Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

The statue was eleven hundred. Eddie had the sales tax figured in a moment and made out a receipt. He was wondering about the reliability of the check when the man spoke. “Can you deliver?”

“In Lexington?”

“We’re a few miles out. Manitoba Farm.”

Eddie kept his surprise from showing. Horses from Manitoba Farm ran in the Kentucky Derby; at least one of them had won it.

“I’m Arthur Boynton,” the man said.

“I can bring them out tomorrow morning.”

“That’s fine. I’ll be there at ten.” He handed Eddie the check.

“You should have seen it,” Eddie said, pleased. He set the car keys by the register. There was no one in the store but the two of them. “They have marble statues in the foyer and abstract paintings in the living room. There’s nothing horsey about it.”

“Just rich,” Arabella said.

Eddie looked at her. She was frowning as if in concentration. “Yes,” he said, “rich.” He felt suddenly uncomfortable. “What are you pissed about?”

“I don’t know.” She had just finished showing one of the less expensive quilts and it was laid out on the counter to display the pattern; she began folding it now. “I’m sorry if I was mean-spirited, Eddie,” she said, “but I’m beginning to feel as if I’m working for you. You make the decisions and take the responsibilities.”

He seated himself on the stand where the Statue of Unliberty had been. “You took us to Marcum and the others,” he said. “You’ve put up money.”

“It’s not the same. I was the one who was supposed to know folk art, but you chose the pieces to buy. You’ve taken over.”

He understood her problem, but he was getting annoyed. “You don’t have to be a second-class citizen.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Maybe you’re right. You caught me off balance at first. I hadn’t expected you to move so fast.”

“I was making up for lost time.” He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “Still am.”

She finished folding the quilt, carried it to where the others were kept and set it on top. Then she came back and stood by Eddie, putting her hand on his shoulder. “I could gather the articles I’ve done over the past few years, add five or six more, and I’d have a book. I’ve talked to some people at the Press, and they like the idea.”

He looked up at her and then held up a cigarette. “Sounds fine to me,” he said. “Now that we’re beginning to roll, we don’t both have to be here.”

She took the cigarette and lit it. “The trouble is, there’s no money in a university press book, and a lot of work. I have to get photographs, and do interviews. I don’t know if I’m ready for it.”

“I thought that’s what you like doing.”

She took a deep puff from her cigarette, and let it out slowly. “I’m good at it. But it’s like shooting pool is for you. I’m not sure about it anymore.”

He pictured his Balabushka, still locked in its rack at the Rec Room. “Wait a minute,” he said, suddenly angry. “It’s not that I don’t want to play those kids. I just can’t beat them.”

“You don’t really know that, Eddie.”

“I know it well enough. Babes Cooley made me look like a geriatric fool.”

Her eyebrows went up. “ Geriatric ? Don’t be silly. Your problem is that you aren’t committed to pool any more than you are to me.” She took a quick, angry puff from the cigarette and then stubbed it out unfinished. “You were never committed to beating Fats either, Eddie. Never.”

He stood up angrily and walked over to Betty Jo Merser’s Fiery Furnace, with its Not for Sale sign, and studied it for a moment. He liked the quilt more every time he looked at it; it helped calm him down. Then he turned to Arabella and said, “Maybe you’re right. But it’s a stand-off between you and me.”

“A stand-off?”

“If what’s between us means so much to you, why do you keep a drawerful of obituaries for Greg Welles?”

She stared at him silently for a moment. Then she said, levelly, “That’s goddamned competitive of you, Eddie.”

“I suppose it is,” he said. “I hate those newspapers.”

Arabella shrugged. “All right. It’s a stand-off. There are worse things.”

They were civil but distant at breakfast. When he said it was time to leave for the shop, she suggested he go ahead while she cleaned up the breakfast things. She would be over in an hour or so. There was nothing wrong with it, but they hadn’t done it that way before. He took the car and drove over alone.

When he got out of the car he knew immediately that something was wrong. The pieces in the window were gone, although the glass wasn’t broken. He unlocked the door and opened it. There was a heavy smell of cold, wet smoke. He flipped the light switch, coughing. Through a haze he saw, where Newby’s work had hung, the words KENTUCKY FUCK ART—this time in huge, skewed, blue letters—sprayed carefully, the letters gone over and over again until the paint dripped in tears down the empty wall. There was not a single piece of art in the room.

He knew where to look. A hole the size of a saucer had been smashed through the sliding glass door right beside the lock. All the son of a bitch had to do was reach his arm—with its goddamned black hair—through the hole and flip the lock down before sliding the door open. The room was freezing cold. The door was still wide open.

It was all out in the little garden, in the brick barbecue oven, still weakly radiating heat. A black sodden mass of burned quilts. It would be impossible to tell which was the Hebrew Children in the Fiery Furnace, which were the delicate, intricately wrought trapuntos of Leah Daphne Merser or the appliques of Betty Jo Merser. He had burned them and then, just to make sure, doused them with water from the garden hose. Amid the quilts, Deeley Marcum’s women lay in a crumpled heap, dismantled, smashed and charred. The son of a bitch must have worked all night at it.

An arm of Little Bo Peep had fallen to the ground. Eddie picked it up and poked at the mess. Underneath everything else were pieces of charred wood. The goddamned son of a bitch had used Newby’s magical carvings for kindling. For kindling.

The carpet was a deep forest green; it extended halfway up the walls. In the center of the room a sunken bed rose six inches from the floor, covered with burnt-orange suede cloth; near it stood a huge circular bathtub of beige imitation marble. Surrounded by bright mirrors, a black marble sink glittered in a far corner. Its basin and faucets were gold. On a shelf above the toothbrush holder sat a small white television set. This was on when Eddie checked in; a closed-circuit show was explaining the rules of baccarat, as played at Caesar’s Tahoe. Lamps were everywhere, their chrome bases bright as the polished mirrors. It was a big room, a winner’s room.

The bellboy pulled the cord that opened heavy green drapes; outside was deep blue sky and a segment of a bluer lake—Lake Tahoe itself, mostly hidden by the Sahara Hotel across the highway. A Roman sofa upholstered in the green of the rug and walls sat facing the window. There were no paintings on the walls. There was no art at all.

He tipped the bellboy generously and, when he had left, stripped to his shorts and seated himself on the Roman bench for a while, looking at the sky. There was nothing of university life in what he saw outside the window or inside; he felt a kind of youthful excitement just to know that. He had a stack of one-hundred-dollar traveler’s checks on the nightstand beside the bed. He no longer had a marriage, a business or a job. It didn’t matter. He did not have to think about any of that for two weeks. This hotel and this view had been made for him; twelve floors below were a gambling casino, four restaurants, bars, a theater, and a huge ballroom with five pool tables in it. It was a world he understood more than he would ever understand life, and he sat here at the high edge of it, high himself to be West, rich enough for the time and place.