Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

The young man seemed friendly and sympathetic now. His coldness had gone. “You’ll be all right,” he said to Eddie in a confidential tone of voice. “Have you got a place to spend the night?”

“The Bonnie Brae.”

“Give me his pool stick and glasses,” the young man said to the one in the baseball cap. An older man was standing next to him, watching with solicitude. Eddie was sitting in the car, with the door beside him closed and the window down. The young man climbed into the driver’s seat. The man in the cap put Eddie’s cue case through the window and Eddie took it. He followed with the glasses. “Let me have your keys,” the young man said. Everything seemed friendly, well-organized. It was as though they did this every day of their lives. Eddie felt his face for blood, but there wasn’t any. He reached into his jacket pocket, found the keys, handed them up to the driver. “Pump the gas pedal first,” he said.

“You got him in the eye,” the old man said. “He’s a rough son of a bitch.”

Eddie leaned back in his seat, beginning to feel the pain in his body. He worked his hands a minute. They were all right. Nothing broken.

“My god!” Arabella said. “Did you get drunk?”

“I got beaten up.”

“I think you bloody did.”

It was after midnight, but she was able to get a first-aid kit from the motel office and put Bactine and Band-Aids on the cuts across his back, from the poolroom floor. He had bruises, but there was nothing to do about them. A blotchy place was developing on the side of his neck, and there was a smaller bruise on his forehead. He hurt badly in three places and his head throbbed. He was still dizzy. In the bathroom mirror his face looked terrible. “That gross son of a bitch,” he said. “I’d like to go back there and break his thumbs.”

“How horrible,” Arabella said.

“It would hurt like hell.” He came into the bedroom, limping slightly. His right leg was getting stiff. Arabella’s typewriter sat on the table with a stack of paper and the coffee-maker beside it. The plastic curtain over the closed window had the same design of boomerangs that the restaurant table had. On the dresser next to the TV sat the wine bottle. He poured himself a glassful carefully, using the hand that was the least sore, and then took a long swallow. He turned to look at her sitting against the bed pillows. “When we go back,” he said, “I’ll take the job.”

Arabella was no longer a faculty wife, but she was still invited to faculty parties. The first time she suggested he go, Eddie declined; but he was bored at the apartment watching television alone, and he went with her the next weekend. For an hour or so he felt uneasy with the professors and their talk of tenure and department cutbacks. He was painfully conscious of his own lack of education. The home he was in, with canvases on the walls painted by the professor who had invited them, with its plain, expensive furniture, represented an entirely different scale of life from the house he had lived in with Martha, with its cheery wallpaper in the kitchen. The kitchen here was white and austere; the men who stood around in it with drinks in their hands were all professors of art or English or history. Eddie read books but he knew nothing about those disciplines; nothing, from experience, about college.

But he did not live with Martha anymore. The elegant British woman in the silk dress, the woman with the curly silver hair and bright, intelligent eyes who looked right at men when she talked to them and who moved around with these people as more than an equal, was his woman. And he did not live in a suburban house with asphalt shingles on its sides; he lived in a high-ceilinged, white-walled apartment with folk-art paintings, downtown on Main Street.

Standing in the kitchen near the refrigerator, he listened to three art professors across the room. They were discussing next year’s raise in salary. One of them changed the subject to the Cincinnati Bengals’ chances for the Superbowl. No one was talking about art. No one had talked about art or literature or history in the hour he had been in the house. He looked at their clothes; not one of them was dressed as well as he. He took a sip from his Manhattan, walked over to the group and joined in. They talked about the scarcity of good quarterbacks. After a while, Eddie introduced himself. There was nothing to it.

The bedroom overlooked a garden that separated the building from the back of a clothing store. There was a kitchen with white countertops, a dining alcove, and a big living room overlooking Main Street. They would have to buy a dining table and bedroom furniture. It was on the second floor and the view from the living room was not as broad as the view from Arabella’s other apartment, but they were still downtown. Arabella had just started her editorial job with the journal and she was too busy to take more than a quick look; but when he told her it was three sixty a month, she said, “Take it, Eddie.” He signed the lease and gave two months’ rent as a deposit. Then he called a moving company.

“Eddie,” Skammer said, “I’d drop it all and go on the road. I don’t care about tenure. If I could shoot pool like you shoot pool…. Shit, if I could play the oboe , or learn to be a chef….” They were in the Skammers’ big kitchen.

“Roy signed up for a cooking school in France,” Pat said, “but we backed out at the last minute.”

“Lost my nerve.” Skammer plucked the onion from his Gibson and held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment.

“Lost your deposit money too,” Pat said.

Skammer shrugged and popped the onion into his mouth.

“It’s hard to make a change,” Eddie said.

“You’re doing it,” Arabella said.

He looked up from the couch at her. “It was handed to me. The judge gave the poolroom to Martha.”

“Some have greatness thrust upon them,” Skammer said.

Eddie looked back to him. Skammer wore perfectly fitting beige corduroys, beige Saucony running shoes and a white cotton boat-neck sweater that fit him loosely. “What’s wrong with teaching history?”

“Grading the papers,” Skammer said immediately.

“You complain a lot about departmental meetings,” Pat said, “and about living in Kentucky.”

“Camouflage,” Skammer said. “I give lecture courses in world history, and I enthrall the students with my enlightened chatter. I point to maps and I tell anecdotes about the wives of generals. I describe political factions and frown over conditions in the cities.”

“It sounds fine to me,” Eddie said.

“You love it,” Pat said levelly. “You love the sound of your own voice.”

“Maybe I do. But when I read the humbug they write in exam books with their blue Bics, I want to cut my throat.”

“You and your exquisite sensibilities,” Pat said. “Sit down and I’ll serve the salad.”

“You’re changing the subject,” Roy said. “Every time I read their papers I want to resign.”

“Maybe it’s because there’s no show business in grading papers,” Pat said.

“You and your damned insights,” Roy said, cheerfully.

The Skammers lived in a farmhouse on the Old Frankfort Pike. All of the rooms were austere except for the kitchen, which had a brick fireplace and a white sofa. The high-tech table and chairs were lit by track lights, and the floor was scarred pine, varnished and bare. A big window looked on a field with patches of snow and a barn in the distance.

Arabella put the salad bowl on the table and carried the wooden fork and spoon to Roy. “Toss the salad,” she said. “Maybe you don’t want feedback from your students.”