by Irwin Shaw
“Hello,” she said.
“Caroline,” the male voice said, “this is Christopher—”
“Sorry, Christopher,” she said, “you have the wrong number,” and hung up. Then she unhooked the phone, so that if he called again, he’d get a busy signal. She still had the bottle of Worcestershire sauce in her hand and she shook a few more spurts into the tomato juice. She added a double shot of vodka, to calm Scotty down, if by any chance he didn’t believe that it was a wrong number.
Scotty was lying with his eyes closed, all the covers thrown off, when she came into the bedroom with the bloody marys. He really filled a bed, Scotty; you got your money’s worth of man with her ex-husband. His expression was peaceful, almost as if he had gone back to sleep. The phone on the table next to the bed didn’t look as though it had been moved, she noted with relief.
“All up on deck for grog,” she said cheerily.
He sat up, monumentally, muscles rippling, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He reached out his hand and took the glass from her, looked at it consideringly, then hurled it against the opposite wall. A good part of the room turned red.
“Oh, Scotty,” she said reproachfully, “don’t tell me you’re being seized by one of your unreasonable moods again.” She backed off a little, being careful to avoid broken glass, and took two swift swallows of bloody mary for her nerves.
He stood up. It was an awful sight when he stood up naked like that in a comparatively small bedroom. It was like seeing the whole front line of the Dallas Cowboys wrapped into one moving in on you. The funny scar on his forehead that he had had since his brother had hit him with a baseball bat when they were boys, and which stood out when he was angry, was turning a frightening bright pink.
“Scotty Powalter,” she said, “I absolutely forbid you to touch me.”
Thank God he only slapped me with an open hand, she thought as she reeled back into a chair, still miraculously holding onto her drink.
“You’re unjust,” she said from the depths of the chair. “You’re a fundamentally unjust man. Hitting a girl for a little old wrong number.”
“Some wrong number,” he said. “Who’s Christopher?”
“How should I know who Christopher is? This voice said, ‘Hello, this is Christopher,’ and I said—”
“This voice said, ‘Caroline,’” Scotty said.
“Sneak,” she said. “Listening in on other people’s conversations. Is that what they taught you at Yale?” Scotty wasn’t really unintelligent, but his thought processes were cumbersome and sometimes you could fuddle him and make him forget his dreadful intentions by attacking him.
“I suppose he was calling up to remind you you had a date to screw him this afternoon,” Scotty said. “Knowing how dizzy you are about little matters like that.”
“You’re fully aware of what I think about your vocabulary, Scotty,” Caroline said with dignity.
“Fuck my vocabulary,” Scotty said.
“If you must know, and I don’t see where it’s any business of yours, anyway, considering the nature of our relationship,” she said, “I haven’t had a date with anybody since a week ago last Tuesday. And if your poor little brain isn’t drowned in the mists of alcohol, you’ll recall that a week ago last Tuesday, you didn’t get out of this very bed until six P.M. Wednesday.” As she spoke, she began to believe herself and tears of self-pity formed in her eyes. It was almost like being married again.
“Who’s Christopher?” Scotty said. He began to prowl dangerously, like a berserk elephant, and she feared for the lamps and other glassware in the room.
“I’m perfectly willing to tell you,” she said, “if you’ll stop marauding around like some mad beast in the jungle. You know I’ve never hid anything significant from you.”
“Hah,” he said, but he stopped prowling.
“He’s just a poor little table-model clerk in a bookstore on Madison Avenue,” Caroline said. “He’s just a little Shetland pony of a man, you’d be ashamed of yourself being jealous of him if you ever saw him.”
“He called you, no matter what size he is,” Scotty said stubbornly.
“Sometimes he calls me when he gets in a book he thinks I’d like.”
“The Child’s Manual of Sex,” Scotty said. “A Thousand and Three Indian Positions. I can guess what kind of bookstore he runs.”
