Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

He tried to make himself think unkindly about her. When he was exposed to her for any length of time, he felt himself melting in her direction and once or twice he had been perilously close to asking her to marry him. Maybe if before he had met her he’d known a lot of tall girls intimately and had a standard of comparison, they’d be married already.

Sitting there in the cluttered little office watching her lick mayonnaise off her finger with delicious unself-consciousness, he was tempted to forget his whole damn crusade and ask her to have dinner with him that night, even though he’d lied to her successfully and told her he had to have dinner with his mother and father in Westchester that night—they were getting uptight about never seeing him anymore, now that he’d found a girl. But the front doorbell rang just as he was about to speak and he had to go out into the store and stand around for almost a half hour while an elderly couple shuffled around the poetry counter denouncing Allen Ginsberg and finally buying a play in verse by Christopher Fry that must have been on the shelves since the year one.

While the old couple were still fussing around the store, June had come out of the back office, putting on her raincoat, and had whispered, “I have to go now.” She had a date with a girlfriend in front of the Museum of Modern Art and then, since he was busy tonight, maybe they’d go to a concert at Town Hall. “Call me tomorrow. And have a nice evening with your family,” she said, and kissed him quickly, at a moment when the old couple had their backs to them.

He had a severe twinge of guilt as he watched the brave little raincoated figure vanish through the doorway. Perfidy did not come easily to him. He even took a step toward the door, to tell her to come back, but at that moment the old lady called, “Young man, I believe we’ll take this one,” waving the Christopher Fry about like a captured bird.

When he escorted the old couple to the door and opened it for them, he looked across the street and could have sworn that he saw Paulette Anderson walking uptown, holding the arm of a man with wavy gray hair. They seemed to be in earnest conversation.

One more shot, he decided, and then the hell with it.

He went through his address book with the utmost care. He didn’t want to have any more Dorothea Toyes sprung on him.

He stopped at the Ms. Marsh, Susan **. She wasn’t preternaturally tall, but she was a good size and you could be sure she wouldn’t ever ask a man $50 for the pleasure of her company. She was a dark girl with green eyes who was politically advanced, although in a quiet, unpushy way. The reason Christopher knew she was politically advanced was that the only books she ever showed an interest in were written by people like Fanon and Marcuse and Cleaver and LeRoi Jones and Marshall McLuhan. She had beautiful legs. It was unsettling to sell books of that nature to a girl with legs as beautiful as that.

She had once told Christopher that he had a good mind. It was then that he had put her name in his address book and given her two stars. She had been caught in the shop by a rainstorm and they had got to talking. It turned out she was from a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe that she despised. She had been one of the youngest girls ever to graduate from Radcliffe and had intended to take her master’s in philosophy when she had seen the irrelevance of it all. She expressed disapproval of every book Christopher was displaying at the moment in the window and he said, “Actually, the whole world would be better off if they didn’t print another book for the next fifty years.”

That’s when she said he had a good mind. “Books are dividers,” she said. “They form a false elite. To immerse ourselves in the masses, we need song, ritual and bloodshed.” She had invited him to a meeting that night she said might interest him, but he had a date with June and he had to decline.

Now, seeing her name in his book, he remembered the rainy afternoon and the quiet beauty of her green eyes and her sensational legs. A girl with legs like that, he thought, doesn’t use them just for walking, no matter what her politics are.

He reached for the phone. But just as he was about to pick it up, the front door opened and a huge young man without a hat entered the shop, took three steps into the room and stopped, staring the length of the shop at him with a pensive but at the same time somehow threatening expression on his heavy, handsome face. Six feet, four, Christopher thought automatically. At least.

Christopher moved away from the phone to the new customer, who remained planted and silent in the aisle in a tentlike raglan tweed coat, his face ruddy and athletic, with an old diagonal scar pinkish on his forehead, running down almost into one eye.

“May I help you, sir?” Christopher said.

“No,” the man said, continuing to stare fixedly at him. “I’m browsing. This is The Browsing Corner, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m browsing.” But the man never looked at a book, just at Christopher, as though he were measuring Christopher for some unpleasant uniform or deciding whether he could use him for some unpleasant purpose.

Christopher turned away to fuss with a display of books on a table. The man didn’t move and the only sound from him was a rather hoarse breathing. He was too well dressed to be a stick-up man and he didn’t have the look of somebody who was interested in books. Naturally, Christopher couldn’t call Susan Marsh with a customer like that in the shop.

Christopher was pleased when a young couple came into the shop and negotiated their way around the huge man in the middle of the aisle and asked if he had a copy of The Red Badge of Courage . Christopher knew he didn’t have a copy, but he told the young couple to wait while he looked in back. He stayed in back as long as he dared. By that time, the young couple were gone, but the man was still there, still with that fixed, pensive, animal-like stare.

“Have you found anything you like?” Christopher ventured.

“I’m still browsing,” the man said. He had the gift of immobility. While Christopher moved nervously from Popular Fiction to Drama to Biography to Greeting Cards, the man stood there, still, mountainlike, only unblinking his eyes flicking in their sockets, to follow Christopher’s movements.

This is the worst Saturday afternoon I have lived through in my life, Christopher thought, after it had gone on for what must have been at least half an hour.

Finally, the man said, “Hah!” and shrugged. He smiled slowly. “Thank you,” he said, “it’s been a nice browse, Christopher.” Massively, he departed.

Christopher looked after him, confounded. Christopher! How did the man know his name? He could have sworn he had never seen him before in his life. The city is full of nuts, he said to himself. And it’s getting worse.

For some reason, he was trembling and he sat down to calm his nerves. Then he remembered he had had his hand on the phone to call Susan Marsh when the tall stranger had come into the shop. It was a lucky thing he wasn’t in the middle of an intimate conversation when the door had opened.

He strode over to the phone, determined not to let himself be shaken. His hand was almost steady as he dialed Susan Marsh’s number.

Sue watched closely as Harry Argonaut put the machine together on the carpet in her living room. The time might come when she would have to do it herself and there was no room for error. Harry Argonaut wasn’t his real name. It was his nom de plume or, more accurately, his nom de guerre . He was a small, pudgy, slow-moving man. Although he was only twenty-four, he was already bald. Fred Drabner, who had brought over the detonating device after lunch, was seated in an Eames armchair, watching Harry Argonaut attach the last two wires. The machine was to be used that night in Newark. Newark had been picked for the demonstration because it was one of the most explosive communities in America and the bombing of a bank in the heart of the city would create maximum confusion and with luck provoke some shooting by the police and perhaps a few spectacular arrests of innocent passers-by.