Acceptable Losses (17 page)

“Here, here,” Damon said, grabbing instinctively for the arm of the man with the beer bottle, to stop the fight. He missed and the man swung crazily and the beer bottle crashed into Damon’s forehead. He had slumped onto the bar, stunned. Then he must have gone under and slipped to the floor.

A liquid, warm and sticky, was dripping into his eyes and mouth. He tasted salt. He sat up. The faces above him wavered against the battered tin ceiling. “I’m all right,” he said thickly, wiping at his eyes and mouth, then looking at his hand. Seeing the blood on it, he said senselessly, “The blood of the lamb. If you don’t mind …” He was embarrassed at being the center of attention of all these strange people who had just come into the bar for a peaceful drink before lunch. A man who detested scenes, he was the protagonist or victim of one. Hands helped him to his feet. He gripped the bar to keep from slipping down again. The notebook, he noticed, was blotched a wet, rusty red. The blood of the lamb, staining paper, the essential stuff of his life, now the altar of sacrifice. The ram in the thicket.

“Friend,” the bartender said, “the first lesson is, Don’t be a referee when the punching begins in a saloon.”

Damon smiled wanly. “I’ll remember that. Where’s the man who did it?”

“Both long gone,” the barman said. “Honorable gentlemen.” The tone was resigned. “The guy who hit you left a tenspot before he ran.” The barman held up a bill. “He said he was sorry, what he really wanted to do was kill the other feller. They were both very well dressed. These days you can’t tell anything.”

A woman came running out of the kitchen with a first aid kit. “You better sit down, Mister,” she said. “Let me clean that cut.”

Before she led him to a chair he took one look at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The same ghost stared back at him. The mirror was too dark to reflect blood.

He slumped into a chair, and the woman began swabbing at his forehead with a wet cloth that made the cut sting as the babble of voices diminished and the drinkers went back to their glasses. “It don’t look too bad,” the woman said. She was fat and black and smelled of frying oil, but her hands were sure and delicate as they ministered to him. Sheila’s hands in the hospital, he thought.

“Thank the Lord the bottle didn’t break,” the woman said. “How do you feel?”

“Fine,” Damon said. He didn’t feel anything much, except that the room kept swimming in waves around him and somehow the word
Chicago
kept repeating itself, breaking through the low humming in his ears. He had never been knocked out before. He decided it was not an unpleasant sensation. Now he remembered falling, as though from a great height. That, too, had not been unpleasant, but rather euphoric. A first time for everything, he thought, grateful for the soft hands and the wet cloth clearing his forehead and his eyes and mouth.

“You’re going to be fine, honey,” the woman was saying, taping on a small bandage with adhesive tape. “I’m afraid I can’t do nothing about your clothes, though. Just telephone your wife before you go home to warn her that you won’t look exactly the same as you did when you left the house this morning.”

“I love you, Lady,” Damon said. “I would like to take you home with me.”

The woman laughed, a rich, rolling sound. “I ain’t heard that for a long time, and I been around some dudes who was hurt lots worse than you. Now, you want to sit here awhile and wait to see if you can voyage a little.”

Damon stood up. He had the anxious feeling that if he remained on the chair, he would never get up again. By an act of will he kept himself from tottering. “I’ll just finish my drink,” he said, making sure he was speaking clearly.

The woman looked at him compassionately. “At your age, honey,” she said, “I’d let the young folks settle their disputes by theirselves.” She put the roll of bandage and the adhesive tape back into the first aid kit. “If you need help, I’m in the kitchen. My name is Valeska.”

“Valeska,” he said, delighted with the name, wondering what its origin might be, “you’re my angel, my dark angel. My wife has hands like yours. Permit me.” He leaned over and kissed the broad, unlined forehead under the graying hair.

She laughed, the same deep rolling sound. “I don’t know about the hands or the angel part, but I know about the dark,” she said, and went back into the kitchen.

