A Handbook to Luck (10 page)

The restaurant was in a mini-mall on Olympic Boulevard. It looked no different than dozens of other eateries along this stretch. Marta studied the signs in Korean. She liked the angularity of the script, how each word appeared well built, like a brick house. The Spanish alphabet didn't look nearly as sturdy. It was getting dark and the sky was a plague of purples and oranges. The sunsets here were nothing like the ones in El Salvador. Back home, the air wasn't dirty enough for such chemical razzle-dazzle.

Frankie was waiting for her in a back booth, grinning widely. He stood up and invited her to sit down. Marta realized with a start that she'd never seen her boss smile. At the factory, he was all business. Still, his teeth looked too perfect to be anything but dentures.

There was a charcoal grill built right into their table. It was made of the hardwood that repelled termites. The waiter kindled the coals with a flick of his plastic lighter, then served them two bowls of pickled cabbage that tasted like
curtido de repollo.

“Are you so unhappy working for me?” Frankie asked, pouring Marta a glass of unstrained rice wine.

“
We
could be happier,” she said, deliberately including the rest of her coworkers. The drink was thick and bitter tasting. “Please, I prefer a Coke.”

Frankie called over the waiter. Marta liked the sound of their Korean. She felt an urge to imitate it, to slide her own vowels up and down the same slippery slope. A moment later, her drink arrived with a dozen little dishes. Marta tried the soybean-paste soup with baby clams first. Everything was hot and spicy. A whole meal of this and she would surely need to call the fire department.

Frankie showed her how to hold the chopsticks and complimented Marta on her dexterity. Then he topped off her rice bowl with choice bits of meat.

“Why did you leave your country?” he asked.

His stare made her uncomfortable, as if he could read her mind. Marta had heard that there were people who could do this without your knowing.

“I've told you already. Why are you asking me again?” The heat from the grill was suffocating.

“Did something bad happen to you?”

“No,” she said firmly.

“Then why don't you have children?” Frankie persisted, his mouth filled with marinated beef.

Marta's eyes watered against her will. “That's none of your business.”

The smoke momentarily obscured Frankie's face. He put down his chopsticks and leaned toward her. His face was flushed from the wine and the heat. It looked like a lantern, one of the old-fashioned kinds lit with oil. “Then please allow me tell you a story.”

Marta settled back and drank her Coke. Frankie said that he'd grown up on a buckwheat farm, working side-by-side with his parents in the fields. He was a good student, and eventually enrolled at the University of Seoul. There he befriended many writers and poets and fancied himself a writer, though he never wrote more than a few rhymed verses. He told her all this slowly, deliberately, as if he'd been rehearsing it for a long time.

Then, to Marta's surprise, Frankie wiped his mouth with a napkin and recited: “‘I'll go back to heaven again with the dusk, together, just we two at a sign from the cloud.' My best friend wrote that. He was killed by the secret police. They thought he was a Communist spy.”

Marta wasn't sure what to think. If this was a ploy for her sympathy, she wouldn't give in. Poem or no poem, she needed to stay strong for the women at the factory.

Frankie recounted how the police then went after everyone in the poet's address book, how they tortured him for seven months in the basement of their headquarters, using water and electric shocks.

“For this reason,” he continued. “I could not have children. So perhaps we're not so different, after all.” The sorrow rose off his skin like steam.

“But you have a daughter in Korea,” Marta asserted. She'd heard this from the factory accountant, who wired money to his wife and child on the first of every month. Marta wasn't going to let him get away with lying to her.

“Yes, she's my wife's daughter from her first marriage. They came with me to Los Angeles, but they didn't stay. In less than a year they returned to Seoul. Me, I cannot return home anymore.”

Marta felt sorry for Frankie. She didn't want to; there was still so much to complain about. The women were counting on her to get them a raise, to secure at least a nickel more per piecework. At the end of the week, the coins added up. But Marta didn't have the heart to bring up business just then. She filled a pancake with strips of meat and asparagus and ate it, taco style. It was delicious, not as hot as the baby clams, and she asked for some lime on the side. Frankie ordered more rice wine.

“I know you're saving money to bring your brother here.”

“Who told you?” Marta didn't like the idea of him spying on her. Had Dinora been indiscreet? But it was true. She had nearly a thousand dollars saved for Evaristo's passage. She would need another thousand for a first-rate
coyote.
There could be no risks. Evaristo was fragile, shaken by everything he'd seen. After last year's earthquake had knocked him from his tree, he was barely hanging on.

