Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Martin stepped back a little, feeling smothered by the alcoholic breath, by the sudden, racing spill-over of language from this man who until that moment had sounded more or less like everyone else Martin had met during the weekend. “Still,” he said, wondering if Bowman was cunningly sidetracking him with this incoherent, rambling, pitiable confession, “what’s that got to do with climbing balconies and looking in at windows?”

“I’m looking for an answer.” Bowman grinned slyly. “I’m an explorer, looking for an oasis in the middle of the great American desert. I’m an optimist. I believe there’s an answer. I believe that some people aren’t fooling. They seem happy and they are happy. Only you have to catch them by surprise, boy, when they don’t know you’re watching them, to find out the secret. Anybody puts a smile on his face when he knows you’re watching him, like getting your picture taken in front of a monument on vacation. The beast in his natural habitat. Preferably at a significant moment, as the photographers say, when the secret is laid bare. Sitting having a cup of coffee late at night in the kitchen talking over what his life is like with his wife. Is there love on his face, hate, boredom? Is he thinking of going off to Florida with another woman? Helping his ten-year-old son with his homework. What does his face reveal? Does he have any hope? Making love. Do they show the tenderness of human beings, do they touch each other with benevolence and gratitude, or is it one animal falling on another animal, like my wife and myself?”

“You mean to say,” Martin asked incredulously, “that you try to watch at times like that?”

“Of course,” Bowman said calmly.

“You’re crazy,” Martin said.

“Well, if you’re going to talk like that …” Bowman shrugged, sounding aggrieved and misunderstood. “There’s no sense in trying to explain to you. What’s crazier—living the way I do, year after year, not feeling anything, thinking, Somebody has the secret, it’s there, I just have to find out, and doing something about it. Or just giving up, surrendering.… What is it? Is the whole thing a blank? For everybody? Do you know? Maybe you ought to watch outside a couple of windows yourself sometime,” Bowman said contemptuously. “With that honest, eager California face of yours. Stay here—I’ll take you around with me. You ’ll get the inside dope on some of the people right there now—” He gestured toward the candlelit garden. “That pretty one who was on your right during dinner. Mrs. Winters. The one that’s hanging all over her husband all the time and laughing at his jokes as though he made a million dollars a year on television and holding his hands at parties as though they’re going to be married three days later. I’ve been there, I’ve been there.… You know what they do when they get home at night?”

“I don’t want to hear,” Martin said. He had liked Mrs. Winters.

“That’s all right,” Bowman said mockingly. “It won’t offend your pristine sense of modesty. They never say a word. She goes upstairs and takes a handful of pills and greases her face and puts a mask over her face to sleep and he sits downstairs by himself, with one light on, drinking whiskey straight. And after he’s knocked off half a bottle he lies down on the couch with his shoes on and sleeps. I’ve been there four times and it’s been the same each time. Pills, whiskey, silence. The public lovebirds. God, it makes me laugh. And the others … even when they’re alone. You don’t know our minister, do you, the Right Reverend Fenwick?”

“No,” Martin said.

“No, of course not. We played tennis today instead of worshipping.” Bowman chuckled. “I made a call on the man of God a few Sundays ago. His bedroom is on the ground floor. He’s a marvelous-looking gray-haired gentleman. If you were casting somebody to play the Pope in a movie, he’d get the job in five minutes. Always with a soft humble smile on his face, and divine forgiveness radiating out from him all over the state of Connecticut. And what do you think he was doing when I looked in on him? He was standing in front of a full-length mirror with only his shorts on, pulling his gut in, looking at himself critically and approvingly in profile. You’d’ve been surprised what good condition he’s in, he must do fifty pushups a day. Standing there, pushing his hair forward in little dabs, like a woman making up, to get that effect of other-worldly carelessness he’s famous for. He always looks as though he’s too busy communicating with God to pay attention to mundane things like combing his hair. And he was making faces at himself and raising his hands in holy benediction, practicing for next Sunday’s performance, just about naked in his shorts, with legs like an old fullback. The old faker. I don’t know what I hoped for. Maybe to find him on his knees, praying, in communion with God, with some secret happiness showing on his face that never is quite there in church. For the joys of the flesh,” Bowman said, switching abruptly, speaking in a confidential whisper, leaning toward Martin in the darkness, “I tried our African cousins.…”

“What’re you talking about?” Martin asked, puzzled.

“Our colored population,” Bowman said. “Closer to the primeval push. Simpler, I thought, less inhibited. The Slocums have a colored couple. You saw them passing drinks last night. About thirty-five years old, both of them. The man’s huge, he looks as though he could move walls with his bare hands. And the woman’s beautiful. Oversized, black, with great big breasts and a fantastic behind. I’ve sat behind them in the movies and when they laugh it’s like cannon going off in a twenty-one-gun salute. You’d think that if you saw them in bed together you’d shrivel with shame at your own white, niggling, sin-haunted, worn-out, puritanical gropings. Well, I saw them once. They have a room back of the kitchen at the Slocums and you can get up real close. I saw them, and they were in bed together all right, only all they were doing was reading. And do you know what she was reading?” Bowman laughed breathlessly. “She was reading The Second Sex . That’s that French book about how badly women have been treated since the Pleistocene Age. And he was reading the Bible. The first page. Genesis. In the beginning, there was the Word.” Bowman laughed again, sounding delighted with his story. “I went back a couple of times, but they had the curtains drawn, so I don’t know what they’re reading these days.…”

“Harry! Harry!” It was Mrs. Bowman’s voice, calling. She was standing, a white blur in the moonlight, about thirty yards from them. “What’re you doing out there? People’re going home.”

“Yes, dear,” Bowman called. “We’re coming right away. I’m just coming to the tag line of a joke with young Martin, here. I’ll be right along.”

“Well, hurry. It’s late.” Mrs. Bowman turned and walked through the moonlight back toward the house. Bowman watched his wife silently, his eyes brooding and puzzled.

“What did you want from my sister and Willard?” Martin asked, shaken by everything he had heard, no more certain now about what he should do than when he had arrived that evening.

“They were my last hope,” Bowman said in a low voice. “We’d better get back to the party.” He started across the lawn, Martin walking at his side.

“If ever two people seemed”—Bowman hesitated— “connected —dear to each other, pleasurable to each other … I’ve come home on the same train with Willard in the evening and the wives’re waiting, and your sister always seems to be a little apart, preparing herself, almost, and something happens to her face when she sees him.… They’re not all over each other, of course, like the Winters, but once in a while they touch each other with their fingertips. And with their boys … They know something, they’ve found something, that I don’t know and I haven’t found. When I see them, I have the feeling that I’m on the verge. It’s almost there, I almost have it. That’s why you nearly caught me the other night. God, I’ve been doing this for years and nobody’s ever come close. I’m careful as a cat. But that night, watching all three of you in the living room, late at night, I forgot where I was. When you came to the window, I … I wanted to smile, to say … to say, yes, good for you … Ah, maybe I’m wrong about them, too.”