The Color of Money

Chapter Five

When he was a kid in Ohio, you never broke the balls with a jointed cue or with the white ball; you used a house cue stick and a special dull brown cue ball. Charlie taught him that, and it was Charlie who bought him his first Willie Hoppe cue, with the black leather wrappings on its butt and the brass joint. “You don’t slug them with this, Eddie,” Charlie said. “The joint can’t take it.” In those days Eddie would pick out a club of a cue—twenty-two or twenty-three ounces—and smash the rack open with it before using the Willie Hoppe. It was all different now. The balls were made of something called phenolic resin, and their colors were brighter: the old dark green stripe on the fourteen was now a bright emerald with a glow to it, and the nine was canary yellow, like something in Walt Disney. You broke the rack with the white ball now and, with a handmade Balabushka cue, slammed them as hard as you could. You couldn’t ruin the steel joint.

Eddie took a deep swing and blew the eight-ball rack open. The three and the seven fell in, but the cue ball stopped near the foot spot and didn’t follow through to rebreak the balls the way he intended. He looked over the spread, checking out the five other solids and then the eight ball, which had to be made last. There was no problem with any of them; on a table this small, they were all simple enough. He concentrated, took care, and ran them out.

“You shoot a good stick.” It was a different bartender from the one yesterday—a blond kid in a white apron. At four in the afternoon, two old men were huddled over boilermakers at the far end of the bar; Eddie was the only other customer.

“Thanks.” Eddie laid his cue stick on the table and walked over. “Let me have a draft.” He tried to be pleasant and casual, although he did not feel that way.

The kid drew one and set it on the bar. “I haven’t seen you here before, have I?”

“I came in yesterday.”

The kid nodded and began drawing a beer for himself. “You shoot eight-ball like a pro.”

Fats had told him not to hold back, to play his best stick, or nearly. Hold back ten or fifteen percent if it seemed smart. He had been practicing for an hour without holding back at all, as he had the day before. No one had shown any interest. The only problem was the oversize cue ball; you couldn’t draw it back right, and sometimes he snookered himself and missed the next shot. Otherwise it was like child’s pool. He fed quarters into the slot, retrieved the balls, racked them up, broke, and shot them in. The main thing was the sluggish cue ball; it took getting used to.

Eddie sipped his beer and then looked at the kid. “I understand you have some good players around.”

The kid grinned. He was about twenty-five and had a pleasant face. “I thought you might have that understanding. When I saw your cue stick.”

“I like to play for money.” It had been true once, anyway.

“There’s a guy called Boomer.”

“Boomer?”

“His real name, I think. Dave or Dwight or something Boomer. He’ll play you.”

“Would he play for a hundred dollars a game?”

The kid blinked. “If he’s got it.”

“Does he have a backer?”

“A stakehorse?”

“Yes. A stakehorse.”

“There’s a man with him sometimes who only watches.”

“Is he likely to come in soon? I mean tonight?”

“I don’t know.” The kid set his beer down and walked to the pass-through that led back to the kitchen. “Arnie,” he said.

A thin black face appeared at the opening.

“This guy wants to play pool with Boomer.”

The head nodded and glanced briefly at Eddie.

“Isn’t there a number to call?”

“In the register. Under the checks.”

“Okay.” The kid went to the register, opened it, lifted the bill compartment with one hand and shuffled through papers with the other. He found a folded sheet of notepaper and turned to Eddie. “Do I call him?”

Eddie felt a tightness in his stomach. “I’d appreciate it.”

“Son of a bitch!” Boomer said when he saw Eddie’s Balabushka. “I was dragged from the comfort of my home to play a man with a stick like that. May the Lord deliver me!” He took a red bandanna handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Protect me from men with Balabushka cue sticks.” He looked at Eddie’s face for the first time, squinting at him. “I bet you do trick shots.” His face was broad and red and heavily lined; he looked like some kind of wild-eyed field hand. A drug-crazed sharecropper. He wore a faded tan military shirt with epaulettes, and baggy corduroys that fell over the creased insteps of cowboy boots. It was hard to tell what his age was—anywhere from thirty to fifty—but he had a potbelly and wrinkles around his eyes. The eyes were a pale, unreal blue, and cold as ice. “I bet that Balabushka makes them balls dance around like agitated molecules.”

“It’s no better than the man behind it,” Eddie said.

“Jesus Christ,” Boomer said, “you look serious.” A few people in the crowd laughed. In the hour since the bartender called, fifteen or twenty people had gathered.

“Why don’t you get your stick out,” Eddie nodded toward the leather case Boomer was carrying, “and we can shoot pool.” He held his cue in one hand and had the other in his pocket; he hoped fervently that his nervousness didn’t show. He had forgotten how it was to play a man on his home table with his home crowd around him. And Boomer had taken possession of the tavern the moment he came in, with his loud voice and his boot heels clacking on the Kentile floor.

“If this stick don’t wilt for shame when it sees yours,” Boomer said. He opened the top of the case and slid out a two-piece cue. It looked plenty good enough—a Huebler or a Meucci. Probably a three-hundred-dollar cue. When he screwed it together he did so deftly, with a light and accurate touch that contradicted the roughness of his appearance. Eddie had seen that before in the old days. Rough-looking country men with soft hands and, when they bent over a pool table, the light touch of a jeweler.

“Eight-ball is what we play here,” Boomer said.

“A hundred dollars a game.”

“Oh my god,” Boomer said, “I am lying in my king-sized bed watching a rerun of ‘Magnum PI’ and the telephone rings and now here I am talking to a stranger with an upscale cue stick who wants to play pool for a hundred dollars. There’s no comfort in life.”

“Do you want to play?” Eddie said quietly. The man was getting what he wanted; Eddie was beginning to feel rattled.

“Wayland,” Boomer said to the bartender, who had been watching all this attentively, as had everyone else in the place. “Let me have a Drambuie on the rocks and a dish of potato salad.” Then, to Eddie: “Put a quarter in the table.”

They flipped a coin for the break and Boomer won it. He used a heavy house cue to smash the balls open, the way Charlie had taught Eddie to when he was a kid, and pocketed three of them. Then he switched to the jointed and ran the balls out. Eddie handed him two fifties. It was six o’clock. The crowd was getting larger; they leaned against the rails of the tavern’s other two tables and stood in the space behind them. The bar stools had filled with men who were now turned toward them, watching.

