Acceptable Losses (12 page)

Fitzgerald looked startled when Damon came into the room. “Oh,” he said, raising his glass, “you caught me in the act. An actor’s unforgivable crime. Reporting for duty while under the influence.”

“What’s wrong, Maurice?”

“What’s wrong,” Fitzgerald said, “is that I’m a shit, if that can be considered wrong in this day and age. Join me in a drink. We’re both going to need it tonight.”

“Curtain time is in less than three hours, Maurice.”

“I can go through that piece of money-grabbing Broadway junk in my sleep,” Fitzgerald said contemptuously. “I can also let the curtain go up without me and let the audience guess who’s missing.”

“Cut it out, Maurice. What is it?”

“All right, nursey-nurse.” Fitzgerald went over to the table where they kept the bottles and the ice and glasses. “Here, let me fix you a drink. The maids have all fled. And about time, too.” His hands shook as he made a drink for Damon and freshened his own. The lip of the bottle clinked against the rim of the glasses. Spilling whiskey from both glasses, he crossed the room to where Damon was standing. Damon took a glass, sipped at it and sat down.

“That’s it, good friend, sit down. It might be a long chat.”

“Okay, Maurice;” Damon said, “what is it?”

“It,” Fitzgerald said, “is Antoinetta. Or to be more accurate, it is Antoinetta and your good friend, Maurice Fitzgerald, aptly named. Bastard son of Gerald.”

“You don’t have to spell it out,” Damon said quietly, although he had to fight back the impulse to strangle the man at whose side he had survived the war and had celebrated hundreds of hilarious nights.

“You didn’t guess?” Fitzgerald, Damon could see, was trying to look contrite, but with all he had drunk, the expression on the loose comedian’s face was a leer.

“No,” Damon said, “I didn’t guess.”

“Bless the innocents of this black world.” Suddenly, Fitzgerald hurled his glass into the empty fireplace. The whiskey made a trail across the floor and the glass shattered against the back wall of the fireplace.

“How long has it been going on between you two?” Damon still managed to keep his voice down. He didn’t want details or explanations; all he wanted was to rid himself of the flushed, leering face hanging over him. But the words came out automatically.

“A month. Just enough time for a lady to make up her mind.”

“Christ,” Damon said, “she slept with me all this weekend, and last night, for God’s sake, with you in the next room.”

“Amor omnia vincit,”
Fitzgerald said. “Or perhaps the other way around.
Omnia amor vincit.
Men and women, good friend, men and women. Beasts of the jungle.”

“
Are
you going to marry her?”

“Probably in due time,” Fitzgerald said. “There are decks to be cleared, regrets to be expressed.” He had been having a long affair with one of the cooks he had brought home. She was cloyingly devoted to him and Damon guessed that was one of the decks to be cleared.

“There’s no rush to the church,” Fitzgerald said. “I’ll make an honest woman of Antoinetta in the end.”

“You
are
a shit,” Damon said bitterly.

“I said it first,” Fitzgerald said, “but I don’t mind being quoted. Where the hell is my drink?”

“You threw it in the fireplace.”

“Oh, the lost and wind-grieved ghost of a bottle of Scotch. From the works of Thomas Wolfe, a famous American author. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. More from the famous author. God, I never can forget anything. What a burden. I won’t forget you, good friend.”

“Thanks,” Damon said. He stood up. “I’m going to pack and get out of here.”

Fitzgerald put out his hand to stop him. “You can’t. I’m the one who has to go.”

“I’m not wild about living in a whorehouse,” Damon said. “Especially after I find out what the red light in the window means.”

“One of us has to stay,” Fitzgerald said. “Our lease still has a year to run.”

Damon hesitated. He couldn’t pay for another place to live and pay half the rent for the apartment at the same time.

“I have a prop-proposition to make,” Fitzgerald said. “Let’s toss for it. The loser stays and pays the full rent.”

Damon sighed. “Okay,” he said.

“You got a coin?” Fitzgerald asked. “All my change is on the table in my room, and I hate the thought of your being alone for a minute, good friend.”

“Just shut your mouth, Maurice,” Damon said, reaching into his pocket for a coin. He pulled out a quarter. “And if you call me good friend once more, I’ll break your jaw. I’ll toss. You call.”

