Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  It was not the sort of book that either he or his old partner Gray had ever bothered with before. For the most part they had devoted themselves to discovering young writers and nursing them along to good reviews and modest sales, often keeping the writers alive out of their own pockets while they were finishing their books or plays. Neither of them had ever made a great deal of money, and a disappointing percentage of the young men and women they had helped had turned out to be one-book writers or had taken to dope or drink or had disappeared in Hollywood.

  He had had small hope for Mrs. Dolger’s book and was almost relieved when a half-dozen houses had turned down the novel in quick succession. He had been ready to call the lady in Roslyn and tell her, with polite regret, that the book was unsaleable when a small publishing house took it, paying an infinitesimal advance for a small first printing. It had risen quickly to the top of the bestseller list, had sold to the paperbacks for a million dollars and had been bought for Hollywood.

  His commissions were, for him, astronomical. For the first time, his name had been mentioned in the newspapers and his office was being flooded with manuscripts by well-known and highly paid writers who were dissatisfied with their current agents for one reason or another and most of whom he had never even met in his long career in the business.

  “The roll of the dice,” Oliver had said complacently. “Finally we had to come up with a seven.” He had demanded that his salary be doubled and that his name be put on the door as a partner. Damon was pleased to be able to accede to both requests, had changed the name of the firm to Gray, Damon and Gabrielsen and had merely asked Oliver to attend fewer parties. But he had firmly refused to move out of what Oliver described as their sorry two-room excuse for an office to more splendid and what Oliver considered in their new affluence, would be more appropriate quarters. “Face it, Roger,” Oliver had said, “when anybody walks in here, they think we’ve furnished this place as a set for Bleak House and they look to see if we’re still using quill pens.”

  “Oliver,” Damon had said, “let me explain myself, although by now you’ve been with me for so long I shouldn’t have to. I’ve put in almost my whole working life in what you call this sorry excuse for an office and I’ve been lucky here and loved coming to work here in the morning. I have no wish to become a tycoon and I’ve made a decent living, although perhaps not by what modern young people think are proper standards. I have no wish to look out over a sea of desks and know the people at them are working for me and demanding that I hire them, fire them, judge them and pay their social security and pension plans and God knows what else. The case of Threnody is a freak, lightning striking once. To tell the truth I hope nothing like it ever happens again. I cringe when I pass it in a book store window and my weekends have been ruined by seeing it on the list every Sunday in the Times. I have gotten infinitely more pleasure out of ten brilliant lines in a manuscript by an unknown young writer than I ever will out of the royalty statements on Threnody. As for you, my old friend, you are young and as in the custom these days, rapacious.” This was a bit unfair and Damon knew it, but he wanted to make his point. Oliver Gabrielsen was not as young as all that—he was approaching forty—and was as devoted to the service of decent writing as Damon himself and when he had asked for raises, he had done so almost apologetically, and Damon knew that if it weren’t for his wife’s salary Oliver would be living close to the poverty line. He also knew that Oliver had often received offers to work as an editor in publishing houses at much higher wages than he received from Damon and had turned them down because of what he considered the unbridled commercialism of the big houses which could afford what must have seemed like princely wages to him after the iron rations he received from Damon. But the unexpected tide of money that was rolling through the office seemed to have temporarily unhinged him and the percentage of the commissions which he now received as a partner had noticeably changed the fashion in which he dressed and the restaurants in which he lunched, and he had moved from a dingy apartment on the West Side to a small address in the East Sixties. Damon, as was to be expected, blamed Oliver’s wife, Doris, who had given up her job and now appeared from time to time in the office in a mink coat.

  “You may be too young, Oliver,” Damon continued, enjoying the opportunity of lecturing on a subject on which his old employer, Mr. Gray, had often expanded, “to know the comfort of modesty; the arrogance, even, of rejoicing in moderate aims and even more moderate worldly achievements, to know that the things that other men are pressuring themselves into the grave to reach are of no consequence to you. I have never had a sick day in my life and I’ve never had an ulcer or high blood pressure or visited a psychiatrist. The only time I’ve been in a hospital it was because I was hit by an automobile while crossing the street and was laid up with a bad leg.”

  “Knock wood,” Oliver had said. “Better knock wood.”

  Damon could see he was not taking the lecture graciously.

  “I’m not suggesting we rent the Taj Mahal, for Christ’s sake,” Oliver went on. “It wouldn’t kill us if we each had a room for ourselves and a decent place where we could put another secretary to help with all the damned mail. And with all the calls we’re getting these days it’s pretentious to have only one telephone line. Just last week a guy at Random House told me he dialed our number for two days before he could get through. The next time he wants to communicate with us he said he was going to use tom-toms. Putting in a switchboard wouldn’t mean that everybody thought you were surrendering your soul to the Philistines. And it wouldn’t be sinful luxury if we had windows that were washed once every six months. Here, if I want to know what the weather is outside I have to listen to the radio.”

  “When I’m gone,” Damon said, purposely sonorous, “you can hire a floor at Rockefeller Center and have the winner of the Miss America contest for your receptionist. But while I’m still here, we’ll conduct our business as usual.”

