Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

The girl took down a huge illustrated book on French cooking and opened it at random to a page on which there was a color photograph of poularde de Bresse en cocotte . She stroked the page absently. “Chicken,” she said.

“You like chicken?” It was awfully pedestrian, but he had to keep the conversation going. If she had been at the literary-criticism counter, the dialog would have been more inspiring.

“I love it,” the girl said. “Chicken. My mother used to kill two every Sunday. Whenever I have chicken, it’s like a day I don’t have to work.”

“What do you work at?” The conversation was getting more intimate in long leaps and heady bounds. Although the picture of the girl’s mother wringing the heads of two chickens every Sunday was a little disquieting.

“An actress. A dancer. A little bit of both,” the girl said.

A dancer. That explained the legs. “Where are you working now?”

“No place for the moment.” She kept stroking the picture of poularde de Bresse en cocotte . “I’m up for a part off-off-Broadway. One of those naked plays.” She kept looking down at the cookbook and her voice was so low he wasn’t sure that he’d heard correctly.

But whether he had heard correctly or not, it was making an effervescent impression on him. To have a beautiful girl, with pretty nearly the longest legs in the world, who had been walking around in the nude all day before dozens of people, just wander in off the street like that. And just before closing time!

“If you like chicken,” he said, putting everything on the one throw, “I know a place on Sixty-first Street where they do it better than anyplace in New York. A French place.”

“I wouldn’t mind a good chicken dinner,” the girl said.

“By a lucky accident,” he said, “I’m free tonight.”

“By a lucky accident,” she said, “so am I.”

He looked at his watch. “I close up here in about forty minutes. There’s a nice bar around the corner on Lexington. Smiley’s. Why don’t you have a drink there and I’ll be right along and then we can go on to dinner at this great place?”

“You’re sure you won’t forget and leave me there?” she said, sounding dubious.

“You just don’t know me, Miss—”

“My name is Anna. Anna Bukowski. I’m going to change it if I get the part.”

“My name is Christopher Bagshot.”

“It’s a good name,” the girl said, “for a man who works in a bookshop. What time did you say you’d be there?”

She was eager, to top it all. “No later than seven-fifteen. Are you hungry?”

“I can eat,” she said. She gave him the Swedish-actress incest smile and went out of the shop in her miniskirt and electric-blue fun fur.

He raced catatonically around the store, getting things in order before closing up and speeding over to Smiley’s Bar. Now he knew that voice in his dream hadn’t spoken for nothing.

Anna Bukowski walked slowly and deliberately over toward Lexington Avenue. She had to walk slowly to conserve her energy. She hadn’t eaten for two whole days now and she was dizzy from lack of food, and every step she took was like dragging through hot tar. She wasn’t on a diet or anything like that. She was just flat broke. She was just in from Cleveland and she had had no idea New York was so expensive. She had spent her last money on subway fare downtown for the tryouts that morning and she had walked all the way up from St. Mark’s Place after parading around naked all day, which was also fatiguing, even though it didn’t seem like much. But people didn’t count the nervous strain.

The reason she had gone into the bookstore was to see if she could steal a book and sell it to a corrupt little man in a basement. Somewhere, she had heard that was a thriving industry. But then that young man had stood so close to her she wouldn’t have had a chance to steal a rubber band. And she had asked to see cookbooks because she had been thinking of food all day.

Her landlord had thrown her out that morning, too, and kept her bag, and she was standing in all the clothes she possessed in this world, in a miniskirt that was two centuries out of style. If that man in the bookstore was as wild to get laid as he seemed and if she didn’t ruin things at dinner, she might be able to swing getting him to ask her to spend the night with him in his place. If he didn’t live with his dying mother or something. And that would mean at least breakfast, too, the next morning. As an old dancer had once told her in Cleveland, “I was in Buenos Aires and I was living off coffee and rolls. My stomach was shrinking to the size of a pistachio nut and I had to make a decision, and I made it. I sold one part of me to support another.”

When she got to Lexington Avenue, she had forgotten which way the man had told her to turn, uptown or downtown, for Smiley’s Bar. Hunger wasn’t good for the memory. Well, there were only two ways to go. She chose uptown. She stepped down off the curb without looking which way the lights were on and a taxi made a wild swing, with a loud screeching of tires, to avoid hitting her. She jumped back, but fell down. She was safe, but the day had been so awful and she had come so near to being killed that she just sat there on the cold pavement of the city of New York and began to weep.

A man who had been waiting for the lights to change came across the street and said, “Please, let me help you.”

She didn’t say anything but, still sobbing, allowed the man to pull her to her feet.

“You really have to watch the lights,” the man said gently. “All things combine in an attempt to destroy you in this town.”

She sobbed uncontrollably. She was in no mood to hear lectures on safety precautions at the moment.

“What you need is a drink, young lady.” She looked at him, conscious of rivulets on her cheeks. He was about forty and wore a nice dark topcoat and a hat.

She nodded. Her tears stopped. If the nice man took her to a bar, maybe it would be Smiley’s; it was in the neighborhood. And even if it wasn’t, there would probably be potato chips there and olives and salted peanuts and she could put down a little foundation so she wouldn’t disgust the man from the bookstore with her gluttony at dinner and ruin her chances for a bed for the night and Sunday breakfast.

“It’s very good of you, sir,” she said.

The bar he took her to wasn’t Smiley’s. It was a dark, elegant small place, with candles on the restaurant tables in the rear. There were plenty of potato chips and olives and salted peanuts and she just couldn’t help from tearing into them as she drank a bull shot, which was good for dulling the appetite, too, because of the bouillon. Bull shot, Bagshot. It was funny having a bull shot before going to dinner with a Bagshot. She giggled, the liquor getting to her swiftly in her condition. The nice man watched her with a smile on his face as she ravaged three plates of potato chips and two of salted peanuts.

“Have you been on a diet?” he asked.

“Sort of,” she said.

“But you’re off it now?”

“Thank God.”

“Do you know,” he said, “I think the best thing I could do would be to march you to a table and order us dinner.”

“I’m expected in a half hour or so,” she said, although it took a great effort to say no.

“We’ll just have one dish,” the man said, taking her down off the bar stool. “And then you can flitter off.”

She couldn’t refuse an offer like that, so she allowed the man to lead her to a table. She asked the bartender where Smiley’s was and he said it was just down Lexington Avenue two blocks, so there was plenty of time.

The menu looked so tempting that with a little coaxing from the nice forty-year-old man, now without his hat and topcoat, she ordered the whole thing. Hors d’oeuvres, cream-of-tomato soup, steak with broccoli with hollandaise sauce and French fried potatoes, salad, cheese, and strawberry tart for dessert. It seemed like a lot to cram into a half hour before going out to dinner, but the waiter assured her he would hurry.