The Color of Money

by Walter Tevis

  “I’ll fix you another drink.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe you’ll feel more like it.”

  Suddenly he was annoyed. “Don’t give me that,” he said. “I don’t think you’re in the mood either.”

  She looked at him.

  “You just want to put the ball in my court.”

  She hesitated. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am right. You’re not the only sex that gets exploited.”

  She frowned and took a long swallow from her drink. “You’re so good looking,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be smart.”

  He walked back to the window and looked out again. Far to the right, on the next block downtown, was a theater. He could just read the marquee.

  He turned back to her. She had moved her legs out from under her and was now sitting on the sofa in the regular way, with her feet crossed at the ankles. She had nice feet, with pale blue shoes that fit her well. In the light from the window her complexion glowed. “Have you seen Reds?” he said.

  “Reds?”

  “The movie. With Warren Beatty.”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go see it.”

  She looked astonished. “At two o’clock in the afternoon?”

  “They wouldn’t play all afternoon if people didn’t go.”

  “People who have nothing better to do.”

  “Do you have something better to do?”

  She looked at him and then shrugged. “Let’s go,” she said.

  ***

  It was a long movie, with an intermission in the middle, and they didn’t get out until after five. Arabella was a lot more at ease when they came out. While they stood blinking in the bright afternoon light—startling after the dark theater—she said, “I used to be a Socialist. My grandmother wanted me to work for the Party, but I never did.”

  “Why did you come to America?”

  “I don’t like English men.”

  “Laurence Olivier?” he said. “Mountbatten?”

  “They never asked me out.”

  “I could have been a Socialist,” he said. “Some people say it’s subversive. What goes on in daily business is what’s subversive.”

  “Daily business?”

  “Real estate. Insurance. Mid-American Cable TV.”

  “I wish you could have met my grandmother.”

  “Let’s go back to your apartment.”

  “Don’t you have to be anywhere?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “I don’t want to make love.”

  “That’s a relief,” Eddie said. “I want to see your place again. I like all the white.”

  “Eddie,” she said, “you are a prince. What do you do for a living?”

  He was silent awhile before he spoke. “I don’t want to tell you yet,” he said.

  ***

  Eddie knocked, and then opened the door to Fats’ room. Fats was in a Danish Modern chair by the window, almost completely obscuring the chair, his enormous bottom stuffed into it and hanging over. The plastic swag lamp above the table by him shone theatrically on boxes of junk desserts: King Dongs, Devil Dogs, Twinkies. He held a Ring Ding Junior—a kind of chocolate hockey puck—in his hand and was chewing on another. The television was off. Nothing else was going on in the room. Eddie felt for a moment as though he’d found him masturbating. He stood with his hand on the doorknob, silent, while Fats finished chewing.

  “Come in, Fast Eddie,” Fats said.

  Eddie walked in. “I thought you were more of a gourmet than that.”

  “Don’t gourmet me,” Fats said. “Do you think they sell French desserts in the Rochester Holiday Inn? Éclairs? Mousse au chocolate?”

  Eddie shrugged and seated himself on the bed. “That’s quite a few of them.”

  Fats looked at the Ring Ding in his hand with distaste. “I am not overweight for nothing.” He took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “What do you want, Eddie?”

  “I was thinking,” Eddie said. “Maybe we shouldn’t finish the tour.”

  Fats looked at him and said nothing.

  “If ‘Wide World of Sports’ isn’t going to pick us up…”

  “You’ve heard something?”

  “If they haven’t done it by now they probably won’t.”

  Fats finished his Ring Ding and picked up a package of Twinkies. “Well,” he said, “I’ve been enjoying myself. Relatively speaking.”

  Eddie frowned. “You’re being paid more than I am.”

  “And I’m winning.” He pinched the top of the Twinkie pack and zipped it open expertly—the way a wino opens a bottle of muscatel, Eddie thought. He slipped out a Twinkie, held it between finger and thumb. “My game has been good and I enjoy the applause. Now that you’ve got glasses, you should practice.”

