The Color of Money

Chapter Three

When he came into the kitchen, Jean was at the sink putting vitamin pills into little egg cups, and she didn’t turn around. “I’m giving you four C’s, Eddie, because you smoked so much last night.” Jean was big on health. On the counter by the blender sat jars of lecithin granules, brewer’s yeast and desiccated liver, together with a large bottle of safflower oil. During their first month together, it was croissants and scrambled eggs with chives; now it was vitamin pills and instant coffee.

He walked into the little living room with its rock maple furniture, and raised the Venetian blinds. The morning sun was already ferociously bright on the suburban lawns; it would be another hot day. Across the street their Pakistani neighbor came striding from the front porch of his brick ranch house to the Toyota at the curb, on his way to the laundromat he managed. Before the poolroom closed, Eddie and he would sometimes nod amiably to each other in the mornings—neighbors off to work at the same time. Now that was over; Eddie’s working day would consist of one phone call. The Pakistani started his car and drove off. Eddie stood at the window, thinking now of Minnesota Fats. One fifty to nine.

Jean came in with the vitamin pills and a plastic mug of Folger’s Instant. “Maybe you’ll beat him in Chicago next week,” she said.

Eddie took the vitamins and said nothing.

“You looked terrible last night,” she said. “You shouldn’t have stayed up so late.”

“I couldn’t sleep. It hurts like hell to lose like that.”

“It isn’t that important, Eddie.”

“If it isn’t,” Eddie said, “what is?”

“I’ve got to go to work. I’m already late.”

Donahue had another sex-book author—a woman who talked about freeing yourself up and discarding the old tapes. When Donahue began working the audience with his coy smiles and earnestness, Eddie turned it off and called Enoch’s office. Enoch Wax ran Mid-American Cable TV from an office downtown. He never returned calls.

“Mr. Wax isn’t in right now,” the secretary said.

“What about my check?” Eddie said.

“Mr. Wax didn’t say anything about a check, Mr. Felson. But he did say that Chicago has cancelled. They decided to use Rich Little for the program, instead. The impersonator.”

“I know who Rich Little is. Have you called Fats?”

“I left a message on his answering machine. If you’ll come in Monday afternoon, we’ll be running the tapes from Miami. Mr. Wax will be in then.”

“I’ll be there,” Eddie said.

Without Chicago, there would be ten days until the next match in Denver. Eddie found the Yellow Pages, looked up “Eye Doctors” and was referred to “Ophthalmologists.” He picked one on Main Street, and called.

The doctor put drops in his eyes that made him squint and, eventually, see watery haloes tinged with iridescence. In the trick chair that was uncomfortably like a dentist’s, Eddie peered through eyecups at black letters on the far wall while the doctor clicked circles of glass into slots, making the letters go from black to gray and back again, making them elongate or compress, blur or sharpen. He chatted of the upcoming racing session at Keeneland as he slipped disks in and out of the machine, interrupting himself with questions about the clarity of what Eddie saw. There was some randomness to the progression, but gradually the white square with its letters became sharper, until the black edges had a delineation that was remarkable. In Eddie’s stomach was a sudden hope: he had forgotten how clearly a man could see.

“That’ll do it,” the doctor said.

“When do I get the glasses?” Eddie said.

“Eight days.” The doctor swung the machine away from Eddie’s face and Eddie blinked.

“Can’t I get them sooner?”

“Come in Monday.”

The red cloth on the table was even redder on the TV monitor, but you could see the balls well enough. Fats was shooting, and for a while his large body blocked the view of the balls—until the picture switched to the other camera. Eddie lit a cigarette, leaned back and tried to relax. It was the first he’d seen of the tapes.

“I’m really sorry about the money, Eddie,” Enoch said. “Wednesday for sure.”

Eddie said nothing. He caught a quick shot of himself sitting and felt a strange embarrassment. There he sat, doing nothing, not even at the moment watching Fats shoot pool. It was the first time he had ever seen himself on television.

Fats kept shooting for what seemed an intolerable length of time. In the TV office, Eddie sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup, smoked cigarettes and waited to see himself. He remembered the shot Fats would miss on—the three ball, a long cut into the bottom corner. The office was small and disorderly. There was no sound yet on the videotape, and the only noise was from the air conditioner in the window.

He got his glasses out and tried them carefully. They felt strange sitting on his nose and digging slightly into his ears, but the picture on the screen became clearer when he put them on.

