Acceptable Losses (5 page)

“Oh, come on now, Roger,” Sheila said. “Sunday night.”

He hesitated, almost asked her to sit down so that he could tell her the whole story. But he didn’t want to spoil her homecoming. If he could avoid it, he didn’t
ever
want to tell her the whole story. “A restaurant it is,” he said. “I’ll have your drink ready.”

She peered at him intently. He recognized the look. He called it her hospital look. He had met her when he was lying in bed with his leg in traction after being hit by a taxicab. He was in a semiprivate room, sharing it with a man whose name was Biancella, who also had been run over and who was Sheila’s unmarried uncle. They were very close, largely because they shared the same despairing opinion of Sheila’s mother, who was Biancella’s sister.

The two men had become friends in shared misery. Damon had found out that Biancella, a small, dark, handsome man with grizzled graying hair, ran a garage in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and came to New York only once a year, to see his niece. “This would never have happened in Old Lyme,” Biancella had said tapping the hip-high cast ruefully. “My mother warned me to stay out of big cities.”

“I’ve lived in New York for years,” Damon said, “and I stepped off the curb just like you.”

They laughed at their mutual carelessness. They were both mending and they could afford to laugh.

Sheila came to visit her uncle every day after her work in the nursery school was over and it was in the semiprivate room that Damon had discovered her hospital look. Biancella always tried to put on a cheerful and uncomplaining face when his niece came into the room, no matter how bad the day had been for him up until then. And he had had some very bad days indeed, lying in the bed across from Damon’s. But with one glance, as she came into the room, Sheila would say, “Now, don’t try to fool me, Uncle Federico, what’s wrong today? A nurse is bothering you, a doctor is hurting you, what?”

Invariably, she was right. In the three weeks that she had been coming into the room, she had more or less adopted Damon, too, and his attempts at stoicism were swept aside by the dark, handsome young woman with the grave eyes, and again and again she had made him confess that all was not well with him, that they were not sedating him enough so that he could sleep, that his complaints to the doctors that his cast was too tight were being ignored. She made herself unpopular with the doctors and some of the nurses with her demands for immediate treatment, but as Damon watched her arranging her uncle’s pillows, coaxing him to eat the delicacies she had brought him, which she insisted Damon share, speaking soothingly in a low, rich voice to her uncle about news of the family, entertaining him with bitterly comic anecdotes about her mother, telling him of plays she had gone to see, the performances of the children in her classes, Damon began to look forward to her afternoon visits as the climax of each day.

She made it her job to find vases for the flood of flowers that Damon’s friends sent him and was coolly correct, although not cordial, when her visits happened to coincide with those of some of the ladies of Damon’s acquaintance. She was sedate and proper and Damon could understand when Biancella, who was a bony and pain-wracked old man, said of his niece, “When she puts her hand on my forehead to see if I have fever, I feel that she is healing me more than all the doctors and nurses and injections combined.”

By the time Damon had been in the hospital for two weeks he had decided that his divorced wife and most of the girls and women he had known were unbearably frivolous and unstable when compared to Sheila Branch, which was her maiden name, and that despite the difference in their ages (he was over forty and she twenty-five) he would marry her if she would have him.

But her sensitivity, while fine for a hospital, was sometimes difficult to bear in a prolonged marriage and now, in the first moments after her arrival, as she peeled off the gloves she had worn for driving, she said, “You look awful. What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said brusquely, sounding irritated, which sometimes stopped her questioning. “I’ve been reading all day and trying to make up my mind what’s wrong with the manuscript and how it can be fixed.”

“It’s more than that,” she said, peasant stubborn. He had said that to her more than once. “You had lunch with your ex-wife,” she said accusingly. “That’s what it is. You always come back from seeing her as though it’s thundering inside your head. What is it—she want more money again?”

“For your information, I had lunch alone and I haven’t seen my ex-wife in more than a month.” He was glad of the opportunity to sound innocent and honestly aggrieved.

“Well,” Sheila said, “look better—or at least different when we go out to dinner.” She smiled, ending the argument, at least for the moment. “I’m the one who should be looking like thunder after two days with Madonna.”