  “It bores me, Fats.” He leaned forward. “I mean it seriously bores me.”

  “Then something’s wrong with your head.” Fats popped the Twinkie into his mouth and picked up his glass of Perrier.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my head. I’ve just been away from serious pool too long. I’m too old to play for money.”

  Fats swallowed, drank some more Perrier and looked at him. “Fast Eddie,” he said, “if you don’t shoot pool, you’re nothing.”

  “Come on, Fats. Life is full of things.”

  “Name three.”

  “Don’t be dumb.”

  “I’m not being dumb. How good is sex when you’re half a man?”

  “I’m not half a man.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Fats said. “I can tell by the way you shoot pool.” He took the other Twinkie out of its wrapper. “Money comes after sex. Maybe before. I already know you don’t have money.”

  Eddie tried to be cool, but he wasn’t able to smile “That’s sex and money. Two things.”

  “Self-respect,” Fats said.

  “I can have self-respect doing something besides shooting pool.”

  “No you can’t,” Fats said. “Not you.”

  “Why not? I didn’t sign a contract that says I shoot pool for life.”

  “It’s been signed for you.” Fats finished his glass of Perrier. “I played all of them, forty years. You were the best I ever saw.”

  Eddie stared at him. “If that’s true,” he said, “it was twenty years ago. This is nineteen eighty-three.”

  “August,” Fats said.

  “I don’t see so well. I’m not young anymore.”

  “August fourteenth. Nineteen eighty-three.”

  “What are you, a calendar?”

  “I’m a pool player, Fast Eddie. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be anything at all.”

  Eddie looked at him in silence. Then, not ready to let it go, he said, “What about the photographs? The roseate spoonbills?”

  “Roseate spoonbills?” Fats said. “I am what I am because I shoot pool.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Eddie said.

  “I am right. Practice eight hours a day. Play people for money.”

  “I don’t know….” Eddie said.

  “I know,” Fats said. “If you don’t practice, your balls will shrivel and you won’t sleep at night. You’re Fast Eddie Felson, for Christ’s sake. You ought to be winning when you play me. Don’t be a goddamned fool.”

  “You make it sound like life and death.”

  “Because that’s what it is.”

  ***

  Back in Lexington, he tried it the first morning. Out to the closed poolroom at nine for eight hours of practice. When he unlocked the door he was shocked. There were only three tables in the room. He tried to shake off the dismay and began to shoot. It made him dizzy, walking around the table for hours in the near-empty room, bending, making a ball and going on to the next one. But he stayed with it doggedly, leaving for a few minutes at noon to get two hot dogs and a cup of coffee at Woolworth’s. He shifted from straight pool to banks but got bored with that and started practicing long cut shots, slicing the colored balls pa
rallel with the rail and into the corner pockets. His stroke began to feel smoother but his shoulder was tired. Was Fats right? Had his balls been shriveling? He started shooting harder, making them slap against the backs of the pockets, rifling them in. Fats knew a lot. Loaded on junk food, his belly and ass enormous, over sixty years old, Fats shot pool beautifully; he had balls. Balls was what he, Eddie, had started playing pool for in the first place—that was what they all did. Mother’s boys, some of them. He had been shy when he was twelve and thirteen, before he first picked up a pool stick. When he found out about pool and how well he could play it, it had changed him. He could not remember all of it, but it had even changed the way he walked. He smashed the orange five ball down the rail and into the pocket. Then the three, the fourteen, twelve, hitting them perfectly. He went on blasting at them, but missed the final ball. It came off the edge of the pocket, caromed its way around the table, bouncing off five cushions, and then rolled slowly to a stop. His back was hurting and he had a headache.

  It was almost five o’clock. The phone at the room had been cut off for weeks. He went outside to the pay phone in the parking lot and called Arabella.

