Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  They got into a cab and went downtown to his apartment.

  The City Was in

  Total Darkness

  Dutcher stood at the bar, feeling clean after his shower and still thirsty, looking at the girls, glad that he was alone, listening with one ear to the conversation around him. “The British and French,” a man in a hound’s-tooth-check jacket was saying, “will shuttle back and forth over Germany from Paris to Warsaw. And besides, he has no oil. Everybody knows Hitler has no oil.”

  “‘Darling,’ she says to me,” a large blonde woman said loudly to another large blonde woman, “‘darling, I haven’t seen you in forever. Where’ve you been—in the summer theater?’ She knows goddamn well I just finished two pictures for Fox!”

  “It’s a bluff,” the man in the hound’s-tooth-check said. “He’s going to back down, Russia or no Russia. He has no oil. Where are you today without oil?”

  “Mr. Dutcher.” The barman brought over a phone and plugged it in. “For you.”

  It was Machamer on the phone. “What’re you doing tonight, Ralph?” Machamer asked, his voice, as always, grating and noisy.

  “I’m drinking tonight,” Dutcher said. “I’m drinking and waiting for something good to happen to me.”

  “We’re going to Mexico,” Machamer said. “Want to come along?”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Dolly and me. Want to come along?”

  “What part of Mexico?” Dutcher asked. “What distant part of that verdant land? Vera Cruz, Mexico City …?”

  Machamer laughed. “Tia Juana. I got to be back on Tuesday to look for a job. Just overnight. For the races. Want to go?”

  “Without oil,” the man in the check was saying, “a war is absolutely impractical.” Dutcher looked gravely at him, considering whether or not he wanted to go to Mexico. He had avoided people after playing tennis in the afternoon, because he’d wanted to be alone, by himself, with the decks clear for something special and significant to happen to him on this special and significant week end.

  “Have they got bullfights in Tia Juana?” he asked Machamer.

  “Maybe,” Machamer said. “They have them sometimes. Come on, this is Labor Day, there’s nobody in Hollywood.”

  “I’m tired,” Dutcher said. “I’ve been listening to the radio for seven nights and I played tennis and I’m thirsty.”

  “You can lie down in the back of the car, with a bottle,” Machamer said. Machamer was a young writer and very impressed with Dutcher’s two novels and constantly was after him. “I’ll drive.”

  “I never saw a bullfight,” Dutcher said. “Did you ever see one there?”

  “Oh, nuts!” Machamer said. “Dolly and I’ll be over in fifteen minutes to pick you up.”

  “Tonight,” Dutcher said, “I would like to have a startling adventure.”

  “Oh, nuts,” Machamer said. “Fifteen minutes.”

  Dutcher gravely put the phone back on its pedestal. “I’ve got to find another bar,” he said to the barman. “Whenever people want to find me they call me here. It’s bad for the reputation. In two years nobody’ll give me a job.” The barman grinned. “Another Rum Collins,” Dutcher said, looking steadfastly at a slender girl down the bar who had long thick black hair and tremendous full breasts that jutted out like pennants in front of her. The barman looked too. “Doesn’t it break your heart?” the barman said.

  “California,” Dutcher said. “Specialty of the country.”

  “That cameraman,” one of the blonde ladies was saying, “he made me look like William S. Hart’s mother. I told him, too, but loud!”

  In Poland, now, the tanks were roaring over the dusty plains. German boys were climbing into bombers now, Dutcher thought, fiddling with the controls, peering at the instruments, thinking in this one minute when they were waiting and there was nothing to do, “Is this the last time?” and then getting the signal and sweeping off the field toward Warsaw. Cavalry, Dutcher remembered, the Poles had wonderful cavalry. He could just see a wonderful Polish cavalryman sitting heavily on his plodding mount, retreating, sleepless, from the border, stinking from the horse, listening to the bombers overhead, thinking of sleep and home and the English air force, kicking his horse wearily, saying, “Son of a bitch.” And the rich and their women, like the rich and their women everywhere, leaving quietly out the back way, while the dawn broke and the light came up and the boy in the bomber could get a good clear view of the cavalryman on the long, open road below.

