Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Stanley brightened. “I have an idea,” he said. “I know some pretty smashing tall girls—”

  “I bet you do,” Christopher said, loathing his friend momentarily.

  “What the hell,” Stanley said. “I’ll give a party. Just you and me and maybe two or three fellers even shorter than you and four or five girls, five feet, eight and over.… A quiet party, where everybody is just sitting or lying around, no dancing or charades or anything embarrassing like that.”

  “What’re you doing tonight?” Christopher asked eagerly.

  “The thing is,” Stanley said, “tonight I’m busy. But for next Saturday—”

  “The voice said tonight,” Christopher said.

  They sat in silence, listening to the echo of that ghostly imperative in the back of the cross-town bus.

  “Well,” Stanley began, his tone dubious, “maybe I could fix you up with a blind date.”

  “It’s Saturday,” Christopher reminded him. “What sort of a girl five feet, eight or over would be available to go out on a blind date on a Saturday night in New York in October?”

  “You can never tell,” Stanley said, but without conviction.

  “I can just see it,” Christopher said bitterly, “I’m sitting in a bar waiting, and this big girl comes in, looking around for me, and I get off the stool and I say, ‘You must be Jane’ or Matilda or whatever, and she takes one look and that expression comes over her face.”

  “What expression?”

  “That ‘What the hell did I let myself in for tonight?’ expression,” Christopher said. “That ‘I should’ve worn flat heels’ expression.”

  “Maybe you’re too sensitive, Chris.”

  “Maybe I am. Only I’ll never know until I’ve tried. Look, I want to get married, it’s about time. I want to marry some great girl and be happy with her and have kids, the whole deal. But I don’t want to be nagged all my life by the feeling that I did my shopping only in the bargain basement, in a manner of speaking.” Christopher felt that this was an apt and convincing phrase, considering that Stanley worked in Bloomingdale’s. “I want to feel I had a pick from every goddamn floor in the place. And I don’t want my kids to look at me when they’re nineteen and they’re five feet, six, and say, ‘Is this as high as I go?’ the way I look at my father and mother.” Christopher’s father was even shorter than he was and there was just no use in measuring his mother.

  “Do you know any big girls?” Stanley asked as Christopher stood up, because they were approaching Madison Avenue. “At least to talk to?”

  “Sure,” Christopher said. “Plenty of them come into the store.” He was the manager of a book-and-record store, one of a chain his father owned. There was a section devoted to greeting cards. Christopher found this demeaning, but his father was profit-minded. When his father retired, Christopher would wipe out the greeting-card section the first week. His father had no complexes about being small. If he had been running the Soviet Union, he would have run it very much along the same lines as Joseph Stalin, only more drastically. Still, Christopher couldn’t complain. He was more or less his own boss and he liked being around books and his father was so busy with the more important shops in the chain that he made only flying, unexpected visits to the comparatively minor enterprise over which Christopher presided.

  “I know plenty of tall girls,” he said. “I encourage charge accounts, so I have plenty of addresses.” When a tall girl came into the shop, Christopher tried to be on a library ladder, reaching for a book on an upper shelf. “And telephone numbers. That’s no problem.”

  “Have you tried any yet?”

  “No.”

  “Try,” Stanley said. “My advice is, try. Today.”

  “Yeah,” Christopher said dully.

  The bus stopped and the door opened and Christopher stepped down onto the curb, with a wintry wave of his hand.

  Might as well start with the A’s, he thought. He was alone in the store. It was impossible to get a decent clerk who would work on Saturdays. He had tried college boys and girls for the one-day-a-week stint, but they stole more than they sold and they mixed up the stock so that it took three days to get it straight again after they had gone. For once, he did not pity himself for working on Saturday and being alone. God knew how many calls he would have to put in and it would have been embarrassing to have someone listening in, male or female. There was no danger of his father’s dropping in, because he played golf all day Saturday and Sunday in Westchester County.

  Anderson, Paulette**, he read in his pocket address book. He had a system of drawing stars next to the names of girls. One star meant that she was tall and pretty or even beautiful and that, for one reason or another, she seemed to be a girl who might be free with her favors.