  “I’d like to come over for a drink,” he said.

  “I’m going to a play at eight. You can come for a while.”

  “I’ll bring wine,” he said, and hung up.

  ***

  “Tell me about your husband,” Eddie said. He was seated in one of the white armchairs. “Is his name Weems?”

  “Harrison Frame.”

  “Haven’t I heard of him?”

  “It would be hard not to,” Arabella said. “He used to do a television show on the university channel.”

  “You sound like you hate him.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.”

  She took a thoughtful swallow from her wineglass. “I suppose you’re right. Let’s not talk about him. What have you been doing today?”

  “Catching up on my homework.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Catch up?”

  “I only started.” He got up and went to the window, looking at the traffic in the street and the buildings across the street. “I like this apartment a lot,” he said.

  “Eddie,” she said from the sofa, “I’ve been living in this one room for two months and I’m going crazy.”

  “It’ll be better when you find a job.”

  “I’m not going to find a job. There’s a recession going on. President Reagan speaks of recovery, but he’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Another goddamned performer, like my former husband. He’s only working the room, our president. Counting the house and working the room. The son of a bitch.”

  “Hey,” Eddie said, laughing. “You sound terrible. Are you drunk?”

  “If three glasses of wine makes you drunk, I’m drunk.”

  “I’ll get you something to eat.” He left the window and went to the refrigerator. There was a wedge of Brie and four eggs. Nothing else. “What about a soft-boiled egg?”

  “If you say so.”

  He boiled her two of them and, since there was no butter, merely put them in a bowl with salt and pepper and handed it to her. He heated some coffee and gave her a cup of it black.

  She was a real cutie, eating her eggs on the sofa. She hunched over them with her silver hair glowing in the late afternoon light from the big window, spooning them in small bites. He sat across from her and watched, sipping his own coffee.

  “Thanks, Eddie,” she said when she finished. She held the bowl in her lap and smiled. “Why don’t you tell me what you do for a living?”

  He hesitated. “I was a poolroom operator until a few months ago. A long time ago I was a player.” He felt relieved; it was time he told her about pool.

  “A poolroom?” She didn’t seem to understand.

  “Yes.”

  “But what has that to do with Enoch Wax?”

  “I’m doing exhibition games for Mid-Atlantic.”

  “Then you must be good.”

  “I lost the first two matches.”

  She didn’t seem to notice what he said. She just kept looking at him. Finally she said, “Holy cow. A pool player.” She sounded excited by the idea.

  “My game isn’t what it was. I practiced all day today and it bored the hell out of me.”

  She bit her lip a moment, then reached forward and set her empty bowl on the glass coffee table, next to a vase of orange gladiolas. “It must be better than sitting around an apartment.”

  “Not by much.”

  She stretched and yawned. “My God, Eddie! First you cheer me up, now I’m cheering you up. It could go on forever. Why don’t you go to the play with us tonight? I can inveigle a ticket.”

  “I’ve never seen a play.”

  “All the more reason to go.”

  “Maybe you’re right. What’s the name of it?”

  “A Streetcar Named Desire. At the university theater. The principal character bears some resemblance to you.”

  He looked at her. “Stanley Kowalski or Blanche DuBois?”

  “Well,” she said, “a closet intellectual.”

  “I saw the movie.”

  “You didn’t say Marlon Brando or Vivien Leigh.”

  “Look,” he said, irritated, “I’ll go to the play with you. But I’m tired of being figured out. I’m not a rube. I know who Tennessee Williams was. I just don’t go to plays. Nobody asked me to before.”

  ***

  They had dinner at the Japanese place, and this time Eddie ordered Sushi. He had practiced with a pair of pencils at Jean’s apartment, picking up cigarettes. The trick was to hold the bottom one steady and use the top one like the jaw of a clamp. The Sushi was easy. Arabella watched him for a moment but made no comment.

