Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

He was a sight for his enemies’ eyes at that moment, Paulette thought; the Vice-President would enjoy seeing him now, and she felt a motherly twinge of pity, although she was only twenty-four. She had become very friendly with the commentator during the last month of preparing hypodermics of Novocain for him and adjusting the rubber apron around his neck and watching him spit blood into the basin at the side of the chair. Before and after the sessions, in which he had shown exemplary courage, they had had short but informative conversations about affairs of the day and he had let drop various hints about scandals among the mighty and prophecies of disaster, political, financial and ecological, that lay ahead for America. She had gained a new respect from her friends in retelling, in the most guarded terms, of course, some of the more dire items that Omar Gadsden vouchsafed her.

She was sure that Mr. Gadsden liked her. He addressed her by her first name and when he telephoned to postpone an appointment, he always asked her how she was doing and called her his Angel of Hygeia. One day, after a grueling two hours, after Dr. Levinson had put in his temporary upper bridge, he had said, “Paulette, when this is over, I’m going to treat you to the best lunch in town.”

Today it was all going to be over and Paulette was wondering if Mr. Gadsden was going to remember his promise, when the telephone rang.

“Excuse me,” she said and went out of the office, in a starchy, bosomy white bustle, to her desk in the small reception room, where the telephone was.

“Dr. Levinson’s office,” she said. “Good morning.” She had a high, babyish voice, incongruous for her size and womanly dimensions. She knew it, but there was nothing she could do about it. When she tried to pitch it lower, she sounded like a female impersonator.

“Miss Anderson?”

“Yes.” She had the feeling she had heard the voice before, but she couldn’t quite place it.

“This is Christopher Bagshot.”

“Yes?” She waited. The name meant something, but, like the voice, it was just beyond the boundaries of recognition.

“From the Browsing Corner.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Paulette said. She began to riffle through Dr. Levinson’s appointment book, looking for open half hours on the schedule for the next week. Dr. Levinson was very busy and sometimes patients had to wait for months. She remembered Bagshot now and was mildly surprised he had called. He had perfect white teeth, with canines that were curiously just a little longer than ordinary, which gave him a slightly and not unpleasantly wild appearance. But, of course, you never could tell about teeth.

“What I called about”—he seemed to have some difficulty in speaking—“is, well, there’s a lecture at the Y.M.H.A. tonight. It’s a professor from Columbia. ‘You and Your Environment.’ I thought maybe if you weren’t busy. We could have a bite to eat first and.…” He dribbled off.

Paulette frowned. Dr. Levinson didn’t like personal calls while there were patients in the office. She had been with him for three years and he was satisfied with her work and all that, but he was elderly and had old-fashioned notions about employees’ private lives.

She thought quickly. She had been invited to a party that night at the home of an economics instructor at NYU, down in the Village, and she hated going into a room full of people alone and Bagshot was a good-looking serious young man who could talk about books and the latest problems very sensibly and would make a welcome escort. But there was Mr. Gadsden in the chair, and his promise. Of course, it had only been for lunch, but she knew his wife was visiting her family in Cleveland this week. She knew because he had come into the office on Monday and made a joke about it. “Doc,” he’d said, “this is one week I’m glad to see you. You may tear my jaw apart, but it’s nothing to what my father-in-law does to my brain. Without instruments.” He had a wry way of putting things, Mr. Cadsden, when he wanted to. If he was alone, she thought, and remembered about lunch, and had nothing to do for the evening.… It would be OK going to the party at the instructor’s apartment with the bookstore boy, but it would be dazzling to walk in and say, “I guess I don’t have to introduce-Omar Gadsden.”

“Miss Anderson,” Dr. Levinson was calling testily from the office.

“Yes, doctor,” Paulette said, then into the phone: “I’m terribly busy now. I’ll tell you what—I’ll come by after work this afternoon and let you know.”

“But—” Bagshot said.

“Have to run,” she whispered, making her voice intimate to give him enough hope to last till five o’clock. “Goodbye.”

She hung up and went back to the office, where Dr. Levinson was standing with the new shining set of teeth held aloft above the gaping mouth of Omar Gadsden and Mr. Gadsden looking as though he were going to be guillotined within the next two seconds.

Christopher hung up the phone. Strike one, he thought. The last whisper over the phone had left him tingling weirdly, but he had to face facts. Strike one. Who knew what would happen to a girl like that before five o’clock of a Saturday afternoon? He tried to be philosophical. What could you expect the very first number you called? Still, he had nothing really to reproach himself for. He had not just jumped in blindly. The invitation to the lecture at the Y.M.H.A. had been calculatingly and cunningly chosen as bait for a girl who was interested in the kind of books Anderson, Paulette ** was interested in. He had carefully perused the “Entertainment Events” section in the Times before dialing Dr. Levinson’s office and had studied Cue magazine and had rejected the pleasures of the movies and the theater as lures for the dental assistant. And she had said that she would come by at five o’clock. She wouldn’t have said that if she’d felt it was ridiculous for a girl her size to be seen with a man his size. The more he thought about it, the better he felt. It hadn’t been a blazing success, of course, but nobody could say it had been a total failure.

Two college students, a boy and a girl, who made a habit of Saturday-morning visits, came in. They were unkempt and unprincipled and they rarely bought anything, at the most a paperback, and he kept a sharp eye on them, because they had a nasty habit of separating and wandering uninnocently around the shop and they both wore loose coats that could hide any number of books. It was fifteen minutes before they left and he could get back to the telephone.

He decided to forget about alphabetical order. It was an unscientific way of going about the problem, dependent upon a false conception of the arrangement of modern society. Now was the time for a judicious weighing of possibilities. As he thumbed through his address book, he thought hard and long over each starred name, remembering height, weight, coloring, general amiability, signs of flirta-tiousness and/or sensuality, indications of loneliness and popularity, tastes and aversions.

Stickney, Beulah **. He lingered over the page. Under Stickney, Beulah **, in parentheses, was Fleischer, Rebecca , also double-starred. The two girls lived together, on East 74th Street. Stickney, Beulah ** was actually and honestly a model and often had her photograph in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar . She had long dark hair that she wore down loose over her shoulders and a long bony sensational body and a big model’s mouth and a model’s arrogant look, as though no man alive was good enough for her. But the look was just part of her professional equipment. Whenever she came into the shop, she was friendly as could be with Christopher and squatted unceremoniously on the floor or loped up the ladder when she was looking for books that were in out-of-the way places. She was a great one for travel books. She had worked in Paris and Rome and London and while she bought books about distant places by writers like H. V. Morton and James Morris and Mary McCarthy, when she talked about the cities she had visited, her vocabulary was hardly literary, to say the least. “You’ve got to get to Paris before the Germans come in again, luv,” she would say. “It’s a gas.” Or, “You’d go ape over Rome, luv.” Or, “Marrakesh, luv! Stoned! Absolutely stoned!” She had picked up the habit of calling people luv in London. Christopher knew it was just a habit, but it was friendly and encouraging, all the same.