  Oliver sniffed. He was a diminutive blond man, almost an albino, and to make up for it he carried himself very erectly, with his shoulders militarily squared. Sniffing was uncharacteristic for him. “When you’re gone,” he said. “You won’t be gone for a thousand years.” They were good friends, as they had to be, working in their shirt-sleeves so close to each other day after day, and there was no ceremony between them.

  “As I’ve told you repeatedly,” Damon said, “I intend to retire as soon as possible and catch up on reading all the books I haven’t had time to read keeping this office going.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Oliver said. But he smiled as he said it.

  “I promise never even to visit you in your palatial new quarters,” Damon said. “I’ll be satisfied merely to collect the quarterly checks you’re bound by our contract to send me and trust that you haven’t found yourself a thieving accountant to doctor the books.”

  “I’ll cheat you out of your back teeth,” Oliver said. “I promise.”

  “So be it,” Damon said, patting him on the shoulder. “And now let’s leave it at that. As a concession to your sensibilities I’ll pay a man myself to wash the windows tomorrow.”

  They both laughed then went back to their work.

  Sitting in the cluttered living room, with the Sunday bells still ringing and the book review open before him to the bestseller list, he recalled the conversation with Oliver and Oliver’s words—“Money. Money is written all over this book.”

  Oliver had been right. Regrettably right.

  Damon also remembered what Zalovsky had said—“I read the papers like everybody else.” What Zalovsky didn’t know was that a good part of the commissions had gone to pay off long-standing debts and to make the necessary repairs on the small house on Long Island Sound in Old Lyme, Connecticut, that a doting and childless uncle of Sheila’s had left her in his will. They spent their summer vacations there and an occasional weekend, when they could manage it, trying to ignore its ramshackle condition. Now it would have a new roof, new p
lumbing and a new paint job. It would be ready for him when Damon found it was time to retire.

  A simple case of attempted blackmail or extortion, Damon thought, the price of a few lines in some newspaperman’s column on a slow day. Or was it as simple as that?

  Still, it was a clue. He dialed the number in Roslyn. “Genevieve,” he said when the lady herself answered the phone, “have you seen the Times this morning?”

  “Isn’t it marvelous?” Genevieve said. She had a small defensive voice, as though she was used to being contradicted by her husband and children on all occasions. “Week after week. It’s like a fairy tale.”

  More than you’ll ever know, sweetheart, Damon thought. But, he said, “You’ve touched the marrow of readers everywhere.” Before the sale to the paperbacks he would have blushed to hear himself utter the words. “I wanted to ask you—by any chance did you get a telephone call from a man called Zalovsky?”

  “Zalovsky, Zalovsky?” Genevieve sounded uncertain. “I don’t remember. So many people keep calling these days. Television, radio, interviews … My husband says he’s going to ask for an unlisted number …”

  Another unlisted number, Damon thought. Succeed and hide. The American Way.

  “Zalovsky …” Genevieve went on: “Why do you ask?”

  “I got a telephone call. About the book. He was quite vague. He said he might call again and I thought that perhaps he preferred dealing directly with you. As you know, there’s only Oliver and myself and the secretary in the office, and since you hit it so big we find it hard to keep up with all the requests … It’s not like in some of the big offices, with dozens of people and departments and all …”

  “I know. They all turned my book down before I came to you.” The voice was not defensive now, but bitter and cold. “And not with ordinary civility, either. You and Oliver were the first two true gentlemen I met since I wrote the book.”

  “We try to keep in mind the old maxim, which my former partner Mr. Gray liked to repeat—publishing is a gentleman’s business. Of course that was a long time ago and times have changed. Still, it’s nice to know that one’s manners are appreciated in some quarters.” He was always uncomfortable when talking to Genevieve Dolger. His speech sounded in his ears as though it had been starched and ironed. He was disturbed that he could not speak normally to this woman whom circumstance had thrown into his life. He was not a man who dissembled. It was his policy, of which he was proud, that he said exactly what he thought to his clients, whether in praise or admonition. If they bridled at his criticism or became angry or overly defensive, he would tell them frankly that they would be happier with another office. That was the only way he could work, he explained to them. Now this woman, who had enriched him, made him speak as though he had a mouth full of marshmallows.

  “Don’t think that I’ll ever forget your help or what I owe you,” Genevieve was saying, her voice quivering. “I’ll be grateful to you two all my life for what you’ve done for me.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Damon said, remembering all the authors who had at one time or another said much the same thing and then gone on, sometimes shamefacedly, sometimes in anger, to the large agencies which could introduce them to movie stars, send limousines to meet them at the airport, secure tickets at the last moment for Broadway hits that had been sold out for months, arrange television publicity campaigns throughout the country and business lunches in the best restaurants in town. “Be sure to let me know when you get your unlisted number.”

  “You’ll be the first one I’ll call, Roger,” she said, her voice, to Damon’s sorrow, filled with genuine emotion.

  “Oh,” he said, asking the question he knew she was waiting to be asked, “how’s the new book going?”

