Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  But in the meantime, Mr. Gadsden was working powerfully on her stockings. There was a fiendish ingenuity to his attack. When she defended one place, the assault shifted, with demonic energy, to another. If this was the way he was when exhausted, he must be perfectly shocking when fresh. If his public were to see him now, she thought, they might take his pronouncements on public morality with a grain of salt.

  Suddenly, he stopped. He didn’t move away, but he stopped. He looked at her, wrinkling his lovely gray eyebrows inquiringly. His hair was tousled and he looked sad and disturbed. As long as he didn’t move, she liked him very much. If you had to do it with an old man, she thought, he wouldn’t be a bad one to start with. She lay on the couch, disheveled, skin showing here and there.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Are you a Lesbian?”

  She began to cry. Nothing as bad as that had ever been said to her before, she said. What she didn’t tell him was that she was something even stranger. She was a virgin. She felt that she would die of shame if Mr. Gadsden found out that she was a virgin.

  She sobbed bitterly, not knowing whether it was because Mr. Gadsden had asked her if she was a Lesbian or because she was a virgin. He took her in his arms and stroked her hair and kissed her tears away and said. “There, there, treasure,” and in eight minutes she was lying naked on top of the day bed and Mr. Gadsden was taking off his shirt. She kept her eyes averted from him and looked at the photographs on the walls, of Mr. Gadsden with President Kennedy and Mr. Gadsden with Mayor Lindsay and Mr. Gadsden with John Kenneth Galbraith. When the moment comes, she thought, I’ll close my eyes. I can’t bear the thought of doing it in front of all those important people.

  Mr. Gadsden seemed to be taking a long time and she looked over at him out of the corner of her eye. He was putting his shirt on.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’d better get dressed. I can’t go through with it.”

  She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of Mr. Gadsden, President Kennedy, Mayor Lindsay, John Kenneth Galbraith.

  But she couldn’t shut her ears. “I looked down at you, lying there, so young and perfect,” Mr. Gadsden was saying, “and I thought of you in your white uniform performing those humble necessary tasks in Dr. Levinson’s office, peering in at my bleeding jaws with all those weird little stumps of teeth, the ugly maw of age, and I thought, Omar Gadsden, you are trading on innocence and pity, you despicable old lecher; it is unbecoming and disgusting.”

  It was too bad that she was in no condition to appreciate him at that moment, because later on she realized he had never been as eloquent or convincing on any of the programs on which she had seen him.

  “Get dressed, Paulette,” he said gently, living up to his image. “I’ll go into the bathroom until you’re ready.”

  He left the room and she dressed slowly, half hoping he would come out and say he’d changed his mind. She didn’t know how she’d ever be able to get this far with a man again.

  But he didn’t come out until she was fully dressed and had put up her hair, which had fallen loose in the scuffling.

  He poured stiff whiskeys and they sat in elegiac silence in the dying light of the late October afternoon. When she reminded him timidly that he’d wanted to go to the party downtown, he said his jaws were hurting him and he was going to stay home and nurse them.

  They had another drink and it was dark when she left his apartment, leaving him sunk in a chair, swishing whiskey around his wounded gums.

  She remembered that she had told the boy in the bookstore that she’d come in around five. She didn’t really make a decision, but she started across toward Madison. She had to go downtown tonight anyway, she told herself.

  People came crowding into the baggage and Customs area from Immigration in clotted lumps of tourism and there was so much milling around that it would have been hard to pick out your own mother from the visitors’ gallery, let alone a man you had only seen for thirty days in your whole life nine months before. Beulah peered through the plate glass anxiously, trying to spot Jirg, with people all around her waving spastically to relatives on the floor below and holding up babies and waving the babies’ hands for them.

