Acceptable Losses (22 page)

“No,” Damon said, then added inanely, “I’m in a hurry.”

“Very well, Sir.”

This was no afternoon for haggling. He had finally joined the most civic-minded tribe of Americans, the insatiable consumers. He was soaring. Buy, buy, buy and sing all your troubles away.

Carelessly, with a flourish, he signed the slip for his credit card, that totem of the tribe, without looking at the price and made sure the woman would have the coat delivered between nine and twelve the next morning.

As he walked out of the ground floor exit of the store he thought momentarily of going to the office and giving their gifts to Miss Walton and Oliver. But the ecstasy of spending, which he had never experienced and never appreciated, was on him now. The afternoon was young and the treasures of the Imperial City lay all around him, waiting for his credit card.

He hummed an air from the musical
Camelot
, remembering the words of the tune “The Lusty Month of May” and singing the words in his head to himself … “the time for every frivolous whim, proper or im …”

He chuckled aloud, making a passing couple look at him questioningly. It was only April. Not too far off, he thought. Because of matters beyond his control, he was just a little ahead of the season. Now, where to go, what kind of store to visit? A grave decision. The echo of the song within his head made the decision for him. He turned off Fifth Avenue and went down the street toward Madison Avenue and the big music shop on the corner. Music, soothing the savage breast, next on the agenda. He did not know how long he lingered in the store, going over the catalogue, the salesman who waited on him becoming more and more affable as he called out the names of the records he wanted—the last quartets;

Beethoven my father, my brother; Chopin, ardent and light-fingered Pole, hater of Russia; Mozart, that dazzling fountain; Liszt, that dark rhetorician; Brahms, a deep, tremendous sigh from the middle of Europe; Mahler, Richard Strauss, the lost world of Vienna; Poulenc, light and bell-like and not given enough credit for what he’d written;
tant pis
; Elgar, Ives, come into the twentieth century, boys; Gershwin, the jangled, blue sounds of the streets of New York; Copland, Appalachian dances, Western rhythms, the frenzied Mayan rhythms of Mexico; Shostakovich, Stravinsky, was that the Russian soul? Call on Lenin or Tolstoy to answer. The list grew longer and longer, the salesman more and more genial. We must have a little of the great soloists, Artur Rubinstein for openers, Casals, Stern, Schnabel, even if it’s an old recording, Horowitz, Segovia, for the flamenco, Rostropovich, to compare with Casals. Don’t go away yet, young man, there’s still the opera to consider. Verdi’s
Falstaff
to begin with,
Cosi Fan Tutte
and naturally,
The Magic Flute.
I’ll confer with my wife and drop in tomorrow for some others. Omit Wagner, if you don’t mind. Well, perhaps
Die Meistersinger.
And we must not snub the conductors … Bernstein, Karajan, Toscanini. You seem to be one of those young people who are up on the new men, I’ll trust you to give me some of their best.

I guess that’s enough for one day, young man. But it would be blasphemy to submit all that glorious anthology of sound to the scratchy old phonograph in the living room. Let me hear one of the newer models. He listened to several radio-phonographs. Those clever Japanese, every one of the records sounding as though the orchestra was in the room, pure, sonorous, non-Oriental. He imagined himself sitting on the porch of Uncle Biancella’s little house in Connecticut, himself the country gentleman in a smart corduroy jacket that was guaranteed to last almost forever, looking out at the golden sheet of the Sound at sunset, growing older to the sound of angelic voices, a thousand glorious instruments addressing his ear only. The machine he chose was not the cheapest, nor the most expensive. He wrote a check, the figures of no importance, he told the salesman, who by now was dreaming of becoming at least a vice-president of the corporation that owned the store, to make sure everything was to be delivered in the morning, went out of the store immensely satisfied with himself.

