Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Yes.”

Beddoes took a deep breath and looked through the window. A man in a raincoat was walking past, reading a newspaper and shaking his head.

“All right,” Beddoes said. “What’s so great about him?”

“What can I be expected to say to that?” Christina asked. “He’s a gentle, good, useful man. And now what do you know?”

“What else?”

“And he loves me.” She said it in a low voice. In all the time they’d been together, Beddoes hadn’t heard her use the word before. “He loves me,” Christina repeated flatly.

“I saw,” said Beddoes. “Immoderately.”

“Immoderately,” Christina said.

“Now let me ask another question,” Beddoes said. “Would you like to get up from this table and go off with me tonight?”

Christina pushed her cup away, turning it thoughtfully. “Yes,” she said.

“But you won’t,” said Beddoes.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s talk about something else,” said Christina. “Where’re you going on your next trip? Kenya? Bonn? Tokyo?”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m tired of people like you,” Christina said clearly. “I’m tired of correspondents and pilots and promising junior statesmen. I’m tired of all the brilliant young men who are constantly going someplace to report a revolution or negotiate a treaty or die in a war. I’m tired of airports and I’m tired of seeing people off. I’m tired of not being allowed to cry until the plane gets off the ground. I’m tired of being so damned prompt. I’m tired of answering the telephone. I’m tired of all the spoiled, hung-over international darlings. I’m tired of sitting down to dinner with people I used to love and being polite to their Greeks. I’m tired of being handed around the group. I’m tired of being more in love with people than they are with me. That answer your question?”

“More or less,” Beddoes said. He was surprised that no one at any of the other tables seemed to be paying any special attention to them.

“When you left for Egypt,” Christina went on, her voice level, “I decided. I leaned against that wire fence watching them refueling all those monstrous planes, with the lights on, and I dried the tears and I decided. The next time, it was going to be someone who would be shattered when I took off.”

“And you found him.”

“I found him,” Christina said flatly. “And I’m not going to shatter him.”

Beddoes put out his hands and took hers. They lay limp in his grasp. “Chris …” he said. She was looking out the window. She sat there, outlined against the shining dusk beyond the plate glass, scrubbed and youthful and implacable, making him remember, confusedly, the first time he had met her, and all the best girls he had ever known, and what she had looked like next to him in the early-morning autumnal sunlight that streamed, only three months before, into the hotel room in the south, which overlooked the brown minor Alps and the distant sea. Holding her hands, with the familiar touch of the girlish fingers against his, he felt that if he could get her to turn her head everything would be different.

“Chris …” he whispered.

But she didn’t turn her head. “Write me in Seattle,” she said, staring out the window, which was streaked with moisture and in which the lights from within the café and the lights from the restaurant across the street were reflected and magnified and distorted.

Beddoes let her hands go. She didn’t bother to move them. They lay before her, with their pale nail polish glistening dully, on the stained wood table. Beddoes stood up. “I’d better go.” It was difficult to talk, and his voice sounded strange to him inside his head, and he thought, God, I’m getting senile, I’m tempted to cry in restaurants. “I don’t want to wait for the check,” he said. “Tell your friend I’m sorry I couldn’t join you for dinner and that I apologize for leaving him with the check.”

“That’s all right,” Christina said evenly. “He’ll be happy to pay.”

Beddoes leaned over and kissed her, first on one cheek, then on the other. “Good-bye,” he said, thinking he was smiling. “In the French style.”

He got his coat quickly and went out. He went past the TWA office to the great boulevard and turned the corner, where the veterans had marched a half hour before. He walked blindly toward the Arch, where the laurel leaves of the wreath were already glistening in the evening mist before the tomb and the flame.

He knew that it was a bad night to be alone and that he ought to go in somewhere and telephone and ask someone to have dinner with him. He passed two or three places with telephones, and although he hesitated before each one, he didn’t go in. Because there was no one in the whole city he wanted to see that night.

M unnie Brooks was awakened by the sound of two shots outside the window. He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. By the quality of the light, even through the drawn curtains, he could tell that it was sunny outside. He turned his head. In the other bed Bert was still asleep. He slept quietly, the blankets neat, in control of his dreams. Munnie got out of his bed and, barefooted, in his pajamas, went over to the window and parted the curtains.

The last mists of morning were curling up from the fields, and far off and below, the sea was smooth in the October sunlight. In the distance, along the curve of the coast, the Pyrenees banked back in green ridges toward a soft sky. From behind a haystack more than a hundred yards away, beyond the edge of the hotel terrace, a hunter and his dog appeared, walking slowly, the hunter reloading. Watching him, Munnie remembered, with mild, gluttonous pleasure, that he had had partridge, newly killed and plump with the summer’s feeding, for dinner the night before.

The hunter was an old man, dressed in fisherman’s blue and wearing fisherman’s rubber boots. He moved solidly and carefully behind his dog, through the cut stubble. When I am an old man, thought Munnie, who was twenty-two, I hope I look and feel like that on an October morning.

He opened the curtains wider and looked at his watch. It was after ten o’clock. They had been up late the night before, all three of them, at the casino in Biarritz. Earlier in the summer, when they had been on the Côte d’Azur, a paratroop lieutenant on leave had showed them a foolproof system for beating the roulette table, and whenever they could, they frequented casinos. The system took a lot of capital and they had never made more than 8000 francs in one night among them on it, and sometimes it meant sitting up till three o’clock in the morning following the wheel, but they hadn’t lost yet, either, since they met the lieutenant. It had made their trip unexpectedly luxurious, especially when they got to places where there was a casino. The system ignored the numbers and concentrated on the red and the black and involved a rather complicated rhythm of doubling. The night before they had won only 4500 francs and it had taken them until two o’clock, but still, waking late, with the weather clear and an old man hunting birds outside your window, the thousand-franc notes on the dresser added a fillip of luck and complacency to the morning.

Standing there, feeling the sun warm on his bare feet and smelling the salt and hearing the distant calm mutter of the surf, remembering the partridge and the gambling and everything else about the summer that had just passed, Munnie knew he didn’t want to start home that morning as they had, planned. Staring down at the hunter following his dog slowly across the brown field on the edge of the sea, Munnie knew that when he was older he would look back upon the summer and think, Ah, it was wonderful when I was young. This double ability to enjoy a moment with the immediacy of youth and the reflective melancholy of age had made Bert say to him, half seriously, half as a joke, “I envy you, Munnie. You have a rare gift—the gift of instantaneous nostalgia. You get twice your investment out of everything.”