Boomer shot quietly, as Eddie expected he would, and almost as gracefully as Fats. His stroke was eccentric, swooping the cue stick over a long, wavering bridge, but he hit them solidly. And he was used to the heavy cue ball; on one shot he drew it back lightly by three feet.

“Winner breaks,” Boomer said, and went to the bar for a mouthful of potato salad and a drink. He came back wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, jammed the napkin into his hip pocket, took his cue and broke the balls. The table was three and a half by seven; after a solid break shot, the balls were distributed evenly all over it. Eddie had never played on a table like this before; he wasn’t sure how many games a man could run on it.

Boomer bent and sank his first ball, and then looked at the crowd around him. “I got to keep making these little fuckers,” he said. “If I give that Balabushka a chance, it’ll put me in the County Home.”

“It’s only a pool cue, Boomer,” somebody in the crowd said.

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” Boomer said. “That cue has radar and microcircuits in its tip. With a cue like that a man can stay in bed and send the cue stick out on Saturday nights. ‘Bring in five hundred, Balabushka’ is what you say. I know about them high-technology pool cues, come from Silicon Valley with a college degree.” He shook his head, bent and shot, cutting the seven ball into the side. His cue ball rolled a few feet for perfect position.

Eddie remained silent. He had seen routines like this before. The best thing to do was stay loose and not try to enter the spirit of it or make a fool out of yourself. So far, it was impossible to tell just how good Boomer was. Fats had said there were three or four professionals in this town—men who made their-livings entirely by hustling on bar tables—and apparently Boomer was the best among them. Eddie leaned against the empty table a few feet from the one Boomer and he were playing on, and tried to relax. Boomer was funny; but there was threat in the way he talked, and in the cold-eyed look he flicked toward Eddie from time to time. Eddie watched, and kept quiet, and waited for him to miss.

When Boomer had two more balls to make, he overshot a long cut and his cue ball rolled too far, leaving him out of position. He shrugged, banked at one of the remaining balls, missed it and rolled the white ball into a perfect safety. It was an “if-I-miss” shot of the kind Fats had demonstrated back in Denver.

Eddie tightened his cue stick and looked at Boomer. “What’s the house rule if I don’t hit one?”

“I get the cue behind the line,” Boomer said. “Same as a scratch.”

That was a pisser. If Eddie didn’t hit one of the stripes, Boomer would have an easy run out. And the cue was snookered behind the six. He studied it a moment. The thing to do was bank off the near rail and try to tap into the eleven ball and hope for a safety. It was the only smart thing to do.

But the twelve, down at the far end of the table, was a few inches from the corner pocket. The cue ball could be banked two cushions out of the corner, down the long diagonal. A very difficult shot. If he missed it, Boomer would own the table. It was a one-in-ten shot, a two-rail kick-in. Eddie looked at the bartender. “Let me have a Manhattan, on the rocks,” he said. He stepped up to the table, adjusted his glasses, carefully spread the fingers of his left hand in a high bridge over the snookering six ball, elevated the back of his cue, looked once behind him at the twelve ball and shot, hard, smooth, and angry.

The cue ball bounced out of the corner, rolled the diagonal of the table and clipped the twelve ball sharply. The twelve rolled briskly into the pocket. “Son of a bitch!” Boomer said. “Goddamned microchips.”

“Printed circuits,” Eddie said, going to the bar for his drink. The men on the bar stools stared at him silently. He waited while the bartender put the cherry in, took a long swallow and came back to the table feeling, at last, relaxed.

Boomer was good, but nowhere as good as Fats. He couldn’t bank well, and his main strength was in easy runs. He would have been a good straight-pool player if hustlers played straight pool anymore, and he was certainly good enough to make a living at eight-ball in barrooms. Eddie held himself steady, and by ten o’clock he was seven hundred dollars ahead.

When Boomer gave him the last pair of fifties, he looked at Eddie coldly and said, “If you want to play me anymore, my friend, you’re going to have to give me some weight.” He had dropped the wild-country-boy act and spoke quietly.

Eddie was finishing his supper—a bacon and tomato sandwich. He took the paper plate over and set it on the bar and then came back. The crowd silently made way for him. “What do you need?”

“I’ll take the break,” Boomer said.

Eddie looked at him, at his strange face with the look of crazy, mean intelligence; the veiled threat in his cool eyes; the small hands now holding his thin, delicate cue. “I won’t give you the break but I’ll bank the eight ball. If we play for five hundred a game.”

“I’ve heard of guys like you,” Boomer said.

“I bet you have, Boomer.”

Boomer stared at him a moment and then gave a small grin. “I’ve got to make a phone call.”

“Go ahead.”

He went to the pay phone at the end of the bar while Eddie got himself a cup of coffee. His shoulder had begun to ache, and now that Boomer was calling his backer or whatever, he felt the tightness in his stomach again. That was something else he had forgotten over the years: the goddamned fear.

The backer showed up surprisingly soon. He was a small man in a tight gray suit and dark necktie. The men leaning against one of the empty tables made room for him and he stood there, not leaning, and watched while Eddie racked up the balls and Boomer broke them. He made one on the break. It was going to be tough. For a moment Eddie felt like a fool giving such odds. Banking the eight could be ruinous. You couldn’t afford to miss against a player like Boomer and on tables like this. Boomer ran three of the stripes and then played safe. Eddie did not try anything fancy this time but played a safety back. It went back and forth like that for several shots, but then on a draw shot, Eddie did not pull the heavy cue ball back as far as he had meant to and he left Boomer a piece of the eleven. Boomer said nothing, but zeroed in and cut it into the side. He ran out. Eddie took five hundred out of his wallet. Boomer nodded over toward the man in the suit and said, “Just pay my friend.” Eddie walked over and handed the little man the bills. He took them silently, smoothed them out and began counting. Eddie walked back over to the table and racked the balls. Then he went to the bar and finished his coffee, watching the table as he drank. Boomer swung his bat of a cue into the break ball and spread the rack. A stripe and a solid dropped in. He began running the solids. Eddie walked back over to the table. His feet and his shoulder were hurting, and the coffee hadn’t really helped. What was he doing, saying he would bank the eight on this man’s own table, with his own crowd, here in some town in North Carolina whose name he had already forgotten? Haneyville. That was it—the first name on the list from Fats. “Some high rollers there,” Fats had said. Well, there one of them was, making balls like a machine. Plop, plop they went, into the big pockets of the little table. Plop. The last was the eight ball. Eddie got another five hundred and gave it to the dapper little man. He was now, after four hours of pool, three hundred dollars behind. And quite a few quarters. He put another quarter in, telling himself he had better bear down; when the balls came rolling through the chute he took them out and racked them, eight ball in the center, for Boomer.

