Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  “Did you see the kid?”

  “No. I wrote her that it was long in the past and that I thought it would be better if we didn’t complicate things,” Damon said. “Actually, it’s occurred to me through the years that I didn’t really know anything about the woman, that she might have been sleeping with a dozen men around New York while she was here, that it might have been anybody’s son. Well, when she called, she said she’d kept the letter, hidden away, and the husband found it.”

  Schulter nodded. “The lesson is—never put anything in writing. Go on. What else did the lady have to say on the phone?”

  “She was crying, so that it was hard for her to talk and she was not very coherent, but I managed to piece out that the husband began beating her until she told him the whole story. True or not. She told me he swore he’d grind me to a pulp if he ever ran across me. And he said I’d better pay for the support of the boy and his education if I knew what was good for me.”

  “Have you been paying?”

  “I sent her a thousand-dollar check.”

  “That was a mistake,” Schulter said. “Your name on it and all.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” Damon said wearily. Truth and consequences, he thought, was not a game, but a blood sport.

  “Do you have her address?”

  “Yes.” Damon took a small notebook out of his pocket and wrote the address down and tore the page out of the notebook and handed it to Schulter.

  “I’ll call a police captain I know in Gary,” Schulter said, “and ask him to check the guy out.”

  “Tell him to be discreet, for God’s sake.”

  “Discreet”—Schulter’s upper lip curled. “That’s a word police captains have to look up in the dictionary. The next time that individual, Zalovsky, calls you, what’re you going to do?”

  “I thought maybe you could tell me what I ought to do.”

  Schulter thought for a moment, took a sip of his cold coffee. “Well, the first thing I suggest is that you attach a recording machine to your phone. Then when he calls, try to make an appointment to meet him the next day. Then let me know where and when the meeting’s going to take place and I’ll try to be there or somewhere around there, hoping he won’t notice me.”

  “The time he called,” Damon said, “he said he wanted to see me in ten minutes. On the corner. I imagine his next call will be like that, too. There won’t be any time to call you.”

  Schulter blew his breath out through his teeth, making a whistling sound. “You could buy some equipment to wire yourself up so that you can tape what he says to you. You can get the stuff in any of the electronic equipment stores.” He looked at his watch, pushed the cup and saucer away from him. “I got to be going. If you have any more nice little stories in your past like Mrs. Larch’s, you might try to remember them and put them down on paper, with names and dates, for the next time I see you.” He stood up, stolid, bulky, not sweating in his heavy overcoat, and put on a narrow-brimmed dark brown felt hat that looked ridiculously small on his massive head. “One last thing,” he said as Damon rose, “Mrs. Sparman said that you were considering asking for a permit for a pistol.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How old are you, Mr. Damon?”

  “Sixty-five.”

  “You ever handle a small arm before?”

  “No. I never touched a gun in my life.”

  “Where were you during the war?”

  “I was in the Merchant Marine. They didn’t use guns.”

  Schulter nodded. “A gun’ll do you more harm than good,” he said. “Anyway, there’re too goddamn many guns on the street as it is. Merchant Marine, eh?” There was no mistaking the contempt in his voice. “Overtime pay for days spent in combat zones. Rough duty, we used to call it.”

  “Were you in the war?”

  “First Marines,” Schulter said. “No overtime pay.”

  “Weren’t you awfully young? What are you now—fifty?”

  “Fifty-seven,” Schulter said. “I joined up when I was seventeen. Balmy days in the romantic South Pacific. I still turn yellow a couple of times a year. Well, I’m on my way. I ain’t got the time to tell you the story of my life. Those crazy Jews in the diamond district—they walk around with two hundred thousand bucks’ worth of stones in those attaché cases—they might as well put a sign on their backs—Come and get me. Then they’re surprised they’re murdered. If I was them, I’d hire a platoon of infantrymen from the Israeli army to patrol Forty-seventh Street. I got a heavy afternoon ahead of me—I got to check on two dead men’s dearest friends.” He settled the absurd little hat more securely on his balding head. “Stay here for a minute or two after I leave. I don’t want us to go out on the street together. And hope for the best.”