“That’s hardly the way to talk to a woman who’s been your wife,” Caroline said fastidiously. “If you want to see with your own eyes and convince yourself once and for all, just you get yourself dressed and I’ll take you over to Madison Avenue and I’ll bet you’ll take one look and get down right then and there on your bended knee and beg my forgiveness for the bestial way you’ve treated me this morning.”
“I don’t want to get dressed,” Scotty said. “I want a bloody mary and I want to go back to bed. In that order. Make it snappy.”
He was like that. Anger aroused other emotions in him.
He was stretching himself on the bed like some huge beached vessel as she went out of the bedroom toward the kitchen to make another batch of bloody marys. Her head was ringing a little from that Yale-sized slap along the side of her jaw, but she was pleased with her over-all handling of what could very easily have developed into a crisis. As she shook the bloody marys, she hummed to herself. She might, later on, at the proper moment, remind Scotty that along about dawn he had mentioned the possibility of getting remarried. And she was damn well going to get him to write a check to have the bedroom repapered. And if he turned ugly again this afternoon, as he was likely to do, there was always that dear little man waiting patiently on Madison Avenue.
Wrong number, Christopher thought, staring at the dead phone in his hand. Who is she kidding? That was no wrong number. He had an annoyed impulse to dial her again, just to show her that he wasn’t being fooled, but decided against it, out of tact. He could imagine all too well why she had said it was a wrong number.
Luckily, a spate of customers entered the store and he was too busy wrapping books and ringing up cash to brood about it.
By the time the store emptied in the lunchtime lull, he had almost convinced himself that it didn’t matter at all to him what Caroline Trowbridge did with her Saturday afternoon.
He sat down at the desk by the cash register and took out his address book.
Toye, Dorothea**. He would never have given her two stars on his own, although she was pretty enough and if she wasn’t exactly five feet, eight inches tall, she was certainly in the neighborhood of five feet, seven and a half. She was not a flashy woman. She was shapely, but in a polite way, and wore simple, sober-colored, almost college-girl clothes, or at least the kind of clothes that girls used to wear in college, and although he guessed she was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, her appearance was demure, her voice low and hesitant, her smile rare. The first two or three times she came into the shop, he had hardly remarked her. But then he had noticed that if there were other men in the shop, even old men or men who at other times seemed to lose themselves in the books, they would slowly begin following her with their eyes and then somehow drift helplessly in her direction. He regarded Dorothea Toye more carefully to see what it was that acted so magnetically on his male customers. He decided that it was probably her complexion. She was always a light tan, with a glow, like a touch of the sun, on her silken skin. She was brilliantly clean. If Caroline Trowbridge looked like a girl just in from a farm, Dorothea Toye looked like a child who had just splashed out of the sea to be dried with a rough towel by her mother. He had been surprised when she had ordered a book of prints by Aubrey Beardsley.
He had been even more surprised when one of his old customers, Mr. O’Malley, who to the best of his knowledge had never spoken a word to the lady, had followed her out of the shop one afternoon at three o’clock and gotten into a cab with her. It was then that he had awarded her her second star. Seeing her get into a cab with Mr. O’Malley heightened his interest in her.
She di
dn’t buy many books, but concentrated for the most part on the small record library against the rear wall, buying albums of every new Broadway musical. At the cut-rate music stores and discount houses farther downtown, she could have gotten the same albums much more cheaply, but as she once told Christopher while he was wrapping the album of Hair for her, “I don’t go downtown much. I’m really a homebody.”
She was an outside chance, Dorothea Toye, but the day was passing swiftly.
He dialed her number. The phone rang and rang and he was just about to give up when it was answered.
“Yes?” The voice was businesslike, but it was Dorothea Toye’s.
“This is Christopher Bagshot.…”
“Who?” Now the voice was cold and suspicious.
It was a dream of Christopher’s that the day would come on which people would not say, “Who?” when he said, “This is Christopher Bagshot.”
“From the bookstore, Miss Toye.”