And Boomer boomed them open, dropping three. He was getting hot now. Maybe he had been holding back before. Eddie watched him, for a moment feeling some of the helplessness he had felt against Fats in Miami and Cincinnati, with a tight, painful sensation in his stomach. Boomer was moving around the little table faster now, sliding balls into pockets quietly while the whole crowded barroom full of men in working clothes watched him, fascinated. The gray smoke above the cone of light over the table was nearly solid; men sipped their drinks silently; no one played the jukebox or talked. The sound of Boomer’s boot heels when he moved from shot to shot was like footsteps in a library. He made all the striped balls, shot the eight in the side, and Eddie paid the man in the suit.

“I may never find out if you can bank that eight ball,” Boomer said as Eddie was bent near him, getting the balls from the rack.

Eddie froze and stared at him a moment. “Let’s play for a thousand,” he said. He had twelve hundred dollars with him.

“You’re on,” Boomer said.

He finished racking them, surprised at his own steadiness. He had not planned to play for that much money. Boomer might run out without giving him a shot. Boomer had gone over to the nearby table and was whispering with his backer, whose face was impassive. Eddie looked at him and immediately knew he would miss soon.

Boomer stepped up to the table, drew back his cue and slammed into the rack of balls. They spread out, but nothing fell in. “Son of a bitch!” he said, this time meaning it.

The balls were wide, and the eight was an inch from the side pocket. After making the others, Eddie could bring the cue ball near it for a simple cross-side bank. First, he would have to cut the seven thin, slip it into the bottom corner, and let his cue ball roll the length of the table to sit down by the three. It wasn’t easy. He glanced up at Boomer, who was standing a few feet from the table.

“Don’t miss,” Boomer said.

Eddie stared at him a moment. “Boomer,” he said, “you’re scared of me.”

He bent down, stroked smoothly, and cut the seven ball in. The cue ball rolled up the table and sat down sweetly behind the three. He shot it in, and then the four ball and the two and the others, finally giving himself position for the bank on the eight ball. He stopped a second to chalk his cue and then bent, stroked, shot. The eight ball struck the cushion smartly, rolled across the table and fell into the pocket.

Boomer got the money from his backer, handed it to Eddie. This time Eddie did not take out his wallet. He folded the bills and pushed them down into his pants pocket while Boomer stood watching. “You’re not quitting, are you?” Eddie said pleasantly. He liked the way his voice sounded.

Boomer shook his head.

“Then rack the balls,” Eddie said.

He got her number from long-distance information and dialed from the phone by his bed. It was a little before one. He had woken up at noon, showered, and ordered coffee from room service.

“Pat told me you were living alone,” she said. Her voice did not sound friendly, but at least she was willing to talk.

“I sure am.”

“Where are you?”

“In the Holiday Inn in Haneyville, North Carolina.”

“What in god’s name are you doing in North Carolina?”

“Playing pool for money.”

“I thought you didn’t do that anymore.”

“Sometimes I even surprise myself.”

“Is that what you called to tell me?”

“I’ll be at Bluegrass Airport at six. If you’ll pick me up, I’ll take you to the Japanese place for dinner.”

“Eddie,” she said, “I don’t know….”

“I know,” he said, looking at the stack of over four thousand dollars he had won from Boomer. “Pick me up at the airport. We ought to be together.”

She was there waiting for him, looking terrific in a black wool sweater and blue jeans, her gray hair freshly washed and fluffy around her face, like a movie star on her day off. He was carrying his cue and nylon bag, and they didn’t kiss. She shook his hand, looking him over. Neither of them spoke. Finally she said, “We don’t know each other very well at all.”

“Like hell we don’t,” he said.

She hadn’t found herself a job yet and was getting tired of looking. She would have given up weeks before and settled for living on alimony if it weren’t that staying in the apartment was driving her crazy. They had a long quiet supper while she told him these things; afterward they went back to her apartment and, for the first time, made love. They were like old friends, old lovers. The week apart and the trip and the money had changed everything for him and they could both feel it. He knew what to do and so did she. They lay on her sofa bed afterward and talked. He would look for a while at the lights of downtown outside her windows, closed now against a September chill, and then turn back to her smooth white body beside him in the bed. They smoked his cigarettes and stubbed them out in a coffee saucer between them.

“You’re playing pool for money again?” she said, breaking the silence.

“It’s been a long time.”

“You mean gambling, don’t you? Not just giving an exhibition.”

“That’s right. Gambling.”

“In England people spoke of billiards sharks. You call them hustlers, I think. Is that what you are?”

He looked at her a moment. “I’m not a pool shark.”

“I’m sorry. What do I call you—a hustler?”

“Call me Eddie and hand me a cigarette.”

She frowned and gave him one. “Whatever you are, you aren’t a professor.”

He took the cigarette and lit it. “I fly to Albuquerque in a month to do an exhibition. Before that I’m going to Memphis to play eight-ball at a roadhouse called Thelma’s. How would you like to come along?”

“You want me to travel with you? Like a gun moll or something?”

“There you go again.”

“As the consort of a pool player.”

“Do you have anything better to do?”

She rolled over and kissed him on the neck. “No, I haven’t,” she said.

“You’d like it if I played tennis.”

“Or bridge?” Arabella, dressed only in pale blue panties, was pulling something big out of the closet. Another painting, apparently, wrapped in brown paper. She laid it flat in the center of the living room and, while Eddie watched from the bed, seated herself cross-legged on the rug and began to remove masking tape from the paper. “Or the French horn?”

“Something like that. Shooting pool sounds like shooting craps.”

“It does?” She got one end of the wrapping free and began slipping the framed picture out of it. Eddie leaned up on his elbow to see it better but could not make it out. Her small breasts as she bent over were wonderful, and so was the curved ridge of her backbone. “What happened to nightgowns?” he asked.

“It’s a warm apartment.” She began folding the paper neatly into a square, pressing the wrinkles out of it. He had already noticed the towels in the bathroom closet, folded and stacked as though displayed in an expensive store. Everything about her apartment was orderly. When she finished, she got up from the floor and carried the paper to the green oriental chest at the far wall and set it neatly in a drawer. From the drawer she took out a hammer and brought it over to the bed. “Here,” she said. “You can drive the nail.”

