The Cardturner (16 page)

Now she was the one who hesitated. After a long pause, she finally said, "You didn't miss much."

"Was Katie there?" I asked.

"Who?"

I repeated Katie's name, although Toni's "Who?" had pretty much answered that question.

"There were a lot of people there," she said. "I'm not good at names. Why?" she asked in a teasing, gossipy sort of voice. "Is she someone you
like
?"

I hesitated.

"You don't have to answer that," she said.

"It's complicated," I said.

We hung up shortly thereafter. She apologized for waking me, and I told her I'd been just about to get up anyway.

When Katie and I were still together, she used to ask me those kinds of questions about Cliff too.
What's with your friend Cliff? I don't think he likes me very much. What does he say about me? He hates me, doesn't he?

I remained sitting up in my bed, trying to decide if I should call Cliff. Who was I kidding? I knew I'd call him, and I knew the call would depress me.

I dialed his number.

"Hey, Alton," he answered.

"So how was Gilliam's party?"

"Oh, kind of a dud."

"So, did you go with Katie?" I asked.

"No, I think things are kind of ratcheting down between Katie and me. Your bridge friend was there, what's her name, Toni?"

As if he didn't know her name!

"There's nothing going on between you two, right?" he asked.

"No," I admitted.

"So, since you're not interested in her, she's free?"

Did you notice that I never said I wasn't interested in her? Still, who was I to say she wasn't free?

"Did you and Toni hook up?" I asked.

"Oh, you know how it is, everyone dancing."

"So, you danced with her?"

"No, she didn't want to dance. We just talked, and maybe kissed a little." Cliff gave a short laugh, then said, "She's cray-zee!"

Toni had no reason to be worried. Cliff made "crazy" sound like a good thing.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Oh, you know, just the way she— Okay, here's something. Gilliam's parents own a karaoke machine, only their taste in music is pretty lame."

"Were his parents there?" I asked.

"No, but it was their karaoke machine. So we're all trying to find some song somebody might have heard of. Then suddenly Toni just gets up, turns on the machine, and just starts singing this old-time song. It was like she stepped out of a time machine."

"What was the song?" I asked.

"I don't know! Nobody had ever heard it before. Something about a bird. That's not the point."

"‘Bye Bye Blackbird'?" I asked.

There was a long hesitation on the other end. "How did you know?"

I don't know how I knew. I was still trying to figure out how two people could
maybe
kiss.

36
Synchronicity

I looked it up on the Internet. "Bye Bye Blackbird" is a song from 1926.

I had gone my entire life without hearing it, and then on the same night that Gloria and Trapp sang it to me on the car ride home, Toni sang it at a party, quite possibly at the very same time.

Trapp had a word for that:
synchronicity,
he called it. "It's when two related things occur without any apparent cause-and-effect."

We were driving to the bridge studio, and I told him about the coincidence, leaving out the part about Cliff and Toni
maybe
kissing.

He said that synchronicity was different from a mere coincidence. With synchronicity you feel that there's a definite connection. You just don't know what that connection is.

I was reminded of something that had happened to me the year before, quite possibly another moment of synchronicity. I had never told anyone about it, not even Cliff, because it was really no big deal, although it did feel like a big deal at the time.

There was a kid I knew in third grade named Doug Bridges. He lived down the street from us. He only lived there for about a year; then his family moved away.

He was one of those people you know for a short while and then forget about. I hadn't thought about him since the third grade, but then, one day last year, I don't know why, I suddenly thought about him. I had a very vivid memory of my third-grade class going on a field trip to a bakery. Before we got on the bus, our teacher had us pair off. She told everyone to choose a buddy.

Cliff and I were best friends even then, but I noticed Doug, the new kid, standing sadly alone, so I asked Doug to be my buddy. I remembered everyone in my class was given a freshly baked cookie at the bakery. Seven years later, when I suddenly found myself thinking about this incident, my memory was so strong I could smell the bakery and taste the cookie.

That's it. No big deal. I had this memory flash, and most likely would have forgotten all about it, but the next day, my father asked me if I remembered Doug Bridges, who used to live on our street. "He was killed in an automobile accident yesterday."

"Are you certain you didn't remember the bakery incident
after
you'd heard he had died?" Trapp asked me.

I was sure. That's why it had seemed so weird.

"Synchronicity," he agreed. "But just because there is no apparent cause-and-effect, it doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. We simply may be unable to perceive or comprehend the connection."

"Like when Captain listens to the radio," I said.

"Hah!" he laughed, then said, "Exactly so."

"What about the fact that his last name was Bridges?" I asked.

"What about it?"

"And now I'm taking you to play bridge?"

He said that was a meaningless coincidence. For there to be synchronicity, it must feel like there's some sort of connection just beyond your grasp. "Perhaps," he suggested, "Doug Bridges at the instant of his death somehow thanked all the people who had been kind to him over his lifetime, by reminding them of their good deeds."

I smiled. That was a nice idea, anyway.

Trapp then told me about an incidence of synchronicity that had happened to him more than fifty years ago, when he was in his early twenties. One night, he and a group of friends had been staying up late, "drinking cheap wine, as we contemplated our future."

He had thought of something he had read in a book. "About how the character traits we admire—kindness, generosity, honesty—all lead to failure. And the character traits we supposedly abhor—greed and selfishness and the like—are the character traits of successful people."

He had tried to repeat the quote to his friends, but it didn't come out right. He couldn't quite remember it. He also couldn't remember where he had read it.

