After supper Arabella sat in the canvas director’s chair she had watched from the night before, reading a book. At nine he went out to the bar, got two bottles of beer and poured hers into a glass.
“Well,” she said, “think of how you did last night.”
“Do you want to play?”
“All right.” She closed her book and set it on the table by the beer.
He showed her how to draw the cue ball by putting bottom English on it and how to make a proper bridge with her thumb and forefinger. Her concentration was impressive. He set up balls for her and watched her tap them in, and for a while, it was a pleasure. She liked getting things right. He took the seat she had been in, drank his beer slowly from the bottle and watched her. After a while he was reading from The Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett while she shot the balls around on the table. They were strange little stories, about Englishmen; he read three. When he looked up from the third, Arabella was standing in front of him, her arms crossed over the top of the Balabushka.
“It does get boring after a while,” she said.
Eddie stretched and yawned. “Not at five hundred a game.”
“Let’s go to the room, Eddie. I’m tired.”
The next evening around eight o’clock, Billy Usho came in. This time he was wearing a chocolate-brown velvet jacket and tan slacks over light Italian shoes. He was carrying his cue case and he smiled ruefully when he saw Eddie sitting in the director’s chair.
“What if I bank the eight?” Eddie said.
“Blindfold, maybe,” Usho said.
“Have a seat,” Eddie said. “Where can I get a game?”
“Next to impossible.”
“A friend told me there were money players around here.”
“Not anymore. Who’s your friend?”
“Fats, from Chicago.”
“Oh yes,” Billy Usho said, looking very Japanese. He could have said, “Ah so!” He opened his case and took out a cue that was different from the one he had used before. Its butt was wrapped in brown linen that matched his jacket. “I hear Fats came through here six years ago and cleaned them all out. But there was money in those days. It’s not like that now.”
“You’re just passing through too, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been here a week. You have to work at it.”
Eddie fell silent for a while. There was an amateurish game of pool going on in front of them, and they watched for a while. Then Eddie said, “Did you ever play the nine-ball tournament at Lake Tahoe?”
“Those tournaments are a bitch. You got to come in first or second, or the hotel bill eats you alive.”
“I hear Earl Borchard makes a good living at tournaments.”
“He’s a genius. So’s Babes Cooley.”
Eddie got down from his chair, put a quarter in the table and began shooting banks. Usho came over and watched.
Eddie tapped the five ball cross-side, freezing the cue ball. “I haven’t seen anybody play serious nine-ball for twenty years.”
Billy looked at him speculatively. “Where’ve you been?”
Eddie slammed a long cross-corner bank on the twelve ball. “In a fog, Billy. I’ve been in a god-damned fog for twenty years.”
“Good bank on the twelve,” Billy said.
As they walked out onto the parking lot at one, a carload of teenagers drove up, screeching to a stop in the space next to Eddie’s car. Six of them got out, the boys staggering and laughing, the girls squealing. Eddie and Billy watched as they went under the big red neon sign into Thelma’s. As Eddie was unlocking his car he turned to Billy and said, “Do you think I could beat Earl Borchard at nine-ball? Or Babes Cooley?”
“No,” Billy said, “I don’t think you could.”
“Why not?”
“This eight-ball in bars is nothing but a scuffle. The best players are in nine-ball.”
“What about straight pool?”
“Nine-ball. That’s where the money is.”
There was no way not to leave Arabella stuck in motels over the next two weeks. She read books, spent some time on the telephone, and they went to matinees of movies together, saving the night for pool-shooting. She would go to whatever bar he was working and stay an hour or so, but it was tedious for him and more so for her; there wasn’t anything for her to do.
Worse, he wasn’t making any money. The best game he found was for twenty dollars, and the man quit him after a few hours of it, leaving Eddie with a profit of a hundred eighty. That was in the first week, and even it was not repeated.
After three days in a Holiday Inn in Beaufort, North Carolina, Arabella’s boredom was beginning to show. She tried to be cheerful, but there were long silences between them at breakfast—or at what was lunch for her and breakfast for him. One day at noon, when he had just gotten up from a long, unsuccessful night at a downtown bar, several things went wrong. The hotel laundry service had lost two blouses, the television set had lost its ability to make a coherent picture, they went to lunch and the waitress brought her the wrong sandwich. She had ordered the Big Chuck hamburger; the waitress brought her liverwurst. Arabella stared furiously at the glossy white bread. Eddie tried to hail the waitress as she disappeared into the kitchen.
“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I want to go home.”
“There’s an afternoon flight from Raleigh. I’ll go with you.”
It was colder in Lexington now, and he wore a scarf and gloves on his way to the Faculty Club in the mornings. The leaves had all fallen from the trees and been raked from the neatly cropped grass of the campus; there were still rake marks like the lines in the fine gravel of a Japanese garden. Eddie walked briskly from the parking lot to the club, chin down against the morning cold, cue case tucked under his arm. He liked it. After the raw towns in the South, with their neon and poverty, the university—with its substantial old brick buildings, its neatly kept walks, its sense of order and security—was a profound relief. He would walk into the anteroom of the Faculty Club, past the wooden tables where breakfast was being set up by students in white jackets, up the wooden stairs to the second floor and down the hallway to the game room, to uncover the big mahogany table and begin his morning’s work. He knew he did not belong here either by education, social class or any right other than Roy Skammer’s invitation; yet, he felt far more at home than by the bar tables near tavern dance floors or in the rough, smoke-stained rooms of North Carolina roadhouses. He felt at ease in the faded genteel quiet of an upstairs room with oil portraits of professors on the walls and chamber music sometimes drifting up from the lounge below. A faded oriental rug sat under the pool table, extending out a few feet from its periphery; Eddie’s leather jacket and scarf hung from the brass hook of a mahogany coatrack; the rotund face of an emeritus professor of history looked sternly down on the table; Eddie thought of him as Lexington Fats. Sometimes after pocketing a particularly difficult shot he would look up confidently at the old man’s face.
He had hoped his game was improved from the weeks of eight-ball, and it was. He was now making runs in the seventies and missing less. The glasses were a godsend. Whatever muscles of back and shoulder and arm it took to play pool for hour after hour had toughened; nothing in his body hurt anymore. He was still not as good as he once had been, when he could make a hundred balls without missing, but he felt he was getting there. In Albuquerque he would give it his best shot, and if he was hitting, would beat Fats. It was about time.