Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

“Like hell we don’t,” he said.

She hadn’t found herself a job yet and was getting tired of looking. She would have given up weeks before and settled for living on alimony if it weren’t that staying in the apartment was driving her crazy. They had a long quiet supper while she told him these things; afterward they went back to her apartment and, for the first time, made love. They were like old friends, old lovers. The week apart and the trip and the money had changed everything for him and they could both feel it. He knew what to do and so did she. They lay on her sofa bed afterward and talked. He would look for a while at the lights of downtown outside her windows, closed now against a September chill, and then turn back to her smooth white body beside him in the bed. They smoked his cigarettes and stubbed them out in a coffee saucer between them.

“You’re playing pool for money again?” she said, breaking the silence.

“It’s been a long time.”

“You mean gambling, don’t you? Not just giving an exhibition.”

“That’s right. Gambling.”

“In England people spoke of billiards sharks. You call them hustlers, I think. Is that what you are?”

He looked at her a moment. “I’m not a pool shark.”

“I’m sorry. What do I call you—a hustler?”

“Call me Eddie and hand me a cigarette.”

She frowned and gave him one. “Whatever you are, you aren’t a professor.”

He took the cigarette and lit it. “I fly to Albuquerque in a month to do an exhibition. Before that I’m going to Memphis to play eight-ball at a roadhouse called Thelma’s. How would you like to come along?”

“You want me to travel with you? Like a gun moll or something?”

“There you go again.”

“As the consort of a pool player.”

“Do you have anything better to do?”

She rolled over and kissed him on the neck. “No, I haven’t,” she said.

“You’d like it if I played tennis.”

“Or bridge?” Arabella, dressed only in pale blue panties, was pulling something big out of the closet. Another painting, apparently, wrapped in brown paper. She laid it flat in the center of the living room and, while Eddie watched from the bed, seated herself cross-legged on the rug and began to remove masking tape from the paper. “Or the French horn?”

“Something like that. Shooting pool sounds like shooting craps.”

“It does?” She got one end of the wrapping free and began slipping the framed picture out of it. Eddie leaned up on his elbow to see it better but could not make it out. Her small breasts as she bent over were wonderful, and so was the curved ridge of her backbone. “What happened to nightgowns?” he asked.

“It’s a warm apartment.” She began folding the paper neatly into a square, pressing the wrinkles out of it. He had already noticed the towels in the bathroom closet, folded and stacked as though displayed in an expensive store. Everything about her apartment was orderly. When she finished, she got up from the floor and carried the paper to the green oriental chest at the far wall and set it neatly in a drawer. From the drawer she took out a hammer and brought it over to the bed. “Here,” she said. “You can drive the nail.”

“Toss it on the bed. I’ll get it in a minute.”

“Come on, Eddie. I want to hang this picture.”

He reached over and got a cigarette. “Not without coffee.”

“I’ll make some instant.”

“Instant coffee leads to divorce.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “I’ll use the Vesuviana. It would be simpler if you’d take tea in the morning.”

“Arabella,” Eddie said, “it would be simpler if the world was flat.”

“I’ll make the coffee.” She tossed the hammer beside him on the bed and went to the stove. “Why should I want you to play tennis, Eddie?”

“It has class.”

She turned to him from the stove with the coffee can in her hand. “I hate that word. My grandmother used it all the time. It was working class or leisure class.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’re an aristocrat.”

“Come on, Eddie,” she said. “It’s my accent. You Americans are all alike when it comes to British accents.”

“I mean the way you look. The way your apartment looks, with the white floor and oil paintings.”

“It’s called taste , Eddie.”

“What does your taste say about hustling pool?”

“My taste doesn’t say a fucking thing about it.” She turned, carried the coffee can back to the stove and took its top off. She began spooning coffee into the basket of the little machine.

He hesitated a moment and then said, “I think Martha was ashamed of it.”

“Was Martha your wife?”

“Thoroughly.”

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

“I’m learning to talk like you.”

“You’re an Anglophile.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

She got the coffee machine back together and put it on the burner in front of the stove. “Well I’m not Martha. When I saw you playing pool with Roy I was thrilled.”

He looked at her back for a moment as she adjusted the flame. Then he stood up barefoot and took the hammer. “Where do you want to hang this?”

“I admire skill,” Arabella said, coming over to him, “and I respect people who live by their wits.” She handed him a brass picture-hanger. “Center the painting above the chest. The trees in it will look good over the green.”

He held up the framed canvas for a moment. Like the painting over the sofa, it was crude and bright, as though done by a skilled child. There were two figures and a horse standing under trees; everything was as simply drawn as in a child’s painting, but each leaf of the trees had been individually painted.

“It’s what some people call naive art,” Arabella said. “It was done by a woman without formal training.”

“It would make a good jigsaw puzzle. Sharp lines.”

“These two pictures are all I got from the divorce, if you don’t count the alimony. Harrison kept the furniture—even the sheets and towels.”

“Why did you get the paintings?”

“Because they’re mine. A friend bought me the other one and I bought this myself.”

“Harrison likes naive art?”

“He hates it. It was the friend who taught me about naive art. Contemporary folk art.”

“Okay.” He went over to the chest and held the painting up. “I’m pretty good with a hammer, too.”

“It’s what attracted me to you in the first place.”

On his fourth night in Arabella’s apartment he lay awake in bed next to her for over an hour. It was late, but there were still sounds of traffic from Main Street through the closed windows. He wore shorts in bed and she was naked, covered by the sheet and a silvery down comforter. She slept facing him, the sheet and comforter huddled under her left arm, which was bare and white with light freckles toward the shoulder. Even in sleep her face looked smart. What was he doing in bed with a woman like this? The lashes on her closed eyes were perfect, curling slightly upward above unblemished cheeks. Her small hand lay on his arm.

She was on the rebound from a genteel life and she liked him. She was interested in what he knew about running a small business, had asked him solid questions about it over dinner that evening, wanting to know how he had figured his operating expenses and what the problems were with taxes. She liked the idea of hustling pool; it excited her to be with a gambler. She liked his looks.

He liked her air of competence and ambition, the clarity of what she said, the authority her voice had on the telephone, the way she disdained makeup, did not talk down to him, slept naked, swore, and never wavered in matters of taste. When she made love she did it without the encumbrance of modesty or indirection, although her passion was restrained and her orgasms silent. But they did not know each other very well yet. He had his own restraints too and was afraid sometimes to let go, but he felt he could talk about that with her when the time came.