Arabella spent her days at home working on articles for the folk-art journal or typing papers for professors, sometimes complaining about the bad prose and footnotes she had to rattle her way through at her Selectric, but she seemed content to be working. The apartment was small for the two of them, and they spoke sometimes of finding a bigger one. They went out to movies some nights and spent others reading or watching television. Something in Eddie fretted at this part of his life. It was solid and easy, but he wanted something else. As his pool game came back, the old restlessness had reentered his spirit; he wanted to be playing for money, taking risks, staying at good hotels, sleeping till noon, winning money in cash, in hundred-dollar bills.
On his fourth day back from the South he went to Martha’s apartment to pick up some winter clothes he had left behind. Martha was there, and as usual had a cold. She was cordial but edgy as he pulled an armload of clothes from the maple dresser—sweaters, corduroy pants and an extra scarf. Being in the old apartment made him dizzy; he found he had nothing to say. She was silent too. He got what he needed and left.
Arabella told him there was space at one side of her big closet. He opened its sliding door to a four-foot row of dresses. There must have been forty of them, on hangers covered with quilted rayon. He ran a hand along colored silk, wool and linen. Near the closet floor a shelf held two long rows of shoes, lined up perfectly in Arabella’s British way, blue and red and brown and black shoes. Each held a lavender metal tree, its color precisely matching the coat-hanger covers.
Eddie found space at the end for his clothes and he hung them there—bemused by the array of the dresses and shoes, radiating along with the smells of potpourri and moth crystals the sense of another life.
A few days later they made a stab at apartment hunting. To get to a subdivision with moderately priced apartments, they drove through a fine old residential district, along a gently curving street lined with heavy elms. At a stop sign Arabella said, “Look there,” and pointed to a house on Eddie’s side. Far behind an enormous lawn sat a white-columned porch banked by shrubbery; the house itself was of gray limestone with a red tile roof and a row of dormers; it had tall, airy French windows on the first floor. “That was my house,” Arabella said. It went with the clothes. She had lived there fifteen years, with a distinguished professor of art—a man who had his work shown in galleries in New York and who appeared often on television. Now she was the mistress of a pool hustler—a former pool hustler. Eddie said nothing and drove on.
“Don’t you miss the parties?” he said to her that evening.
“What parties?” She had just finished doing a paper on hydraulic engineering and was tapping the sheaf of pages against the top of her desk. “I need a paper clip.”
“Behind your typewriter. I mean parties at the university, when you were a faculty wife.”
“Sometimes. Not often.” She found the clip, fastened the papers together and put them in a manila folder. Then she stood up and stretched. “At faculty parties what the women talk about is their children, and I don’t have children. It was a chance to dress up every now and then, but then I had to listen to Harrison. The two cancelled out.”
“I’ve heard that professors need wives.”
“To do the laundry?”
“You really are pissed at him,” Eddie said. “I meant to look good at parties, to help his career.”
“People say that, but it’s not really true. Harrison is what he is because he fills out a good grant-request form and looks superb in an Irish fisherman’s sweater. I don’t really hate him, Eddie. Thinking about him just irks me.”
“What were you in it for?”
She looked at him a long moment, then lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. Maybe the clothes.”
“You got a lot of them.”
“Security. I wanted to be taken care of, Eddie. By somebody good-looking and with a good career.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Would you want it?”
He lit a cigarette and said, “What in hell are you mad at?”
She walked to the desk and picked up the paper she had typed. “I’m mad at Harrison and I’m mad at the professor who wrote this study of stress resistance in water-retaining structures.”
“I think you’re mad at me,” Eddie said.
“I’m tired of the university. There are students who graduate from here with nothing in their heads but drugs and rock music.”
“You’re forgetting sex. I think it’s me you’re mad at.”
She looked at him. “Eddie, why don’t you get your act together and start playing tournaments?”
“I’m not good enough yet. I may never be.” He looked at his watch. It was midnight. He walked over to the sofa and began unfolding it into a bed. “If you lived in a house like that, why don’t you have a lot of money?”
“The house belongs to Harrison’s mother and didn’t figure in the settlement. I get eight hundred a month in alimony.”
“You could live on that.”
Arabella was quiet while he got his shoes off. Then she said, “Eddie. When I got upset in North Carolina and wanted to come home, it wasn’t just the boredom and the bad food.”
“I thought there was something.”
“I need to do more than support a man in his career. It was beginning to feel as if I’d never left Harrison.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sorry. You’re not like Harrison, but you’re another kind of star.”
That annoyed him but he said nothing.
When she spoke again her voice was resigned. “I could do more work for the arts-and-crafts journal. They’ve offered me an office for reading copy.”
“Take it.”
“It’s still working for professors.”
“Then don’t take it.”
“I just don’t know.” She looked upset. She walked to her desk and picked up the folder with the paper she had just finished typing. “Maybe all I want is to be with a good-looking man who’s good at what he does.” She tossed the folder back on the desk. “There’s a lot of pressure on women these days to be themselves. Maybe it’s all a mean joke.”
Eddie looked at her. “No it isn’t,” he said.
“But what can I do?”
He stood up barefoot and stretched. “I know that one. It’s a real son of a bitch.”
Chapter Six
The game was at a fairgrounds outside Albuquerque; from the parking lot came the smell of horses and straw, even on a cold November day. When Eddie got out of the taxi, Fats was at a hot-dog stand, eating a Coney Island piled with chili. In the autumnal sunlight his face had a distinct pallor.
Fats chewed and swallowed before he spoke. “I’ve seen the table,” he said. “A four-and-a-half-by-nine Gandy. It looks all right.”
“You look pale, Fats,” Eddie said.
“I was sick two weeks ago.” Fats held his cue case under his arm and finished the hot dog. He wiped his fingers and chin with a paper napkin, wadded it, dropped it in a trash bin nearby.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be here.”
“Being here is no problem. The chili dog is the problem.”
“Then stop eating chili dogs.”
“Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie.” Fats turned and started walking toward the open-air arena with a banner reading THE GREAT MINNESOTA FATS AND FAST EDDIE SHOOT OUT. He was, as always, light on his feet.