A Turn of the Cards Chapter 1. Hey by Rebecca Anderson Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there. – Woody Allen

In 1996 I was 23, newly graduated from Harvard, with a low-paying job as a sysadmin at a biotech company called Gene Systems, Inc. I figured I would eventually go to graduate school, but I wanted a year or two out in the world before I tried that.

Life away from the stress of college was good socially, but it wasn’t easy financially. The cost of housing in Cambridge had always been high, but as the tech boom of the mid 1990s began it accelerated out of all proportion to the ability of the local population to pay. The area was full of students and recent graduates but a lot of them were subsidized by their parents, or had high-paying jobs, or had partners who had high paying jobs. Locals didn’t stand a chance.

None of these things was true in my case.

I was living in Somerville, near Davis Square, in a three bedroom apartment which was the upstairs half of a large house. I lived with my former Harvard roommate Pete, who was almost always around, and a lesbian friend Talia, a fellow sysadmin/database administrator who actually worked at Harvard, but who only seemed to be home once a month. All of us had crippling student loans, and none of us had family wealth to fall back on. I had started at college on a scholarship, but after a little personal meltdown in my sophomore year I’d had to pay to finish my degree. Final year tuition had been $24,880. That doesn’t sound like all that much money now for Harvard, but it was hell back then. Mom and Dad and my grandmother had helped a little, but I was still buried under a mountain of debt.

Relative poverty aside, my friends and I had a good time. The presence of half a dozen of the nation’s finest academic institutions in or around Cambridge, and the more than one hundred thousand or so undergraduates attending, makes the city and its surrounds an unusual hotbed of youthful sexual tension. The party scene was hot. In the mid-90’s geeks were suddenly almost cool. It seemed as though everyone (except me) was working for startups, or knew people who were. Even undergrads were being poached if they could write code. Young women could still afford to pick and choose the guys they went out with, but increasingly they started to go out with guys based on their personalities and intelligence instead of their personalities and looks.

Which was fine with me. I wasn’t the next Bill Gates, but most of the girls in town didn’t know that, and, while there were gold-diggers everywhere, a lot of the girls were smarter than the guys they were chasing anyway.

An added bonus on the dating front was that in Cambridge there wasn’t the stigma attached to the Big H that there is in the rest of the country. Girls in Cambridge are happy to date Harvard geeks. It’s no big deal. Elsewhere you have to deal with the usual annoying mix of envy, resentment, and social-climbing. Drop the H-bomb in a conversation in Nebraska and see where it gets you.

Not that Harvard is anything like the way it’s presented in the movies. Oh, maybe it is for the 10% or fewer that belong to fraternities, but for the vast majority of students it’s a college like any other. None of my friends belonged to fraternities or came from wealthy families. Obviously there were students there that did – if you’ve seen that movie The Social Network you’ve heard of the Winkelvii — but I never met them, or any of the other wealthy students. I never comped for Final Clubs (“to comp“ is Harvard-ese for “to compete“ — everything at Harvard is about competition). None of the women I met seemed particularly concerned about the wealth or social status or otherwise of any of us. We were mostly kids from middle or working-class homes, and many of us were the children of immigrants. We worked hard in school, maintained a great GPA, took lots of AP classes and did all the other things that got us selected to one of the best educational institutions in the world.

Not that we liked it all that much once we got there. I mean, we knew we were lucky. Sure, we worked hard, but there’s still something of a lottery aspect to getting selected to many Ivy League schools. It’s not enough to have good grades, and write a great admissions essay: your essay has to be read by the admissions officer at the right time of day, hopefully on a good day, when they’re feeling well disposed to nobodies from an underwhelming high school in Nebraska. Maybe they got laid that morning, or they had an especially good Danish with their soy moccaccino. Whatever. My friends and I all recognized our good fortune and we didn’t think it made us better than people we knew who went to other colleges. If you're part of the great mass of people who know about Harvard from movies, you probably don’t believe that, but it’s true. We were mostly the geeks, the outcasts, the intellectuals. We weren't used to feeling superior to anyone.

