Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  He had been twenty then, a penniless art student, and there had been some dreadful times, of which he never spoke, before he established himself in New York. And he never disclosed whether or not he had left any family behind him.

  Although he was proud of being Hungarian (a civilized people always caught in the wrong century was his way of describing his compatriots) he was not sentimental about it. “Middle Europa,” he said, “is like those coral atolls in the Pacific. The tide comes in—you don’t see it. The tide goes out—it is there. The best that you can say for it is that it is peril to navigation. When I drink Tokay wine and I am little drunk I think there is after-taste of blood and sea water.”

  With his high brow and receding sparse black hair, bland, archaic smile and round, comfortable middle-aged paunch, he looked, Damon had once told him, like a Buddha, contemplating mischief.

  He spoke with a soft, peculiar accent, his dark Magyar face lit by deep, mocking eyes, his lips, with an extra little upturned curl like an ornamental bow which was meant to be hung on a wall but not for killing, making it seem that nothing he said was to be taken seriously. However, he was a dedicated and gifted artist and aside from his paintings, which had been exhibited in galleries all over the country, had done the scenery for many Broadway plays. He painted slowly and painstakingly and turned down commissions for plays by the dozen because they did not please him, so he could not afford to live like a rich man but made a jest of his poverty as compared to the affluence of his more accommodating colleagues.

  His wife, Ebba, a large, lanky, sweet woman with a frontierswoman’s worn face, came from Swedish stock in Minnesota and was a theatrical costume designer. Between them, aside from forming a devoted and socially most rewarding couple, they combined to make an extremely useful working team.

  Damon had no idea what Gregor was celebrating, but a few hours of noise and conversation in their big loft near the Hudson River which the Khodars had converted into a studio in which they could both work and live would certainly be better than brooding through the long Sunday afternoon by himself.

  Just in case Sheila arrived ahead of schedule he left a note saying that he was at Gregor’s and for her to call. Sheila liked the couple and had even for once sat still enough for Gregor to paint her portrait the previous summer when the Khodars had visited them in Connecticut. Gregor had not been satisfied with his work and kept it on an easel in his studio so that he could keep dabbing at it from time to time. “The problem, Sheila,” he had told her, “is that you are noble, face, figure, character, everything, and they don’t make paints anymore in the modern age to express nobility. At least not in human beings. People just don’t look noble anymore. Only certain dogs, Newfoundlands, golden retrievers, Irish setters. Give me time, give me time. I must go back to the fifteenth century. It is not a short subway ride.”

  Gregor greeted Damon with a hug and Ebba with a shy kiss on the cheek. Gregor, who had his own ideas about how an artist should dress, was wearing a checked flannel shirt with a large bright orange wool necktie and baggy corduroy pants. He had on a thick chocolate brown tweed jacket, which he wore in even the hottest weather. It was as though at one time in his life he had been so chilled that he would never be warm enough again.

  Unlike other artists’ studios there were no examples of Gregor’s work on exhibition. Sheila’s portrait on the easel was covered with a cloth and all his other canvases were stacked faces to the wall. “I am afraid,” Gregor had explained, “to look at what I have already done when I am doing something else. If I am tired or in rough passage, there would be great temptation to take easy way out—plagiarize myself. When I am drunk, late at night, all work done for the day, I look at them. I laugh or I cry, then I hide them again.”

  Damon was relieved to see that it was not a large party, just a Mr. and Mrs. James Franklin, whom he had met several times before with Gregor. They were owners of a gallery they ran together on Madison Avenue. Both the Franklins were wearing No Nuke buttons and Damon remembered reading that there had been a demonstration that day against nuclear weapons.

  There was also a pleasant, handsome lady by the name of Bettina Lacey of about sixty who had a divorced husband in her past and ran an antique store. They were all drinking wine, as Gregor had promised, and there were slim slices of hard Hungarian sausage arranged on a large platter, garnished with radishes.

  After the greetings, and they had seated themselves, European fashion, around a large, scrubbed wood circular table, Damon asked, “What’s this about a celebration?”

