“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.”
“Come on,” Pat said, “nobody types one forty. The ribbon would disintegrate.”
Arabella frowned harder at the seven ball, then bit her lip. She pumped her right arm and hit the cue ball surprisingly hard. The seven rolled across the table and into the side pocket. Eddie could have hugged her. She looked up at Pat and said, “On a good day I do one fifty. Haven’t lost a ribbon yet.”
Roy came in with four cans of beer and handed them out. “Let’s play some eight-ball,” he said impatiently. “I want to show my trick shots.”
“I’ll rack,” Eddie said.
“Wait a minute!” It was Arabella. “I don’t know the rules.”
There had been some two-piece cues locked at one end of the wall rack. Roy went over and unlocked one of them. “We’ll explain it as we go along.” He came back with his cue. It was an old Wille Hoppe, with a brass joint. “Pat and I will be partners, and Arabella and Ed. The losing team buys the next round.”
“You’re on,” Arabella said, looking at Eddie.
“Two out of three games,” Pat said.
“Sure.” Arabella began chalking her cue the way Eddie had showed her. “That’ll give me time to get in stroke.”
The women went first. Pat broke weakly and missed an easy shot on the four ball. That gave the Skammers the solids. Eddie explained to Arabella that they had to shoot the striped balls in; he showed her how to make the thirteen in the corner. She was still awkward with her cue, but she concentrated and shot it in. But her position was terrible and she miscued on the next one. Roy went to the chalk dispenser and banged powder into his left hand. Too much of it, making a little cloud. “I want everyone to pay complete attention,” he said. He didn’t seem entirely to be kidding. “You are about to see eight-ball shot the way it was intended to be shot.” He walked to the table and pointed at the two ball with his stick. “I am going to bank this blue ball into the side pocket right here”—he pointed to the pocket—“and the cue ball will roll into position for the six afterward. Very few white people understand this kind of playing.”
“Quit grandstanding, Roy,” Pat said. “Make the shot.”