The Color of Money

by Walter Tevis

  “He wanted me to meet him for a drink when I close up.”

  “He looked pretty young.” Eddie did not say anything about Greg, who had not been much older.

  “That’s what I told him,” Arabella said, “but he was persistent. He said age didn’t matter to him as long as everything else was right. That’s when I told him to get lost.”

  Eddie got a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “Don’t worry about it. You did the right thing.”

  She reached into the pocket and took a cigarette for herself. She smoked rarely, and only when upset. “I suppose so,” she said.

  ***

  The morning show on Monday gave them six minutes. Eddie timed it. The pictures of Marcum’s women looked bright and good, and when Arabella came on she was very professional, smart and relaxed. It should help a lot.

  By eleven there was a good crowd of people there—at least a dozen. Several mentioned the TV show, and a few seemed interested in buying, saying they would think about it or mull it over. But nobody bought anything. By six the shop was empty, and at six-thirty Eddie and Arabella locked the door and left. He was beginning to feel worn out.

  “Well,” Arabella said, “we’re merchants. Two weary merchants.”

  “Let’s eat at the Japanese place,” Eddie said. “I’m not ready to go home.”

  The restaurant was two blocks away; they left the car in front of the gallery and walked. After dinner they decided to go to a movie and then they walked around downtown for a while. It was eleven before they got back to the car. As they crossed the dark street to the gallery, Eddie saw something on the window; it became clearer when he got closer.

  Using white spray paint, someone had covered the glass over the gallery sign and then written below it, in glossy white, KENTUCKY FUCK ART GALLERY.

  “Son of a bitch,” Eddie said between his teeth. “That goddamned son of a bitch.”

  “I’ll call the police,” Arabella said.

  ***

  The police were no help, although the sergeant who came by a half hour afterward said he’d have his men keep an eye on the place. Eddie was able to get the paint off with a razor blade, and since the gold lettering was inside the glass, no real harm had been done.

  ***

  He was an unprepossessing man in a gray tweed overcoat with a button missing. He appeared to be about sixty. When he came in he went immediately to the quilts and looked at them at great length, especially studying Betty Jo’s Fiery Furnace, which had a small not-for-sale sign on the wall below it. Leah Daphne Merser’s bird-and-flower design was next to it, and he studied that for a long time too, tilting his head this way and that. Eddie sat on the stool at the counter drinking coffee. There was no one else in the store.

  Suddenly the man broke the silence. “Remarkable trapunto,” he said. “The stitching is flawless and the stuffing is tight.”

  “Leah Daphne Merser,” Eddie said. “She was one of the best.”

  “I believe you,” the man said. “Nineteen thirties?”

  “She died during the war.”

  “I see you are asking eighteen hundred dollars.”

  “I know it seems like a lot,” Eddie said.

  “It’s a museum piece,” the man said. “I have no problem there.”

  Eddie finished his coffee and said nothing. The man began looking at the metal sculptures. After a few minutes he came over to the counter. He was carrying a checkbook. “I’ll take the trapunto quilt,” he said, “and the Statue of Unliberty. I think you were exactly right in putting them together.”

  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 suggest
ed 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.

  Chapter Eight

  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.

  He stood, then padded barefoot to where his suitcase was and took the cue case from beside it. He slid out the solid, beautifully wrought Balabushka, walked back to the window and stood there screwing the two pieces together, looking at the sky and a distant row of dark pines behind the Sahara.

  He had flown to San Francisco, picked up a rented car at the airport and had driven the two hundred miles across California, starting with the Bridge and then a four-lane highway through Oakland. There were miles of Oakland, the city where he was born, and yet none of it meant anything to him. There was not even the name of a familiar street on the exit signs, no tall building seen from the road that he had seen before. Only the light in the morning sky and the glimpses of the bay caught through heavy traffic on the Bridge were familiar. The house he had lived in was off the road somewhere, behind gas stations and gritty buildings. He had no idea where. Despite this, driving a bypass that was like any other American bypass, he knew he had come home for a moment at least. On the backseat were his suitcase and his cue stick; in his pocket was money. He had nothing to do for two weeks except play pool as well as he could.

  At the hotel now he took a long, slow shower, standing in the tub in the center of the room with only half the curtain drawn, letting hot water run down his body for a long time before soaping up. He had turned on the huge TV that faced the bed, and as he showered he could hear the voice-over detailing the ways of placing bets on a roulette table: “Each player is given his own color of chips,” the plausible voice explained, as though to children, “and he keeps them throughout his time at the table. Your croupier will answer any questions.” The picture on the screen showed a young woman croupier handing chips to a bettor. Money was not mentioned. Everything was cheerful. It was just the thing to be watching while taking a shower in the middle of the bedroom. The Balabushka lay on the bed, its bright chrome-plated joint gleaming in the light from the bright Nevada sky, ready for use.

