Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “My sister’ll believe me. And Willard.” Martin started back toward the candlelit garden. “We’ll see about the rest.” He heard Bowman’s steps behind him.

  “Wait a minute,” Bowman said.

  Martin stopped and the two men faced each other in silence.

  Then Bowman chuckled drily. “Is that why you decided to stay another night, boy?”

  “Yes.”

  Bowman nodded. “I thought so.” He rubbed his face with the back of his hand, making a little dry, unshaven sound. “All right,” he said in a flat voice. “Supposing it was me. What do you want?”

  “I want to know what you were doing there,” Martin said.

  “What’s the difference?” Bowman said. Now he sounded like a stubborn and unreasonable child and his voice had taken on a whining, high tone. “Was anything stolen? Was anything broken? Let’s put it this way—I was paying a visit.”

  “With a ladder?” Martin said. “That’s a hell of a visit.”

  “People shouldn’t leave ladders lying around.” Bowman said wearily. “Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you go to France and leave me alone?”

  “What were you doing there?” Martin persisted.

  Bowman waved both his hands, clumsily, in a broken gesture. “I was on my rounds,” he said.

  “For the last time,” Martin said, “I tell you I’m going to go to the police.”

  Bowman sighed. “All I ever do is watch,” he said, whispering. “I never hurt anyone. Why don’t you leave me alone, boy?”

  “What do you mean, watch?”

  Bowman chuckled, almost soundlessly. “I watch the happy ones,” he said. Now he sounded coquettish, like a young girl, and Martin, for the first time, began to wonder about the sanity of the man standing beside him on the moonlit dewy grass. “You’d be surprised,” Bowman said, as though imparting a secret, “how many happy people there seem to be around here. All ages, all sizes, all religions.… They go around with big smiles on their faces, they shake each other’s hands, they go to work in the morning and kiss their wives at the station when they come home, they sing at parties, they put money in the collection box at church, they make speeches at the parent-teachers’ association meetings about how to bring up the younger generation, they go off together on vacations, they invite their friends in, they make love, they deposit money in the bank and buy insurance, they make deals, they tell each other how successful they are, they buy new houses, they greet their in-laws and baptize their children, they get checked for cancer every twelve months, they all seem to know what they’re doing, what they want, where they’re going.… Like me.” He chuckled again, the same rasping chuckle. “The major question is, who’re they fooling? Who am I fooling? Look at me.” He came close to Martin, his breath, freighted with gin and wine and brandy, hot in Martin’s face. “The biggest house in the neighborhood, the prettiest wife. I’m proud to say ten men around here’ve made passes at her and she’s never as much as blinked an eye. Three children who say ‘Yes sir, no sir,’ and recite their prayers at night, if I die before I wake, and remember Mommy and Daddy. And it’s all a show. Don’t believe a minute of it. Sometimes I make love to my wife and it doesn’t mean anything. One animal falling on another animal in the jungle. One driven, the other—what shall I say—resigned. No more than that. I get up from her bed and I go to my bed and I’m ashamed of myself, I don’t feel like a human being. Can you understand that? I’m drunk, I’m drunk, but if I ever was honest when I was sober, I’d say the same thing. And what does it mean to my wife? She’s more interested in whether she’s going to buy green curtains next year for the dining room than whether I live or die. I have the feeling when I go to work in the morning, she has to stop and think hard three times a day to remember my name. And my children—they’re a separate state, behind frontiers, waiting for the appropriate time to declare war. Surprise—drop the bomb and kill Daddy. It’s normal. Read the papers. Children kill their fathers every day. To say nothing of abandoning them and letting them die. Look at the populations of the old peoples’ homes. The incurable wards. I sit in an office all day, I hire people and fire them, I make important, businesslike gestures, and right behind me all the time, what is there—a blank, a big blank.”