  There was no handshake and the old Marine strode toward the bar, rolling like a sailor in a storm as he went through the doorway.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  HE WALKED SLOWLY UP Sixth Avenue, remembering that there was a big store that sold electronic equipment near Fiftieth Street. He felt physically bruised after his session with Lieutenant Schulter. It was as though he had just gone through an excessively rough massage. Schulter hadn’t been of much help, had, in fact, raised more questions than given answers. And it had been painful to have to tell him about Julia. After all these years to come weeping out of the past to bedevil him with a problem not of his own making. He remembered the evening they met. He and Sheila had gone to a small party at which the talk had been mostly about books. Someone learned she had been a librarian before her marriage and regretted having left New York. She only joined in the general conversation at intervals, although the few things she said made it plain that she had read a great many of the contemporary writers, knew about all the books that came up in the course of the evening and kept up with literary gossip, even in Gary, by reading a lot of magazines and by correspondence with friends she had left behind in New York who were on the fringes of the publishing and theatrical worlds. She was a pretty little thing, in a pale, washed-out, shy way and she made no distinct impression on Damon, either good or bad.

  He was going through a rough period with Sheila. He was drinking heavily because his business was going badly and several of his more successful clients had drifted away. Three or four nights a week he stayed out until two or three o’clock in the morning with friends of his who could be counted on to drink themselves into a stupor by midnight. He, himself, more often than not, reached his apartment walking unsteadily and fumbling as he put the key into the lock of the front door. His excuses were lame and Sheila listened to them in icy silence. They hadn’t made love for weeks before the night of the party. When they got home after it, they barely said good night to each other before Sheila turned off the light on her bedside table.

  He was feeling lustful and had a huge erection and reached out to caress her. She pushed his hand away angrily. “You’re drunk again,” she said. “I don’t make love to drunks.”

  He lay back, wallowing in self-pity. Nothing is right, he thought, everything is sliding downhill, this marriage won’t last much longer.

  In the morning, he didn’t wait for Sheila to make his breakfast, but had it in a cafeteria on the way to work. Miraculously, he had no hangover. Clearheaded, he decided that his behavior of the last few months had been Sheila’s fault as well as his. The deterioration of the marriage had started with a quarrel about money. He was bringing very little in and Sheila never made much, and the bills were piling up. Then a publisher with an unsavory reputation who had become rich by publishing sensational semi-pornographic books had made him an offer of a job in his office to start a more respectable line. The money he promised was very good, but the man was a vulgarian and Damon felt it would take ten Damons ever to make him respectable. He had turned the offer down and had made the mistake of telling Sheila about it. She had been furious and let him know it.

  “You’ve had it too soft up to now, my dear husband,”
she had said. “Integrity is all very well, but it doesn’t pay any bills. If you’d ever had to deal with abused, bewildered, violent children, like me, you’d know what it’s like to have to do the meanest and ugliest of jobs to keep from starving.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic.”

  “You’re the one who’s being melodramatic. Sacrificing everything to keep the holy flame of literature alive. Okay, remain pure and three cheers for Roger Damon’s precious integrity. I know you too well to think for a minute that you’d change anything just to please me. Go back to that seedy shrine of an office of yours and smoke your pipe and wait for the next T. S. Eliot to come through the door and anoint you with a signed contract.”

  “Sheila,” he had said sadly, disturbed by this echo of what Mr. Gray had told him of his last conversation with his son and the son’s contempt when he said that his father was content to live in a corner on crusts all his life. “Sheila, you’re not talking like yourself.”

  “There’s one thing I can guarantee you, my dear husband,” Sheila said harshly, “and that is that poverty is one sure way of changing the tone of a lady’s voice.”

