Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

When he had taken out his wallet to pay the bill in the restaurant she had gotten a glimpse of a photograph of a young woman behind a celluloid shield. She had insisted upon his showing it to her. It was his wife, a smiling, serene, lovely girl, with wide-spaced grey eyes. She didn’t like the mountains, she hated skiing, he said. He went on weekends alone. Their own business. Each marriage to its own rules. She, Rosemary, would not intrude, could not intrude. Jean-Jacques was sitting there, holding her hand not as a lover, but as a friend whom she needed, who had committed himself, unselfishly, to help her.

“Of course,” Jean-Jacques was saying, “whatever it costs, I will.…”

“I don’t need that sort of help,” she said quickly.

“How much time do you have?” he asked. “I mean, when do you have to be back home?”

“I should be there now.”

“And America?”

She took her hand out of his. She remembered some of the stories friends of hers had told her. The darkened rooms in doubtful neighborhoods, the money paid in cash in advance, the sleazy nurses, the criminal doctors, the staggering home two hours later, hurried out of doors which bore no nameplates. “Anything better than my sweet native land,” she said.

“I’ve heard,” Jean-Jacques said. “A little.” He shook his head. “What countries we inhabit.” He scowled, looking across the blare of tulips at the idiocy of nations.

Her mind began to feel like Op Art again.

“I am to go to Switzerland for the weekend. Spring skiing.” He gave an apologetic little shrug. “It has been arranged weeks ago. I will stop in Zurich. I have friends there. I will try to find a more sympathetic doctor.”

“Psychiatrist.”

“Of course. I will be back on Tuesday. Can you wait?”

More Op Art. “Yes.” Another week.

“Unfortunately, I must go to Strasbourg tomorrow,” he said. “On business. I am to go on to Switzerland directly from there. I will not be able to entertain you in Paris.”

“That’s all right. I’ll entertain myself.” Entertain, there’s a word. “It’s very good of you.” Inane, but she wanted to make up in some way for earlier, unspoken judgments on him.

He looked at his watch.

There is always the moment, she thought, when a man, the best of men, looks at his watch.

The phone was ringing in her room when she opened the door. “Eldred Harrison here,” a soft British voice said in the receiver. “I’m a friend of Bert’s. Like everybody else.” A little laugh. “He said you were alone in Paris and I must take care of you. Are you free for dinner?”

“Well.…” She prepared her refusal.

“I’m dining with some friends. A small party. We could come by your hotel and pick you up.”

She looked around her hotel room. Stained, Wateauesque wallpaper, bulbs too dim to read by. The room joined her brain in Op Art patterns. A week to wait. She couldn’t just sit in the room and wait seven days.

“That’s very good of you, Mr. Harrison.”

“I look forward to it.” He didn’t say it heartily, but softly and tentatively. “Shall we say eight?”

“I’ll be ready,” she said.

“At five minutes to eight she was sitting in the hotel lobby. Her hair was pulled back severely and she had put on her most shapeless dress. She didn’t want to attract anybody this week, not even an Englishman.

Exactly at eight, a couple came into the lobby. The girl was young, with pale hair and Slavic bones. She was pretty, a little chubby, like a child, and seemed anxious to smile. She obviously didn’t have much money to spend on her clothes. Jean-Jacques would have liked her, but he would take her to out-of-the-way restaurants. The man was tall, with greying, well-brushed hair and his hint of a self-deprecating stoop, the discreet cut of his patterned grey suit, went with the voice on the telephone. After the first glance, Rosemary sat there, her ankles crossed primly, waiting. The man spoke to the concierge in French and the concierge indicated Rosemary, sitting near the window. The couple came over. They both smiled.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting, Mrs. Maclain,” Harrison said.

She stood up and gave him her hand, smiling back. There wasn’t going to be any trouble tonight.

She hadn’t counted on the drinking. Harrison kept to a schedule. One whiskey every fifteen minutes. For everybody, including the girl. Her name was Anna. She was Polish. She had come from Warsaw four months ago. Her papers were doubtful. She worked as a receptionist because she spoke five languages. She wanted to marry an American, for the passport, so she wouldn’t be sent back to Warsaw. Strictly a marriage of convenience, she wanted that understood from the beginning, and a quick divorce and the passport.

Harrison did something in the British Embassy. He smiled benignly at Anna, relieved, Rosemary thought, that Anna would not settle for a British passport. He was on the watch for a likely American. He ordered another round of whiskeys. They seemed to make no difference to him. He sat straight, his hands did not tremble as he lit cigarettes, his voice remained low and cultured and clublike. The Empire had not crumbled because of the likes of him.

They were in a small dark bar near Rosemary’s hotel. Convenient little spot, Harrison had said. There were a thousand convenient little spots in Paris for Harrison, Rosemary was sure. He knew most of the people in the bar. Some other Englishmen, about Harrison’s age, in their forties, some young Frenchmen. The whiskey arrived on schedule. The bar became somewhat hazy, although Rosemary felt that her eyes were growing dazzlingly bright. Dinner was for the future. They were to dine with a young American. Rosemary couldn’t quite make out just where they were to meet him.

They spoke about Bert. Athens. The Army had just taken over in Athens. Bert would like that. He swam in trouble. “I fear for him,” Harrison said. “He is always being beaten up. He likes rough trade. One day, I’m sure they’ll find him floating in the harbor of Piraeus, some harbor. A peculiar taste.”

Rosemary nodded. “I’ve felt the same thing. I’ve talked to him about it.” Oh, Love, Bert had said, a boy does what a boy has to do, Love.

Anna smiled over her fifth whiskey. She reminded Rosemary of her own daughter, smiling over the rim of a glass of milk at some secret eleven-year-old joke before bedtime.

“I knew somebody else like that,” Rosemary said. “An interior decorator. A small, pleasant man. Over fifty. Quiet. Not blatant, like Bert. American. He was beaten to death by three sailors in a bar in Livorno. Nobody ever could figure out what he was doing in Livorno.” What was his name? She knew it. She knew she knew it. She had met him dozens of times, had talked to him often at parties. He had invented a chair, she remembered. She was annoyed at not remembering his name. A bad sign. If a man you’ve talked hours to, a man who had done something important like inventing a chair is murdered, the least you can do is remember his name. A very bad sign.

Another round of drinks. Anna smiled. The bar grew appreciably darker. Rosemary wished Bert weren’t in Athens. Tanks on the streets, curfew, people being rounded up at the point of a gun, nervous soldiers not likely to understand an English fairy’s jokes. Be lugubrious, Love.

They walked across a bridge. The river flowed among monuments. Paris is a Bible in stone. Victor Hugo. A taxi driver nearby ran them down and shouted, “ Sales cons ,” at them. The voice of Lutetia.

“ Ta gueule ,” Harrison called, out of character.

Anna smiled.

“The streets are dangerous.” Harrison held her elbow protectively. “Chap I know, Frenchman, got into a tangle with another car on a side street near the Opera, the other driver came raging out, hit him once and killed him on the spot. In front of his wife. Turned out to be a karate expert, something along that line.”