“You look beautiful,” he said, and meant it. Although she never would have been chosen by the model agencies to be photographed for the fashion magazines, the stern, prominent lines of her face, the great dark eyes, the coarse, thick black hair, cut shoulder length, the strong, generous, olive-skinned body, had over the years become the standard against which he judged the worthiness and character of women.

Despite that, he had been attracted briefly but irresistibly to many women, and as he had with his Iberian beauty, taken his pleasure with a number of them: The long years of joyous bachelorhood after the break-up of his marriage had been given over to two things—work and appetite, and his second marriage had not changed him in those respects. He was not a religious man, although when forced to think about religion, he opted for agnosticism. Still, he had a sense of sin, if appetite itself was sin. He did not blaspheme or bear false witness or steal or kill, although from time to time he did covet his neighbor’s wife. His appetite was strong and natural and he made very little effort to curb it, although when possible he tried to do no harm either to himself or his partners in satisfying it. New York during those years was not a center of abstinence. He had been handsome when young and as people who have been good-looking in their youth are likely to do, conducted himself with ease and assurance even when age had left its grim traces on his appearance. He had not tried to hide this side of his character from Sheila. In any event, it would not have been possible—she had seen the parade of women who had come to visit him in his hospital room and arranged the flowers they had sent him. The lady from Spain had angered Sheila because of her indiscretion. To tell the truth, it had annoyed him, too, and he had given the lady up with something like relief and there hadn’t been anyone else in the two years since they had parted.

He had never asked Sheila about her affairs before their wedding day or after or pleaded for forgiveness. By and large, although they had had their stormy periods, they had been happy together and, as he had done tonight, he always felt a lifting of the heart when she came through the door. Selfishly, he was glad that he was so much older than she and that he would die before her.

Now, with Sheila standing before him, safely home, he took her in his arms once more and kissed her on the lips, the familiar soft lips, which could on occasion set into stubborn harshness, sweet against his own. “Sheil,” he murmured, still holding her, but whispering in her ear, “I’m so glad you’re back. The two days felt like centuries.”

She smiled again, touched his mouth with the tip of her finger as though to hush him and went into the bedroom. The way she walked, erect, not swaying, her head high and motionless as the rest of her moved, reminded him, not for the first time, of a girl he had liked and had an affair with just after he arrived in New York. She was a young actress, dark and, like Sheila, had an Italian mother. Somewhere in her genes, as in Sheila’s, there must have been a racial memory of women with heavy jars on their heads striding down the sun-struck paths of Calabria. Her name was Antoinetta Bradley and he was in love with her for the best part of a year, and he thought she was in love with him and they even had talked about getting married. But it turned out that she was in love with one of his best friends. Maurice Fitzgerald, with whom he shared an apartment in Manhattan. They tossed to see who would keep the apartment and Damon lost.

“The luck of the draw,” Fitzgerald said as Damon started packing.

Antoinetta Bradley and Maurice Fitzgerald left for London some time later and Damon heard that they had been married there and become British residents. He hadn’t seen either of them in thirty years, but he still remembered how Antoinetta walked and the way Fitzgerald had said, “The luck of the draw.”

In the kitchen, getting the ice out for the drinks, the memory made him sigh and brought back the early days before the war and just after when he had worked as an actor and still hoped for the break that would make him a star. He didn’t do too badly and he was given enough small parts to keep him living fairly comfortably, and it had never occurred to him that he would at one time in the future try anything else but the theatre and perhaps the movies.

It was during the rehearsals of one of the plays in the late 1940s that his life had been changed. Mr. Gray, who represented the playwright, came to the rehearsals from time to time and Damon and he had fallen into the habit of carrying on whispered conversations in the back of the darkened theatre in the long periods when Damon was not needed onstage. Mr. Gray had asked him his opinion of the play and Damon had told him frankly that he thought it was going to fail and why. Gray had been impressed and had told him he was in the wrong end of the business and had said that if he ever needed a job, there would be one open for him in the Gray office. “You’ve been honest with me about the play,” he said, “and you’re obviously an intelligent and well-educated young man and I can use you. Onstage it’s a different matter—you don’t convince me and I’m almost certain you’ll never convince an audience. If you try to continue in your career as an actor, it’s my opinion that you’re going to end up as a failed and disappointed man.”