“Toss it on the bed. I’ll get it in a minute.”

“Come on, Eddie. I want to hang this picture.”

He reached over and got a cigarette. “Not without coffee.”

“I’ll make some instant.”

“Instant coffee leads to divorce.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “I’ll use the Vesuviana. It would be simpler if you’d take tea in the morning.”

“Arabella,” Eddie said, “it would be simpler if the world was flat.”

“I’ll make the coffee.” She tossed the hammer beside him on the bed and went to the stove. “Why should I want you to play tennis, Eddie?”

“It has class.”

She turned to him from the stove with the coffee can in her hand. “I hate that word. My grandmother used it all the time. It was working class or leisure class.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’re an aristocrat.”

“Come on, Eddie,” she said. “It’s my accent. You Americans are all alike when it comes to British accents.”

“I mean the way you look. The way your apartment looks, with the white floor and oil paintings.”

“It’s called taste, Eddie.”

“What does your taste say about hustling pool?”

“My taste doesn’t say a fucking thing about it.” She turned, carried the coffee can back to the stove and took its top off. She began spooning coffee into the basket of the little machine.

He hesitated a moment and then said, “I think Martha was ashamed of it.”

“Was Martha your wife?”

“Thoroughly.”

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

“I’m learning to talk like you.”

“You’re an Anglophile.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

She got the coffee machine back together and put it on the burner in front of the stove. “Well I’m not Martha. When I saw you playing pool with Roy I was thrilled.”

He looked at her back for a moment as she adjusted the flame. Then he stood up barefoot and took the hammer. “Where do you want to hang this?”

“I admire skill,” Arabella said, coming over to him, “and I respect people who live by their wits.” She handed him a brass picture-hanger. “Center the painting above the chest. The trees in it will look good over the green.”

He held up the framed canvas for a moment. Like the painting over the sofa, it was crude and bright, as though done by a skilled child. There were two figures and a horse standing under trees; everything was as simply drawn as in a child’s painting, but each leaf of the trees had been individually painted.

“It’s what some people call naive art,” Arabella said. “It was done by a woman without formal training.”

“It would make a good jigsaw puzzle. Sharp lines.”

“These two pictures are all I got from the divorce, if you don’t count the alimony. Harrison kept the furniture—even the sheets and towels.”

“Why did you get the paintings?”

“Because they’re mine. A friend bought me the other one and I bought this myself.”

“Harrison likes naive art?”

“He hates it. It was the friend who taught me about naive art. Contemporary folk art.”

“Okay.” He went over to the chest and held the painting up. “I’m pretty good with a hammer, too.”

“It’s what attracted me to you in the first place.”

On his fourth night in Arabella’s apartment he lay awake in bed next to her for over an hour. It was late, but there were still sounds of traffic from Main Street through the closed windows. He wore shorts in bed and she was naked, covered by the sheet and a silvery down comforter. She slept facing him, the sheet and comforter huddled under her left arm, which was bare and white with light freckles toward the shoulder. Even in sleep her face looked smart. What was he doing in bed with a woman like this? The lashes on her closed eyes were perfect, curling slightly upward above unblemished cheeks. Her small hand lay on his arm.

She was on the rebound from a genteel life and she liked him. She was interested in what he knew about running a small business, had asked him solid questions about it over dinner that evening, wanting to know how he had figured his operating expenses and what the problems were with taxes. She liked the idea of hustling pool; it excited her to be with a gambler. She liked his looks.

He liked her air of competence and ambition, the clarity of what she said, the authority her voice had on the telephone, the way she disdained makeup, did not talk down to him, slept naked, swore, and never wavered in matters of taste. When she made love she did it without the encumbrance of modesty or indirection, although her passion was restrained and her orgasms silent. But they did not know each other very well yet. He had his own restraints too and was afraid sometimes to let go, but he felt he could talk about that with her when the time came.

One thing that disturbed him was the newspaper in the desk drawer. Unpacking three days before while Arabella was out, he had checked the desk for an empty drawer, sliding out the bottom one first. A newspaper sat on top of a pile of newspapers. He took it out idly and saw that the paper under it was another copy. Below that were others—at least a dozen, all the same. There were two photographs on the front page; one was of Nancy Reagan and the other was of a smiling young man with light, curly hair. Above this a headline read: ART EXPERT KILLED IN CYCLE CRASH. The word art caught his attention; Arabella knew a lot about art. The article identified the man as Gregory Welles, assistant professor at the university and editor of the Journal of Kentucky Arts and Crafts. Arabella wrote articles from time to time for the journal. He looked at the date at the top of the page; it was a little over a year old. Welles had swerved on a country road to avoid being hit, had gone over into the ditch, had died. With him at the time was Mrs. Harrison Frame, who escaped serious injury. Welles and Mrs. Frame had been visiting the shop of a craftsman in Estill County. Eddie had noticed two moon-shaped scars on Arabella’s knees; when he asked about them she said, “I was in a wreck,” and changed the subject.

Twelve copies of the same paper. He looked closely at the young man’s face. It was a plain, American face, but Eddie felt his stomach tighten as he looked at it. Of course she would have had other lovers. It shouldn’t bother him. What did he want—a forty-year-old virgin? And the man was dead. Still, he did not like it. He hated it. He hated the young man, the man Arabella had gone off with, riding country roads behind him on his motorcycle, the man she had been able to talk art with, had probably slept with as she was now sleeping with him. Eddie finished the article. Greg Welles had died at twenty-six.

Thelma’s parking lot was half full when they drove up at nine-thirty. He had wanted to get there before any serious games would start and was afraid he might be too late. Fats said this was the hottest place in the whole South. Eddie’s stomach was tight and his mouth dry. He was ready to play.

The bar was packed and noisy, with a Loretta Lynn recording from the jukebox—loud as it was—only barely discernible against the talking and shouting of the people jammed at the bar and filling the small tables. There were a half-dozen illuminated beer signs over the bar itself; a sequined globe hung from the center of the ceiling, with colored lights sparkling on it. There were no pool tables in sight. Arabella looked around as though she were at a circus, her eyes wide.

He spotted a doorway with a sign over it reading GAME ROOM, took her by the elbow and led her past the crowded tables. The dance floor was filled with couples in bright silky shirts and jeans, with young men wearing big mustaches, and long-haired women. Arabella seemed astonished by it all, and when he got her into the relative quiet of the other room, she said, “It’s just like the movies.”

