Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  She stood up, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Thank you,” she said. “You have my address. You know where to send the bill.”

  He stood up and escorted her to the door and opened it for her. “Adieu, Madame.” He bowed slightly.

  Outside, she walked quickly down the steep cobbles, toward the lake. There were many antique shops on the narrow street, clean, quaintly timbered, eighteenth century. Too picturesque by half for a day like this. She stopped in front of a shop and admired a leather-topped desk, a fine mahogany sideboard. Swiss law. But it had happened in Switzerland. They had no right to, it wasn’t just. When she thought this, even the way she was feeling, she had to laugh. A customer coming out of the shop glanced at her curiously.

  She went down to the lake and looked at the fountain frothing in its snowy column, a flag for swans, high out of the water, and the excursion boats moving sedately like 1900, out toward Ouchy, Vevey, Montreux, in the sunshine.

  She felt hungry. Her appetite these days was excellent. She looked at her watch. It was time for lunch. She went to the best restaurant she knew in the town and ordered truite au bleu. If you’re in a country try the specialties of the country. She had a bottle of white wine that was grown farther down the lake.

  Travel in Europe, the advertisements in the magazines announced. Relax in Switzerland.

  The afternoon loomed before her, endless.

  She could get on one of the steamers and throw herself overboard, in her smart suit, into the blue, polluted lake. Then, when they fished her out, she could go, still dripping, to the man in the brown room and confer once more with him on the subject of her mental health.

  “Barbaric,” Jean-Jacques was saying. “It is a barbaric country. In France, of course, we are even more barbaric.” They were sitting at a table on the terrasse of the Pavillon Royal in the Bois de Boulogne, overlooking the lake. The trees were mint-green, the sun surprisingly hot, there were tulips, the first oarsmen of the season were gliding out on the brown water in the rented boats, a young American was taking a photograph of his girl to prove when he got home that he had been in the Bois de Boulogne. The girl was dressed in bright orange, one of this season’s three colors, and was laughing, showing American teeth.

  Rosemary had been in Paris three days before she had called Jean-Jacques. She had found the scribbled piece of paper in her valise. Business address. Legible foreign handwriting. Très bien in orthographe in the Ecole Communale. The good little clever boy at the small desk. Finding the folded scrap of paper had brought back the smell of the tidy, scrollwork hotel room on the mountain. Old wood, the odor of pine through the open window, the peppery tang of sex between the sheets. She had nearly thrown the address away again. Now she was glad she hadn’t. Jean-Jacques was being human. Not French. He had sounded cautious but pleased on the phone, had offered lunch. In Paris his name hadn’t seemed too—too, well, foreordained. In Paris the hyphen was not objectionable.

  She had spent the three days without speaking to anyone she knew in Paris. She had used the telephone once, to call Bert, in London. He had been sympathetic, but useless. He was on his way to Athens. Athens was swinging these days. If any ideas occurred to him among the Greeks, he would cable. Never fear, Love, something will turn up. Enjoy Paris, Love.

  She was in a hotel on the Left Bank, not her usual hotel on the Rue Mont Tabor where she was known. She didn’t want to see anybody she knew. She was going to think everything out sensibly, by herself. Step one, step two, step three, step one, step two, step.… Then she had the sensation that her brain was turning around on itself, inverting, like an Op Art painting. Whorls and squares, making illusory patterns that started and ended at the same point. Then suddenly she had to talk to someone. About anything. She hadn’t really meant to tell Jean-Jacques. What was the use? But then, in the restaurant near her hotel (sole bonne femme, a bottle of Poully Fumé), he had been so solicitous, he had guessed so quickly that something was wrong, he was so good-looking in his dark suit and narrow tie, so civilized, it had all come out. She had laughed quite a lot as she told the story, she had made a humorous character out of the man in the brown suit, she had been brave and worldly and flippant and Jean-Jacques hadn’t asked Pourquoi moi?, but had said “This must be discussed seriously,” and had driven her out to the Bois in his lady-killing British racing green sports car for brandy and coffee in the sunshine. (They must have a four-hour lunch period in his office, she thought.) Sitting there, watching the young men row past the tulips, she didn’t regret the snowy weekend quite so much. Maybe not at all. It had amused her, she remembered, to take him away from the tight-flanked young beauties who were lying in wait for him. She remembered the ignoble sense of triumph with which she had managed it, older than all the rest, a hesitant novice skier approaching middle age, not swooping down the slopes like those delicious, devouring children. Jean-Jacques held her hand lovingly on the iron table in the sunshine and she felt wickedly pleased all over again. Not pleased enough to go to bed with him again, she had made that clear. He had accepted that graciously. Frenchmen were much maligned, she thought.