Two weeks after the play closed Damon was working in Mr. Gray’s office.

Carrying the ice out of the kitchen and pouring the two drinks, Damon grimaced a little as he remembered Mr. Gray’s words. Tonight, in a manner of speaking, he would be onstage once more, with an audience of one. He would give the best performance he could, but the years had not improved his acting and he was almost sure that now as then he would not be convincing. There would be a long night ahead.

“Oliver,” Sheila was saying to Oliver Gabrielsen after they had given their luncheon order to the waiter in the restaurant downtown, where Sheila knew there was no chance of bumping into her husband, “the reason I called you at home so early in the morning yesterday, just after Roger had left for the office, was that I didn’t want him to know why I had to see you.” She had asked Oliver to have lunch with her that noon, but he had an appointment he couldn’t break and now it was Tuesday.

“My wife was suspicious,” Oliver said. “She isn’t used to ladies calling me at breakfast to make a date with me. She says you’re devastatingly beautiful. In an old-fashioned way.” He smiled and touched Sheila’s hand across the table. “The most dangerous kind, she says. And that I’m always looking for a mother to get into bed with. She envies you and tries to copy you. Did you notice that since last year she’s had her hair done the way you wear yours?”

“I noticed. If you must know the truth, I thought it was a little severe for that youngish face,” Sheila said. She did not add the word
empty
to the description although it would have made the image more accurate. She was not too fond of Doris Gabrielsen and thought that she was not worthy of Oliver.

“And once I caught her practicing walking like you in front of a mirror,” Oliver said.

“She’ll never manage it,” Sheila said, briefly annoyed with this vision of another marriage. “She’s got a built-in sashay. Forgive me for being bitchy. She reminds me of how old I am.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Oliver said. “She’s sometimes bitchy about you. This morning she said it was damned odd you wanting to see me alone. She was quite cross when I told her I had no idea what it was about, and she said she knew I was lying. She says that you and Roger and herself and me are not a quartet—we’re a trio and a half and she’s the half.”

“I’m sorry,” Sheila said.

Oliver shrugged. “Do her good. Helps keep the necessary tension in the marriage.”

“Well, make up some story but don’t tell her the truth because it’s about Roger,” Sheila said.

“I guessed that.”

“And it’s strictly between you and me. I was away two days and something must have happened while I was gone. He acted most peculiarly—for him. You know how he likes to walk everywhere …”

Oliver nodded. “I suffer from it. When we have an appointment outside the office, even if it’s halfway across town, he refuses to take a taxi and he despises buses. I told him I’m buying a pair of hiking boots to wear in the office, and he walks so fast I arrive everywhere panting and covered with sweat. It keeps him fit, but it just reminds me that all the males in my family died early of heart trouble.”

“Well,” Sheila said, “fit or not, on Sunday night when we went out to dinner, he insisted on taking a taxi, even though the restaurant was only a ten-minute walk away and then a taxi back. He said the streets have become too dangerous to walk around these nights. Then when we got home, he began talking about the landlord’s not having the buzzer fixed and anybody being able to get into the house at all hours of the day and night. And he said he was going to have a new door to the apartment put in, a steel door with a chain and real locks and a peep-hole. And changing our phone to an unlisted number. You know, he’s not a fearful man—I’ve seen him break up fights on the street between two huge ruffians—and I couldn’t get out of him what he was so suddenly worried about. He even said he thought we ought to move—to one of those big new dreadful apartment houses with what they call a security system—you know, television in the elevators and two men at the door and a switchboard where everybody has to give his name and be announced.” She shook her head distractedly. “It’s so unlike him. He loves the apartment and ordinarily he hates to change anything. I’ve been after him for years to have the walls done over—the paint’s peeling all over the place—and he’s refused to hear of it or even get rid of some of the books that’re swamping us.”