There were five tables of the same small size as Haneyville’s, and games were in progress on three of them. One of the others had a plastic cover over it, and on the fifth a foursome of silent children were poking cue sticks at balls. Arabella looked at them for a minute; none was over ten years old. Then she whispered, “Is that the junior division?”

For some reason he felt irritated at the joke. “The parents are probably back there dancing.”

“With one another?”

“Honey,” he said coolly, “I don’t understand these places any better than you do. I’m just learning my way around.”

“I thought you made your living in places like this.”

“In poolrooms. Not barrooms.”

She got quiet then, and he began watching the three games. The ones on the first two tables were not much; none of the players had a decent stroke or knew what to shoot at, but what was happening on the middle table was something different. It was a cool, quiet game of serious nine-ball. One player was oriental. Japanese, with delicate features, narrow eyes and brown skin. He wore a blue velvet jacket that fit perfectly across his narrow shoulders, and a silvery open-collared shirt underneath, matching his silver trousers. The man he was playing was thirtyish, with a heavy beard and workingman’s clothes.

Two high director’s chairs sat against the back wall. Eddie took Arabella by the arm, led her over to them and seated himself with his cue case across his lap.

The Japanese was impeccably dressed. His hair, his nails and his shave were perfect. Eddie liked the quiet way he concentrated on his shots. The other player was quiet too, but sloppy in appearance, at least compared to the Japanese. He looked like Lon Chaney in the werewolf movies, at about the middle of the transformation, with bushy hair coming down over his forehead and the full beard.

They watched for about a half hour, and then Arabella leaned over and said, “When are you going to play?”

“If somebody comes in. Or if one of them quits.”

Just as he said this the bearded man, who had lost four games since they started watching, lost another. He handed the Japanese some money, unscrewed his cue, and left.

Eddie looked at the Japanese and grinned. “Do you want to play some more?”

“Eight-ball?”

“What about straight pool?”

The little man smiled. “We usually play eight-ball here.”

“All right.” Eddie stood and unfastened the clasp on his cue case. “What were you two playing for?”

The man continued smiling. “Twenty dollars.”

“How about fifty?”

“Sure.” Eddie could hear Arabella draw in her breath behind him.

The Japanese was easy to play but difficult to beat. There was no belligerence or muscling to him, but he shot a thoroughly professional game. He ran the balls out when he had an open table to work with and played simple, effective safeties when he didn’t. When Eddie made a good shot he would say, “Good shot!” He made a great many of them himself. Eddie had difficulty with the heavy cue ball. All bar tables used them, so the ball would bypass the chute when you scratched; and he knew he would have to get accustomed to the sluggishness. It caused him to misjudge his position a few critical times. After an hour had passed, he was down by a hundred dollars. He was racking the balls and considering raising the bet when the other man spoke. “Would you like to double the bet?”

Eddie finished racking, hung the wooden triangle at the foot of the table and said, “Why don’t we play for two hundred a game?”

The Japanese looked at him calmly. “Okay.”

But at two hundred Eddie went on losing. On some shots the cue ball seemed to be made of lead and would not pull backward when he needed it to. During the third game at two hundred, Eddie ran all of the stripes without difficulty but failed to make the eight ball because the weight of the cue ball threw his position off. There was no life to the damned thing; it was maddening.

The Japanese seemed unconcerned with the problem, making balls steadily, clicking them in like a tap dancer. They hardly spoke to each other. Eddie kept paying, racking the balls, and watching the other man shoot. Being short, he bent only slightly from the waist; his long cue stick seemed more intimate with the table, more neatly parallel to it, than Eddie’s. Eddie felt that pool tables were too low for a man of average height, and he himself was taller than average. When the Japanese stepped up to a shot, the way he bent his waist and extended his left arm, the way his right arm cocked itself for the stroke, and the way his quiet eyes zeroed in on the cue ball and then on the line extending from the cue ball to the ball he was going to pocket were perfect. The open front of his powder-blue jacket hung straight down, missing the side of the table by an inch; the crease at the bottoms of his silver trousers broke neatly above the tops of his polished shoes; and his brown, unlined face showed a hint of exquisite sadness. When Eddie stepped up to shoot now he felt, compared with the other man, big and clumsy, like the big, clumsy barroom cue ball he had to hit.

When Eddie was nine hundred dollars down, the man excused himself to go to the bathroom. Eddie walked over to Arabella. “I hope you’re not bored,” he said.

“It’s really a thrill,” she said. “I wish you’d teach me more, Eddie, so I could understand it better.”

“Sure.”

She looked behind her to see if the other player was still gone from the room. Then she leaned forward. “When are you going to start beating him, Eddie?”

“As soon as I can.”

“Aren’t you losing on purpose? Isn’t that the way you do it?”

“I told you,” Eddie said, frowning, “I’m not a pool shark. I’m trying to beat the man.”

“Oh,” she said, clearly disappointed.

“I’m having trouble with the cue ball….”

She just looked at him.

Just then a waitress came in. “Anybody here want something from the bar?”

“Sure,” Eddie said, and then to Arabella, “What would you like?” He realized that his voice was cold.

Arabella spoke to the waitress. “Do you have white wine?”

“Sure, honey,” the waitress said brightly. “You want dry or extra dry? We’ve got a nice dry Chablis.”

“I’ll have a glass of that.”

“Bring me a Manhattan on the rocks.” Eddie was feeling uncomfortable. The man on the far table ordered beer.

Just then the Japanese came walking back into the room. “Do you want a drink?” Eddie asked.

“Bourbon and soda.” He smiled at Eddie. “Tough work, shooting eight-ball.”

There was something about him. Eddie could not help liking him. A lot of hustlers were that way, since their livelihoods depended partly on charm; but the feeling for this little man was stronger than that.

The Japanese picked up his cue, set its butt on the floor between his feet and held it so its tip was level with his chin. Then he slipped a small metal rasp from his coat pocket and began tapping the cue tip with it. It was something Eddie hadn’t seen for so long that he had forgotten: the man was dressing the tip to make it hold chalk better.

When he finished, Eddie said, “Could I use that a minute?”

He nodded and handed it to him. Eddie stood his cue in front of him and gave it a few taps.

“That’s a very pretty stick,” the Japanese said.

“Thanks.” Eddie scuffed the center of the tip where there was a hard spot, and then began chalking it heavily. The other man took a square of chalk and did the same thing. He looked at Eddie and said, “I’m Billy Usho.”

“Ed Felson. This is Arabella.”

