Pocket Kings (21 page)

Cynthia and I arrived at the Nirvana a day before the Artsy Painter Clan was to arrive, but I was already nervous. Cynthia noticed it, while she and I relaxed by one of the hotel's three enormous pools (she relaxed, I didn't), while we ate an enormous and only so-so seafood dinner, while we sat and played blackjack together in the evening and shot craps after that.

“So what's wrong?” she asked.

We were walking along the white sand beach.
Th
e moon was enormous, the sky was swimming with stars, the sea was silent. It was summer and midnight and 99 degrees.

“Nothing. Why?”

“Because something's wrong. I can tell.”

Ten years of marriage, three years of dating before that. She knew me well.

“I don't know . . . I just don't feel right.”

“It's that
Trilogy,
” she said, “isn't it?”

Okay, so maybe she didn't know me that well.

We went back to our room, which looked onto two of the Nirvana's pools and the Caribbean beyond. I'd lost $250 at blackjack and won it back at craps. It took three hours. A hell of a lot of work for not that much profit or loss.

So back in the room when Cynthia went to bed I turned on my laptop and logged on.

I played three hands in High and, after folding the first two, won two grand with the last.

Th
en I opened up an e-mail from Artsy Painter Gal.

“Hope to see you tomorrow,” it said. “I'm kissing you long and deep in the pool now under a cool waterfall pouring all over us. We're making the water steam.”

“What are you doing?” Wifey asked me groggily.

“You think the Muses,” I said, “stop singing to me just because we're on an island?
Th
ey have found, can find, and will find me anywhere.”

When I woke up the next morning I was so panic-stricken that I went to the bathroom, got on my knees and dry-heaved violently. In her Nirvana terry cloth robe and fluffy Nirvana slippers, Cynthia put a cold wet towel on my forehead. I clutched my belly and gagged up nothing but wave after wave of balmy air.

“It must have been that seafood,” Cynthia said. “I thought the tuna tasted gamy.”

APG and family wouldn't be arriving until seven that night, but throughout the day I kept looking at my watch every five minutes, which Cynthia noticed.

“Do you have to be somewhere?” she asked poolside.

“Oh, it's just a habit,” I said.

“A
habit?
You don't ever have to be anywhere anymore!”

I tried everything I could to ease my nerves: swimming in the pool, wading in the sea, walking on the beach, almost dying on one of the hotel fitness center's Stairmasters, drinking four margaritas. I went to the barber shop and got another short haircut (the
Martin Guerre
bangs were now officially all gone) . . . it seemed like I was in the chair three hours. In this glitzy tropical paradise, time, as the hotel's Web site guaranteed, did not stand still—it moved backward. When at one point Cynthia suggested, “Maybe you should go upstairs and write,” I couldn't even eke out a grunt.

“Let's try the water slide?” she suggested. “
Th
at might be fun.”

Wifey and I arose from our poolside chairs, now drenched with a tangy blend of sweat, suntan lotion, and tequila, and walked to the top of the slide, where we deftly cut in front of a few kids. Cynthia went first, then it was my turn. I slithered down and made a large loud splash when I hit the water. It was fun and for ten seconds I forgot that in a few hours my online poker-playin' mistress would be somewhere on the premises, then suddenly I was confronted by one of the hotel's lifeguards, a dark Adonis in a yellow bathing suit not much larger than a Band-aid, who told me, “Sir, I don't think you should be using the water slide.” My impact had created too large a splash.

We ate dinner at six o'clock at one of the Nirvana's fifteen restaurants.
Th
e menu informed us the beef was Black Angus and was aged for so many days, that the lobsters were flown in live from Maine, and that all the produce was local. (Unless they were growing lettuce on the roofs of the hotel, that didn't seem possible.) Cynthia had salad and prime rib, a baked potato and string beans, I didn't touch whatever it was I ordered.

I was too scared to go into the casino that night. APG might be there. I was scared to leave the room, but when Wifey suggested another walk on the beach I went.
Th
e water was warm but my bare feet stayed cold. Walking back to the hotel—all 5,800 rooms—I saw room lights twinkling in Tower 1 and wondered if one them was APG's.

