Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

“Do not dilute the pleasure,” I said. “Do you remember who said that?”

Fabian laughed. “I do indeed.” Then, after a moment, “On that subject – let me ask you a question. What is your conception of money?”

I shrugged. “I guess I never really thought about it. I don’t think I have a conception. That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Fabian said.

“If I asked you the same question, what would your answer be?”

“A conception of money,” Fabian said, “doesn’t exist in a pure state. I mean you have to know what you think of the world in general before you can hope to have a clear notion about money. For example, your view of the world, from what you’ve told me, changed in one day. Am I right?”

“The day in the doctor’s office,” I said. “Yes.” “Wouldn’t you say that before that day you had one conception of what money meant to you and after it another?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t had any dramatic changes of outlook like that,” Fabian said. “A long time ago I decided that the world was a place of infinite injustice. What have I seen and lived through? Wars in which millions of the innocent perished, holocausts, droughts, failures of all kinds, corruption in high places, the enrichment of thieves, the geometric multiplication of victims. And nothing I could possibly do to alter or alleviate any of it. I am not a pain-seeker or reformer, and, even if I were, no conceivable good would come out of my suffering or preaching. So – my intention has always been to try to avoid joining the ranks of the victims. As far as I could ever see, the people who avoided being victims had at least one thing in common. Money. So my conception of money began with that one thing – freedom. Freedom to move. To be one’s own man. Freedom to say, screw you, Jack, at the appropriate moment. A poor man is a rat in a maze. His choices are made for him by a power beyond himself. He becomes a machine whose fuel is hunger. His satisfactions are pitifully restricted. Of course there is always the exceptional rat who breaks out of the maze, driven most often by an exceptional and uncommon hunger. Or by accident. Or luck. Like you and me. Well, I don’t pretend that the entire human race is – or should be – satisfied with the same things. There are men who want power and who will abase themselves, betray their mothers, kill for it. Regard certain of our presidents and the colonels who rule most of the world today. There are saints who will commit themselves to the fire rather than deny some truth that they believe has been vouchsafed them. There are men who wear themselves out with ulcers and heart attacks before the age of sixty for the ludicrous distinction of running an assembly line, an advertising agency, a brokerage house. I’ll say nothing about the women who allow themselves to become drudges for love, or whores out of pure laziness. When you were earning your living as a pilot, I imagine you believed yourself happy.”

“Very,” I said.

“I dislike flying,” Fabian said. “I am either bored in the air or frightened. Everyone to his own satisfactions. Mine, I’m afraid, are banal and selfish. I hate to work; I like the company of elegant women; I enjoy traveling, with a certain emphasis on fine, old-fashioned hotels; I have a collector’s instinct, which up to now I have had to suppress. None of this is particularly admirable, but I’m not running as an admirable entry. Actually, since we’re partners, I’d prefer it if we could share the same tastes. It would reduce the probability of friction between us.” He looked at me speculatively. “Do you consider yourself admirable?”

I thought for a moment, trying to be honest with myself. “I guess I never thought about it one way or another. I guess you could say it never occurred to me to ask myself if I was either admirable or unadmirable.”

“I find you dangerously modest, Douglas,” Fabian said. “At a crucial moment you may turn out to be a dreadful drag. Modesty and money don’t go well together. I like money, as you can guess, but I am rather bored by the process of accumulating it and am deeply bored by most of the people who spend the best part of their lives doing so. My feeling about the world of money is that it is like a loosely guarded city which should be raided sporadically by outsiders, non-citadins, like me, who aren’t bound by any of its laws or moral pretensions. Thanks to you, Douglas, and the happy accident that led you and myself to buy identical bags, I may now be able to live up to my dearest image of myself. Now – about you — Although you’re over thirty, there’s something – I hope you won’t take this unkindly – something youthful, almost adolescent – unformed, perhaps – that I sense in your character. If I may say so, as a man who has always had a direction, I sense a lack of direction in you. Am I unfair in saying that?”

“A little,” I said. “Maybe it’s not a lack of direction, but a confusion of directions.”

“Perhaps that’s it,” Fabian said. “Perhaps you’re not yet ready to accept the consequences of the gesture that you have made.”

“What gesture?” I asked, puzzled.

“The night in the Hotel St Augustine. Let me ask you a question. Supposing you had come across that dead man, with all that money in the room, before your eyes went bad, while you still were flying, still were playing with the idea of marriage – would you have done what you did?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“There’s one thing you can always depend on,” Fabian said. “The wrong man will always be in the wrong place at the right moment.” He poured some more wine for himself. “As for me – there never was a time in my whole life that I would have hesitated for a second. Well, all that’s in the past. We want to move as far away as possible from the original source, to cover it up, so to speak, with so much fresh capital, that people will never speculate about just how we started in the first place. Don’t you agree?”

“In principle, yes,” I said. “But just how do you propose to do it? We can’t depend upon buying winning horses every day…”

“No,” Fabian said. “I must admit, we have to regard that as unusual.”

“And you’ve told me you’re never going to play bridge or backgammon again.”

“No. The people I had to associate with depressed me. And the deception I had to practice made me a little ashamed of myself. Duplicity is unpleasant for a man who, by his own lights, would like to have a high opinion of himself. I sat down every night with the cold intention of taking their money away from them and nothing more – but I had to pretend to be friendly with them, be interested in them and their families, enjoy dining with them… I really was getting too old for all that. Money…” He pronounced the word as though it were a symbol for a problem in mathematics that had to be solved. “To get the most pleasure out of money, it is best not to have to think about it most of the time. Not to have to keep on making it, with your own efforts or your own luck. In our case, that would mean investing our capital in such a way as to ensure us a comfortable income over the years. By the way, Douglas, what is your notion of a comfortable yearly income?”

“Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars,” I said.

Fabian laughed. “Come, come, man, raise your sights a little.”

“What would you say?”

“One hundred at least,” Fabian said.

“That’ll take some doing,” I said.

“Yes, it will. And entail some risks. From time to time it will also take nerve. And no matter what happens, no recriminations. And certainly no more stilettos.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident of the future than I actually was. “I’ll go along.”