by Walter Tevis
The joints of the slates were patched in twenty minutes, along with the countersink holes for the heavy screws that held the slates in place. By the time he was finished, the lunchtime crowd began to come in and he let the plaster dry while he marked time cards and handed out balls.
He had to stay behind the counter for the next hour and a half, keeping an eye on things, making change and taking in money. During a short break he clamped the tenon machine to the countertop; then he took a few cues that were in need of repair and began replacing their ferrules. The Elk Master tips would go on later. One cue was too warped to be worth the effort; he put it in the trash with the worn-out cloth from Table Eight.
At two the crowd slacked off abruptly, leaving for classes. It would be slow until three-thirty or so, when Mayhew came in. They would work together to handle the crowd until Eddie left at five. By two-thirty, a dozen cues had new white ferrules and leather tips. He went back to Table Eight and sanded down the plaster, using progressively finer paper, until the joints were silky and rock-hard. He checked the bed one final time with the level and then unrolled the Simonis cloth. At first he planned to save this one superb billiard cloth for last; now he had decided to start out with it. He had been saving it for several years, for a rainy day. His rainy days had come, and maybe gone. He got shears out and began to cut the strips for the six rails. It took him two hours to get the cloth cut, trimmed, pulled tightly over the rubber cushions and held in place with the feather strips. But the material was a pleasure to work with. It was virgin wool from Belgium—fine, smooth, tightly woven and a dazzlingly bright green. By four o’clock he had the rest of it cut, stretched across the slate table bed and fitted around the six pockets. He was kneeling beside the table putting in the last of the number-three tacks with the tack hammer when Mayhew came in.
Eddie had said to him several days before that he planned to work on the equipment; Mayhew had nodded curtly and muttered, “Go ahead.” Now he ignored Eddie and went behind the counter and turned the radio on, to his gospel show. Eddie gritted his teeth and spit the last of the tacks out onto the peen of the hammer. The show would go on two hours, with sanctimonious music, a sermon and letters. It was infuriating, but there was nothing to do about it except wait for spring, when Mayhew would leave for good, retiring from his twenty-year job of running this half-assed poolroom. After a few minutes, during a commercial for Preparation H, Mayhew walked back to the men’s room, passing Eddie but not looking at him. Eddie had the first rail in place and was fastening it to the slate bed with a hex wrench. When Mayhew came back a few minutes later, he stopped and looked over the freshly covered table. Eddie finished one of the rails and set the wrench down. “These Gold Crowns are solid,” he said. “Good slates and rails.”
Mayhew looked at him a moment. “There was a lot of wear left in that old cloth.”
***
They had all the pictures hung, but there were still Arabella’s books in boxes. They spent that evening putting them into the built-in bookcases in the dining room. “You haven’t said much about your job,” Arabella said.
“There’s not much to say about it.”
“How’s Mayhew?”
“I can stand him till spring.”
“Do you shoot any pool?”
“I don’t have the time. How do you like editing?”
She didn’t answer for a moment but worked on the books, getting them alphabetized onto the shelves. “I ought to read these Chekhov stories,” she said after a while. “I’ve had the books a dozen years. Editing an academic journal’s a bore.”
“Maybe you’ll find something better.”
“It isn’t likely.”
“What we need,” Eddie said, “is a drink.”
Arabella put the last of the Chekhov volumes neatly on their shelf, stood back and looked at them. “A drink,” she said, “and then a movie.”
During the next week, he covered Tables Six and Seven, using Peerless rubber-backed cloths this time. They were less elegant than the Simonis on Number Eight, but were durable and certainly better than what they replaced. The cloths had been sitting in a stack on the top shelf of Mayhew’s supply closet; Eddie saw them there on his first day. They were covered with a layer of dust.
After doing the tables he went to work in earnest on the rest of the cues, throwing out a half-dozen warped or split ones, re-tenoning some, putting new white plastic points and fresh tips on all of them, sanding and buffing the leather edges so they fit perfectly and would not bulge out in use. It was tough work, but it satisfied something in him that needed satisfaction. He had not worked this hard since the first month of owning his own poolroom.
Mayhew made no further comments and Eddie spoke to him only when necessary. There was usually a dead hour after the lunch crowd left, and now Eddie spent the time practicing, taking his Balabushka in its case from under the counter. He used Number Eight, enjoying the smooth, long roll the Simonis gave to the balls. He had cleaned the light fixtures over the tables and polished all eight sets of balls, had thrown away all the used chalk and put fresh blue cubes out. The light was clear and bright; the balls shone crisply on the green; Eddie drilled them into pockets with quiet precision. What he was practicing, for the first time in his life, was nine-ball.
