The referee was standing near Eddie. Eddie touched his elbow and said, “You’d better get Oliver,” and pointed to him.
“Jesus!” the referee said. “He’s really out of it.”
The referee had to lead him to the table like a seeing-eye dog. Oliver looked lost and angry, and when he came close Eddie could smell whiskey on him as strong as perfume. It was his turn to shoot. He made two simple shots, missed the third and sat down with a sigh. Eddie looked away. The score was five-three in Eddie’s favor. He finished off the table, broke hard and ran the rack. He felt uncomfortable and wanted to get this over with; he bore down carefully and won four of the next five games, getting scattered applause when the match ended. Ten-four. Oliver just sat there. Finally he got up and shambled off without shaking Eddie’s hand.
His game the next day was with a young black man named Cunningham. Eddie bore down hard, but the man was good. He was the third-rated player in the tournament, the man Cooley had beaten just before beating Eddie, and he controlled the game. His position play was like Cooley’s—elaborate and sweet—and although he fought him hard, Eddie knew by the middle of the match that he was being outplayed. The man did not make any better shots than Eddie did, was in fact a shade less accurate; but he knew his nine-ball. And Eddie was being forced to see that there was a lot to know in nine-ball. Cunningham won the match ten to eight. That was the end of it. He could pack up and go home or wait and watch the semifinals and the finals.
As he was unscrewing his cue stick, he looked up to see Babes Cooley elbowing through an aisle between the bleachers, screwing his cue together. Babes nodded curtly in his direction and stepped up to the table Eddie had just lost on. He began to warm up for the semifinal match.
Eddie slipped his cue stick into its case, pushed through the crowd and left. There was a plane from Hartford to Cincinnati at ten-thirty, and a flight to Lexington at midnight. He could take his time and eat dinner in Hartford. For a moment he felt as though he should stay, should watch Cooley and study the ways he played position. But it didn’t make any difference; nine-ball was a young man’s game.
Eddie handed her a cigarette and she lit it from his, tilting her head back to blow the smoke toward the ceiling. They were in the living room. She had waited up after he called from Hartford. “I know it’s upsetting,” she said, “but coming in fifth isn’t the end of the world.”
His prize money was four fifty—enough to pay the entry fee and the hotel bill, but not the airplane tickets and rented car. “It was a second-rate tournament.”
“It was your first tournament, Eddie.”
“And last.”
“You’ll feel better in the morning.”
But he didn’t feel better. When he got to the Rec Room and saw he had to begin the day by sweeping up, he felt worse. He cleaned up the bathroom, polishing the chromium and the two small mirrors with Windex. It was eleven o’clock by then, and still no customers had come in. This was the week before Christmas break, and there probably would be few students around anyway. He decided to cover another table with a rubber-back cloth. If he was going to be doing this for a living from now on, he might as well do it right.
By the time Mayhew came in Eddie had the rails off Number Five and was working on the slate. Mayhew said nothing; when Eddie stood up from his work the old man was behind the counter looking bleakly around the near-empty game room. Eddie turned back to the slate he was leveling.
For twenty years of his life there had been no excellence. Working for himself, running his own business, he had never worked as he was working now for the grim, detached Mayhew and for the college students with whom he almost never spoke. There was desperation in his covering of the tables, repairing the split cues, getting the faucet washers replaced in the men’s room, installing brighter bulbs in the light fixtures. Arabella asked him once why he worked so hard at such a job, and all he could say was, “I need it.” It was true. He needed something right about his life—if only a properly covered pool table, its fresh green cloth tight and clean, its rubber cushions firm, its surface level. By starting to play again, to put his skill and nerve on the line, he had awakened something in his soul that was not easy to stifle.
Sometimes in bed with Arabella, he found himself making love with energy close to ferocity; but the release when it came was never adequate to the demands he was making on himself, on his fifty-year-old body. Once she said, “Take it easy, love. It’s not a contest.” Finished with sex, he would fall back in bed with his heart pounding and his mouth dry, satisfied and not satisfied. It had never been that way with Martha, as he had never run his own business with the energy he was putting into this anonymous, university recreation room. Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly.
People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along when it had only been luck and muddle; a pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it: hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches; blow-jobs from women of stunning beauty; restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right, the lamb or duck or terrine sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy, gleaming in your manicured hand below the broadcloth cuff and mother-of-pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit, even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith, but the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo, though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of twelve-year-old Scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the haircuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for and always had paid for.
Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth—cloth that was itself the color of money—could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts; but on the table, with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there. It had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.