  Dutcher looked at the girl with breasts like pennants. He sat at the bar, making believe he was staring blankly ahead, making believe nothing was happening inside him, feeling lust rise within him as definitely as water rising in a filling glass. General, non-particular lust, he thought, looking at the girl, pretty, with her black hair and long throat and bright print dress and that amazing bosom. I ought to be ashamed, Dutcher thought. The reader of Spinoza, the admirer of John Milton, the advocate of moral and economic reforms, a sufferer from general and indiscriminate lust ten times daily at the sight of a face, a ruffle, at the sound of a woman’s laugh.

  “We live on two planes,” Dutcher said to the bartender. The bartender smiled weakly.

  Hollywood, Dutcher thought, Hollywood had a great deal to do with it. It was the product of the neighborhood, and everywhere you went it was pushed in your face like cheese in Wisconsin, and you tried to keep yourself from thinking about Murder at Midnight and sex rushed in to fill the vacuum. Murder at Midnight was the picture he was writing. It had a long complicated story about a night-club singer who got drunks to spend money on her but who was genuine, all the way through, as everyone always said in the conferences. She had a small son from whom she bravely tried to conceal the tawdriness of her profession, and she got mixed up in a murder and she fled town in the rain with the son and the cops picked up an innocent man.… Dutcher shook his head. He never could get the story straight. Anyway, this was the week end. And he’d be through in two weeks and have enough money for eight months in New York. Why’m I kidding myself? he thought. I look at them in New York, too.

  Hollywood, you could always blame everything on Hollywood. That was the nicest thing about Hollywood.

  “Sacred and profane,” he told the bartender. “That’s the whole explanation.”

  Machamer came in with Dolly. “On to Mexico,” Machamer said.

  “Sit down,” Dutcher said, “and give me some good arguments. Dolly, you look beautiful.” Dolly looked as thin and as plain and nervous as ever, and Dutcher was always very careful, in this city of magnificent women, to be gallant and flattering to her. “Give me Dolly,” he said to Machamer, “and I’ll go to Mexico.”

  Dolly laughed. Her laugh was high and very nervous and always made Dutcher a little uncomfortable.

  “Poor Dutcher,” Dolly said. “Poor lonesome Dutcher.”

  “Get me a girl,” Dutcher said, suddenly, not thinking about it or why he was saying it, “and I’ll go with you.”

  “Now, Dutcher,” Machamer protested. “Eight o’clock Saturday night, Labor Day week end …”

  “On a high moral plane,” Dutcher said. “I just want to have somebody to talk to.”

  “You have plenty of girls,” Machamer said.

  “I’m tired of them,” Dutcher said. “Tonight I’m tired of them. War, Murder at Midnight, the fickleness of the male character, I’m tired of them. Tonight I’m in the mood for a new face.” Dutcher waved his hands elaborately, embroidering on the theme, although already half-sorry that he’d said anything about a girl. “A face moody, passionate, with the eyes cynical and despairing, the mouth lost and contemptuous and stormy, the hair tossed and black …”

  “He wants a character out of Thomas Wolfe,” Machamer said.

  “A face for the week end,” Dutcher said, his tongue sliding joyfully in his mouth after the Rum Collins, “a face tragic and tortured by the guilt of a slaughtering and slaughtered world …”

  Dolly jumped off her stool. �
��I’m going to call Maxine,” she said.

  “Who’s Maxine?” Dutcher asked, warily.

  “She’s very pretty,” Dolly said. “She’s an actress at Republic.”

  “Oh, God,” Dutcher said.

  “Don’t be such a snob,” said Dolly. “Give me a nickel.”

  “What do you expect at eight o’clock Saturday night?” Machamer gave her a nickel. “Heddy LaMarr?”

  “She’s very pretty,” Dolly repeated. “She just got in from New York and she may not be busy …” She started toward the phone.

  “On a high moral plane!” Dutcher shouted after her. “Remember!”

  Dolly strode out of sight toward the telephone booth. Dutcher watched her and then turned to Machamer. “When you read the papers,” he said, “and you read about airplanes bombing people and then being shot down, do you ever think about what it’s like up there, with the bullets coming at you and the plane bucking and all of a sudden just air below …?”

  “All the time,” Machamer said soberly.

