Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  “She seemed to be okay to me. And her boss told me she’s very efficient.”

  Oliver laughed. “Roger,” he said, “you’re getting old. Her boss couldn’t take his eyes off her all the time she was in the room and when she stood up and went back to her own office his look practically undressed her right there and then. His tongue was almost literally hanging out of his mouth and he looked like a terminal case of frustration. Miss Deal may be efficient in the office, but I’ll bet she’s a lot more efficient in bed. If you want to know the truth, after about five minutes I was pretty frustrated myself.”

  “I must really be getting old, as you say.” Damon smiled. “I didn’t notice anything in particular about her.”

  That was the girl who came into the office while Damon was putting on his coat to leave. Because of what Oliver had said about her and out of old habit, which he had thought he had broken since the Iberian lady, after whom he had subsided into uncomplicated monogamy, Damon looked at her with more interest than he had shown the first time he had seen her and decided Oliver had been right in being so disturbed by her. Lusts of the mind as well as those of the flesh. Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

  They went down in the elevator together after Damon had locked the office and Damon said, “I usually stop for a drink on my way home in the evening. Would you like to join me?”

  She looked at him with a glint of knowing amusement in her eyes, no stranger to men’s overtures. “That would be very nice, Mr. Damon,” she said, demurely. “I was hoping you’d ask me.” Her voice was a little husky and fitted her appearance and Damon guessed that she had worked at it, either in acting school or with a singing teacher.

  In the lounge of the Algonquin, where he had taken her, although that was not the place he usually patronized for his post-workday first drink, it turned out he had been correct in his guess.

  “The reason I hoped you’d ask me for a drink,” she said, sipping at her glass of white wine, “is I wanted to talk to you about Apple.”

  He smiled a little at her quick assumption that they were professionals together, with theatre people’s universal trick of abbreviating the titles of plays. “I’m not really a secretary,” she said. “I work with Mr. Proctor only when I’m between plays.” She spoke in small, rapid bursts, as though the words were bubbling up irresistibly in her throat.

  “Have you been in any?”

  “A few. Off-Broadway. Off-off-Broadway. Equity Library. Summer theatre. Drama school productions. Podunk.” Her voice mocked herself. “The usual rocky road to stardom. Have you ever seen me?”

  “I don’t think so,” Damon said. “In fact, I’m sure. If I’d seen you on the stage I’m certain I’d have remembered you.” He was too gallant a man to say otherwise.

  “They ought to put up a monument outside Sardi’s. With an eternal flame. To the unknown actress.” She laughed, without bitterness. “The last play I was in was downtown. Man Plus Man.”

  “I saw the play,” Damon said, “but I walked out after the first ten minutes.” He remembered it well. It had opened and closed just after the opening which was the night he and Sheila had gone to see it. He did not tell the girl why he had walked out. “You must have come on after that.”

  “Second act,” she said. “You didn’t miss anything. I had a big scene in the second act. No reviews, though. The critics all left at intermission.” She laughed gaily. “So did my mother and father. I would have, too, if I hadn’t signed a contract.”

  “I remember the evening,” Damon said. He had been invited by the producer, a man named Guilder, whom he didn’t know, except by reputation, which was not good. He was a very rich young man from a family which owned mines in Colorado and had backed a few shows, all failures. His reputation came neither from his wealth or his career in the theatre. He had been arrested for felonious assault, with intent to kill, after he had picked up a young man in a bar and then had beaten him terribly when they got to his apartment. His plea was that the young man had made homosexual advances to him and in a rage he had struck the fellow. He had adroit and highly paid lawyers and although just about everyone in the courtroom knew that Guilder had homosexual leanings himself, to say the least, with a taste for rough trade, he was acquitted.

  In an interview for the newspapers Guilder had berated the producers of the New York theatre indiscriminately for their timidity and their choice of material and its staging, and announced that from now on he would produce plays himself, without partners. Man Plus Man was his first independent production, off-Broadway in a theatre near the Damons’ apartment, and having nothing else much to do on the evening of the opening they used their gift tickets at the last minute, more out of curiosity than any hope that the production would yield them much pleasure.

  But they were not prepared for what they saw. The play was about a transvestite and his friends and while Damon, in the fashion of the time, was neutral on the subject of homosexuals and often invited clients of his who were gay to his house for dinner, the scatological language and the snickering display of nudity were too much for him. He stood up in the middle of the first scene and said to Sheila, knowing what he was doing, “Come on, let’s go. I’ve had enough. It’s pure filth.”

  They had been sitting up front of the theatre and Damon spoke loudly and clearly and strode up the aisle with Sheila behind him. Before he and Sheila had reached the exit, other couples followed their example, some of them shouting at the stage.

  Guilder was standing at the back of the theatre as the Damons passed him. Damon recognized the man from photographs in the newspapers and in a poetic pose on the cover of the program, but went by without saying anything.

  The play closed that night, having given only the one performance.

  “I never saw a man so furious,” Melanie Deal was saying. “He told the cast you had deliberately wrecked the play, knowing that everybody or practically everybody in the opening night audience knew who you were and the influence you had. There wasn’t even a critic left for the second act. The reason you’d done it, he said, was that you were a closet queen and that you couldn’t stand to see the truth on the stage and he promised the cast he was going to ruin you in the theatre and send you back to digging ditches where you belonged.” She giggled. “Has he ruined you?”

