Уолтер Тевис - The Hustler

“I’m going to try to make some money. I need it, the money.” And suddenly he cursed himself, silently, for the apology that had been in his voice. He had nothing to apologize to her for. He made his voice carefully matter of fact, “I’m leaving early in the morning.”

She looked at him for a moment. Her voice was like ice water, “Leave now.”

He looked at her, with the quick irritation that she could make him feel. “Grow up,” he said.

She didn’t look at him again. “All right, maybe I should grow up. But why in hell didn’t you tell me sooner? Is that the way pool sharks do? Here today, gone tomorrow, like the gamblers in the movies?”

He had never liked to hear anyone say “pool shark,” and he did not like to hear her say it. “I didn’t know sooner,” he said.

“Sure you didn’t. Big deal coming up in Lexington, I bet. All the big card sharps, confidence men. Maybe even Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, is that it?”

He did not say anything for a while. They were nearing her place, and he took her inside and sat down before he spoke. “I’m going to Kentucky to play pool with a man named Findlay. I need the action and I need the money. And that’s it. If you want to you can probably come with me.”

Abruptly, she started laughing, standing in the middle of the big and shabby living room. “Just what I need,” she said. The arrogance and self-pity in her pose embarrassed and angered him. He turned away from her, looking at the large picture of the clown on the wall, which he liked. She had stopped the laughing, but the sarcasm in her voice kept him from looking at her. “No, Eddie,” she said. “I’ll wait for you. Your faithful little piece of tail. How’ll that be?”

This last, the phoniness of it, suddenly changed his anger to something else. He turned to look at her, standing, now, staring at him, her small hands jammed in her pockets, her feet wide apart. It occurred to him that she was like a small sick thing in a jar, a fluttering, shrill insect that he could have poked with a stick, could prod, when he wanted to.

“That would be fine,” he said, his voice strange to him, but easy. “You make a very good piece of tail. One of the best.”

She stared at him. “Eddie,” she said, her voice trembling, “you’re probably a cheap crook. It just occurred to me.”

“The hell it just did.” His voice was cool and level. “It’s been occurring to you for a damn long time already. Probably excites the pee out of you, too—shacking up with a criminal.”

“All right. Maybe it does. Or did. And maybe I’m beginning to learn what a criminal is.”

He looked at her with open contempt. “You’ve got no goddamn idea what a criminal is. You got no goddamn idea what I am either. You wouldn’t know a crook from a bartender. Who the hell do you think you are, calling me a crook? What do you know about what I do for a living?” He turned away from her again. “Get me a drink.”

He did not hear her move or breathe for a long moment. Then she walked into the kitchen. He heard her fixing drinks.

When she came back in she did not look as though he had beaten her—or even stalemated her—but he knew that her front was one of the best he had ever seen. He began to wonder, with some interest, what was going to happen next. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

Finally she said, “All right. You win again. You always win.” And then, “Only, next time, let me know a little in advance, will you?”

“Sure. If I can.”

What she said next she said as if she were talking to herself, ruminating, meditating aloud, “If there is a next time…”

He did not want to let that go by. He felt a little as Bert must feel, felt like pushing, getting it out, crowding her.

“Why not a next time?” he said.

But she did not answer that. Instead she looked at him, her eyes blazing again, suddenly, and said, “Do you know what you’ve gotten out of me—what I’ve given you?”

“What?”

“Among other things, myself.”

Suddenly, he felt like laughing. “And you think you shouldn’t have given that? You should have sold it, maybe.”

She hesitated before she spoke. “How low can you hit, Eddie?” she said.

“Maybe you’re trying to collect now, maybe that’s it. Only you never gave me a thing, without taking, and you know it. I never hustled you—even when I thought I was hustling you—and you know that too. What you give me is below your waist, and that’s all of it. And that’s the only thing I give you. What else do you want, for what you’re offering?”

She seemed to be desperate for a word that would cut him down. She took the coward’s way out. “Love,” she said, as if the word were important in some abstract way.

He stared at her and then grinned. “That’s something else you wouldn’t know if you saw it walking down the street. And I wouldn’t either.”

She took a gulp of her drink. “What are you trying to do to me? I love you, for Christ’s sake.”

He looked at her steadily and she seemed even more like an insect trying to escape from a jar, a jar with slippery, transparent, glass walls. “That’s a goddamn lie,” he said.

For more than a minute she was silent, looking at him.

“All right, Eddie,” she said. “You’ve won. Rack up your cue. You always win.”

He stared at her. “That’s more crap,” he said. But he did not say it well; she had gotten through.

“The way you’re looking at me,” she said, her eyes wide, hurt and angry, but her voice level. “Is that the way you look at a man you’ve just beaten in a game of pool? As if you had just taken his money and now what you want is his pride?”

“All I want is the money.”

“Sure,” she said. “Sure. Just the money. And the aristocratic pleasure of seeing him fall apart.” She looked at him more calmly now. “You’re a Roman, Eddie,” she said. “You have to win them all.”

He turned his face away, towards the orange clown. He did not like what she was saying. “Nobody wins them all.”

“No,” she said. “No, I suppose not.”

And suddenly he turned to her, seeing for the first time what seemed to be the whole truth of Sarah, in a moment’s flash of wonder and contempt. “You’re a born loser, Sarah,” he said.

Her voice was soft. “That’s right,” she said. She remained seated on the couch, upright, holding her drink in both hands protectively, as if holding a child or a child’s doll. Her elbows were on her knees, her lips tightly together, and she was no longer looking at him. It took him a moment to realize what she was doing. She was crying.

He said nothing, for there came to him a strange and ambivalent thing, twisting him, distorting his vision and yet making it so sharp that he felt that he could see anything—around corners, through walls, into the eye of the sun—there came into his mind, with a kind of pleasant contempt, the words that Bert had used with him: self-pity. One of the best indoor sports.

Then, suddenly, she looked back up to him and said, “And you’re a winner, Eddie. A real winner…”

Bert was exactly on time, in the morning. It was a warm, fine, beautiful morning, a glistening, late-summer morning; but Eddie was hardly aware of this. He was awake; he had come sharply awake at four-thirty, to the sounds of shrill and infrequent birds and to a kind of cold turbulence within his own mind; but he hardly saw the thing that the morning had to show him—the city of Chicago, Illinois, in a state of grace. He leaned back in the large, well-upholstered seat of Bert’s car, held his small leather case in his lap, and kept his mind from thinking, or feeling.

Bert drove as he played poker, sitting erect, his lips tight, his eyes fixed ahead, missing nothing. He too was silent. They hardly spoke until noon, although there was no tension between them. What went on in Bert’s mind was unfathomable; Eddie would not have been certain what was going on in his own.