Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Oh, damn, she thought as she reached for the phone hanging on the kitchen wall, I forgot to switch it to the answering service. When she expected Scotty over, she made a practice of instructing the service to pick up all calls on the first ring, because nothing infuriated Scotty more than hearing her talk to another man. She loved him, divorce or no divorce, but she had to admit that he was a neurotically suspicious creature.

“Hello,” she said.

“Caroline,” the male voice said, “this is Christopher—”

“Sorry, Christopher,” she said, “you have the wrong number,” and hung up. Then she unhooked the phone, so that if he called again, he’d get a busy signal. She still had the bottle of Worcestershire sauce in her hand and she shook a few more spurts into the tomato juice. She added a double shot of vodka, to calm Scotty down, if by any chance he didn’t believe that it was a wrong number.

Scotty was lying with his eyes closed, all the covers thrown off, when she came into the bedroom with the bloody marys. He really filled a bed, Scotty; you got your money’s worth of man with her ex-husband. His expression was peaceful, almost as if he had gone back to sleep. The phone on the table next to the bed didn’t look as though it had been moved, she noted with relief.

“All up on deck for grog,” she said cheerily.

He sat up, monumentally, muscles rippling, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He reached out his hand and took the glass from her, looked at it consideringly, then hurled it against the opposite wall. A good part of the room turned red.

“Oh, Scotty,” she said reproachfully, “don’t tell me you’re being seized by one of your unreasonable moods again.” She backed off a little, being careful to avoid broken glass, and took two swift swallows of bloody mary for her nerves.

He stood up. It was an awful sight when he stood up naked like that in a comparatively small bedroom. It was like seeing the whole front line of the Dallas Cowboys wrapped into one moving in on you. The funny scar on his forehead that he had had since his brother had hit him with a baseball bat when they were boys, and which stood out when he was angry, was turning a frightening bright pink.

“Scotty Powalter,” she said, “I absolutely forbid you to touch me.”

Thank God he only slapped me with an open hand, she thought as she reeled back into a chair, still miraculously holding onto her drink.

“You’re unjust,” she said from the depths of the chair. “You’re a fundamentally unjust man. Hitting a girl for a little old wrong number.”

“Some wrong number,” he said. “Who’s Christopher?”

“How should I know who Christopher is? This voice said, ‘Hello, this is Christopher,’ and I said—”

“This voice said, ‘Caroline,’” Scotty said.

“Sneak,” she said. “Listening in on other people’s conversations. Is that what they taught you at Yale?” Scotty wasn’t really unintelligent, but his thought processes were cumbersome and sometimes you could fuddle him and make him forget his dreadful intentions by attacking him.

“I suppose he was calling up to remind you you had a date to screw him this afternoon,” Scotty said. “Knowing how dizzy you are about little matters like that.”

“You’re fully aware of what I think about your vocabulary, Scotty,” Caroline said with dignity.

“Fuck my vocabulary,” Scotty said.

“If you must know, and I don’t see where it’s any business of yours, anyway, considering the nature of our relationship,” she said, “I haven’t had a date with anybody since a week ago last Tuesday. And if your poor little brain isn’t drowned in the mists of alcohol, you’ll recall that a week ago last Tuesday, you didn’t get out of this very bed until six P.M. Wednesday.” As she spoke, she began to believe herself and tears of self-pity formed in her eyes. It was almost like being married again.

“Who’s Christopher?” Scotty said. He began to prowl dangerously, like a berserk elephant, and she feared for the lamps and other glassware in the room.

“I’m perfectly willing to tell you,” she said, “if you’ll stop marauding around like some mad beast in the jungle. You know I’ve never hid anything significant from you.”

“Hah,” he said, but he stopped prowling.

“He’s just a poor little table-model clerk in a bookstore on Madison Avenue,” Caroline said. “He’s just a little Shetland pony of a man, you’d be ashamed of yourself being jealous of him if you ever saw him.”

“He called you, no matter what size he is,” Scotty said stubbornly.

“Sometimes he calls me when he gets in a book he thinks I’d like.”

“ The Child’s Manual of Sex, ” Scotty said. “ A Thousand and Three Indian Positions . I can guess what kind of bookstore he runs.”

“That’s hardly the way to talk to a woman who’s been your wife,” Caroline said fastidiously. “If you want to see with your own eyes and convince yourself once and for all, just you get yourself dressed and I’ll take you over to Madison Avenue and I’ll bet you’ll take one look and get down right then and there on your bended knee and beg my forgiveness for the bestial way you’ve treated me this morning.”

“I don’t want to get dressed,” Scotty said. “I want a bloody mary and I want to go back to bed. In that order. Make it snappy.”

He was like that. Anger aroused other emotions in him.

He was stretching himself on the bed like some huge beached vessel as she went out of the bedroom toward the kitchen to make another batch of bloody marys. Her head was ringing a little from that Yale-sized slap along the side of her jaw, but she was pleased with her over-all handling of what could very easily have developed into a crisis. As she shook the bloody marys, she hummed to herself. She might, later on, at the proper moment, remind Scotty that along about dawn he had mentioned the possibility of getting remarried. And she was damn well going to get him to write a check to have the bedroom repapered. And if he turned ugly again this afternoon, as he was likely to do, there was always that dear little man waiting patiently on Madison Avenue.

Wrong number, Christopher thought, staring at the dead phone in his hand. Who is she kidding? That was no wrong number. He had an annoyed impulse to dial her again, just to show her that he wasn’t being fooled, but decided against it, out of tact. He could imagine all too well why she had said it was a wrong number.

Luckily, a spate of customers entered the store and he was too busy wrapping books and ringing up cash to brood about it.

By the time the store emptied in the lunchtime lull, he had almost convinced himself that it didn’t matter at all to him what Caroline Trowbridge did with her Saturday afternoon.

He sat down at the desk by the cash register and took out his address book.

Toye, Dorothea **. He would never have given her two stars on his own, although she was pretty enough and if she wasn’t exactly five feet, eight inches tall, she was certainly in the neighborhood of five feet, seven and a half. She was not a flashy woman. She was shapely, but in a polite way, and wore simple, sober-colored, almost college-girl clothes, or at least the kind of clothes that girls used to wear in college, and although he guessed she was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, her appearance was demure, her voice low and hesitant, her smile rare. The first two or three times she came into the shop, he had hardly remarked her. But then he had noticed that if there were other men in the shop, even old men or men who at other times seemed to lose themselves in the books, they would slowly begin following her with their eyes and then somehow drift helplessly in her direction. He regarded Dorothea Toye more carefully to see what it was that acted so magnetically on his male customers. He decided that it was probably her complexion. She was always a light tan, with a glow, like a touch of the sun, on her silken skin. She was brilliantly clean. If Caroline Trowbridge looked like a girl just in from a farm, Dorothea Toye looked like a child who had just splashed out of the sea to be dried with a rough towel by her mother. He had been surprised when she had ordered a book of prints by Aubrey Beardsley.