When we got back into the hotel complex—the lobby alone is three acres—Wifey asked if I wanted to go to the casino and I said no.
Th
ere was a good chance, I knew, that Artsy might be there. “We'll spot each other,” she had written me, “at one of the pools or in the casino.”

So I didn't see APG that night.

But we did have contact. She had brought her laptop, too. At 1 a.m., while Wifey slept and hugged a Nirvana pillow (it was the size of Santa's toy sack for a family of five), I logged on to the Galaxy.
Th
ere she was, in a room at a table by herself. Her avatar presently was the Jayne Mansfield/Lady Godiva blonde; I occupied the body of the suave James Bond dude.

Artsy Painter Gal:
I have attained Nirvana. You're here too, right?

Chip Zero:
I'm here.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Tower 1?

Chip Zero:
Tower 1.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Room #? You must tell me or die, Mr. Bond!!

Chip Zero:
1022. You?

Artsy Painter Gal:
OMG.

Th
ere was a thud right over my head.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Th
at was my suitcase! We're in 1122! I'm on top of you, baby. Hope it feels good. So tomorrow, okay?

Chip Zero:
Okay (gulp).

Again we kept it vague: one of the pools, the casino, a bar, a restaurant. She tried to pin me down to an exact place at an exact time but I refused to commit.

Th
e next day I was even more of a wreck. Every time a new person arrived at the pool my stomach went sour. Half of the people at the pool were women, two thirds of those were with men, a third of those were with kids. APG had salt-and-pepper hair, she'd told me—“a lot more pepper than salt”—and these days no more resembled a young Joan Collins than I did. “But I'm still in pretty decent shape for my age,” she added. She had told me she'd wear a shiny red maillot on the first day at the pool.
Th
inking it would be suspicious to ask Wife out of the blue, “Hey, what's a maillot look like?” I found a few examples online. On APG's first full day, there were eight women in red maillots at the pool, four with what could be construed as salt and pepper hair . . . but none that could be said to be in “pretty decent shape” for their ages.

I couldn't eat yet couldn't keep anything down.
Th
is time my heaving wasn't dry.

Maybe I was throwing up Cynthia's prime ribs and string beans vicariously.

“Should we go back home?” Wifey offered. We could end the trip and catch an earlier flight, she suggested. I shook my head and told her I'd gut it out.

In the late afternoon, while Wifey was at the spa getting an oatmeal and aloe-vera enema and having her eyebrows reorganized, I logged on to the Galaxy. APG wasn't on but I saw a new player named Hibernian Hottie sitting by herself and playing as the slinky Dragon Lady. I played a hand and she began talking to me. I lost, on purpose, then won the next. Hibernian told me, “I'm so hot that if you saw me your screen would melt.” I won, she won, we folded a few hands, I won, she told me she was playing with her enormous tits. I said, “Oh, okay,” then she said: “You turd! It's me! Second Gunman! I've been playing as a woman for 3 days and I've been cleaning up too!” I told him, “I'm gonna kill you, you transvestite arsehole!” and he said, “Well, you're gonna get the chance to cuz I'm coming to New York in a few weeks.”

“You are?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

I didn't know how I felt about that.
Th
ese fake people whose real money I was taking and was spending all my time with were actually real people, but maybe it was better if they weren't.

After dinner that night—I forced myself to eat a quarter of a hamburger—and after chasing a Xanax with a double-shot of Pepto-Bismol, I went down to the casino. “I'll be wearing,” APG had e-mailed me, “a tight black dress and red do-me pumps.”

I played blackjack—sitting down concealed my burgeoning paunch better than standing at a dice table—and after two hours broke even. How, I don't know . . . I wasn't paying attention.
Th
ere were too many women in black dresses and red pumps to count, but I did tally ten women with salt-and-pepper hair in black dresses and red pumps that could be construed as “do-me.” Of those ten, a mere three could be said to be in decent shape for their ages. Two of them were no taller than five foot three—“I'm five-eight,” APG had told me—and the other one's hair was straight and almost fell to her waist. “My hair is shoulder-length and wavy,” APG had said.

I gave up at ten that night and went back to the room and suffered the worst stomach cramps and case of nerves I've ever experienced. Trembling hands, sweat all over, cotton mouth, throbbing temples, the whole bit. If a panic attack means breathing rapidly and going in and out of consciousness, then I was having one . . . on the bathroom floor.