He would rack the balls into the little diamond with the yellow-striped nine in its center, blow them apart with his strongest break shot and then run them in rotation, starting with the one and working up to the money ball—the nine. It was different from the straight pool he knew: you had to make tougher shots, and play position differently, running them out in the numbered sequence. Maybe the most important thing was that you had to work the entire green. A good straight-pool player kept the balls at the bottom of the table and did most of his scoring on tight shots. In nine-ball you had to go from one end to another, sometimes making the cue ball travel by two or three cushions to settle down for position. He would miss some of those long, difficult shots, or get so badly off-angled that he couldn’t give himself position on the next ball. The pressure built as you approached the nine. If you missed on the seven or eight it would give the game away.
Arabella worked from nine to five at the magazine’s office on campus. Her salary was twelve hundred a month, only slightly less than Eddie’s; it came from a government grant. With her salary, her alimony and his paycheck, they were well off. They ate dinner out most evenings, did not entertain, and went to every new movie in town. They made an odd couple—a former faculty wife and a former pool hustler—but their oddness was consonant with the times; they were invited to a lot of parties. Eddie drove them through snowy streets to suburban houses or to duplexes in older neighborhoods to drink with professors of sociology, history or art. His lack of education did not inhibit him. People talked about tenure or declining SAT scores among the students; at the homes of younger professors, pot was smoked ceremonially as a kind of testament to youth. Eddie would pass the joint without inhaling. He preferred bourbon. J. T. S. Brown.
At one of these parties Eddie was talking to Arabella near the kitchen door of someone’s house when he saw her staring toward the other end of the room. He looked over to see a couple who had just come in. The man was tall and youthfully middle-aged; he wore a gray turtleneck under his parka. The girl with him was much younger. She wore tight faded jeans and a sweater like the man’s, also under a parka. The man’s boyish face looked familiar to Eddie; he was noisily stamping packed snow from his hiker’s boots and did not seem to mind the commotion he was making. “It’s Harrison,” Arabella said softly.
“Who’s the girl?”
“Some graduate student.”
Eddie had seen him on television years before. It seemed he had worn the same sweater, the same boots, while talking about disadvantaged children or New York artists or whatever it was. He was tanned and muscular-looking; his shoes and sweater looked expensive, as did his heavy corduroy pants and the long, matching scarf. He had one of those faces that manag
es to appear modest and smug at the same time, as if he knew he was important and did not want to imply that he knew it.
A half hour later Eddie found himself talking with him. Arabella was not in the room at the time. Frame just came up and said, “You’re Felson, aren’t you?” and Eddie said, “That’s right,” and they talked casually for about five minutes. It was simple; neither mentioned Arabella. They talked about the recession.
***
For the occasion, Arabella had bought Italian white wine and California Burgundy, together with a quarter-wheel of Brie—the runniest Eddie had seen. During his first weeks with Arabella he had felt he was finally entering the modern world of American style and had responded to it happily enough: dry wine, French cheese, English biscuits to put the cheese on, Perrier, rare lamb, sushi. Sometimes Arabella cooked osso bucco or couscous—dishes he had never heard of before. He had not shown any surprise at this kind of living; it went with her appearance, her accent. Sometimes she put liver pâté on whole-wheat English muffins for breakfast and served them with espresso from her stout little Vesuviana, in white cups with baroque silver spoons. It was like a certain kind of movie, or pages seen in Arabella’s New York magazine or the magazine section of her Sunday Times.
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. Th
ere 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.
In his jacket pocket was a page torn from a Rec Room copy of Billiards Digest that morning. He took it out now, spread it on the bar in front of him and read over the ad:
EASTERN STATES CHAMPIONSHIP
NINE-BALL EVENT
$7,000 IN PRIZES!!
FIRST PLACE: $2,500
ENTRY FEE: $350 DECEMBER 13, 14, 15
MABLEY’S BILLIARDS
NEW LONDON, CONN.
DEFENDING CHAMP:
GORDON (BABES) COOLEY
He would show it to Fats and ask him what he thought. He finished his drink and ordered another, letting the sweet warmth in his stomach spread, thinking of pool.
He was whistling when he got his cue case from the locker. He began moving through the crowd of Christmas shoppers down toward the banner.
When he arrived it was time to start, but Fats wasn’t there. The table was set up and ready—a Brunswick table for a change, with an honest green cloth. At least a hundred people were seated in the stands and another hundred were hanging around waiting for something to happen. But time passed and Fats did not show up. Eddie called the Ramada Inn and they rang Fats’ room, but no one answered. The shopping-mall manager tried Enoch Wax’s office in Lexington; Enoch had heard nothing from Fats. Eddie waited an hour, shooting a few trick shots to hold the audience and to give himself something to do. At three-twenty there was still no Fats and the bleachers were nearly empty. Eddie told the manager he was leaving, went back to Tony’s, had a drink and called a taxi to take him to the Ramada Inn.