Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  “Before you go,” Damon said, hesitating before asking the question, “is Antoinetta here with you?”

  Fitzgerald looked at him queerly. “She died in an airplane accident,” he said, his voice flat. “Ten years ago. The plane went down in the Irish Sea. All hands lost.”

  “I’m sorry,” Damon said lamely. “Very sorry.”

  Fitzgerald shrugged. “The luck of the draw,” he said. “Ah, I try to be offhand about it, and I thought I’d get over it, but I never have.” He tried to smile. “No sense thinking about.” He made a little ambiguous gesture, dismissive, warding off pity? Damon couldn’t tell.

  They walked out onto the avenue together.

  “See you tomorrow night at eight,” Fitzgerald said. “Tell your wife I eat anything at all.” He jumped spryly into a taxi. Damon watched as the taxi drove off, then went back into the shop and up to the same counter and bought the instrument for taking messages off the phone.

  Then, carrying the machine in a wrapped box, he went into the nearest bar and ordered the first drink of the afternoon and thought of the good times and bad times he and Fitzgerald had had together.

  Among them were the long nights in Downey’s Restaurant or Harold’s Bar, where actors gathered after their shows were out, and he and Fitzgerald would argue with anyone who came along about the different talents of O’Neill, Odets, Saroyan, Williams, Miller, and George Bernard Shaw. Fitzgerald, who had a prodigious memory, would quote from all of them or anybody else, to prove a point. Styles of acting were examined and Fitzgerald dubbed The Method, as exemplified by the Group Theatre, “The New York School of Mumble.” His father was Irish and had gone to Trinity in Dublin and had bequeathed his son a clear and pleasing musical speech, which could rise to Shakespearean heights or drop into a lilting Irish accent when he quoted passages from Joyce.

  Despite his stature and the comedian’s face, he always attracted girls and there were always two or three of them around, asking him to recite favorite poems of theirs or one of the great soliloquies, which Fitzgerald delivered with quiet passion and admirable clarity, no matter how drunk he happened to be at the time.

  He also had a great talent for picking up girls who could cook and would bring them to the apartment triumphantly to prepare feasts of boeuf bourgignon and fritto misto and duck à l’orange. When he found a girl who could cook better than the current candidate for the title, he ruthlessly cut her off and dubbed the new one la Maitresse de la Maison. Damon couldn’t count the names of Maitresse de la Maison they went through while they had the apartment together.

  The first time Damon had brought Antoinetta to the apartment, Fitzgerald had immediately asked, “Can you cook?”

  Antoinetta had looked questioningly at Damon. “Who is this peculiar fellow?” she asked.

  “Humor him,” Damon had said. “He has this thing about cooking.”

  “Do I look like a cook?” Antoinetta had asked.

  “You look like the goddess rising from the foam,” Fitzgerald had said, “and the foam is made of chocolate mousse.”

  Antoinetta had laughed at that. “The answer is no. I definitely cannot cook. What can you do?”

  “I can tell a hawk from a handsaw and a flat soufflé from a sirloin steak.” He turned to Damon. “What else can I do?”

  “Argue,” Damon said, “sleep late in the morning and make the rafters ring when you recite Yeats.”

  “Do you know ‘In Flanders Fields’?” Antoinetta asked. “I recited it once in the school auditorium when I was ten. They cheered when I finished.”

  “I bet,” Fitzgerald said nastily. Damon knew Antoinetta well enough to know that she was joking, getting even for being asked if she were a cook. You couldn’t joke about poetry with Fitzgerald. He turned to Damon. “Don’t marry the lady, good friend,” he said. He never told Damon if he had said it because Antoinetta couldn’t cook or because he didn’t approve of “In Flanders Fields.”

  In the end, Damon thought, ordering a second drink from the barman, he had taken Fitzgerald’s advice. He had not married Antoinetta.

  He should have warned Antoinetta before bringing her home that Fitzgerald was at his best with the Irish poets. If he had, she might have saved herself the snub and Fitzgerald would have been interested in her from the beginning and saved all three of them a great deal of trouble.

  Fitzgerald’s greatest admiration for poetry was reserved for that of William Butler Yeats, and during the slow voyage across the Atlantic in convoy, he and Damon would stand at the bow of the Liberty ship as it pushed across the long swells of the North Atlantic and he would intone the haunted verses of the poet. He recited “Sailing to Byzantium” as a special treat on nights when it seemed they were out of danger and the sea was calm. Damon had heard it so often that even now, standing at a bar on Sixth Avenue, he could whisper it in Fitzgerald’s Irish accent.

  He whispered because he didn’t want the other people in the bar to think that he was a madman, talking to himself.

  That is no country for old men.

  The young in one another’s arms,

  Birds in the trees—those salmon-falls,

  The mackerel-crowded seas. Fish, flesh,

  Or fowl; commend all summer long

  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

  Caught in that sensual music all neglect

  Monuments of unaging intellect.

  Fitzgerald would be weeping softly as he came to the end of the first verse, and Damon could feel the tears come to his own eyes as he remembered those moments.

