Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Jesus,” Stanley said, “you’ve got it bad.”

“Have I ever,” Christopher said.

Stanley brightened. “I have an idea,” he said. “I know some pretty smashing tall girls—”

“I bet you do,” Christopher said, loathing his friend momentarily.

“What the hell,” Stanley said. “I’ll give a party. Just you and me and maybe two or three fellers even shorter than you and four or five girls, five feet, eight and over.… A quiet party, where everybody is just sitting or lying around, no dancing or charades or anything embarrassing like that.”

“What’re you doing tonight?” Christopher asked eagerly.

“The thing is,” Stanley said, “tonight I’m busy. But for next Saturday—”

“The voice said tonight,” Christopher said.

They sat in silence, listening to the echo of that ghostly imperative in the back of the cross-town bus.

“Well,” Stanley began, his tone dubious, “maybe I could fix you up with a blind date.”

“It’s Saturday,” Christopher reminded him. “What sort of a girl five feet, eight or over would be available to go out on a blind date on a Saturday night in New York in October?”

“You can never tell,” Stanley said, but without conviction.

“I can just see it,” Christopher said bitterly, “I’m sitting in a bar waiting, and this big girl comes in, looking around for me, and I get off the stool and I say, ‘You must be Jane’ or Matilda or whatever, and she takes one look and that expression comes over her face.”

“What expression?”

“That ‘What the hell did I let myself in for tonight?’ expression,” Christopher said. “That ‘I should’ve worn flat heels’ expression.”

“Maybe you’re too sensitive, Chris.”

“Maybe I am. Only I’ll never know until I’ve tried. Look, I want to get married, it’s about time. I want to marry some great girl and be happy with her and have kids, the whole deal. But I don’t want to be nagged all my life by the feeling that I did my shopping only in the bargain basement, in a manner of speaking.” Christopher felt that this was an apt and convincing phrase, considering that Stanley worked in Bloomingdale’s. “I want to feel I had a pick from every goddamn floor in the place. And I don’t want my kids to look at me when they’re nineteen and they’re five feet, six, and say, ‘Is this as high as I go?’ the way I look at my father and mother.” Christopher’s father was even shorter than he was and there was just no use in measuring his mother.

“Do you know any big girls?” Stanley asked as Christopher stood up, because they were approaching Madison Avenue. “At least to talk to?”

“Sure,” Christopher said. “Plenty of them come into the store.” He was the manager of a book-and-record store, one of a chain his father owned. There was a section devoted to greeting cards. Christopher found this demeaning, but his father was profit-minded. When his father retired, Christopher would wipe out the greeting-card section the first week. His father had no complexes about being small. If he had been running the Soviet Union, he would have run it very much along the same lines as Joseph Stalin, only more drastically. Still, Christopher couldn’t complain. He was more or less his own boss and he liked being around books and his father was so busy with the more important shops in the chain that he made only flying, unexpected visits to the comparatively minor enterprise over which Christopher presided.

“I know plenty of tall girls,” he said. “I encourage charge accounts, so I have plenty of addresses.” When a tall girl came into the shop, Christopher tried to be on a library ladder, reaching for a book on an upper shelf. “And telephone numbers. That’s no problem.”

“Have you tried any yet?”

“No.”

“Try,” Stanley said. “My advice is, try. Today.”

“Yeah,” Christopher said dully.

The bus stopped and the door opened and Christopher stepped down onto the curb, with a wintry wave of his hand.

Might as well start with the A’s, he thought. He was alone in the store. It was impossible to get a decent clerk who would work on Saturdays. He had tried college boys and girls for the one-day-a-week stint, but they stole more than they sold and they mixed up the stock so that it took three days to get it straight again after they had gone. For once, he did not pity himself for working on Saturday and being alone. God knew how many calls he would have to put in and it would have been embarrassing to have someone listening in, male or female. There was no danger of his father’s dropping in, because he played golf all day Saturday and Sunday in Westchester County.

Anderson, Paulette **, he read in his pocket address book. He had a system of drawing stars next to the names of girls. One star meant that she was tall and pretty or even beautiful and that, for one reason or another, she seemed to be a girl who might be free with her favors.

Anderson, Paulette **, had large and excellently shaped breasts, which she took no pains to hide. June had once told Christopher that in her experience, girls with voluptuous bosoms were always jumping into bed with men, out of vanity and exhibitionism. Treacherously, after his conversation with June, Christopher had added a second star to Anderson, Paulette *.

He didn’t have her home address or telephone number, because she worked as an assistant to a dentist in the neighborhood and came around at lunch hour and after work. She wore a womanly chignon and was at least five feet, ten inches tall. Although usually provocatively dressed in cashmere sweaters, she was a serious girl, interested in psychology and politics and prison reform. She bought the works of Erich Fromm and copies of The Lonely Crowd as birthday presents for her friends. She and Christopher engaged in deep discussions over the appropriate counters. She sometimes worked on Saturdays, she had told Christopher, because the dentist remade mouths for movie actors and television performers and people like that, who were always pressed for time and had to have their mouths remade on weekends, when they were free.

Anderson, Paulette ** wasn’t really one of those marvelous girls—she wasn’t a model and she didn’t get her picture in the paper or anything like that—but if she were to do her hair differently and take off her glasses, and didn’t tell anybody she was a dental assistant, you certainly would look at her more than once when she came into a room. For the first one, Christopher thought, might as well start modestly. Get the feel.

He sat down at the desk next to the cash register toward the rear of the shop and dialed the number of Anderson, Paulette **.

Omar Gadsden sat in the chair, his mouth open, the chromium tube for saliva bubbling away under his tongue. Occasionally, Paulette, comely in white, would reach over and wipe away the drool from his chin. Gadsden was a news commentator on Educational Television, and even before he had started to come to Dr. Levinson’s office to have his upper jaw remade, Paulette had watched him faithfully, impressed by his silvering hair, his well-bred baritone, his weary contempt for the fools in Washington, his trick of curling the corners of his thin lips to one side to express more than the network’s policy would otherwise have permitted him.

Right now, with the saliva tube gurgling over his lower lip and all his upper teeth mere little pointed stumps, waiting for the carefully sculpted bridge that Dr. Levinson was preparing to put permanently into place, Omar Gadsden did not resemble the assured and eloquent early-evening father figure of Educational Television. He had suffered almost every day for weeks while Dr. Levinson meticulously ground down his teeth and his dark, noble eyes reflected the protracted pain of his ordeal. He watched Dr. Levinson fearfully as the dentist scraped away with a hooked instrument at the gleaming arc of caps that lay on a mold on the marble top of the high chest of drawers against the wall of the small office.