“I’ve enjoyed watching you play.” Arabella twirled her wineglass by the stem.

“That’s nice.” Usho smiled. “My wife says it bores her. Out of her skull.”

“That’s a shame,” Arabella said. “I think it’s a beautiful game. Very intricate and bright.”

Eddie began racking the balls. He felt, as he had before in his life, that if he didn’t do something his money would drift away from him and he would go on losing. He did not like Arabella’s sympathy with the little man. He did not like his own. The Japanese was like Fats: another cool man who dressed impeccably. Another star. Eddie was better than this dapper Japanese, better maybe than Fats.

“Let’s play for five hundred,” Eddie said.

“That’s a lot of money for eight-ball.”

Eddie straightened up from racking and shrugged. At the table across the room, the men who had ordered beers were staring at him. They must have heard him say five hundred dollars. He noticed for the first time that the kids had left the other table, had apparently been gone for some time. He looked over at Arabella briefly; her face was expressionless. He turned back to Billy Usho. “What have you got to lose?”

“Okay.” Billy picked up the chalk again, ran it lightly over the tip of his cue, bent to the table and smashed the rack of balls open.

Eddie took a deep breath and watched, not sitting, keeping his back to Arabella. The five ball fell in; that gave Billy the solids. Eddie kept his eyes on the table and not on Usho’s clothes or his smooth, youthful face.

None of the solids was in an easy position, and the cue ball was frozen to a side rail. Billy studied the lie for a long time before he played safe. The cue ball stopped between the eight and the four, out of line with all the striped balls. Eddie would have to keep his nerves steady and his balls tight just to get a decent safety out of it. The cue ball would have to be banked rail-first into the eleven. It was a pisser.

Just then the waitress came in with their drinks. Eddie gave her a ten, took his Manhattan and turned back to the table. If he shot it hard, the eleven might go in the side; it was a foot and a half away from the pocket and in a direct line with it. But, Jesus, to thump that big cue ball off the cushion and try for a perfect hit on the eleven was a killer. He looked at Billy’s Japanese face, his almost pretty face, for a moment and thought, To hell with him. He took a long swallow from the sweet drink, set it down, not looking at Arabella, and walked over to the table. He could make the eleven ball.

He did it quickly, spreading the fingers of his left hand over the eight, elevating the cue stick, stroking once and then tapping the cue ball. He could feel the purchase on the big, clunky ball that roughing the leather of the tip had given him. He watched the white ball pop off the rail and hit the eleven dead center, watched the eleven roll into the side pocket. The cue ball stopped in position for the thirteen. Eddie chalked, took three steps over and pocketed the thirteen. Then the nine, the fifteen, the fourteen and the twelve. The black eight sat four inches from the lower corner and his cue ball ten inches from the eight. He plunked the eight ball into the pocket and went back to his Manhattan. Billy paid him silently and racked the balls.

At midnight Eddie raised the bet to a thousand and Billy brought in two backers. One wore a dark suit and looked like a banker. The other could have been a rodeo cowboy. He chewed tobacco, drank Rolling Rock beer, and paid Eddie in worn-looking hundred-dollar bills from what seemed an inexhaustible supply.

At one in the morning, Eddie put Arabella in a taxi and sent her back to the Holiday Inn. She kissed him sleepily before getting in the cab. “I’m glad you started beating him.”

“You know what I’m going to do tomorrow?” Eddie said to her. “I’m going to buy some new clothes.”

After they closed the bar at two-thirty, a crowd of a dozen diehards stayed to watch. Someone kept feeding quarters into the jukebox in the other room; the muted voices of Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard came through the open doorway. Billy’s face was no longer unlined, and his hair no longer neatly combed. There was a smear of talcum powder near the lapel of his blue jacket, and his narrow eyes were narrower.

Eddie was reaching a place he had almost forgotten, where the nerves of his arms and fingertips seemed to extend through the length of the Balabushka to the glossy surfaces of the balls themselves, to the napped green of the table. There were no aches in his feet or shoulders, and his stroke was unruffled, pistonlike, and dead-accurate. He could not miss. There was no way he could miss. The whole fatty accumulation of his middle-class life had fallen away from him, and his movements at the table were both fully awake and dreamlike. The visual clarity was astounding. The click of his cue tip against the cue ball, the click of the cue ball against the ball he was tapping in or easing in or nudging in or powering in was like the click of oiled machinery. He was silent and loose; in some newly awakened reach of his mind he was dazzled by himself.

Billy did not quit for a long time. It was amazing that he didn’t quit. He shot fine pool, better than he had played at the beginning, and he even won games. There was no way to prevent him from winning games. But he had no real chance. By three o’clock in the morning it must have been clear to everyone in the room, as it was to Eddie, that he had no chance; but he kept on playing and his backers kept handing money to Eddie.

With the rail-first bank on the eleven ball, he had lost his clumsiness with the cue ball; and now he made it dance for him, still sluggish though it was. He had found the string for it and his control was flawless. He even felt a certain fondness for the big white ball, like the fondness he had felt for Billy Usho; but now he was in command of both. There was nothing in life like this. Nothing. To stroke and hit the cue ball, to watch the colored ball roll with the certitude that he himself imposed on it, to see and hear the colored ball fall into the pocket he had chosen, was exquisite.

Coming into the room, he tried not to wake her, but she stirred when he closed the door. A moment later she turned the bedside light on. She was squinting at the clock radio, her hair disheveled and her breasts bare. She didn’t look at him. “Dear God!” she said. “It’s five o’fucking clock.”

“A quarter after,” Eddie said.

“Maybe you should play tennis.”

“No I shouldn’t.” He set the cue stick in the closet and began unbuttoning his shirt. He took it off and laid it across the back of a chair. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Come on to bed.”

“After the shower.”

“All right,” she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “I missed you last night. How much did you take him for?”

“Take him for?”

“Isn’t that what you say?”

He grinned at her, a bit dreamily. He felt thoroughly tired. His arms and legs, his chest and back, felt warm and relaxed, and the dull ache in his insteps and in his right arm—his stroking arm—was more a comfort than a pain. He reached into his right pocket and pulled out a handful of bills. He dropped it on the bed at her side and then pulled out another handful. Hundreds had a special shade of green on their backs, and the numbering that read “100” was curved pleasantly at the corners, the engraving baroque and substantial. He had always loved them. He dropped the second beside the first, then pulled out more, along with a fistful of loose bills. Arabella had become wide-eyed. She stared at the money and then up at his face. He felt deeply relaxed and yet alert; if someone attacked him he would respond like a drowsy leopard, like a great white shark, lazy and deadly.

