Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

His photograph was in the papers every week, with laudatory articles. Newspapermen sought him out and quoted him faithfully when he said, “The trick is to study your opponents. The National Football League is no place for guesswork.”

He posed for advertising stills, his hair combed with greaseless products. He modeled sweaters and flowered bathing trunks and was amazed at how simple it was to earn large sums of money in America merely by smiling.

His picture was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and small boys waited for him at the players’ entrance after practice. He autographed footballs, and taxi drivers recognized him and sometimes refused to take payment for their fares. He took to eating out in restaurants with Sibyl, because the managers more often than not tore up the check when he asked for it. He learned to eat caviar and developed a taste for champagne.

He was invited to parties at the home of Bruce Fallon, the quarterback, who had been paid $200,000 to sign and who was called a superstar by the sportswriters. Until then, Fallon, who only went around with the famous old-timers and the upper-bracket players on the club, had never even said hello to him when they passed on the street. “Do you play bridge, Hugo?” Fallon asked.

They played bridge, Fallon and Fallon’s wife, Nora, and Hugo and Sibyl, in the huge living room of the Fallons’ apartment, which had been decorated by an imported Norwegian. “Isn’t this cozy?” Nora Fallon said, as the four of them sat around the pale wood table before the fire, playing for ten cents a point. Hugo’s left ear worked for bridge as well as poker and Hugo wound up the first evening with an $800 profit, and Fallon said, “I’ve heard about your poker from the boys, Hugo. I’ve never met anybody with a card sense like yours.”

Fallon discussed the coach with him. “If Bert would really let me call my own game.” Fallon said, pouring whiskeys for himself and Hugo, “we’d be twenty points better a Sunday.”

“He’s a little primitive, Bert, that’s true,” Hugo said, “but he’s not a bad guy at heart.” He had never heard anybody criticize the coach before and had never even thought of him by his first name. Even now, with the coach a good seven miles away across town and safely in bed, Hugo felt a curious little tickling in the small of his back as he realized that he had actually said, “Bert.”

When they left that night, with Fallon’s check for $800 in his pocket, Nora Fallon put up her cheek to be kissed. She had gone to school in Lausanne. She said, “We have to make this a weekly affair,” as Hugo kissed her, and he knew she was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a little quiet tête-à-tête, you and I, sometime soon?”

That night, when Hugo got home, he wrote the Fallon telephone number in his little pocket address book. He wondered what it could be like, making love to a woman who thought in French.

The trainer took a fussy interest in him now and, when he came up with a small bruise on his knee, insisted on giving him whirlpool baths for six days. The coach let him off a half hour early one day to make a speech at a local high school. Brenatskis, the publicity man, rewrote his biography for the programs and said that he had made Phi Beta Kappa in college. When Hugo protested, mildly, Brenatskis said, “Who’ll know?” and, “It’s good for your image.” He also arranged for a national magazine to have Hugo photographed at home for a feature, article. Sibyl insisted on buying a pair of gold-lamé pajamas if she was going to be photographed for a national magazine, and on having new curtains in the living room and new slipcovers made. When the article came out, there was only one picture accompanying it—Hugo in an apron, cooking in the kitchen. He was supposed to be making a complicated French dish. He never actually even made coffee for himself.

He bought three loud checked sports jackets for himself and a $400 brooch for Sylvia, who was still subject to headaches. He couldn’t tear himself away from Sylvia, although he was beginning to find her rather common, especially compared with Nora Fallon. He bought a $100 pair of earrings for Sibyl.

On Sundays, he raged over all the fields in the league, and at the end of home games, he had to get to the locker room fast to keep from being mobbed by fans. He began to receive love letters from girls, who sometimes included photographs taken in surprising positions. He knew that these letters disturbed Sibyl, but the mails were free, after all. By now, everybody agreed that he was photogenic.

Sibyl one day announced that she was pregnant. Until then, although Hugo had wanted children from the beginning of their marriage, she had insisted that she was too young. Now, for some reason, she had decided that she was no longer too young. Hugo was very happy, but he was so occupied with other things that he didn’t have quite the time to show it completely. Still, he bought her a turquoise necklace.

Fallon, who was a born gambler, said that it was a shame to waste Hugo’s card sense on penny-ante poker games and ten-cent-a point family bridge. There was a big poker game in town that Fallon played in once a week. In the game, there was a stockbroker, a newspaper publisher, the president of an agricultural-machinery firm, an automobile distributor and a man who owned, among other things, a string of race horses. When Fallon brought Hugo into the hotel suite where the game was held, there was a haze of money in the room as palpable as the cigar smoke that eddied over the green table and against the drawn curtains. Hugo and Fallon had made a private deal that they would split their winnings and their losses. Hugo wasn’t sure about the morality of this, since they weren’t letting the others know that they were up against a partnership, but Fallon said, “What the hell, Huge, they’re only civilians.” Anybody who wasn’t in some way involved in professional football was a civilian in Fallon’s eyes. “Huge” was Fallon’s friendly corruption of Hugo’s name and it had caught on with the other men on the team and with the newspapermen who followed the club. When the offensive team trotted off the field, passing the defensive team coming in, Fallon had taken to calling out, “Get the ball back for me, Huge.” A sportswriter had picked it up and had written a piece on Hugo using that as the title, and now, whenever the defensive team went in, the home crowd chanted “Get the ball back for me, Huge.” Sometimes, listening to all that love and faith come roaring through the autumn air at him, Hugo felt like crying for joy out there.

The men around the green table all stood up when Fallon and Hugo came into the room. The game hadn’t started yet and they were still making up the piles of chips. They were all big men, with hearty, authoritative faces. They shook hands with the two football players as Fallon introduced Hugo. One of them said, “It’s an honor,” and another man said, “Get the ball back for me, Huge,” as he shook Hugo’s hand and they all roared with kindly laughter. Hugo smiled boyishly. Because of the five-tooth bridge in the front of his mouth, Hugo for years had smiled as little as possible: but in the past few weeks, since he had become photogenic, he smiled readily. He practiced grinning boyishly from time to time in front of the mirror at home. People, he knew, were pleased to be able to say about him, “Huge? He looks rough, but when he smiles, he’s just a nice big kid.” Civilians.

They played until two o’clock in the morning. Hugo had won $6020 and Fallon had won $1175. “You two fellers are just as tough off the field as on,” said the automobile distributor admiringly as he signed a check, and the other men laughed jovially. Losing money seemed to please them.