Michael said to the cardplayers, “what my cousin Asher used to make some years?” He looked at me. “Tell them, Asher,” he said. “Impress them. Tell them what you used to make some years.”

“You tell them, Michael,” I said. “They’re your friends.”

“All right,” Michael said. He ignored Aurora now. He looked at the cardplayers again. He put the proper amount of respect into his voice. He said: “Why, some years, old Asher here used to make a hundred and twenty-five grand a year. Before taxes, of course.”

He paused. Maybe they were impressed. They just looked at their cards. Michael’s voice clotted. “And I made shit,” he said. “Before, during and after taxes.”

“Jesus, does anyone open?” the thin nervous player with the green eyeshade said.

“Asher’s come a long way,” Michael said, “through the snow and all. He’s been duped. Is that the word? Old Asher’s been taken, and he detects, he suspicions a little malice in the taking, and he’s come up here through the howling snow for an explanation. Isn’t that right? Well: I think old Asher here is entitled to an explanation so let’s just hold up on the game a few minutes while I explanation my aging and put-upon relative here,” Michael said.