  They met the other couple outside the theater, in the Fine Arts Building. The Skammers, both of them professors. He was history and she was math. They were both thin people, both in running shoes and bright cotton sweaters, both easygoing and cordial. She had reddish hair and was pretty in an unexciting way. Eddie noticed the man was wearing a gold Rolex. The four of them had only a few minutes to chat before curtain time.

  He had never seen even a high-school play and was uncertain what to expect. The actors were college students, and from his third-row seat he could see their makeup. It took him awhile, feeling self-conscious with real people on the stage in front of him, but after a few minutes he got into it. He liked Stanley; the student playing the part had the right swagger. And Blanche was a genuine loser—the real thing—with her talk and her posing. Arabella, sitting by him, laughed aloud at some of Blanche’s lines, but he didn’t find her funny. It would be frightening to be like that, in that kind of a fog. It was fascinating to listen to her talk, to hear her construct her version of her past and Stella’s, and to watch her come apart. He had seen pool players come apart like that. “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” You didn’t have to be taken off by men in white suits to fail like that. You could stay home, drink beer, watch TV. There was a lot of it going around.

  That was what he said when Skammer asked him, afterward, how he liked it. “There’s a lot of that going around.” They all stared at him and then laughed loudly.

  “Eddie,” Arabella said, “will you teach me to shoot pool?”

  He was feeling good. “Right now?”

  “Why not? Do you know a place?”

  “Shoot pool?” Roy Skammer said. “That’s a stunning idea.”

  “Oh boy!” Pat said. She had been crying at the play and her face was streaked from it. They were walking along the campus on their way to the car.

  “Don’t knock it,” Roy said. “In my sophomore year I did little else. I was a veritable Fast Eddie.”

  Arabella looked at him. “A Fast Eddie?”

  “Of the Princeton Student Union.”

  “There’s a table at the Faculty Club,” Pat said
. “Roy is the eight-ball terror of arts and sciences.”

  “My my,” Arabella said. And then to Eddie, “Will you teach me?”

  Eddie shrugged. He was still feeling high from the play. It was a warm night and the light from mercury lamps was filtered through tall trees along the campus walk. He was not really interested in shooting pool. His right shoulder was sore from the eight hours at the room that day and he was not interested in seeing how well Roy Skammer shot eight-ball. Roy Skammer seemed amiable and smiled a lot, but Eddie did not like him. He did not like the man’s glib way of talking.

  “I’d like to learn,” Arabella said.

  “Okay. I’ll show you how.”

  “If you’d like,” Roy said, “I’ll help.”

  ***

  There was a little bar when you came in the front door. A group of men were sitting there at a table drinking beer. A couple of them waved to Roy. “There he is,” one of them said to Skammer; and another said to Arabella and Eddie, “Don’t play him for money.” There were dark oil portraits above the bar, probably of former professors.

  The pool table was in a big upstairs room with an Oriental rug on the floor and more paintings of scholarly-looking men on the dark walls. It was an old Brunswick table with fringed pockets and a cloth with brownish stains on it. Skammer flipped a switch and yellowish lights over the table came on. “Go ahead,” he said to Eddie. “I’ll go down and get some beer.”

  Since they walked in the door, Eddie had felt a little stiff. He had never been around professors before, had not even been on campus in his years in Lexington. The Skammers made no attempt to impress with their education, but he felt inhibited. They were the kind of couple you sometimes saw on the street or read about in magazines. But when he got a pair of cue sticks out of the wall rack and gave one to Arabella, he began to loosen up. He showed her how to hold the cue at the balance and to keep her left arm straight. He had her stand sideways at the table and bend at the waist, letting the stick slide across her open-hand bridge. She concentrated and did it surprisingly well. Pat had played before and didn’t require instruction. Watching Arabella shoot the white ball around, she said, “You’re pretty damned apt, Weems”; and Arabella, bending to shoot at the seven ball, said, “You don’t type a hundred forty words a minute without being apt.”