Acceptable Losses (11 page)

But when the man turned around, Damon saw that it
was
Fitzgerald: not the young man he had known, with black hair and an unlined face, but a man of about the same age as himself, with gray sideburns under the cap.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Fitzgerald said. “Roger Damon!”

Even as they shook hands, Damon knew that no matter what, out of fear of ghosts, he would not have been the first to speak. “What’re you doing back in the old country?” Damon asked.

“I’m in a play that’s starting rehearsals tomorrow. I didn’t realize I’d get such a kick in being back in New York. Is there a man with soul so dead, who etcetera, etcetera … And bumping into you the second day back is just the icing on the cake.” He gazed fondly at Damon. “You look well, Roger.”

“As do you.”

“A little ragged around the edges.” He took off his cap and touched his head. “Gray hair. Worry lines around the eyes. The eyes no longer shining and innocent. Well, I’m glad to see you still have your hair, too.” He grinned. “Two old cocks. Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang and all that.”

“You don’t look old at all,” Damon said. He was speaking the truth. At the worst, Fitzgerald looked no more than fifty, although he was several months older than Damon.

“Being in the public eye. Does wonders, in a desperate sort of way, toward keeping up the illusion of youth.”

“Sir,” the clerk, who had been standing patiently watching the two men, now asked, “Sir, are you taking this set with you?”

“Yes, thank you.” Fitzgerald tossed a credit card down on the counter. “What’re you buying here in this house of magic?”

“I’m just looking, not buying.” Damon didn’t want to explain to Fitzgerald why he needed a machine that took messages over the phone and excused you for not taking the calls in person. “I think this reunion calls for a drink. Don’t you?”

Fitzgerald shook his head regretfully. “Damn it, I’ve got a lunch with the producer of the show. Mustn’t stand up the brass, you know. I’m late as it is.”

“How about tomorrow night. Have dinner at our place. I’d like you to meet my wife.” Fitzgerald had known Elaine and had congratulated Damon on getting rid of her, but he had gone to London long before Damon married for the second time.

“That sounds smashing,” Fitzgerald said. “What time and where?”

“Eight
P.M.
Here, I’ll give you my address.” He took out the notebook from which he had torn a page to write Julia Larch’s address for Schulter and wrote his own address for Fitzgerald. The local habitations and names of friends and enemies, torn out of a twenty-cent notebook. Poet’s work, as Shakespeare had noted.

“Before you go,” Damon said, hesitating before asking the question, “is Antoinetta here with you?”

Fitzgerald looked at him queerly. “She died in an airplane accident,” he said, his voice flat. “Ten years ago. The plane went down in the Irish Sea. All hands lost.”

“I’m sorry,” Damon said lamely. “Very sorry.”

Fitzgerald shrugged. “The luck of the draw,” he said. “Ah, I try to be offhand about it, and I thought I’d get over it, but I never have.” He tried to smile. “No sense thinking about.” He made a little ambiguous gesture, dismissive, warding off pity? Damon couldn’t tell.

They walked out onto the avenue together.

“See you tomorrow night at eight,” Fitzgerald said. “Tell your wife I eat anything at all.” He jumped spryly into a taxi. Damon watched as the taxi drove off, then went back into the shop and up to the same counter and bought the instrument for taking messages off the phone.

Then, carrying the machine in a wrapped box, he went into the nearest bar and ordered the first drink of the afternoon and thought of the good times and bad times he and Fitzgerald had had together.

Among them were the long nights in Downey’s Restaurant or Harold’s Bar, where actors gathered after their shows were out, and he and Fitzgerald would argue with anyone who came along about the different talents of O’Neill, Odets, Saroyan, Williams, Miller, and George Bernard Shaw. Fitzgerald, who had a prodigious memory, would quote from all of them or anybody else, to prove a point. Styles of acting were examined and Fitzgerald dubbed The Method, as exemplified by the Group Theatre, “The New York School of Mumble.” His father was Irish and had gone to Trinity in Dublin and had bequeathed his son a clear and pleasing musical speech, which could rise to Shakespearean heights or drop into a lilting Irish accent when he quoted passages from Joyce.

