The Hustler

by Walter Tevis

  Bert was climbing down slowly from the high chair, his smooth, babyish face with a pleased expression, the look of a man well content with his small and comfortable world. “Come on,” he said to Eddie.

  “Where?”

  “I’m buying you a drink. Now that we’re in business together….”

  15

  He practiced for most of the next day, and when he was finished was afraid that he had overdone it; his thumbs seemed to be even stiffer and more sore. But there would be time for them to loosen up, tomorrow, during the trip.

  He was not certain how to tell Sarah that he was leaving—he had not even told her about the money he’d won from Bill Davis—and he did not know exactly what to expect from her. Obviously, the best thing was to be diplomatic about it: get her properly drunk and then bring it up.

  It was four in the afternoon when he finished practicing, and he went immediately from the poolroom to Sarah’s. She was working on her writing, in the kitchen, when he came in. He walked into the room, turned the fire on under the remains of the breakfast coffee, sat down at the table opposite her and said, “What kind of outfit can you buy for fifty dollars?”

  She peered over at him, looking over her glasses, the old puzzled expression on her face. She was wearing a white shirt with the tail out, and a green corduroy skirt. “You mean dress, shoes, hat?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A fair one. It’s summer; summer clothes are cheaper. Why?”

  He pulled a cigarette out and lit it. “Seventy-five dollars?”

  “A good outfit. Damn good. What’s it for? And who?”

  “For you. For dinner. Tonight.”

  She took her glasses off, frowning. “I don’t need clothes. And what’s happening tonight?”

  “What’s happening tonight is we’re going out for dinner. At the best place you can pick.” He got up, cut the fire off under the coffee and began searching for a clean cup. “And you can use some clothes.”

  “Now wait a minute. What’s the plan, Eddie? First it’s candy—at two o’clock in the morning. Now clothes. Where did you get the money?”

  He found and began rinsing out a cup. “A man gave it to me.”

  “Sure.” She looked away from him. “Playing pool?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Great. That’s fine. Where do I fit in on this? Why give me a cut? Is your conscience bad?”

  “Look,” he said, “maybe I should forget it.”

  “Maybe you should. You don’t have to buy me things. You’ve already seduced me, remember?”

  He drank off half the cup of coffee. It was lukewarm and foul. “I remember.” He set the cup, unfinished, back in the sink. “Do you want the clothes? Somebody told me, once, that women like clothes. And candy.”

  Her voice was hard. “Your logic’s overwhelming. Who told you I like clothes and candy? And going out to dinner?”

  “Nobody. Forget it.” He went into the living room, sat down and picked up a news magazine. Somebody was fighting a war and he read about this, although it was not interesting. Her typewriter kept banging for several minutes and then stopped. Then he heard her clinking ice and glasses. In a minute she came in and held out a highball.

  She smiled slightly. “Sometimes,” she said, “I’m a bitch.”

  “That’s right.” He took the drink.

  She sat on the footstool that was in front of his chair, and began working on her drink silently. He set his magazine down and looked at her. The shirt she was wearing was like a man’s shirt, and the top two buttons were undone. Her brassiere was loose and looking down he could see her nipples. This amused him at first, for the hustle in it was obvious. He knew very well that there is nothing accidental that women do with their bosoms.

  Finally she looked up at him again, grinning a little wryly, self-consciously. “Do you still want to take me out?” The breath that she took, after saying this, was just a bit exaggerated, heaving the breasts up.

  He could not help laughing. “Okay,” he said, reaching down and taking her under the arms. “You win. We’ll buy the dress, afterward.”

  “We’d better hurry,” she said. “The stores’ll be closing.” He took her by the arm, leading her into the bedroom.

  Afterward he lay on his back in bed, perspiring. He felt very good, very relaxed. And there was a good feeling in his stomach, the feeling of something about to begin. There would be new places to go, new games to play. Sarah was smoking a cigarette in bed, looking thoughtful and at ease, her small body covered with the sheet.

  She rolled over and stubbed her cigarette out, leaning across him in bed so that her hair fell down over her face as she mashed the cigarette in the ash tray. Then she looked down at him and grinned. “Let’s go,” she said….

  ***

  She tried to act as if buying the clothes meant nothing to her, but he could see that she was enjoying it. She would act cynical about every outfit she looked at, but he noticed that she was very careful about what she bought. And what she finally did buy looked tremendous on her: a navy blue dress, tight and perfectly fitting, that made her butt gorgeous, navy blue shoes, unornamented, a navy blue and white hat, and white gloves.