“Oh, yes.” The voice was warmer but had a hint of puzzlement in it.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Christopher said.
“Oh, no, I’m just making myself a bit of breakfast.” Christopher looked at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock, and he realized he was hungry. He wondered briefly where Miss Toye could have been the night before to be having breakfast now at one P.M.
“I guess you’re surprised, my calling you up like this, I mean,” Christopher said, “but I thought—”
“Oh, I get a lot of calls,” Miss Toye said. She sounded husky and not demure over the phone.
“I’m sure you do,” Christopher said gallantly. “What I am calling about is—I mean, what are you doing tonight?”
Miss Toye laughed peculiarly.
“I could see if I could get some tickets to a show,” he said hurriedly, “unless, of course, you’ve seen them all.”
“I’m booked from eight on tonight, honey,” Miss Toye said, “but if you want, you could come over right now.”
“I can’t leave the store,” Christopher said, confused by the bluntness of the invitation. “And I don’t close till around seven and.…”
“Well,” Miss Toye said, “I can handle it at seven, if you don’t waste any time getting over here. Fifty dollars.”
“What was that, Miss Toye?” Christopher said faintly.
“I said my price was fifty dollars.” She sounded annoyed at something.
At that moment, the front door of the shop opened and June came in, wearing a raincoat, although there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. She waved gaily. Christopher tried to frown in a businesslike way as he cupped the telephone in both hands. He felt himself getting very rosy. “I’m afraid that isn’t exactly what I had in mind, madam,” he said.
“Look, Mr. Bagshot,” Miss Toye said crisply, “you don’t give books away free, do you?”
June was approaching him swiftly.
“I’ll talk it over with my father,” Christopher said loudly as June came into earshot, “and perhaps we can come to an arrangement.”
Miss Toye’s second laugh was even more peculiar than the first one had been. Christopher put the telephone down decisively as June kissed him on the cheek.
“My idea,” June said, “is that you close the shop and take me to lunch.”
“You know I can’t do that.” He walked away quickly from the phone and June followed him.
“You have to eat,” she said.
“I call the deli and they deliver,” he said. He wondered what he could say, without actually hurting her feelings, to discourage her from these raids at all hours.
“You look like someone in the final stages of mal de mer,” June said. She was studying French at Berlitz in case she ever had the occasion to go to France. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. Nothing.”
“My God, we’re emphatic today,” June said. “OK, nothing. You glad I came?”
“As always,” he said. His conversation with Miss Toye had done something cramping to his throat and he had difficulty in pronouncing words correctly. Ordinarily, he would have been happy to see June come into the shop, she was a sweet girl, darling, even, at certain times, but her coming in just when Miss Toye was laughing that bruising laugh on the telephone showed an unfortunate, even if unconscious, sense of timing on June’s part.
His nose began to run. It was a familiar symptom. Whenever he was under tension, his nose leaked. In school, he always went to exams with three large handkerchiefs in his pockets. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew vigorously.
“Are you catching a cold or something?” June asked.
“Not that I know of.” He sneezed. He wondered if any other of Miss Toye’s potential clients were affected the same way after a telephone call.
“I know an absolutely fabulous pill that—”
“I am not catching a cold,” he said. He blew again.
“You don’t have to snap my head off just because I show a normal human interest in your health,” June said.
“June,” he said, “I’m having a rough day. All alone here in the store and—”
“I’m sorry,” June said, instantly contrite. “That’s why I came. I thought I might cheer you up. Maybe even help you a little this afternoon.…”
“That’s awfully sweet of you,” he said, aghast at the thought of having June there with Miss Anderson coming in around five o’clock and maybe even Beulah Stickney, too, if she got rid of her aunt. “But it’s too complicated with someone who isn’t familiar with the stock and all.”
“Anyway,” June said, “I’m going to have lunch with you. No protests.” She certainly was a bossy girl. “I’ll go to the delicatessen myself and buy us both a perfectly scrumptious lunch and we’ll have a picnic in the office.”
