Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond.
It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity’s sake.’ I think of that sometimes when I’m analyzing my ass.
There seemed to be a kind of insulation around her that kept everything at a distance.
It’s not luck – there’s probably no such thing as luck, and if there is you can’t depend on it. All you can do is play the percentages, play your best game, and when the critical bet comes – in every money game there is always a critical bet – you hold your stomach tight and you push hard. That’s the clutch. And that’s where your born loser loses.
Eddie Felson, with the ball bearings in his elbow, with eyes for the green and the colored balls, for the shiny balls, the purple, orange, blue and red, the stripes and solids, with geometrical rolls and falling, lovely spinning, with whiffs and clicks and tap-tap-taps, with scrapings of chalk, and the fingers embracing the polished shaft, the fingers on felt, the ever and always ready arena, the long, bright rectangle. The rectangle of lovely, mystical green, the color of money.
U-10 had been before the 1980s Decade of Enlightenment, the University of Tennessee – the 1980s had held no illusions what was important to the American way of life- and they landed their little olive drab plastic craft in front of the library.
I looked up. Two suns shone pleasantly down on my body. At night there were half a dozen moons. Everything about this place was generous, replete, fulfilling, I breathed as deeply as my lungs would allow, exhaled, and walked slowly down the rest of the hill, into the valley.
You Americans did not create that oil you used for your cars, your air conditioners, your lawn mowers, or for the plastic films you wrapped toys and pens and vegetables in. The oil was made by the world itself, when great ferns covered Texas and the Persian Gulf. It took millions of years to make it. You and the Arabs threw it away in a century.
It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies – sexual and economic and narcotic – upon the automobile.
Perhaps the grimness and coldness that I see everywhere exist because there are no children. No one is young anymore. In my whole life I have never seen anyone younger than I am. My only idea of childhood comes from memory, and from the obscene charade of those robot children at the zoo. I must be at least thirty. When my child comes he will have no playmates. He will be alone in a world of old and tired people who have lost the gift for living.
He’s Fast Eddie. You’ve been hustled.
He looked at his watch. A quarter of twelve. He would probably be having coffee with her now, if he were home. Home? What in the hell did that mean- He didn’t have any home. But the idea stayed with him for several minutes, the idea of a house somewhere and Sarah, doing whatever women are supposed to do in houses.
Was Newton, also a master of quiet morning drunkenness, looking for – for whatever it was that could supply a sane man in an insane world a reason for not being drunk in the morning?
Doesn’t mankind have a right to choose its own form of destruction?
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 itself was the color of money – could never be only pretense.
My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.
Someone had left a lipstick on the back of the toilet. She went to the bathroom and studying herself in the mirror, reddened her lips carefully. She had never worn lipstick before. She was beginning to feel very good.
How human he had become, to rationalize that way! He blamed her for his going native and becoming obsessed with vague guilts and vaguer doubts. She had taught him to drink gin; and she had shown him an aspect of strong and comfortable and hedonistic and unthinking humanity that his fifteen years of studying television had left him unaware of.
The man was very odd. Tall, thin, with white hair and a fine, delicate bone structure. He had smooth skin and a boyish face – but the eyes were very strange, as though they were weak, over-sensitive, yet with a look that was old and wise and tired.
Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.
Lately,’ she said, ‘I’ve been trying to memorize my life.