  “In good time, my friend,” Gregor said. “First you drink.” He poured some wine into a glass for Damon. Damon saw the label. It was Tokay. When he sipped it he tasted neither blood nor sea water.

  “Next,” Gregor said, “Bettina must tell her story. Celebration after that. Bettina …” He made a sweeping gesture, spilling a little of his wine, in the direction of the lady who ran the antique store.

  “Gregor,” Mrs. Lacey protested, “you’ve all just heard it.”

  “Not Roger,” Gregor said. “I want to see what he makes out of it. He is a hard-headed and honest man and I value his opinion on anything I do not understand myself. Commence.”

  “Well,” the woman said, not completely reluctant, “it’s about my daughter. I think I told you, she’s studying in Rome …”

  “Yes,” Damon said.

  “Aside from that, she tries to keep an eye out for any antiques—furniture, old silver, stuff like that that might turn up in Italy that I might be interested in. Last Sunday there was a great antique fair just outside Rome and she told me that she would be going and would write me about what she saw and what was available. I just got a letter from her two days ago explaining why she didn’t go, even though she’d hired a car to drive out to it.” The lady sipped at her wine, as though the story she had to tell was a painful one and she had to reinforce herself to tell it. “When she awoke Sunday morning, even before she got out of bed, she wrote, she had a feeling that she’d never had before—terrible apprehension, fear. In a vacuum, she said, without reason. She found she could hardly get herself together enough to make her breakfast and at the thought that she was going to have to drive a car out of the city, she broke into tears. She was all alone and she felt foolish, but she couldn’t stop crying. And she’s not a girl who cries easily. Even when she was an infant. She was shaking and it took her over an hour to get dressed. The feeling didn’t leave her all that morning, in fact not all day, and she never even picked up the car. She just sat in the sun in the Borghese Gardens, not looking or speaking to anyone until it got dark and then went back to her place and got into bed and fell dead asleep and didn’t wake up until nine o’clock the next morning.” Mrs. Lacey sighed, her face marked by sorrow, as though she felt guilty of not having been able to comfort her daughter on a day like that. She tried to smile and went on. “Whatever it was that she’d been suffering from the day before had passed and she felt fine and rested and went down to get the morning newspaper on the way to the library where she was working. Then she saw the headlines. There had been a dreadful fire in the old wooden building where the fair was being held and all the doors had been locked and thirty people died.” She exhaled a long breath as though the telling of the story had exhausted her.

  There was silence in the room for several moments.

  “Do you believe in precognition, Mr. Damon?” Franklin asked. He was a proper, businesslike man, who dealt in known quantities. From his tone Damon could tell he did not wish to make too much of the story of the daughter.

  “Well,” Damon said, shaken more than he wished to show by the woman’s recital, “of course Jung and then Arthur Koestler …”

  “Still, they never proved anything,” Franklin said. “How about you, Gregor?”

  “I believe in anything that can’t be proven,” Gregor said. “I think we all need another drink.”

  As he went into the kitchen to get another cold bottle of wine, Mrs. Lacey sa
id, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to spoil Gregor’s party. Naturally, whatever it was, I’ll raise my thanks to God for it the rest of my days.”

  There was a small uncomfortable silence after she had spoken, the holiday mood broken for a moment. “What’s this about a celebration?” Damon asked, as much to keep himself from speculating about the troubling meaning of Mrs. Lacey’s daughter’s behavior as to lighten the level of conversation.

  “We’ve got joint foundation grant,” Gregor said, “Ebba and me. For year in Europe. Generous. To refresh our talents at fountain of culture.” He grinned. “Museums, opera, churches, rich dinners, French wines. It is better than food stamps. America is bountiful place. Oil companies, Congress, the new Medicis. Except no strings attached. I do not have to paint pictures of oil derricks or portraits of corporation presidents or their wives. And Ebba does not have to design costumes for debutante daughters. I assure you, we will be good capitalists, we will not give them money’s worth. We leave in a week. What’s matter, Roger, you don’t look happy.”

