Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  The man stopped and looked at him puzzledly, half-frightened by the greeting. He put his hands behind his back. “There must be a mistake, Sir,” the old man said. “My name is George.”

  Damon stepped back, blinked, shook his head to clear it. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost stammering. “You look so much like one of my best friends. I don’t know what I was thinking of. He’s dead, you know …” The man stared at him suspiciously, sniffed as though to detect prelunch martinis on Damon’s breath. “I’m not dead,” he said, offended. “As I hope you can see.”

  “Forgive me, Sir,” Damon said lamely. “I must have been daydreaming …”

  “At the very least,” the man said crisply. “And now if you’ll permit me …”

  “Of course.” Damon stepped aside to let the old man pass him. Then, when the man had gone, he shook his head violently again and, feeling the cold sweat break out all over his body, continued on toward his office, watching his every step and being meticulously careful when crossing a street to watch out for speeding cars. But when he came to the entrance to his building on Forty-third Street, he stopped, stared dully at the people going in and out and knew that he was not going to be able to enter and take the elevator and face Miss Walton and Oliver Gabrielsen at their desks and pretend that it was an ordinary afternoon and that they could depend upon him to go through an ordinary afternoon’s routine of work.

  Stopping dead men in the street. He shivered, thinking of it. Often, at this hour, he would have just had lunch with Mr. Gray at the Algonquin on the next block uptown and more often than not would move from the dining room to the bar, to which Mr. Gray was attached, by many years of quiet tippling, for an after-lunch brandy, Mr. Gray’s preferred drink.

  Almost automatically, Damon walked toward Sixth Avenue, now called Avenue of Americas (Oh, amigo, what is America?) and turned into Forty-fourth Street and went into the Algonquin bar, which he had patronized rarely since Mr. Gray’s death. He liked the bar and had not permitted himself to delve into the reasons why the death of his friend and partner had been the signal somehow to avoid it.

  The dead have their claims, he thought as he sat himself down at the small familiar bar; the places in which our conversations have taken place in the lull of an afternoon are reserved for them. The bar was empty except for himself and he didn’t recognize the barman. He ordered a Cognac, not his usual Scotch, remembering that Mr. Gray (strangely, after their long friendship, he thought of him as Mr. Gray instead of by his Christian name) had liked Bisquit Dubouchet. The fumes assailed his memory and for a moment Mr. Gray was a living presence at his side. The presence was not macabre, the memory not sorrowful, but warm and comforting.

  The last time he had seen Mr. Gray had been on the occasion of the Damons’ tenth wedding anniversary. There had been a small party at the Damons’ apartment, with a few of the agency’s clients of whom they were particularly fond and an old friend of Damon’s, Martin Crewes, who had been a client and had gone to Hollywood, where he was now a highly paid screenwriter and had a business manager who made his deals for him. He was in New York for conferences with a director, and Damon had been pleased to hear his voice on the phone the day before. They had been good friends, and he had been an honest and gifted man and had always been good company. He had written two fine novels about the small town in which he had grown up in Ohio, but they had hardly sold at all and Crewes had told Damon and Mr. Gray as he was leaving for the West Coast, “The hell with it. I surrender. I’m tired of starving. There has to be a limit to the number of times you hit your head against the stone wall. The only thing I know how to do is write, and if somebody wants to pay me for it, God be with him. I’ll try not to write shit, but if that’s what they want, that’s what I’ll give them.” He had been a humorous and zestful man when Damon had known him, but after a few minutes over the drinks before dinner, Damon was saddened to see that his friend had turned into a solemn and pompous windbag who told dreary anecdotes about producers and directors and movie stars, punctuating his conversation with a high, nervous giggle that put Damon’s nerves on edge.

  He had been a solidly built, slightly fat young man but now was trimmed down to the bone and Damon guessed that he did calisthenics at least two hours a day and ate only fruits and nuts to maintain that tense, ballet dancer’s figure. His hair glistened, an unnatural ebony, and was cut in a kind of pageboy bob that completely covered his ears. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, with a thick gold chain hanging on his chest and black pants and a fawn-colored cashmere jacket. The boy from the little town in Ohio about whom he had once written had successfully disappeared.