  When he had taken out his wallet to pay the bill in the restaurant she had gotten a glimpse of a photograph of a young woman behind a celluloid shield. She had insisted upon his showing it to her. It was his wife, a smiling, serene, lovely girl, with wide-spaced grey eyes. She didn’t like the mountains, she hated skiing, he said. He went on weekends alone. Their own business. Each marriage to its own rules. She, Rosemary, would not intrude, could not intrude. Jean-Jacques was sitting there, holding her hand not as a lover, but as a friend whom she needed, who had committed himself, unselfishly, to help her.

  “Of course,” Jean-Jacques was saying, “whatever it costs, I will.…”

  “I don’t need that sort of help,” she said quickly.

  “How much time do you have?” he asked. “I mean, when do you have to be back home?”

  “I should be there now.”

  “And America?”

  She took her hand out of his. She remembered some of the stories friends of hers had told her. The darkened rooms in doubtful neighborhoods, the money paid in cash in advance, the sleazy nurses, the criminal doctors, the staggering home two hours later, hurried out of doors which bore no nameplates. “Anything better than my sweet native land,” she said.

  “I’ve heard,” Jean-Jacques said. “A little.” He shook his head. “What countries we inhabit.” He scowled, looking across the blare of tulips at the idiocy of nations.

  Her mind began to feel like Op Art again.

  “I am to go to Switzerland for the weekend. Spring skiing.” He gave an apologetic little shrug. “It has been arranged weeks ago. I will stop in Zurich. I have friends there. I will try to find a more sympathetic doctor.”

  “Psychiatrist.”

  “Of course. I will be back on Tuesday. Can you wait?”

  More Op Art. “Yes.” Another week.

  “Unfortunately, I must go to Strasbourg tomorrow,” he said. “On business. I am to go on to Switzerland directly from there. I will not be able to entertain you in Paris.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll entertain myself.” Entertain, there’s a word. “It’s very good of you.” Inane, but she wanted to make up in some way for earlier, unspoken judgments on him.

  He looked at his watch.

  There is always the moment, she thought, when a man, the best of men, looks at his watch.

  The phone was ringing in her room when she opened the door. “Eldred Harrison here,” a soft British voice said in the receiver. “I’m a friend of Bert’s. Like everybody else.” A little laugh. “He said you were alone in Paris and I must take care of you. Are you free for dinner?”

  “Well.…” She prepared her refusal.

  “I’m dining with some friends. A small party. We could come by your hotel and pick you up.”

  She looked around her hotel room. Stained, Wateauesque wallpaper, bulbs too dim to read by. The room joined
her brain in Op Art patterns. A week to wait. She couldn’t just sit in the room and wait seven days.

  “That’s very good of you, Mr. Harrison.”

  “I look forward to it.” He didn’t say it heartily, but softly and tentatively. “Shall we say eight?”

  “I’ll be ready,” she said.

  “At five minutes to eight she was sitting in the hotel lobby. Her hair was pulled back severely and she had put on her most shapeless dress. She didn’t want to attract anybody this week, not even an Englishman.

  Exactly at eight, a couple came into the lobby. The girl was young, with pale hair and Slavic bones. She was pretty, a little chubby, like a child, and seemed anxious to smile. She obviously didn’t have much money to spend on her clothes. Jean-Jacques would have liked her, but he would take her to out-of-the-way restaurants. The man was tall, with greying, well-brushed hair and his hint of a self-deprecating stoop, the discreet cut of his patterned grey suit, went with the voice on the telephone. After the first glance, Rosemary sat there, her ankles crossed primly, waiting. The man spoke to the concierge in French and the concierge indicated Rosemary, sitting near the window. The couple came over. They both smiled.

  “I hope we haven’t kept you waiting, Mrs. Maclain,” Harrison said.