Then Fats stepped up to the three ball and Eddie leaned forward in his chair to watch. Fats missed, but barely. It did not look as though he was doing it deliberately.

On the screen Fast Eddie stepped up. Looking at himself on television, Eddie was shocked at his inelegance, compared to Fats. He could have been the older man. The TV Eddie, holding the Balabushka, hesitated over the position for a long time before bending to shoot. And when he bent, he looked stiff.

“Well now!” Enoch said from his seat next to Eddie’s. “There you are.”

Eddie said nothing, watching himself with dismay.

He went directly from Enoch’s little suite of offices to the shopping center and parked where he had always parked when the place was open for business. The big sign was down now, leaving rough holes in the concrete-block facade, and there was a card reading THIS SPACE FOR RENT on one window. The door key was still on the ring with his car keys. He opened up and flipped on the lights. It was a shock. There were only seven tables. Numbers Five and Nine had red tags with the word SOLD. The cash register and the time clock were gone, but the water cooler was still there; after turning on the air conditioner he took a long drink. Then he folded the dust cloth off Number Four, got a box of balls and spread them out on the green surface. He took the Balabushka from its case, screwed the two pieces together and set the assembled cue on the table. He slipped his glasses from his pocket and held them up to the light; they seemed clean enough. He put them on and picked up his cue. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

At first it was exasperating, and he thought it might be impossible. He kept looking over the frames as he shot. He tried holding his head higher, but then the frames split his vision. But he had seen other players shoot with glasses on; it could be done.

He held his head even higher, not bending down as far over the table as he was used to, and tried stroking that way. He made a few easy shots, but his neck felt stiff from it. And everything looked strange—the table seemed shorter. But the balls at the far end had a sharpness he hadn’t seen for years. He kept at it, and by four o’clock he was getting the feel. It was a matter of the way he held his head and his body.

He remembered how awkward he had looked on television, and that had been without the glasses. He could feel the awkwardness in himself now and he hated it—he hated wearing these damned things on his face, hated the way his body felt as he bent over the table. He kept at it for the rest of the afternoon and eventually began making longer and longer runs of balls. He ended by pocketing nearly fifty without missing, cutting in several difficult ones across the entire length of the table. By that time, it was seven o’clock. Jean would be wondering where he was. He put the balls away, brushed the table, took his cue apart, turned off the air conditioner, and left.

Six years before, to celebrate paying off the mortgage on the poolroom, Eddie and Martha went to Northern California. It was Martha’s idea; she wanted them to have the nude massage at a place she had heard of. “You’re naked,” she said, “and all you can hear is the sound of the surf.” Eddie was willing to go along. He needed a vacation from fluorescent lights and the clatter of pool balls; and he hadn’t been back to California in the twenty years since he had left, with Charlie, to try his skill on the road. They flew Supersaver to San Francisco, rented a Ford from Avis, and drove. But by that time Martha had a cold and she spent the time fussing with Kleenex and checking her watch while Eddie drove silently. He tried to ignore her. It was good to be back in California.

His masseuse was naked too. He hadn’t expected that. They had told him to strip and then to lie on the padded bench on the wooden deck below. He was alone there on his stomach, looking out at the water, for ten minutes before she showed up. The surf was loud, and he didn’t hear her come up but only saw, sleepily, her deeply tanned body. Her hair was brown and gold and she had freckles like smashed raisins on her neck and her breasts. She was about thirty.

“I’m Milly,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“I’ve been enjoying the sun.”

“Do you want oil?”

“Oil?” It sounded like a gas station.

“Some people like to be rubbed with oil. We use Chinese sesame.”

“Sure,” he said. “I want the whole thing.”

She said nothing, but poured pale oil from a jar into the palm of her hand and rubbed it between her palms. Then she said, “Relax now,” and began rubbing his back.

He closed his eyes and began to relax. It felt good. The woman’s hands were firm and practiced in what they did. She rubbed his calves in long strokes, ending with a firm squeeze at the ankles. When she bent down, he could feel the heat from her breasts at the backs of his knees. The oil felt wonderful on his skin; in direct sunlight he was feeling baked and basted. The woman was humming something softly; he could hear her between the crashings of the waves below. Martha was back at the hotel watching TV and filling herself with Dristan. It was good to be away from her for a while. Milly began squeezing his ankles harder, around the Achilles tendon; it was painful in a way, and sent little sparks into his head; but there was something remarkable about it—as though his feet were being liberated. He began to get hard.