It was still bugging him the next day. "I was searching through my bookcases and all my boxes of books, hoping that if I saw the title it would jar my memory, when suddenly the phone rang, interrupting my search. The call was from a woman I hardly knew, someone who had never called me before. She wanted to know if I owned a copy of
Cannery Row,
by John Steinbeck, and if so, could she borrow it?"

I felt a chill. I already knew what was coming next.

"
Cannery Row
was the book I had been trying to remember."

"And she just called out the blue?" I asked. "Had you ever mentioned the book to her?"

"No. I'd played against her a few times at bridge tournaments. That was it. Her name was Annabel King. Her husband was a senator. He had taken the book from her, because he thought Steinbeck was a Communist."

Trapp had brought his copy of
Cannery Row
to the next tournament, where he and Annabel King agreed to play as partners.

37
Trapp's Closest Living Relatives

The game didn't go too well. I'm back to Trapp and Gloria now, not Trapp and Annabel. Trapp and Annabel won the first time they played together, but on this particular Monday, Trapp and Gloria just barely broke 50 percent.

"I shouldn't have played so soon after the tournament," Trapp said to her after we finished. "I'm still worn out."

Gloria said it had nothing to do with how he had played. "It was just one of those days where the opponents made all the right decisions, and there was nothing we could do about it."

Maybe. It was hard for me to tell if what Gloria said was true, or if she was just being nice. Still, Trapp canceled the rest of his games for the next week and a half. He wanted to rest up for the regional tournament.

I'd be taking him and Gloria there a week from Wednesday. They would play in something called a knockout, which would be an even greater test of his ability and his endurance. It would be a two-day, four-session event, and they'd be competing against only the top players at the tournament.

A knockout is a team event, with four people on each team. I didn't quite understand how that would work. Two old friends would be flying in from Connecticut to join them. I also found out that the regional would be held in a fancy hotel, where we would spend the night, and I'd get to order room service.

Toni called me that night. "Since Trapp won't be playing Thursday, do you want to play with me?"

"You mean bridge?" I asked.

"No, hopscotch."

I knew what she meant, of course. I was just stalling as I tried to figure out how playing bridge with Toni would fit in with me and Cliff, and Cliff and Toni, not to mention Cliff and Katie.

"At the studio?" I asked.

"That's the place," she said.

"Those people there are experts," I pointed out. "I barely know how to bid."

She said she'd e-mail me some simple bidding rules. "C'mon, what's the worst that can happen?"

I agreed to play. I suppose I knew I would the second she asked me. Still, I wondered if I should call Cliff first and get his okay.

Toni's so-called simple bidding rules arrived on my computer the next day. There were eleven pages, single-spaced. Leslie helped me study. We dealt out bridge hands and then figured out how each person would bid, pretending we didn't know which cards were in each of the other hands. We would then play the hands too, to see if we could make our contract.

In my daydreams, I dazzled Toni with my superb bidding and brilliant card play, but my daydreams never went any further than that. I couldn't let them. I was still pretending to myself that I was only interested in bridge, not Toni.

I never called Cliff. I told myself it wasn't necessary, because Toni had probably told him she'd be playing bridge with me. And if she hadn't told him, why should I?

There was something else, too, that kept me from letting my daydreams go too far. It was something that I'd been wondering about for a while, and maybe you have been too.

Were Toni and I cousins? In other words, was Trapp her grandfather? Or, to be more blunt, when Trapp was a young man, did he have sex with Annabel King, the senator's wife, his own wife's sister?

It would explain a lot, like why Trapp's marriage didn't last, and why he was so close to Sophie Castaneda. She was his daughter. It also might have something to do with Annabel going insane.

And so much for my family's being his closest living relatives.

38
Thank You, Partner

I felt energized as I drove to the bridge studio on Thursday. After having turned Trapp's cards for him week after week, hand after hand, card after card, I was excited about getting to turn my own cards for a change. I was also nervous.

I tried to calm myself down as I walked up the concrete stairs of building two. I took a deep breath, then opened the door to the bridge studio.

From across the room, Toni smiled and waved at me. I don't think there's anything better than seeing a pretty girl smile and wave at you, the way her face lights up when she catches your eye. I casually waved back, then made my way to table ten, where she was sitting.

"Hello, partner," she brightly greeted me. "I chose East-West, so we wouldn't have to keep score. I hope that's okay."

"That's fine," I said, sitting across from her, in the East seat.

I told her I'd learned all the rules she sent me. "Leslie helped me study."

"They're not rules," said Toni. "They're guidelines. It's not about memorizing rules. You have to think.
What is my partner trying to tell me? What information does my partner need from me?
We have to let each other know what we've got, so we can figure out what the trump suit should be, and whether we should bid game, or even slam."

"I'm not bidding slam," I said.

"You might," she said. "If it's right."

"I'm not bidding slam," I repeated.

She smiled, then said, "Too bad Trapp doesn't know Leslie. He'd love her."

The director announced we would play nine rounds, three boards per round. "Shuffle and play."

We started with boards twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and thirty. I dealt board thirty, and somehow couldn't seem to give everyone thirteen cards. I had to deal it three times. Then, when I removed my hand from board twenty-eight, I dropped two cards on the table, the king and ten of hearts. You would have thought I'd never done this before.

Technically, our opponents were supposed to call for the director, but the man sitting South told me to just put them back in my hand and not to worry about it. "Pretend you never saw them," he told Toni.

"I'm not used to sitting East," I said. "I usually sit South."

As if that made a difference.

The woman sitting in the North seat told me that the first time she played duplicate bridge, she was so nervous her entire hand just exploded onto the table.

"The day's still young," I said, and everyone laughed.

This was my first hand: