Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  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.”

  The man grinned as he took the money. “We was supposed to come this morning because your wife said the cleaning woman would be in the apartment. I’m glad we was held up, because you don’t get drinking money from cleaning women. Here …” He took out his wallet and selected a soiled card. “If you ever need any electrical work, just call us and we’ll come right over.”

  “Thank you,” Damon said. “Have a good lunch.”

  The man left and Damon looked down at the card in his hand. “Acme Electrical Appliances,” he read. “P. Danusa.” Nice man, Damon thought, I should have made it five dollars. The next time P. Danusa came to the door he wouldn’t be in danger of being hit over the head with an iron poker. Damon put the poker back in its stand and then started out, but stopped because he remembered that when he had changed his clothes, he had emptied his pockets and had left the telltale notebook on the top of the dresser in the bedroom. He got it, saw that it was now dry and put it in his pocket. He had not finished his list. Besides, he couldn’t leave it lying around for Sheila to discover.

  When he went o
ut of the apartment, he locked the door with two keys, one for the old lock and the second for the new supposedly burglar-proof lock that Sheila had had installed right after her lunch with Oliver Gabrielsen. She had done it reluctantly, but she had done it. She had balked at the steel door and the lock bar, though. “I refuse to live as though we’re at war,” she had said, “just because of one crazy telephone call. If anyone gets this far,” she added, her Sicilian heritage inflaming her, “I’ll figure out a way to take care of him.”

  Damon grinned as he remembered this. It was lucky for Mr. P. Danusa that it hadn’t been Sheila who had answered the knock on the door, poker in hand. Otherwise Mr. P. Danusa might very well be lying on the floor of the foyer at this moment with a broken skull.

  Damon walked uptown, keeping his eyes on the pavement so that he wouldn’t recognize anybody, living or dead, young or old, in the passing crowd. He didn’t go directly to his office, but had a hasty lunch and then went on to the electronic equipment store near Fiftieth Street. The clerk recognized him and looked surprised when he asked for a telephone answering machine.

  “Didn’t you buy one yesterday?” the clerk asked.

  “I did.”

  “Is there anything wrong with it? You can bring it back if it’s defective.”

  “It’s not defective,” Damon said. “I forgot it in a bar.”

  “A pity.” The clerk looked for a long moment at the strip of bandage and adhesive tape on Damon’s forehead, then brought out another machine. “That will be ninety-six dollars and eighty cents,” the clerk said.

  Damon gave him a credit card and signed the slip. Danger, he thought as the clerk wrapped the box, is an expensive luxury.

  This time he did not go to a bar. He was off bars and drinking, at least for the day. He went back to the office and made no explanations of his long absence to Miss Walton or Oliver, although they both looked at him questioningly.

  “What’s that, Roger?” Oliver asked, tapping his own forehead.

  “The bump of wisdom,” Damon said curtly, and sat down at his desk and began going through two contracts that Miss Walton had put there for him to read.

  Before dinner that night he and Sheila disconnected the extension telephone in the bedroom and attached the answering machine to the telephone in the living room and Sheila recorded the necessary formula—“Mr. and Mrs. Damon are not at home at the moment. If you wish to leave a message, please wait for the beeping sound and leave your name and telephone number. You will have thirty seconds to record the message. Thank you.”

  They looked at each other uneasily as Sheila pushed the button so that they could be sure the recording could be understood. Without saying so, they both knew that the machine was a further intrusion into their lives, a capitulation to reality, to the idea that a Mr. Zalovsky existed and had to be warded off.

  “The wonders of the modern age,” Sheila said ironically as she ran the tape back. “How did we ever live without it? Now, let’s have dinner.”

  She had prepared the meal and the table was set, but Damon said, “I feel like having dinner out. Leave the stuff for tomorrow.” What he didn’t say was that if they remained at home, they ran the chance of just sitting there staring fearfully at the answering machine most of the night.

  “You’re sure you’re up to it?” Sheila asked. She had accepted his explanation of the bandage on his forehead, but had noticed that he had taken two aspirin when he arrived home. “No more headache?”

  “All gone,” Damon said. He never took drugs at any time and they had to search all over the apartment for an old bottle of aspirin that the cleaning woman had put behind some bottles in the kitchen cabinet. “Also,” he said, “I’d like to take in a movie after dinner. I hear Breaker Morant is playing in the neighborhood, and everybody who’s seen it gives it the highest marks.” With the dinner, the movie, and a couple of drinks in a bar after it, they could stay out until nearly one A.M. Six or seven hours of respite, engaged in the problems of creatures of fiction, not in their own.