There was no getting out of it, so he pulled out his wallet and took a five-dollar bill from it. But June waved it away. “This lunch is on me,” she said. “I’ve had a big week.” She worked out of an office that supplied temporary secretarial help and some weeks she made as much as $150. She wouldn’t take a permanent job, because she had come all the way East from Pasadena to become a singer. She studied with a man who said he had been responsible for Petula Clark.
Christopher put the five-dollar bill back into his wallet.
“Aren’t you insanely happy now I came by?” she asked.
“Insanely,” he said.
“Then smile,” she said, “and say something nice.”
“I love you,” he said. That’s what she meant when she said say something nice.
“That’s better,” she said. She kissed him briefly and went out, blonde and small, lovable and intent on marriage, in her raincoat. She always wore a raincoat to protect her throat, just in case.
He thought of Miss Toye and had to blow his nose again.
“Isn’t this cozy?” June asked as they ate their roastbeef sandwiches and pickles and drank their milk at the table in the little back office. June was against alcohol because of her throat.
“Uh-huh,” Christopher said, chewing hard on a piece of gristle.
“Sometimes, when I’m alone,” June said, “and I happen to think of this little room, I’m almost tempted to cry.”
The reason she was tempted to cry was that the first time they had kissed, it had been in the little back office. If you wanted to look at it that way, it had all started there. The kiss had been wonderful and it had led to other and better things and there was no denying they had had a lot of fun together and she was a pretty and lively girl, nubile and often gay; but still the dark little office was hardly a shrine, for heaven’s sake.
He tried to make himself think unkindly about her. When he was exposed to her for any length of time, he felt himself melting in her direction and once or twice he had been perilously close to asking her to marry him. Maybe if before he had met her he’d known a lot of tall girls intimately and had a standard of comparison, they’d be married already.
Sitting there in
the cluttered little office watching her lick mayonnaise off her finger with delicious unself-consciousness, he was tempted to forget his whole damn crusade and ask her to have dinner with him that night, even though he’d lied to her successfully and told her he had to have dinner with his mother and father in Westchester that night—they were getting uptight about never seeing him anymore, now that he’d found a girl. But the front doorbell rang just as he was about to speak and he had to go out into the store and stand around for almost a half hour while an elderly couple shuffled around the poetry counter denouncing Allen Ginsberg and finally buying a play in verse by Christopher Fry that must have been on the shelves since the year one.
While the old couple were still fussing around the store, June had come out of the back office, putting on her raincoat, and had whispered, “I have to go now.” She had a date with a girlfriend in front of the Museum of Modern Art and then, since he was busy tonight, maybe they’d go to a concert at Town Hall. “Call me tomorrow. And have a nice evening with your family,” she said, and kissed him quickly, at a moment when the old couple had their backs to them.
He had a severe twinge of guilt as he watched the brave little raincoated figure vanish through the doorway. Perfidy did not come easily to him. He even took a step toward the door, to tell her to come back, but at that moment the old lady called, “Young man, I believe we’ll take this one,” waving the Christopher Fry about like a captured bird.
When he escorted the old couple to the door and opened it for them, he looked across the street and could have sworn that he saw Paulette Anderson walking uptown, holding the arm of a man with wavy gray hair. They seemed to be in earnest conversation.
One more shot, he decided, and then the hell with it.
He went through his address book with the utmost care. He didn’t want to have any more Dorothea Toyes sprung on him.
He stopped at the Ms. Marsh, Susan**. She wasn’t preternaturally tall, but she was a good size and you could be sure she wouldn’t ever ask a man $50 for the pleasure of her company. She was a dark girl with green eyes who was politically advanced, although in a quiet, unpushy way. The reason Christopher knew she was politically advanced was that the only books she ever showed an interest in were written by people like Fanon and Marcuse and Cleaver and LeRoi Jones and Marshall McLuhan. She had beautiful legs. It was unsettling to sell books of that nature to a girl with legs as beautiful as that.