While we felt lucky, I don’t know that any of us liked living in our respective Houses at Harvard that much. College can be a lonely place, until you find friends, and geeks and outcasts and intellectuals often find it difficult to do that.

I’m digressing. A lot of this story might contain digressions. I hope you’ll bear with me, because I’m not digressing to make excuses for what happened to me. I’m digressing to try to explain how I came to be in a certain place, at a certain time, and got offered a certain set of opportunities and problems that — in hindsight — I should have been smart enough to avoid because I’m smart. Everybody has always told me I’m smart. Except when I’m spectacularly stupid. Is there such a thing as an idiot-savant, but in reverse? Someone who’s exceptional at everything except for one thing where they’re extraordinarily defective? If so, I’m it: as functionally skilled as I choose to be at most intellectual things, with an inexplicable and profound deficit in the area of understanding relationships.

On the subject of relationships, and Harvard, and avoiding digression; by 1996 none of the women in Cambridge, so far, had dated me. No girl had agreed to more than one date with me since Lisa Hemphill in the tenth grade, when we were both young and I guess I was a safer choice than some of the ugly goons at our school. Truth was, I wasn’t really boyfriend material. At 5’6” I was three and a half inches under the national average height for men, more than one standard deviation from the norm (I’d looked it up), and I was wafer thin, like those kids who had sand kicked in their face in the old Charles Atlas comic book ads (did I mention some of us were Rocky Horror tragics?). I wasn’t just thin, I was really thin. I had a metabolism that worked five times harder than everyone else’s. It was great for being able to pull all-nighters, but not much good for developing a manly physique. Thin arms, small hands and feet, thin torso. On top of everything else I had lousy eyesight. I couldn’t see more than about five feet in front of me without glasses.

Plus there was the fact I looked about ten years younger than my real age. It might have been due to excellent skin – unlike other kids I never had any meaningful acne – or it might have been my size. Whatever it was, I got carded absolutely everywhere. Everywhere. And most people who didn’t know me well thought I was still about sixteen.

Apart from all that (if you can dismiss “all that”) I wasn’t bad looking, so long as you weren’t looking for someone built like Dwayne Johnson. A friend once described me as “exotic in an offbeat way”. I was the product of a Jewish American father, improbably named Benjamin Jones, and a Japanese mother whose own parents were French and Japanese. Dad had been drafted into the Marines in the last year of the Vietnam War, and met Mom when he was stationed on Okinawa during his time in the Corps. He was tall and broad shouldered, she was the classic tiny Japanese girl. Even as a kid I thought they looked kind of funny together.

I got my mother’s DNA, because I had an Asian set of features, although my skin was quite pale. My thick dark brown hair made me look even paler. My friend and college roommate Pete once told me that if he’d had to guess where I was from he would have said Siberia, because I had that peculiar mix of features balanced between Caucasian and Asian often found there. My roommate Talia told me I should move to Japan and start a boy band. “You fit the classic profile for ‘non-threatening boy’,” she said. In her defense she was drunk at the time.

The delicacy of my features had been a problem where my family lived in Nebraska, and despite having short hair from age fourteen, I had been called “Miss” a lot until around my seventeenth birthday, when I moved to go to college. It hadn’t done wonders for my self-esteem, but fortunately it had ceased when I moved East. Perhaps people in Cambridge were more used to seeing foreigners, since both MIT and Harvard were both full of Asian kids. I’d become comfortable enough to let my hair grow almost to my shoulders, which saved on haircuts and fit in better with the geek crowd I ran with.