“Tails,” Fitzgerald said.

Damon tossed the coin, caught it in the palm of his hand and covered it for a long ten seconds with his other hand. Then he lifted the hand. Fitzgerald was bending over to see the coin. He let out his breath in a low hiss of sound.

“Heads it is. I lost. I stay,” he said. “The luck of the draw. Acceptable losses, as the military so delicately put it when drawing up plans for the next invasion which would cost only eighteen thousand lives. I’m sorry, Roger.”

Damon flipped the coin at Fitzgerald, who made no move to catch it and let it hit him in the forehead before dropping to the floor.

Then Damon went in to pack. It didn’t take long, and when he came out of his room, he heard Fitzgerald singing in the shower, preparing for his evening performance.

Full fathom five Antoinetta lies, Damon thought, and moved with his glass down toward the end of the bar because a group of men had come in and were arguing loudly next to him about a television show, for which one of the men was the sponsor’s representative and the other men were advertising executives and people connected with the program in one way or another.

Full fathom five, Damon thought. Is there coral in the Irish Sea? He had never seen Antoinetta again, and the wound had long since healed, and her double defection had left him free to marry Sheila, blessed woman, lover, stalwart companion, many years later.

Fitzgerald had done him a service, even though neither he nor Damon had known it at the time. Before the farewell party for Fitzgerald and Antoinetta Bradley, to which Damon had been invited and had not gone, he had received a letter from Fitzgerald, in which his erstwhile friend had written, “Forgive me. I love you like a brother and I am not one to use the word
brother
loosely. But brothers are fated to screw each other. Consider Cain. Be happy. And the next time we meet I hope we can embrace.”

Well, this afternoon had been the next time they had met, and if Damon had been a man used to such gestures between men, he would have embraced his old deceitful friend. When Maurice came to dinner the following night, he would remind him of his letter and he would embrace him.

By this time the whiskey had taken effect and the world was misting over, and for no reason that he could explain to himself he tried to repeat the first verse of “Sailing to Byzantium,” but stumbled over the words and didn’t remember the middle lines and giggled foolishly as he said, with great dignity, to the barman, “The check, please.”

Under the influence, as Fitzgerald had put it, he left the message-taking machine on the bar. He was not thinking of Zalovsky or Lieutenant Schulter at the moment.

He never got the chance to embrace Fitzgerald. When he opened the
New York Times
the next morning, there was Fitzgerald’s photograph on the front page and beside it the story. “Maurice Fitzgerald, the noted actor, whose career spanned more than forty years on the American and later the English stage, suffered a heart attack and collapsed in the restaurant in which he was lunching with the theatrical producer, Mr. Nathan Brown. He was taken to the Lenox Hill Hospital in an ambulance but was pronounced dead on arrival.”

Damon put the paper down on the table beside his coffee cup and stared vacantly out the window at the house across the street. Then he bowed his head and put his hand over his eyes.

Sheila, who was sitting across from Damon at the breakfast table, saw by the expression on his face that something was seriously amiss. “What’s the matter, Roger?” she asked anxiously. “Are you all right? You’ve suddenly gone dead pale.”

“Maurice died just after I saw him yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, the poor man,” Sheila said. She reached over and took the newspaper from his side of the table. She glanced at the small headline at the bottom of page one, then read the short article. “He was only sixty-five,” she said.

“My age,” Damon said. “Time to go.”

“Don’t say that,” Sheila said sharply.

Damon felt that he was going to break into uncontrollable sobs. To stem them, he made a hideous joke. “Well,” he said, “he’s missed a good meal tonight.”

CHAPTER

NINE

W
HEN HE GOT TO THE OFFICE
, the first thing he did was apologize to Oliver for his outburst the day before.

“Oh, everybody has the right to show a bit of annoyance once in a while,” Oliver said, embarrassed by the apology. “Sheila seemed so worried, and to tell you the truth, so was I.” He smiled childishly at Damon. “A little temper clears the air.”

“Well,” Damon said. “Sheila knows everything by now—or at least everything
I
know, so there’s no need for her to get daily bulletins from the office anymore.” He said it without anger but Oliver understood it.

