Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Christopher was just about to lock the front door and go into the little lavatory next to the back office and shave. He would be cheating his father of about five minutes’ worth of service, but he felt he really had to shave. He had shaved in the morning, but although he was small he was manly and he needed to shave twice a day. But just as he was about to turn the handle of the lock, through the glass of the door he saw Beulah Stickney striding toward him, like a model advertising health food. He stepped back and she entered briskly.

“Hi, luv,” she said, morning-fresh, vital and friendly. “Auntie folded like last year’s violets. Aren’t you the lucky boy tonight? Let’s celebrate. The night is young and you are beautiful. Where’re you taking your friend Beulah to dinner? I hear there’s a new place over on First that’s—”

“I’m afraid tonight is out,” Christopher said, with a delicious sense of power. “I’ve made other arrangements. Perhaps if I’m free some night next week.…”

“You mean you’re feeding another bird, luv?” Beulah asked, a slight edge of what he thought was sharpness in her tone, and what she knew as hysteria.

“If you mean do I have an engagement for dinner with another lady,” Christopher said, liking his language round tonight, “you’re correct.”

“Pah, luv,” Beulah said airily, “let’s make it à trois . It can be a load of laughs. May the best woman win.” She didn’t ordinarily descend to lures like that, but it was Saturday night and seven o’clock.

“Well.…” He hadn’t thought about that possibility and it intrigued him. He hesitated, thinking hard. But then the door opened and Paulette Anderson came into the shop.

All I need now, Christopher thought, is for Sue Marsh finally to show up for her bag and Caroline Trowbridge to come in to apologize for saying it was a wrong number and Dorothea Toye to pass by, offering to cut her price.

“Why, Beulah,” Paulette cried, “what on earth are you doing here?”

“This is my friendly neighborhood think tank, luv,” Beulah said. “I was just passing by on the way home to change and I saw the beckoning light of literature and I came in to see if he had the new Harper’s Bazaar or the latest Mailer to read in the tub.” Her eyes flashed a clear signal to Christopher, and with a sudden maturity and understanding of women that he had never had before, he knew that she was warning him not to let Paulette Anderson know that she had come in to get him to take her to dinner. And certainly not to let her know that she had been turned down. “What brings you to these parts at this hour yourself, luv?” Beulah asked, her voice rising infinitesimally.

“I was going to invite Mr. Bagshot to a party,” Paulette said.

Dental assistants, Christopher realized, did not observe the same rules of feint and parry as models. Paulette looked as though she had had a wearing day and her clothes didn’t seem to be on just right, but she had taken her glasses off and there was a winsome fluster to her hair.

“I see you ladies know each other,” Christopher said. He hoped they didn’t know each other too well.

“We’re cap-and-crown sisters, luv,” Beulah Stickney said. “I patronize the sainted Dr. Levinson and Paulette holds my hand to keep me from screaming while he wreaks his will on me. I have also taken her shopping in the rag bazaar on Seventh Avenue at wholesale rates so that she can be beautiful enough to invite popular young men like you to parties.”

Bitch, Christopher thought. It gave him great pleasure to say this in his mind. “Oh,” he said, “so that’s how you know each other.”

“Well, I must be toddling along,” Beulah said. “I’m late as it is.” She picked up a copy of the French Vogue . “Put it on my bill, luv. The next time I have a toothache, Paulette, you can tell me how the party turned out.”

She left, smiling, the air perfumed and polar behind her.

“I’m always a little in awe of her,” Paulette said. “Aren’t you?”

“Not really,” Christopher said.

“Well, I suppose men are different,” Paulette said. She breathed loudly. “I hope I’m not too late. But the afternoon was just one thing after another and I just took a chance that you might still be open and.… Well, anyway, I’m invited to a party and if you still want to.…” She ran down and stopped. The way he was looking at her, with this new light in his eyes, she was sure he knew that she had been lying naked on the day bed of Mr. Gadsden’s emergency apartment as late as 4:30 that afternoon.

He just remained silent, silent and powerful, looking at her.

“Of course,” she said. She was nervous, even if she did tower over him and she had thought of him as a last resort until this very minute. “Of course, if you don’t want to go to a party, I’ll understand.…”

“I’d love to go, Paulette,” he said easily. “It’s just that I’m taken for the evening.”

“Naturally,” Paulette said. “At this hour. Well, maybe another time. Good night.”

“ Ciao ,” he said. He had never said Ciao before to anyone. “Good of you to drop by.”

He opened the door for her. She heard it locking behind her.

As she walked heavily down Madison Avenue, she was overcome with the awful certainty that she was going to be a virgin for the rest of her life.

Humming, Christopher shaved. He felt marvelous. He didn’t remember feeling this marvelous since the day he got his 4-F classification in the draft. Before going in to shave, he had tripped over the blue tennis bag and put it out of the way under the table. Looking at it, he decided he’d have it delivered on Monday by messenger to Miss Marsh’s apartment, with a big bunch of forget-me-nots from that florist on Fifth Avenue. That would be ironic.

He shaved slowly because he didn’t want to bleed. Even if he were late, that girl in the miniskirt with the great legs, what was her name, Anna, would wait. Tonight women waited for Bagshot.

It would have been all right if the steak hadn’t been so good. But it was more than an inch thick and so tender you hardly needed the knife to cut it and it tasted the way steaks look in advertisements. It had just disappeared from her plate while the nice forty-year-old man was barely beginning on his and he had said, “My dear girl, I haven’t seen anything like this since I played football in college.” And he had insisted, it was the only word you could use, insisted, that she have another one, and what with the wine and all, and three kinds of cheese that she had never tasted before and the strawberry tart and the Cointreau with the coffee, well, it was 10:30 before she looked at her watch again and there was no use searching up and down Lexington Avenue at that hour like a lost soul for Smiley’s Bar. And when she got out of the nice forty-year-old man’s apartment at five o’clock the next day, which was Sunday, after a pancake and bacon-and-eggs brunch, served by a butler, there would have been even less use, wouldn’t there, to look for Smiley’s Bar?

She got the job in the off-off-Broadway naked show and two good reviews, mostly for her figure, if you wanted to be honest, and the nice forty-year-old man was as generous as nice forty-year-old men are supposed to be to tall young naked actresses, and all she had to worry about that autumn was her weight.

Lying idly in bed right before Christmas, reading the “Society” section of the Sunday Times , she saw an announcement that Mr. Christopher Bagshot, son of Mr. Bernard Bagshot, the owner of the well-known chain of bookstores, had been married the day before at St. Thomas’s, in Mamaroneck, to a girl by the name of June Leonard.