At 23 I didn’t get “Miss” any more from sales clerks, but I wasn't a babe magnet, even in Cambridge, and I was still inexperienced at sex. Of the seven women who had ever agreed to the one date, only two had ever gone so far as to “invite me in” afterward, and I think I had disappointed both. The result was that I had something of a fierce inferiority complex regarding my chances with women. So I was surprised one Saturday night when Alice Kim spent so much time talking to me at our friend Henry’s birthday drinks. Alice was beautiful and smart, the daughter of Korean immigrants who’d worked their asses off and instilled in her the same drive to succeed. We knew each other, vaguely, through a mutual friend. She was an MIT graduate, doing postgrad work in something related to artificial intelligence at MIT. It was an expanding and exciting field. She could have been talking to any guy at the party, but she chose to spend most of the evening with me. I was, of course, entranced.

When Alice began speaking to me, I first thought she was only interested in my connection to my best friend, Pete. She kept looking at him, across the room, where he was deep in conversation with our friends Dave and Michael. She even asked me how I knew him. So I was pretty sure, to begin with, that she was just gathering intelligence to make a play for him later. But our conversation quickly turned to other things: music, food, books. She drank water, and fruit juice. No alcohol. Her voice was sweet and musical and her eyes were clear and sparkling.

Toward the end of the night she made her pitch, but subtly, so at first I didn’t realize it was a pitch. After a few more hours of talking about study, travel, her family and relaxation, she asked me whether I knew anything about card counting.

“Not a thing,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t gamble much.”

“It’s not really gambling,” she said. “It’s just math. You’re good at math, right Alex?”

I looked at Alice, one of the prettiest girls I’d ever met. I knew I was being sold something, but I couldn’t resist hearing what that something would be. Truth be told, she could have read me a book on introductory macramé and I would have been fine just listening to her voice.

But Alice got to the point a lot faster than I thought she would. “Do you want to come to Connecticut with me next Friday night to play some cards?” She asked. “There’s a new casino there. You don’t need to get off work early, we’ll leave around six.”

I would have followed Alice past the gates of hell. I didn’t know anything at all about playing cards, but I was sure I wanted to spend Friday night with her.

The week passed slowly. Work was a drag – Dilbert squared – and I was bored at home, too. I reorganized my CD collection, tidied my room for the umpteenth time, listened to music, tried to read, and did nothing. It meant I saw more of my roommate, Pete, than usual. At some point I must have said something to him about meeting Alice and her inviting me out.

“Alice Kim?” he said, when I told him. “Dude.”

I blushed. Despite being Asian I blush obviously, on account of my pale skin.

“Well, it’s just going out with her and some friends.”

Nevertheless Pete was impressed. He knew Alice from classes, but had barely been able to bring himself to speak to her. “Alice” Pete said, unintentionally mangling both The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Say Anything, “has a brain the size of a planet in the body of a Korean game show hostess.”

Pete and I met when I was a freshman, in the first week I was in Cambridge. Both of us were living in Matthews, albeit in different rooms, but we were both trying to get involved in the student radio show called 'the record hospital' (yeah, they were precious about the lower-case thing back when Pete and I were involved) at WHRB, and we had shown up at a session where they were explaining the station to freshmen. WHRB, which was more or less the Harvard radio station, gave over the entire night shift to the record hospital, which had a very competitive selection and training process called “comp”, somewhat like the “comp“ process for Final Clubs. The comp directors were two guys who were basically assholes. They poured scorn on anything that fell outside their own indie punk credo.

We clicked on that first night even if the comp directors were completely dismissive of our musical tastes, which ran too close to pop for their determinedly lo-fi tastes. I remember we had a really pretentious discussion with them about the decline of Bob Mould as a serious songwriter. It was a stupid conversation, but neither Pete nor I seemed to mind, and because we were dismissive instead of enthusiastic — one-upping them in the disdain stakes — we got to do a show, a very late show, together. We spent a lot of very long hours in the studio playing anything that was in the “heavy rotation/new“ bin at the station, interspersed with random bits of Pixies, Alex Chilton, Iggy Pop and as much old pop and soul as the station would let us get away with.