Frankie reached into his pocket and pulled out a canvas wallet. He counted out ten one-hundred-dollar bills and slid them to Marta's side of the table. She stared at the money. Why was he giving this to her?

“To help you with your brother.”

“No, I can't take it.” Marta thought how easy it would be to slip the money into her purse, arrange for Evaristo to join her. It was unthinkable that they'd been apart for three long years. How the devil knew her weakness! Her hands felt swollen with temptation, like stuffed gloves. Was this where her life was pointing? To this Korean
viejito
from half a world away? Tomorrow she would consult Dinora again, ask her to burn candles on her behalf.

“Where do things that don't yet exist wait to be born?” Frankie asked her.

“Excuse me?”

“How long have I known you?”

“Not that long, maybe a year and a half.” Marta ate another stuffed pancake; it had grown lukewarm on her plate. She noticed the diamonds on Frankie's ring. Were they fake, too, like his teeth?

“You're a good woman. I think we can grow old together.”

“You're already old,” Marta snapped. If he was looking for a mistress, he could just forget about it.

“Not so old,” he defended himself.

“How old?” she challenged. “Tell the truth.”

“Forty-two,” Frankie said without hesitating. Then he started to laugh.

Marta looked over at her boss—at the faded chestnut brown of his eyes, at his shoe-polish hair and the liver spots speckling his manicured hands—and she couldn't help laughing, too.

Enrique Florit

I
t was the Friday after Thanksgiving, the biggest gambling day of the year, and Enrique was playing poker at the Diamond Pin. Las Vegas was filled with out-of-towners, hometown champs ready to pit their skills against the pros. Enrique looked around his table at the other players and recognized nobody. This was a good sign. He hoped to quickly dispatch with their money and move on to games with bigger stakes. That was where the real fun was, not grinding it out with these weekenders. It was just past four o'clock. There was still plenty of time.

Across from him, wobbly as a sunflower, a long-necked man wore padded yellow gloves and sunglasses, trying to hide his tells. To Enrique's left was a guy in a maroon suit with velvet lapels and to his right, a woman sporting a felt hat and a rosy, ravaged face. The woman said that she was an orthodontist from Oregon and referred to her poker chips, ridiculously, as ching-chang.

Enrique entertained himself by thinking of the two and a half million possible five-card hands in a deck of cards. But it didn't relieve the depressing poker being played today. His tablemates called every raise, played mediocre hands, lost a few hundred bucks, then raced across the casino to try to recoup their losses at blackjack or craps. They didn't have a clue about the game. Most aggravating was when these two-bit players got lucky and mistook it for skill. But as Jim Gumbel liked to say, it was the little people who kept the poker economy running.

Gumbel was at the edge of the action, talking with his partner, who had a fat plug of tobacco in his cheek. Lately, tax auditors had been coming around to the Diamond Pin and there was talk of it closing. Gumbel calmly dispelled the rumors. Enrique wasn't too worried either. After all, the man was a former outlaw in Texas (a copy of the 1952
WANTED
poster hung in his office) and it hadn't stopped him any. Gumbel wasted no time in pointless deliberations. If it wasn't about poker, it didn't interest him.

Enrique decided to skip the next game and get something to eat. He was up three thousand dollars and would need a lot more than that for school. He'd been accepted to MIT but Papi had begged him to defer for a year, and so Enrique gambled a little and taught math classes at the community college instead.
Why do you want to go bury yourself in the snow, hijo? You're a smart boy. Whatever you would learn there, you could learn just as easily right here with me.
One year had stretched to three—mostly because he had to keep bailing his father out of one financial disaster after another—and he still didn't have enough money to break away.

At the Diamond Pin coffee shop, Enrique was settling down to lunch when a commotion broke out at the craps tables. Someone had hit a hot streak and a crowd was gathering around. Enrique got a glimpse of the lucky woman. She was stunning, unlike anyone he'd ever seen. And he saw his fair share of beauties in Las Vegas. A chant went up around her: Lei-la! Lei-la! Lei-la!

Enrique wandered over and watched her from a distance. The woman was petite and caramel-skinned, flawless from every angle, with a halo of loose, lustrous hair. She wore tight jeans, a beige cashmere sweater, and dangling earrings. He tried to decipher her accent but he couldn't place it. Normally, Enrique didn't go near the craps tables. The game was no better than roulette. Pure chance and zero skill. Craps players, for all their talk of “systems,” simply got lucky, or not.

