Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Rosemary began to feel very warm. She could sense the sweat breaking out on her throat.

“Brother Three-Iron looked the same as usual. Except that there was no cigarette hanging from his lip. It made a different man of him. It deprived him of authority. After our first glance we didn’t look at each other. He gave no sign of recognition and I … well, to tell the truth, and I can’t really understand it, I felt slightly … embarrassed. After all those years, the situation seemed … well, irregular. Wrong. One falls into patterns of behavior and when they are suddenly upset.…” Harrison shrugged. “Ellsworth didn’t waste any words. ‘I’ve heard about this fellow,’ he said, ‘and the way he went for you with that club.’ He picked up the club and laid it on his desk, right in front of Brother Three-Iron. Brother Three-Iron looked at it once and something went on behind his eyes, though I couldn’t say even to this day what it was. ‘Well,” Ellsworth said, ‘the club’s yours now.’ He pushed it a little way toward me. ‘He’ s yours.’ But I didn’t pick it up. ‘What’re you waiting for, man?’ Ellsworth said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir,’ I said. I was telling the truth. I actually didn’t. Then Ellsworth began to curse. I’ve never seen a man so angry. ‘Ah, get out of my sight. There’re too many like you. You went under. If I had my way you’d never get back to Britain. You’ll always be prisoners. You’ve got the balls of prisoners.’ Forgive me, Mrs. Maclain.” Harrison turned apologetically toward Rosemary. “I’ve never told this part of the story before and my memory has remained uncensored.”

“What finally happened?” Rosemary asked, disregarding the apology.

“I got out of Ellsworth’s sight. Never saw him again, either. Luckily for me. His contempt was unendurable. I imagine Brother Three-Iron was eventually executed.” He looked at his watch. “It is getting late.” He waved for the bill.

Carroll hunched forward on the wine-stained tablecloth. “I wish I could be sure that I would have acted the same way as you did,” he said to Harrison.

“Really?” Harrison sounded mildly surprised. “I keep wondering if Ellsworth wasn’t right. I might be an entirely different man today.” He made a failure’s gesture.

“I wouldn’t want you to be different man,” Anna said softly.

Harrison patted her hand on the table. “You’re a dear young girl, my Anna,” he said. “Oh, perhaps it didn’t really matter. In the state I was in it would have taken me weeks to kill him.” Harrison paid the check and they stood up. “May I suggest a nightcap? I told some friends I’d meet them in St.-Germain-des-Près.”

“I have to go back to the office,” Carroll said. “They promised the blowups’d be in before midnight.”

“It’s late for me,” Rosemary said. “I have a big day tomorrow.”

The lights went out in the restaurant as they closed the door behind them. There was a wind blowing and the street was dark.

“Well, then,” Harrison said, “we’ll take Mrs. Maclain home.”

“There’s no need,” Rosemary said.

“I’ve offered to accompany Mrs. Maclain, Eldred,” Rodney said. His voice was tentative.

“Ah, then,” said Harrison, “you’re in safe hands.” He kissed Rosemary’s hand. He had been in France for years. “I have enjoyed this evening. Mrs. Maclain, I hope I may call you again. I must write to Bert and thank him.”

They said their good nights. Rosemary said she wanted to walk a bit, to clear her head, and Carroll and Harrison and Anna got into a taxi together, since Carroll’s office was on Harrison’s way. The taxi dieseled down the dark street into silence. Rosemary allowed Rodney to take her arm and they walked toward the Champs-Elysées without talking.

The cold air hit Rosemary hard and there was an elliptical spin that started at the base of her neck and widened to include the city of Paris. She leaned harder on Rodney’s arm.

“I say,” he began, “I think a taxi might …”

“Sssh,” she said. She stopped and kissed him in the last ten yards of darkness before the lights of the boulevard. To create a fixed point. To keep the spin within reasonable limits. His mouth tasted like fresh grapes. He trembled as he kissed her. His face was very warm in the cold spring night wind.

She pulled away, without haste. “Sssh,” she said again, although he hadn’t said anything.

They walked up the Champs-Elysées. People were coming out of a movie theater. On a giant poster above the entrance, a gigantic girl in a nightgown pointed a pistol the size of a cannon at a thirty-foot-tall man in a dinner jacket. Whores cruised slowly in pairs in sports cars, searching trade. If she were a man, she would try that. At least once. The flesh of Paris spinning against the flesh of Paris. Man and Woman, created He them. At this moment, in the whirling, secret beds of the city, how many were clasped, the world forgot …? Harrison, prisoners’ balls, forgetting Asia on the warm young chubby body of the girl from the Warsaw jail? Carroll, with one of those superb fashion models he photographed when he wasn’t taking pictures of wars? God was here, but He left early, propped against the mantelpiece, to oversee the exercise?

Jean-Jacques, with his hard, expert body, entwined in legitimate abandon with the wide-eyed wife who didn’t like to ski, in the great lit matrimonial off the Avenue Foch, and a girl in Strasbourg in reserve and another for the weekend of spring skiing, before he stopped off in Zurich to find an obliging psychiatrist?

The various uses and manifestations of the flesh. To caress, to mangle, to behead, to kill with a karate stroke on a city street, to prepare out of cloth a derisive simulacrum of the instrument of sex in a Polish prison. To cherish and despise. To protect and destroy. To clamor in the womb to become flesh. (A boy does what he has to do, Love.) To lie like Armstead, dead in the Livorno alley, with the polished toenails and shapely Yoga brown legs. To turn into Bert, with a Greek sailor in besieged Athens, the window open and a view of the Parthenon. Or floating face-down in the oily waters of the harbor of Piraeus. The grapy young kiss of the young Englishman.

Two stout, decorously dressed middle-aged men came out of the café. They were discussing interest rates. Tomorrow would they cross swords gingerly in a garden and claim blood’s honor while the photographers clicked away?

A man with a turban passed them. A Gurkha with a shovel, honing it down to a knife edge to avenge the insult of the cigarettes. Violence, costumed, pursues us. Rosemary shivered.

“You’re cold,” Rodney said and they got into a taxi. She huddled against him, as close as she could get. She unbuttoned his shirt and put her hand on his chest. The skin was soft and hairless; the flesh, unscarred, had never known the harshness of uniforms, the death of prisons. Gentle, that fair English skin, gentle the soft hands.

“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” she whispered in the dark taxi.

Gentle the uncertain, unfamiliar, undemanding kiss. The winy desires of the Paris night, the torment of the past, the imperious clamor of tomorrow, were made cozy, manageable. Even if she hadn’t remembered his name it would have been all right.

They went up to her room together. The night clerk didn’t even look up when he handed her the key. They didn’t put on the light when they undressed. But then, in bed, it turned out he didn’t want to make love to her. He merely wanted to spank her. She repressed the desire to laugh. She allowed him to do whatever he wanted to do. Who was she to be spared?

When he left, toward dawn, he kissed her, gently as ever, and asked if they could meet for lunch. When he had gone through the door she put on the light, went into the bathroom and took off her makeup. Looking into the mirror, she began to laugh, coarse, unstoppable laughter.