We were polar opposites looks wise: Pete Johanssen was your basic 6’4” blond blue-eyed Wisconsin boy genius, a former high school basketball star in Madison before he wrecked an ankle, and as confident and relaxed around people as I was shy. Why he didn’t have three hundred girls chasing him at any given time was a mystery to me, and to him, too. He was co-founder of an online startup he’d begun with a Russian math geek friend when they were in their sophomore year. It had something to do with a kind of limited artificial intelligence through pattern recognition. I knew what it was about in the abstract, but we’d never discussed the key aspects of his business in detail.

Since freshman year, Pete had become easily my closest male friend. One of the reasons I liked him so much was that, mostly, I never had to think about anything when we were together. He was completely low-maintenance, without being slack. The two of us just worked well together on some unconscious level, could make decisions about doing things without having to talk about them, and could finish each other’s sentences. We liked the same music. We mostly liked the same food. We both felt completely lost at Harvard, and weren’t afraid to admit it. I didn’t need to act macho around him. We didn’t have to try to impress each other. We could just be.

Pete and I hit a local bar, listened to some music from a wannabe indie pop act, and bumped into his partner from their startup, a Russian named Vassily who looked almost like a parody of a young engineer, with thick-rimmed glasses and a bad haircut. He was a nice guy though, at least as far as I could tell from the few times I’d met him. He was with his wife that night, a pretty blonde named Yana who would have been model material if she’d had better dental care as a teenager. She was at least three inches taller than Vassily, closer to six foot. She danced with a friend for most of the evening. Pete, Vassily and I all did the white man’s overbite thing grooving along with the music. When it was closing time we said farewell to our Russian friends and stumbled half drunk into the night afterward.

Up until I was about fifteen I didn’t really notice girls. For that matter, I didn’t notice guys much, either. I existed in my own little cocoon, in which sex wasn’t an issue. Yes, I was a late bloomer, as far as those things go, and maybe it was my hormones, or lack of them, but I didn’t get all totally distracted at every girl who looked at me, like most of my peers did. I was going to write “like most of my friends did” in that last sentence, except that I didn’t have that many friends, and if they got distracted by girls it was always short-lived distraction.

There was Carl Choi, one of the only other Asian kids at my school, and Hal Donovan, who lived just a few doors from me and had been my companion to and from school on many occasions, although we weren’t exactly soulmates. Carl was smart, but he lived in his own little world of math and computing. I think these days he’d probably have been diagnosed with Aspergers, but at the time we put his obsession with math down to his driven parents. Not that I had anything against math – Carl was my only competition in class – but it wasn’t my life the way that it was Carl’s. He could make a math problem out of just walking down the street. He ended up at Cornell, in some kind of elite PhD fast-track, but I didn’t know much about him since because we drifted apart in senior year of high school.

Hal was a different kind of friend. The kind of friend you get from proximity instead of shared interests. We didn’t have much in common, but he was an alright guy. Not smart like Carl, or even me, but not totally stupid. Even so, I could pretty much get him to do what I wanted, just by thinking a few steps ahead in any situation, and it seemed like Hal couldn’t reciprocate. I sometimes felt guilty about that, but evidently not guilty enough to stop.

Hal’s Mom and my Mom were friends, and we spent a lot of time together when we were kids and our Moms were together, and I didn’t dislike him, but I couldn’t have said he was my best friend, either. I didn’t really have a best friend.

If this sounds like a familiar story, it is. For every popular kid at high school, there must be a dozen that have only a few friends, and there are always one or two kids in every class that have almost no friends at all. Such is the misery of the American high school experience. Does it happen that way in other countries, or is it some special variety of torture we cooked up all on our own? When I won the scholarship to Harvard, all of a sudden the years of torment seemed, if not negated, then at least greatly diminished. I had a ticket out.

Of course, once I was at Harvard, surrounded by people who were – quite obviously – much smarter than me, I had to overcome different feelings of inadequacy. But Harvard, at least, was not the horror that high school had been. Odd then, that it was at Harvard that I had a breakdown.