  She stood up and gave him her hand, smiling back. There wasn’t going to be any trouble tonight.

  She hadn’t counted on the drinking. Harrison kept to a schedule. One whiskey every fifteen minutes. For everybody, including the girl. Her name was Anna. She was Polish. She had come from Warsaw four months ago. Her papers were doubtful. She worked as a receptionist because she spoke five languages. She wanted to marry an American, for the passport, so she wouldn’t be sent back to Warsaw. Strictly a marriage of convenience, she wanted that understood from the beginning, and a quick divorce and the passport.

  Harrison did something in the British Embassy. He smiled benignly at Anna, relieved, Rosemary thought, that Anna would not settle for a British passport. He was on the watch for a likely American. He ordered another round of whiskeys. They seemed to make no difference to him. He sat straight, his hands did not tremble as he lit cigarettes, his voice remained low and cultured and clublike. The Empire had not crumbled because of the likes of him.

  They were in a small dark bar near Rosemary’s hotel. Convenient little spot, Harrison had said. There were a thousand convenient little spots in Paris for Harrison, Rosemary was sure. He knew most of the people in the bar. Some other Englishmen, about Harrison’s age, in their forties, some young Frenchmen. The whiskey arrived on schedule. The bar became somewhat hazy, although Rosemary felt that her eyes were growing dazzlingly bright. Dinner was for the future. They were to dine with a young American. Rosemary couldn’t quite make out just where they were to meet him.

  They spoke about Bert. Athens. The Army had just taken over in Athens. Bert would like that. He swam in trouble. “I fear for him,” Harrison said. “He is always being beaten up. He likes rough trade. One day, I’m sure they’ll find him floating in the harbor of Piraeus, some harbor. A peculiar taste.”

  Rosemary nodded. “I’ve felt the same thing. I’ve talked to him about it.” Oh, Love, Bert had said, a boy does what a boy has to do, Love.

  Anna smiled over her fifth whiskey. She reminded Rosemary of her own daughter, smiling over the rim of a glass of milk at some secret eleven-year-old joke before bedtime.

  “I knew somebody else like that,” Rosemary said. “An interior decorator. A small, pleasant man. Over fifty. Quiet. Not blatant, like Bert. American. He was beaten to death by three sailors in a bar in Livorno. Nobody ever could figure out what he was doing in Livorno.” What was his name? She knew it. She knew she knew it. She had met him dozens of times, had talked to him often at parties. He had invented a chair, she remembered. She was annoyed at not remembering his name. A bad sign. If a man you’ve talked hours to, a man who had done something important like inventing a chair is murdered, the least you can do is remember his name. A very bad sign.

  Another round of drinks. Anna smiled. The bar grew appreciably darker. Rosemary wished Bert weren’t in Athens. Tanks on the streets, curfew, people being rounded up at the point of a gun, nervous soldiers not likely to understand an English fairy’s jokes. Be lugubrious, Love.

  They walked across a bridge. The river flowed among monuments. Paris is a Bible in stone. Victor Hugo. A taxi driver nearby ran them down and shouted, “Sales cons,” at them. The voice of Lutetia.

  “Ta gueule,” Harrison called, out of character.

  Anna smiled.

  “The streets are dangerous.” Harrison held her elbow protectively. “Chap I know, Frenchman, got into a tangle with another car on a side street near the Opera, the other driver came raging out, hit him once and killed him on the spot. In front of his wife. Turned out to be a karate expert, something along that line.”

  Anna smiled. “It’s worse in Warsaw,” she said.

  She had been in prison in Warsaw. Only for forty-eight hours, but in prison. They were in the restaurant by this time, but waiting at the bar, with the whiskeys still coming. The American hadn’t shown up yet. The restaurant was a small one off the Champs-Elysées, with men sitting alone reading newspapers. On the front page of one of the newspapers there was a large photograph of two fattish middle-aged gentlemen gingerly poking rapiers at each other. There had been a duel that morning in a garden in Neuilly between two representatives of the Chambre des Députés. A little blood had been spilled. A nick in the arm. Honor had been satisfied. France.

  “I am only sixteen at the time,” Anna was saying. “I am invited to party. A diplomat from Italy. I am in demand in foreign circles because of my languages.” She was a mistress of the present tense, Anna. “I still drink only juices of fruit. All the Poles present are arrested.”

