Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

The man Sloane had called Fabian smiled gently. He had a charming smile, almost womanish in sweetness, with laugh wrinkles permanently around his liquid dark eyes. “I must admit,” he said, “I’m having a modest little run of luck.” He had a soft, husky voice and an accent that was a little strange. I couldn’t tell from the way he spoke where he came from.

  “Modest!” Sloane said. He wasn’t a pleasant loser.

  “I’m going to bed,” Flora said. “I’m skiing in the morning.”

  “I’ll be right up,” Sloane said. He was shuffling the cards as though he was preparing to use them as weapons. …

  I escorted Flora to her door. “Isn’t it comfy,” she said, “we’re just side by side?” She kissed my cheek good night, giggled, and said, “Night-night,” and went in.

  I wasn’t sleepy and I sat up and read. I heard footsteps about a half hour later and the door to the Sloane’s room open and shut. There were some murmurs through the wall that I couldn’t make out and after a while silence.

  I gave the couple another fifteen minutes to fall asleep then opened the door of my room silently. All along the corridor, pairs of shoes were placed in front of bedroom doors, womens’ and mens’ moccasins, wing tips, patent leathers, ski boots, in eternal sexual order. Two by two, entries to the Ark. But in front of the Sloanes’ door, there were only the dainty leather boots Flora Sloane had worn on the train. For whatever reason, her husband had not put out the brown shoes with the gum soles, possibly size ten, to be shined. I closed my door without a sound, to ponder the meaning of this.

  10

  “I’M WORRIED ABOUT MY husband,” Flora Sloane said to me. We were having a drink before lunch, seated in the sunshine on the terrace of the Corveglia Club, among the maritime Greeks, the Milanese industrialists, the people who were photographed beside pools at Acapulco, and the ladies of various nationalities who preyed on them all. Flora Sloane, who obviously had not been what has in other times been called “gently reared” and who lapsed, when excited, into a language and an accent you might expect to hear from a waitress in a diner in New Jersey patronized almost exclusively by truck drivers, was completely at home here and accepted all attention or deference with regal aplomb. I, on the other hand, felt like a man who had just been dropped behind enemy lines.

  The temporary membership had cost me a hundred and twenty francs for two weeks, but where the Sloanes went I had to follow. Not that Sloane himself was very much in evidence. In the mornings, according to Flora, he was on the phone back to his office in New York for hours on end and in the afternoon and evening he played bridge.

  “He won’t even have a tan when we get back to Greenwich,” she complained. “People won’t believe he’s ever seen an Alp.”

  Meanwhile, I had the honor of leading Flora Sloane down the hill and buying her lunch. She was a fair skier, but one of those women who squealed when she came to a steep bit and constantly complained of her boots. I spent quite a bit of time kneeling in the snow, loosening the hooks, then tightening them again after three turns. I had refused to be seen in the red pants and the lemon yellow parka I had found in the suitcase and had bought myself a sensible navy blue outfit. At great expense.

  At night, there was the inevitable sweaty dancing and the champagne. Madame Sloane was becoming progressively more amorous, too, and had a nasty habit of sticking her tongue in my ear while we danced. I wanted to get into the Sloanes’ room and search it, but not that way. There was a choice of reasons for my coolness, not the least of which was the total lack of all response to any sexual stimulation, dating from the moment I had realized that my seventy thousand dollars had disappeared. Money was power. That I knew. It had not occurred to me that its absence involved impotence. Any attempt at performance on my part, I was sure, would be grotesquely inadequate. Flora Sloane’s flirtatiousness was trying enough. Her derision would be catastrophic. I foresaw years of psychiatry ahead of me.

  My efforts at detective work had been pathetically useless. I had knocked at the Sloanes’ door several times on one pretext or another in the hope of being invited in so that I at least could take a quick, surreptitious look around their room, but whether it was the wife or the husband who responded, all conversations took place on the threshold, the door just barely ajar.

