Mayhew made no further comments and Eddie spoke to him only when necessary. There was usually a dead hour after the lunch crowd left, and now Eddie spent the time practicing, taking his Balabushka in its case from under the counter. He used Number Eight, enjoying the smooth, long roll the Simonis gave to the balls. He had cleaned the light fixtures over the tables and polished all eight sets of balls, had thrown away all the used chalk and put fresh blue cubes out. The light was clear and bright; the balls shone crisply on the green; Eddie drilled them into pockets with quiet precision. What he was practicing, for the first time in his life, was nine-ball.
He would rack the balls into the little diamond with the yellow-striped nine in its center, blow them apart with his strongest break shot and then run them in rotation, starting with the one and working up to the money ball—the nine. It was different from the straight pool he knew: you had to make tougher shots, and play position differently, running them out in the numbered sequence. Maybe the most important thing was that you had to work the entire green. A good straight-pool player kept the balls at the bottom of the table and did most of his scoring on tight shots. In nine-ball you had to go from one end to another, sometimes making the cue ball travel by two or three cushions to settle down for position. He would miss some of those long, difficult shots, or get so badly off-angled that he couldn’t give himself position on the next ball. The pressure built as you approached the nine. If you missed on the seven or eight it would give the game away.
Arabella worked from nine to five at the magazine’s office on campus. Her salary was twelve hundred a month, only slightly less than Eddie’s; it came from a government grant. With her salary, her alimony and his paycheck, they were well off. They ate dinner out most evenings, did not entertain, and went to every new movie in town. They made an odd couple—a former faculty wife and a former pool hustler—but their oddness was consonant with the times; they were invited to a lot of parties. Eddie drove them through snowy streets to suburban houses or to duplexes in older neighborhoods to drink with professors of sociology, history or art. His lack of education did not inhibit him. People talked about tenure or declining SAT scores among the students; at the homes of younger professors, pot was smoked ceremonially as a kind of testament to youth. Eddie would pass the joint without inhaling. He preferred bourbon. J. T. S. Brown.
At one of these parties Eddie was talking to Arabella near the kitchen door of someone’s house when he saw her staring toward the other end of the room. He looked over to see a couple who had just come in. The man was tall and youthfully middle-aged; he wore a gray turtleneck under his parka. The girl with him was much younger. She wore tight faded jeans and a sweater like the man’s, also under a parka. The man’s boyish face looked familiar to Eddie; he was noisily stamping packed snow from his hiker’s boots and did not seem to mind the commotion he was making. “It’s Harrison,” Arabella said softly.
“Who’s the girl?”
“Some graduate student.”
Eddie had seen him on television years before. It seemed he had worn the same sweater, the same boots, while talking about disadvantaged children or New York artists or whatever it was. He was tanned and muscular-looking; his shoes and sweater looked expensive, as did his heavy corduroy pants and the long, matching scarf. He had one of those faces that manages to appear modest and smug at the same time, as if he knew he was important and did not want to imply that he knew it.
A half hour later Eddie found himself talking with him. Arabella was not in the room at the time. Frame just came up and said, “You’re Felson, aren’t you?” and Eddie said, “That’s right,” and they talked casually for about five minutes. It was simple; neither mentioned Arabella. They talked about the recession.
For the occasion, Arabella had bought Italian white wine and California Burgundy, together with a quarter-wheel of Brie—the runniest Eddie had seen. During his first weeks with Arabella he had felt he was finally entering the modern world of American style and had responded to it happily enough: dry wine, French cheese, English biscuits to put the cheese on, Perrier, rare lamb, sushi. Sometimes Arabella cooked osso bucco or couscous—dishes he had never heard of before. He had not shown any surprise at this kind of living; it went with her appearance, her accent. Sometimes she put liver pâté on whole-wheat English muffins for breakfast and served them with espresso from her stout little Vesuviana, in white cups with baroque silver spoons. It was like a certain kind of movie, or pages seen in Arabella’s New York magazine or the magazine section of her Sunday Times.
One of the striking things about university life was its amiable ostentation of taste, and not just in food. It included furniture, paintings, bric-a-brac—glass ashtrays from Venice, nineteenth-century prints showing views of Brussels, antique chess sets. Not everyone was involved in this; some were either oblivious to it or scorned it. Their apartments were furnished cheaply and their cuisinary embellishments were those of the early sixties: flaky Cheddar, mushrooms, and pepper mills. But half the homes Eddie had seen were exemplars of careful, au courant taste, mixing antiques with high tech. If the apartment you were in for Sunday brunch had track lights over a walnut highboy and a piece or two of industrial metal furniture, you knew there would be croissants—served with unsalted butter on a plain white dish from Scandinavia—and the eggs would be undercooked.
The best thing about all this was Arabella’s ease with it. It was as though she knew her British accent and the delicate, clear structure of her facial bones gave her an edge. There was no strain on her part and no uncertainty; she knew without hesitation which cheeses, which fresh pasta and which wines to order, just as she had known what spare, simple pieces of furniture to buy for the new apartment. She was sure, swift and without snobbery. Coming from a world of backyard barbecues, Eddie slipped with surprising ease into this ambience, pleased with Arabella’s confidence, pleased with the way she never talked about such things.
Roy and Pat were delayed; by the time they got out of their duffel coats and were handed glasses of wine by Eddie it was four o’clock. He wheeled Arabella’s little Sony in front of the sofa and turned it on. Arabella put the cheese and the Carr’s wafers on the high-tech coffee table; Roy Skammer held his wineglass aloft and said, “To the champ himself!” and the television picture shifted from a movie preview to a rack of pool balls in close-up and the superimposed words, THE GREAT SHOOT OUT—DENVER. An overhead shot showed Fats breaking the rack. The cue ball caromed into the bottom and the side rail; its path, seen from above, was like a geometric diagram. A voice-over began, calling the two players “legendary” and the game “demanding the most a player can give.” It was mercifully short and it mercifully omitted saying that Eddie had already lost three matches in the series. Now Eddie, seen from overhead, stepped up to play safe. Pat and Roy applauded. Now in profile, Fats made a shot, and then another. His run would be in the twenties. This was the game where Eddie made sixty-three, but Fats had the floor now. A whispered commentary—whispered needlessly, since it had been added after the game—spoke of the difficulty of shots that were not difficult and passed over ones that were; the tape had been edited so it all went faster than in reality. Every now and then the camera picked up Eddie wearing his glasses and sitting in his chair waiting for Fats to miss. When Fats did miss, Eddie stepped up and went to the table. It was a relief to see it: he was far less slow and uncertain than in the Miami game on Enoch’s monitor. He looked all right, even with the glasses. Eddie watched himself pocket a dozen balls and then play safe. His stroke was sharp and smooth.