  “Encore trois whiskeys, Jean,” said Harrison to the barman.

  “The diplomat is smuggling works of art out of Poland.” Anna said. “He is a lover of art. The police talk to me for ten hours in small room in prison. They want me to tell them how I help smuggle out works of art and what I am paid. They say they know I am spy, besides. All I can do is cry. I know nothing. When I am invited to party I go to party. A girl goes to party when she is invited. I want to see my mother, but they say they will lock me up and keep me in prison until I talk, they do not tell nobody I am there. Forever.” She smiled. “They put me in cell with two other women. Prostitutes. Very bad talking. They laugh when they see me crying, but I cannot stop. They are in prison three months already, they do not know when they must get out. They are crazy for man. Three months too long to go without man, they say. Out of cloth, twisted around, they make an,” she hesitated, searching for the word, “an object,” she said modestly, “shaped like sex of man.”

  “Penis,” Harrison said, helpfully British.

  “They use it on each other,” Anna said. “They want to use it on me. I scream and the guard comes and they laugh. They say in three months I be screaming for them to lend it to me.” She sipped her drink, smiling. “The next night, I am set free. I am not to tell anybody where I have been. So now I am in Paris and I would like to marry American and live in America.”

  On cue, the American entered the restaurant. There was a young blond-and-pink Journey’s End kind of Englishman with him. The American was called Carroll and had a long, gaunt, sunburnt face. He was wearing a leather jacket and a black turtleneck sweater under it. He was a news photographer working for a big agency and had just come back from Vietnam and he explained he was late because he had been waiting in the office for blowups of some of his shots. They hadn’t arrived yet. The Englishman had something to do with the BBC and seemed shy. The American kissed Anna, a brotherly kiss. He was not the type to enter into a marriage of convenience.

  More whiskey appeared. Rosemary felt radiant. The young Englishman seemed to blush again and again, whenever she caught him looking at her. How much better this was than sitting brooding alone in the
hotel room, with lights too dim to read by.

  “Prison is the ultimate experience,” Harrison was saying, on his schedule of whiskey. Anna’s reminiscence had set him off. He had been in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for three years. “It is more of a test of character, it is more essential than combat, even.”

  They were at table. They were eating hors d’oeuvres. The restaurant was famous for its hors d’oeuvres. There were two large carts loaded with plates of tuna, sardines, little radishes, céleri rémoulade, eggs with mayonnaise, raw mushrooms in oil, ratatouille, a dozen different kinds of sausage and pâté. The armies of the poor could be fed indefinitely on these tidbits of Paris. The young Englishman was sitting next to Rosemary. When his knee touched Rosemary’s accidentally under the table, he pulled his leg back frantically, as though her knee were a bayonet. The whiskey had been transmuted to wine. New Beaujolais. The purple bottles came and went.

  “The guards had a little game,” Harrison was saying. “They would smoke a cigarette, very slowly, in front of us. A hundred men, starving, in rags, who literally would have given their lives for a cigarette. There wouldn’t be a sound. Nobody would move. We just stood there, our eyes riveted on a little man with his rifle, looking at us over the smoke, letting the cigarette burn away in his hand. Then when it was half-finished, he’d throw it to the ground and trample it with his boot and walk away a few yards. And a hundred men would fling themselves on their knees, punching, scratching, kicking, cursing, to get at the shreds of the tobacco, while the guards laughed at us.”

  “The magical East,” Carroll said. “Some of the things I’ve seen in Vietnam.…”

  Rosemary hoped he wouldn’t elaborate. She was enjoying her hors d’oeuvres and given half a chance the wine, after all that whiskey, would make her happy to be in Paris. Luckily, Carroll was a taciturn man and didn’t go on. All he did was to reach into his pocket and take out a photograph and put in on the table in front of Rosemary. It was the sort of photograph you were used to seeing these days. A woman who looked about eighty years old, in black, squatting against a wall, her hand held out, begging, with a small, starved, almost naked child seated, puppy-eyed, beside her. A slender Eurasian girl, heavily made up, with a bouffant hairdo and a long slit in her silk dress showing a marvelous leg was walking past the old woman without a glance at her. On the wall that filled the background of the picture somebody had scrawled in large chalk letters, God was here, but He left early.