“This is the last straw. You have done enough.”
“Can I talk to Mom?” he said, but Peter had already hung up.
He ducked into a bar on Grand Street and ordered a whiskey. The bar was small and dark, nondescript, a jukebox playing AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” and a video slot machine glowing insistently at him from a corner. He turned his back to it and looked through his phone, went through a few messages and deleted them, saw a note he’d saved months ago, when he was still at Potsdam, with the name and address of an underground poker club in the city. Two hundred to buy in, Kyle had said. The address was on Lafayette, a few blocks away.
He deleted the note and finished his drink. He would go to Jim and Elaine’s to give his parents the right essay, though he didn’t know their address. He walked east, kept taking the green lights, staying on Grand, then saw a bank and went inside to get cash. His finger hovered over the button that said $50, but he hit $500, the bulk of his account, and watched the bills shoot out.
On the corner of Grand and Lafayette, the address for the poker club reverberated in his mind. He headed south to where Howard Street crossed over to Hester. It wasn’t too late, he could turn and go right to Roland’s, go right past the building, which was narrow, no doorman, only an intercom. He checked his phone; no messages. He was frightened by how much he was about to fuck up, by his lack of desire to stop himself, the rising anticipation at the prospect of falling down, failing harder, and going straight to tilt; he’d known from the moment he left the bar exactly where he would end up. He pressed the intercom button. “What?” a guy’s voice said. He provided the password, and for a moment, a feeble hope hung in the air that it would be the wrong one. But the door buzzed open.
The club was a one-bedroom apartment with two tables piled with poker chips. There was a large TV with a basketball game playing on mute, a counter with buckets of beer. Daniel gave his five hundred to a woman in a black suit and waited for a seat. The other players were all men, of different races and ages, and he was one of the best dressed. He approached a table, ready to play.
IT WAS THE DEADEST time of morning, before sunrise, when the street sweepers and garbage trucks had yet to emerge, and Daniel sat on a bench along the East River, wind blowing in an unsynced delay, hitting his face seconds after it rippled over his coat. At the beginning of the night, so many hours ago, when he left the restaurant, he’d had a hat, but lost it along the way. He’d lost the Carlough College essay as well, the one he had meant to deliver to Kay and Peter, though it was saved on his computer. He could e-mail it to them if he wanted.
He wanted breakfast, coffee, but was out of money. The men had been tougher than they looked. He’d known early on that he was in over his head, but kept playing despite their suppressed excitement. They thought he would lose so much he would break down, and they were waiting for the big show, his inevitable unraveling, but each loss felt like shucking off another weight and removing an uncomfortable article of clothing, so that by the end of the night he wasn’t crying but grinning. When he left, he heard one guy say to the other, “Wacko.”
He felt a savage euphoria. The night had confirmed his failures, and he’d freed himself from having to fight his inability to live up to Peter and Kay’s hopes. He didn’t want to go to Carlough, wasn’t ever going to be the kind of guy Angel respected, some law-school-applying moral citizen. God, it was great to be himself again.
From his bench he could see winking lights on the water and make out flashes of ships as they moved toward the ocean. He heard the distant bellows of boats, purple, low and soothing, nautical mating calls. This was where he used to come with his mother, walking from the Rutgers Street apartment, and once she had told him that when she was a little girl, she had loved going to the river in Minjiang. “We would watch how the waves went off into nothing and that was the place I wanted to go,” she said. “Far, far away.” He never asked her who we was.
The sky pinkened at its edges, white clouds marbleizing into pastels, and the night broke into patches. Daniel’s toes curled inside his boots. Well, she’d done it. She’d gone far away from him.
The sun tore the night into orange and yellow streaks. The river became blue and glassy. A wave of anger broke over him, and he wanted to talk to her, tell her how angry he was.
He dialed the number. The phone rang, but by the fifth ring he knew she wasn’t going to answer and he relaxed. The woman on the recorded voice mail message didn’t identify herself by name, but he recognized his mother immediately. Her voice was reedy and trumpety, yet her tones were clipped and plucked, a flawless-sounding Mandarin he didn’t remember her having before.
He left a message with his name and number. If she didn’t call him, it would be all the evidence he needed.
Nine
Daniel knew before they finished the first song that they would kill it, that he had arrived at the sweet spot when he was no longer conscious of being onstage. They had practiced plenty and he hadn’t drunk tonight, but the secret was more than that, it was believing in it, even if the songs were crappy and overwrought. At the end of the set he awoke to find himself onstage with Roland, covered in sweat, the room vibrating around him in sheets of violet and lavender, a roar of cheering and clapping.
When they returned to the floor, Daniel felt hands thump his back and shoulders. He heard voices he didn’t recognize. “Damn, you can play.” He followed Roland’s head through the crowd, stopping every few feet to be complimented by someone else. Roland caught his eye and grinned. Daniel was a prizefighter, surrounded by his entourage after a landing a KO. He’d scored a comeback. He’d fucking showed them.
At the bar, waiting for Javier and his band to go on, Daniel recognized Hutch, the Jupiter booker, in a beige canvas coat and faded dad jeans. Someone else intercepted Roland, and Hutch said to Daniel, “Didn’t think you had it in you after the last time.”
“I’m full of surprises.”
“I like what you guys did with the sound. Maybe the vocals and drums can be amped up even more. Push that distortion, up the reverb, you know.”
“We’ll see. Thanks.”
Roland’s friend Yasmin, of the theremin and melodica and strange, yowly songs, who always called him Darren or David, or one time, puzzlingly, Thomas, punched him in the arm and said, “Daniel, great job.”
“First time you got it right,” he said, smiling.