  “As you see,” Damon said, smiling, “I can still afford to buy drinks for a pretty young lady in the Algonquin. Although I did hear some rumors that he was bad-mouthing me all over town and twice he outbid producers who wanted to do plays I represented and then never put them on.” Damon shrugged. “You’ve got to expect spoiled rich kids in the theatre. Nobody takes him seriously and if I really was responsible for closing the play I ought to get a medal for public service for it. Mr. Guilder doesn’t interest me. He’s of no consequence. Let’s change the subject, shall we, to something more pertinent? What did you want to talk to me about Apple?”

  “When you were talking about casting in the office … You described what Helen should look like. How she should do the part …” She spoke in short gasps. “Well, I thought, That nice man is describing me.”

  Damon smiled again. “Perhaps I was … ah … subconsciously influenced.” He was enjoying the small flirtation. “Have you talked to Mr. Proctor about a test for the part?”

  She shook her head vigorously, her thick, gleaming hair whipping around her face. “Mr. Proctor regards me in only two ways—as a secretary and sex object.” There was malicious glee reflected in her small, fine face. “He can only imagine me at the typewriter or in bed.” She laughed coarsely, her laughter a little out of control. “No hope, New Jersey. Tell him, if he happens to ask.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I played in summer stock at New Hope, New Jersey,” she said. “Everything went wrong. Every time we started rehearsals on a new play somebody would say, No hope, New Jersey. It became our way of saying not a chance in a million.”

  Damon began to feel the first electric
tingle of desire and he wished he had left the office earlier and told Oliver to close up. Tomorrow he had to tell Oliver that his boss was not as old as he seemed.

  “Mr. Proctor,” the girl went on, “thinks highly of your taste and experience. Whenever you send in a play he reads it right away, no matter what else is on his desk. If you put in a word for me, he’d listen.” The words kept tumbling out breathlessly and she was leaning forward so that he couldn’t help but notice the enticing shape of her breasts under the tight cashmere sweater she was wearing, with no brassiere underneath. Generous offerings, he thought sadly, remembering his young manhood, on a ritual platter. He now understood Proctor’s rapt gaze while he tried to talk contracts with Melanie Deal in view.

  Troubled, he ordered another drink, to keep the evening from getting out of hand. The girl gulped her wine down and he ordered another glass for her. She was flushed with the wine and the speed and vehemence with which she had been talking. “Well,” he said, looking around the hotel lounge to see if there was anybody there who knew him who would spread the word that old Roger Damon was now robbing cradles. There was no one he recognized and he relaxed a little. “Well,” he said, “the casting is a long way in the future. And there’s no director yet. And the author has to rewrite the whole first act.”

  “I know all that,” she said impatiently. “But if you put the bug in Mr. Proctor’s ear, I’d wait.”

  “I’d advise you, Miss Deal, to …”

  “Melanie.”

  “I’d advise you, Melanie,” he said, trying to sound paternal, “not to give up any parts that you’re likely to be offered while we’re waiting to get into production.”

  “All I want is a chance to try out.” She was speaking earnestly now, leaning across and gripping his forearm, her hand surprisingly strong. “All you’d have to do is suggest.” She swept her hair back from her pale, high white forehead. “Look,” she said challengingly, throwing her head back, her eyes glittering, “am I or am I not the girl you described in the office.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said softly, then tried to recover himself and make the compliment sound banal with a fatherly, “my dear.” He heard a clock chime somewhere. “Oh, it’s getting late. My wife will be worried.” Sheila never worried about what time he came home from the office as long as it was before eight o’clock or he had called her if he was going to be delayed for an hour or two, but he wanted to sound uxorious before this tempting girl, who was young enough to be his daughter. And then some.

  “I live near you,” she said. “I looked you up in the telephone book after you came into the office the other day.” She laughed. Again there was something wild and out of control in her laughter. “We can go together. I live on West Twenty-third Street.”

  “Well,” he said, not knowing by now whether he was glad or sorry he had invited her to join him in a drink, “I usually walk.”

  “I’m a great walker,” she said, grinning, pinning him down. “I’m one of the most notorious walkers in New York. And I don’t wear high heels to work.”

  “All right,” he said. He felt the need for fresh air. And he doubted that she would try anything outlandish on a public thoroughfare at six-thirty in the evening.

  “If that’s what you want,” he said, “we’ll go downtown together.”

  “That’s what I want. I’m a persistent cuss, aren’t I?” she said triumphantly. She grinned, her perfect teeth gleaming in the youthful face.

  “You’ll go a long way, Melanie,” he said as he paid the waiter. “In the theatre and out of it.”

  “You bet your ass,” she said. She helped him on with his coat, patting his shoulder as she did so and they went out of the hotel, she with her hand possessively on his elbow.