Damon looked around him sternly, forbidding the other patrons of the bar from helping him. Uneasily, the men nearest him looked away from him, made a point of attending to their drinks. Above all, he thought, glaring threateningly at the men who had now turned their backs to him, no pity and no jokes about the old man who had broken the New York code of not interfering in what the black lady had called the disputes of the young. He saw that almost by a reflex action the space next to where he had been standing had been cleared of other drinkers. He walked, almost steadily, from where he had been sitting to the bar, where his drink stood, with the notebook, still open and stained with his blood, at its side. He saw that his glass had not been touched in the fracas, but the ice in it had melted and the first taste was almost pure ice water. “Barman,” he said, his voice firm, “another drink, please.”

The bartender looked worried. “You sure, Mister?” he asked. “Maybe you got a concussion and it’ll hit you hard.”

“One Black and White,” Damon said. “If you please.”

The barman shrugged. “It’s your head, Mister,” he said, and poured the whiskey into a jigger and gave him a fresh glass with ice and a small bottle of soda.

Damon drank it slowly, felt it restoring his strength. A transfusion of Scotch, that supporter of life. Perhaps, he thought, glass in hand, from now on I shall become a daily drunk. With his handkerchief he wiped at the stained pages of the notebook, the names of Machendorf and Melanie Deal and Mr. Eisner blurred by caked blood. When he called for his check, the barman said, “It’s on the house, Mister.”

“As you wish, Sir,” Damon said. “I thank you.” He walked steadily out the door, conscious of the rust-colored blots on his collar and jacket and the sidelong glances of the men at the bar.

It was a long time before he could hail an empty taxi and while he stood at the curb, vainly waving, he saw a young boy who looked about twelve run across the street, dodging the speeding cars. For a moment he blinked. The boy was carrying a fielder’s glove. Damon remembered a snapshot his father had taken when he had been just the boy’s age and had just come back from playing a baseball game. He smelled the freshly mown grass of the outfield turf. The boy was capless and smiling recklessly at the oncoming taxi and was dark and built exactly as Damon had been when he was the boy’s age, lanky and strong. For a moment Damon thought that his own photograph had come alive, and he almost made a move to save the boy from a taxi roaring down on him. Just in time the boy made the sidewalk safely, then turned around and thumbed his nose at the driver. I could have been killed, Damon thought, confused. He shook his head, turned to shut out the sight of that grinning, familiar, impudent young face that might have been his own when he was that age.

When he arrived home, he was relieved to see that Sheila wasn’t there. Sometimes she walked over from the day nursery to make lunch for herself. He would have time to change his clothes before she saw him.

He went into the bathroom and stared at his face. Under the weathered ruddiness of his skin he thought he detected a greenish tinge, and there were curious patches of almost dead white under his eyes.

Then he remembered the boy with the fielder’s glove dodging the taxi. He went back into the living room and began searching for an old photographic album that he hadn’t looked at in years. He and Sheila didn’t even own a camera and when friends of theirs took pictures of him, he was dismayed by the signs of age in his face. If he was given one of those photographs, he said, “Thank you,” and immediately tore it up. Getting old was a sad enough decline, without keeping an accurate year-by-year record of the process.

He found the album under a pile of old
New Yorkers.
All those Notes and Comments, all that elegant prose, crisp, muted fiction, polite biographies, clever cartoons, reviews of books and plays that were long forgotten. He had never gone back and reread the magazines and doubted that he would ever do so, but still he kept them, neatly ranged in stacks on the bottom shelf of the long, stuffed bookcase. Perhaps he was afraid to reread even his favorite essays and stories. Doing so would remind him of more joyous times, old friends who had disappeared, editors on the magazine to whom he had submitted the work of some of his clients and who had been the most intelligent and courteous of men and who had somehow vanished from his life.

He ran his hand lovingly, regretfully, along the ten-inch pile of magazines, then lifted the album of photographs from its resting place under that impressive paper monument to years of intensive labor, successes and failures, that subdued transitory thin clamor for immortality.

“I’m married to a hoarder of paper,” Sheila had said. “One day I’m going to sneak in here when you’re off to work and clear out all the junk you’ve accumulated before we’re buried under a mountain of print.”

