Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Tibbell was grateful to the old man for this request for clarification, since without it he was sure he would be kept awake most of the night trying to figure out just what the sequence of events had been which had resulted in this midnight chase and punishment. Tibbell had never hit a woman in his life and could not imagine ever doing so, and certainly never for three hundred francs, which was, after all, worth just about sixty cents.

  “Let me reconstruct,” the man in the dark suit said immediately, presenting his side quickly, before the Spanish woman could roil the crystal waters of truth. “I saw her sitting at a bar, waiting to be picked up.”

  “I was not waiting to be picked up,” the woman said hotly. “I was on my way home from the cinema and I stopped in to have a glass of beer, before going to bed.”

  “Enfin,” the man in the dark suit said impatiently, “you allowed yourself to be picked up. If we are going to quibble about terms, we will be here all night.”

  “I allowed you to pay for one glass of beer,” the woman said. “I am not responsible for any sordid interpretation you choose to put on it.”

  “You also allowed me to pay for three hundred francs’ worth of violets,” the man in the dark suit said.

  “I allowed it as a small gesture of gallantry,” the woman said haughtily. “In Spain one is used to gentlemen.”

  “You also allowed yourself to get into my car,” the man in the dark suit said, “and you furthermore allowed yourself to inflame the emotions by kissing on the lips.”

  “That, now,” the woman said dramatically to Moumou’s father, “is a superb lie.”

  “If it’s a lie,” said the man in the dark suit, “what about this?” Violently, he seized the point of his white collar and pulled it away from his neck to show M. Banary-Cointal.

  The old man peered at it nearsightedly, bending close to the man in the dark suit. “What is it?” the old man asked. “It’s awfully dark here. I can’t see anything.”

  “Lipstick,” said the man in the dark suit. “Look.” He took the old man’s arm and pulled him over in front of the headlights. Both men leaned over low so that the old man could inspect the collar. M. Banary-Cointal stood up. “There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “Lipstick.”

  “Aha,” said the man in the dark suit, casting a look of angry triumph at the Spanish woman.

  “It is not mine,” she said coldly. “Who knows where this gentleman has been spending his time and who knows how many times a week he changes his shirt?”

  “I warn you,” said the man in the dark suit, his voice thick with rage, “I regard that as insulting.”

  “What difference does it make whose lipstick it is?” the woman said. “You do not please me. All I want is to be allowed to go home alone.”

  “Ah,” said Moumou, her attention finally caught, “if that were only possible—to go home alone.”

  Everybody, including Moumou’s father, looked puzzledly for a moment at the somber figure against the wall, as though it had been a statue that had given cryptic utterance.

  “My dear man,” said M. Banary-Cointal reasonably, addressing the man in the dark suit, “certainly this lady has made herself very clear.” He made a slight bow in the direction of the Spanish woman, who nodded politely in answer. “She doesn’t demand very much. Just to go to her own home in peace. Surely, this is not too much to ask.”

  “She can go wherever she damn pleases,” said the man in the dark suit, “as soon as she gives me my three hundred francs.”

  A look of censure creased the old man’s face. “Monsieur,” he said, with some asperity, “I am a little surprised that a man like you, the possessor of an automobile of this quality and price”—he touched the gleaming hood of the little Italian car—“could really need three hundred francs enough to make such a …”

  “It is not a question of three hundred francs,” said the man in the dark suit, his voice beginning to be edged, too, at this imputation of miserliness. “It would not even be a question if the sum were fifty thousand francs. It is a question of principle. I have been led on, I have been inflamed, as I mentioned before, I have been induced to spend my money—the amount has nothing to do with the matter, I assure you, Monsieur—all corruptly and under false pretenses. I am a generous and reasonable man but I do not like to be cynically made a fool of by a putain!”

  “Here, now,” the old man said sternly.

  “What’s more, look at her hand!” The man in the dark suit seized the woman’s hand and held it in front of M. Banary-Cointal’s eyes. “Do you see that? The wedding ring? By a putain, who, on top of everything else, is married!”

