Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

The next panel showed Indians bowing before a stern white man on a rocky shore. The ship was in a cove in the distance. Carved in relief into the sky were the words MAN’S MISUSE OF MAN. In the next panel a dozen Indians were shooting arrows into the Pilgrims while a Pilgrim baby looked on, its face distorted in fright. The final panel showed a conventionalized city skyline, with dark skyscrapers and the wasted bodies of children lying in the street at the foot of them, their eyes shut and their faces twisted. This one had a wooden frame carved around it; on the frame were painted the words AMERICA AS WE HAVE MADE IT. The idea was clear enough and Eddie did not exactly disagree with it. He had seen this final panel reproduced as a photograph in Arabella’s journal article. The anger was unsettling, and he wasn’t sure you could sell things this grim—not for the kind of prices they would require. Deeley Marcum’s work was so blunt as to be nearly comical, but there was nothing comical about these panels. They were like dark, spiritual graffiti. They reminded Eddie of bag ladies on the street who hated whatever they saw.

“If you’re going to sell, I suppose it’ll be only the whole set,” Eddie said.

“I didn’t say I wanted to sell,” Newby said.

Arabella said nothing; she looked from one of their faces to the other and jammed her hands into the pockets of her coat.

“If I’d made those I wouldn’t want to sell them,” Eddie said. “Maybe one like this.” He pointed to a single panel that showed a church with the devil seated—horns and trident painted red—on its front steps. “Or The Three Graces.” That had been the first one Touissant Newby showed them; it had three fat black women on their backs asleep on a brass bed with three chamber pots under it.

Newby looked at the floor. “Five hundred dollars.”

“For both.”

“Apiece.”

Eddie said nothing and walked out of the shop. It was a raw March day and there was ice on the sidewalk. A minute later Arabella came out. She was wearing a knit cap pulled down over her ears. Eddie had his scarf over his chin and his own cap pulled down.

“I don’t think we should buy anything more,” she said as she came up to him.

“I didn’t like that set at first, but I like it now.”

“He’ll want thousands for it, Eddie, and we haven’t even opened the shop yet.”

“Those titles grab you after a while.” Eddie jammed his hands deeper into his pockets. “The old son of a bitch.”

“Once we begin selling the quilts, and Deeley’s women—”

“I don’t want to wait,” Eddie said. “If we put that eight-piece set on the wall facing the quilts—and get the old man to lend us that newspaper article. Somebody’s going to want to buy it.”

“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I’m scared to risk any more money . What if the business doesn’t go and nobody wants to buy anything?”

He looked up at the dead white sky, feeling the deep chill. “I don’t want to play it safe. I’ve never won anything playing it safe.”

Arabella looked at him a moment as if she were going to say something, but she didn’t speak.

“Let’s go back inside,” Eddie said. “It’s too damned cold out here.”

He paid with a combination of a check and cash. It left him less than two thousand in the bank. Arabella had twenty-three hundred in savings and the alimony on the first of each month. That was it. He felt all right. In his twenties, playing against Fats in Chicago, he had put every penny he had on one game, doubling the bet in the face of losses. They had shot straight pool for five thousand dollars and Eddie had never played better in his life, amazing even himself with what he could do with that much money riding on a single game—while Bert and Charlie, the cautious ones, had watched as he pocketed the balls one after another.

Now, with the eight panels of the set and three others with them in the backseat and trunk, he felt the old sense of control. Going back to Lexington it had begun to snow and the road was white with fresh powder over ice patches. Eddie drove like a dream, handling the little car effortlessly, his whole nervous system relaxed and precise, spiritually enhanced by the presence of risk.

It was almost midnight when they arrived in Lexington. Eddie drove them to the shop and they carried the panels in. He wanted to see them under the floodlights. And he was too wide awake to go to bed yet.

While Arabella made coffee with the hot plate on the countertop, he measured off the right-hand wall with his tape, marking it into eight equidistant sections, and then drilled holes with his quarter-inch drill and put in Molly bolts. Each of the panels had a heavy ring screwed to the back; he hung them in order across the wall. He climbed the ladder and re-aimed the lamps, dividing them between the two walls. Against the fresh white, the colors seemed incandescent. The Levolor blinds had been installed the day before; he went over, lowered and then tilted them, to make the window wall now white. He walked back to the center of the room; his footsteps on the bare floor were shockingly loud.

“It’s spooky in here,” she said. “I feel frightened.”

“Look at the things on the walls,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, it looks good .”

She raised her head and looked around herself. She faced Touissant Newby’s walnut panels for a long time. Then she turned to Eddie and smiled. “Yes, they do. They really do.”

Arabella went to bed as soon as they got home, but Eddie stayed up for an hour in the living room, surrounded by his quilts and wooden panels, with the row of insolent metal women—like a small, angry choir—against the wall facing him. It was three o’clock before he turned in, and even then he had difficulty getting to sleep. He kept seeing the gallery as it would be with all the stock in place. They had nothing small or cheap for sale; if they could sell only one piece a week, it would pay the rent and support them. Everything beyond that would be profit.

On Saturday morning Arabella had coffee and croissants ready to serve to as many as forty people, but no one came in. She had sent out announcements and made phone calls. Several professors had promised to drop by, but they did not. Eddie put a simple notice in the window saying “OPEN” and his ads had run in the evening paper on Thursday and Friday, but no one came in the doors. People passing looked in, and some stopped to stare for a while at the Las Vegas Model and the Olive Oyl that stood there facing out, with the REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR quilt behind them. It would take a while. If a week passed and no one came in, that would be the time to panic. He left the shop for a while in midmorning to go up Main to Alexander’s Photo and get the black-and-white blowups he had ordered to be mounted on plastic. He brought them back and fastened them to the walls with brass round-headed screws. They were big grainy pictures, copies from old photographs, and they looked properly artistic on the walls: Betty Jo Merser, unsmiling, with her gray hair in a bun; Deeley Marcum, bald and squinting, from one of his old newspaper clippings; and the double-page spread on Newby from the Courier-Journal enlarged to twice its original size. It was eleven-thirty by the time he had them all up.

At one-thirty a couple came in. He was from the university, from one of the science departments. Arabella did not know him. He and his wife looked around in that silent, respectful way of middle-class people in museums. He held his hands behind his enormous camel-hair overcoat and she kept her arms folded in front of her, placing her weight on one foot while studying the quilts and the metal sculptures and then going from one wooden plaque to the next. Both of them were self-conscious; both more interested in looking at things in the right sort of way than in the things themselves. At one particular moment when the woman was studying the middle panel of Newby’s set, she held her fingers to her chin and pursed her lips in an exaggeration of discriminating thought.