Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Then Tibbell saw a figure stealing furtively down the other side of the street, keeping close to the walls. It was Raoul. He came out into the light of the lamppost to inspect the scooter. He kicked once at the broken glass on the pavement. Then he waved at the corner. A girl came running out toward him, her white dress gay and dancing and bridal on the dark street. As she sat on the pillion behind Raoul and put her arms lovingly around his waist, she laughed softly. Her laughter rose lightly and provocatively to Tibbell’s window. Raoul started the Vespa, with the usual loud, underpowered, falsely important snarl. The Vespa, without headlight, sped down the street, the white dress dancing in the wind, slanting out of sight at the far corner. Tibbell sighed and silently wished the bride luck.

Downstairs, there was the creak of a shutter.

“Spaniards,” the night voice said, “what can you expect from Spaniards?”

The shutter creaked again and the voice ceased.

Tibbell closed his own shutters. As he stepped back into the dark room he was thankful for the first time that he had gone to Exeter and Swarthmore for his education.

H is sleep had been troubled for weeks. Girls came in and out of the misty edges of dreams to smile at him, beckon him, leer at him, invite him, almost embrace him. He was on city streets, on the decks of great ships, in satiny bedrooms, on high bridges, accompanied and not quite accompanied by the phantom figures whom he always seemed on the verge of recognizing and never recognized, as they slipped away beyond the confines of dream, to leave him lying awake in his single bed, disturbed, sleepless, knowing only that the figures that haunted him were sisters in a single respect—they were all much taller than he—and that when they vanished, it was upward, toward unreachable heights.

Christopher Bagshot woke up remembering that just a moment before he opened his eyes, he had heard a voice saying, “You must make love to a woman at least five feet, eight inches tall tonight.” It was the first time in weeks of dreaming that a voice had spoken. He recognized a breakthrough.

He looked at the clock on the bedside table. Twelve minutes to eight. The alarm would go off on the hour. He stared at the ceiling, searching for significance. He remembered it was Saturday.

He got out of bed and took off the top of his pajamas and did his exercises. Fifteen push-ups, twenty-five sit-ups. He was a small man, five feet, six, but fit. He had beautiful dark eyes, like a Moroccan burro’s, with long lashes. His hair was straight and black and girls liked to muss it. Small girls. In another age, before everybody looked as though he or she had been brought up in Texas or California, his size would not have bothered him. He could have fitted into Henri Quatre’s armor. And Henri Quatre was large enough to say that Paris was worth a Mass. How the centuries slide by.

“I had this dream,” he said. They were standing on the corner, waiting for the 79th Street crosstown bus. Stanley Hovington, five feet, ten inches tall, neighbor and friend, was waiting for the bus with him. It was a cool, sunny, New York October. Two boys, aged no more than fifteen, one of them carrying a football, slouched into Central Park. Each of them was nearly six feet tall. Autumn Saturday. All over the country, long-legged girls wearing chrysanthemums, cheering for Princeton, Ohio State, Southern California. Large, fearsome men, swift on green turf.

“I had a dream last night, too,” Stanley said. “I was caught in an ambush in the jungle. It’s the damned television.”

“In my dream …” Christopher, said uninterested in Stanley’s nighttime problems. Stanley, too, had to work on Saturdays. He had a big job at Blooming-dale’s, but the thing was, he had to work on Saturdays. “In my dream,” Christopher persisted, “a voice said to me, ‘You must make love to a woman at least five feet, eight inches tall tonight.’”

“Did you recognize the voice?”

“No. Anyway, that isn’t the point.”

“It would seem to me,” Stanley said, “that’s just the point. Who said it, I mean. And why.” He was a good friend, Stanley, but argumentative. “Five feet, eight inches. There might be a clue there.”

“What I think it means,” Christopher said, “is that my subconscious was telling me it had a message for me.”

The bus came along and they mounted and found seats at the rear, because it was Saturday.

“What sort of message?” Stanley asked.

“It was telling me that deep in my soul I feel deprived,” Christopher said.

“Of a five-foot-eight girl?”

“It stands to reason,” Christopher said earnestly in the rocking bus. “All my life”—he was twenty-five—“all my life, I’ve been short. But I’m proud, so to speak. I can’t bear the thought of looking foolish.”

“Stalin wasn’t any taller than you,” Stanley said. “He wasn’t worried about looking foolish.”

“That’s the other danger,” Christopher said, “the Napoleonic complex. Even worse.”

“What are you deprived of?” Stanley asked. “What’s her name—that girl—she’s crazy about you.”

“June,” Christopher said.

“That’s it, June. Damn nice girl.”

“I’m not saying anything against June,” Christopher said. “Far from it. But do you know how tall she is?”

“I think you’re obsessive on the subject,” Stanley said, “to tell the truth.”

“Five feet, three. And she’s the tallest girl I ever had.”

“So what? You don’t play basketball with her.” Stanley laughed, appreciating himself.

“It’s no laughing matter,” Christopher said gravely, disappointed in Stanley. “Look—you have to figure it this way—in this day and age in America, for some goddamn reason, almost all the great girls, I mean the really great ones, the ones you see in the movies, in the fashion magazines, with their pictures in the papers at all the parties, almost all of them are suddenly big .”

“Maybe you’ve got something there,” Stanley said thoughtfully. “I hadn’t correlated before.”

“It’s like a new natural resource of America,” Christopher said. “A new discovery or a new invention or something. It’s part of our patrimony, if you want to talk fancy. Only I’m not getting any of it. I’m being gypped . It’s like the blacks. They see all these terrific things on television and in the magazines, sports cars, hi-fis, cruises to the Caribbean, only they can’t get in on them. I tell you, it teaches you sympathy.”

“They’re pretty tall,” Stanley said. “I mean, look at Wilt Chamberlain.”

Christopher made an impatient gesture. “You don’t get my point.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Stanley said, “actually, I do. Though maybe it’s more in your imagination than anything else. After all, it doesn’t go by volume , for God’s sake. I mean, I’ve had girls all sizes; and once it comes down to the crunch, in bed, I mean, size is no criterion.”

“You can say that, Stanley,” Christopher said, “you have a choice. And I’m not only talking about in bed. It’s the whole attitude. It stands to reason. They’re the darlings of our time, the big ones, I mean the marvelous big ones, and they know it, and it gives them something extra, something a lot extra. They feel they’re superior and they have to live up to it. If they’re naturally funny, they’re funnier. If they’re sexy, they’re sexier. If they’re sad, they’re sadder. If there’re two parties that night, they get invited to the better one. If there’re two guys who want to take them to dinner, they go out with the handsomer, richer one. And it’s bound to rub off on the guy. He feels superior. He knows every other man in the place envies him, he’s way up there with the privileged classes. But if a small guy walks somewhere with one of the big beautiful ones, he knows that every cat in the place who’s two inches taller than he is is thinking to himself, ‘I can take that big mother away from that shrimp any time,’ and they’re just waiting for the small guy to go to the john or turn his head to talk to the headwaiter, to give his date the signal.”