Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

There was no way not to leave Arabella stuck in motels over the next two weeks. She read books, spent some time on the telephone, and they went to matinees of movies together, saving the night for pool-shooting. She would go to whatever bar he was working and stay an hour or so, but it was tedious for him and more so for her; there wasn’t anything for her to do.

Worse, he wasn’t making any money. The best game he found was for twenty dollars, and the man quit him after a few hours of it, leaving Eddie with a profit of a hundred eighty. That was in the first week, and even it was not repeated.

After three days in a Holiday Inn in Beaufort, North Carolina, Arabella’s boredom was beginning to show. She tried to be cheerful, but there were long silences between them at breakfast—or at what was lunch for her and breakfast for him. One day at noon, when he had just gotten up from a long, unsuccessful night at a downtown bar, several things went wrong. The hotel laundry service had lost two blouses, the television set had lost its ability to make a coherent picture, they went to lunch and the waitress brought her the wrong sandwich. She had ordered the Big Chuck hamburger; the waitress brought her liverwurst. Arabella stared furiously at the glossy white bread. Eddie tried to hail the waitress as she disappeared into the kitchen.

“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I want to go home.”

“There’s an afternoon flight from Raleigh. I’ll go with you.”

It was colder in Lexington now, and he wore a scarf and gloves on his way to the Faculty Club in the mornings. The leaves had all fallen from the trees and been raked from the neatly cropped grass of the campus; there were still rake marks like the lines in the fine gravel of a Japanese garden. Eddie walked briskly from the parking lot to the club, chin down against the morning cold, cue case tucked under his arm. He liked it. After the raw towns in the South, with their neon and poverty, the university—with its substantial old brick buildings, its neatly kept walks, its sense of order and security—was a profound relief. He would walk into the anteroom of the Faculty Club, past the wooden tables where breakfast was being set up by students in white jackets, up the wooden stairs to the second floor and down the hallway to the game room, to uncover the big mahogany table and begin his morning’s work. He knew he did not belong here either by education, social class or any right other than Roy Skammer’s invitation; yet, he felt far more at home than by the bar tables near tavern dance floors or in the rough, smoke-stained rooms of North Carolina roadhouses. He felt at ease in the faded genteel quiet of an upstairs room with oil portraits of professors on the walls and chamber music sometimes drifting up from the lounge below. A faded oriental rug sat under the pool table, extending out a few feet from its periphery; Eddie’s leather jacket and scarf hung from the brass hook of a mahogany coatrack; the rotund face of an emeritus professor of history looked sternly down on the table; Eddie thought of him as Lexington Fats. Sometimes after pocketing a particularly difficult shot he would look up confidently at the old man’s face.

He had hoped his game was improved from the weeks of eight-ball, and it was. He was now making runs in the seventies and missing less. The glasses were a godsend. Whatever muscles of back and shoulder and arm it took to play pool for hour after hour had toughened; nothing in his body hurt anymore. He was still not as good as he once had been, when he could make a hundred balls without missing, but he felt he was getting there. In Albuquerque he would give it his best shot, and if he was hitting, would beat Fats. It was about time.

Arabella spent her days at home working on articles for the folk-art journal or typing papers for professors, sometimes complaining about the bad prose and footnotes she had to rattle her way through at her Selectric, but she seemed content to be working. The apartment was small for the two of them, and they spoke sometimes of finding a bigger one. They went out to movies some nights and spent others reading or watching television. Something in Eddie fretted at this part of his life. It was solid and easy, but he wanted something else. As his pool game came back, the old restlessness had reentered his spirit; he wanted to be playing for money, taking risks, staying at good hotels, sleeping till noon, winning money in cash, in hundred-dollar bills.

On his fourth day back from the South he went to Martha’s apartment to pick up some winter clothes he had left behind. Martha was there, and as usual had a cold. She was cordial but edgy as he pulled an armload of clothes from the maple dresser—sweaters, corduroy pants and an extra scarf. Being in the old apartment made him dizzy; he found he had nothing to say. She was silent too. He got what he needed and left.

Arabella told him there was space at one side of her big closet. He opened its sliding door to a four-foot row of dresses. There must have been forty of them, on hangers covered with quilted rayon. He ran a hand along colored silk, wool and linen. Near the closet floor a shelf held two long rows of shoes, lined up perfectly in Arabella’s British way, blue and red and brown and black shoes. Each held a lavender metal tree, its color precisely matching the coat-hanger covers.

Eddie found space at the end for his clothes and he hung them there—bemused by the array of the dresses and shoes, radiating along with the smells of potpourri and moth crystals the sense of another life.

A few days later they made a stab at apartment hunting. To get to a subdivision with moderately priced apartments, they drove through a fine old residential district, along a gently curving street lined with heavy elms. At a stop sign Arabella said, “Look there,” and pointed to a house on Eddie’s side. Far behind an enormous lawn sat a white-columned porch banked by shrubbery; the house itself was of gray limestone with a red tile roof and a row of dormers; it had tall, airy French windows on the first floor. “That was my house,” Arabella said. It went with the clothes. She had lived there fifteen years, with a distinguished professor of art—a man who had his work shown in galleries in New York and who appeared often on television. Now she was the mistress of a pool hustler—a former pool hustler. Eddie said nothing and drove on.

“Don’t you miss the parties?” he said to her that evening.

“What parties?” She had just finished doing a paper on hydraulic engineering and was tapping the sheaf of pages against the top of her desk. “I need a paper clip.”

“Behind your typewriter. I mean parties at the university, when you were a faculty wife.”

“Sometimes. Not often.” She found the clip, fastened the papers together and put them in a manila folder. Then she stood up and stretched. “At faculty parties what the women talk about is their children, and I don’t have children. It was a chance to dress up every now and then, but then I had to listen to Harrison. The two cancelled out.”

“I’ve heard that professors need wives.”

“To do the laundry?”

“You really are pissed at him,” Eddie said. “I meant to look good at parties, to help his career.”

“People say that, but it’s not really true. Harrison is what he is because he fills out a good grant-request form and looks superb in an Irish fisherman’s sweater. I don’t really hate him, Eddie. Thinking about him just irks me.”

“What were you in it for?”

She looked at him a long moment, then lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. Maybe the clothes.”

“You got a lot of them.”

“Security. I wanted to be taken care of, Eddie. By somebody good-looking and with a good career.”