When he came in, she was reading a book, a tumbler of dark whiskey beside her on the end table. She did not seem to see him and he sat down before he spoke, looking at her and, at first, hardly seeing her. The room was hot; she had opened the windows, but the air was still. The street noises from outside seemed almost to be in the room with them, as if the shifting of gears were being done in the closet, the children playing in the bathroom. The only light in the room was from the lamp over the couch where she was reading.
He looked at her face. She was very drunk. Her eyes were swollen, pink at the corners. “What’s the book?” he said, trying to make his voice conversational. But it sounded loud in the room, and hard.
She blinked up at him, smiled sleepily, and said nothing.
“What’s the book?” His voice had an edge now.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard.” She pushed her legs out straight on the couch, stretching her feet. Her skirt fell back a few inches from her knees. He looked away.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Well, I don’t exactly know, myself.” Her voice was soft and thick.
He turned his face away from her again, not knowing what he was angry with. “What does that mean, you don’t know, yourself?”
She blinked at him. “It means, Eddie, that I don’t exactly know what the book is about. Somebody told me to read it, once, and that’s what I’m doing. Reading it.”
He looked at her, tried to grin at her—the old, meaningless, automatic grin, the grin that made everybody like him—but he could not. “That’s great,” he said, and it came out with more irritation than he had intended.
She closed the book, tucked it beside her on the couch. She folded her arms around her, hugging herself, smiling at him. “I guess this isn’t your night, Eddie. Why don’t we have a drink?”
“No.” He did not like that, did not want her being nice to him, forgiving. Nor did he want a drink.
Her smile, her drunk, amused smile, did not change. “Then let’s talk about something else,” she said. “What about that case you have? What’s in it?” Her voice was not prying, only friendly, “Pencils?”
“That’s it,” he said. “Pencils.”
She raised her eyebrows slightly. Her voice seemed thick. “What’s in it, Eddie?”
“Figure it out yourself.” He tossed the case on the couch. She picked it up, fumbling with and then opening the buckle at the top. When she pulled out the silk-wound butt end she said, “Interesting,” and then pulled out the other, thinner piece. “How do you work it?”
“It screws together.”
She looked at it with frowning concentration for a moment, then deftly—in spite of her drunkenness—put the pieces in place and twisted them together. She ran her hand lightly over the silken end, holding the cue in her lap. Suddenly she said, raising her eyes, puzzled, “It’s a pool stick!”
“That’s right.”
“It’s like a fancy cane. All these inlays…” Then it seemed to hit her and she said, “Are you a pool shark, Eddie?”
He had never liked that term, and he did not like her tone of voice. “I play pool for money,” he said.
She took a gulp of her drink, shuddered under it, and then laughed self-consciously. “I thought you were a salesman. Or maybe a confidence man…” She smiled at him. “I don’t know. It seems strange….”
He looked at her a minute, carefully, before he spoke. Then he said, “Why?”
She looked back to the cue in her lap. “I never knew a pool shark before. I thought they all wore double-breasted suits and striped shirts….”
He started to answer this, but did not. She bit on her fingernail for a moment, and then said, “Why play pool?”
He had heard this before, several times. And always from women. “Why not?”
She was trying to sound serious, but her voice was still drunken. “You know what I mean. Do you make a living at it?”
“Sometimes. I’ll do better.”
This seemed to exasperate her. “But why pool? Couldn’t you do something else?”
“Like what?” He noticed for the first time that she had light freckles at her elbows, and this discovery irritated him vaguely.
“Don’t be cute about it,” she said. “You know what I’m driving at. You could… sell insurance, something like that.”
He looked at her for a moment, wondering whether he should take her to bed, work up a little action. “No,” he said. “What I do I like fine.”
He decided that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. He stood up from the couch, stretched, and then went into the bedroom to the dresser mirror and began combing his hair. The mirror, like the clown in the living room, had a white frame. He combed his hair carefully, patting it on the left side and then patting down the slight wave. He needed a haircut. Which was always a nuisance.
Sarah spoke to him from the chair in the living room. “I’ve heard that pool can be a dirty game,” she said.
He put the comb back in his pocket. “People say that,” he said. “I’ve heard people say that myself.”
“You’re being comical,” she said, trying to make her voice sound dry. And then, “Is it dirty?”
He walked back into the living room and, not looking at Sarah, looked instead at the clown. The clown looked back, sad and mean, holding the wooden staff. His fingers were painted in only sketchily, but they were graceful and sure of themselves. The clown was, apparently, unhappy, but was not to be pushed around; a good, solid clown and a figure to be respected. Eddie stretched again, his back to Sarah, still looking at the picture. “Yes. It’s dirty.” He felt of his face, which needed a shave. “Anyway you look at it, it’s dirty.”
Then he walked into the bathroom and began undressing, hanging his clothes over the edge of the bathtub. On the back of the toilet Sarah kept a turtle in a glass bowl. At present, it was probably asleep. Eddie did not investigate this; but he thought about the turtle. A self-contained, cautious, withdrawn creature. Solid and reliable, like Bert—withdrawn, now, into its two houses: one given it by God, the other by the five-and-ten. The turtle asked no questions, and was required to give no answers.
Eddie put his pajamas on and went to bed. Before he turned the bedroom lights out, he saw that Sarah was still in the living room, staring at the wall. He rolled over and fell immediately asleep.
12
The ride was a long one. The cab took him through a district of warehouses, of loud, dirty kids in the streets, of oculists and liquor stores and lady fortune tellers. The wooden building with the faded sign that said ARTHUR’S was in the middle of a block, with a decaying heap of a warehouse on one side and a vacant lot on the other. It was early Saturday night and through the open window of the cab he could hear loud talk and hillbilly music coming from the bar. An ancient and greatly stooped man was shuffling down the street, near the sidewalk, muttering loudly to himself.
Eddie almost told the driver to take him back; he did not know this kind of place and it made him uneasy to be in it. But he needed money and he needed action and he got out of the cab. There was no movement of air and the air itself was very warm, tinged faintly with the smell of garbage. The door of the poolroom was open, and the clicking sounds of the balls seemed louder, out in the street, than he was used to hearing them sound inside.
Inside, the poolroom was very small, hot, smelling of creosote and, faintly, of stale urine. In the middle of the room was a large overhead fan with flat, black blades. From the center of this hung a curled streamer of flypaper, dotted with black. There was a cuspidor by each wall, sitting on the plank floor, and by each of these was a cluster of empty bottles—whiskey, Coca-Cola, and 7-Up.