“I'm sure,” Wifey said, “the hotel has a doctor.”

She looked at me with such genuine concern that I wanted to never meet Artsy or talk to her again. Nobody ever liked me this much. What was I doing?

“I couldn't make it to the casino tonight, damn it,” APG IM'ed me that night.

(Had my e-mistress and I, I briefly suspected, come all this way just to narrowly avoid meeting me each other?)

“No problem,” I IM'ed back. “RLO. Wifey here. Gotta go!”

Knowing the coast was momentarily clear I took an elevator downstairs, ran to the steakhouse and wolfed down two New York strip steaks, an order of fries, a baked potato, and two pieces of cheesecake in fifteen minutes, and made it back upstairs and quickly fell asleep.

On the third day I was so self-conscious that I wore a shirt by the pool. At some point I
had
to make contact with Artsy and time was running out.

“Why are you wearing that thing?” Cynthia asked me by the pool.

“I don't want to burn,” I told her.

“But long sleeves?”

I stayed at the pool from ten until five. I also kept a robe over the chaise longue, for added protection from APG's disillusionment. My shirt still on, I peed in the pool three times.

I didn't go to the casino that evening. On the thirtieth floor of Tower 2, the hotel has a spa, unforgivably named Nirvanspa—there are hospitals in medium-sized towns that aren't as large—and it's open twenty-four hours a day. Manmade waterfalls and hissing pools and the bubbly drone of New Age Music, everything saffron yellow, terra cotta, brilliant turquoise.
Th
at night, I got a Shiatsu massage at seven, a Swedish massage at nine, a hot-lava-stone and aroma-therapy combo at eleven. It didn't help me relax.

An hour after I returned to my room, so dehydrated and manhandled that I looked like a peach pit, Artsy Painter Gal told me, live on the Galaxy, that she had spent the day with her daughters on the beach and shopping at the hotel's complex of 150 shops. Meanwhile Mr. APG, the Rugged Beachy Type, had hang-glided, jet-skied, and parasailed . . . but that goes without saying. (Had a great white shark attacked a young girl, he no doubt would have swam out and killed the evil beast with his bare hands.) Artsy had also visited the casino and gone on an extended futile Chip Zero hunt and won $250 at roulette.

“I'm going to be at one of the pools all day tomorrow,” she said. “I may be alone. FIND ME OR ELSE, Big Blond Boy!” She would be back in the shiny red maillot, she told me.

Tomorrow was my last day. I had to find her.

Okay, let us act as if this hard-hitting, pull-no-punches, take-no-prisoners memoir is a movie on DVD. I'm going to press the
PAUSE
button here for you.

If anyone were to play Cynthia/Wifey in the movie version of this Caribbean getaway, it would not be, despite what she would tell you, Ava Gardner in her delicious prime—for Cynthia just isn't nearly that beautiful (oh,
your
wife is?)—but Ava Gardner's body double's body double. Wavy black hair, dark olive skin, bright green eyes. As Gérard Depardieu's French accent is too thick for him to pass for a native Jersey Boy, James Gandolfini, circa Season One of
Th
e Sopranos,
gets the role of me without an audition (he would need to don a rug, however). Although the Joan Collins of
Land of the Pharaohs
and
Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?
might play the younger Artsy Painter Gal/Victoria Landreth in some sexy flashbacks, the adult role would have to go to Liz Taylor right when she was on the wane, post–
Th
e Sandpiper,
in her
Boom
and
Th
e Only Game in Town
days.
Th
e part of Mr. Artsy Painter Gal goes to one person and one person only or this movie doesn't get made: George Clooney.

I'll press the
PLAY
button now and the action resumes.

It is the next day, my final full day at the Nirvana. I wake up, after three hours of card-haunted sleep, knowing that today Artsy and I will meet,
must
meet. Cynthia hasn't slept that much either: my ragged nerves seem to be contagious and she is on edge and the bags under my eyes are also under hers. Even during our breakfast (Jacks and 2s, Bet Midler, Stuey Hunger, $50) on the patio, which I charge to the room, she's biting her nails and shaking her legs as she sips her Bloody Mary. I'm looking around for APG and family, but they don't seem to be there.