  “During the Spanish War I used to dream about being machine-gunned by airplanes. I’d run and run along alleyways between garages and the planes would always come back and get me from an open side.” Dutcher finished his drink. “I wonder what garages had to do with it. The trouble with the human race is it’s too brave. You can get people to do anything—fly around and get shot at twenty thousand feet up, walk into hand grenades, fight naval battles. If the human race wasn’t so damn courageous, this would be a much better world to live in. That’s the sum total of my thinking in two months in Hollywood.”

  “Einstein is resting easy,” Machamer said. “He’s still got a good lead.”

  “I know,” said Dutcher. “But he doesn’t have to think in this climate.”

  Dolly slipped in between them. “It’s all settled,” she said. “Maxine is dying to go. She’s heard about you.”

  “Good or bad?” Dutcher asked.

  “She’s just heard about you. She says you mustn’t get fresh.”

  Dutcher wrinkled his nose. “Did she say ‘fresh’?”

  “Yes,” Dolly said.

  “I don’t like Maxine.”

  “Nuts,” Machamer said, and pulled him away from the bar and out to his car.

  * * *

  The big car sped toward Mexico. Dutcher sprawled luxuriously on the back seat with his head in Maxine’s lap. Occasionally he moved his head lazily because Maxine was wearing a suit trimmed all the way down the front with red fox and the fur got into his nose and tickled him.

  “He was an Italian,” Maxine was saying. “He had large estates in Italy and he had a good job in New York, fifteen thousand a year, but he didn’t like Mussolini.”

  “A character,” Dutcher said softly. “A beautiful character.”

  “We were engaged to be married,” Maxine said, speaking loudly, talking to Dolly, “but two weeks later he gave up his job. He relaxed; my little Wop relaxed.” She laughed a little sadly, stroked Dutcher’s head absently. “As soon as I meet a man he relaxes.”

  Machamer turned on the radio, and a man in London said that Hitler had not as yet answered Chamberlain’s ultimatum and an orchestra played “I May Be Wrong, But I Think You’re Wonderful.”

  Dutcher looked thoughtfully up at Maxine’s face. It was a round, full face, with a little full mouth that looked as though it had been created in God’s mind with a careful brilliant smear of lipstick already on it. “You’re very pretty,” he said seriously.

  Maxine smiled. “I’m not so bad,” she patted him in appreciation. “I’m a little fat at the moment. I drank too much wine in New York. Dolly, I heard that Gladys is marrying Eddie Lane. Is that true?”

  “In October,” Dolly said.

  Maxine sighed. “That Gladys. Eddie Lane’s old man is good for five hundred thousand a year. She was in my class at high school. Oil. Old man Lane is up to his navel in oil. Eddie Lane chased me for two years like a kid after a fire truck. What a goddamn fool I was to go to New York.”

  Dutcher laughed, looking up at her. “You have a nice, refreshing outlook on finance.”

  Maxine laughed with him. “Money is money,” she said. “I’ll get a little fatter and even Republic won’t have me, and then where’ll I be?”

  “I’ll write a play,” Machamer said, at the wheel, “and you can act in it in New York. They like them fat in New York.”

  “I tried that, too,” Maxine said grimly. “I thought of another way out. I had my step-father insured …”

  “Holy God!” Dutcher said. “For how much?”

  “Fifty thousand.”

  “We’re in the dough,” Dutcher said. “Stop and buy me a Lincoln.”

  “Hah,” said Maxine. “I paid his insurance three years then he went and got married on me. A little Irish biddy he saw waiting on table in San Luis Obispo.”

  They all laughed. “You’re wonderful,” Dutcher said. He pulled her down and kissed her. She kissed politely, with reserve, carefully, yet with a hint of vulgar accomplishment.

  Unsatisfactory, Dutcher thought, letting his head fall back, yet … Reader of Spinoza, admirer of John Milton …

  “This is Berlin,” a voice said on the radio. “The city is in total darkness. The Fuehrer has not replied as yet to the English ultimatum. There is constant troop movement at the Berlin railroad stations and trains are pouring toward the Polish frontier.”

  A band played “Begin the Beguine,” and Maxine talked to Dolly about another friend of theirs who had married a seventy-year-old man with fourteen blocks of real estate in downtown Cleveland.

