Acceptable Losses (8 page)

“What?” Damon said, surprised. He knew that Mr. Gray had been married and had been a widower when they had first met, but the son had never been mentioned before.

“My son,” Mr. Gray repeated. “He’s a grain merchant, dealing in futures, things like that. He made a fortune during the war. And after. Waiting till the market went up before selling wheat to the starving millions of Europe and Asia. He was a brilliant boy, he was close to being a genius. His field was mathematics, physics. He could have been the shining star of any faculty at any university in the country. He was the one golden gift of an otherwise dreadful marriage. He used his talent all right—to wheel, to deal, to take advantage of every trick and turn of the law and the marketplace. I read not long ago that he was the youngest multimillionaire in the United States who had made all his money by his own efforts. With the cold heart of a guard in a concentration camp. It was in
Time
magazine.”

“I never happened to read it,” Damon said.

“I didn’t carry it in my pocket to show to my friends.” Mr. Gray smiled faintly.

“I never knew you had a son,” Damon said.

“It pains me to talk about him.”

“You didn’t talk much about your wife, either. I gathered it was a painful subject.”

“My wife died young,” Mr. Gray shrugged. “No great loss, either. I was shy and she was meek and she was the first girl who let me kiss her. She died, I think, of embarrassment, embarrassment at being alive and taking up space on the planet. There wasn’t a flicker of real life in her from the day she was born, she had the spirit of a slave. My son, I believe, turned out to be what he is because he looked at his mother and told himself that in every possible way he would be different from her. And he despised me. The last time we talked he told me—I can still hear the contempt in his voice as he said it—he told me I was content to live in a corner on crusts all my life, but he wasn’t.” Mr. Gray gave a short laugh. “Well, I’m still in my corner and he’s the youngest self-made multimillionaire in America.” He sighed, finished his brandy, looked questioningly at Damon. “Do you think I might have just one more?”

“Of course,” Damon said and refilled his glass.

Mr. Gray bowed his head to sniff the Cognac. Damon had the impression that he was crying and trying to hide it. “Ah,” he said finally, his head still down, “I didn’t keep you up to wail about my private life. An old man, late at night, under the influence of just a little too much brandy …” His voice trailed off. “If you don’t mind, Roger, I left my briefcase in the hall, would you kindly get it for me?”

Damon took his time getting the briefcase, so that Mr. Gray could dry his tears. He heard him blowing his nose loudly. The briefcase was heavy and Damon wondered what Mr. Gray could have in it or why he would carry a briefcase to a party.

“Ah, there we are,” Mr. Gray said brightly as Damon came into the room. “You found it.” He put his brandy down and placed the briefcase on his knees. The briefcase was usually filled with manuscripts that he took home to read after office hours” and on weekends. He caressed the worn leather and the battered brass lock, then opened the case and took out a small bottle of pills. He shook out a pill and placed it under his tongue. Damon noticed that the veined, liver-spotted hand was shaking. “Brandy makes the heart race,” Mr. Gray said, almost apologetically, as though as a guest it was discourteous to his host to provide his own nourishment. “The doctors warn me, but one can’t live completely without vices.” His voice suddenly became stronger and his hands stopped shaking. “What a nice party this was. And Sheila always looks so splendid in her own home. Ten years, is it? My, where do the years fly?” He had been a witness at the wedding in the judge’s chambers. “You’ve been good for each other. If I were younger, I’d be jealous of your marriage. And if I were you, I’d be most careful not to do anything to disturb it.”

“I know what you mean,” Damon said uncomfortably.

“Those little absences from the office in the afternoons, the telephone calls …”

“We have an understanding, Sheila and I,” Damon said. “A tacit understanding. Sort of.”

“I’m not rebuking you, Roger. In fact, I took a vicarious pleasure in your mid-afternoon excursions. I had fantasies of what it would be like to be handsome like you, lusty, pursued by women … It brightened many a dull day. But you’re no longer young, the fires should be banked by now, you have something precious to preserve …”

“As you just said, one can’t live completely without vices.” Damon laughed, to put the conversation on a lighter plane. “And I very seldom drink brandy.”