  They had a good dinner and Sheila, as always when she dined out alone with Damon, was at her best, vivacious and full of bright anecdotes about the children and their mothers at the nursery school. They were in a good mood as they settled themselves in their seats just in time for the beginning of the picture.

  The movie was all that he had been told about it and more, and they both watched it fascinated, like two privileged and awed children. Damon believed that they were seeing a masterpiece. It was a word he almost never spoke and rarely thought, but he could tell by the tense silence in the crowded theatre that his opinion was being shared by the rest of the audience, which broke into applause as the picture came to an end, something he had never seen or heard in the routine running of a movie in a neighborhood theatre. Sheila, whom he didn’t remember ever weeping in a theatre, was crying at the end, when the two soldiers, sitting in chairs on a wide field, outlined against the rising sun, were executed by the firing squad.

  God, Damon thought, brushing at his own tears, what a glorious thing talent is and how often it is misused. Even though the movie was about the corrupt processes, the callous political purpose and the blind, omniprevalent malevolence of the race of man, which led to the inevitable deaths of the two officers, he could feel the surge of elation and gratitude in the people around him. Catharsis through pity and terror, he thought, even though perhaps only a handful of spectators in the theatre had ever heard or read the phrase.

  But after the showing was over and they had gone to their local bar and were sipping their first drinks, Damon began to reflect somberly about the movie. Magnificent as it had been, he thought, it was not the night on which to see it, at least not for him. Of course the two actors who had gone calmly and courageously with disciplined soldierly dignity to their deaths must have stood up from where they were lying after the coups de grace and the director had called, “Cut.” They would have been laughing, joking at something someone had said, had undoubtedly gone off in high spirits to have a celebratory beer, since it was an Australian production, and prepared to learn their lines for the next day’s shooting.

  What jokes was he ready to make, what were the lines he might prepare for tomorrow, what director was on hand to shout, “Cut” and stop the action?

  In the past few days, he felt, he had been steeped in death and thoughts of death. Zalovsky, with his warning, Harrison Gray, whose name turned out to be George, Antoinetta and. Maurice Fitzgerald, Gregor with his neutron bomb, Melanie Deal, victim of a drunken driver. Masterpiece or no, he would have been better off if he had bought tickets for some inane musical comedy in which nobody died and which ended happily in a blare of sound as the curtain came down.

  He felt the bloodstained notebook in his pocket. That was reality, not the formula for pre-Christian Greek playwrights; there was terror there in his pocket, but no pity and no catharsis.

  Sheila, too, was subdued and he guessed that her thoughts were very much like his. Sensing this, he put out his hand and took hers. She squeezed his hand hard and tried to smile, and he saw that she was near tears.

  When they got home, it was past one o’clock. As if by magnetic attraction, their eyes were drawn to the answering machine. “Let’s go to bed,” Sheila said. “Leave the damned thing alone until morning.”

  It had been a long and tiring day, and Damon fell asleep almost immediately, cradling Sheila’s warm, naked body against his own. Sheila, shield, he murmured just before sleep overtook him.

  His dreams tormented him and he struggled to awake. When he did, he was trembling. Carefully he moved away from Sheila, who was sleeping peacefully, and got out of bed. He put on a woolen robe and went barefooted into the living room. He didn’t switch on the lights, but sat himself at the desk in front of the window and looked down on the empty street below. The clock on the desk stood at four o’clock.

  The dreams came back to him. He was dressing for a funeral and was putting on his dark blue serge suit for
it. There was a button loose at the end of the sleeve, and he tugged at it to take it off so that he wouldn’t lose it. The button didn’t come off, but the whole sleeve came away in his hands from the middle of the forearm down. In the dream, he remembered being slightly amused at it, but waking he was not amused. Rending garments, he remembered the producer, Nathan Brown, saying over the phone when they were talking about Maurice Fitzgerald and the reaction of the woman who had answered the phone in his flat in London.

  Damon shivered. Sleep was not as Shakespeare had described it, knitting the raveled sleeve of care.

  Another dream, which had come to him immediately after that one, like a quick dissolve in a film, had been more puzzling. It had started, he remembered, ordinarily enough—he had lost his wallet and had searched all over for it in a large house he did not recognize. He had met his father coming down the stairs. His father was a young, hearty man and he, himself, was his present age, but that had seemed of no moment in the dream. With his father, there had been his dead brother, Davey, but not as he was, aged ten at the time of his death, but a grown man who unaccountably had turned into Lieutenant Schulter, overcoat, blue jaw, ridiculous small hat and all.