  “Of course I’m happy,” Damon said. “For you. But I hoped you’d look at a script I’m representing. The play’s due to be put on in the fall and I’d hoped you might be interested.”

  “Play is one set, two characters, am I right?” Gregor asked.

  Damon laughed. “Three,” he said.

  Gregor nodded. “Shakespeare had maybe thirty, forty characters, twenty different scenes.”

  “Shakespeare didn’t have to deal with the Shuberts, the banks, the unions.”

  Gregor nodded again. “Poor Shakespeare. Denied valuable experience. Showed in his work, didn’t it? Roger, my dear friends, the theatre in New York has shrunk to size dehydrated walnut. Sidewalk tie salesman. Get yourself a carpenter or interior decorator. Describe to me the set when play opens. I’ll be at La Scala watching The Magic Flute. Bedrooms, streets, cast of hundred, statues, hell-fire. When you find play with trains pulling into stations, cathedrals, palaces, forests, armies marching, mob scenes, two hundred costumes, all different, call us. America, richest country in world, one-set plays, psychiatrist’s couch, doctor there and patient. Act One, I am in trouble, Doctor. Act Two, I am still in trouble, Doctor. Finish.”

  Damon laughed. “You’re a little hard on your contemporaries, Gregor,” he said. “There’re still good plays.”

  “Narrow, narrow,” Gregor said morosely.

  “I’ll find a musical for you.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Work year, two year, thousand sketches, hysteria, cost enough to feed all Cambodia for six months, close in one night. Après moi, le deluge. The guillotine next week. I am not man who can stand waste. I never throw anything away, not anything, not a piece of string, not a tube of paint that has one more dot of color in it.”

  “As usual, Gregor,” Damon said good-naturedly, “there’s no arguing with you.”

  Gregor beamed. “If only everybody was as wise as you, my friend. I will send you postcard from Florence. Meanwhile, if you can find artist who want nice big studio cheap for one year, send him to me. But he must be worse painter than me. I won’t enjoy Europe if I know man is using my place to produce masterpieces. But not one of those people my friend Jim Franklin shows in gallery—two lines on canvas eighty by eighty, background sprayed on acrylic. I can stand mediocrity here, but not desecration.” He glowered at Franklin.

  “Come now,” Franklin said, not offended. “I showed you, too.”

  “How many canvases sold?”

  “One.”

  “Hah!” Gregor snorted. “You have made them worship geometry. Roundness, passion, delight, admiration for the human face and figure—kaput. I am stray dog in your gallery.” This was obviously a sore point with Gregor and the good humor had gone out of his voice.

  “Gregor, please,” Ebba said. “Jim isn’t responsible for the last fifty years of modern art all by himself.”

  “He compounds felony,” Gregor said darkly. “Fifteen shows a year. Look at them with their buttons.”

  Franklin touched the button on his lapel self-consciously. “What’s wrong with being against nuclear war?” he asked defensively.

  “I do not complain your being against nuclear war,” Gregor said loudly. “But I’m against buttons. What do they announce? I am in a strict category, defined by somebody else, I listen, I do as I am told, the button says. I make myself fit, even if it means cutting out one-half of brain, that’s what they announce.” He was in full flight now, not joking anymore. “Marching down the avenues of America.”

  “I invite you to march with us the next time there’s a demonstration. See for yourself,” Franklin said, still calm, although Damon could see he was annoyed by the painter’s attack.

  “When you get equal number Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, East Germans, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Cubans to march with same buttons,” Gregor said, almost out of breath by the effort of getting out the list of names, “I march with you. Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, they see pictures in papers of Americans, British, Frenchmen marching and they roar with laughter and send another hundred thousand troops to Afghanistan and they pick out best houses in America, Park Avenue, the Hamptons, Beverly Hills, on secret map, where the commissars will live when they get here.”

  “Gregor,” Ebba said sharply, “stop being so Hungarian. This isn’t Budapest.”

