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the news.” He asked me if I’d learned anything about Layla.
    I told him about St. Jude’s and about my dead end online.
    He said, “I know a PI in Memphis. I’ll give her a call.”
    POKERTOX, A COSMETIC and dissembling procedure, may not have been anything new, but it was news to me. Botox for card players—an attempt to disguise the signs of facial tells. My thinking was if you needed an injection of potent neurotoxins to elevate your game, you must not have been very skillful to begin with, and you were unlikely to benefit greatly from the immobilizing therapy. You felt vulnerable and exposed, and you questioned your cleverness at the table. You were leaking critical information throughyour unconstrained countenance. You got the dermatologic fix. But what you didn’t realize was that even with your face as vacant as the Bates Motel, you betray your weakness in other ways. The face is not our only expresser of emotions, but it is the easiest to mask. Just smile with your eyes.
    The tell is in the behavior, not the expression. Is he holding his breath or breathing rapidly? Are his hands still or busy with the chips? Is he chatty or quiet? Rude or cordial? Is he slumped in his seat or leaning forward? Is he putting on a show? If he’s rubbing his forehead, you know he’s struggling with something. If he’s steepling his hands, you know he’s holding wired eights or better.
    There were two Pokertoxics at Bay’s table. The older one, Bart, had also plumped his lips with collagen. His hair was as thin and white as finely spun glass, but his eyebrows were black. He wore ironically large glasses with metal frames, but he seemed unable to blink. The other fellow was Clifford, and he didn’t have much of a face to start with: weak chin, a small and slightly celestial nose, tiny spectral-blue eyes, just a trace of blond eyebrows, and meager lips. His was the idea of a face more than a face, a first draft of a face, a sketch.
    When I suggested to Bay a while back that not playing every hand would make the game boring, he smiled and said he counted on people like me sitting down at his table and opening our wallets. “Poker’s like baseball. The most intense moments happen between pitches when nothing seems to be going on. The fielders, the batter, and the base runners all have to consider the infinity of possibilities that might ensue with the next pitch and prepare themselves for each contingency. When there is no apparent drama on stage, the imagination fires on all cylinders.”
    Poker isn’t gambling, Bay was fond of saying. But it is luck. And good luck is understanding that you can’t control randomness—thecards can’t tell the difference between Amarillo Slim and Slim Pickens—but you can control whom you sit next to, and whom you bluff, and whom you call. “When I see a dude pull out his card-guard coin with a four-leaf clover on it, it warms my heart, and I know I’m going to bleed him dry. Poker is applied math and behavioral psychology.” Bay says you play poker as if you can see your opponents’ cards, and you can—in their behavior.
    I took a seat by the poker table, ordered a martini from a waitress named Sincere Lee, at least that’s what her name tag claimed, was served a Manhattan, which I took with a smile—apparently I’ll drink anything—tipped her, and watched Bay go to work. He won a small pot and then folded on three straight hands. The joker next to him wore a gray hoodie and white shades, chewed a toothpick, grunted once in a while, and laughed at other players’ failures. Watching him, I could tell what he was like away from the table, an excruciating asshole on whom therapy would be wasted because he didn’t think anything was wrong with him. When he walks into a room, he’s already smirking. I took my drink and went for a walk before he pissed me off even more. Only later