  Tibbell, listening, fascinated, could not discover why the girl’s marital condition added so powerfully to the rage of the man in the dark suit, and concluded that perhaps it was something in the man’s past, some painful disappointment with some other married woman that had left him tender on the subject and which now served to pour fuel on the fire of his wrath.

  “There is nothing more disgraceful than a Spanish whore with a wedding band,” the man in the dark suit shouted.

  “Here, that’s enough of that,” M. Banary-Cointal said with authority, as the woman unexpectedly began to sob. The old man had had enough of women’s tears for the night, and this new flood made him testy. “I will not allow you to talk in such terms in front of ladies, one of whom happens to be my daughter,” he said to the man in the dark suit. “I suggest you leave immediately.”

  “I will leave when I get my three hundred francs,” the man said stubbornly, crossing his arms.

  “Here!” M. Banary-Cointal dug angrily in his pocket and pulled out some coins. “Here are your three hundred francs!” He threw them at the man in the dark suit. They bounced off his chest and onto the pavement. With great agility, the man in the dark suit bent and scooped up the coins and threw them back into M. Banary-Cointal’s face. “If you’re not careful, Monsieur,” the old man said with dignity, “you are going to get a punch in the nose.”

  The man in the dark suit raised his fists and stood there, in the pose of a bare-knuckle English fighter of the early part of the eighteenth century. “I await your attack, Monsieur,” he said formally.

  Both women now wept more loudly.

  “I warn you, Monsieur,” M. Banary-Cointal said, taking a step backwards, “that I am sixty-three years of age, with a faulty heart, and besides, I wear glasses, as you can see. The police will be inclined to ask you some very searching questions in the event of an accident.”

  “The police!” said the man in the dark suit. “Good. It is the first sensible suggestion of the evening. I invite you all to get into my car and accompany me to the commissariat.”

  “I am not getting into that car again,” said the Spanish woman.

  “I am not budging from here,” Moumou said, “until Raoul gets back.”

  There was a ringing behind Tibbell, and he suddenly became conscious that it had been going on for some time, and that it was the telephone. He stumbled across the dark room and picked up the instrument, the voices outside his window becoming a blurred buzzing on the night air. He wondered who could be calling him at this time of the night.

  “Hello,” he said, into the mouthpiece.

  “Is this Littré 2576?” an impatient female voice crackled through the receiver.

  “Yes,” Tibbell said.

  “On your call to New York,” the operator said, “we are ready now.”

  “Oh, yes,” Tibbell said. He had forgotten completely that he had put the call in for Betty. He tried to compose himself and put himself back into the tender and rosy mood that had swept over him an hour before, when he had decided to call her. “I’m waiting.”

  “Just a minute, please.” There were some Atlantic, electric howls on the wire and Tibbell pulled the telephone away from his ear. He tried to hear what was being said outside, but all he could distinguish was the noise of a car starting up and surging down the street.

  He stood
next to the German’s bookcase, the telephone held loosely along his cheek, remembering that he had wanted to tell Betty how much he loved her and missed her, and perhaps, if the conversation turned irrevocably in that direction, as indeed it might in the three allotted minutes, to tell her that he wanted to marry her. He found himself breathing heavily, and the ideas churned confusedly in his head, and when he tried to think of a proper opening phrase, all he could think of was, “There is nothing more disgraceful than a Spanish whore with a wedding band.”

  “Just a moment, please,” said an American voice. “We are ringing.”

  There was some more electrical scratching and Tibbell switched the phone to his other ear and tried to make out what was being said downstairs and at the same time to push from his mind the remark about the wedding band.

  “Miss Thompson is not home,” the American voice said, with great crispness and authority. “She has left word she will come back in an hour. Do you wish us to put the call in then?”

  “I … I …” Tibbell hesitated. He remembered the old man’s admonition to the girl who had been kissing in the doorway—-”Profit by the events you have witnessed tonight.”