  It was after that he took to drink and late nights with the boys, as Sheila sardonically called them. Any excuse in a storm, he thought, too honest with himself to be able to shift all the blame.

  Remembering all this and the stubborn resentment on Sheila’s face that had persisted now for months, he thought, She looks like a peasant and she’s acting like a peasant. It was ugly and he didn’t like it and although he wasn’t sure how it would turn out in the end he was certain he wasn’t going to endure it any longer.

  He had been sitting at his desk, unhappily going over his accounts and thinking resentfully of how Sheila had pushed his hand away in bed the night before, when the phone rang and he picked it up. It was Julia Larch. He had tried to keep the surprise out of his voice when she announced her name. “I’ve been thinking how nice it was to meet you last night,” she said, “and how much nicer it would be to meet you again.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Uh … Mrs. Larch,” Damon said.

  “I dreamed about you just before I woke up this morning.” She laughed softly. “That’s just about ten minutes ago.”

  “I hope the dream was a pleasant one,” Damon said, beginning to feel embarrassed and hoping that Oliver at his desk couldn’t guess what was being said at the other end of the telephone line.

  She laughed again. “It was very sexy,” she said.

  “That’s good news.”

  “And I thought, Wouldn’t it be a good way to end my holiday in New York if you’d come up to my room right away, before I could forget the dream, and make love to me.”

  “Well, I … I,” Damon stuttered. “It’s very tempt …”

  “I’m at the Hotel Borden. It’s on East Thirty-ninth Street. The room number is 426. The door will be open.” And she hung up.

  Damon put the phone down slowly, painfully aware, after weeks of abstinence, of how much the low voice over the phone had aroused him.

  “Anything important?” Oliver asked.

  “Just somebody saying good-bye.” He sat for five minutes more looking at the dire figures listed on the page before him, then stood up and went out of the office and walked across town to East Thirty-ninth Street and the hotel door that would be open for him.

  He was still thinking about that call almost eleven years ago and the day that had followed it as he made his way through the heavy noontime pedestrian traffic of Sixth Avenue. In bed, Julia Larch had proved to be neither pale nor washed out or shy and by the time night fell he had had more orgasms than he had ever had in one day or one night, even when he was a youth of eighteen.

  Whether it was a coincidence or not, after that his fortunes improved abruptly. A client whose previous two books had been badly received and had not sold came out with a novel that stayed somewhere in the middle of the bestseller lists for two months; Damon swung a contract for a newspaperman to co-write an autobiography with a movie star and arranged for a whopping advance; an aunt in Worcester died and left him ten thousand dollars in her will. He no longer felt the need to drink and Sheila, at first suspicious that this was only a passing phase, finally became the old Sheila again and apologized for being a shrew. It was no longer necessary to reach out for her in bed because she now reached out for him.

  Looking back at it now, he could date his happiness for the last decade from the day he went up to Julia Larch’s room. But now, remembering the events of the past few days, he felt that a new era, dark and cold, one of wire-taps and warnings, of men who dealt in murder, an era of shameful memories, ushered in by the continuing presence of the dead, was beginning for him. He knew he was going to get drunk that afternoon. He also knew that Sheila, her faith in him as a dependable provider now restored, would forgive him for it.

  He had reached the store that sold electronic equipment and gazed into the window, marveling at the limitless ingenuity of mankind which had so cleverly solved the most abstruse of problems which nature had set before the race to produce the tiny computers, the radios and cassette players and minute television sets. Before he went in, he decided he’d buy a message-taking machine for his home telephone, but not the gadget with which he could turn himself into a peripatetic recording studio. I am not built for spying, he told himself righteously. But without really confessing it to himself, he knew he was being superstitious. If he wired himself for sound, when Zalovsky called next, he would feel compelled to see him. Unwired, there would be no good reason, he told himself, to confront the man.