Leila rode her luck another ten minutes before the dice turned against her. Enrique joined the crowd that was rallying to keep her going. Everyone was feeling the heat. Only he remained silent. Enrique wanted to tell this Leila to stop and cash in her chips, but he knew it was useless. She was going down. It was like watching a pearl dissolve before his eyes.

“Gambling is a branch of mathematics,” Enrique ventured as she walked away from the craps table. “Every time you doubled your bet you were doubling the casino's advantage.”

“Thanks for the advice, but it's a little late.” Leila headed over to a slot machine and thrust in a quarter. No luck. She followed with more quarters in rapid succession.

“I don't know if you've noticed, but these aren't fair random generators. Slot machines are programmed for one purpose only: to make profits for the casinos. I should know. I helped design them.”

This got her attention, but Leila only put her hands on her hips and turned away. Enrique noticed how her cashmere sweater clung to her breasts like a second skin.

“Look, play the minimum limits until you get ahead, then cash out and move to another slot,” he said, trying hard not to stare at her. “Your chances of hitting a higher prize will increase.”

Enrique went to the cashier and returned with fifty rolls of quarters in a bucket. “Let's get started.”

“Why are you doing this?” Leila demanded.

“Whose money is in the bucket?” Enrique could tell she was growing intrigued. All those years of playing poker—of reading faces, the betraying twitch of muscle—were paying off.

“Are you in, then?”

Twenty minutes later, Leila was eight hundred dollars richer.

“So what do you play?” she asked. A wild garden smell drifted off her hair.

“Poker.”

“Do you ever get lucky?”

“Sometimes. But the point is to become skilled enough so that luck is less important. Poker's a lot more like race-car driving than gambling.” Enrique remembered what Johnny Langston used to tell him: Forget the money in the pot, boy. It's not yours anymore. What you gotta ask yourself is this: Are the odds in my favor? Then don't let anything stop you.

“So what are the odds of me buying you lunch?” Enrique asked.

“About a thousand to one.”

He laughed. “What if I throw in a magic trick?”

“Your odds are improving, but only slightly.”

“And a tour of Las Vegas?”

“Let's start with the trick,” she said, bemused.

Enrique stopped to think for a minute. What would his father do? “Don't go away.” He dashed into the coffee shop, ordered a cup of tea, and brought it back to Leila on the casino floor.

“Sugar?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He sprinkled two packets into the steaming tea. “Taste it. Make sure it's not too sweet.” The cup rattled against the saucer as he offered it to her.

She took a sip and handed it back.

Enrique swirled the tea slowly, holding the cup in both hands, and muttered a few lines of José Martí:
“¡Ve!—que las seis estrellas luminosas te seguirán y te guiarán, y ayuda a tus hombros darán cuantos hubieran bebido el vino amargo de la vida!”
Then he turned the tea in the cup into quarters.

“How did you do that?” Leila was astonished.

“For you.” Enrique grinned and poured the quarters into her hands. For once, being a magician's son had come in handy. “Now can we have lunch?”

Leila yielded without saying a word.

“Fried eggs and toast,” she told the waitress in the checkered apron, who inspected her closely.

“Over easy?”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“Grilled cheese and tomato.”

“Again?”

“What the hell.” Enrique waved her away.

The set of Leila's back stiffened and she leaned forward, as if about to take flight. Enrique thought of inviting her to Papi's early show at the Stardust. He had a new trick, in which he turned volunteers from the audience into a flock of geese. Instead Enrique told her about another poker player making the rounds, a cherubic fur trader from Saskatchewan whom everyone called the Fatal Angel on account of his gimmicky toga and deadpan stare.

“Did you see how that old crone was checking me out?” Leila interrupted. Her hands traced the air with fine gestures. “I get so sick of this. Sometimes I pretend to be an Indian to avoid the stupid questions.”

“What questions?” Enrique loved the dark registers of her voice.

“About the Ayatollah. Or didn't you know he's declared you the number one enemy of Iran?”

“Me personally?” he joked, but she wasn't amused.

The waitress reappeared with their orders. Leila aggressively dipped her toast into an egg yolk, ignoring the charred bacon she hadn't ordered. One of her aunts, she said, had cured her husband's wrenched neck with applications of dried bread and egg yolk. Her Aunt Parvin had a remedy for everything: migraines, joint pain, gallstones, double vision. She was not beneath using leeches or cupping glasses when she deemed it necessary.

“Some people believe anything can be fixed,” Leila said. “It's a mechanical view of life, don't you think?”

