Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

Eddie had said to him several days before that he planned to work on the equipment; Mayhew had nodded curtly and muttered, “Go ahead.” Now he ignored Eddie and went behind the counter and turned the radio on, to his gospel show. Eddie gritted his teeth and spit the last of the tacks out onto the peen of the hammer. The show would go on two hours, with sanctimonious music, a sermon and letters. It was infuriating, but there was nothing to do about it except wait for spring, when Mayhew would leave for good, retiring from his twenty-year job of running this half-assed poolroom. After a few minutes, during a commercial for Preparation H, Mayhew walked back to the men’s room, passing Eddie but not looking at him. Eddie had the first rail in place and was fastening it to the slate bed with a hex wrench. When Mayhew came back a few minutes later, he stopped and looked over the freshly covered table. Eddie finished one of the rails and set the wrench down. “These Gold Crowns are solid,” he said. “Good slates and rails.”

Mayhew looked at him a moment. “There was a lot of wear left in that old cloth.”

They had all the pictures hung, but there were still Arabella’s books in boxes. They spent that evening putting them into the built-in bookcases in the dining room. “You haven’t said much about your job,” Arabella said.

“There’s not much to say about it.”

“How’s Mayhew?”

“I can stand him till spring.”

“Do you shoot any pool?”

“I don’t have the time. How do you like editing?”

She didn’t answer for a moment but worked on the books, getting them alphabetized onto the shelves. “I ought to read these Chekhov stories,” she said after a while. “I’ve had the books a dozen years. Editing an academic journal’s a bore.”

“Maybe you’ll find something better.”

“It isn’t likely.”

“What we need,” Eddie said, “is a drink.”

Arabella put the last of the Chekhov volumes neatly on their shelf, stood back and looked at them. “A drink,” she said, “and then a movie.”

During the next week, he covered Tables Six and Seven, using Peerless rubber-backed cloths this time. They were less elegant than the Simonis on Number Eight, but were durable and certainly better than what they replaced. The cloths had been sitting in a stack on the top shelf of Mayhew’s supply closet; Eddie saw them there on his first day. They were covered with a layer of dust.

After doing the tables he went to work in earnest on the rest of the cues, throwing out a half-dozen warped or split ones, re-tenoning some, putting new white plastic points and fresh tips on all of them, sanding and buffing the leather edges so they fit perfectly and would not bulge out in use. It was tough work, but it satisfied something in him that needed satisfaction. He had not worked this hard since the first month of owning his own poolroom.

Mayhew made no further comments and Eddie spoke to him only when necessary. There was usually a dead hour after the lunch crowd left, and now Eddie spent the time practicing, taking his Balabushka in its case from under the counter. He used Number Eight, enjoying the smooth, long roll the Simonis gave to the balls. He had cleaned the light fixtures over the tables and polished all eight sets of balls, had thrown away all the used chalk and put fresh blue cubes out. The light was clear and bright; the balls shone crisply on the green; Eddie drilled them into pockets with quiet precision. What he was practicing, for the first time in his life, was nine-ball.

He would rack the balls into the little diamond with the yellow-striped nine in its center, blow them apart with his strongest break shot and then run them in rotation, starting with the one and working up to the money ball—the nine. It was different from the straight pool he knew: you had to make tougher shots, and play position differently, running them out in the numbered sequence. Maybe the most important thing was that you had to work the entire green. A good straight-pool player kept the balls at the bottom of the table and did most of his scoring on tight shots. In nine-ball you had to go from one end to another, sometimes making the cue ball travel by two or three cushions to settle down for position. He would miss some of those long, difficult shots, or get so badly off-angled that he couldn’t give himself position on the next ball. The pressure built as you approached the nine. If you missed on the seven or eight it would give the game away.

Arabella worked from nine to five at the magazine’s office on campus. Her salary was twelve hundred a month, only slightly less than Eddie’s; it came from a government grant. With her salary, her alimony and his paycheck, they were well off. They ate dinner out most evenings, did not entertain, and went to every new movie in town. They made an odd couple—a former faculty wife and a former pool hustler—but their oddness was consonant with the times; they were invited to a lot of parties. Eddie drove them through snowy streets to suburban houses or to duplexes in older neighborhoods to drink with professors of sociology, history or art. His lack of education did not inhibit him. People talked about tenure or declining SAT scores among the students; at the homes of younger professors, pot was smoked ceremonially as a kind of testament to youth. Eddie would pass the joint without inhaling. He preferred bourbon. J. T. S. Brown.

At one of these parties Eddie was talking to Arabella near the kitchen door of someone’s house when he saw her staring toward the other end of the room. He looked over to see a couple who had just come in. The man was tall and youthfully middle-aged; he wore a gray turtleneck under his parka. The girl with him was much younger. She wore tight faded jeans and a sweater like the man’s, also under a parka. The man’s boyish face looked familiar to Eddie; he was noisily stamping packed snow from his hiker’s boots and did not seem to mind the commotion he was making. “It’s Harrison,” Arabella said softly.

“Who’s the girl?”

“Some graduate student.”

Eddie had seen him on television years before. It seemed he had worn the same sweater, the same boots, while talking about disadvantaged children or New York artists or whatever it was. He was tanned and muscular-looking; his shoes and sweater looked expensive, as did his heavy corduroy pants and the long, matching scarf. He had one of those faces that manages to appear modest and smug at the same time, as if he knew he was important and did not want to imply that he knew it.

A half hour later Eddie found himself talking with him. Arabella was not in the room at the time. Frame just came up and said, “You’re Felson, aren’t you?” and Eddie said, “That’s right,” and they talked casually for about five minutes. It was simple; neither mentioned Arabella. They talked about the recession.

For the occasion, Arabella had bought Italian white wine and California Burgundy, together with a quarter-wheel of Brie—the runniest Eddie had seen. During his first weeks with Arabella he had felt he was finally entering the modern world of American style and had responded to it happily enough: dry wine, French cheese, English biscuits to put the cheese on, Perrier, rare lamb, sushi. Sometimes Arabella cooked osso bucco or couscous—dishes he had never heard of before. He had not shown any surprise at this kind of living; it went with her appearance, her accent. Sometimes she put liver pâté on whole-wheat English muffins for breakfast and served them with espresso from her stout little Vesuviana, in white cups with baroque silver spoons. It was like a certain kind of movie, or pages seen in Arabella’s New York magazine or the magazine section of her Sunday Times .