  I had opened my door every night when the hotel slept, but the brown shoes had never been in the corridor. I had begun to feel that I had been the victim of a hallucination in the train compartment—that Sloane had never worn brown shoes with gum soles and never had a red wool tie around his neck. I had brought up the subject of the confusion of luggage at airports these days, but the Sloanes had shown no interest. I would stay the week, I had decided, on the off chance that something would happen, and then I would leave. I had no idea of where I would go next. Behind the Iron Curtain, perhaps. Or Katmandu. Drusack haunted me.

  “Those miserable bridge games.” Flora Sloane sighed over her Bloody Mary. “He’s losing a fortune. They play for five cents a point. Everybody knows Fabian’s practically a professional. He comes here for two months each winter and he walks away rich. I try to tell Bill that he’s just not as good a bridge player as Fabian, but he’s such a stubborn man he refuses to believe that anybody is better than him at anything. Then when he loses he gets furious at me. He’s the worst loser in the world. You wouldn’t believe some of the things he says to me. When he comes up to the room after one of those awful games, it’s nightmare time. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since I came up here. I have to drive myself to put on my ski boots in the morning. By the time I leave here, I’ll be a worn-out old hag.”

  “Oh, come now, Flora.” I made the awaited objection. “You couldn’t look like a hag if you tried. You look blooming.” This was true. At all hours of the day and night, in no matter what clothes, she looked like an overblown peony.

  “Appearances are deceiving,” she said darkly. “I’m not as strong as I look. I was very delicate as a child. Frankly, honey, if I didn’t know you were waiting for me downstairs every morning, I think I’d just stay in bed all day.”

  “Poor girl,” I said sympathetically. The thought of Flora staying in bed was delicious, but not for the reason that Flora herself might have believed. With her off the hill I could give back my rented skis and boots and never have to go up the mountain again that winter. Even with the welcome discovery that my eyes served me adequately when skiing, after Vermont the sport had no joys for me.

  “There’s a gleam of hope,” Flora said. She looked at me obliquely in that sidelong, automatically provocative way I had learned to hate. “Something has come up and Bill may have to go back to New York next week. Then we could spend all the time together.” The all had a thunderous emphasis that made me look around uneasily to see if anyone on the terrace happened to be listening to us. “Wouldn’t that be just beautiful?”

  “B … bu … beautiful,” I said. It was the first time I had stuttered since I left the St. Augustine. “Let’s … let’s go in for lun … lunch.”

  That afternoon she presented me with a watch. It was a great, thick model, guaranteed for accuracy under three hundred feet of water or when dropped from the roofs of tall buildings. It had a stopwatch attachment and all sorts of dials. It did everything but play the Swiss national anthem. “You shouldn’t have,” I said faintly.

  “I want you to think of this marvelous week whenever you look at the time,” she said. “Don’t I get just a little kiss for it?”

  We were in a stubli in the middle of town where we had stopped on the way to the hotel after the afternoon’s skiing. I liked it because there wasn’t a bottle of champagne in the house. The place smelled of melted cheese and wet wool from the other skiers who crowded the room, drinking beer. I pecked at her cheek.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked. “The watch, I mean.”

  “I love it,” I said. “Hon … honestly. It’s just so extravagant.”

  “Not really, honey,” she said. “If you hadn’t come al
ong and just pampered me, I’d have had to hire a ski teacher and you know what ski teachers cost in a place like this. And you have to buy them lunch besides. And the way they eat! I think they just dine on potatoes all the rest of the year and stock up in the winters.” She was a flighty woman, but she had a strong feeling for economics. “Here,” she said, “let me put it on you.” She slipped it on my wrist and clipped on the heavy silver band. “Isn’t it just absolutely male?”

  “I suppose you could describe it like that,” I said. When I finally rid myself of the Sloanes, man and wife, I would take it back to the jeweler’s and sell it back. It must have cost at least three hundred dollars.

  “Just don’t tell Bill about it,” she said. “It’s a little secret between you and me. A little darling secret. You’ll remember, won’t you, honey?”