Milly was massaging the soles of his feet now, still humming. “Your body’s in good shape,” she said, “for a man of your age. Do you work out?”

“Three times a week.”

“It shows. Do you eat meat?”

“Sure. Are you a vegetarian?”

“I’m supposed to be. But I had salami for lunch.”

She might fuck. But where would they go? No one else was on the little deck with them, but it was still public, and someone could come in. She was oiling his toes individually now, and running her fingers between them. He opened his eyes for a minute and looked back at her. She was facing him with her head down. Between his feet he could see the dark of her pubic hair.

“You’re getting turned on, aren’t you?” Her voice was matter-of-fact.

The bright sun seemed to burn away the need for indirection. “What about you?”

“No,” she said, finishing with his toes. A moment later she added, “I like women.”

“That’s a shame.”

“No it isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with it.” She began patting his feet. “Let’s talk about something else. Are you an athlete?”

“I run a poolroom in Kentucky.”

“Oh,” she said. “My dad has a pool table in the basement. I used to play eight-ball. It was awfully competitive. Do you play pool?”

“Sure.”

“Isn’t it very competitive?”

“It’s better to win than lose.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer. He had heard that question before. She came alongside him now and began putting oil on the small of his back. “Who cares whether you win or lose?” she said. “What difference does it make?”

“If you’re playing for fifty dollars a game, it makes fifty dollars’ difference.”

“A hundred,” she said. “The difference between plus fifty and minus fifty.”

“Be my manager,” Eddie said.

She leaned over and began pressing hard into the muscles of his back on either side of his spine, using more oil. Several times her breasts brushed against his side. “It’s the way men want to win just to be winning,” she said. “It’s a sexual thing—like war—and there’s no end of it.”

“Is that why you like women?”

She laughed and rested for a minute. “No.”

“You were being competitive when you said the difference was a hundred dollars.”

“You’re right.” She began to knead around his spine. Her pubic hair pressed against his hip like warm bristles.

“You like winning arguments.”

“I don’t bet money on them.”

“That wasn’t what we were talking about. Nobody bets money on wars either.”

“My dad did. He bet the Germans would win.”

“How’d he do?”

“Don’t be facetious.” She began rubbing his ass, gently, using more oil.

“My my!” he said.

“Enjoy,” she said.

“Let’s fuck.”

“Come on,” she said. “Take it easy.”

He rolled over on his back, carefully so as not to fall off the bench. “Come on, Milly,” he said, “you can bar that door.”

“I told you,” she said, “I like women.” She looked thoughtful.

“Give me a break,” Eddie said. “Let’s don’t compete about this.”

“Well,” she said and smiled slightly. She reached out and took it in her hand. He had to hold himself back. “That’s the ticket,” he said. “Climb on.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Eddie Felson,” he said quickly. “They call me Fast Eddie.”

“Fast Eddie!” she said. “My God, Daddy used to talk about you.”

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t just stand there.”

“Fast Eddie,” she said. “Jesus Christ!” And then, “I don’t have my diaphragm.”

“Then use your goddamned hand,” he said. “Use the Chinese oil.”

Suddenly she laughed and squeezed him. “I can do better than that.” She bent down to him.

“There you go,” he said. She put her free hand under him, moving her head up and down slowly, more or less in rhythm with the sound of the surf below them.

It was wonderful, and he took her address and phone number afterward, but he never called. It was the last time sex had been really good. On the way home from California he decided he needed a mistress, but it was years before he found one. And nothing with Jean ever turned out as simple and pleasant as it had been that day at Esalen with Milly. Nothing.

He had not realized before that day at Esalen how middle-class he had become, how his life had consisted of the business and the apartment and the marriage and the slow moving toward the grave. Cigarettes, Manhattans before bedtime, art posters on the family-room walls, Time magazine, anger buried so deeply that it seemed more a part of the rooms he lived in than in himself; television. Martha wanted a Mr. Coffee and he wanted something from her, something sexual but more lasting than sex; and he swore at her that they had two coffee makers already and what they drank was instant. There were two toasters. The freezer was full of hard blocks of meat wrapped in Reynolds Wrap. To the front door came magazines that were never read, along with offers of bargain rates for new magazines, discounts on photo developing, discounts on travel. There were telephones in every room, even in the bathroom by the toilet, and there was no one he wanted to call.