Friday I washed my hair and packed a change of clothes and took them with me to work so I could meet Alice outside The Brattle. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had dressed neatly in what passed for standard Harvard Square attire: ironic logo t-shirt, thrift store black jacket, and khakis, with my hair tied back in the standard geek ponytail. I looked like hundreds of grad students and junior faculty.

A long white Toyota van pulled up and Alice slid the rear door open. “Get in.”

Obviously, Alice wasn’t alone. Inside the van I recognized a few faces, all of Asian or Indian origin. My friend Henry Yang was driving. He’d been in my stairway at Matthews and, while we weren’t close, he’d always seemed like a straight-up guy. It had been at his party a few days earlier that Alice had invited me to come. In the front passenger seat was an Indian guy I knew, and didn’t like, Arun Kapoor. Great. If I’d known he was involved in Alice’s adventure I’d never have come. Arun and I had fallen out a few years earlier when we were both in the chess club, and he was being a dick about some strategy. I had beaten him five times straight, and it was clear he was a very sore loser. It was no big deal, really, but he acted like I had impugned his honor or something, and for the remainder of the year he rode me on every single thing I ever said at the club. We almost had a fight one afternoon after Dan Koh, a mutual friend, complimented me on a game I had played the week before. Eventually I left the club, because the atmosphere at the club just wasn’t fun any more. Now here he was again, four years later, as was Dan, in the back of the van sitting next to Alice.

As I climbed into the back of the van Arun turned to introduce himself, it seemed as though he’d forgotten our history together, such as it was. “Arun,” he said, offering his hand. I tried to shake it but since I was trying to balance as the van took off that was a little tricky. I wondered whether pretending not to know me was his way of trying to avoid unpleasantness.

Apparently Arun suffered from Prosopagnosia, which is an inability to remember faces. It seemed that although he knew my name was Alex, he didn’t remember my face, so he didn’t know I was Alex Jones. I wondered how long it would take for him to make the rest of the connection.

Alice introduced me to the rest of her friends. In the three seats in back were Lucy Huang, Emily Zhang, and James Gee, all MIT students I’d met through a computing club I’d belonged to when I was an undergrad.

I smiled at Dan, who had been in Matthews my freshman year, and was also in my second year Astronomy class. I liked Dan. We’d never been especially close during our time in Matthews, but he was the one who was in chess club with me and who witnessed the almost-fight with Arun. He was quiet, like me, but the few times we’d got to talking I'd liked his extremely dry sense of humor. I was never entirely sure when he was joking, but his humor was never malicious. Unlike most of us, he was enormous, with a significant weight problem he put down to too many pizzas and too much Mountain Dew while coding. With his broad Han face he looked very Buddha-like whenever he was seated. He took up most of the seating in the second row of the van, and so Alice and I were scrunched together. I couldn’t say I minded that at all.

As we pulled up at the Mohegan Sun Casino a few hours later Arun turned to me before I got out of the van. “Enjoy yourself,” he said, as he handed me a roll of bills. “You can talk to Alice but you don’t know any of the rest of us. If you speak to any of us, we’ll all be leaving.”

“Just watch and learn,” said Henry as he got out of the van.

I looked at the cash Arun had given me. It was around $5,000. I had never held that much cash in my hand in my life. I was immediately suspicious. Why would a guy who was such a dick hand me $5,000? Looking in his eyes I could tell he had remembered who I was, but Alice reached over and closed my hand around the money, and shoved it in my jacket pocket. I looked at her, surprised, and she shrugged and pushed me out of the van.

The team members went into the casino in ones and twos. Alice and I entered before Arun. I tried to follow her lead without making it look like she was in control.

“I wish you’d told me Arun was involved in this,” I said quietly, as we moved through the slot machines to the blackjack tables.

“I didn’t know you knew Arun,” Alice said. “What is it between you two?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Put it this way: no love lost.”

She shrugged. “Whatever. You don’t have to love him. He probably doesn't remember you, anyway.”

