Arabella was no longer a faculty wife, but she was still invited to faculty parties. The first time she suggested he go, Eddie declined; but he was bored at the apartment watching television alone, and he went with her the next weekend. For an hour or so he felt uneasy with the professors and their talk of tenure and department cutbacks. He was painfully conscious of his own lack of education. The home he was in, with canvases on the walls painted by the professor who had invited them, with its plain, expensive furniture, represented an entirely different scale of life from the house he had lived in with Martha, with its cheery wallpaper in the kitchen. The kitchen here was white and austere; the men who stood around in it with drinks in their hands were all professors of art or English or history. Eddie read books but he knew nothing about those disciplines; nothing, from experience, about college.
But he did not live with Martha anymore. The elegant British woman in the silk dress, the woman with the curly silver hair and bright, intelligent eyes who looked right at men when she talked to them and who moved around with these people as more than an equal, was his woman. And he did not live in a suburban house with asphalt shingles on its sides; he lived in a high-ceilinged, white-walled apartment with folk-art paintings, downtown on Main Street.
Standing in the kitchen near the refrigerator, he listened to three art professors across the room. They were discussing next year’s raise in salary. One of them changed the subject to the Cincinnati Bengals’ chances for the Superbowl. No one was talking about art. No one had talked about art or literature or history in the hour he had been in the house. He looked at their clothes; not one of them was dressed as well as he. He took a sip from his Manhattan, walked over to the group and joined in. They talked about the scarcity of good quarterbacks. After a while, Eddie introduced himself. There was nothing to it.
The bedroom overlooked a garden that separated the building from the back of a clothing store. There was a kitchen with white countertops, a dining alcove, and a big living room overlooking Main Street. They would have to buy a dining table and bedroom furniture. It was on the second floor and the view from the living room was not as broad as the view from Arabella’s other apartment, but they were still downtown. Arabella had just started her editorial job with the journal and she was too busy to take more than a quick look; but when he told her it was three sixty a month, she said, “Take it, Eddie.” He signed the lease and gave two months’ rent as a deposit. Then he called a moving company.
“Eddie,” Skammer said, “I’d drop it all and go on the road. I don’t care about tenure. If I could shoot pool like you shoot pool…. Shit, if I could play the oboe, or learn to be a chef….” They were in the Skammers’ big kitchen.
“Roy signed up for a cooking school in France,” Pat said, “but we backed out at the last minute.”
“Lost my nerve.” Skammer plucked the onion from his Gibson and held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment.
“Lost your deposit money too,” Pat said.
Skammer shrugged and popped the onion into his mouth.
“It’s hard to make a change,” Eddie said.
“You’re doing it,” Arabella said.
He looked up from the couch at her. “It was handed to me. The judge gave the poolroom to Martha.”
“Some have greatness thrust upon them,” Skammer said.
Eddie looked back to him. Skammer wore perfectly fitting beige corduroys, beige Saucony running shoes and a white cotton boat-neck sweater that fit him loosely. “What’s wrong with teaching history?”
“Grading the papers,” Skammer said immediately.
“You complain a lot about departmental meetings,” Pat said, “and about living in Kentucky.”
“Camouflage,” Skammer said. “I give lecture courses in world history, and I enthrall the students with my enlightened chatter. I point to maps and I tell anecdotes about the wives of generals. I describe political factions and frown over conditions in the cities.”
“It sounds fine to me,” Eddie said.
“You love it,” Pat said levelly. “You love the sound of your own voice.”
“Maybe I do. But when I read the humbug they write in exam books with their blue Bics, I want to cut my throat.”
“You and your exquisite sensibilities,” Pat said. “Sit down and I’ll serve the salad.”
“You’re changing the subject,” Roy said. “Every time I read their papers I want to resign.”
“Maybe it’s because there’s no show business in grading papers,” Pat said.
“You and your damned insights,” Roy said, cheerfully.
The Skammers lived in a farmhouse on the Old Frankfort Pike. All of the rooms were austere except for the kitchen, which had a brick fireplace and a white sofa. The high-tech table and chairs were lit by track lights, and the floor was scarred pine, varnished and bare. A big window looked on a field with patches of snow and a barn in the distance.
Arabella put the salad bowl on the table and carried the wooden fork and spoon to Roy. “Toss the salad,” she said. “Maybe you don’t want feedback from your students.”
“That’s the truth,” Roy said. He went over to the table and slipped the implements under the mound of lettuce leaves in the wooden bowl. “Maybe I just want to show off.”
“There are worse things than that,” Eddie said.
Roy began agitating the leaves expertly. “I’d rather shoot pool,” he said.
“In front of an audience,” Pat said.
“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Roy said, lifting the leaves and letting them drop back into the bowl.
“The trouble with shooting pool,” Eddie said, “is that it’s no good if you don’t win.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Skammer said.
“Let’s eat,” Pat said. “The roast’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
When they were driving home Eddie asked Arabella how much money the Skammers made.
“He’s an associate professor,” she said. “Twenty-six thousand, probably. She’s an assistant and makes about twenty.”
“They’re doing all right.”
Arabella was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I think he really does hate it. He doesn’t have the strength to leave.”
“It sounds like a good life to me.”
“He tried to kill himself. A couple of years ago.”
“Come on….” Eddie said.
“With pills. He took a sabbatical to write a book and he didn’t write anything. Just hung around the house and tinkered with the plumbing. One morning he didn’t wake up and Pat took him to the hospital. They pumped him out.”
Eddie shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought he was the type.”
“Well,” Arabella said, “there’s a lot of it going around.”
The second drugstore he tried had dental plaster. He bought two cartons of the large size, along with a deck of plastic playing cards, and put them in the backseat. The next morning he drove out to the old poolroom.
The windows were boarded up, but the key still opened the front door. There were no workmen around. He had never seen workmen, only the sporadic effects of their presence. The carpet was gone now, and the counter had been torn out and lay against the wall like a passed-out drunk. He ignored all this and walked to the back wall where the closet door stood by the men’s room, still bearing its Employees Only sign. Nothing in it had been touched. He took down a large roll of cloth wrapped in clear plastic and labeled SIMONIS, easing it from the top shelf and putting it into an empty toilet-paper box. On another shelf was the tenon lathe, like an oversize pencil sharpener; he set it carefully next to the roll of cloth and then got the magnetic tack hammer, the four-foot level and a stack of roofing shingles. From a low shelf he took a small carton labeled TWEETEN ELK MASTER and a cardboard box filled with white plastic cylinders. He took those and then looked around himself. After the familiarity of the supplies closet, the devastated poolroom was a synchronistic shock, moving him instantaneously from the way things had been to the way they were now. The effect was not altogether unpleasant; there was no love in him for this place. He could have torn it apart himself. He looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty. The college Rec Room didn’t open until nine.