When he found Jean after twenty years of marriage, he thought he had found a way out of the boredom and drift. But he was wrong. The affair was tepid from the start; Jean’s life was, if anything, narrower and less interesting than his. The principal effect of the relationship resulted when Martha found out about it. When she said, “I want a divorce,” he hardly blinked; his soul yielded Martha her point without protest. At the moment, the only difficulty he foresaw was in disentangling with Jean, who bored him by now as much as Martha did. It was only the next day, when Martha told him she had seen a lawyer and intended to keep their apartment for herself, that he realized he needed Jean. At least until he could find a place to stay.

He had lived a life without drama for twenty years, remembering from time to time the games of straight pool he had played as a young hustler—some of them filling the entire night until sunlight came shockingly through poolroom blinds and lay unwanted on the chalk-smeared green of the table. Urbana, Illinois. Fresno and Stockton in California. Johnson City. Valley Falls. Carson. Poolrooms with eight-by-ten tables and men holding bottles in paper sacks—men lined up to watch him as he played the local pool-shark through the night. One pocket at forty a game. Fourteen-and-one straight pool for a hundred. Two hundred. Sometimes a thousand. A cone of yellow light hung above the table and the colored balls rolled harshly on the worn green, plopping into leather pockets. Paper money. Wrinkled old tens and hard-edged new twenties, jammed into the table’s side or corner pocket and tamped down by the heavy balls dropping on it. After he ran the final rack of straight pool or drilled in the winning ball in one-pocket or stiffened the final ball up the rail in a game of banks, he walked to where the money was, taking out the bills a few at a time and smoothing them. Then he folded and pushed them down in the front pocket of his pants, feeling the pressure against the top of his leg while he watched someone racking the balls up for the next game. A night in some small town could pass like that and seem a matter of minutes. Or in the bigger places there might be a crowd with college students in it—girls sometimes, trying to look knowing despite the innocent makeup they wore, girls in tweed skirts and angora sweaters. That would be 1960. Sometimes the man he played—in Columbus, Ohio, or Lexington, Kentucky, or in Chicago—would carry a name Eddie had heard for years but never before attached to a face: Shotgun Harry, Flyboy, Machine Gun Lou, Detroit Whitey, Cornbread Red. And then, in Chicago, at Bennington’s in 1961, Minnesota Fats. They had played for over thirty hours, and for the first time Eddie lost. Up to then he had beat them all—all the local favorites, all the resonant old names heard in the poolroom in his teens where he had played five or six hours a day during his last years of school. He had beaten them all and earned his own name doing it: Fast Eddie. Because he liked raising the bet. He had come back and beaten Fats—beaten him until Fats quit with a shrug of the shoulders and with words that Eddie would never forget, no matter what else he might forget in the life that kept passing less and less intelligibly before him: “I can’t beat you, Fast Eddie.”

And then Bert had told him he was no longer on his own. From now on, if he played he would be backed by Bert’s people and would share what he won with them.

That was the end of it, of the all-night pool with strangers, the travelling, the hotels and the sleeping all day. He never saw Bert again. He dropped him from his life as he had dropped the crippled Sarah in that same summer of his twenty-eighth year, in Chicago. Somebody had spoken of a poolroom for sale in Kentucky, and borrowing from Martha, he made a down payment, changing his life with a signature and the seal of a notary in a bright suburban bank. The lease on the apartment, and the marriage, followed like the sequence of shots, unquestioned, in a game of nine-ball.

Sometimes it all came back and he would feel again the late-night vigor from the old poolrooms and the bedazzled love for his old skill at the table. His win over Fats had become known around the country and, a few years after it, some fat pool player whom Eddie had never heard of started appearing on television. Watching the man shoot, Eddie was reminded of Fats and of the night he played him. It came back to him with a tightness in his stomach and a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck. It was a Sunday afternoon and the poolroom was closed. When the television show ended with trick shots, Eddie went to the poolroom to play straight pool alone for hours, missing supper doing it, playing at first with the old excitement, remembering players like One-Eyed Tony and Wimpy Lassiter and Weenie Beenie; and then picturing Fats, silent and heavy and nimble, pocketing balls like a gross dancer. After hours of making shots in the closed poolroom, on the center table, alone, Eddie finally permitted the sensation that had nagged him since watching the stupid show on television. It was a feeling he could not bring himself to name. It was grief. The best part of him had died and he grieved for it.