  He went in and crossed to a counter where a clerk was waiting on a customer. “I want one that’s small and light enough so that I can throw it into my bag when I travel,” the customer was saying.

  Damon started as he heard the voice. It was the voice of the man who been in acting classes with him before the war and had been a shipmate and close friend of his in the Merchant Marine and shared an apartment with him for several years, Maurice Fitzgerald. At the time that Damon was deciding to give up acting, Fitzgerald was already doing very well on the stage and in constant demand. They had remained good friends, even though Damon had left the theatre, but had parted coolly. Their friendship had been irreparably damaged and Damon had not gone to the farewell party for Fitzgerald and Damon’s recent lover, Antoinetta Bradley, on the eve of their departure for London. But now, seeing the familiar jaunty face, under the Irish tweed hacking cap, the coolness was gone and replaced by the old comradely warmth of the days on the ship and of the bachelor apartment. In London, with his sonorous Irish voice and his ability to play any sort of part, Fitzgerald had made a solid career for himself as a dependable second lead. Despite his talents, he had known he never would be a star. He was short and his face, elastic and sly, would have been useful to a comedian in burlesque. He could never have been called handsome, even by his mother, as he used to say with a rueful smile.

  Damon was tempted to go up to the man, whose back was now turned to him, and tap him on the shoulder and say, “On deck, mate.” But, feeling a strange, disturbing tingling all over his body and remembering his encounter with the man he had thought was Mr. Gray, he waited until he could get another good look before saying anything. One encounter in a week like the one with the false Mr. Gray was enough for anyone.

  But when the man turned around, Damon saw that it was Fitzgerald: not the young man he had known, with black hair and an unlined face, but a man of about the same age as himself, with gray sideburns under the cap.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Fitzgerald said. “Roger Damon!”

  Even as they shook hands, Damon knew that no matter what, out of fear of ghosts, he would not have been the first to speak. “What’re you doing back in the old country?” Damon asked.

  “I’m in a play that’s starting rehearsals tomorrow. I didn’t realize I’d get such a kick in being back in New York. Is there a man with soul so dead, who etcetera, etcetera �
� And bumping into you the second day back is just the icing on the cake.” He gazed fondly at Damon. “You look well, Roger.”

  “As do you.”

  “A little ragged around the edges.” He took off his cap and touched his head. “Gray hair. Worry lines around the eyes. The eyes no longer shining and innocent. Well, I’m glad to see you still have your hair, too.” He grinned. “Two old cocks. Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang and all that.”

  “You don’t look old at all,” Damon said. He was speaking the truth. At the worst, Fitzgerald looked no more than fifty, although he was several months older than Damon.

  “Being in the public eye. Does wonders, in a desperate sort of way, toward keeping up the illusion of youth.”

  “Sir,” the clerk, who had been standing patiently watching the two men, now asked, “Sir, are you taking this set with you?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Fitzgerald tossed a credit card down on the counter. “What’re you buying here in this house of magic?”

  “I’m just looking, not buying.” Damon didn’t want to explain to Fitzgerald why he needed a machine that took messages over the phone and excused you for not taking the calls in person. “I think this reunion calls for a drink. Don’t you?”

  Fitzgerald shook his head regretfully. “Damn it, I’ve got a lunch with the producer of the show. Mustn’t stand up the brass, you know. I’m late as it is.”

  “How about tomorrow night. Have dinner at our place. I’d like you to meet my wife.” Fitzgerald had known Elaine and had congratulated Damon on getting rid of her, but he had gone to London long before Damon married for the second time.

  “That sounds smashing,” Fitzgerald said. “What time and where?”

  “Eight P.M. Here, I’ll give you my address.” He took out the notebook from which he had torn a page to write Julia Larch’s address for Schulter and wrote his own address for Fitzgerald. The local habitations and names of friends and enemies, torn out of a twenty-cent notebook. Poet’s work, as Shakespeare had noted.