Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

Warmed by the man’s unflagging attention, she felt electric, sparkling, and irresistible. She opened the two top buttons of her dress. Let her glories be displayed. Besides, it was warm in the restaurant. She could speak of unmentionable things, she could use words that until now she had only seen scrawled on walls by naughty boys. She had achieved candour, that aristocratic privilege.

‘I never pay any attention to them.’ She was responding to

a question from Boylan about the men in the office. ‘Squirming around like puppies. Small-town Don Juans. Taking you to the movies and an ice-cream soda and then necking in the back seat of a car, grabbing at you as though you’re the brass ring on a merry-go-round. Maying a noise like a dying elk and trying to put their tongues in your mouth. Not for me. I’ve got other things on my mind. They try it once and after that they know better. I’m in no hurry!’ She stood up suddenly. ‘Thank you for a delicious lunch,’ she said. ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’ She had never before said to any of her dates that she had to go to the bathroom. Her bladder had nearly burst from time to time in movie houses and at parties.

Teddy stood up. “The first door in the hall to the left,’ he said. He was a knowing man, Teddy, informed on all subjects.

She sauntered through the room, surprised that it was empty. She walked slowly, knowing that Teddy was following her every step with his pale intelligent eyes. Her back was straight. She knew that. Her waist was slender, her hips curved, her legs long and rounded and firm. She knew all that and walked slowly to let Teddy know it once and for all.

In the ladies’ room, she looked at herself in the mirror and wiped off the last of the lipstick from her mouth. I have a wide, striking mouth, she told her reflection. What a fool I was to paint it just like any old mouth.

She went out into the hall from the ladies’ room. Teddy was waiting for her at the entrance to the bar. He had paid the bill and he was drawing on his left glove. He stared at her sombrely as she approached him.

‘I am going to buy you a red dress,’ he said. ‘A blazing red dress to set off that miraculous complexion and that wild, black hair. When you walk into a room, the men will drop to their knees.’

She laughed, red her colour. That was the way a man should talk.

She took his arm and they went out to the car.

He put the top up because it was getting cold and they drove slowly south, his bare right hand, thoughtfully ungloved, on hers on the seat between them. It was cosy in the car, with the windows up. There was the flowery fragrance of the alcohol they had drunk, mixed with the smell of leather.

‘Now,’ he said, tell me. What were you really doing at the >us stop at,King’s Landing?’

She chuckled.

That was a dirty chuckle,’ he said.

‘I was there for a dirty reason,’ she said.

He drove without speaking for a while. The road was deserted, and they drove through stripes of long shadows and pale sunshine down the tree-lined highway.

‘I’m waiting,’ Teddy said.

‘Why not? she thought. All things could be said on this blessed afternoon. Nothing was unspeakable between them. They were above the trivia of prudery. She began to speak, first hesitantly, then more easily, as she got into it, of what had happened at the hospital.

She described what the two Negroes were like, lonely and crippled, the only two coloured men in the ward, and how Arnold had always been so reserved and gentlemanly and had never called her by her first name, like the other soldiers, and how he read the books she loaned him and seemed so intelligent and sad, with his wound and the girl in Cornwall who had never written to him again. Then she told about the night he found her alone when all the other men were asleep and the conversation they had and how it led up to the proposition, the two men, the eight hundred dollars. ‘If they’d been white, I’d have reported them to the Colonel,’ she said, ‘but this way … ‘

Teddy nodded understandingly at the wheel, but said nothing, just drove a little faster down the highway.

‘I haven’t been back to the hospital since,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t. I begged my father to let me go to New York. I couldn’t bear staying in the same town with that man, with his knowing what he said to me. But my father … There’s no arguing with my father. And naturally, I couldn’t tell him why. He’d have gone out to the hospital and killed those two men with his bare hands. And then, this morning -I didn’t go to the bus, I drifted into it. I knew I didn’t really want to go to that house, but I guess I wanted to know if they really were there, if there were men who actually acted like that. Even so, even after I got out of the bus, I just waited on the road. I had a Coke, I took a sunbath … I … Maybe I would have gone a bit down the road. Maybe all the way. Just to see. I knew I was safe. I could run away from them easily, even if they saw me. They can hardly move with their legs … ‘

The car was slowing down. She had been looking down at her shoes, under the dashboard of the car, as she spoke. Now she glanced up and saw where they were. The gas station. The general store. Nobody in sight

The car came to a halt at the entrance to the gravel road that led down to the river.

‘It was a game’ she said, ‘a silly, cruel, girl’s game.’ ‘You’re a liar,’ Boylan said.

‘What?’ She was stunned. It was terribly hot and airless in the car.

‘You heard me, pet,’ Boylan said. ‘You’re a liar. It wasn’t any game. You were going to go down there and get laid.’

‘Teddy,’ she said, gasping, ‘please , . . open the window. I can’t breathe.’

Boylan leaned across her and opened the door on her side. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Walk on down, pet. They’re still there. Enjoy yourself. I’m sure it’ll be an experience you’ll cherish all your life.’

‘Please, Teddy … ‘ She was beginning to feel very dizzy and his voice faded in her ears and then came up again, harshly.

‘Don’t worry about transportation home,’ Boylan said. ‘I’l wait here for you. I have nothing better to do. It’s Saturday afternoon and all my friends are out of town. Go ahead. You can tell me about it when you come back. Ill be most interested.’

‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ she said. Her head was expanding and contracting and she felt as though she were choking. She stumbled out of the car and threw up by the side of the road in great racking heaves.

Boylan sat immobile at the wheel, staring straight ahead of him. When she was finished and the throat-tearing convulsions had ceased, he said, curtly, ‘All right, corne back in here.’

Depleted and fagile, she crept back into the car, cold sweat on her forehead, holding her hand up to her mouth against the smell.

‘Here, pet,’ Boylan said kindly; He gave her the large coloured silk handkerchief from his breast pocket. ‘Use this.’ She dabbed at her mouth, wiped the sweat from her face, ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘What do you really want to do, pet?’ he asked. ‘I want to go home,’ she whimpered. ‘You can’t go home in that condition,’ he said. He started the car. ‘Where’re you taking me?’ ‘My house,’ he said. She was too exhausted to argue and she lay back with her

head against the back of the seat, her eyes closed, as they drove swiftly south along the highway.

He made love to her early that evening, after she had rinsed her mouth a long time with a cinnamon-flavoured mouthwash in his bathroom and had slept soddenly on his bed for two hours. Afterward, silently, he drove her home.

Monday morning, when she came into the office at nine o’clock, there was a long, white, plain envelope on her desk, with her name printed on it and ‘Personal’ scribbled in one corner. She opened the envelope. There were eight one hundred dollar bills there.