Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

It was too bad that she was in no condition to appreciate him at that moment, because later on she realized he had never been as eloquent or convincing on any of the programs on which she had seen him.

“Get dressed, Paulette,” he said gently, living up to his image. “I’ll go into the bathroom until you’re ready.”

He left the room and she dressed slowly, half hoping he would come out and say he’d changed his mind. She didn’t know how she’d ever be able to get this far with a man again.

But he didn’t come out until she was fully dressed and had put up her hair, which had fallen loose in the scuffling.

He poured stiff whiskeys and they sat in elegiac silence in the dying light of the late October afternoon. When she reminded him timidly that he’d wanted to go to the party downtown, he said his jaws were hurting him and he was going to stay home and nurse them.

They had another drink and it was dark when she left his apartment, leaving him sunk in a chair, swishing whiskey around his wounded gums.

She remembered that she had told the boy in the bookstore that she’d come in around five. She didn’t really make a decision, but she started across toward Madison. She had to go downtown tonight anyway, she told herself.

People came crowding into the baggage and Customs area from Immigration in clotted lumps of tourism and there was so much milling around that it would have been hard to pick out your own mother from the visitors’ gallery, let alone a man you had only seen for thirty days in your whole life nine months before. Beulah peered through the plate glass anxiously, trying to spot Jirg, with people all around her waving spastically to relatives on the floor below and holding up babies and waving the babies’ hands for them.

Finally, she saw him and she took a deep breath. He was wearing a long black-leather coat, down to his ankles, like an SS officer, and a green Tyrolean hat, with a feather. He was warm and he opened his coat and took off his hat to fan his face. Under the coat, he was wearing a bright-green tweed suit. Even from where she was standing, the bumps on the tweed looked like an outbreak of green boils. And when he took his hat off, she saw that he had gotten a haircut for his trip. A good economical haircut that would last a long time, probably until next spring. A wide pale expanse showed under the high, sharp hairline on the back of his neck, and his ears, she noticed for the first time, stuck out alarmingly from the bare pink scalp. Out of a sense of style, he was wearing long pointed Italian blue-suede shoes and fawn-colored suede gloves.

She regretted that she was farsighted.

Before he could see her, she shrank back away from the window to think. She wheeled and ran down a corridor and went into the ladies’ room. She looked around her wildly. There was a Tampax vending machine on the wall. “Thank God,” she said. She pushed past a square little Puerto Rican lady with three little girls and fumbled for a coin and put it into the machine.

When she came out of the ladies’ room, she didn’t bother to go back to the visitors’ gallery, but went directly to the exit where the passengers came out after clearing Customs. She fixed a wan smile on her lips and waited.

When he finally came out of Customs, he was thriftily carrying his own bags and sweating. He had put on weight since the end of the skiing season and his face was curiously round. He was short, she noticed, almost as short as the bookstore boy. Was it possible that he could have shrunk since last winter? When he saw her, he dropped his bags, making an old lady behind him stumble, and roared “ Schatzl ,” at her and nearly knocked down a child of three running over to embrace her.

The leather coat smelled as though it had been improperly cured, she noted as he kissed her, and he had doused himself with airline lavatory perfume. If I have a friend at this airport who recognizes me, she thought as she permitted herself to be chucked under the chin, I shall sink through the floor.

“Here,” she said, “we’d better get your bags out of the way. I’ll help you.”

“Finally in your country I come,” Jirg said as they gathered up the bags and started toward the taxis. “Where is the nearest bed?”

“Sssh,” Beulah said. “They understand English here.” Her eyes swiveled around uneasily. The people on both sides of her looked very thoughtful.

“They giff me a big party for farewell, the boys,” Jirg said. For the first time she realized his voice had been trained for shouting instructions to people caught in distant avalanches. “They know you wait for me. You should hear some of the jokes they make. You would laughing die.”

“I bet,” Beulah said.

They got into a taxi, Jirg holding onto the little air travel bag he was carrying.

“Where to, lady?” the driver asked.

Oy, she thought. “I’ll tell you when you cross the bridge to Manhattan,” she said.

The driver gave her a look. “Games,” he said. He was one of those insufferable New York taxi drivers. He started his car with a neck-snapping jerk.

Jirg put his hand on her knee and looked conqueringly into her eyes. He had his hat on again.

“And what was the weather like?” she asked lovingly. “In Austria this summer, I mean.”

“Always rain,” he said. “Sometimes hail.” He stroked her knee. In Austria it would have sent her through the ceiling with desire. His hands were horny with callus and she could hear him making snags in her stocking.

“Did you enjoy your trip?”

“Filthy,” he said. “The plane was all Amerikaners . Maybe they are all right in their own country, but they haff no Kultur when they voyage. Except for one Amerikanerin I know.” He leered seductively at her. He had had his teeth fixed since she had seen him last and one molar and one front tooth were pure gold. His hand went up her thigh, snagging thread.

“How was the food on the plane?” she asked, grabbing the other hand fondly, to immobilize it. She regretted not having worn culottes that day. They didn’t offer much protection, but they offered some.

“Swiss food,” he said. “For cows. And they make you pay for drinks. The Swiss love one thing. Money.”

“All airlines charge for drinks in tourist class,” she said, sweetly reasonable.

“Drink,” he said. “Oh, that reminds me.” He smiled benevolently. “I brought my Amerikanisches Schatzl a gift.”

In the rearview mirror, she saw the taxi driver grimace, as though he had a gas pain. Jirg took his hand off her leg and dug in the air travel bag on the seat beside him and took out a small squarish unlabeled bottle. She recognized the shape of the bottle and felt her duodenum contract.

Jirg proudly held up the bottle. “See,” he said, “I remembered.”

It was a drink she loathed, a Tyrolean home product made up of odds and ends of herbs and poisonous weeds that grew in dank spots near precipices in the Alps. Jirg imbibed it in huge quantities, like a giant intake valve. She had pretended to be one of the boys in Austria and had expressed her enthusiasm for the foul stuff. He twisted the cork and offered her the bottle. A smell came out of the neck of the bottle like old and ill-cared-for animals.

She took a ladylike sip, managing not to gag.

He took a huge swig. “Ach,” he said, nostalgically, “the nights we drank together.”

“Hey, lady,” the taxi driver half turned his head, scowling. “No drinking allowed in this cab.”

“You’ll have to put the bottle away, luv,” Beulah said. “He says it’s against the law.”

“It is not believable,” Jirg said. “Drinking against the law. He is making fun of me. I believe he is a Jew.” Jirg’s face turned a sudden Master Race purple. “I haff heard about New York.”