  In his first ten minutes in the room he had already told the assembled guests that the picture he had just completed had cost a cool seven and the next one was going to be epical in scope and they’d be lucky to get in under ten. It took a few moments for Damon to realize that the seven was seven million and the ten ten million.

  When Mr. Gray came in, later than the other guests, he made his disapproval of Crewes plain with his first words to the man—“Ah, Stonewall Crewes has finally returned to take the salute of his ragged but loyal troops”—and Damon knew that it had been a mistake to invite the screenwriter to the party. And when Mr. Gray stepped back to survey Crewes, as though to get a better look at a painting in a museum and said, in tones of mock wonder, “Is that the Paramount uniform?” Damon knew that Crewes would never call him again, no matter how many times he came to New York.

  Still, the party was agreeable; Crewes left early, after drinking only soda water with a slice of lemon in it and merely nibbling at some salad and around the edges of the slice of baked ham that Sheila had put on his plate.

  The Damons were leaving the next day for a month tour of Europe and the friends who had been to Europe advised them of places they couldn’t afford to miss, and the friends who had not been to Europe told them how much they envied the travelers and Mr. Gray, in a ceremonious speech, presented Damon with a leather-bound diary in which to put down his impressions of the trip and gave Sheila a slide rule in a suede leather case with which you could figure out how to change meters and centimeters into yards and inches and foreign currencies into the value in American dollars.

  The party ended late, but Damon could see that Mr. Gray was loath to leave and poured him his third brandy of the night and whispered, “Stay a while,” before saying good-bye to his other guests. Sheila went into the bedroom to do some last-minute packing, and Damon fixed himself a drink and sat down in the chair near the end of the couch on which Mr. Gray was sitting.

  “I have to apologize, Roger,” Mr. Gray said, “for what I did to Crewes. After all, he was one of your guests.”

  “Nonsense,” Damon said. “Anybody who comes to a party in New York dressed like that deserves what he gets.”

  “I just couldn’t hold myself back,” Mr. Gray said. “You know, I have nothing against the movies, per se. In fact, I love them. And I have nothing against the people who make them. But when I see a man who had the talent Crewes had let himself go like that and never write a decent word in ten years, I mourn. The waste, man, the waste. There’re writers who’ve gone through our office I’ve counseled to go out there and stay there because I knew they’d be happier adapting other people’s materials and relieved of the heavy burden of creation. They’d be paid besides and I don’t underestimate the love for money some men have, and anyway the language wouldn’t be a phrase the loser by their spending their lives writing to order. And there are other men I’ve counseled to go and do one picture, for the experience, for the money, because I knew they’d come back and do the work they were born to do.” He sipped sadly at his brandy. “And in Crewes’s case it was a personal disappointment. I thought I was molding him. I saw a one-act play of his in one of those Equity Library presentations, and I sought him out and told him he was a novelist, not a playwright, and I financed him for a full year while he was working on his first book and he was one of the most promi
sing young men ever to come into the office. Now, what is he? A suntanned cockerel, crowing in the barnyard.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “Ah, why go on about it? In our profession disappointment is the one commodity we can be sure will arrive with every morning’s mail.” He sipped his drink in silence for a few moments, staring thoughtfully into the embers of the dying fire. “Not only in our profession,” he said bitterly. “My son, for example.”

  “What?” Damon said, surprised. He knew that Mr. Gray had been married and had been a widower when they had first met, but the son had never been mentioned before.

  “My son,” Mr. Gray repeated. “He’s a grain merchant, dealing in futures, things like that. He made a fortune during the war. And after. Waiting till the market went up before selling wheat to the starving millions of Europe and Asia. He was a brilliant boy, he was close to being a genius. His field was mathematics, physics. He could have been the shining star of any faculty at any university in the country. He was the one golden gift of an otherwise dreadful marriage. He used his talent all right—to wheel, to deal, to take advantage of every trick and turn of the law and the marketplace. I read not long ago that he was the youngest multimillionaire in the United States who had made all his money by his own efforts. With the cold heart of a guard in a concentration camp. It was in Time magazine.”

