Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

D utcher stood at the bar, feeling clean after his shower and still thirsty, looking at the girls, glad that he was alone, listening with one ear to the conversation around him. “The British and French,” a man in a hound’s-tooth-check jacket was saying, “will shuttle back and forth over Germany from Paris to Warsaw. And besides, he has no oil. Everybody knows Hitler has no oil.”

“‘Darling,’ she says to me,” a large blonde woman said loudly to another large blonde woman, “‘darling, I haven’t seen you in for ever . Where’ve you been—in the summer theater?’ She knows goddamn well I just finished two pictures for Fox!”

“It’s a bluff,” the man in the hound’s-tooth-check said. “He’s going to back down, Russia or no Russia. He has no oil. Where are you today without oil?”

“Mr. Dutcher.” The barman brought over a phone and plugged it in. “For you.”

It was Machamer on the phone. “What’re you doing tonight, Ralph?” Machamer asked, his voice, as always, grating and noisy.

“I’m drinking tonight,” Dutcher said. “I’m drinking and waiting for something good to happen to me.”

“We’re going to Mexico,” Machamer said. “Want to come along?”

“Who’s we?”

“Dolly and me. Want to come along?”

“What part of Mexico?” Dutcher asked. “What distant part of that verdant land? Vera Cruz, Mexico City …?”

Machamer laughed. “Tia Juana. I got to be back on Tuesday to look for a job. Just overnight. For the races. Want to go?”

“Without oil,” the man in the check was saying, “a war is absolutely impractical.” Dutcher looked gravely at him, considering whether or not he wanted to go to Mexico. He had avoided people after playing tennis in the afternoon, because he’d wanted to be alone, by himself, with the decks clear for something special and significant to happen to him on this special and significant week end.

“Have they got bullfights in Tia Juana?” he asked Machamer.

“Maybe,” Machamer said. “They have them sometimes. Come on, this is Labor Day, there’s nobody in Hollywood.”

“I’m tired,” Dutcher said. “I’ve been listening to the radio for seven nights and I played tennis and I’m thirsty.”

“You can lie down in the back of the car, with a bottle,” Machamer said. Machamer was a young writer and very impressed with Dutcher’s two novels and constantly was after him. “I’ll drive.”

“I never saw a bullfight,” Dutcher said. “Did you ever see one there?”

“Oh, nuts!” Machamer said. “Dolly and I’ll be over in fifteen minutes to pick you up.”

“Tonight,” Dutcher said, “I would like to have a startling adventure.”

“Oh, nuts,” Machamer said. “Fifteen minutes.”

Dutcher gravely put the phone back on its pedestal. “I’ve got to find another bar,” he said to the barman. “Whenever people want to find me they call me here. It’s bad for the reputation. In two years nobody’ll give me a job.” The barman grinned. “Another Rum Collins,” Dutcher said, looking steadfastly at a slender girl down the bar who had long thick black hair and tremendous full breasts that jutted out like pennants in front of her. The barman looked too. “Doesn’t it break your heart?” the barman said.

“California,” Dutcher said. “Specialty of the country.”

“That cameraman,” one of the blonde ladies was saying, “he made me look like William S. Hart’s mother. I told him, too, but loud! ”

In Poland, now, the tanks were roaring over the dusty plains. German boys were climbing into bombers now, Dutcher thought, fiddling with the controls, peering at the instruments, thinking in this one minute when they were waiting and there was nothing to do, “Is this the last time?” and then getting the signal and sweeping off the field toward Warsaw. Cavalry, Dutcher remembered, the Poles had wonderful cavalry. He could just see a wonderful Polish cavalryman sitting heavily on his plodding mount, retreating, sleepless, from the border, stinking from the horse, listening to the bombers overhead, thinking of sleep and home and the English air force, kicking his horse wearily, saying, “Son of a bitch.” And the rich and their women, like the rich and their women everywhere, leaving quietly out the back way, while the dawn broke and the light came up and the boy in the bomber could get a good clear view of the cavalryman on the long, open road below.

Dutcher looked at the girl with breasts like pennants. He sat at the bar, making believe he was staring blankly ahead, making believe nothing was happening inside him, feeling lust rise within him as definitely as water rising in a filling glass. General, non-particular lust, he thought, looking at the girl, pretty, with her black hair and long throat and bright print dress and that amazing bosom. I ought to be ashamed, Dutcher thought. The reader of Spinoza, the admirer of John Milton, the advocate of moral and economic reforms, a sufferer from general and indiscriminate lust ten times daily at the sight of a face, a ruffle, at the sound of a woman’s laugh.

“We live on two planes,” Dutcher said to the bartender. The bartender smiled weakly.

Hollywood, Dutcher thought, Hollywood had a great deal to do with it. It was the product of the neighborhood, and everywhere you went it was pushed in your face like cheese in Wisconsin, and you tried to keep yourself from thinking about Murder at Midnight and sex rushed in to fill the vacuum. Murder at Midnight was the picture he was writing. It had a long complicated story about a night-club singer who got drunks to spend money on her but who was genuine, all the way through, as everyone always said in the conferences. She had a small son from whom she bravely tried to conceal the tawdriness of her profession, and she got mixed up in a murder and she fled town in the rain with the son and the cops picked up an innocent man.… Dutcher shook his head. He never could get the story straight. Anyway, this was the week end. And he’d be through in two weeks and have enough money for eight months in New York. Why’m I kidding myself? he thought. I look at them in New York, too.

Hollywood, you could always blame everything on Hollywood. That was the nicest thing about Hollywood.

“Sacred and profane,” he told the bartender. “That’s the whole explanation.”

Machamer came in with Dolly. “On to Mexico,” Machamer said.

“Sit down,” Dutcher said, “and give me some good arguments. Dolly, you look beautiful.” Dolly looked as thin and as plain and nervous as ever, and Dutcher was always very careful, in this city of magnificent women, to be gallant and flattering to her. “Give me Dolly,” he said to Machamer, “and I’ll go to Mexico.”

Dolly laughed. Her laugh was high and very nervous and always made Dutcher a little uncomfortable.

“Poor Dutcher,” Dolly said. “Poor lonesome Dutcher.”

“Get me a girl,” Dutcher said, suddenly, not thinking about it or why he was saying it, “and I’ll go with you.”

“Now, Dutcher,” Machamer protested. “Eight o’clock Saturday night, Labor Day week end …”

“On a high moral plane,” Dutcher said. “I just want to have somebody to talk to.”

“You have plenty of girls,” Machamer said.

“I’m tired of them,” Dutcher said. “Tonight I’m tired of them. War, Murder at Midnight , the fickleness of the male character, I’m tired of them. Tonight I’m in the mood for a new face.” Dutcher waved his hands elaborately, embroidering on the theme, although already half-sorry that he’d said anything about a girl. “A face moody, passionate, with the eyes cynical and despairing, the mouth lost and contemptuous and stormy, the hair tossed and black …”