He was surprised when he left the store. The sun was low in the sky, it was past six o’clock. New York was a hundred Grand Canyons, eroded by the flow of mankind, the sun a dying star descending on the Meadowlands of New Jersey. All the big stores were closed for the night. But as he had been choosing the music he wished to hear over and over again in his last year, he had decided that there were books that had vanished from his library that he would want with him in Connecticut and new ones that he never had time to read during his active life. Of course, he might change, he would be aghast at what he had spent this afternoon, revert to his usual parsimony, be caught, in his declining years, with only the memory of the books that had disappeared or those he had borrowed from friends or public libraries and returned. Luckily, he remembered that the big book shops on Fifth Avenue remained open all evening. When he had first come to New York, it had been a city for book-lovers, shops on almost every side street, great dusty stores where old, spectacled clerks would say, when asked for a particular volume, “Ah, I do think I know where I could find that,” and would then leave among creaking shelves and reappear ten minutes later with some schoolboy’s copy of Burke’s
On Reconciliation with the Colonies
or a first edition of Kipling’s
Barrack Room Ballads.
All the best things are swept away by the tide of time, he thought, ravaged by nostalgia. No more, no more, quoth the raven, Nevermore.

Do not look back. Think forward. Generations have their own demands. Space has become one of the dearest commodities on this crowded small outcropping of water-girt stone. “Out of Print” could easily be the name of every publishing house he now dealt with. Tell me not in mournful numbers that when Scott Fitzgerald died, no book he had written could still be found except at exaggerated prices by rare-book dealers who advertised in small print in the back pages of
The Nation
and
The New Republic.
Do not linger over the fact that last year’s huge bestseller has already been shredded into waste paper.

Still, here and there treasures could be found. He made up the list in his mind as he walked along Fifth Avenue. The list was enormous. Stopped at a traffic light, he finally reflected upon what he had been doing all afternoon, was still doing. He had been building a wall of
things
, permanent or semipermanent, around himself and those he loved in their different ways—Sheila, with a coat to keep her out of the wind for many winters to come, Miss Walton, a hardy perennial flower at her desk, warmed now for many seasons after his eventual departure, Oliver chic in his blazer for future festivities on Long Island, he in his own corduroy jacket, guaranteed to last almost forever, the hundreds, thousands, of concerts that would take years to listen to and know completely and assimilate. The books he had just included in his mental list, with his own overflowing library, meant decades of quiet afternoons and evenings to go through. He was thumbing his nose at death, at Zalovsky, he had put his bet down on the future in the space of a few hours of an April afternoon, and he walked toward the book shop euphorically, even smiling to himself at the thought that even if Zalovsky somehow managed to put his hand on what money he had, the sum would be immensely diminished by the day’s purchases.

Significantly, he had not bought a television set, although the one they had at home was small and emitted a wavery image and was broken more often than it worked. Television did not stretch into the future. It was of today, immediate, it left tomorrow up for grabs. When he moved to Connecticut, he would donate the set to the Red Cross.

In the book shop he ordered first the complete collection of the poetry of Yeats, in honor of the memory of Maurice Fitzgerald, for Oliver Gabrielsen to read when he was not at the modish parties in his blue blazer. He hesitated at what there was on the shelves that might be useful to Miss Walton. She could not wear the cashmere sweater twenty-four hours a day. He chose the poems of Emily Dickinson—dry, New England words of consolation across a century from one spinster to another, to make the lonely nights of New York endurable for the sweet and dutiful spirit locked in that mound of fat.

The first thing he ordered for himself was the great two-volume edition of the unabridged
Oxford English Dictionary
in micro-print, that came with a magnifying glass to enlarge the words. After all, he thought, excusing himself for the extravagance, words were his trade and if anything in this century could be considered permanent, it was the English language.

Then he ordered a handsome copy of the King James Bible in large, elegant print. His own was tattered and worn, and the pages were yellowing, and the print seemed to grow smaller and smaller with each year.

Then, in a disorderly spate, he ordered
Don Quixote
, the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the
Goncourt Journals
, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
,
Nicholas Nickleby
,
The Brothers Karamazov
, Ortega’s
The Revolt of the Masses
, Auden, Lowell’s
The Confederate Dead
, Freeman’s immense biography of Robert E. Lee and for balance the memoirs of General Grant, whatever book Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
and
Dr. Faustus
were in
(the topless towers of Ilium
—
sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss),
thought sadly of how the word
topless
was used these days. After that, Hugo’s and Rimbaud’s poetry, in French. Long hours of venturing into a new language that he had not really spoken since his last year in college. Who knew—he and Sheila might want to travel in the wintertime, when the seaside climate was hard to bear. Boswell’s
The London Diaries
would be another kind of traveling too.