“Whatever you say, boss,” he said. “
Omerta
, as they say in Sicily. The code of silence. But if you ever need my help …”

“Thanks,” Damon said, “I’ll be all right.”

Damon looked up the number of Nathan Brown, the producer, and called him. He had to wait a long time. “I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Damon,” the operator said, when he had given his name. She sounded flustered and was close to tears. “This morning here … Everybody in the whole world is calling. You can imagine what it’s like in the office. I’ll give you Mr. Brown.”

There were some clicks on the wire, then Brown was on. “The last words he spoke were of you,” Brown said. “He told me, “I met a wonderful old friend just before I came to lunch. It’s a lucky omen. Roger Damon, do you know … ?” And before I could answer, he began to sway in his chair in the most frightening way, and before I could reach over to help him, he toppled to the floor. The restaurant suddenly became still as the grave and I guess a waiter called for an ambulance, because I heard the siren in what seemed just a few seconds later, although at that moment, it’s curious. I had no sense of time. The ambulance men did what they could, but it was no use and they carried him off. It’s a terrible loss to all of us … Such a fine and talented man …”

“Who’s making the funeral arrangements?” On the walk uptown from the office Damon had been able to gain control of his nerves and he spoke unemotionally.

“When I got back to the office after the hospital, when it was all over,” Brown said, “I took a chance and called his number in London. A woman answered. I didn’t know who it was, if it was his wife or whatever and I asked and she said she was a friend, a very close friend and that she knew Maurice had wanted to be buried in England. I wrote down her name. I’ll give it to you and the telephone number. You might want to call her.”

“I do,” Damon said. “Who’s making the arrangements?”

“I am,” Brown said. “Or at least trying to. It’s so complicated.” He sounded weary and uncertain of himself. He had expected the beginning of rehearsals and he had come in as the curtain descended on the last act of closing night. “Would you like to view the body? It’s at the …”

“No,” said Damon, “I would not like to see the body, thank you.” The knowledge that Maurice was dead was as much as he could bear; he did not want to be confronted with the cold mortal fact. His friend was now just a memory in a long box; he would not mind traveling alone to the lady who answered the phone Of his place in London when he was out of town and who now would take full possession of the man, who while he had been living with her had been possessed by the memory of a woman drowned in the Irish Sea a long time ago. It would be cruel to encumber her with an old American friend who might break down and inadvertently blurt out stories of the dead man’s past that she did not want to hear.

“Do you know what his religion was?” Mr. Brown was asking.

“Catholic,” Damon said. “Not much of one. I doubt that he believed in the Virgin Birth.”

“These days.” Brown sighed, sad at the decline of faith since Moses and Jesus Christ. “Still, I asked the priest at the hospital to administer Extreme Unction. Just in case, you know.”

“It didn’t do any harm.” Damon didn’t remember Fitzgerald ever having gone to Mass.

“I thought that it might be fitting if we arranged a kind of memorial service for him in a week or two. In a small theatre. Non-sectarian. He was very popular among his fellow actors, even though most of his career was in England. He did some recordings of Shakespeare for the BBC. Play one of those, have people give small eulogies. As his oldest friend, would you …?”

“Sorry, no,” Damon said. He remembered Fitzgerald’s speeches the evening when they had tossed for the apartment, but doubted that even the non-sectarian audience assembled in Fitzgerald’s memory would be pleased to hear them.

“Did he have a favorite hymn? Or poem?”

“When I knew him, it was ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ His taste may have changed since that time.”

“Would you consider reading it, Mr. Damon?”

“No, get an actor. If I read it, he’d turn in his grave.”

Mr. Brown gave a short, sad laugh. “We’re not used to such modesty in the theatre,” he said. “By the way, do you happen to have a brilliant young playwright among your clients who is just waiting to break upon the scene and needs a producer?”

Business as usual, even as dead friends are being loaded on planes to fly across an ocean. The show must go on. Scratch entry, prepare for the next race. “Alas, no,” Damon said.

Mr. Brown sighed. “I’ll have to cancel the production of the play we were just starting to rehearse. There’s nobody I can think of who could replace him.”

Good for his tombstone, Damon thought. Here lies Maurice Fitzgerald, Irreplaceable. “Have you got the number of the lady in London handy?”