  “I’ll remember.” That was one promise I definitely would keep.

  The crisis arrived the next morning. When she came down into the hall where I was waiting for her as usual at ten o’clock, she wasn’t in ski clothes. “I’m afraid I can’t ski with you this morning, honey,” she said. “Bill has to go to Zurich today and I’m taking him to the train. The poor man. With all this beautiful snow and gorgeous weather and all.” She giggled. “And he has to stay overnight, too. Isn’t it just too bad?”

  “Awful,” I said.

  “I hope you won’t be lonesome, skiing by yourself,” she said.

  “Well, if it can’t be helped, it can’t be helped,” I said manfully.

  “Actually,” she said, “I don’t feel much like skiing today either. I have an idea. Why don’t you go up now and get your exercise and come down by one o’clock and we’ll have a cosy little lunch somewhere? Bill’s train leaves at twenty to one. We can have a perfectly dreamy afternoon together …”

  “That’s a great idea,” I said.

  “We’ll start with a scrumptious cold bottle of champagne in the bar,” she said, “and then we’ll just see how things work out. Does that sound attractive to you?”

  “Scrumptious.”

  She gave me one of her significant smiles and went back upstairs to her husband. I went out into the cold morning air feeling a frown beginning to freeze on my face. I had no intention of skiing. If I never saw a pair of skis again it would be all the same to me. I regretted ever having listened to Wales about the ski club plane, which was the beginning of the chain of events that was leading Mrs. Sloane inexorably into my bed. Still, I had to admit to myself, if I had crossed the ocean on a regular flight and my bag had been stolen, I’d have had no notion at all of where I might look for it. And through the Sloanes I had met quite a few of the other passengers on the plane and had been able to try my lost luggage gambit on them. True, it had yielded nothing so far, but one could always hope that on the next hill or in the next Alpine bar, a face would leap out, an involuntary gasp or heedless word would put me on the track of my fortune.

  I thought of leaving St. Moritz on the same train with Sloane, but when we got to Zurich what could I do? I couldn’t trail him around the city spying on him.

  I contemplated the perfectly dreamy afternoon ahead of me, starting with a scrumptious bottle of champagne (on my bill) and groaned. A young man, swinging ahead of me down the street on crutches, his leg in a cast, heard me and turned and stared curiously at me. Everyone to his own brand of trouble.

  I turned and looked into a shop window. My reflection stared back at me. A youngish-looking man in expensive ski clothes, on holiday in one of the most glamorous resorts in the world. You could have taken my picture for an advertisement for a chic travel magazine. Money no object. The vacation of your dreams.

  Then I grinned at myself in the window. An idea had come to me. I started down the street, after the man on crutches. I was limping a little. By the time I passed him I was limping noticeably. He looked at me sympathetically. “You, too?” he said.

  “Just a sprain,” I said.

  By the time I reached the small private hospital, conveniently located in the center of town, I was giving a fair imitation of a skier who had fallen down half the mountain.

  Two hours later I came out of the hospital. I was equipped with crutches and my left leg was in a cast above the knee. I sat in a restaurant for the rest of the morning, drinking black coffee and eating croissants, happily reading the Herald Tribune of the day before.

  The young doctor at the hospital had been skeptical when I told him I was sure I had broken my leg—“A hairline fracture,” I told him. “I’ve done it twice before.” He was even more skeptical when he looked at the X rays, but when I insisted he shrugged and said, “Well, it’s your leg.”

  Switzerland was one country where you could get any kind of medical attention you paid for, necessary or not. I had heard of a man who had a slight fungous growth on his thumb and had become obsessed with the idea that it was cancer. Doctors in the United States, England, France, Spain, and Norway had assured him it was only a slight fungous infection that would go away eventually and had prescribed salves. In Switzerland, for a price, he had finally managed to have it amputated. He now lived happily in San Francisco, thumbless.

  At one o’clock I took a taxi back to the Palace. I accepted the sympathy of the men at the desk with a wan smile, and I fixed a look of stoic suffering on my face as I clumped into the bar.

