The Risk Pool

wanting to appear unworldly. Then I asked him whether they’d decided if Tria would be going to Mohawk High.
    “She would be if it was up to me,” he said in a way that suggested it wasn’t up to him and that a lot of other things weren’t up to him either. “Call her sometime,” he suggested.
    I did. That very afternoon. We didn’t have a phone, so I had to do it from the Mohawk Grill. Mrs. Ward answered on the first ring, and when I identified myself she did not seem surprised. “She’s gone, you see,” Tria’s mother informed me. “School starts early in Connecticut. In August, you see.”
    “Get fuckin’ lucky, you jitbag!” Wussy bellowed from a few feet away, where he and my father were playing gin on the Formica counter.
    For some reason, I was unable to hang up the phone. I talked and I refused to stop talking. I mentioned having run into Mrs. Ward’s husband at the country club, intimated that our paths crossed there frequently, told her that he himself had suggested that I call. I asked after her own health and told her I was glad the Lincoln was all right now. I believe I even inquired after Mrs. Petrie, the cook, and asked to be remembered to her. All this Isaid, my back to the counter and the card players, my hand partially cupped over the mouthpiece. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m not sure I believed that Tria was gone. Wouldn’t her own father have known? But maybe he did. Maybe that was why he’d urged me to call, like telling someone to call you on Monday when you know you’ll be out of town. I think what I wanted from Mrs. Ward was for her to consider me worthy. Hadn’t I once been thought worthy? Hadn’t she referred to me as their savior? Was it possible that I had slipped so far, so suddenly, in her estimation? Would I ever get another invitation to join them for something cool?
    “There!” Wussy said. “Gin, you bastard.”
    “It must be Dummy Day,” I heard my father say.

24
    I have heard expressed more than once a theory that claims a direct relationship between skill at pocket billiards and a corresponding lack of skill in matters sexual. I lean toward the theory, especially if you happen to be talking about adolescents. In Mohawk, all the best pool shooters had reputations as ladies’ men, but I could never see where these reputations were earned or deserved. There was the general sense that guys who hung around the pool hall were men of the world, and stories of conquest travel even better over green felt than calm water. But I never knew back then, nor do I know now, a real stud with a pool cue who could carry on a normal conversation with a woman.
    I’m not talking about the sort of player who shoots well enough not to embarrass himself, who can make the occasional bank shot and still leave himself in position for the eight. I mean the guys who can do real magic, the ones who can’t find a game without leaving town and who leave town, often as not, in a hurry, their underwear still in a drawer at the Y.M.C.A., custom pool cue inits case tucked neatly under one arm. And I’m talking about that lower echelon of players who aspire to such an existence.
    The ignorance of such men concerning women is peculiar, many of them having participated greedily in numerous obscenities, and feeling no compunction about dropping their trousers in the dark room above the pool hall for some toothless old woman hired off the street at a flat hourly rate who has no idea how long the line outside in the hallway is growing. Such men are sometimes adept at slipping quietly up the back stairs to a dingy third-floor flat where graveyard husbands dwell with bored young wives. But this is the extent of their experience.
    I called Tria Ward just that once from the Mohawk Grill, and then I took up pool, a magic, hypnotic sport, a Freudian playground of balls, stiff rods, a variety of holes to approach from a variety of angles, all promissory, all destined to be filled, eventually, regardless of the shooters’ skill. Don’t take my word for it. Watch a foursome of thirteen-year-olds around a pool table in somebody’s basement. See how long it takes one of them to see the cue as a makeshift prick, placed proudly between the legs and waved around to the detriment of lamps and wall hangings. No thirteen-year-old sharpie is ever content to just sink a shot, he’s got to ram it into the pocket manfully. He’d rather miss altogether, sending the ball skittering along the