  Anderson, Paulette**, had large and excellently shaped breasts, which she took no pains to hide. June had once told Christopher that in her experience, girls with voluptuous bosoms were always jumping into bed with men, out of vanity and exhibitionism. Treacherously, after his conversation with June, Christopher had added a second star to Anderson, Paulette*.

  He didn’t have her home address or telephone number, because she worked as an assistant to a dentist in the neighborhood and came around at lunch hour and after work. She wore a womanly chignon and was at least five feet, ten inches tall. Although usually provocatively dressed in cashmere sweaters, she was a serious girl, interested in psychology and politics and prison reform. She bought the works of Erich Fromm and copies of The Lonely Crowd as birthday presents for her friends. She and Christopher engaged in deep discussions over the appropriate counters. She sometimes worked on Saturdays, she had told Christopher, because the dentist remade mouths for movie actors and television performers and people like that, who were always pressed for time and had to have their mouths remade on weekends, when they were free.

  Anderson, Paulette** wasn’t really one of those marvelous girls—she wasn’t a model and she didn’t get her picture in the paper or anything like that—but if she were to do her hair differently and take off her glasses, and didn’t tell anybody she was a dental assistant, you certainly would look at her more than once when she came into a room. For the first one, Christopher thought, might as well start modestly. Get the feel.

  He sat down at the desk next to the cash register toward the rear of the shop and dialed the number of Anderson, Paulette**.

  Omar Gadsden sat in the chair, his mouth open, the chromium tube for saliva bubbling away under his tongue. Occasionally, Paulette, comely in white, would reach over and wipe away the drool from his chin. Gadsden was a news commentator on Educational Television, and even before he had started to come to Dr. Levinson’s office to have his upper jaw remade, Paulette had watched him faithfully, impressed by his silvering hair, his well-bred baritone, his weary contempt for the fools in Washington, his trick of curling the corners of his thin lips to one side to express more than the network’s policy would otherwise have permitted him.

  Right now, with the saliva tube gurgling over his lower lip and all his upper teeth mere little pointed stumps, waiting for the carefully sculpted bridge that Dr. Levinson was preparing to put permanently into place, Omar Gadsden did not resemble the assured and eloquent early-evening father figure of Educational Television. He had suffered almost every day for weeks while Dr. Levinson meticulously ground down his teeth and his dark, noble eyes reflected the protracted pain of his ordeal. He watched Dr. Levinson fearfully as the dentist scraped away with a hooked instrument at the gleaming arc of caps that lay on a mold on the marble top of the high chest of drawers against the wall of the small office.

  He was a sight for his enemies’ eyes at that moment, Paulette thought; the Vice-President would enjoy seeing him now, and she felt a motherly twinge of pity, although she was only twenty-four. She had become very friendly with the commentator during the last month of preparing hypodermics of Novocain for him and adjusting the rubber apron around his neck and watching him spit blood into th
e basin at the side of the chair. Before and after the sessions, in which he had shown exemplary courage, they had had short but informative conversations about affairs of the day and he had let drop various hints about scandals among the mighty and prophecies of disaster, political, financial and ecological, that lay ahead for America. She had gained a new respect from her friends in retelling, in the most guarded terms, of course, some of the more dire items that Omar Gadsden vouchsafed her.

  She was sure that Mr. Gadsden liked her. He addressed her by her first name and when he telephoned to postpone an appointment, he always asked her how she was doing and called her his Angel of Hygeia. One day, after a grueling two hours, after Dr. Levinson had put in his temporary upper bridge, he had said, “Paulette, when this is over, I’m going to treat you to the best lunch in town.”

  Today it was all going to be over and Paulette was wondering if Mr. Gadsden was going to remember his promise, when the telephone rang.

  “Excuse me,” she said and went out of the office, in a starchy, bosomy white bustle, to her desk in the small reception room, where the telephone was.

  “Dr. Levinson’s office,” she said. “Good morning.” She had a high, babyish voice, incongruous for her size and womanly dimensions. She knew it, but there was nothing she could do about it. When she tried to pitch it lower, she sounded like a female impersonator.

