Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

He didn’t trust Beulah’s ability to get rid of her aunt before seven o’clock. He had aunts of his own and once they got hold of you, they stuck.

Back to the address book. It was nearly twelve o’clock and people would be going out to lunch and then matinees or linen showers or whatever it was girls went to on Saturday afternoons.

Caroline Trowbridge was in bed with Scotty Powalter. At one time, Caroline Trowbridge had been Caroline Powalter, but Scotty Powalter had found her in bed with his ex-roommate from Yale, Giuliano Ascione, and had divorced her for adultery. It hadn’t been a completely friendly divorce. It had been all over the New York Daily News and Caroline had been dropped from the social register the next year, but she and Scotty had what they both agreed was a Big Physical Thing for each other and every once in a while they spent a night or a week together until something happened to remind Scotty of his ex-roommate at Yale.

The truth was that Caroline had a Big Physical Thing with almost every man she met. She was a tall, sturdy, inbred, healthy social-register kind of girl who was crazy about boats and horses and Italians and if she had had to swear to it under oath, she wouldn’t have been able to say what was more fun—leaping a ditch on an Irish hunter or crewing a Dragon in a force-six gale or going on a weekend to a sinful little inn in the country with one of her husband’s best friends.

Despite her catholic approval of the entire male sex, she oftened regretted not being married to Scotty anymore. He was six feet, four inches tall and built accordingly and the way he behaved in bed, you’d never suspect he came from one of the oldest families along the Main Line in Philadelphia. His family had a place up in Maine with horses and he had a sixty-foot ketch at Center Island and he didn’t have to bother with anything boring like working. As she sometimes said to her lovers, if he hadn’t been so insanely and irrationally possessive, it would have been the marriage of the century.

He had called her the evening before from the Racquet Club, where he had been playing backgammon. When she recognized his voice on the telephone and he said he was calling from the Racquet Club, she knew he had been losing, because he always got horny when he lost at backgammon, especially on weekends. She’d canceled the man she was supposed to go to Southampton with—after all, husbands, even ex-husbands, came first—and Scotty had come over and she’d opened two cans of turtle soup and they’d been in bed ever since 9:30 the night before. It had been such a complete night that sometime around dawn, he’d even mentioned something about getting remarried. It was almost noon now and they were hungry and she got out of bed and put on a pink terry-cloth robe and went into the kitchen to make some bloody marys, for nourishment. She was always strict with herself about no drinks before 11 o’clock, because she had seen too many of her friends go that route. She was dashing in the Worcestershire sauce when the phone rang.

What Christopher liked about her, he thought, as his hand hovered over the phone, preparing to dial, was that she was wholesome. In the polluted city, she was a breath of fresh country air. If you didn’t know about her and her family’s steel mills and her divorce and her expulsion from the social register, you’d think she was a girl just in from the farm, milking cows. She came into the shop often, breezing in with a big childish smile, hanging onto a man’s arm, a different one each time, and buying large, expensive, color-plate books about boats or horses. She had an account at the shop, but usually the man with her would pay for the books and then she would throw her strong firm arms around her escort and kiss him enthusiastically in gratitude, no matter who was looking.

She had kissed Christopher once, too. Although not in the shop. He had gone to the opening of a one-man show at an art gallery four doors down on Madison Avenue and she was there, too, squinting over the heads of the other connoisseurs at the geometric forms in clashing colors that represented the painter’s reaction to being alive in America. Extraordinarily, she was unaccompanied, and when she spotted Christopher, she bulled her way through the crowd, smiling sexily, and said, “My deliverer,” and put her arm through his and stroked his forearm. There was something unnatural about her being alone, like a free-floating abalone. Her predestined form was the couple. Knowing this, Christopher was not particularly flattered by her attention, since it was no more personal than a swan’s being attracted to a pond or a wildcat to a pine tree. Still, the touch of her capable ex-social-register fingers on his arm was cordial.

“I suppose,” she said, “clever man that you are, that you know what all this is about.”

“Well.…” Christopher began.

“They remind me of my trigonometry class at Chatham Hall. That distressing pi sign. Don’t they make you thirsty, Mr.—uh?”

“Bagshot.”

“Of course. Why don’t you and I just sidle out of here like true art lovers and go out into the night and snap on one or two martinis?”

They were nearly at the door by now, anyway, so Christopher said, as brightly as he could, “Right on.” The owner of the gallery, who was a business friend of his, was near the door, too, looking at him with a betrayed expression for leaving so quickly. Christopher tried to show, by a grimace and a twitch of his shoulders, that he was under the sway of powers stronger than he and that he would come back soon, but he doubted that he communicated.

They went to the Westbury Polo Bar and sat in one of the booths and ordered martinis and Caroline Trowbridge sat very close to him and rubbed her knee against his and told him how lucky he was to have a vocation in life, especially one as rewarding as his, involved in the fascinating world of books. She had no vocation, she said sadly, unless you could consider horses and sailing a vocation, and she had to admit to herself that with the way the world was going—just look at the front page of any newspaper—horses and boats were revoltingly frivolous, and didn’t he think they ought to call a waiter and order two more martinis?

By the time they had finished the second martini, she had his head between her two strong hands and was looking down into his eyes. She had a long torso as well as long legs and she loomed over him in the semiobscurity of the Polo Bar. “Your eyes,” she was saying, “are dark, lambent pools.” Perhaps she hadn’t paid much attention in the trigonometry class at Chatham Hall, but she certainly had listened in freshman English.

Emboldened by alcohol and lambency, Christopher said, “Caroline”—they were on a first-name basis by now—“Caroline, have dinner with me?”

“Oh, Christopher,” she said, “what a dear thoughtful thing to say,” and kissed him. On the lips. She had a big mouth, that went with the rest of her, and she was pleasantly damp.

“Well,” he said when she unstuck, “shall we?”

“Oh, my poor, dear, beautiful little mannikin,” she said, “nothing would give me greater joy. But I’m occupied until a week from next Thursday.” She looked at her watch and jumped up, pulling her coat around her. “Rum dum dum,” she cried. “I’m hideously tardy right this very moment and everybody will be cross with me all the wretched night and say nasty things to me and tweak my ear and suspect the worst and never believe I was in an art gallery, you naughty boy.” She leaned over and pecked the top of his head. “What bliss,” she said and was gone.

He ordered another martini and had dinner alone, remembering her kiss and the curious way she had of expressing herself. One day, when she was a little less busy, he knew he was going to see her again. And not in the shop.