Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

I dozed fitfully after that, dreaming disconnectedly. There was a man who appeared and disappeared at the edge of my dreams who might have been Sloane or Drusack, jangling keys.

I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was Flora Sloane, inviting me to dinner. I made myself sound enthusiastic as I accepted. I didn’t have to dress for dinner, she said; we were dining in town. Somehow, Bill had forgotten to pack his tuxedo, and it was being flown from America but hadn’t arrived yet. I said I preferred not dressing myself and went in and took a cold shower.

We met for drinks at the bar of the hotel. Sloane was wearing a dark gray suit. It was not mine. He had changed his shoes. There was another couple at the table who had been on our plane coming over and who were also from Greenwich. They had been out skiing that day and the wife was already limping. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said. “I can just go up to the Corveglia Club every day for the next two weeks and just lie in the sun.”

“Before we were married,” her husband said, “she used to tell me how much she loved to ski.”

“That was before we were married, dear,” the woman said complacently.

Sloane ordered a bottle of champagne. It was finished quickly and the other man ordered a second one. I would have to get out of St Moritz before it was my turn to reciprocate. It was easy to love the poor in that atmosphere.

We went to dinner in a restaurant in a rustic chalet nearby and drank a great deal more champagne. The prices on the menu were not rustic. During the course of the meal I learned more than I ever wanted to know about Greenwich – who was nearly thrown out of the golf club, what lady was doing it with what gynaecologist, how much the new addition to the Powell’s house cost, who was leading the brave fight to keep black children from being bussed into the town schools. Even if I had been guaranteed that I would get my seventy thousand dollars back before the end of the week, I wondered if I could endure the necessary dinners.

It was worse after dinner. When we got back to the hotel, the two men went to play bridge and Flora asked me to take her dancing in the Kings Club downstairs. The lady with the limp came along with us to watch. When we were seated at a table. Flora asked for champagne, and this time it was fairly and truly on my bill.

I never liked to dance, and Flora was one of those women who clutch their partners as if to cut off any possible movement to escape. It was hot in the room and infernally noisy and my flannel blazer was heavy and too tight under the arms and I was swamped in Flora’s perfume. She also hummed amorously into my ear as we danced.

“Oh, I’m so glad we found you,” she whispered. “You can’t drag Bill onto a dance floor. And I’ll bet you’re a great skier, too. You move like one.” Sex and all other human activities were clearly inextricably entwined in Mrs Sloane’s mind. “Will you ski with me tomorrow?”

“I’d love to,” I said. If I could have chosen a list of people whom I could suspect of having stolen my suitcase, the Sloanes would have been far down at the bottom.

It was after midnight, with two bottles of champagne gone, when I finally managed to call a halt. I signed the check and escorted the two ladies upstairs to where their husbands were playing bridge. Sloane was losing. I didn’t know whether I was glad or sorry. If it was my money, I would have wept. If it was his, I’d have cheered. Aside from his friend from Greenwich, there was a handsome, graying man of about fifty at the table, and an old lady encrusted with jewelry, with a harsh Spanish accent, like the cawing of a crow. The Beautiful People of the International Set.

While I was watching, the handsome, gray-haired man made a small slam. “Fabian,” Sloane said, “every year I find myself writing out a check to you.”

The man Sloane had called Fabian smiled gently. He had a charming smile, almost womanish in sweetness, with laugh wrinkles permanently around his liquid dark eyes. “I must admit,” he said, “I’m having a modest little run of luck.” He had a soft, husky voice and an accent that was a little strange. I couldn’t tell from the way he spoke where he came from.

“Modest!” Sloane said. He wasn’t a pleasant loser.

“I’m going to bed,” Flora said. “I’m skiing in the morning.”

“I’ll be right up,” Sloane said. He was shuffling the cards as though he was preparing to use them as weapons… I escorted Flora to her door. “Isn’t it comfy,” she said, “We’re just side-by-side?” She kissed my cheek good night, giggled, and said, “Night-night,” and went in.

I wasn’t sleepy and I sat up and read. I heard footsteps about a half hour later and the door to the Sloanes’ room open and shut. There were some murmurs through the wall that I couldn’t make out and after a while silence.

I gave the couple another fifteen minutes to fall asleep then opened the door of my room silently. All along the corridor, pairs of shoes were placed in front of bedroom doors, women’s and men’s moccasins, wing tips, patent leathers, ski boots, in eternal sexual order. Two by two, entries to the Ark. But in front of the Sloanes’ door, there were only the dainty leather boots Flora Sloane had worn on the train. For whatever reason, her husband had not put out the brown shoes with the gum soles, possibly size ten, to be shined. I closed my door without a sound, to ponder the meaning of this.

“I’m worried about my husband,” Flora Sloane said to me. We were having a drink before lunch, seated in the sunshine on the terrace of the Corveglia Club, among the maritime Greeks, the Milanese industrialists, the people who were photographed beside pools at Acapulco, and the ladies of various nationalities who preyed on them all. Flora Sloane, who obviously had not been what has in other times been called “gently reared” and who lapsed, when excited, into a language and an accent you might expect to hear from a waitress in a diner in New Jersey patronized almost exclusively by truck drivers, was completely at home here and accepted all attention or deference with regal aplomb. I, on the other hand, felt like a man who had just been dropped behind enemy lines.

The temporary membership had cost me a hundred and twenty francs for two weeks, but where the Sloanes went I had to follow. Not that Sloane himself was very much in evidence. In the mornings, according to Flora, he was on the phone back to his office in New York for hours on end and in the afternoon and evening he played bridge.

“He won’t even have a tan when we get back to Greenwich,” she complained. “People won’t believe he’s ever seen an Alp.”

Meanwhile, I had the honor of leading Flora Sloane down the bill and buying her lunch. She was a fair skier, but one of those women who squealed when she came to a steep bit and constantly complained of her boots. I spent quite a bit of time kneeling in the snow, loosening the hooks, then tightening them again after three turns. I had refused to be seen in the red pants and the lemon parka I had found in the suitcase and had bought myself a sensible navy blue outfit. At great expense.

At night, there was the inevitable sweaty dancing and the champagne. Madame Sloane was becoming progressively more amorous, too, and had a nasty habit of sticking her tongue in my ear while we danced. I wanted to get into the Sloanes’ room and search it, but not that way. There was a choice of reasons for my coolness, not the least of which was the total lack of all response to any sexual stimulation, dating from the moment I had realized that my seventy thousand dollars had disappeared. Money was power. That I knew. It had not occurred to me that its absence involved impotence. Any attempt at performance on my part, I was sure, would be grotesquely inadequate. Flora Sloane’s flirtatiousness was trying enough. Her derision would be catastrophic. I foresaw years of psychiatry ahead of me.