  Martin stepped back a little, feeling smothered by the alcoholic breath, by the sudden, racing spill-over of language from this man who until that moment had sounded more or less like everyone else Martin had met during the weekend. “Still,” he said, wondering if Bowman was cunningly sidetracking him with this incoherent, rambling, pitiable confession, “what’s that got to do with climbing balconies and looking in at windows?”

  “I’m looking for an answer.” Bowman grinned slyly. “I’m an explorer, looking for an oasis in the middle of the great American desert. I’m an optimist. I believe there’s an answer. I believe that some people aren’t fooling. They seem happy and they are happy. Only you have to catch them by surprise, boy, when they don’t know you’re watching them, to find out the secret. Anybody puts a smile on his face when he knows you’re watching him, like getting your picture taken in front of a monument on vacation. The beast in his natural habitat. Preferably at a significant moment, as the photographers say, when the secret is laid bare. Sitting having a cup of coffee late at night in the kitchen talking over what his life is like with his wife. Is there love on his face, hate, boredom? Is he thinking of going off to Florida with another woman? Helping his ten-year-old son with his homework. What does his face reveal? Does he have any hope? Making love. Do they show the tenderness of human beings, do they touch each other with benevolence and gratitude, or is it one animal falling on another animal, like my wife and myself?”

  “You mean to say,” Martin asked incredulously, “that you try to watch at times like that?”

  “Of course,” Bowman said calmly.

  “You’re crazy,” Martin said.

  “Well, if you’re going to talk like that …” Bowman shrugged, sounding aggrieved and misunderstood. “There’s no sense in trying to explain to you. What’s crazier—living the way I do, year after year, not feeling anything, thinking, Somebody has the secret, it’s there, I just have to find out, and doing something about it. Or just giving up, surrendering.… What is it? Is the whole thing a blank? For everybody? Do you know? Maybe you ought to watch outside a couple of windows yourself sometime,” Bowman said contemptuously. “With that honest, eager California face of yours. Stay here—I’ll take you around with me. You’ll get the inside dope on some of the people right there now—” He gestured toward the candlelit garden. “That pretty one who was on your right during dinner. Mrs. Winters. The one that’s hanging all over her husband all the time and laughing at his jokes as though he made a million dollars a year on television and holding his hands at parties as though they’re going to be married three days later. I’ve been there, I’ve been there.… You know what they do when they get home at night?”

  “I don’t want to hear,” Martin said. He had liked Mrs. Winters.

  “That’s all right,” Bowman said mockingly. “It won’t offend your pristine sense of modesty. They never say a word. She goes upstairs and takes a handful of pills and greases her face and puts a mask over her face to sleep and he sits downstairs by himself, with one light on, drinking whiskey straight. And after he’s knocked off half a bottle he lies down on the couch with his shoes on and sleeps. I’ve been there four times and it’s been the same each time. Pills, whiskey, silence. The public lovebirds. God, it makes me laugh. And the others … even when they’re alone. You don’t know our minister, do you, the Right Reverend Fenwick?”

  “No,” Martin said.

  “No, of course not. We played tennis today instead of worshipping.” Bowman chuckled. “I made a call on the man of God a few Sundays ago. His bedroom is on the ground floor. He’s a marvelous-looking gray-haired gentleman. If you were casting somebody to play the Pope in a movie, he’d get the job in five minutes. Always with a soft h
umble smile on his face, and divine forgiveness radiating out from him all over the state of Connecticut. And what do you think he was doing when I looked in on him? He was standing in front of a full-length mirror with only his shorts on, pulling his gut in, looking at himself critically and approvingly in profile. You’d’ve been surprised what good condition he’s in, he must do fifty pushups a day. Standing there, pushing his hair forward in little dabs, like a woman making up, to get that effect of other-worldly carelessness he’s famous for. He always looks as though he’s too busy communicating with God to pay attention to mundane things like combing his hair. And he was making faces at himself and raising his hands in holy benediction, practicing for next Sunday’s performance, just about naked in his shorts, with legs like an old fullback. The old faker. I don’t know what I hoped for. Maybe to find him on his knees, praying, in communion with God, with some secret happiness showing on his face that never is quite there in church. For the joys of the flesh,” Bowman said, switching abruptly, speaking in a confidential whisper, leaning toward Martin in the darkness, “I tried our African cousins.…”

  “What’re you talking about?” Martin asked, puzzled.

