Loser Takes Al

“Not tomorrow. You see, according to my calculations the cycle of loss comes up tomorrow. Of course I’ll only use 1,000-franc tokens, so as to reduce the incident.”

“Then the day after…”

“That’s when I have to win back on double stakes. If you’ve finished your coffee it’s time for the ballet.”

“I’ve got a headache. I don’t want to go.”

“Of course you’ve got a headache eating nothing but rolls.”

“I ate nothing but rolls for three days and I never had a headache.” She got up from the table and said slowly, “But in those days I was in love.” I refused to quarrel and I went to the ballet alone.

I can’t remember which ballet it was—I don’t know that I could have remembered even the same night. My mind was occupied. I had to lose next day if I were to win the day after, otherwise my system was at fault. My whole stupendous run would prove to have been luck only—the kind of luck that presumably by the laws of chance turns up in so many centuries, just as those long-lived laborious monkeys who are set at typewriters eventually in the course of centuries produce the works of Shakespeare. The ballerina to me was hardly a woman so much as a ball spinning on the wheel: when she finished her final movement and came before the curtain alone it was as though she had come to rest triumphantly at zero and all the counters around her were shovelled away into the back—the two thousand francs from the cheap seats with the square tokens from the stalls, all jumbled together. I took a turn on the terrace to clear my head: this was where we had stood the first night watching together for the Seagull. I wished Cary had been with me and I nearly returned straight away to the hotel to give her all she asked. She was right: system or chance, who cared? We could catch a plane, extend our holiday: I had enough now to buy a partnership in some safe modest business without walls of glass and modern sculpture and a Gom on the eighth floor, and yet—it was like leaving a woman one loved untouched, untested, to go away and never know the truth of how the ball had come to rest in that particular order—the poetry of absolute chance or the determination of a closed system? I would be grateful for the poetry, but what pride I should feel if I proved the determinism.

The regiment was all assembled: strolling by the tables I felt like a commanding officer inspecting his unit. I would have liked to reprove the old lady for wearing the artificial daisies askew on her hat and to speak sharply to Mr Bowles for a lack of polish on his ear-appliance. A touch on my elbow and I handed out my 200 token to the lady who cadged. “Move more smartly to it,” I wanted to say to her, “the arm should be extended at full length and not bent at the elbow, and it’s time you did something about your hair.” They watched me pass with expressions of nervous regret, waiting for me to choose my table, and when I halted somebody rose and offered me a seat. But I had not come to win—I had come symbolically to make my first loss and go. So courteously I declined the seat, laid out a pattern of tokens and with a sense of triumph saw them shovelled away. Then I went back to the hotel.

Cary wasn’t there, and I was disappointed. I wanted to explain to her the importance of that symbolic loss, and instead I could only undress and climb between the humdrum sheets. I slept fitfully. I had grown used to Cary’s company, and I put on the light at one to see the time, and I was still alone. At half past two Cary woke me as she felt her way to bed in the dark.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“Walking,” she said.

“All by yourself?”

“No.” The space between the beds filled with her hostility, but I knew better than to strike the first blow—she was waiting for that advantage. I pretended to roll over and settle for sleep. After a long time she said, “We walked down to the Sea Club.”

“It’s closed.”

“We found a way in—it was very big and eerie in the dark with all the chairs stacked.”

“Quite an adventure. What did you do for light?”

“Oh, there was bright moonlight. Philippe told me all about his life.”

“I hope you unstacked a chair.”

“We sat on the floor.”

“If it was a madly interesting life tell it me. Otherwise it’s late and I have to be…”

““Up early for the Casino.” I don’t suppose you’d find it an interesting life. It was so simple, idyllic. And he told it with such intensity. He went to school at a lycée.”

“Most people do in France.”

“His parents died and he lived with his grandmother.”

“What about his grandfather?”

“He was dead too.”

“Senile mortality is very high in France.”

“He did military service for two years.”

I said, “It certainly seems a life of striking originality.”

“You can sneer and sneer,” she said.

“But, dear, I’ve said nothing.”

“Of course you wouldn’t be interested. You are never interested in anybody different from yourself, and he’s young and very poor. He feeds on coffee and rolls.”

“Poor fellow,” I said with genuine sympathy.

“You are so uninterested you don’t even ask his name.”