Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

T he night is the time for calls across the ocean. Alone in the hours past midnight in a foreign city, a man’s thoughts center on another continent, he remembers loved voices far away, he calculates differences in time zones (it is eight o’clock in New York, the taxis are bumper to bumper, all the lights are lit) , he promises himself that there will be a general saving on such things as cigarettes, liquor, and restaurants to make up for the sweet extravagance of several moments of conversation across the three thousand miles of space.

In his apartment on the narrow street behind the Boulevard Montparnasse, Nicholas Tibbell sat, holding a book in his hand, but not reading. He was too restless to sleep, and although he was thirsty and would have liked a beer, he was not resolute enough to go out once more and find a bar that was still open. There was no beer on ice in the apartment because he had neglected to buy any. The apartment, which he had rented from a German photographer for six months, was an ugly, small place, with only two badly furnished rooms, the walls of which were covered by blown-up photographs of emaciated nude women whom the German had posed in what Tibbell considered rather extreme positions. Tibbell spent as little time and thought on the apartment as possible. At the end of six months, the company for which he worked, a large organization which dealt in chemicals on both sides of the Atlantic, would decide whether he was to be kept in Paris or sent somewhere else. If his base was to be permanently in Paris, he would have to find more comfortable quarters for himself. In the meantime, he used the apartment merely for sleeping and for changing his clothes, and tried to keep down the waves of self-pity and homesickness which assailed him at moments like this, late at night, trapped among the unfleshed contortionists of the German’s living room.

From the stories he had heard from other young Americans in Paris, it had never occurred to Tibbell that he would have to face so many nights of loneliness and vague, unformed yearning once he had established himself in the city. But he was shy with girls and clumsy with men and he saw now that shyness and clumsiness were exportable articles that passed from country to country without tax or quota restrictions and that a solitary man was as likely to find himself alone and unremarked in Paris as in New York. Each night, after a silent dinner with only a book for companion, Tibbell, with his neat American haircut, his uncreased, neat Dacron suit, his naïve, questing, blue, polite American eyes, would go from one crowded terrasse of St. Germain des Près to another, drinking as little as he dared, waiting for the one brilliant night when he would be noticed by some glorious, laughing band of young people who, with the legendary freedom of the capital, would seize upon him, appreciate him, sweep him along with them in their expeditions among the joyous tables of the Flore, the Epi Club, the Brasserie Lipp and out to the gay and slightly sinful inns in the smiling green countryside beyond Paris.

But the one brilliant night never arrived. The summer was nearly over and he was as alone as ever, trying to read a book, near the open window, through which the warm night breeze carried an erratic distant hum from the traffic of the surrounding city and a thin fragrance of river water and dusty September foliage. The thought of sleep, even though it was after midnight, was intolerable.

Tibbell put down the book (it was Madame Bovary , to improve his French) and went over to the window and looked out. He found himself looking out the window a good deal of the time when he was in the apartment. There wasn’t much to see. The apartment was one floor up, confronted by tightly locked shutters and flaky soot-grey stone walls. The street was narrow and looked as though it was waiting to be bombed or torn down to make way for a modern prison and at the busiest of times carried very little traffic. Tonight it was silent, and deserted except for two lovers who made a single, unmoving shadow in a doorway diagonally across from him.

Tibbell peered at the lovers with envy and admiration. What a thing it was to be French, he thought, and experience no shame in the face of desire and be able to display it so honestly, on a public thoroughfare. If only he had gone to Paris during his formative years instead of to Exeter!

Tibbell turned away from the window. The lovers kissing in the arch of the doorway across the street disturbed him.

He tried to read, but he kept going over the same lines again and again—“Une exhalaison s’échappait de ce grand amour embaumé et qui, passant à travers tout, parfumait de tendresse l’atmosphère d’immaculation où elle voulait vivre.”

He put the book down. He felt much sorrier for himself than for Emma Bovary. He would have to improve his French some other night.

“The hell with it,” he said aloud, making a decision, and picked up the phone from its cradle on the bookcase full of German books. He dialed the overseas operator and asked for Betty’s number in New York, in his careful, accurate, though unimproved French, which he had learned in two years in Exeter and four at Swarthmore. The operator told him to hold on, saying that there was a possibility that she could put the call through immediately. He began to sweat a little, pleasurably, at the thought of talking to Betty within the next two minutes. He had a premonition that he was likely to say something original and historic tonight and he turned out the light because he felt he could express himself more freely in the dark.

But then the operator came on the line again to say that the call would take some time to put through. Tibbell looked at the radium dial of his watch and told her to try anyway. He pushed the phone to one side and leaned back in his chair with his eyes half-closed, and thought of what Betty’s voice would sound like from the other side of the ocean, and how she would look, curled on the sofa of her tiny apartment, twelve stories above the streets of New York, as she spoke into the telephone. He smiled as he remembered the familiar, lovely, small image. He had only known Betty eight months and if the Paris trip hadn’t come up two months before, he was sure that a propitious moment would have presented itself in which to ask her to marry him. He was nearly thirty and if he was ever going to get married it would have to be soon.

Leaving Betty behind had been a sorrowful experience and it had only been by the exercise of the stoniest self-control that he had managed to get through their last evening together without risking everything then and there and asking her to follow him on the next plane. But he prided himself on being a sensible man and arriving to take up a new and perhaps temporary job in a new country with a new wife at his side was not his idea of how a sensible man should act. Still, the combination of pleasure and longing with which, hour after hour, he thought of her, was something he had never experienced before and tonight he wanted to make powerful and naked statements to her that until now he had been too timid to voice. Up to now Tibbell had contented himself with writing a letter a day, plus a call on Betty’s birthday. But tonight he was irresistibly moved to indulge himself in the sound of her voice and in his own avowal of love.

He waited, impatiently, for the phone to ring, trying to make the time seem shorter by imagining what it would be like if Betty were beside him now, and what they would be saying to each other if they were hand in hand in the same room instead of divided by three thousand miles of humming wire. He had closed his eyes, his head leaning back against the chair, a little smile on his lips as he remembered old whispers of conversation and imagined new exchanges, when he heard voices, harsh and excited, coming through the open window. The voices were passionate, insistent. Tibbell stood up and went to the window and looked down.