“Good god in heaven!” Arabella said softly, looking at the money beside her.

He dug deeper and found another dozen of them in that pocket. Then he shifted to the other pocket, where there was a roll, pulling it out with thumb and forefinger. On the bed the roll uncoiled itself like a living thing, to become a sheaf. More bills were beneath it. He slipped them out a few at a time. The pile of green bills next to Arabella now filled up the space from her knees to her elbows, covering about a foot’s width of the bed. She reached down, scooped up a double handful and held them against her cheeks as a child might hold a beloved doll. “Where have you been all my life, Eddie?” she said.

“Who cares?” Eddie said. “I’m here now.”

The next day Arabella drove to Thelma’s with him at noon and played a pinball machine while he waited around for someone to come in. He got a handful of quarters at the bar and practiced, but none of the people who walked into the bar for an afternoon beer came back to the room where Eddie, feeling like a house hustler, was banking balls up the rails. By late afternoon it had gotten to him. During his years in Lexington he had come to hate these long days with pool tables and the endless, desultory shooting. There were games going on at the other tables now, but not for money. The excitement of the night before was gone. By the time they had their supper at the bar, his arm was tired and his feet ached.

After supper Arabella sat in the canvas director’s chair she had watched from the night before, reading a book. At nine he went out to the bar, got two bottles of beer and poured hers into a glass.

“Well,” she said, “think of how you did last night.”

“Do you want to play?”

“All right.” She closed her book and set it on the table by the beer.

He showed her how to draw the cue ball by putting bottom English on it and how to make a proper bridge with her thumb and forefinger. Her concentration was impressive. He set up balls for her and watched her tap them in, and for a while, it was a pleasure. She liked getting things right. He took the seat she had been in, drank his beer slowly from the bottle and watched her. After a while he was reading from The Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett while she shot the balls around on the table. They were strange little stories, about Englishmen; he read three. When he looked up from the third, Arabella was standing in front of him, her arms crossed over the top of the Balabushka.

“It does get boring after a while,” she said.

Eddie stretched and yawned. “Not at five hundred a game.”

“Let’s go to the room, Eddie. I’m tired.”

The next evening around eight o’clock, Billy Usho came in. This time he was wearing a chocolate-brown velvet jacket and tan slacks over light Italian shoes. He was carrying his cue case and he smiled ruefully when he saw Eddie sitting in the director’s chair.

“What if I bank the eight?” Eddie said.

“Blindfold, maybe,” Usho said.

“Have a seat,” Eddie said. “Where can I get a game?”

“Next to impossible.”

“A friend told me there were money players around here.”

“Not anymore. Who’s your friend?”

“Fats, from Chicago.”

“Oh yes,” Billy Usho said, looking very Japanese. He could have said, “Ah so!” He opened his case and took out a cue that was different from the one he had used before. Its butt was wrapped in brown linen that matched his jacket. “I hear Fats came through here six years ago and cleaned them all out. But there was money in those days. It’s not like that now.”

“You’re just passing through too, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been here a week. You have to work at it.”

Eddie fell silent for a while. There was an amateurish game of pool going on in front of them, and they watched for a while. Then Eddie said, “Did you ever play the nine-ball tournament at Lake Tahoe?”

“Those tournaments are a bitch. You got to come in first or second, or the hotel bill eats you alive.”

“I hear Earl Borchard makes a good living at tournaments.”

“He’s a genius. So’s Babes Cooley.”

Eddie got down from his chair, put a quarter in the table and began shooting banks. Usho came over and watched.

Eddie tapped the five ball cross-side, freezing the cue ball. “I haven’t seen anybody play serious nine-ball for twenty years.”

Billy looked at him speculatively. “Where’ve you been?”

Eddie slammed a long cross-corner bank on the twelve ball. “In a fog, Billy. I’ve been in a god-damned fog for twenty years.”

“Good bank on the twelve,” Billy said.

As they walked out onto the parking lot at one, a carload of teenagers drove up, screeching to a stop in the space next to Eddie’s car. Six of them got out, the boys staggering and laughing, the girls squealing. Eddie and Billy watched as they went under the big red neon sign into Thelma’s. As Eddie was unlocking his car he turned to Billy and said, “Do you think I could beat Earl Borchard at nine-ball? Or Babes Cooley?”

“No,” Billy said, “I don’t think you could.”

“Why not?”

“This eight-ball in bars is nothing but a scuffle. The best players are in nine-ball.”

“What about straight pool?”

“Nine-ball. That’s where the money is.”

There was no way not to leave Arabella stuck in motels over the next two weeks. She read books, spent some time on the telephone, and they went to matinees of movies together, saving the night for pool-shooting. She would go to whatever bar he was working and stay an hour or so, but it was tedious for him and more so for her; there wasn’t anything for her to do.

Worse, he wasn’t making any money. The best game he found was for twenty dollars, and the man quit him after a few hours of it, leaving Eddie with a profit of a hundred eighty. That was in the first week, and even it was not repeated.

After three days in a Holiday Inn in Beaufort, North Carolina, Arabella’s boredom was beginning to show. She tried to be cheerful, but there were long silences between them at breakfast—or at what was lunch for her and breakfast for him. One day at noon, when he had just gotten up from a long, unsuccessful night at a downtown bar, several things went wrong. The hotel laundry service had lost two blouses, the television set had lost its ability to make a coherent picture, they went to lunch and the waitress brought her the wrong sandwich. She had ordered the Big Chuck hamburger; the waitress brought her liverwurst. Arabella stared furiously at the glossy white bread. Eddie tried to hail the waitress as she disappeared into the kitchen.

“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I want to go home.”

“There’s an afternoon flight from Raleigh. I’ll go with you.”