  “Miss Anderson?”

  “Yes.” She had the feeling she had heard the voice before, but she couldn’t quite place it.

  “This is Christopher Bagshot.”

  “Yes?” She waited. The name meant something, but, like the voice, it was just beyond the boundaries of recognition.

  “From the Browsing Corner.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Paulette said. She began to riffle through Dr. Levinson’s appointment book, looking for open half hours on the schedule for the next week. Dr. Levinson was very busy and sometimes patients had to wait for months. She remembered Bagshot now and was mildly surprised he had called. He had perfect white teeth, with canines that were curiously just a little longer than ordinary, which gave him a slightly and not unpleasantly wild appearance. But, of course, you never could tell about teeth.

  “What I called about”—he seemed to have some difficulty in speaking—“is, well, there’s a lecture at the Y.M.H.A. tonight. It’s a professor from Columbia. ‘You and Your Environment.’ I thought maybe if you weren’t busy. We could have a bite to eat first and.…” He dribbled off.

  Paulette frowned. Dr. Levinson didn’t like personal calls while there were patients in the office. She had been with him for three years and he was satisfied with her work and all that, but he was elderly and had old-fashioned notions about employees’ private lives.

  She thought quickly. She had been invited to a party that night at the home of an economics instructor at NYU, down in the Village, and she hated going into a room full of people alone and Bagshot was a good-looking serious young man who could talk about books and the latest problems very sensibly and would make a welcome escort. But there was Mr. Gadsden in the chair, and his promise. Of course, it had only been for lunch, but she knew his wife was visiting her family in Cleveland this week. She knew because he had come into the office on Monday and made a joke about it. “Doc,” he’d said, “this is one week I’m glad to see you. You may tear my jaw apart, but it’s nothing to what my father-in-law does to my brain. Without instruments.” He had a wry way of putting things, Mr. Cadsden, when he wanted to. If he was alone, she thought, and remembered about lunch, and had nothing to do for the evening.… It would be OK going to the party at the instructor’s apartment with the bookstore boy, but it would be dazzling to walk in and say, “I guess I don’t have to introduce-Omar Gadsden.”

  “Miss Anderson,” Dr. Levinson was calling testily from the office.

  “Yes, doctor,” Paulette said, then into the phone: “I’m terribly busy now. I’ll tell you what—I’ll come by after work this afternoon and let you know.”

  “But—” Bagshot said.

  “Have to run,” she whispered, making her voice intimate to give him enough hope to last till five o’clock. “Goodbye.”

  She hung up and went back to the office, where Dr. Levinson was standing with the new shining set of teeth held aloft above the gaping mouth of Omar Gadsden and Mr. Gadsden looking as though he were going to be guillotined within the next two seconds.

  Christopher hung up the phone. Strike one, he thought. The last whisper over the phone had left him tingling weirdly, but he had to face facts. Strike one. Who knew what would happen to a girl like that before five o’clock of a Saturday afternoon? He tried to be philosophical. What could you expect the very first number you called? Still, he had nothing really to reproach himself for. He had not just jumped in blindly. The invitation to the lecture at the Y.M.H.A. had been calculatingly and cunningly chosen as bait for a girl who was interested in the kind of books Anderson, Paulette** was interested in. He had carefully perused the “Entertainment Events” section in the Times before dialing Dr. Levinson’s office and had studied Cue magazine and had rejected the pleasures of the movies and the theater as lures for the dental assistant. And she had said that she would come by at five o’clock. She wouldn’t have said that if she’d felt it was ridiculous for a girl her size to be seen with a man his size. The more he thought about it, the better he felt. It hadn’t been a blazing success, of course, but nobody could say it had been a total failure.

  Two college students, a boy and a girl, who made a habit of Saturday-morning visits, came in. They were unkempt and unprincipled and they rarely bought anything, at the most a paperback, and he kept a sharp eye on them, because they had a nasty habit of separating and wandering uninnocently around the shop and they both wore loose coats that could hide any number of books. It was fifteen minutes before they left and he could get back to the telephone.

  He decided to forget about alphabetical order. It was an unscientific way of going about the problem, dependent upon a false conception of the arrangement of modern society. Now was the time for a judicious weighing of possibilities. As he thumbed through his address book, he thought hard and long over each starred name, remembering height, weight, coloring, general amiability, signs of flirta-tiousness and/or sensuality, indications of loneliness and popularity, tastes and aversions.

  Stickney, Beulah**. He lingered over the page. Under Stickney, Beulah**, in parentheses, was Fleischer, Rebecca, also double-starred. The two girls lived together, on East 74th Street. Stickney, Beulah** was actually and honestly a model and often had her photograph in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She had long dark hair that she wore down loose over her shoulders and a long bony sensational body and a big model’s mouth and a model’s arrogant look, as though no man alive was good enough for her. But the look was just part of her professional equipment. Whenever she came into the shop, she was friendly as could be with Christopher and squatted unceremoniously on the floor or loped up the ladder when she was looking for books that were in out-of-the way places. She was a great one for travel books. She had worked in Paris and Rome and London and while she bought books about distant places by writers like H. V. Morton and James Morris and Mary McCarthy, when she talked about the cities she had visited, her vocabulary was hardly literary, to say the least. “You’ve got to get to Paris before the Germans come in again, luv,” she would say. “It’s a gas.” Or, “You’d go ape over Rome, luv.” Or, “Marrakesh, luv! Stoned! Absolutely stoned!” She had picked up the habit of calling people luv in London. Christopher knew it was just a habit, but it was friendly and encouraging, all the same.

  Fleischer, Rebecca** was just about as tall and pretty as Stickney, Beulah**, with short dark red hair and a pale freckled complexion to go with it and tapering musician’s fingers and willowy hips. She was a receptionist for a company that made cassettes and she wore slacks on Saturdays that didn’t hide anything. She was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn and made no bones about it, larding her
conversation with words like shmeer and schmuck and nebbish. She didn’t buy books by the reviews nor by their subject matter, she bought them after looking at the pictures of the authors on the back covers. If the authors were handsome, she would put down her $6.95. She bought the books of Saul Bellow, John Cheever and John Hersey. It wasn’t a scientific system, but it worked and she put an awful lot of good writing on her shelf that way. At least it worked in America. Christopher wasn’t so sure it would work with foreign authors. She had endeared herself to Christopher by buying Portnoy’s Complaint and having him gift-wrap it and send it to her mother in Flatbush. “The old bag’ll sit shiva for six months when she reads it,” Rebecca had said, smiling happily.

  Christopher wouldn’t have dared send anything more advanced than the works of G. A. Henty to his mother and he appreciated the freedom of spirit in Miss Fleischer’s gesture. He had never gone out with a Jewish girl, not that he was anti-Semitic or anything like that but because somehow the occasion hadn’t arisen. Listening to a Jewish girl in skintight slacks who was five inches taller than he talk the way Miss Fleischer talked was intriguing, if not more. June said that Jewish girls were voracious in bed. June came from Pasadena and her father still believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so her opinions on the subject could not be called scientific; but even so, whenever Miss Fleischer came into the shop, Christopher looked carefully for pleasing signs of voracity.

  He hesitated over the two names. Then he decided. Stickney, Beulah**. A redheaded giantess who was also Jewish would be too much for the first go. He dialed the Rhinelander number.

  Beulah sat under the drier in the living room of the three-room flat, with kitchen, that she shared with Rebecca. Rebecca was painting Beulah’s nails a luminous pearly pink. The ironing board on which Rebecca had ironed out Beulah’s hair into a straight shining sheet of living satin was still in place. Beulah kept looking nervously over Rebecca’s bent head at the clock on the mantelpiece of the false fireplace, although the plane wasn’t due in at Kennedy until 3:15 and it was only 10:40 now. The girls did each other’s hair and nails every Saturday morning, if other amusements didn’t intervene. But this was a special Saturday morning, at least for Beulah, and she’d said she was too nervous to work on Rebecca and Rebecca had said that was OK, there was nobody she had to look good for this weekend, anyway.