  “The city is in total darkness,” Dutcher murmured. He lay back comfortably. This wasn’t so bad, racing through the night to a new country, with a new girl, even though it was only Tia Juana and only an ordinarily pretty girl, getting a little fat, and a little hard and not exactly the girl you’d pick to take with you on a visit to your old Professor of Ethics at Amherst. Still it was better than sitting at a bar all alone, thinking, “I’ll wait another ten minutes and then go out and buy another paper, see what they have to say.”

  He turned and buried his face in the red fox. There was a heavy smell of perfume, which was pleasant over the old smell of leather and gasoline in the back of the car. “Prince Matchabelli,” Dutcher said. “This fox fell into a well of Prince Matchabelli and drowned. A beautiful death. Machamer, did I ever tell you about Cynthia Messmore, who was a classmate of mine at PS 99 and Miss Finch’s? She married old Shamus Goonan, from the eleventh assembly district …”

  “No!” Machamer said, in tones of wonder.

  “A brilliant match,” Dutcher said. “He was on the WPA three days a week and he was good for seven hundred and sixty dollars a year, as long as he stayed sober. Sewer construction, he was a sewer construction magnate, he was up to his navel in …”

  “Are you making fun of me?” Maxine’s voice was hard, and Dutcher knew he ought to stop, but he couldn’t. He sat up.

  “I never should’ve left PS 99,” he said sadly. “Sex is the opium of the people. Turn on the radio, Machamer.”

  Dolly was shaking her head at him, but Dutcher made believe he was looking out the window. Mean, he thought, I’ve been mean. And I liked it. Tonight I want to be everything … mean, angry, noble, gracious, lordly, docile, everything. I want my emotions to be engaged. I can’t love her, I can’t make her love me, but I can make her angry at me and then win her over, then …

  “This is Paris,” a voice said. “All the lights are out. The Cabinet has been in conference since seven o’clock this evening.”

  Machamer turned the radio off.

  Dutcher felt Maxine eyeing him. He turned and looked pleasantly at her. After all, he thought, regarding her, she is a pretty girl, with a fine figure and we are going to be together until tomorrow night …

  “Is that how you’re going to the races tomorrow?” Maxine asked. “Without a tie?”

  Dutcher felt at his collar. He was wearing a pol
o shirt, open at the throat. “I guess so,” he said. “It’s awfully hot.”

  “I won’t go with you,” Maxine said, “unless you wear a tie.”

  “I haven’t got a tie.”

  “I won’t go with you,” Maxine said firmly.

  “We live in a tropical climate,” Dutcher said. “We mustn’t ever forget that. I’m a Northern man, I sweat like …”

  “I have an extra tie,” Machamer said. “You can wear that.”

  Dutcher nodded. “If it’ll make Maxine happy …” He smiled at her.

  “I wouldn’t be seen in front of all those people with a man who wasn’t wearing a tie.”

  “You’re right,” Dutcher said, smiling pleasantly at her. “Now that I think of it, you’re absolutely right.”

  Maxine smiled back at him. At least, he thought, I haven’t thought of Murder at Midnight since the trip began. At least, she’s done that.

  They stopped in San Diego and drank at a bar among a lot of sailors from the naval base. Dolly took some of the pills she was always taking and for a moment gripped Machamer’s arm and leaned over and kissed his neck. It was nearly two o’clock and the bar was closing and the sailors were drunk.

  “The United States will not get into any war,” a big blond farm boy jutting out of his flimsy blue uniform announced. “I have the guarantee of my congressman.”

  “Where you from?” Dutcher asked.

  “Arkansas.”

  Dutcher nodded as though this convinced him. The sailor gulped down what was left of his beer.

  “Let the Japs come over,” he called. “We’ll sweep ’em from the seas. I’d like to see the Japs just try and come over. I’d just like to see …”

  Maxine was smiling at the sailor.

  “I’m hungry,” Dutcher said, herding Maxine and Dolly toward the door. “I hate discussions of relative naval strength.”

  “That was heartening,” Machamer said, as they walked toward the bright lights of a waffle shop down the street. “An official representative of the United States armed forces says we won’t get into a war.”

  “He was a nice-looking boy,” Maxine said, as they entered the waffle shop. “If you took him out of that sailor suit.”