  “I never happened to read it,” Damon said.

  “I didn’t carry it in my pocket to show to my friends.” Mr. Gray smiled faintly.

  “I never knew you had a son,” Damon said.

  “It pains me to talk about him.”

  “You didn’t talk much about your wife, either. I gathered it was a painful subject.”

  “My wife died young,” Mr. Gray shrugged. “No great loss, either. I was shy and she was meek and she was the first girl who let me kiss her. She died, I think, of embarrassment, embarrassment at being alive and taking up space on the planet. There wasn’t a flicker of real life in her from the day she was born, she had the spirit of a slave. My son, I believe, turned out to be what he is because he looked at his mother and told himself that in every possible way he would be different from her. And he despised me. The last time we talked he told me—I can still hear the contempt in his voice as he said it—he told me I was content to live in a corner on crusts all my life, but he wasn’t.” Mr. Gray gave a short laugh. “Well, I’m still in my corner and he’s the youngest self-made multimillionaire in America.” He sighed, finished his brandy, looked questioningly at Damon. “Do you think I might have just one more?”

  “Of course,” Damon said and refilled his glass.

  Mr. Gray bowed his head to sniff the Cognac. Damon had the impression that he was crying and trying to hide it. “Ah,” he said finally, his head still down, “I didn’t keep you up to wail about my private life. An old man, late at night, under the influence of just a little too much brandy …” His voice trailed off. “If you don’t mind, Roger, I left my briefcase in the hall, would you kindly get it for me?”

  Damon took his time getting the briefcase, so that Mr. Gray could dry his tears. He heard him blowing his nose loudly. The briefcase was heavy and Damon wondered what Mr. Gray could have in it or why he would carry a briefcase to a party.

  “Ah, there we are,” Mr. Gray said brightly as Damon came into the room. “You found it.” He put his brandy down and placed the briefcase on his knees. The briefcase was usually filled with manuscripts that he took home to read after office hours” and on weekends. He caressed the worn leather and the battered brass lock, then opened the case and took out a small bottle of pills. He shook out a pill and placed it under his tongue. Damon noticed that the veined, liver-spotted hand was shaking. “Brandy makes the heart race,” Mr. Gray said, almost apologetically, as though as a guest it was discourteous to his host to provide his own nourishment. “The doctors warn me, but one can’t live completely without vices.” His voice suddenly became stronger and his hands stopped shaking. “What a nice party this was. And Sheila always looks so splendid in her own home. Ten years, is it? My, where do the years fly?” He had been a witness at the wedding in the judge’s chambers. “You’ve been good for each other. If I were younger, I’d be jealous of your marriage. And if I were you, I’d be most careful not to do anything to disturb it.”

  “I know what you mean,” Damon said uncomfortably.

  “Those little absences from the office in the afternoons, the telephone calls …”

  “We have an understanding, Sheila and I,” Damon said. “A tacit understanding. Sort of.”

  “I’m not rebuking you, Roger. In fact, I took a vicarious pleasure in your mid-afternoon excursions. I had fantasies of what it would be like to be handsome like you, lusty, pursued by women … It brightened many a dull day. But you’re no longer young, the fires should be banked by now, you have something precious to preserve …”

  “As you just said, one can’t live completely without vices.” Damon laughed, to put the conversation on a lighter plane. “And I very seldom drink brandy.”