  Finally, she saw him and she took a deep breath. He was wearing a long black-leather coat, down to his ankles, like an SS officer, and a green Tyrolean hat, with a feather. He was warm and he opened his coat and took off his hat to fan his face. Under the coat, he was wearing a bright-green tweed suit. Even from where she was standing, the bumps on the tweed looked like an outbreak of green boils. And when he took his hat off, she saw that he had gotten a haircut for his trip. A good economical haircut that would last a long time, probably until next spring. A wide pale expanse showed under the high, sharp hairline on the back of his neck, and his ears, she noticed for the first time, stuck out alarmingly from the bare pink scalp. Out of a sense of style, he was wearing long pointed Italian blue-suede shoes and fawn-colored suede gloves.

  She regretted that she was farsighted.

  Before he could see her, she shrank back away from the window to think. She wheeled and ran down a corridor and went into the ladies’ room. She looked around her wildly. There was a Tampax vending machine on the wall. “Thank God,” she said. She pushed past a square little Puerto Rican lady with three little girls and fumbled for a coin and put it into the machine.

  When she came out of the ladies’ room, she didn’t bother to go back to the visitors’ gallery, but went directly to the exit where the passengers came out after clearing Customs. She fixed a wan smile on her lips and waited.

  When he finally came out of Customs, he was thriftily carrying his own bags and sweating. He had put on weight since the end of the skiing season and his face was curiously round. He was short, she noticed, almost as short as the bookstore boy. Was it possible that he could have shrunk since last winter? When he saw her, he dropped his bags, making an old lady behind him stumble, and roared “Schatzl,” at her and nearly knocked down a child of three running over to embrace her.

  The leather coat smelled as though it had been improperly cured, she noted as he kissed her, and he had doused himself with airline lavatory perfume. If I have a friend at this airport who recognizes me, she thought as she permitted herself to be chucked under the chin, I shall sink through the floor.

  “Here,” she said, “we’d better get your bags out of the way. I’ll help you.”

  “Finally in your country I come,” Jirg said as they gathered up the bags and started toward the taxis. “Where is the nearest bed?”

  “Sssh,” Beulah said. “They understand English here.” Her eyes swiveled around uneasily. The people on both sides of her looked very thoughtful.

  “They giff me a big party for farewell, the boys,” Jirg said. For the first time she realized his voice had been trained for shouting instructions to people caught in distant avalanches. “They know you wait for me. You should hear some of the jokes they make. You would laughing die.”

  “I bet,” Beulah said.

  They got into a taxi, Jirg holding onto the little air travel bag he was carrying.

  “Where to, lady?” the driver asked.

  Oy, she thought. “I’ll tell you when you cross the bridge to Manhattan,” she said.

  The driver gave her a look. “Games,” he said. He was one of those insufferable New York taxi drivers. He started his car with a neck-snapping jerk.

  Jirg put his hand on her knee and looked conqueringly into her eyes. He had his hat on again.

  “And what was the weather like?” she asked lovingly. “In Austria this summer, I mean.”

  “Always rain,” he said. “Sometimes hail.” He stroked her knee. In Austria it would have sent her through the ceiling with desire. His hands were horny with callus and she could hear him making snags in her stocking.

  “Did you enjoy your trip?”

  “Filthy,” he said. “The plane was all Amerikaners. Maybe they are all right in their own country, but they haff no Kultur when
they voyage. Except for one Amerikanerin I know.” He leered seductively at her. He had had his teeth fixed since she had seen him last and one molar and one front tooth were pure gold. His hand went up her thigh, snagging thread.

  “How was the food on the plane?” she asked, grabbing the other hand fondly, to immobilize it. She regretted not having worn culottes that day. They didn’t offer much protection, but they offered some.

  “Swiss food,” he said. “For cows. And they make you pay for drinks. The Swiss love one thing. Money.”

  “All airlines charge for drinks in tourist class,” she said, sweetly reasonable.

  “Drink,” he said. “Oh, that reminds me.” He smiled benevolently. “I brought my Amerikanisches Schatzl a gift.”

  In the rearview mirror, she saw the taxi driver grimace, as though he had a gas pain. Jirg took his hand off her leg and dug in the air travel bag on the seat beside him and took out a small squarish unlabeled bottle. She recognized the shape of the bottle and felt her duodenum contract.

  Jirg proudly held up the bottle. “See,” he said, “I remembered.”

  It was a drink she loathed, a Tyrolean home product made up of odds and ends of herbs and poisonous weeds that grew in dank spots near precipices in the Alps. Jirg imbibed it in huge quantities, like a giant intake valve. She had pretended to be one of the boys in Austria and had expressed her enthusiasm for the foul stuff. He twisted the cork and offered her the bottle. A smell came out of the neck of the bottle like old and ill-cared-for animals.

  She took a ladylike sip, managing not to gag.

  He took a huge swig. “Ach,” he said, nostalgically, “the nights we drank together.”

  “Hey, lady,” the taxi driver half turned his head, scowling. “No drinking allowed in this cab.”

  “You’ll have to put the bottle away, luv,” Beulah said. “He says it’s against the law.”

  “It is not believable,” Jirg said. “Drinking against the law. He is making fun of me. I believe he is a Jew.” Jirg’s face turned a sudden Master Race purple. “I haff heard about New York.”

  “He isn’t a Jew, luv, he’s an Irishman.” She looked at the driver’s ticket, stuck in its frame at the back of the front seat. The man’s name was Meyer Schwartz. “Put the bottle away, luv. We’ll drink it later.”

  Muttering in German, Jirg put the bottle back in the air travel bag. The driver swerved the taxi in front of a truck, missing it by seven inches.

  By the time they reached the cutoff to Shea Stadium, Jirg’s hand was all the way under her skirt, sliding under her panties. She was surprised it had taken that long. Luckily, she was in the right hand corner of the back seat and the driver couldn’t see what was happening in his mirror.

  Jirg panted convincingly in the region of her neck, while his hand worked expertly between her thighs, his middle finger amorously exploring. She lay back, tense but waiting. Suddenly, the middle finger stopped moving. Then it moved again, two or three sharp scientific probes. Jirg took his hand away abruptly and sat up.

  “Scheisse,” he said, “vas ist das?”

  “That’s fate, luv.” Beulah sat up, too.

  “Fate? I do not know that word.”

  “It means what will be will be.”

  “Speak slowly.”

  “It means I have the curse, luv.”

  “Who cursed?” he said. “So, I said Scheisse.”

  “It’s a word American girls use when they are temporarily out of commission. Not in working order. Not ready for visitors.”

  “Four thousand miles I flew,” Jirg said piteously.

  “Mother nature, luv,” Beulah said. “Take heart. It only lasts a few days. For most girls.” She was preparing him for the moment when she would tell him it sometimes went on with her for months, especially in the autumn.

  “Vat vill I do for a few days?” Jirg whined.

  “Sight-see,” Beulah said. “I think the boat that goes all around Manhattan Island is still running.”

  “I did not come to New York to go boat riding,” Jirg said. He looked bleakly out the window at the passing architecture. “New York is a pigsty,” he said.

  He sat in silence, disapproving of New York, until they had crossed the Triborough Bridge.

  “We are in Fun City, lady,” the taxi driver said. “Where to?”

  “That motel on Ninth Avenue,” Beulah said. “I forget the name.” She had never been inside it, but it looked clean, efficient and inexpensive from the outside. It had the added charm of being distant from her flat. She was sure there would be ice water for Jirg, probably running out of the taps, which would entertain him for a day or two.

  “We are not to your apartment going?” Jirg asked.

  “I was going to explain about that, luv,” Beulah said nervously. “You see, I have a roommate.”

  “Does she ski?”

  “That isn’t the point, luv. She … she is neurotically puritanical. Religious.”

  “So?” Jirg said. “I am also religious. Nobody is more religious than Austria. I will talk religion with your roommate.”

  “She believes it is immoral for unmarried girls to sleep with men.” Beulah was briefly thankful that Rebecca was not there to overhear this comment.

  “I did not come to New York to be married,” Jirg said warily.

  “Of course not, luv. But just to keep peace in the apartment, it would be better if you stayed in a hotel for the first few days. Until she gets used to you.”

  “In Austria,” Jirg said, “I haff slept in the same room with two girls. In the same bed.”