  The evening had turned nasty and a fine drizzle was coming down. Damon thought it would be the act of a sadist to make a girl like that, with her lovely hair uncovered, and the pretty moccasins and the sheer stockings on the beautiful long legs to walk more than a mile in the rain. He waited for a moment at the entrance to the hotel and said, “This is no night for walking.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “Let the north wind blow, let the heavens come down.”

  “Do you have a scarf or anything?”

  She shook her head. “It was sunny when I went to work this morning.”

  “We’ll take a taxi,” he said. “If we can ever find one.”

  Just then a taxi drove up and stopped in front of the hotel and a couple stepped out. Melanie let go of Damon’s arm and dashed across the sidewalk and held the door open defiantly before the man who had just gotten out could close it and before a woman who had seen the taxi as it turned the corner onto Forty-fourth Street and had run after it waving and shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!” could reach it. “Tough shit, Lady,” Melanie said, grimly victorious, as the woman came panting up. Melanie gestured impatiently at Damon to get moving. He shambled across the sidewalk and said, shamefacedly, to the woman as he climbed into the taxi, “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”

  “Young people these days,” the woman said, gasping. “Barbarians. The language.”

  Melanie got into the taxi and gave her address to the driver. She settled cozily next to Damon and put her hand on his thigh. “It’s an omen,” she said.

  “What’s an omen?”

  “Our getting this taxi on a rainy night,” she said.

  “With one million people running after them on the streets of New York.”

  “A good omen or a bad one?”

  “Good, silly.”

  “Not so good for that poor woman.”

  “Old fat bag,” Melanie said coldly, disregarding the fact that the man at her side had at least twenty years of age on the old bag. “Wherever she’s going, nobody’s waiting for her. Are you superstitious? About omens and things like that?”

  “Yes. I always put my left shoe on first when I get dressed in the morning and get out of the left side of the bed.” He laughed. “At my age.”

  “You’re not so old.”

  “My dear young lady,” Damon said, “if you woke up just one morning and felt your bones creaking like mine, you wouldn’t say that.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Damon,” she said, stroking his thigh. “You’re one of the most attractive men in New York, whatever your age is.”

  “Good God!”

  “Would you like to hear what several other ladies you’ve known told me about you?”

  “Absolutely not.” The tingle he had felt in the office when he really had looked at her for the first time had now grown to an alarming voltage.

  “I’m going to tell you just the same.” She laughed with evil, gleeful mischief. “Ladies in my acting class. Mature ladies. Been around. Know what they’re talking about. Three of them. Well preserved. We were having coffee together during a recess from class. The talk turned to sex. Ladies’ locker room talk.” She laughed that slightly wild laugh again.

  “I’d prefer it if you stopped right now, Melanie,” Damon said with all the dignity he could muster.

  “Don’t pretend to be a prude.” She lifted her hand from his thigh, then jabbed at his leg sharply with one finger. “After what I heard about you the performance doesn’t wash. It so happens that all three ladies had affairs with you.”

  “You’re impossible, my dear girl,” he said flustered. “I don’t want to know what they said or who they are.” He was lying. From the way she was speaking he knew that what she was going to tell him would be flattering and would remind him of agreeable moments in the past.

  “All the girls,” Melanie said, “were rating their various lovers. Who was the best, who was the worst. That sort of thing. If I told you the names of the ladies you’d know they had plenty of comparisons to go by. The vote was unanimous for the top of list. You turned out to be the best lay in town by a landslide.” She laughed again. “The worst lays they’d encountered were their own husbands.”

  He couldn’t help joining in her laughter. W
hen he stopped laughing he said, “That was long ago.” He guessed who the ladies were. “I was younger and more active then.”

  “Not so long ago,” she said. “And stop talking about age. My present lover is fifty years old. He’s a broker down in Wall Street and he has a platinum plate in his head. They knocked the top off his head in Korea. He was a big hero there. He’s got a chest full of medals and he’s got guns all over the house he brought back with him. Well, he’s not a big hero anymore and nobody would pin a medal on him now for anything and every once in a while he thinks he’s in a foxhole or whatever he had in Korea and he thinks I’m a Chinaman creeping in on him and he’s grayer than you are and we have great times together.”

  “He sounds like a young girl’s dream,” Damon said dryly.

  “I have a father fixation,” Melanie said, “and I love it.”

  “Well,” said Damon, “I don’t have a daughter and I haven’t a daughter fixation and I love it.” He tried, without success, to sound irritated. “I haven’t touched anybody but my wife in God knows how long.”

  The girl ignored what he had said and ran her hand under his coat high up his leg. “I’m making a pass at you, Mr. Damon,” she said flatly, without emotion.

  He put his own hand out and clasped her arm firmly so that she couldn’t go all the way up. He was both charmed and annoyed by her brusque directness, annoyed because there was a chance, more than a chance, that she was offering herself to him not for his reputation with the ladies in the acting class but as a lever to move him to suggest her for the part in the play to Proctor.

  “In my day,” he said, “ladies waited to be asked.”

  She didn’t try to move her hand any farther but said, “This isn’t your day anymore, Mr. Damon,” she said, “and I’m not a lady. I like to choose, not be chosen. What I would like would be for us to have a long languorous, romantic affair, starting tonight. Sneaky afternoons, slipping off to country inns on weekends …”