  “Our colored population,” Bowman said. “Closer to the primeval push. Simpler, I thought, less inhibited. The Slocums have a colored couple. You saw them passing drinks last night. About thirty-five years old, both of them. The man’s huge, he looks as though he could move walls with his bare hands. And the woman’s beautiful. Oversized, black, with great big breasts and a fantastic behind. I’ve sat behind them in the movies and when they laugh it’s like cannon going off in a twenty-one-gun salute. You’d think that if you saw them in bed together you’d shrivel with shame at your own white, niggling, sin-haunted, worn-out, puritanical gropings. Well, I saw them once. They have a room back of the kitchen at the Slocums and you can get up real close. I saw them, and they were in bed together all right, only all they were doing was reading. And do you know what she was reading?” Bowman laughed breathlessly. “She was reading The Second Sex. That’s that French book about how badly women have been treated since the Pleistocene Age. And he was reading the Bible. The first page. Genesis. In the beginning, there was the Word.” Bowman laughed again, sounding delighted with his story. “I went back a couple of times, but they had the curtains drawn, so I don’t know what they’re reading these days.…”

  “Harry! Harry!” It was Mrs. Bowman’s voice, calling. She was standing, a white blur in the moonlight, about thirty yards from them. “What’re you doing out there? People’re going home.”

  “Yes, dear,” Bowman called. “We’re coming right away. I’m just coming to the tag line of a joke with young Martin, here. I’ll be right along.”

  “Well, hurry. It’s late.” Mrs. Bowman turned and walked through the moonlight back toward the house. Bowman watched his wife silently, his eyes brooding and puzzled.

  “What did you want from my sister and Willard?” Martin asked, shaken by everything he had heard, no more certain now about what he should do than when he had arrived that evening.

  “They were my last hope,” Bowman said in a low voice. “We’d better get back to the party.” He started across the lawn, Martin walking at his side.

  “If ever two people seemed”—Bowman hesitated—“connected—dear to each other, pleasurable to each other … I’ve come home on the same train with Willard in the evening and the wives’re waiting, and your sister always seems to be a little apart, preparing herself, almost, and something happens to her face when she sees him.… They’re not all over each other, of course, like the Winters, but once in a while they touch each other with their fingertips. And with their boys … They know something, they’ve found something, that I don’t know and I haven’t found. When I see them, I have the feeling that I’m on the verge. It’s almost there, I almost have it. That’s why you nearly caught me the other night. God, I’ve been doing this for years and nobody’s ever come close. I’m careful as a cat. But that night, watching all three of you in the living room, late at night, I forgot where I was. When you came to the window, I … I wanted to smile, to say … to say, yes, good for you … Ah, maybe I’m wrong about them, too.”

  “No,” Martin said, thoughtfully, “you’re not wrong.”

  They were close to the candlelit tables by now and somebody had turned on the radio inside the house and from a loudspeaker on the terrace music was playing and several couples were dancing. Willard and Linda were dancing together, lightly, not close to each other, barely holding each other. Martin stopped and put his hand on Bowman’s arm to halt him. Bowman was trembling and Martin could feel the little shudders, as though the man were freezing, through the cloth of his sleeve.

  “Listen,” Martin said, watching his sister and her husband dance, “I ought to tell them. And I ought to tell the police. Even if nobody could prove anything, you know what that would mean to you around here, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Bowman said, his eyes on the Willards, longing, baffled, despairing. “Ah, do whatever you want,” he said flatly. “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  “I’m not going to say anything now,” Martin said, sounding harsher than he felt, trying, for Bowman’s sake, to keep the pity out of his voice. “But my sister writes me every week. If I hear that anybody has seen a man outside a window—once—just once …”

  Bowman shrugged, still watching the dancers. “You won’t hear anything,” he said. “I’ll stay home at night. I’m never going to learn anything. Why’m I kidding myself?”