Mr. Gray laughed then, too, an old friend sharing masculine rascality in a locker room. “Well,” he said, “at least manage to get away with it.” Then his face grew serious again. Once more he opened the flap of the briefcase which he had been cradling on his lap. He took out a thickly stuffed large manila envelope. “Roger,” he said, speaking softly, “I’m going to ask you to do me a great favor. There are years of work in this envelope and a lifetime of hope. It’s a manuscript.” He laughed uneasily. “It’s a book I’ve just finished writing. The only book I ever wrote or probably ever will write. When I was a young man, I wanted to be a writer. I tried, but it was no use. I had read too much to believe what I put down was of any worth. So I did the next best thing, I thought. I would be the vessel, the means, the conduit, if you will, for the work of good writers. Here and there you might say I’ve succeeded, but that’s not the point. With age, with the immersion in words, so to speak, with the years of observation, criticism, editing, I thought perhaps I had accumulated enough wisdom so that I could create something that would salvage what was left of my life. Now you’re going on a voyage, there will be days of rain when you can’t leave your hotel, perhaps long train trips, nights when you’re tired of listening to a foreign language. When you get back, I hope you will have read it. No one but me, not even a typist, has glanced at it until now.” He took a deep breath, put his hand to his throat as though to relieve some hidden strain there. “If you tell me it’s good, I’ll show it around. If you tell me it’s no good, I shall burn it.”

Damon took the envelope. On it, in Mr. Gray’s neat round script was written
Solo Voyage
, by Harrison Gray. “I can’t wait to read it,” he said.

“Please,” said Mr. Gray, “be at least three thousand miles away before you look at the first line.”

The trip was everything they could have hoped for—and better. They wandered without a schedule, as the mood seized them, footloose and free, finding new joy in being together twenty-four hours a day, walking hand-in-hand like young lovers along the Seine, on the banks of the Tiber, through the Uffizi Palace, on a mountain path in the Swiss Alps, over the bridges of the canals near the Great Lagoon. They stood silent before the Cathedral of Chartres and climbed to the top of Mont St. Michel. Together, they read Henry James on Paris, Ruskin’s
The Stones of Venice
and Stendhal on Rome, dined off bouillabaisse in spring sunlight at restaurants overlooking the port of Antibes and
fettuccine al pesto
at tables facing the Ligurian Sea. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Gray’s manuscript, Damon could not have imagined a more perfect holiday. When Sheila asked him what the book was like, Damon said it was fine. But he was lying. The book lay dead in his hands. Harrison Gray, as a young man, had traveled for a few months on a tramp steamer around the islands of the South Pacific, and the book was a recollection, in the form of a novel, of that voyage. In the writing it seemed like a dull parody of Conrad’s
Youth.

Mr. Gray, the delicate and fastidious man, so tuned to the turn of a phrase, so acute in pointing out a wrong note in an imaginary character, so sharp in detecting falsity or rhetoric, so steeped in and devoted to the glory of great literature, had written a book so stale, trite, clumsy, that Damon wept inwardly as he went through the pages on which there were no two sentences that followed each other with any of the music or savor of the English language. As the month drew to its close, Damon dreaded the idea of the trip home and the moment when he would arrive at the office and have to confront his old and beloved friend.

But Mr. Gray, gentlemanly and considerate to the end, spared Damon the confrontation. When he went to the office carrying the manuscript on his first day back, Damon was greeted at the door by a weeping Miss Walton, at that time thinner, with coquettish bangs of mousy hair, who told him that she had not known where to reach him in Europe to tell him that Mr. Gray had died the week before.

That night, although it was warm and New York was already seized by summer, Damon lit a fire in his living room and fed
Solo Voyage
page by page into the flames. It was the least he could do in honor of his friend’s memory.

Remembering all this, Damon stared down at the glass of brandy on the bar, sighed, picked up the glass and finished the drink, paid the barman and went out of the hotel.

For once he did not walk the two miles to home. Facing the long night that lay ahead of him with his wife, with its explanations, confessions, fears and alarms, he was in no mood to meet any others of his familiar dead on the streets of the city.

