Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Please, she thought, make this one good. Childishly, she felt, If this one is good it will be a turning point, a symbol, his whole life will be different. She hated herself for her thoughts and stared blankly at Eleanor, self-consciously alert and desirable in her pretty dress.

Why the hell did she have to come here this Sunday? Jane thought despairingly.

She heard the crack of the racket behind her. The ball whistled past her, hit the tape, rolled undecidedly on top of the net for a moment, then fell back at her feet for a double fault and the set.

“Too bad.” She turned and smiled at Stewart, helplessly feeling herself beginning to wonder how she would manage to find the six weeks it would take in Reno. She shook her head, knowing that she wasn’t going to Reno, but knowing, too, that the word would pass through her thoughts again and again, more and more frequently, with growing insistence, as the days went by.

She walked off the court with Stewart, holding his hand.

“The shadows,” Stewart was saying. “Late in the afternoon, like this. It’s impossible to see the service line.”

“Yes, dear,” Jane said.

T he curtain came down and the applause began. The theatre was warm now, after the three long acts, and Robert Harvey applauded lightly, only from the wrists, because he didn’t want to sweat. He was a big, heavy man, and he had found that when he permitted himself enthusiasm in the overheated midtown auditoriums, he came away soaking wet. He had once caught a bad cold that way, going out into a rainstorm after A Streetcar Named Desire , and he had learned to temper his gratitude, moving his hands politely but making very little noise. The curtain went up again and the cast took their bows, smiling widely because the play had been running three months and was going to run at least a year and they were all eating. Robert regarded them coolly, thinking, Well, they certainly aren’t worth four-eighty a seat. What has happened, he thought, to the plays I used to see when I was a younger man?

Virginia, in the next seat, was applauding briskly. Her eyes were shining, as they did when she was enjoying herself. Robert decided not to say anything about the four-eighty a seat when he talked to her later about the play. The actors were taking individual curtain calls now, and when the girl who played the cynical friend of the heroine came on, Robert clapped his hands quite powerfully, risking perspiration, because he had met her once at a party. Besides, she was not a bad-looking girl, with longish black hair, cut in an unusual way, and large blue eyes. She was a bit too big and eventually she was going to be fat and you had the feeling she never was going to get very far as an actress, but none of these things would be crucial for several more years. Robert felt the beads of perspiration coming out on his forehead, and he was glad when the girl, after a bosomy curtsy, went off into the wings.

The lights came on and the Harveys moved slowly up the aisle in the newly disturbed waves of perfume and fur. Virginia said, “That was a very nice little play, wasn’t it?” and Robert nodded, hoping that there were no relatives of the playwright within earshot. In the lobby, as he put on his coat, he saw a young man with a yellow muffler who was leaning against the box-office window staring at Virginia. In a more realistic society, he thought, taking Virginia’s arm and moving her toward the street, you would be permitted to walk over and punch the nose of any man who looked at your wife that way.

They spurted across the street among the taxis, Virginia fleet on her high heels, and went through the alley, between the stage doors and the gay posters for musical comedies. There were three hits playing on the next street, and the people flowing from the theatres sounded good-natured and jubilant, and you knew that they would remain that way for at least another half hour, and it was pleasant to be among them in the windless, cold night air. The lights of the restaurant across the street were warm among the dark buildings, and the doorman, while not effusive, was agreeably polite as he swung the door open for them. The headwaiter was a little chillier than the doorman and seated them at the rear of the restaurant, although there were several empty tables closer to the entrance. Robert humbly accepted the table, thinking philosophically, Well, this is a theatrical restaurant; there are dozens of places where they’d put me near the front of the room and actors’d be lucky to get through the door.

Virginia settled herself on the banquette with a hundred small subsiding movements, then took out her glasses and carefully surveyed the room. After a minute, she put the glasses down on the table and turned toward Robert. “What’re you smiling at?” she asked.

“Because you’re so pleased,” said Robert.

“Who says I’m pleased?”

“You examined the terrain and you said to yourself, ‘Isn’t this nice? I’m prettier than any of them,’ and now you can enjoy your supper.”

“Oh, you’re so sharp,” Virginia said. She smiled. “You’re such a sharp man.”

The waiter came, and they ordered spaghetti and half a bottle of Chianti, and watched the restaurant fill up with people who had been to the theatre and actors who still had traces of greasepaint around their collars and tall, astonishing-looking girls in mink coats from the musicals across the street. Robert ate hungrily and drank his wine slowly, nursing it.

“That play tonight,” Virginia was saying, delicately winding spaghetti on her fork against a spoon, “was all right and I enjoyed it while I was there, but I’m getting tired of how awful all the female characters are in plays these days. All the women always are drunks or nymphomaniacs or they drive their sons crazy or they ruin the lives of two or three people an act. If I were a playwright, I’d write a nice, old-fashioned play in which the heroine is pure and beautiful and makes a man out of her husband, even though he’s weak and drinks too much and occasionally robs his boss to bet on the horses.”

“If you were a playwright, you’d be in Hollywood,” Robert said.

“Anyway, I bet it’d be a big success,” Virginia insisted. “I bet people are just dying to go to see a play that they can come out of and say, ‘Yes, that’s just how Mother was the time Dad had his trouble down at the bank and those two men in plainclothes came to see him from New York.’”

“If anything like that comes up,” Robert said comfortably, “you go to see it some matinée. By yourself.”

“And all the actresses these days. They try to act so ordinary. Just like anybody you’d meet in the street. Sometimes you wonder how they dare charge you admission to watch them. When I was a little girl, actresses used to be so affected you’d know you had to pay to see them, because you’d never meet anybody like that in real life in a million years.”

“How did you like Duse?” Robert asked. “What did you think of Bernhardt when you were ten?”

“Don’t be so witty. You know what I mean. That girl you liked so much tonight, for example …”

“Which girl I liked so much?” Robert asked, puzzled.

“The big one. The one that played the friend.”

“Oh, that one,” Robert said. “I didn’t like her so much.”

“You certainly sounded as though you did. I thought your hands’d be a bloody pulp by the time she got off the stage.”

“I was just being neighborly,” Robert said. “I met her once at a party.”