  He walked away from Martin, robust and demented, a spy lost in a dark country, his pocket crammed with confused intelligence, impossible to decipher. He walked slowly among the dancers, and a moment later, Martin heard his laughter, loud, genial, from the table that was being used as a bar and around which three or four of the guests were standing, including Mr. and Mrs. Winters, who had their arms around each other’s waists.

  Martin turned from the group at the bar and looked at his sister and her husband, dancing together on the flagstone terrace to the soft, late-at-night music, that sounded faraway and uninsistent in the open garden. Looking at them with new understanding, he had the feeling that Willard did not feel the need of leading, or Linda of following, that they moved gently and irresistibly together, mysteriously enclosed, beyond danger.

  Poor Harry, he thought. But even so, he thought, starting over to Linda to tell her he was ready to go home, even so, tomorrow I’m buying them a dog.

  The Troubled Air

  To Martin

  1

  THE CLOCK ON THE ACOUSTICALLY PERFECT WALL MOVED TOWARD nine-thirty, nibbling at Thursday night. The scarred Negro in the cashmere jacket peered through his glasses at the pages in his hand and drawled a line that had seemed funny to everyone in the studio at rehearsal. Fifteen million people laughed. Or were supposed to laugh. Or perhaps didn’t laugh. There would be repercussions from this later in the year.

  In the control room, Clement Archer, behind the sound-proof glass, waved his arm to indicate that time was running out. Loyally, on the floor in front of the microphone, the next actor, Victor Herres, spoke a little more quickly than usual and bit crisply into other people’s cues and the lost seconds were won back from the electric clock.

  Momentarily victorious over Thursday, Archer leaned back in his chair and squinted at the actors on the other side of the glass. Eloquent fish in a clear aquarium, they swam on the element of time up to and away from the nourishment of the microphones, their voices and the sound of musical instruments from another room blended delicately by the ear-phoned engineer who sat at the control board next to Archer.

  The music swelled slowly and the conductor was putting more trumpet into it than Pokorny, the composer, had wanted. Archer was certain that Pokorny, sitting behind him on the edge of a chair, would make a face at this point. He turned and looked. Pokorny was making a face. Pokorny never hid anything. The loose fat jowls, the little pale eyes beh
ind the European glasses, the pink bow mouth immediately reflected every thought that passed through Pokorny’s head. Right now he was making a complicated face, in which he was trying to announce to the world that he was not responsible for the sounds that the butcher of a conductor was drawing from the orchestra, that American musicians were too loud, that he had warned everyone, had fought and as usual lost, because he was a foreigner.

  Archer smiled and turned back to the program. He liked the music. He rubbed his bald head reflectively. He had lost his hair by the time he was twenty-five and in the process had developed a nervous habit of touching the top of his head, as though to confirm the bad news a dozen times an hour. The disaster was now twenty years in the past and confirmation was history, but the sorrowful investigating movement remained.

  The music died down and the closing scene of the program swept smoothly toward the finish. Across the studio, in a small gallery behind another window, the sponsor and O’Neill, the agency man, sat quietly. The sponsor had a dignified expression on his face. He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t look restless. I will settle for dignity, Archer thought, and listened to Herres making the long final speech.

  The scene ended, the music swelled up, Pokorny made another, less complicated face, the announcer praised the product generously, but with decorum. The sponsor looked dignified; the closing theme roared up and faded; the engineer twisted a dial. A pleasant silence filled the control room for a few seconds. Archer blinked and stood up as the actors in the studio broke away from the microphones and started to talk among themselves. Archer patted the engineer’s shoulder. “You were lovely, Johnny,” he said. “Never, in many long years of listening, have I been so moved by an engineer. Such delicacy with the left hand, such virility with the strings, such control with the American Federation of Radio Artists.”