  Genevieve sighed, a soft, sad sound over the wire. “Oh, it’s just terrible,” she said, “I can’t seem to get really going. I write a page and reread it and I know it’s perfectly awful and I tear it up and then go bake a pie to keep from crying.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Damon said, much relieved by her news. “The beginnings’re always the hardest. And don’t press yourself. There’s no hurry, you know.”

  “You’ll have to learn to be patient with me,” she said.

  “I’m used to writers’ blocks,” Damon said, knowing that he ought to cross his fingers as he pretended to accept the woman as a practitioner of that austere and terrifying profession. “They come and go. Well, congratulations again and don’t forget—if you need me just call.”

  He hung up. If he was lucky, he thought, she would bake a hundred pies before she finished the new book, and he would have long since left the office and retired to the little house in Old Lyme on the shores of the Sound. At least, he thought, as he put down the telephone, Zalovsky hadn’t gotten to her. If he had, she’d certainly have remembered the name.

  He moved restlessly around the apartment. He had brought a long manuscript home with him to read during the weekend and picked it up and tried to read a few pages, but they made no sense to him and he tossed it aside. He went into the bedroom and carefully made the bed, something he hadn’t done since the day he was married. Genevieve Dolger with her pies, he with his bed. He looked at his watch. Sheila wouldn’t be home for another six hours. Sundays without her were pointless. He decided to go out and take a walk until it was time to eat lunch. But just as he was putting on his coat the phone rang. He let it ring six times without moving toward the instrument, staring at it, hoping that whoever it was would get tired of waiting and stop. But the phone rang a seventh time. He picked it up, expecting to hear the heavy, hoarse voice. But it was the woman whose manuscript he had brought home with him and which he couldn’t read for the moment.

  “I just wanted to know if you’d finished reading my book,” the woman said. Her voice was the best thing about her—deep and musical. He had had a brief affair with her two years before. Sheila had said, when she was informed of it by a friend, that the woman had flung herself at his head. Sheila’s phrases. For once the phrase had been accurate. After their second meeting the woman had said, “I must tell you. You have the sexiest face of any man I’ve ever met. When you come into a room it’s like a bull coming into the arena.” She had spent a year in Spain and she had read too much Hemingway and her speech was sprinkled with Iberian images. If she had used the word cojones he would not have touched either her or her manuscript. But she refrained and he had succumbed, even though he had never thought of himself in the terms in which she described him. Actually, he thought that when he came into a room he shambled. And he had never seen a bull with pale gray eyes like this. Look into the mirror and see an alien face.

  The woman was fairly pretty and fairly intelligent and not a bad writer and kept her body in trim by going to a gym class daily. He had been flattered that such a woman would go to such lengths to get him into her bed. At his age. Well, sixty something was not the edge of the grave. In one of her rare bitter moments, Sheila had said to him, “You squander yourself on women.” Marriage had not cured him of that particular weakness. The liaison had been agreeable, no more than that.

  “I like what I’ve read so far,” he said. He had an image of her lying naked on the bed, the breasts taut, the gym legs muscled. He nearly invited her to have lunch with him, then decided against it. Do not add to whatever testimony anyone is amassing against you. “I’ll try to finish it by tonight. I’ll call you,” he said.

  Then he went out and walked aimlessly around the streets of Greenwich Village. Nobody seemed to be following him. Usually, on Sundays, he and Sheila had late lunch at a small Italian restaurant which they both liked. Buon giorno, Signor, Signora, va bene? A gangster had been shot there several years before. Spaghetti with clam sauce. Cozy Sunday afternoons when they could unwind together and forget the stresses of the week behind them and the week ahead over a bottle of Chianti.

  The restaurant was crowded and he had to wait for a table and the owner had asked after the health of the missing si
gnora. The noisy people at the other tables made him feel lonelier than ever and the half-bottle of wine did not improve matters. As he ate, he wondered what it was like to be shot in a small Italian restaurant.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  WHEN HE GOT BACK after lunch there was a sheet of paper half-stuffed into the slot of his mailbox. He looked at it apprehensively, hesitated before he touched it, then pulled it out. The piece of paper had been torn from a sketch block and the message on it, scrawled in heavy black pencil, was from Gregor. “We were passing by,” the message read, “and rang your bell. We are rebuffed. Do you hide from us? Friends should be home on Sunday. We are celebrating. I will tell you about it when I see you. We wish to share our joy with our comrades. If you read this before midnight come to us. It will be a festa Hungarian style. There will be wine and women and hard sausage. At least one woman and one sausage. Avanti.”

  Damon smiled as he read the note, then, as he climbed the stairs to the apartment, looked at his watch. It was not yet three o’clock and Sheila wasn’t due home until six. He always enjoyed seeing Gregor Khodar and his hospitable and talented wife. Besides, Damon represented a playwright whose play was to go into rehearsal in September and he hoped Gregor could do the sets. Gregor, in his account of the process of his Americanization, had told him that he had started walking west when the Russians came into Budapest in 1956 and hadn’t stopped until he reached New York. “Whatever happened,” Gregor had once confided to Damon, “I knew it would be bad for human beings. So I asked myself question—am I, Gregor Khodar, human being? I examined pros and cons. I decided, yes, maybe not highest class human being, but still in category.”