Poker gems, #192

John Updike, in short story "Poker Night," published in the 1987 collection Trust Me, as reprinted in John Stravinsky, ed., Read 'Em and Weep: A Bedside Poker Companion, p. 212-218. The narrator is at his regular weekly game, with thoughts of mortality heavy on his mind, having come directly from his doctor's office, where he was told he had advanced cancer:


Ted spilled his beer as he tends to do as the evening wears on, reaching for some cards or the popcorn basket or his bifocals (it's an awkward length: you can see your own cards fine with the short vision but the cards in the middle tend to blur, and vice versa) and everybody howled and kidded him as they always do, and my throat began to go rough, they were all so damn sweet, and I'd known them so damn long, without ever saying much of anything except this clowning around and whose deal was it; maybe that was the sweetness. Their faces blurred and came up in starry points like that out-of-focus thing they do with television cameras now - the false teeth and glasses and the shiny high foreheads where hair had been - and the crazy thought came to me that people wouldn't mind which it was so much, heaven or hell, as long as their friends went with them.