Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Just before he dozed off, he thought of the message from Joe Reeves. Important, he thought a little irritably, important—now, what could that be? He twitched a little, uneasily, nearly coming back to wakefulness. Then, with the steady breathing of his wife sounding from the next bed, he dropped off to sleep.

The siren must have been wailing for some time before Cahill woke, because it entered harshly into his dream, and somehow he was back in London, in the cold billet, and the planes were overhead and the guns were going off, and he had the old feeling that neighbors were dying by chance in burning buildings on the street outside his window. He could feel himself moaning softly and shivering under the blankets and hoping he would be alive in the morning, and then he awoke.

He gazed blindly at the dark ceiling, feeling the cold, unreasonable sweat come out on his body. What is it? he thought. What is it? Then he realized that he was at home, in his own bed, and that the war was over. The noise of the siren howled down the quiet street outside—a police car going to investigate a burglary or pick up a drunk—echoing among the untouched homes, behind their undamaged lawns. He shook his head, irritated with himself for his nervousness. He looked across at his wife. She slept, unperturbed, her breath coming evenly, her arms primly down at her sides, her captured hair untossed on the pillow, happily beyond the reach of sirens and the memory of sirens.

He felt tremblingly awake. Every sound now reached him clearly and with individual significance: the wind troubling the curtains in a starched rhythm; the insubstantial creak of the stairs reacting to the obscure strain that years put upon old houses; the distant crashing of a truck’s gears past a faraway street corner, attacking all insomniacs within a radius of a mile; the even intake and exhalation of his wife’s breath, too mild to be called a snore but now as annoying as a suddenly loud clock, holding the hours of the night too strictly to account, reminding the would-be sleeper that every moment of wakefulness now would be answered by weariness tomorrow.

Cahill looked at the low radium gleam of the clock on the bed table. Four-thirty. He fell back onto his pillow heavily. Too late to take a sleeping pill. If he took a pill now, he’d be doped all day; he wouldn’t have time to sleep it off. The ubiquitous problem of modern civilization, he thought: Is it too late for a pill? Too early? Which way will it be worse tomorrow? All over the country, sleepy, nervous hands reaching out for the clock, troubled heads calculating, It will wear off in six hours, but I have to get up in four. Sleep, he thought, the first great natural resource to be exhausted by modern man. The erosion of the nerves, not to be halted by any reclamation project, private or public.

He lay rigid in his bed, conscious now of various dull, unpleasant sensations in his body. His eyelids felt harsh and granular and seemed to scrape his eyeballs when he blinked. He was too warm, but a damp breeze from the window felt cold and uncomfortable on his forehead. The muscles of his right leg felt cramped, and he had a curious sensation that the tendon running up from his ankle had grown too short during the night. His stomach, just under the diaphragm, was moving in little spasms. He put his hand on the spot and felt the sick, erratic fluttering. He could taste the whiskey he had drunk, high and sour in his throat. That damned siren, he thought. I was feeling so well …

Then Cahill remembered the message. It must be something really pressing, he thought, for Joe Reeves to call like that. Cahill couldn’t recall another occasion, in all the time he’d known Joe, when Joe had left that sort of a message for him. Early in his college career, Joe had decided to be urbane, debonair, off-hand, and his manner of treating all matters light-handedly and without urgency had become, if anything, more pronounced with the years. And there was nothing off-handed about leaving a disturbing note like that waiting for a man to pick up at one o’clock in the morning. After all, he saw Joe almost every day, at lunch. You’d think a man could wait until noon the next day. Unless it was a matter of the most drastic importance …

Cahill twisted restlessly in his bed, trying to keep his eyes closed, sullenly inviting sleep. I will think about this tomorrow, he thought. I will think about this tomorrow. But the restful emptiness of mind he sought evaded him. Unpleasantly, he remembered that Joe had good reason to call him. Subconsciously, he realized, he had been waiting for just such a message, and dreading it. For the twentieth time, he wondered if Joe had heard what he, Cahill, had said about him at the Faculty Club two weeks before. He had felt guilty about it ever since, and ashamed of himself. Even giving himself the excuse that he had drunk a little too much had not helped. In a discussion about teaching techniques, the subject of Joe’s popularity with his classes had come up, and Cahill had said cruelly, “Joe Reeves charms his classes into believing they’re learning a great deal about economics when what they’re really learning is how charming Joe Reeves can be.” It was a stupid thing to say, even though it was partly true, and Lloyd and Evarts, who had been listening to him, had chuckled maliciously. Reeves had seemed rather cool for the last two weeks, and Cahill was almost certain that the remark had got back to him, as was almost inevitable in the narrow companionship of a college town. It was too bad. He and Joe Reeves had been close friends for over twenty years, and even though the relationship by now had more the form than the substance of the earlier friendship (how really remain friendly with any man after you are married?), it was silly to risk it for a light and mischievous judgment over a glass of whiskey. And it didn’t even represent what Cahill really felt about Reeves. True, there was a superficiality about Reeves, especially in recent years, that came with his easy success with everyone—university presidents, faculty wives, students—but buried beneath that were the shrewdness, the good sense, the honorable instincts that had attracted Cahill to him in the first place. Jealousy, Cahill thought, ashamed of himself. How can a grown man give himself to it so easily? Probably, Cahill thought, Reeves had heard about the remark the very next morning and had mulled it over for the last two weeks, growing angrier and angrier, until this evening, when he had decided to have a showdown with Cahill about it. And Cahill couldn’t deny having said it, or disguise in any way the envy and criticism that had called it forth, and that would be the end of the friendship. Joe, for all his easy assurance, was terribly touchy, vain, unforgiving. Cahill pondered on what it would be like not to be friendly with Joe. They had gone through college together, travelled through Europe together, lent each other money, books, opinions, neckties, celebrated together, mourned, exulted together. Even now, they and their wives had dinner together once or twice a week and made free of each other’s homes in a carefully preserved informality that was pleasant, if not quite honest, and that kept alive for them a kind of gentle memory of their exciting younger days. And now, for a phrase, for a drop of wanton acid, to lose it all.

Cahill stared bitterly at the ceiling. The tongue, he thought, grows looser and more destructive with the years. Give a talkative man enough listeners and he will bring down stone with his indiscretions.

The curtains scraped in their humble starch at the windows, rasping across his consciousness. Of course, Cahill thought, it is possible that Joe did not hear what I said about him. The message could be about a dozen other things. What things? Joe was so intimately connected with his life, with the people and events of his past, with the problems and promises of the present, that the message might be concerned with his wife, his children, his job, his health, his finances, anything.