  “Can you hear me, sir?” the crisp New World voice was saying. “Miss Thompson will be back within an hour. Do you wish to place the call then?”

  “I … no,” Tibbell said. “Cancel the call, please. I’ll make it some other time.”

  “Thank you.” America clicked off.

  Tibbell put the phone down slowly. After a moment, he walked across to the window, and looked down. The street was empty and silent. Thermopylae had been cleared of corpses. Agincourt lay waiting for the plow. Unfinished, unfinishable, unresolved, unresolvable, the conflict, the inextricable opponents, had moved off into the darkness, and now there were only fleeting admonitory echoes, ghosts with warning fingers raised to vanishing lips.

  Then Tibbell saw a figure stealing furtively down the other side of the street, keeping close to the walls. It was Raoul. He came out into the light of the lamppost to inspect the scooter. He kicked once at the broken glass on the pavement. Then he waved at the corner. A girl came running out toward him, her white dress gay and dancing and bridal on the dark street. As she sat on the pillion behind Raoul and put her arms lovingly around his waist, she laughed softly. Her laughter rose lightly and provocatively to Tibbell’s window. Raoul started the Vespa, with the usual loud, underpowered, falsely important snarl. The Vespa, without headlight, sped down the street, the white dress dancing in the wind, slanting out of sight at the far corner. Tibbell sighed and silently wished the bride luck.

  Downstairs, there was the creak of a shutter.

  “Spaniards,” the night voice said, “what can you expect from Spaniards?”

  The shutter creaked again and the voice ceased.

  Tibbell closed his own shutters. As he stepped back into the dark room he was thankful for the first time that he had gone to Exeter and Swarthmore for his education.

  Small Saturday

  His sleep had been troubled for weeks. Girls came in and out of the misty edges of dreams to smile at him, beckon him, leer at him, invite him, almost embrace him. He was on city streets, on the decks of great ships, in satiny bedrooms, on high bridges, accompanied and not quite accompanied by the phantom figures whom he always seemed on the verge of recognizing and never recognized, as they slipped away beyond the confines of dream, to leave him lying awake in his single bed, disturbed, sleepless, knowing only that the figures that haunted him were sisters in a single respect—they were all much taller than he—and that when they vanished, it was upward, toward unreachable heights.

  Christopher Bagshot woke up remembering that just a moment before he opened his eyes, he had heard a voice saying, “You must make love to a woman at least five feet, eight inches tall tonight.” It was the first time in weeks of dreaming that a voice had spoken. He recognized a breakthrough.

  He looked at the clock on the bedside table. Twelve minutes to eight. The alarm would go off on the hour. He stared at the ceiling, searching for significance. He remembered it was Saturday.

  He got out of bed and took off the top of his pajamas and did his exercises. Fifteen push-ups, twenty-five sit-ups. He was a small man, five feet, six, but fit. He had beautiful dark eyes, like a Moroccan burro’s, with long lashes. His hair was straight and black and girls liked to muss it. Small girls. In another age, before everybody looked as though he or she had been brought up in Texas or California, his size would not have bothered him. He could have fitted into Henri Quatre’s armor. And Henri Quatre was large enough to say that Paris was worth a Mass. How the centuries slide by.

  “I had this dream,” he said. They were standing on the corner, waiting for the 79th Street crosstown bus. Stanley Hovington, five feet, ten inches tall, neighbor and friend, was waiting for the bus with him. It was a cool, sunny, New York October. Two boys, aged no more than fifteen, one of them carrying a football, slouched into Central Park. Each of them was nearly six feet tall. Autumn Saturday. All over the country, long-legged girls wearing chrysanthemums, cheering for Princeton, Ohio State, Southern California. Large, fearsome men, swift on green turf.

  “I had a dream last night, too,” Stanley said. “I was caught in an ambush in the jungle. It’s the damned television.”