He dusted off the album and sat down at the desk in front of the window, where the light was good, and opened the album. He had trouble finding the snapshot of himself at the age of twelve. He had put the pictures in haphazardly, emptying the large envelopes in which they had been stored at random. He had been confined to the house with his leg in a cast after getting out of the hospital and had not yet married Sheila and was trying to get the apartment in order before the wedding. That had been more than twenty years ago and he didn’t remember having looked at the album since then.

He riffled through the brittle, cracked pages. There were pictures of his father, looking boyish and muscular, his mother with short, bobbed hair, in the style of the twenties, Maurice Fitzgerald and himself leaning against the rail aboard ship, Fitzgerald smiling widely and looking dashing, even in sailor’s dungarees and a pea coat.
Full fathom five.
Damon remembered the sound of Fitzgerald’s voice as he said it and his bitterness as he told Damon, as the next ship in the convoy sank, “We’re the eggshell. Don’t tell me if we’re hit by a torpedo.”

Damon turned some pages, stopped at a photograph of Sheila taken just before their marriage at Jones Beach on a summer day, Sheila looking superb in a tight one-piece black bathing suit. Damon sighed and lingered over the page. Then he turned it and there was the photograph of himself he was looking for.

He studied the snapshot carefully. The fielder’s glove he was wearing was small, not like the big webbed mitts in use now, but otherwise the boy in the photograph and the boy he had seen on Sixth Avenue might have been twins.

He stared thoughtfully out the window, wondering if he had really seen the boy or if it was a mirage, a trick of memory, after the blow to his head. The bartender had warned him that the last drink might hit him, and the man could have been right. He closed the album and stood up and took it back and put it under the pile of old magazines, the past, for the moment at least, well buried under print.

Then he went into the bedroom and changed his clothes. After that he went downstairs and stuffed the bloodstained shirt and tie he had been wearing into the trash bin and took the pants and jacket to the tailor’s to be dry-cleaned. He decided not to tell Sheila about the fight in the bar. The bandage on his forehead was a small one, and he could say that while rising from his chair he had hit his head on his desk lamp at the office and that Miss Walton had repaired the damage.

When he got back from the cleaners, he realized he was hungry and looked in the refrigerator to see what there might be for his lunch, then decided that it would be unwise if he left evidence that he had come home at midday, something he never did during the working week. He didn’t want to have to do any more explaining to Sheila than was absolutely necessary.

Just as he was about to go out there was a knock on the door. At this hour of the day there would be no reason for people who knew his and Sheila’s schedules to suppose that anyone would be in the apartment. He froze for an instant, then on tiptoe went over to the fireplace and picked up a poker from the stand for the utensils there. There was another series of knocks on the door, then the doorbell began ringing and kept on ringing as though whoever was outside the door was leaning against the button.

Holding the poker, letting it dangle casually from his hand, as though he had been cleaning out the fireplace and had absentmindedly forgotten to leave the poker behind, he called, “Coming,” and went over and opened the door. A large man in workman’s coveralls was standing there. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Damon,” the man said, “but the landlord says your wife called him and said your intercom to the front door isn’t working.”

“Oh, yes,” Damon said, but still kept a firm grip on the poker.

“We been working on it, my partner and me,” the man said, “and I just wanted to test to see if it’s okay. Can I come in?”

“Yes, of course.” Damon stepped back, blocking the entrance to the living room. “The buzzer and intercom are right next to the door.”

The man nodded and pushed the buzzer button, then turned on the switch for the intercom. “Yeah?” A man’s voice came through the intercom, sounding hollow and mechanical, like the ghostly voices in echo chambers in horror movies.

“Buddy, I’m in the Damon apartment,” the electrician said. “You hear me all right?”

“Roger,” the voice said. Damon was surprised, for the first time, that his name was used by whole sectors of modern society to indicate that communication was loud and clear.

“Okay,” the electrician said, “I’ll be right down and we can go to lunch.” He turned to Damon. “There we are. Now if you can get everybody in the building to use the machine, you won’t be surprised by unwelcome visitors.”

“Thank you very much,” Damon said. He fumbled in his pocket, took out two dollar bills and gave it to the workman. “Here, get yourselves a couple of drinks.”