Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

One of the striking things about university life was its amiable ostentation of taste, and not just in food. It included furniture, paintings, bric-a-brac—glass ashtrays from Venice, nineteenth-century prints showing views of Brussels, antique chess sets. Not everyone was involved in this; some were either oblivious to it or scorned it. Their apartments were furnished cheaply and their cuisinary embellishments were those of the early sixties: flaky Cheddar, mushrooms, and pepper mills. But half the homes Eddie had seen were exemplars of careful, au courant taste, mixing antiques with high tech. If the apartment you were in for Sunday brunch had track lights over a walnut highboy and a piece or two of industrial metal furniture, you knew there would be croissants—served with unsalted butter on a plain white dish from Scandinavia—and the eggs would be undercooked.

The best thing about all this was Arabella’s ease with it. It was as though she knew her British accent and the delicate, clear structure of her facial bones gave her an edge. There was no strain on her part and no uncertainty; she knew without hesitation which cheeses, which fresh pasta and which wines to order, just as she had known what spare, simple pieces of furniture to buy for the new apartment. She was sure, swift and without snobbery. Coming from a world of backyard barbecues, Eddie slipped with surprising ease into this ambience, pleased with Arabella’s confidence, pleased with the way she never talked about such things.

Roy and Pat were delayed; by the time they got out of their duffel coats and were handed glasses of wine by Eddie it was four o’clock. He wheeled Arabella’s little Sony in front of the sofa and turned it on. Arabella put the cheese and the Carr’s wafers on the high-tech coffee table; Roy Skammer held his wineglass aloft and said, “To the champ himself!” and the television picture shifted from a movie preview to a rack of pool balls in close-up and the superimposed words, THE GREAT SHOOT OUT—DENVER. An overhead shot showed Fats breaking the rack. The cue ball caromed into the bottom and the side rail; its path, seen from above, was like a geometric diagram. A voice-over began, calling the two players “legendary” and the game “demanding the most a player can give.” It was mercifully short and it mercifully omitted saying that Eddie had already lost three matches in the series. Now Eddie, seen from overhead, stepped up to play safe. Pat and Roy applauded. Now in profile, Fats made a shot, and then another. His run would be in the twenties. This was the game where Eddie made sixty-three, but Fats had the floor now. A whispered commentary—whispered needlessly, since it had been added after the game—spoke of the difficulty of shots that were not difficult and passed over ones that were; the tape had been edited so it all went faster than in reality. Every now and then the camera picked up Eddie wearing his glasses and sitting in his chair waiting for Fats to miss. When Fats did miss, Eddie stepped up and went to the table. It was a relief to see it: he was far less slow and uncertain than in the Miami game on Enoch’s monitor. He looked all right, even with the glasses. Eddie watched himself pocket a dozen balls and then play safe. His stroke was sharp and smooth.

Much of the midgame was cut; while Arabella was pouring more wine the tape abruptly segued to Eddie’s big run—already thirty balls into it. He was shocked to see the change in himself on the screen. His stroke had been good before, but now it had a control that was visible even on television. His body was relaxed. His movements were as graceful as those of Fats or of Billy Usho. He looked sharp in his clothes. He could remember the good, near-dead stroke he had felt at the time of the run, could recall the sense of inevitability in the way the balls fell in, but he had no idea that he looked so good.

“Eddie,” Pat Skammer said, “you look wonderful ” and some obscure, uncertain part of himself assented. It was a revelation. He looked as good as any pool player he had ever seen. The small Eddie Felson in front of him pocketing pool balls with precision and flair, walking confidently from shot to shot, was him . He sipped his white wine and watched himself. He would lose the game 150–112, but he could have won it.

“Do you play any more matches?” Roy asked.

“One. Next week.”

“What about ‘Wide World of Sports’?” Arabella said.

“Nothing.”

Finally Eddie missed, on the Sony in front of them. “ Aww !” Pat Skammer said. Fats stepped up and began what would be his final run.

“I’ll beat him in Indianapolis,” Eddie said. “I’ll beat his ass.”

On Monday in the Rec Room, several of the players said they watched the game on TV and he looked great. One of them remembered shots that had been especially impressive. But when Mayhew came in and a student asked, “Did you see Mr. Felson on TV Saturday?” Mayhew scowled at him.

“I see more games in here than I want to see,” he said.

The airplane landed in a hush of snow—airport runway snow not yet soiled. Even the passengers were muted by it, waiting in wombish quiet for permission to stand and retrieve their luggage, then standing mute in the aisle as though the white outside the plane’s baby windows had charmed them to silence. This mood remained until assaulted by the Formica, Orlon and Muzak cheeriness inside the terminal building, bright as a liar’s smile. Eddie tucked his cue case under his arm, walking through this fluorescent limbo to Baggage Claim. Through windows framed in pitted aluminum, he saw giant toys of airplanes bearing familiar heraldry—Trans World, Delta, United—being tended in a field of white. He hurried. It was December 12; he was to meet Fats in two hours. He found his bag on the carousel, and then a taxi.

Despite the gray slush in the parking lot and the dense rows of cars whose owners filled the mall, his driver zipped along without delay. Eddie was over an hour early. The driver stopped at the entrance to an enormous J. C. Penney’s; on his way there he passed a restaurant with a sign reading TONY’S PIZZA—COCKTAILS. Eddie carried his bag and stick through Christmas-crowded aisles and tinkling music to the side of the store that faced the mall itself, a wide gallery with huge Christmas trees and an artificial creek. On the other side of an enormous aviary was a sign that read PARCEL CHECK and a row of lockers; he walked past sleeping macaws and a cockatoo, the floor of their cage littered with yellow popcorn, and put his things in a locker. Far down to his right, above the heads of a shifting multitude, a banner read FAST EDDIE MEETS FATS. He was pleased to see the top billing. This time he was ready. He would lock up Fats with safeties; and when he got a shot, would bear down on him as he had not borne down on him throughout this tour. Eddie turned and headed toward Tony’s. Fats was no unbeatable genius, no benevolent father either; he was an old man and, like anyone else, he made mistakes. Eddie would beat him.

Tony’s tables were full of women and the bar was empty. Eddie sat in the middle of it and ordered a Bloody Mary. There was, fortunately, no music in Tony’s; it smelled pleasantly of oregano and hot bread dough. The bartender was a good-natured young woman in a red sweater. He had drunk nothing on the airplane, and the pepper from the Bloody Mary burned pleasurably on his tongue. He liked the warm, pungent anonymity of this American place—liked being unidentifiable among middle-aged women. He sat in a suburb of Indianapolis but could have been anywhere at all; there was probably a Tony’s Pizza in Bangor, Maine, or in Honolulu that would be indistinguishable from this, with no character but what its designer had given it and a manufactured ambience that could have made it all: the women with their children in booths eating pizza, the Budweiser clock on the wall over the bar, the red-sweatered blonde who served him drinks—part of some jolly TV commercial for, say, the telephone company.