  “In my dream …” Christopher, said uninterested in Stanley’s nighttime problems. Stanley, too, had to work on Saturdays. He had a big job at Blooming-dale’s, but the thing was, he had to work on Saturdays. “In my dream,” Christopher persisted, “a voice said to me, ‘You must make love to a woman at least five feet, eight inches tall tonight.’”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “No. Anyway, that isn’t the point.”

  “It would seem to me,” Stanley said, “that’s just the point. Who said it, I mean. And why.” He was a good friend, Stanley, but argumentative. “Five feet, eight inches. There might be a clue there.”

  “What I think it means,” Christopher said, “is that my subconscious was telling me it had a message for me.”

  The bus came along and they mounted and found seats at the rear, because it was Saturday.

  “What sort of message?” Stanley asked.

  “It was telling me that deep in my soul I feel deprived,” Christopher said.

  “Of a five-foot-eight girl?”

  “It stands to reason,” Christopher said earnestly in the rocking bus. “All my life”—he was twenty-five—“all my life, I’ve been short. But I’m proud, so to speak. I can’t bear the thought of looking foolish.”

  “Stalin wasn’t any taller than you,” Stanley said. “He wasn’t worried about looking foolish.”

  “That’s the other danger,” Christopher said, “the Napoleonic complex. Even worse.”

  “What are you deprived of?” Stanley asked. “What’s her name—that girl—she’s crazy about you.”

  “June,” Christopher said.

  “That’s it, June. Damn nice girl.”

  “I’m not saying anything against June,” Christopher said. “Far from it. But do you know how tall she is?”

  “I think you’re obsessive on the subject,” Stanley said, “to tell the truth.”

  “Five feet, three. And she’s the tallest girl I ever had.”

  “So what? You don’t play basketball with her.” Stanley laughed, appreciating himself.

  “It’s no laughing matter,” Christopher said gravely, disappointed in Stanley. “Look—you have to figure it this way—in this day and age in America, for some goddamn reason, almost all the great girls, I mean the really great ones, the ones you see in the movies, in the fashion magazines, with their pictures in the papers at all the parties, almost all of them are suddenly big.”

  “Maybe you’ve got something there,” Stanley said thoughtfully. “I hadn’t correlated before.”

  “It’s like a new natural resource of America,” Christopher said. “A new discovery or a new invention or so
mething. It’s part of our patrimony, if you want to talk fancy. Only I’m not getting any of it. I’m being gypped. It’s like the blacks. They see all these terrific things on television and in the magazines, sports cars, hi-fis, cruises to the Caribbean, only they can’t get in on them. I tell you, it teaches you sympathy.”

  “They’re pretty tall,” Stanley said. “I mean, look at Wilt Chamberlain.”

  Christopher made an impatient gesture. “You don’t get my point.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Stanley said, “actually, I do. Though maybe it’s more in your imagination than anything else. After all, it doesn’t go by volume, for God’s sake. I mean, I’ve had girls all sizes; and once it comes down to the crunch, in bed, I mean, size is no criterion.”

  “You can say that, Stanley,” Christopher said, “you have a choice. And I’m not only talking about in bed. It’s the whole attitude. It stands to reason. They’re the darlings of our time, the big ones, I mean the marvelous big ones, and they know it, and it gives them something extra, something a lot extra. They feel they’re superior and they have to live up to it. If they’re naturally funny, they’re funnier. If they’re sexy, they’re sexier. If they’re sad, they’re sadder. If there’re two parties that night, they get invited to the better one. If there’re two guys who want to take them to dinner, they go out with the handsomer, richer one. And it’s bound to rub off on the guy. He feels superior. He knows every other man in the place envies him, he’s way up there with the privileged classes. But if a small guy walks somewhere with one of the big beautiful ones, he knows that every cat in the place who’s two inches taller than he is is thinking to himself, ‘I can take that big mother away from that shrimp any time,’ and they’re just waiting for the small guy to go to the john or turn his head to talk to the headwaiter, to give his date the signal.”

  “Jesus,” Stanley said, “you’ve got it bad.”

  “Have I ever,” Christopher said.