Before Enrique could answer, Leila dropped her bread in disgust. She said that neither the toast nor the egg had any specific taste, a taste that said, This is an egg, this is a piece of bread. “In Iran, bread is baked in a hole in the ground, ten feet deep, and it's shaped like a big, flat cake. It speaks, it shouts: I am bread!”

“Are you homesick?”

“Pah!” Leila was embarrassed. “How important is bread, anyway?”

Enrique took a bite of his grilled cheese. It was already cold and congealing to plastic. He wanted to say that he understood her perfectly. The smallest details—a Spanish street name, the taste of pineapple jam—could catapult him back to a life that no longer existed.

“Where do you pretend to be from?”

“An Arctic tribe called the Pedersags. In Farsi it means ‘Your father's a dog.'”

“I should be flattered that you didn't try that on me,” Enrique laughed.

“Yes,” Leila said, staring right at him. “You should be.”

Enrique got so flustered that he went on about some nature program he'd watched on Alaskan otters during one of the many nights he couldn't sleep, thinking about how he was wasting his life away. In the show, the otters floated on their backs leisurely cracking clams on their stomachs. What if everyone could be that self-contained?

“Your hair, it's beautiful,” he practically shouted.

Leila scrutinized his fringed suede jacket and his western shirt with the mother-of-pearl buttons, which were his finest clothes. Then she looked down at his pressed jeans and rattlesnake-skin boots. She probably thought he was some kind of cowboy. Did she like what she saw? Enrique couldn't tell. His senses were in disarray under her gaze.

“Where are you from?” Leila asked, breaking the spell.

“Cuba. I'm from Cuba.”

Then, for no particular reason, Enrique told her about the time he was three years old and jumped out the second-story window of his grandparents' house in Cárdenas, determined to fly. Word of the “miracle” spread and the whole neighborhood crowded into his grandparents' kitchen. Tía Adela predicted that Enrique would become the next pope. “
¡Imagínate!
A Cuban pope!” That same year, his aunt was forced to fight in the Bay of Pigs and got shrapnel in her stomach that lurched north like a compass after every meal.

“Do you ever wish you'd stayed?” Leila asked.

“Sometimes. But I'd probably be off fighting in Angola or someplace.” Enrique felt his throat swelling up. “So where do you live?”

“Los Angeles.”

“I lived in Santa Monica when I was a kid. What keeps you there?”

“School.” Leila hesitated. “And my fiancé. We're getting married in two weeks.”

Enrique tracked the rapid descent of his heart. “You're engaged?”

“We leave for Tehran next Friday. Hundreds of people are coming to the wedding. Relatives I didn't even know I had.”

“What brought you here then?”

“I guess you could say I was testing my luck.”

“And?” Enrique winced, anticipating more pain.

“So far, so good.”

Coño,
she was making him crazy. What kind of chance did he have with her? The same principles applied in love and poker, Enrique reminded himself, or so his Texan friends claimed.
When in doubt, opt for the bolder approach.

“May I invite you to dinner?”

“We haven't even finished lunch,” Leila teased him.

“The International Ballroom Competition is on at the Tropicana tonight. Do you dance?” He had to think of something to keep her near.

“Will you be performing?”

“I will if you come.” Enrique issued a pleading smile.

“What's your specialty?”

“The maxixe. It's a Brazilian two-step. Not too many people know about it outside Rio. Actually, my father is competing. He's a hell of a dancer. I'd love for you to meet him.”

“Meet him or dance with him?”

“There usually isn't much difference.”

“I'd like to go, but I need to get home. My fiancé will worry.”

“He didn't mind you coming to Las Vegas?” Enrique figured things couldn't be that great between them if she was here by herself.

“We made a deal,” Leila said.

“Don't ask, don't tell?”

“Sort of. But he's still expecting me back tonight.”

“Fear makes no exceptions then.”

“What?”

“Let me take you.”

“To L.A.?”

“Why not?” Enrique felt exhilarated all of a sudden, as if he were playing poker with wild cards. What were the odds of having her to himself for the five-hour drive? Low, he calculated, exceedingly low. A monkey typing out the word
Hamlet
(one in 15,625,000,000) had better odds.

“I'm not sure—”

“Look into my eyes,” he insisted.

“Now what? Are you going to hypnotize me?”

“Trust your instincts.”

Leila inspected him again, then offered him her arm. Enrique, exultant, escorted her through the maze of flashing slot machines, toward the exit. On their way out, they ran into Papi walking through the door dressed in full Ching Ling Foo regalia. What the hell was he doing at the Diamond Pin this early?