  “Nobody ever stops being Hungarian,” Gregor said. “And certainly not after seeing the Russian tanks on boulevards.”

  “So what?” Franklin said, nettled. “Do we start dropping bombs immediately?”

  Gregor put his hand up to his head, scowled thoughtfully. “I need drink before answer. Serious question.” He poured himself a full glass of wine, took a long swallow, put down his glass. “I am against nuclear war we are going to have, no matter who marches. I am resigned. One way or another, human race can’t wait for it to happen. I see one way out. Certain type nuclear weapon. Some time ago people make big fuss about it. Why, I don’t know. Neutron bomb. Thirty-five thousand, forty thousand nuclear warheads, end the world in thirty seconds, men, women, children, birds in the air, fish in the sea, no cities left, nothing left. But neutron bomb invented by poet, philosopher, art-lover. Sure, he say, after he finishes calculations, world going to be blown up. But neutron bomb leaves something. Sure, kills all people, but leaves buildings standing, churches, museums, libraries, still-lifes, statues, books, leave something for two or three hundred people left over, Indians on the Amazon, Eskimos on North Pole, to start over again. Big stink. Everybody want total—we go, buildings go too, books, paintings go too. You start my type parade I march with you.”

  “Gregor,” Mrs. Franklin said, speaking for the first time, “you have no children, you can talk like that.”

  “True,” Gregor said in a low voice, “we have no children, Ebba and me. Not our fault. God’s fault.” He leaned over to Ebba, who always sat as close to him as she could and kissed her cheek.

  Damon stood up. The conversation had disturbed him more than he wanted to show. He couldn’t help but wonder if in the final explosion he could be sure that Mr. Zalovsky were certain to be extinguished, he would not cheer it on. “I’d better be getting back. Sheila should be getting in any time now and she doesn’t like to come into an empty house.”

  As he walked toward home he was not sure that it had been a good idea to go over to Gregor’s that afternoon. For one thing he envied the year in Europe that lay ahead of the Khodars. How delicious it would be, he thought, just to be able to buy tickets for himself and Sheila and fly tomorrow to Paris or Rome leaving all responsibilities, contracts, business, threats, behind them, knowing that for twelve carefree months he could forget them all. The advantage of being an artist.

  And the atmosphere in the studio had not been conducive to gaiety. Bettina Lacey’s report about her daughter’s experience was disturbing, to say the least, with its shadow of hideous death, even though the daughter had been spared. And Gregor’s dark humor about the neutron
bomb, if it could be called humor, had aroused fears that, like all the men and women of his time, Damon tried to suppress as much as he could.

  He’d have been better off, Damon thought, if he had not come home after lunch and found Gregor’s note, but had just gone into a bar, had a couple of drinks and watched a baseball game on television.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  WHEN SHEILA HADN’T GOTTEN home by seven o’clock, he began to worry. She had said she’d be back by six and she was admirably prompt in her habits. He regretted that he hadn’t phoned her in the morning at her mother’s house and told her to get back before sunset, that he didn’t want her walking alone in the twilight the five blocks from the garage where she was to leave the car a friend of hers had loaned her for the trip. He could have said that there had been a wave of muggings in the Village the last few days, which wouldn’t have been that far from the truth anyway.

  By eight o’clock he was almost ready to call the police and was pacing the floor nervously when he heard the key in the lock. He hurried to the door and embraced her, holding her tight against him as she entered the small foyer. Usually their greeting was a brief peck on the cheek and she stepped back from his arms in surprise. “My,” she said, “what’s that all about?”

  “You’re late.” He picked up her small bag. “That’s all.”

  “In that case,” she said, smiling, “I’ll be late more often.”

  Her whole face changed when she smiled and even after the long years of marriage, he adored it. In repose her face was grave and dark, and made her look like the sober photographs of peasant women you were likely to see in picture books about Italy. He had once told her her smile brought her back to America. “How was it in Vermont?” he asked.