  Fitzgerald seemed to know practically all of Shakespeare by heart, and on nights of the full moon, when the convoy was outlined as perfect targets against the horizon for the wolfpacks of submarines, he would recite, with sardonic courage, Hamlet’s soliloquy after Fortinbras’s first exit—

  Examples gross as earth exhort me:

  Witness this army of such mass and charge

  Led by a delicate and tender prince,

  Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d

  Makes mouths at the invisible event

  Exposing what is mortal and unsure

  To all that fortune, death and danger dare,

  Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great

  Is not to stir without great argument,

  But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

  And let all sleep, while, to my shame, I see

  The imminent death of twenty thousand men,

  That for a fantasy and trick of fame,

  Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot

  Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,

  Which is not tomb enough and continent

  To hide the slain? O! from this time forth

  My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.

  One night just after he had recited the soliloquy, a ship in their convoy had been torpedoed. The ship had blown up, and they had watched the flames and the sinister column of brilliant smoke in despair as the ship went down. It was the first time they had seen one of their ships destroyed and Fitzgerald sobbed dryly, once, then said, in a soft voice, “Good friend, we’re the eggshell and all thoughts on the sea and deep in it tonight are bloody.”

  Then, recovering, he had quoted from The Tempest, with an ironic lilt,

  Full fathom five thy father lies

  Of his bones is coral made.

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea change

  Into something rich and strange,

  Sea nymphs hourly hourly ring his knell:

  Ding-dong.

  Hark! Now I hear them—ding-dong bell.

  Fitzgerald had been silent for a moment after that, then said, “Shakespeare, the speech for all occasions. I’ll never live to play Hamlet. Ah, I’m going below. If we get hit by a torpedo, don’t tell me.”

  They were lucky and were never hit by a torpedo, and they came back to New York joyous, you
ng and eager to resume the work they were born to do, as Mr. Gray had said on another occasion. It was then that they decided to share an apartment. They found one near the Hudson River, in a district where the streets were mostly given over to used-car dealers and warehouses. It was a rambling, ramshackle flat that they furnished with odds and ends of furniture, quickly cluttered with books and theatrical posters, which the girls who kept drifting in and out kept trying to put in order.

  Like Damon, he had been married before the war but had received a Dear John letter from his wife in which she admitted being in love with another man whom she wanted to marry. “It was a cold divorce,” he said. “The legal ties were broken in Reno while I was just below Iceland in the North Atlantic.”

  He swore he would never marry again and when one woman who had endured three months in the apartment made it plain she wanted him to marry her, he had declaimed to her, in Damon’s presence, a mock-heroic from a play he had acted in, “I’ve been swindled by women, mulcted by women, rebuffed by women, divorced by women, jilted, mocked, teased by women, laid, belayed and betrayed by women. It would take the power of Shakespeare to describe my relations with women. I was the Moor unmoored, the Dane disdained, Troilus tripped, Lear delirious, Falstaff falsified, Prospero plucked, Mercutio with a hole in him twice as deep as a well and five times as wide as a church door—and all by women.”

  Then he gave the lady a chaste kiss on the forehead. “Does that give you a faint idea of my feelings on the subject?”

  The lady had laughed as he expected and had not brought the subject up again. Placidly, she had kept frequenting the apartment along with the successive bevies of other girls.

  To maintain their friendship, Fitzgerald and Damon had an unspoken agreement that each would keep his hands off the girls the other had brought home, and it worked, even through the wildest of parties, until Damon appeared with Antoinetta, who soon became a fixture in their lives, sleeping over with Damon three or four times a week and even stabbing at preparing a meal for them during those infrequent intervals when Fitzgerald had run out of cooks.

  In the mid-afternoon silence of the New York bar, free of submarines, a prey to other dangers, Damon ordered another drink. “Make it a double this round,” he said to the barman. Even though he had had nothing to eat since breakfast and was drinking on an empty stomach, the whiskey was having no effect on him. He felt sober and melancholy, reflecting on the lost, exuberant years, and then the one really bad time with Fitzgerald.

  Damon knew that there was something wrong when he came back to the apartment after work. It was a polar New York winter evening. The walk over from Mr. Gray’s office had left him chilled to the bone, and he was looking forward to drink and the warmth of the fire that he hoped Fitzgerald had started.

  But there was no fire and Fitzgerald was red-eyed, still in a dressing gown, which meant that he hadn’t gone out all day. He was pacing up and down unsteadily in the living room with a drink in his hand, and Damon could tell with one glance that he had been drinking all afternoon, something he never did before going onstage, which he would have to do that night.

  Fitzgerald looked startled when Damon came into the room. “Oh,” he said, raising his glass, “you caught me in the act. An actor’s unforgivable crime. Reporting for duty while under the influence.”

  “What’s wrong, Maurice?”

  “What’s wrong,” Fitzgerald said, “is that I’m a shit, if that can be considered wrong in this day and age. Join me in a drink. We’re both going to need it tonight.”

  “Curtain time is in less than three hours, Maurice.”

