Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Fleischer, Rebecca ** was just about as tall and pretty as Stickney, Beulah **, with short dark red hair and a pale freckled complexion to go with it and tapering musician’s fingers and willowy hips. She was a receptionist for a company that made cassettes and she wore slacks on Saturdays that didn’t hide anything. She was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn and made no bones about it, larding her conversation with words like shmeer and schmuck and nebbish. She didn’t buy books by the reviews nor by their subject matter, she bought them after looking at the pictures of the authors on the back covers. If the authors were handsome, she would put down her $6.95. She bought the books of Saul Bellow, John Cheever and John Hersey. It wasn’t a scientific system, but it worked and she put an awful lot of good writing on her shelf that way. At least it worked in America. Christopher wasn’t so sure it would work with foreign authors. She had endeared herself to Christopher by buying Portnoy’s Complaint and having him gift-wrap it and send it to her mother in Flatbush. “The old bag’ll sit shiva for six months when she reads it,” Rebecca had said, smiling happily.

Christopher wouldn’t have dared send anything more advanced than the works of G. A. Henty to his mother and he appreciated the freedom of spirit in Miss Fleischer’s gesture. He had never gone out with a Jewish girl, not that he was anti-Semitic or anything like that but because somehow the occasion hadn’t arisen. Listening to a Jewish girl in skintight slacks who was five inches taller than he talk the way Miss Fleischer talked was intriguing, if not more. June said that Jewish girls were voracious in bed. June came from Pasadena and her father still believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , so her opinions on the subject could not be called scientific; but even so, whenever Miss Fleischer came into the shop, Christopher looked carefully for pleasing signs of voracity.

He hesitated over the two names. Then he decided. Stickney, Beulah **. A redheaded giantess who was also Jewish would be too much for the first go. He dialed the Rhinelander number.

Beulah sat under the drier in the living room of the three-room flat, with kitchen, that she shared with Rebecca. Rebecca was painting Beulah’s nails a luminous pearly pink. The ironing board on which Rebecca had ironed out Beulah’s hair into a straight shining sheet of living satin was still in place. Beulah kept looking nervously over Rebecca’s bent head at the clock on the mantelpiece of the false fireplace, although the plane wasn’t due in at Kennedy until 3:15 and it was only 10:40 now. The girls did each other’s hair and nails every Saturday morning, if other amusements didn’t intervene. But this was a special Saturday morning, at least for Beulah, and she’d said she was too nervous to work on Rebecca and Rebecca had said that was OK, there was nobody she had to look good for this weekend, anyway.

Rebecca had broken with her boyfriend the week before. He worked in Wall Street and even with the way things were going down there, he had an income that was designed to please any young girl with marriage on her mind. Her boyfriend’s family had a seat on the stock exchange, a big seat, and unless Wall Street vanished completely, which was a possibility, of course, he had nothing to worry about. And, from all indications, he was approaching marriage, like a squirrel approaching a peanut, apprehensive but hungry. But the week before, he had tried to take Rebecca to an orgy on East 63rd Street. That is, he had taken Rebecca to an orgy without telling her that was what it was going to be. It had seemed like a superior party to Rebecca, with well-dressed guests and champagne and pot, until people began to take off their clothes.

Then Rebecca had said, “George, you have brought me to an orgy.”

And George had said, “That’s what it looks like, honey.”

And Rebecca had said, “Take me home. This is no place for a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn.”

And George had said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, when are you going to stop being a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn?” He was taking off his Countess Mara tie as she went out the front door. So she had nobody this Saturday to look good for and she was putting in some extra time on Beulah’s nails, because Beulah had somebody to look good for, at precisely 3:15 that afternoon, to be exact, if the goddamn air-traffic controllers didn’t keep the plane from Zurich in a holding pattern between Nantucket and Allentown, Pennsylvania, for five hours, as they sometimes did.

The picture of the man who was arriving at Kennedy that afternoon was in a silver frame on an end table in the living room and another picture of him, in a leather frame, was on the dresser in Beulah’s bedroom. In both pictures he was in ski clothes, because he was a ski instructor by the name of Jirg in St. Anton, where Beulah had spent a month the previous winter. In the picture in the living room he was in motion, skis beautifully clamped together, giving it that old Austrian reverse shoulder, a spray of snow pluming behind him. He was at rest in the bedroom, brown, smiling, long hair blowing boyishly in the wind, like Jean-Claude Killy, all strong white teeth and Tyrolean charm. Even Rebecca had to admit he was luscious, Beulah’s word for Jirg, although Rebecca had said when Beulah had first reported on him, “John Osborne says in some play or other that having an affair with a ski instructor is vulgar.”

“Englishmen,” Beulah had said, hurt, “’re jealous of everybody. They’ll say anything that comes into their heads, because they zilched the Empire.” It hadn’t been vulgar at all. On the contrary. It hadn’t been like getting involved with a man in the city, worrying about finding a taxi in the rain to get there on time and waking up at seven o’clock in the morning to go to work and eating lunch alone in Hamburger Heaven and worrying if the man’s stuffy friends would think your clothes were extreme and listening to him complain about the other men in the office. In the mountains everybody lived in ski pants and it was all snow like diamonds and frosty starlight and huge country feather beds and rosy complexions and being together day and night and incredibly graceful young men doing dangerous, beautiful things to show off for you and eating in cute mountain huts with hot wine and people singing jolly Austrian songs at the next table and all the other girls trying to get your ski teacher away from you both on the slopes and off, and not managing it, because, as he said in his darling Austrian accent, wrinkling that dear tanned face in an effort to speak English correctly. “It is neffer come my way before, a girl so much like you.”

Beulah hadn’t seen him since St. Anton, but his influence had lingered on. She hadn’t been pleased with any man she’d gone out with since she’d come back to America and she’d been saving her money so that she could spend three months at least this winter in the Tirol. Then the letter had come from Jirg, telling her that he’d been offered a job at Stowe starting in December and would she be glad to see him? Beulah had written back the same day. December was too far off, she wrote, and why didn’t he come to New York immediately? As her guest. (The poor boys were paid a pitiful pittance in Austria, despite their great skills, and you always had to show practically inhuman delicacy about paying when you went anywhere with them, so as not to embarrass them. In the month in St. Anton she had become one of the most unobtrusive bill payers the Alps had ever seen.) She could afford it, she told herself, because this winter she wasn’t going on an expensive jaunt to Europe but would be skiing at Stowe.

“You’re crazy,” Rebecca had said when she learned about the invitation. “I wouldn’t pay for a man to lead me out of a burning building.” Sometimes Rebecca’s mother showed through a little in her daughter’s attitudes.