  Mr. Gray laughed then, too, an old friend sharing masculine rascality in a locker room. “Well,” he said, “at least manage to get away with it.” Then his face grew serious again. Once more he opened the flap of the briefcase which he had been cradling on his lap. He took out a thickly stuffed large manila envelope. “Roger,” he said, speaking softly, “I’m going to ask you to do me a great favor. There are years of work in this envelope and a lifetime of hope. It’s a manuscript.” He laughed uneasily. “It’s a book I’ve just finished writing. The only book I ever wrote or probably ever will write. When I was a young man, I wanted to be a writer. I tried, but it was no use. I had read too much to believe what I put down was of any worth. So I did the next best thing, I thought. I would be the vessel, the means, the conduit, if you will, for the work of good writers. Here and there you might say I’ve succeeded, but that’s not the point. With age, with the immersion in words, so to speak, with the years of observation, criticism, editing, I thought perhaps I had accumulated enough wisdom so that I could create something that would salvage what was left of my life. Now you’re going on a voyage, there will be days of rain when you can’t leave your hotel, perhaps long train trips, nights when you’re tired of listening to a foreign language. When you get back, I hope you will have read it. No one but me, not even a typist, has glanced at it until now.” He took a deep breath, put his hand to his throat as though to relieve some hidden strain there. “If you tell me it’s good, I’ll show it around. If you tell me it’s no good, I shall burn it.”

  Damon took the envelope. On it, in Mr. Gray’s neat round script was written Solo Voyage, by Harrison Gray. “I can’t wait to read it,” he said.

  “Please,” said Mr. Gray, “be at least three thousand miles away before you look at the first line.”

  The trip was everything they could have hoped for—and better. They wandered without a schedule, as the mood seized them, footloose and free, finding new joy in being together twenty-four hours a day, walking hand-in-hand like young lovers along the Seine, on the banks of the Tiber, through the Uffizi Palace, on a mountain path in the Swiss Alps, over the bridges of the canals near the Great Lagoon. They stood silent before the Cathedral of Chartres and climbed to the top of Mont St. Michel. Together, they read Henry James on Paris, Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Stendhal on Rome, dined off bouillabaisse in spring sunlight at restaurants overlooking the port of Antibes and fettuccine al pesto at tables facing the Ligurian Sea. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Gray’s manuscript, Damon could not have imagined a more perfect holiday. When Sheila asked him what the book was like, Damon said it was fine. But he was lying. The book lay dead in his hands. Harrison Gray, as a young man, had traveled for a few months on a tramp steamer around the islands of the South Pacific, and the book was a recollection, in the form of a novel, of that voyage. In the writing it seemed like a dull parody of Conrad’s Youth.

  Mr. Gray, the delicate and fastidious man, so tuned t
o the turn of a phrase, so acute in pointing out a wrong note in an imaginary character, so sharp in detecting falsity or rhetoric, so steeped in and devoted to the glory of great literature, had written a book so stale, trite, clumsy, that Damon wept inwardly as he went through the pages on which there were no two sentences that followed each other with any of the music or savor of the English language. As the month drew to its close, Damon dreaded the idea of the trip home and the moment when he would arrive at the office and have to confront his old and beloved friend.

  But Mr. Gray, gentlemanly and considerate to the end, spared Damon the confrontation. When he went to the office carrying the manuscript on his first day back, Damon was greeted at the door by a weeping Miss Walton, at that time thinner, with coquettish bangs of mousy hair, who told him that she had not known where to reach him in Europe to tell him that Mr. Gray had died the week before.

  That night, although it was warm and New York was already seized by summer, Damon lit a fire in his living room and fed Solo Voyage page by page into the flames. It was the least he could do in honor of his friend’s memory.

  Remembering all this, Damon stared down at the glass of brandy on the bar, sighed, picked up the glass and finished the drink, paid the barman and went out of the hotel.

  For once he did not walk the two miles to home. Facing the long night that lay ahead of him with his wife, with its explanations, confessions, fears and alarms, he was in no mood to meet any others of his familiar dead on the streets of the city.

  Hailing a taxi, he drove downtown in silence.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  WHEN HE KISSED SHEILA good-bye the next morning on his way to work, she looked sober and drawn. It had been an exhausting night, which had begun as he came through the door, with the question, “What’s all this about a pistol?”

  “Where did you hear anything about a pistol?” he had asked, already sorry that even for a day he had left her in ignorance of what was happening.