  Flora Sloane was seated in a corner near the window, with the unopened bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice on the table in front of her. She was dressed in skintight green slacks and a sweater that made the most of her generous, and I must admit, well-shaped bosom. Her leopard coat was on a chair beside her, and the aroma of her perfume made the bar smell like a florist’s shop full of exotic tropical plants.

  She gasped when she saw me stagger in, using the crutches clumsily. “Oh, shit,” she said.

  “It’s nothing,” I said bravely. “Just a hairline fracture. I’ll be out of the cast in six weeks. At least that’s what the doctor says.” I collapsed on a chair with a sound that sensitive ears would have distinguished as a smothered groan, and put the cast up on the chair across from me.

  “How in hell did you do it?” she asked crossly.

  “My skis didn’t open.” That much was true. I hadn’t touched them that day. “I crossed my skis and they didn’t open.”

  “That’s damned peculiar,” she said. “You haven’t fallen once since you’ve been here.”

  “I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” I said. “I guess I was thinking about this afternoon and …”

  Her expression softened. “You poor dear,” she said. “Well, anyway, we can have our champagne.” She started to signal the barman.

  “I’m not allowed to drink,” I said. “The doctor was most specific. It interferes with the healing process.”

  “Everybody else I know who’s broken bones went right on drinking,” she said. She was not a woman who liked to be deprived of her champagne.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I have brittle bones, the doctor said.” I grimaced in pain.

  She touched my hand lightly. “It hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “A little,” I admitted. “The morphine’s beginning to wear off.”

  “Still,” she said, “we can at least have lunch. …”

  “I hate to have to disappoint you, Flora,” I said, “but I’m a bit woozy. Actually, I feel like throwing up. The doctor said I’d better stay in bed today, with my leg up on some pillows. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Well, all I can say is you sure picked the wrong day to crash.” She brushed at her cashmere bosom. “And I got all dressed up for you.”

  “Accidents happen when they’re fated to happen,” I said philosophically. “And you do look beautiful.” I heaved myself to my feet. Or rather my foot. “I think I’d better go upstairs now.”

  “I’ll come with you and make you comfy.” She started to rise.

  I waved her back. “If you don’t mind, for the moment I’d rather be alone. That’s the way I’ve alwa
ys been when something is wrong with me. Ever since I was a kid.” I didn’t want to be lying helpless on a bed with Flora Sloane loose in the room. “Drink the champagne for both of us, dear. Please put this bottle on my bill,” I called to the barman.

  “Can I come and see you later?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m going to try to sleep. I’ll call you later if I wake up. Just don’t worry about me, dear.”

  I left her there, the brightest and fullest flower in the garden, splendid and pouting in her tight green slacks and snug sweater, as I maneuvered out of the bar.

  Just as the last light of the afternoon sun was dying in a pink glow on the farthest peaks I could see from my window, the door of my room opened softly. I was lying in bed merely staring brainlessly but comfortably at the ceiling. I had had lunch sent up and had eaten heartily. Luckily, the waiter had been in to take away the tray, because it was Flora Sloane who poked her head around the door.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you needed anything.” She came into the room. I could barely see her in the dusk, but I could smell her. “How are you, honey?”

  “Alive,” I said. “How did you get in here?” Being an invalid excused me from gallantry.

  “The floor maid let me in. I explained.” She came over to the side of my bed and touched my forehead in a Florence Nightingale gesture. “You have no fever,” she said.

  “The doctor says I can expect it at night,” I said.

  “Did you have a good afternoon?” she asked, seating herself on the edge of the bed.

  “I’ve had better.” This was not true—at least for the time I had been at St. Moritz.

  Suddenly, she swooped down and kissed me. Her tongue, as ever, was active. I twisted, so as to be able to breathe, and my bad leg (as I now considered it) dropped off the edge of the bed. I groaned realistically. Flora sat up, flushed and breathing hard. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s just … well, you know … sudden movements.”