Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

“There you go,” he said. She put her free hand under him, moving her head up and down slowly, more or less in rhythm with the sound of the surf below them.

It was wonderful, and he took her address and phone number afterward, but he never called. It was the last time sex had been really good. On the way home from California he decided he needed a mistress, but it was years before he found one. And nothing with Jean ever turned out as simple and pleasant as it had been that day at Esalen with Milly. Nothing.

He had not realized before that day at Esalen how middle-class he had become, how his life had consisted of the business and the apartment and the marriage and the slow moving toward the grave. Cigarettes, Manhattans before bedtime, art posters on the family-room walls, Time magazine, anger buried so deeply that it seemed more a part of the rooms he lived in than in himself; television. Martha wanted a Mr. Coffee and he wanted something from her, something sexual but more lasting than sex; and he swore at her that they had two coffee makers already and what they drank was instant. There were two toasters. The freezer was full of hard blocks of meat wrapped in Reynolds Wrap. To the front door came magazines that were never read, along with offers of bargain rates for new magazines, discounts on photo developing, discounts on travel. There were telephones in every room, even in the bathroom by the toilet, and there was no one he wanted to call.

When he found Jean after twenty years of marriage, he thought he had found a way out of the boredom and drift. But he was wrong. The affair was tepid from the start; Jean’s life was, if anything, narrower and less interesting than his. The principal effect of the relationship resulted when Martha found out about it. When she said, “I want a divorce,” he hardly blinked; his soul yielded Martha her point without protest. At the moment, the only difficulty he foresaw was in disentangling with Jean, who bored him by now as much as Martha did. It was only the next day, when Martha told him she had seen a lawyer and intended to keep their apartment for herself, that he realized he needed Jean. At least until he could find a place to stay.

He had lived a life without drama for twenty years, remembering from time to time the games of straight pool he had played as a young hustler—some of them filling the entire night until sunlight came shockingly through poolroom blinds and lay unwanted on the chalk-smeared green of the table. Urbana, Illinois. Fresno and Stockton in California. Johnson City. Valley Falls. Carson. Poolrooms with eight-by-ten tables and men holding bottles in paper sacks—men lined up to watch him as he played the local pool-shark through the night. One pocket at forty a game. Fourteen-and-one straight pool for a hundred. Two hundred. Sometimes a thousand. A cone of yellow light hung above the table and the colored balls rolled harshly on the worn green, plopping into leather pockets. Paper money. Wrinkled old tens and hard-edged new twenties, jammed into the table’s side or corner pocket and tamped down by the heavy balls dropping on it. After he ran the final rack of straight pool or drilled in the winning ball in one-pocket or stiffened the final ball up the rail in a game of banks, he walked to where the money was, taking out the bills a few at a time and smoothing them. Then he folded and pushed them down in the front pocket of his pants, feeling the pressure against the top of his leg while he watched someone racking the balls up for the next game. A night in some small town could pass like that and seem a matter of minutes. Or in the bigger places there might be a crowd with college students in it—girls sometimes, trying to look knowing despite the innocent makeup they wore, girls in tweed skirts and angora sweaters. That would be 1960. Sometimes the man he played—in Columbus, Ohio, or Lexington, Kentucky, or in Chicago—would carry a name Eddie had heard for years but never before attached to a face: Shotgun Harry, Flyboy, Machine Gun Lou, Detroit Whitey, Cornbread Red. And then, in Chicago, at Bennington’s in 1961, Minnesota Fats. They had played for over thirty hours, and for the first time Eddie lost. Up to then he had beat them all—all the local favorites, all the resonant old names heard in the poolroom in his teens where he had played five or six hours a day during his last years of school. He had beaten them all and earned his own name doing it: Fast Eddie. Because he liked raising the bet. He had come back and beaten Fats—beaten him until Fats quit with a shrug of the shoulders and with words that Eddie would never forget, no matter what else he might forget in the life that kept passing less and less intelligibly before him: “I can’t beat you, Fast Eddie.”

And then Bert had told him he was no longer on his own. From now on, if he played he would be backed by Bert’s people and would share what he won with them.

That was the end of it, of the all-night pool with strangers, the travelling, the hotels and the sleeping all day. He never saw Bert again. He dropped him from his life as he had dropped the crippled Sarah in that same summer of his twenty-eighth year, in Chicago. Somebody had spoken of a poolroom for sale in Kentucky, and borrowing from Martha, he made a down payment, changing his life with a signature and the seal of a notary in a bright suburban bank. The lease on the apartment, and the marriage, followed like the sequence of shots, unquestioned, in a game of nine-ball.

Sometimes it all came back and he would feel again the late-night vigor from the old poolrooms and the bedazzled love for his old skill at the table. His win over Fats had become known around the country and, a few years after it, some fat pool player whom Eddie had never heard of started appearing on television. Watching the man shoot, Eddie was reminded of Fats and of the night he played him. It came back to him with a tightness in his stomach and a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck. It was a Sunday afternoon and the poolroom was closed. When the television show ended with trick shots, Eddie went to the poolroom to play straight pool alone for hours, missing supper doing it, playing at first with the old excitement, remembering players like One-Eyed Tony and Wimpy Lassiter and Weenie Beenie; and then picturing Fats, silent and heavy and nimble, pocketing balls like a gross dancer. After hours of making shots in the closed poolroom, on the center table, alone, Eddie finally permitted the sensation that had nagged him since watching the stupid show on television. It was a feeling he could not bring himself to name. It was grief. The best part of him had died and he grieved for it.

He had seen the woman before, in a situation much like this one. Both of them were waiting for something, and he could remember thinking how aristocratic she looked. She was about forty and had curly silver hair. She had been sitting in the tiny waiting room of Enoch’s office when he came in. He took the only other chair, put his glasses on and began reading from a magazine called Entertainment Monthly . It was full of pictures of child actors, each giving the kid’s credits in TV commercials. He glanced over at the woman from time to time. She could be a TV actress herself; she was strikingly good looking.

At a small desk, Enoch’s secretary, Alice, was reading too. It was like a library. Eddie would have gotten up and walked out if he had anywhere to go. He didn’t need the money right away, but it would make him feel better to collect something. So far the advance was all he’d been given, and most of that had gone to Fats.

After a while the phone on Alice’s desk rang. She picked it up and spoke softly for a minute. Then she looked at the two of them apologetically and said, “That was Mr. Wax. I’m sorry, but he’s tied up and won’t be in until tomorrow.” Eddie looked at the woman sitting across from him. She was furious.