It was colder in Lexington now, and he wore a scarf and gloves on his way to the Faculty Club in the mornings. The leaves had all fallen from the trees and been raked from the neatly cropped grass of the campus; there were still rake marks like the lines in the fine gravel of a Japanese garden. Eddie walked briskly from the parking lot to the club, chin down against the morning cold, cue case tucked under his arm. He liked it. After the raw towns in the South, with their neon and poverty, the university—with its substantial old brick buildings, its neatly kept walks, its sense of order and security—was a profound relief. He would walk into the anteroom of the Faculty Club, past the wooden tables where breakfast was being set up by students in white jackets, up the wooden stairs to the second floor and down the hallway to the game room, to uncover the big mahogany table and begin his morning’s work. He knew he did not belong here either by education, social class or any right other than Roy Skammer’s invitation; yet, he felt far more at home than by the bar tables near tavern dance floors or in the rough, smoke-stained rooms of North Carolina roadhouses. He felt at ease in the faded genteel quiet of an upstairs room with oil portraits of professors on the walls and chamber music sometimes drifting up from the lounge below. A faded oriental rug sat under the pool table, extending out a few feet from its periphery; Eddie’s leather jacket and scarf hung from the brass hook of a mahogany coatrack; the rotund face of an emeritus professor of history looked sternly down on the table; Eddie thought of him as Lexington Fats. Sometimes after pocketing a particularly difficult shot he would look up confidently at the old man’s face.

He had hoped his game was improved from the weeks of eight-ball, and it was. He was now making runs in the seventies and missing less. The glasses were a godsend. Whatever muscles of back and shoulder and arm it took to play pool for hour after hour had toughened; nothing in his body hurt anymore. He was still not as good as he once had been, when he could make a hundred balls without missing, but he felt he was getting there. In Albuquerque he would give it his best shot, and if he was hitting, would beat Fats. It was about time.

Arabella spent her days at home working on articles for the folk-art journal or typing papers for professors, sometimes complaining about the bad prose and footnotes she had to rattle her way through at her Selectric, but she seemed content to be working. The apartment was small for the two of them, and they spoke sometimes of finding a bigger one. They went out to movies some nights and spent others reading or watching television. Something in Eddie fretted at this part of his life. It was solid and easy, but he wanted something else. As his pool game came back, the old restlessness had reentered his spirit; he wanted to be playing for money, taking risks, staying at good hotels, sleeping till noon, winning money in cash, in hundred-dollar bills.

On his fourth day back from the South he went to Martha’s apartment to pick up some winter clothes he had left behind. Martha was there, and as usual had a cold. She was cordial but edgy as he pulled an armload of clothes from the maple dresser—sweaters, corduroy pants and an extra scarf. Being in the old apartment made him dizzy; he found he had nothing to say. She was silent too. He got what he needed and left.

Arabella told him there was space at one side of her big closet. He opened its sliding door to a four-foot row of dresses. There must have been forty of them, on hangers covered with quilted rayon. He ran a hand along colored silk, wool and linen. Near the closet floor a shelf held two long rows of shoes, lined up perfectly in Arabella’s British way, blue and red and brown and black shoes. Each held a lavender metal tree, its color precisely matching the coat-hanger covers.

Eddie found space at the end for his clothes and he hung them there—bemused by the array of the dresses and shoes, radiating along with the smells of potpourri and moth crystals the sense of another life.

A few days later they made a stab at apartment hunting. To get to a subdivision with moderately priced apartments, they drove through a fine old residential district, along a gently curving street lined with heavy elms. At a stop sign Arabella said, “Look there,” and pointed to a house on Eddie’s side. Far behind an enormous lawn sat a white-columned porch banked by shrubbery; the house itself was of gray limestone with a red tile roof and a row of dormers; it had tall, airy French windows on the first floor. “That was my house,” Arabella said. It went with the clothes. She had lived there fifteen years, with a distinguished professor of art—a man who had his work shown in galleries in New York and who appeared often on television. Now she was the mistress of a pool hustler—a former pool hustler. Eddie said nothing and drove on.

“Don’t you miss the parties?” he said to her that evening.

“What parties?” She had just finished doing a paper on hydraulic engineering and was tapping the sheaf of pages against the top of her desk. “I need a paper clip.”

“Behind your typewriter. I mean parties at the university, when you were a faculty wife.”

“Sometimes. Not often.” She found the clip, fastened the papers together and put them in a manila folder. Then she stood up and stretched. “At faculty parties what the women talk about is their children, and I don’t have children. It was a chance to dress up every now and then, but then I had to listen to Harrison. The two cancelled out.”

“I’ve heard that professors need wives.”

“To do the laundry?”

“You really are pissed at him,” Eddie said. “I meant to look good at parties, to help his career.”

“People say that, but it’s not really true. Harrison is what he is because he fills out a good grant-request form and looks superb in an Irish fisherman’s sweater. I don’t really hate him, Eddie. Thinking about him just irks me.”

“What were you in it for?”

She looked at him a long moment, then lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. Maybe the clothes.”

“You got a lot of them.”

“Security. I wanted to be taken care of, Eddie. By somebody good-looking and with a good career.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Would you want it?”

He lit a cigarette and said, “What in hell are you mad at?”

She walked to the desk and picked up the paper she had typed. “I’m mad at Harrison and I’m mad at the professor who wrote this study of stress resistance in water-retaining structures.”

“I think you’re mad at me,” Eddie said.

“I’m tired of the university. There are students who graduate from here with nothing in their heads but drugs and rock music.”

“You’re forgetting sex. I think it’s me you’re mad at.”

She looked at him. “Eddie, why don’t you get your act together and start playing tournaments?”

“I’m not good enough yet. I may never be.” He looked at his watch. It was midnight. He walked over to the sofa and began unfolding it into a bed. “If you lived in a house like that, why don’t you have a lot of money?”

“The house belongs to Harrison’s mother and didn’t figure in the settlement. I get eight hundred a month in alimony.”

“You could live on that.”

Arabella was quiet while he got his shoes off. Then she said, “Eddie. When I got upset in North Carolina and wanted to come home, it wasn’t just the boredom and the bad food.”

“I thought there was something.”

“I need to do more than support a man in his career. It was beginning to feel as if I’d never left Harrison.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m sorry. You’re not like Harrison, but you’re another kind of star.”

That annoyed him but he said nothing.

When she spoke again her voice was resigned. “I could do more work for the arts-and-crafts journal. They’ve offered me an office for reading copy.”

“Take it.”

“It’s still working for professors.”

“Then don’t take it.”

“I just don’t know.” She looked upset. She walked to her desk and picked up the folder with the paper she had just finished typing. “Maybe all I want is to be with a good-looking man who’s good at what he does.” She tossed the folder back on the desk. “There’s a lot of pressure on women these days to be themselves. Maybe it’s all a mean joke.”

Eddie looked at her. “No it isn’t,” he said.

“But what can I do?”

He stood up barefoot and stretched. “I know that one. It’s a real son of a bitch.”