  ***

  Just keeping the glass clean could have occupied the labors of half the Mafia. The elevators were walled with mirrors, and when you stepped out on the main floor you found yourself walking along a hallway lined with hundreds of large, diamond-shaped mirrors without a spot or a grain of dust on them. Then you turned left, went down a few carpeted stairs, and you were in the casino, facing an acre of chromium-and-glass slot machines—all clean, polished, in immaculate condition despite the hordes of glassy-eyed people who moved among them, wandering from the nickel slots to the dollar ones, threading their ways past the fifty-cent and quarter machines. All the machines had fronts of colored glass lit brightly from inside. Some people stood fixed before one machine for hours at a time, taking silver from a paper cup, dropping it in the slot, pulling the handle, letting the coins that sometimes fell into the chute at the machine’s bottom accumulate until the cup was empty and then refilling the cup. Terrible odds, Eddie thought, but they didn’t seem to care. Maybe they were afraid of doing something stupid or wrong in front of the croupiers and dealers at the games where you had a better chance. The only blunder with a slot machine was deciding to play it.

  Powerful air conditioning sucked smoke from the air faster than the crowds could produce it. Not one ray of natural light penetrated the casino from sunlit Nevada outside; a million watts of electricity spread itself around the enormous room in luminous blue, gold and red glass like the setting for an endless, vaguely pornographic, musical.

  Beyond the acre of slots sat the tables—craps and blackjack, covered in pool-table green. Off to the left in a quiet backwater cordoned by velvet ropes and monitored by men and women in tuxedoes and stage makeup, with frilled electric blue shirts, was baccarat. No sheiks or movie stars sat at those tables, but that was where they were supposed to be if they ever came to Caesar’s Tahoe. The sounds of slot machines, hushed by the thickness of the red and blue carpet, penetrated to this quieter area as a kind of atonal Muzak. The only loud noises came from the odd crapshooter instructing his dice.

  Beyond craps and baccarat were restaurants and a sushi bar. Eddie headed for the sushi bar.

  He started to seat himself at an empty table that overlooked the casino when he saw a Reserved sign. Annoyed, he went on through the drinking crowd and found himself a small table against the wall. He ordered a Manhattan from a waitress with fishnet hose and a skirt about three inches long; the name on her tag read “Marge.” The sushi sat in crushed ice on a buffet table in the center of the room where a piano would have sat a few years
ago—before sushi joined the croissant as chic.

  Just as Marge returned with his drink, he looked up to see a familiar face coming across the room toward him. It was Boomer. “You still got that electronic Balabushka?” Boomer said.

  “In my room.” Eddie signed the check for the drink. “Sit down.”

  “Let me have a Drambuie on the rocks, Marge.” Boomer seated himself with a sigh. “If I draw you in the first round I’m complaining to the management.”

  Eddie took a sip from his drink, which turned out to be far too sweet. “Have you seen the tables yet?”

  “I just got here.” Boomer did not seem to be putting on one of his acts. His voice was genuinely morose. When his Drambuie came, he drank it off fast and ordered another. Eddie’s eyes followed Marge’s legs idly as she headed for the bar, until he saw three slim young men, brightly dressed and looking wired, coming up the steps from the casino. The one in front was Babes Cooley. With him was Earl Borchard. Under his breath Boomer said, “The sons of bitches.”

  The young men were laughing together. They walked to the table marked Reserved and seated themselves. Two waitresses came over, all smiles, and began taking their orders for drinks.

  “Fucking kids,” Boomer said morosely.

  Eddie said nothing, turning back to his Manhattan.

  ***

  The main floor of the hotel was laid out like one of those supermarkets where it is impossible to buy what you want without being given opportunity to buy what you do not want: you had to go through the entire casino to get anywhere else. The ballroom where the tournament would be was at the end of a long hallway; and to get to the hallway from the elevators or the restaurants, you had to walk past the slot machines, the crap tables, the baccarat, twenty-one, roulette, chuck-a-luck and wheel of fortune. Keeno, of course, was everywhere; its numbered boards caught the eye wherever one happened to stand, and its green-skirted runners were ubiquitous.

  The ballroom was not so big as Eddie expected, but it was big enough. The five tables were surrounded by rows of wooden bleachers. At the far end of the room was a platform with a speakers’ table holding microphones.