Except for the Hugo and Rimbaud, he had bought most of the books before or had borrowed them from libraries or had loaned them to friends who had promised to bring them back and had forgotten to do so. One must collect the past—precious baggage.

The list he gave to the clerk who was waiting for him had finally grown to more than a hundred titles. A mere drop in the boundless sea of literature, spanning the ages between the Greek dramatists and Saul Bellow. He might drop in tomorrow, he told the clerk and order some more. Let the rapture continue. Dear Mrs. Genevieve Dolger, with her
Threnody
, who had made this afternoon possible. Bless her sentimental housewifely heart, might all her pies come out crisp and delectable. Let Zalovsky curse as his visions of ill-gotten wealth, which he probably now regarded as his rightful heritage, dwindled. Let his voice whine in beggary instead of sneering in threat. Standing at the salesman’s desk, going over the long list of books that would now be his, Damon resolved, almost joyously, that he would unplug the answering machine, take the telephone calls himself, coolly agree to meet Zalovsky the next time he called and go fearlessly and contemptuously to meet him, no matter what the hour or place. This afternoon he had purchased an amulet, a charm, that would protect him. It was unreasonable, he knew, but that was the way he felt and he was prepared to act on it.

He told the clerk to gift-wrap the books for Oliver and Miss Walton. The other books he would save in their cartons in the locked space in the cellar where they stored things. He would not open the cartons until they made the move to Connecticut. Otherwise Sheila would weep in despair at the enormous added clutter they would make in the apartment.

He walked out of the shop gloating at the prospect of all the reading he had ahead of him, was about to turn downtown toward home when it occurred to him that while during the afternoon he had provided for the spirit, he had neglected the flesh. There was a fine wine and liquor store on Madison Avenue that he patronized on special occasions because they had the widest choice of bottles in New York and he hurried to get there before the shop closed. Inside, he browsed among the shelves, reading the great names on the labels, Montrachet, Chateau Lafite, Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, La Tache, Gorton Charlemagne, Möet-Chandon, Dom Perignon, Chateau Petrus, Chateau Margaux. The names chimed like wedding bells in his head.

Yes, young man, you may take my order now. A case of this, a case of that, three cases of the Lafite. I know it won’t be ready for drinking for at least eight years. I don’t have a proper cellar to store it in the city, but you can keep it in your warehouse until I’m ready for it. I intend to move to my house in Connecticut shortly, there’s an excellent cellar there. Oh, it is difficult, if not illegal, to transport wine or spirits across state borders? No matter. When the time comes, I’ll hire a U-Haul truck to put the cases in, I’ll be moving a great many books and pictures and things like that at the same time, I don’t foresee any problems. And I imagine you have some champagne in the refrigerator, I’ll take two bottles of Mumm’s, please wrap them carefully, I’ll take them with me now.

With a flourish he signed a check for twenty-six hundred and seventy-three dollars and forty cents and went out of the shop, the cold bottles of champagne added to the packages that contained the gifts for Oliver and Miss Walton, gifts he would have to wait until tomorrow to present because the office would be closed by now. Loaded down as he was, the walk downtown would be tiresome so he hailed a cab. The champagne would still be the right temperature when he opened the first bottle for Sheila and himself.

When he opened the door to the apartment, he shouted, “Sheila,” but there was no response. The light in the foyer was on and as he put down the packages, he saw the note in Sheila’s handwriting on the little table.

Dear Roger [he read], Mother’s had a stroke and is in serious condition. I’ve gone up to Burlington, where she’s in the hospital. I tried to call you at the office, but by four o’clock, when you still hadn’t come back, I had to run to catch the plane. Oliver wants you to stay with them until I get back or if that doesn’t suit you, he’ll come and stay with you in the apartment. Please don’t be stubborn about this. And please don’t think of joining me. A hospital with a dying old lady who wouldn’t want to see you at the best of times is no place for you to be now. Besides, I called my sister and she’ll be there, too, with her dreary husband and I know how you feel about them. She told me Mother’s sister, the aunt who is the mother of Gian-Luca, will also be there and that’s a meeting I would like to avoid and you certainly shouldn’t be bothered with. Just call me at the Holiday Inn in Burlington, so that I know you’re all right. And pray for Mother.