“He will.“

Alice motioned to me to get out the money Arun had given me. “How much cash should I change for chips?” I whispered to her.

“All of it,” she said calmly. “We’re going to be playing the high stakes tables, and we’re probably going to lose all of it. And don’t whisper. Give me a kiss.”

Of course I kissed her. It wasn’t my first kiss, nor my last, but I remember it very well. There wasn’t anything particularly special about it, except that it was Alice Kim I was kissing, so there was an element of “I’ve won the lottery,” and she was sweet smelling and sweeter tasting. I was glad I’d eaten a mint on the way down in the van.

The kiss was done, though, and so together walked to a table. We had no sooner approached than a large man appeared beside us. “Evening, ladies. Sorry to bother you. Can I see some ID please?”

I turned to face him and he did a small double-take and I think he suddenly realized his faux pas. “Sorry.” He said. “From the side you, uh …”

“It’s okay,” I said, offering him my driver’s license. I was embarrassed to have it happen in front of Alice, but I always had to show ID when Pete and I went out drinking, and I knew that making a fuss just made the embarrassment last longer.

He examined our ID’s, and after we got them back we played blackjack for a while. I forgot about Arun completely. We won some, we lost some, playing for the table minimum of $50. There were only two other people at the table, in the fifth and sixth positions, an older couple who looked like they might have been locals. After about a dozen hands I noticed Alice sit back, and then stretch her arms above her head. Then she went back to the game. Less than a minute later Henry came and sat immediately to her right, and got ten thousand dollars worth of chips from the dealer. I remembered we weren’t supposed to know one another, but like everyone else at the table, I stared.

“How is everyone?” Henry said to the table in general, laying a thousand dollars worth of chips, half the table maximum, out front before his first card.

“I’m not kicking any goals here or anything,” Alice said. I was puzzled. I’d never heard Alice talk about football before, and the comment seemed out of context.

Henry immediately split the two aces he was dealt. And then, in the next ten hands, I watched Henry win tens of thousands of dollars.

While we were playing I kept stealing glances at Alice. Apart from being gorgeous, she was an extremely graceful woman. I could have watched her hands gliding across the felt and around her face and hair all night. Her neck and wrists were impossibly slender, almost like a child’s, but her movements were confident, poised, anything but childlike. In her simple black shift dress she looked as elegant as a young Audrey Hepburn. I was entranced.

Alice and I stayed at the table for about three hours, and lost about fifteen hundred dollars. Henry stayed 16 hands, won at least twenty thousand, and left the table as soon as the dealer reshuffled the cards and began to deal a new shoe. After another hour or so Alice did her stretching routine again, and this time Arun came to the table.

I almost didn’t recognize him. He’d changed into a dark blue silk shirt and white jeans, and had slicked his hair back. He looked every inch like a Bollywood movie star. “I’m bushed,” Alice said to me as he sat down, more loudly than I thought was necessary, and Arun immediately moved a large pile of chips out front.

Like Henry, Arun won, and won big. He walked from the table with tens of thousands of chips. I noticed him a half hour later with a gorgeous blonde woman at his side, as he was cleaning up at another table. He was a very handsome young man, impeccably groomed and better dressed than the rest of us, and as he was scooping up chips he looked every inch like the son of a very rich man. I loathed him, but I had to admit he had style.

We didn’t stay in Connecticut that night. We left around 4am, and Dan drove the van back. Alice, who was exhausted, fell asleep resting on my shoulder. I loved the drive back. The moon was out, the blue moonlight coated the Mystic River as we headed back up I-95, and I had a beautiful woman resting on my shoulder. I wasn’t completely sure what the night had been about, but I had seen Arun and Henry pass Bob bundles of cash at the end of the night — more cash than I had ever seen. I hadn’t seen Alice counting the cards. I had tried counting, but I gave up, because it was too hard. I didn’t know how Arun and Henry had won the way they had won, but I knew I had seen something extraordinary.