Hailing a taxi, he drove downtown in silence.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

W
HEN HE KISSED SHEILA
good-bye the next morning on his way to work, she looked sober and drawn. It had been an exhausting night, which had begun as he came through the door, with the question, “What’s all this about a pistol?”

“Where did you hear anything about a pistol?” he had asked, already sorry that even for a day he had left her in ignorance of what was happening.

“I had lunch with Oliver,” she said. “He’s as worried about you as I am.”

“All right,” he said. “Sit down. We have some talking to do. Quite a lot of talking.”

Then, in the same words he had used at lunch to Elaine, he told her about the midnight telephone call. He also told her most, but not all, of what Elaine had said about making lists of people who might wish him harm. Out of fear of wounding her and making her feel he mistrusted her, he omitted Elaine’s advice to get Sheila to make her own private list. For other reasons he also omitted the name of the woman he had been involved with long ago, who had called him from Chicago recently and whose family or who herself might be tempted by the idea of revenge, either by violence or in cold cash.

“I hate to ask this question, Sheil,” he had said after hours of discussion and speculation that went round and round and ended, as far as he could tell, in no decisions, “but is it possible that somebody has something against you and is getting at you through me?”

“Did Elaine suggest that?” Sheila asked suspiciously.

“Something of that kind.”

“She would,” Sheila said bitterly. “Did she ask for money again?”

“No. She has a rich boy friend now.”

“Thank heaven for small mercies,” Sheila said ironically. “Let me see if I can count my enemies. Yes, there’s a five-year-old boy in one of my classes who said he hated me because I stood him in the corner for ten minutes for making a little girl cry.” She smiled. “Ah, my head is weary and it’s late. Let’s go to bed and maybe things will look clearer in the morning.”

But it was morning now, an ordinary working day and she was saying good-bye looking careworn and distressed, and he could tell that she had not slept well because of the lines under her eyes. He himself had not slept all that well either, and once more he had had the dream about his father standing at the marble balustrade holding the toy horse and smiling and waving invitingly to him.

They kissed again, lingeringly, at the door and she said, “Take care,” and he said, “Of course,” and went down the stairs and out of the house into a howling cold spring wind. At other times he would have thought it bracing weather for the long walk uptown, but today he huddled into his raincoat, with the collar up around his ears and walked as fast as he could to try to keep warm. The faces of the people he passed looked pinched and hostile and if
en masse
the faces represented anything it was a generalized and all-encompassing hatred and an inner certainty that all men, or at least all New Yorkers, were their enemies.

In the office it wasn’t much better. When Oliver came in, Damon shut the door that separated the room in which they worked from the outer room to keep Miss Walton from hearing what he had to say. Then, harshly, he said, speaking too loudly, “What kind of old lady have you become? Blabbing all over town. I thought we had an agreement that what goes on in this office remains in the office.”

“Oh,” Oliver said, “Sheila told you we had lunch.”

“She certainly did.”

“Listen, Roger,” Oliver said, speaking calmly, although Damon could see he was hurt, “Sheila’s been mystified by the way you’ve been behaving since she came back from Vermont and so have I. A pistol, for God’s sake. You’ve been yelling for years about a gun control law, I’ve seen your name on dozens of petitions to congressmen.”

“So—I happen to have changed my mind,” Oliver said, his voice still too loud. “That’s no excuse for blabbing behind my back.”

“Roger, talking to your wife about a problem that has nothing to do with the office isn’t blabbing all over town,” Oliver said.

“Why’re you so sure it has nothing to do with the office? Maybe it damn well does.” Even as he spoke Damon knew that he was being unfair, but he couldn’t stop himself. “And from now on keep your goddamn mouth shut.”

As Oliver turned and went silently across the room to his desk, Damon thought. One more mark against me.

They didn’t say a word to each other all morning and Damon could only make a pretense of working, shuffling papers irritably around on his desk. It was nearly eleven o’clock when his buzzer sounded.

“Mrs. Damon on the phone,” Miss Walton said.

Damon was surprised. Sheila made a point of never calling him at work. When she did call the office, it was around five o’clock, when she knew that he was getting ready to leave the office and she wanted him to pick up something on the way home or was uptown herself and thought it would be nice to meet for a drink near the office and have dinner and go to a movie.