  She was in the bathroom for what seemed like an hour. It took him twenty minutes to put on a clean shirt and socks and to shave, and he spent the rest of the time reading about the war and about a lot of people who were supposed to be interesting because they were rich or actors or both.

  “Hey!” he said, getting up and walking to her. And she smelled good; he had never known her to use perfume before. “You’re the best. The best there is.”

  He could almost feel her effort to keep her voice wry, “Thanks.” She looked at him and said, “And if you want to do this right you’d better change that suit. It’s wrinkled.”

  He laughed. “Sure.”

  He had one dress shirt and a tie and he put these on together with his gray suit. When he came out she laughed. “I never saw you with a tie before. You look like a fraternity president.”

  “And you’re the sweetheart of whatever it is. Let’s go.”

  As they were going out the door she stopped him for a moment, looked up at him and said, “Eddie. Thanks.”

  ***

  She picked the place they went to. She had heard of it, but never been there. It was precisely the kind of restaurant he had in mind—big, dimly lit, quiet, elegantly furnished. He liked it immediately and, deciding to play it out all the way, gave the headwaiter a five and picked out his own table, by a wall. The five earned them a bowing and impeccable waiter and Sarah started them off with a bottle of cocktail sherry that was as old as she was. One odd thing: he was surprised that Sarah was imposed on by the place, a little nervous, defensive, and awkward; whereas he felt thoroughly at home himself, even though he had hardly ever been in this kind of restaurant in his life. But after two glasses of the wine and after the band began playing quiet, light music, she began to loosen up. He was beginning to feel very fine and he began talking to her about himself—a thing that he seldom did. But he did not tell her about Minnesota Fats. And then when they were through eating and were drinking the tiny glasses of Benedictine which she had ordered and which he found he did not like, he leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and said, “I suppose you know I had a reason.”

  A moment before her face had been alive. Immediately it became hard. “There’s always an angle, isn’t there?”

  “I don’t play the angles. Not with you.”

  “Sure.” There was no conviction in her voice. She finished her glass of Benedictine, settled back in her seat and folded her arms across her chest. “All right, what is it, Eddie?”

  He looked at her coolly, “I’m leaving town for a while.”

  Her eyes darted to his face and then, quickly, away. There was no expression in them, only a kind of curiosity. He knew, however, that this was a pose, and he knew as any gambler would know that there was a reason for it, in the game that t
hey had begun to play—the game that he himself, in fact, had hustled her into a long time before. He did not, however, know what the pose was intended to conceal. With Sarah, he was never quite certain.

  She looked back at him steadily. Then she said, “For how long, Eddie?” She might have been asking him if he wanted another cup of coffee.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A week? A year?”

  “More like a week. I’ll be back.”

  She began putting on her gloves. She did this as she did many things, deftly, yet with care. “Sure,” she said. She stood up. “Let’s go home.”

  Outside they walked silently. There were pockets in the skirt of her dress and by jamming her hands in these she was able, magically, to convert what had been a chic appearance a moment before into the kind of wistful, limping dowdiness that seemed to be her most natural pose in the outside world.

  After several minutes he said, gently, “Don’t you want to know where I’m going?”

  “No. Yes, I want to know where you’re going, and what for. Only I don’t want to ask.”

  “I’m going to Kentucky,” he said. “Lexington. With a friend.”

  She did not say anything, but kept walking, her hands in her pockets still, her eyes straight ahead.

  “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…”

  16

  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.

  They stopped along the road for hamburgers and coffee, and Eddie had a quick drink, although Bert declined one. Afterward, in the car he looked at Bert and said, wanting now to talk, “What do they play in Kentucky, what’s the big game?”

  Bert, as always, thought for a moment before he spoke. “They play bank pool,” he said, “and one-pocket.”

  “Good,” Eddie said. “I like that about one-pocket. What does Findlay play?”

  Bert paused again. “I don’t know. I never saw him play. I only know him from his poker days.”

  Eddie grinned. “You must have a lot of confidence in me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how do you know he won’t beat me? How do you know he won’t shoot better pool than I do?”

  “I don’t know that. And I don’t have much confidence in you. But I got confidence in Findlay.”