  “I can go through that piece of money-grabbing Broadway junk in my sleep,” Fitzgerald said contemptuously. “I can also let the curtain go up without me and let the audience guess who’s missing.”

  “Cut it out, Maurice. What is it?”

  “All right, nursey-nurse.” Fitzgerald went over to the table where they kept the bottles and the ice and glasses. “Here, let me fix you a drink. The maids have all fled. And about time, too.” His hands shook as he made a drink for Damon and freshened his own. The lip of the bottle clinked against the rim of the glasses. Spilling whiskey from both glasses, he crossed the room to where Damon was standing. Damon took a glass, sipped at it and sat down.

  “That’s it, good friend, sit down. It might be a long chat.”

  “Okay, Maurice;” Damon said, “what is it?”

  “It,” Fitzgerald said, “is Antoinetta. Or to be more accurate, it is Antoinetta and your good friend, Maurice Fitzgerald, aptly named. Bastard son of Gerald.”

  “You don’t have to spell it out,” Damon said quietly, although he had to fight back the impulse to strangle the man at whose side he had survived the war and had celebrated hundreds of hilarious nights.

  “You didn’t guess?” Fitzgerald, Damon could see, was trying to look contrite, but with all he had drunk, the expression on the loose comedian’s face was a leer.

  “No,” Damon said, “I didn’t guess.”

  “Bless the innocents of this black world.” Suddenly, Fitzgerald hurled his glass into the empty fireplace. The whiskey made a trail across the floor and the glass shattered against the back wall of the fireplace.

  “How long has it been going on between you two?” Damon still managed to keep his voice down. He didn’t want details or explanations; all he wanted was to rid himself of the flushed, leering face hanging over him. But the words came out automatically.

  “A month. Just enough time for a lady to make up her mind.”

  “Christ,” Damon said, “she slept with me all this weekend, and last night, for God’s sake, with you in the next room.”

  “Amor omnia vincit,” Fitzgerald said. “Or perhaps the other way around. Omnia amor vincit. Men and women, good friend, men and women. Beasts of the jungle.”

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  “Probably in due time,” Fitzgerald said. “There are decks to be cleared, regrets to be expressed.” He had been having a long affair with one of the cooks he had brought home. She was cloyingly devoted to him and Damon guessed that was one of the decks to be cleared.

  “There’s no rush to the church,” Fitzgerald said. “I’ll make an honest woman of Antoinetta in the end.”

  “You are a shit,” Damon said bitterly.

  “I said it first,” Fitzgerald said, “but I don’t mind being quoted. Where the hell is my drink?”

  “You threw it in the fireplace.”

  “Oh, the lost and wind-grieved ghost of a bottle of Scotch. From the works of Thomas Wolfe, a famous American author. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. More from the famous author. God, I never can forget anything. What a burden. I won’t forget you, good friend.”

  “Thanks,” Damon said. He stood up. “I’m going to pack and get out of here.”

  Fitzgerald put out his hand to stop him. “You can’t. I’m the one who has to go.”

  “I’m not wild about living in a whorehouse,” Damon said. “Especially after I find out what the red light in the window means.”

  “One of us has to stay,” Fitzgerald said. “Our lease still has a year to run.”

  Damon hesitated. He couldn’t pay for another place to live and pay half the rent for the apartment at the same time.

  “I have a prop-proposition to make,” Fitzgerald said. “Let’s toss for it. The loser stays and pays the full rent.”

  Damon sighed. “Okay,” he said.

  “You got a coin?” Fitzgerald asked. “All my change is on the table in my room, and I hate the thought of your being alone for a minute, good friend.”

  “Just shut your mouth, Maurice,” Damon said, reaching into his pocket for a coin. He pulled out a quarter. “And if you call me good friend once more, I’ll break your jaw. I’ll toss. You call.”

  “Tails,” Fitzgerald said.

  Damon tossed the coin, caught it in the palm of his hand and covered it for a long ten seconds with his other hand. Then he lifte
d the hand. Fitzgerald was bending over to see the coin. He let out his breath in a low hiss of sound.

  “Heads it is. I lost. I stay,” he said. “The luck of the draw. Acceptable losses, as the military so delicately put it when drawing up plans for the next invasion which would cost only eighteen thousand lives. I’m sorry, Roger.”

  Damon flipped the coin at Fitzgerald, who made no move to catch it and let it hit him in the forehead before dropping to the floor.

  Then Damon went in to pack. It didn’t take long, and when he came out of his room, he heard Fitzgerald singing in the shower, preparing for his evening performance.

  Full fathom five Antoinetta lies, Damon thought, and moved with his glass down toward the end of the bar because a group of men had come in and were arguing loudly next to him about a television show, for which one of the men was the sponsor’s representative and the other men were advertising executives and people connected with the program in one way or another.

  Full fathom five, Damon thought. Is there coral in the Irish Sea? He had never seen Antoinetta again, and the wound had long since healed, and her double defection had left him free to marry Sheila, blessed woman, lover, stalwart companion, many years later.