Seventeen

The Bahamas · One evening · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

I do not gamble. I say it the way other people say they do not smoke, without pride and without apology, as a simple fact of arithmetic. I have spent enough of my life near money to know that the house is not a metaphor. The house is a building, with air conditioning and no clocks, and it was paid for by people who thought tonight would be different.

Still, that evening in the Bahamas, after dinner, my wife and I walked through the casino because it was there, the way you walk through a cathedral in a city you are visiting. It was enormous. It went on in every direction like an airport that had decided to have fun: carpets patterned to hide everything, chandeliers, a thousand slot machines chiming in the same hopeful key, and Americans, hundreds of them, in shorts and in dinner jackets and occasionally in both, shouting at dice as if the dice could hear. It was exactly like the films. I found this reassuring. Some things are allowed to be what you expect.

My wife went to look at the shops. I stood by a blackjack table for a while, watching the cards come out of the shoe, and thought, with the mild curiosity of a man at a zoo: why not. I sat on the one empty stool. The dealer was a woman in her forties with a badge that said Celestine and a way of moving her hands that made the cards look obedient. She glanced at me, at the single stack of chips I bought, and at my face, and decided in about a second that I was harmless. She was right. I was fairly sure of it myself.

I put down one bet. A modest one. I had chosen the number before I sat, and I had no intention of changing it. I was dealt nineteen. Celestine turned her hole card, drew, and went over. She pushed my chips across without comment. That was one. I took the winnings back and put the original bet down again, exactly the same size, as if I were paying a bill. Celestine noticed. Dealers notice everything; it is most of the job. The rest is keeping your face still while strangers lose the price of a car.

The second hand I had twelve and stood, because she showed a six, and even a man who does not gamble knows that much. She went over again. The third I had twenty against her eighteen. The fourth I simply stood on seventeen and watched her draw to twenty-two. The couple beside me, a dentist from Ohio and his wife in a sequinned top, stopped talking to each other and started watching me instead. By the sixth hand the dentist was saying “there he goes” every time Celestine flipped her card, like a man at a racetrack who has finally backed the right horse and has no idea why.

There was nothing clever about it, and I would like that on the record. I counted nothing. I would not know how. I took a card when the table was plainly telling me to and did not when it was not, and I never touched the size of the bet. That was the only discipline in it. The cards did the rest. Eight. Nine. A blackjack on ten, the ace and the king arriving together like a couple who had planned it, and behind my chair a low, involuntary sound from people I had not realised were there.

There were a dozen of them by eleven, twenty by thirteen. Word travels fast in a casino, faster than drinks. A man in a Yankees cap arrived with a beer in each hand and gave one to a stranger just to have somewhere to put it. Somebody filmed. Somebody else began saying the number out loud with each win, and soon a whole semicircle of Americans was counting for me, fourteen, fifteen, the way a stadium counts down a clock. Across the pit a heavy man in a grey suit stood with his arms folded and watched me, not unfriendly, the way a farmer watches clouds. Celestine never looked at him. She dealt exactly as before, neat and unhurried, and lost, and lost again.

“Raise it,” the dentist said at sixteen, urgently, as if the building were on fire. “Come on. You’re hot. Raise it.” Several voices agreed. The man in the Yankees cap said that with my luck he would put the whole stack down and call his mother. I smiled politely and pushed out the same bet I had started with. There was a small groan, the disappointed, affectionate groan people make at a man who refuses to jump into a swimming pool fully dressed. I won sixteen. I won seventeen with a pair of tens against her nineteen, and the table erupted as if a home run had just left the stadium.

I sat for a moment and looked at the chips in front of me. They were not a fortune. They were considerably more than I had sat down with and considerably less than the crowd believed. My heart was beating a little faster, which interested me, because nothing had happened except that some rectangles of card had fallen one way instead of another. And then I felt it, the thing every casino is built to make you feel at exactly that moment: the certainty that the next one is yours too. I will be honest with you. It is a beautiful feeling. Whole careers in the City have been built on it, and a few of them have been ended by it. I have watched both.

Celestine gathered the cards, fed them back into the machine, and began to shuffle. The crowd pressed closer. The dentist’s wife had her hand on his shoulder without seeming to know it. The man in the grey suit unfolded his arms. Hand eighteen was coming, the shoe was ready, and every person around that table was waiting for one thing only: whether the man who did not gamble would stay in his seat, or give the table back. My hand was resting on the chips. I did not yet know which way it would move.

What do bankers want from every bond, and drivers owe at junctions?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.