Free A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins Page A

protecting his father and his world and reopens for a second the door his mother once opened; when a tiny but dazzling flash of that forbidden realm escapes and reaches him, like music escaping a party and reaching some far-off room, and he feels as though a seed is being planted in him. It happens rarely, generally with movies, TV programs, plays, books that at some point touch on the subject of gambling, gamblers, the practice of betting. Everything will be fine, the scenes will be flowing as normal, the film more or less entertaining, the book well or poorly written, the play moving forward—until someone shows up and cuts a deck of cards, or a character tells a story about a night at a casino while sitting at the table after dinner,or a ball takes a few hesitant leaps on the slope of a spinning roulette wheel, and his father, who had been following the developments in silence, entrenched in his indifference, suddenly stiffens, as if struck by an invisible dart, and all of his senses, which until that moment have been floating and dispersed, surface again on his face as though called up for battle, and then fire on what he’s been looking at. In a fraction of a second, he’s transformed into what he’s always been but had been keeping in reserve: the defender of an experience that nobody else knows firsthand, and about which only he possesses the ultimate truth. Being a film fanatic, for example, he readily defends the liberties taken by cinema in the name of art as instances of poetic license that no demand from reality can ever rightfully challenge, and yet he’s feverishly sensitive when it comes to films about gambling. Everything strikes him as sloppy and ludicrous, not because it’s artificial but because it’s wrong. His arguments, when he makes them—when he doesn’t restrict himself to giving a sarcastic little smile instead, a gesture of disdain he aims at the television, the scene, the screen where the outrage is being committed—are unspecific, always general, often sententious. They’re really vetos, laws that can only be formulated negatively. “Nobody who’s ever played baccarat looks at women while he’s playing,” he says. Or: “For a true gambler, cash is
never
a problem.” Or: “Gamblers don’t have lucky rituals.” Or: “There’s no such thing as a nice croupier.” Or: “No gambler wins or loses everything in the first hour of play.” Or: “Nobody ever plays everything.” He’s also riled by the overall aesthetic effect, the gleaming, almost glossy image with which cinema beautifies gambling, where the backs of the playing cards twinkle like mirrors and the ice in the glasses like diamonds, the green baize looks like English grass, and the good gamblers are always elegant while the bad ones are monsters covered in scars and given to the vilest tricks,incapable of doing or deciding anything without the help of the entourage of baleful assistants monitoring the table incognito. But the heart of the reproach is something else, something more fundamental, more radical. What sickens his father is that they’re always secondhand versions, hearsay, pale echoes of echoes. They might keep audiences pinned to their seats, smash the box office, and claim to be based on true stories, but to his father—to anyone who’s been submerged in the original experience—it’s obvious that nobody involved in the concoction of these swindles has ever been there. None of them has lived the gambling life. And it’s this lack of life that poisons these representations with an irremediable falseness.
    Maybe this is his father’s real life, this hidden one, the one they never see, this strange combination of gated paradise and toxic cellar, of orgiastic oasis and forced-labor camp, of which all they can ever hope to know comes from the leaks his father allows to escape every so often, almost against his will, like a medium opening his mouth and speaking and closing it again only when instructed to