  “I’m sure you have, luv,” Beulah said soothingly. “But we have different customs here. You’ll catch on in no time.”

  “I do not like New York,” Jirg said gloomily. “I do not like New York at all.”

  At the motel, which was not as inexpensive as it looked, Beulah got Jirg a single room with a shower. He wanted her to go up with him, but she said she was poorly, because of her malady; he could see how pale she was, she wouldn’t even have stirred from her bed that day if he hadn’t been arriving from Zurich; and if she didn’t go home and lie down with a cold compress, she probably would faint right there in the lobby. She gave him $30 in American money, because all he had with him was Austrian shillings and Swiss francs, and told him to eat in the hotel so he wouldn’t get lost. If she was strong enough that evening, she said, she would call him.

  She watched him follow the bellboy with his bags to the elevator. When the elevator doors slid shut behind him, she sprinted for the main entrance.

  She walked blindly cross-town. By Eighth Avenue, she had decided she was going skiing in Sun Valley this winter. By Seventh Avenue, she had decided to take an offer for a modeling job in Brazil that meant leaving by Tuesday. By Sixth Avenue, she decided she wasn’t going home before midnight, because she wasn’t going to give Rebecca the satisfaction. By Fifth Avenue, she realized that that meant having dinner alone. By Madison Avenue, she remembered Christopher Bagshot. She went into a bar and sat alone over a white lady, trying to decide which was worse.

  It was past six o’clock, 6:15, to be exact, and Sue Marsh hadn’t shown up at the bookstore for her tennis bag. Christopher was beginning to worry. He could not keep open, waiting for her. He was disappointed in her. He hadn’t thought of her as a flighty girl who made idle promises. And Miss Anderson hadn’t come into the store at five o’clock, either, as she had said she would. He knew he should be angry at the type of girl who treated a man with so little consideration, but what he really felt was desolation.

  Then the door opened from the comparative darkness of Madison Avenue and a tall girl with straight blonde hair came into the store. She was wearing a miniskirt that showed a great length of leg, and a hip-length fun fur, more or less electric-blue in color. He had never seen her before and from the uncertain way she moved around the shop, it looked as though she had never been in a bookstore before. He moved briskly toward her. “Is there anything I can do for you, miss
?” he said.

  She had big gray eyes that seemed to be imploring him. She was beautiful, in a strange, haunted way, like some of those movie actresses in Swedish pictures who have affairs with their brothers or sisters. An incoherent, unreasonable hope stirred in his breast. “Do you have any cookbooks?” she said.

  “We have a selection. This way, please.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said, in a near whisper. Her voice trembled. He wondered if she was a young wife who had a fancy dinner to prepare that evening for her husband’s boss or somebody and who had met disaster in the kitchen an hour or so before the guests were to arrive. Saturday evening at 6:15 was a queer time to buy a cookbook. He didn’t catch sight of a wedding ring, though.

  He hovered near. “Just what sort of cooking are you interested in? French, Italian, American …?”

  “Oh, any kind.”

  “There’s an amusing one that has come out fairly recently,” he said. Because it was getting so late, he resolved to be daring. “The Myra Breckinridge Cook Book, by a friend of the author, Gore Vidal. It’s quite risqué.” He chuckled, to show that she could take his risqué or leave it alone. “Here, let me get it down for you.” He reached for the shelf. It wasn’t there. He had seen it when he closed the shop the night before and he knew he hadn’t sold it since. Somebody had stolen it during the day. “I’m afraid I’ve sold the last copy,” he said lamely. “If you’ll give me your name and address, I’ll order one and—”

  “Oh, there’s no need to bother, thank you,” she said softly. Just from the tone of her voice, you knew she wasn’t the sort of girl who would say she’d come by at five o’clock and never show up, or the kind of girl who deposited a tennis bag and then irresponsibly left it with you while she consorted with New Left agitators who made love in public parks.

  The girl took down a huge illustrated book on French cooking and opened it at random to a page on which there was a color photograph of poularde de Bresse en cocotte. She stroked the page absently. “Chicken,” she said.