Despite his stature and the comedian’s face, he always attracted girls and there were always two or three of them around, asking him to recite favorite poems of theirs or one of the great soliloquies, which Fitzgerald delivered with quiet passion and admirable clarity, no matter how drunk he happened to be at the time.

He also had a great talent for picking up girls who could cook and would bring them to the apartment triumphantly to prepare feasts of
boeuf bourgignon
and
fritto misto
and
duck à l’orange.
When he found a girl who could cook better than the current candidate for the title, he ruthlessly cut her off and dubbed the new one
la Maitresse de la Maison.
Damon couldn’t count the names of
Maitresse de la Maison
they went through while they had the apartment together.

The first time Damon had brought Antoinetta to the apartment, Fitzgerald had immediately asked, “Can you cook?”

Antoinetta had looked questioningly at Damon. “Who is this peculiar fellow?” she asked.

“Humor him,” Damon had said. “He has this thing about cooking.”

“Do I look like a cook?” Antoinetta had asked.

“You look like the goddess rising from the foam,” Fitzgerald had said, “and the foam is made of chocolate mousse.”

Antoinetta had laughed at that. “The answer is no. I definitely cannot cook. What can
you
do?”

“I can tell a hawk from a handsaw and a flat soufflé from a sirloin steak.” He turned to Damon. “What else can I do?”

“Argue,” Damon said, “sleep late in the morning and make the rafters ring when you recite Yeats.”

“Do you know ‘In Flanders Fields’?” Antoinetta asked. “I recited it once in the school auditorium when I was ten. They cheered when I finished.”

“I bet,” Fitzgerald said nastily. Damon knew Antoinetta well enough to know that she was joking, getting even for being asked if she were a cook. You couldn’t joke about poetry with Fitzgerald. He turned to Damon. “Don’t marry the lady, good friend,” he said. He never told Damon if he had said it because Antoinetta couldn’t cook or because he didn’t approve of “In Flanders Fields.”

In the end, Damon thought, ordering a second drink from the barman, he had taken Fitzgerald’s advice. He had not married Antoinetta.

He should have warned Antoinetta before bringing her home that Fitzgerald was at his best with the Irish poets. If he had, she might have saved herself the snub and Fitzgerald would have been interested in her from the beginning and saved all three of them a great deal of trouble.

Fitzgerald’s greatest admiration for poetry was reserved for that of William Butler Yeats, and during the slow voyage across the Atlantic in convoy, he and Damon would stand at the bow of the Liberty ship as it pushed across the long swells of the North Atlantic and he would intone the haunted verses of the poet. He recited “Sailing to Byzantium” as a special treat on nights when it seemed they were out of danger and the sea was calm. Damon had heard it so often that even now, standing at a bar on Sixth Avenue, he could whisper it in Fitzgerald’s Irish accent.

He whispered because he didn’t want the other people in the bar to think that he was a madman, talking to himself.

That is no country for old men.

The young in one another’s arms,

Birds in the trees—those salmon-falls,

The mackerel-crowded seas. Fish, flesh,

Or fowl; commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

Fitzgerald would be weeping softly as he came to the end of the first verse, and Damon could feel the tears come to his own eyes as he remembered those moments.

Fitzgerald seemed to know practically all of Shakespeare by heart, and on nights of the full moon, when the convoy was outlined as perfect targets against the horizon for the wolfpacks of submarines, he would recite, with sardonic courage, Hamlet’s soliloquy after Fortinbras’s first exit—

Examples gross as earth exhort me:

Witness this army of such mass and charge

Led by a delicate and tender prince,

Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d

Makes mouths at the invisible event

Exposing what is mortal and unsure

To all that fortune, death and danger dare,

Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

And let all sleep, while, to my shame, I see

The imminent death of twenty thousand men,

That for a fantasy and trick of fame,

Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot

Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,

Which is not tomb enough and continent

To hide the slain? O! from this time forth

My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.

One night just after he had recited the soliloquy, a ship in their convoy had been torpedoed. The ship had blown up, and they had watched the flames and the sinister column of brilliant smoke in despair as the ship went down. It was the first time they had seen one of their ships destroyed and Fitzgerald sobbed dryly, once, then said, in a soft voice, “Good friend, we’re the eggshell and all thoughts on the sea and deep in it tonight are bloody.”

Then, recovering, he had quoted from
The Tempest
, with an ironic lilt,

Full fathom five thy father lies

Of his bones is coral made.

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange,

Sea nymphs hourly hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! Now I hear them—ding-dong bell.

Fitzgerald had been silent for a moment after that, then said, “Shakespeare, the speech for all occasions. I’ll never live to play Hamlet. Ah, I’m going below. If we get hit by a torpedo, don’t tell me.”

They were lucky and were never hit by a torpedo, and they came back to New York joyous, young and eager to resume the work they were born to do, as Mr. Gray had said on another occasion. It was then that they decided to share an apartment. They found one near the Hudson River, in a district where the streets were mostly given over to used-car dealers and warehouses. It was a rambling, ramshackle flat that they furnished with odds and ends of furniture, quickly cluttered with books and theatrical posters, which the girls who kept drifting in and out kept trying to put in order.

Like Damon, he had been married before the war but had received a Dear John letter from his wife in which she admitted being in love with another man whom she wanted to marry. “It was a cold divorce,” he said. “The legal ties were broken in Reno while I was just below Iceland in the North Atlantic.”

He swore he would never marry again and when one woman who had endured three months in the apartment made it plain she wanted him to marry her, he had declaimed to her, in Damon’s presence, a mock-heroic from a play he had acted in, “I’ve been swindled by women, mulcted by women, rebuffed by women, divorced by women, jilted, mocked, teased by women, laid, belayed and betrayed by women. It would take the power of Shakespeare to describe my relations with women. I was the Moor unmoored, the Dane disdained, Troilus tripped, Lear delirious, Falstaff falsified, Prospero plucked, Mercutio with a hole in him twice as deep as a well and five times as wide as a church door—and all by women.”

Then he gave the lady a chaste kiss on the forehead. “Does that give you a faint idea of my feelings on the subject?”

The lady had laughed as he expected and had not brought the subject up again. Placidly, she had kept frequenting the apartment along with the successive bevies of other girls.

To maintain their friendship, Fitzgerald and Damon had an unspoken agreement that each would keep his hands off the girls the other had brought home, and it worked, even through the wildest of parties, until Damon appeared with Antoinetta, who soon became a fixture in their lives, sleeping over with Damon three or four times a week and even stabbing at preparing a meal for them during those infrequent intervals when Fitzgerald had run out of cooks.

In the mid-afternoon silence of the New York bar, free of submarines, a prey to other dangers, Damon ordered another drink. “Make it a double this round,” he said to the barman. Even though he had had nothing to eat since breakfast and was drinking on an empty stomach, the whiskey was having no effect on him. He felt sober and melancholy, reflecting on the lost, exuberant years, and then the one really bad time with Fitzgerald.

Damon knew that there was something wrong when he came back to the apartment after work. It was a polar New York winter evening. The walk over from Mr. Gray’s office had left him chilled to the bone, and he was looking forward to drink and the warmth of the fire that he hoped Fitzgerald had started.

But there was no fire and Fitzgerald was red-eyed, still in a dressing gown, which meant that he hadn’t gone out all day. He was pacing up and down unsteadily in the living room with a drink in his hand, and Damon could tell with one glance that he had been drinking all afternoon, something he never did before going onstage, which he would have to do that night.