Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  Sheila had brought him a chocolate milkshake, rich with ice cream and a raw egg. He had had a passion for milkshakes when he was a boy and he drank a few sips, then pushed it away. Sheila looked worried at his refusal and he was sorry about that, but there was no getting any more of the drink down.

  The dressings on his chest and stomach had been removed but he refused to look at the scars. The nurses changed the bandages and irrigated and sterilized the one huge remaining bedsore on his buttock four or five times a day and that, too, which he had scarcely noticed until now, proved excruciatingly painful, as did the placing of needles for intravenous doses of antibiotics and the continuing blood transfusions. He remembered very clearly all his hallucinations but was not clear whether they were events through which he had actually lived or merely dreamed, so he spoke of them to no one. From time to time he regretted that he had not been permitted to die before then and was sure that he never would get out of the hospital alive and that the time that lay ahead of him was a needless prolongation of agony.

  He resented the prodding of Sheila and the nurses, who tended him in three shifts of eight hours each around the clock, to get him out of bed and walk, first with the walker, then with a cane, a few steps several times a day. He tried to eat, but whatever food he was offered was like dry wool in his mouth, which he chewed with effort then spat out.

  His day nurse weighed him every morning. Without interest, he saw that he weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. As the days went by he neither gained nor lost a pound. When he went into the hospital, he had weighed one hundred and seventy-five.

  A respirator had been set up in his room, although Dr. Zinfandel had told Sheila it was impossible to arrange. But Sheila had gone to the head nurse at the main office on the floor, an old Irish lady with whom she had become friendly and the nurse had snorted when Sheila told her what Zinfandel had said and told Sheila she could put in all the apparatuses necessary in thirty minutes. Damon hated the respirator and the oxygen mask and felt he was being smothered when they clamped it on him and he had to be restrained from pulling the mask off. Oliver was in and out of the room and tried to cheer him up by telling him how well things were going at the office, but Damon shut him up by saying, “Fuck off, Oliver,” when Oliver began to talk about contracts.

  One thing Damon remembered was the pretty nurse Penny crying in his dream as she said goodbye when the ship docked. “Oliver,” he said, “are you going to marry Penny?”

  Oliver looked stricken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “I must warn you,” Damon said. The dream had hardened into reality. “Doris is good for you. And she’s a winner. Pretty as she is, Penny is one of the world’s eternal losers. You would eat the bread of sorrow the rest of your life.” The dying, he thought, have their right to a final honest word.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  DESPITE HIS LOYAL ATTEMPTS to eat the food that Sheila tried to tempt him with and drink the rich milkshakes she prepared for him, he could not regain any of his lost weight and the few steps he managed to make up and down the hall exhausted him for the day. But the tensions and the despair that had nearly overcome him in the Intensive Care Unit had left him. Now he felt calm, resigned to whatever might come.

  The idea of death had become so familiar to him that it did not alarm him. He felt that if the doctors and nurses would only leave him alone, he would die peacefully, with a contented smile on his face. Unless, of course, the hallucinations had come after he had died and then been reanimated by the wonders of modern medicine. That would make the phrase “the peace of the grave” a cosmic bad joke, in the worst of taste. Sixty-five was not a bad age for the final passage. “Time to go,” as he had once said to Sheila when one of his older clients had committed suicide in Hollywood, for good and sufficient reason.

  Holding his finger over the hole in the tube in his throat and remembering Dr. Levine’s instructions about inhaling deeply, he asked Sheila if he had ever really died, then been brought back. “No,” she said, and she was not one to lie, even for the gravest reasons, “never.”

  Dr. Levine, who by this time Damon considered the only doctor in the hospital who knew how to cure anything, breezed in casually and said, “It’s about time you talked like a human being.” Unceremoniously, without preliminaries, he reached over and yanked out the tube. Then, with equal nonchalance, he said, “Speak up, man.”

  Damon looked up at the owlish sharp face in disbelief, thought, What have I got to lose? He took a deep breath. Then in his normal voice he said, “Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation …”

  “Well, that’s that,” Dr. Levine said briskly. He shook Damon’s hand. “That’s the last you’ll see of me. I hope you have something more interesting to say the next time you open your mouth,” and departed.

  Taking advantage of his newfound loquacity, Damon said to Sheila and the nurse, who had been watching the operation apprehensively, “This room is too damn hot. Turn the air-conditioning up, will you please?”

  He had been a man who all his life, except for his disastrous years as an aspiring actor, had spent most of his time reading and listening to other people talk, but now he accepted the lie that the gift of speech was what set the human race apart from the rest of the animal world.

  The room was full of flowers, the gifts of friends, clients, producers, editors, and assorted well-wishers, and until Damon had insisted that the telephone be taken from the room, there had been at least ten calls a day from people who wanted to visit him and cheer him up. He had refused to pick up the phone and Sheila had blocked everyone, except Oliver and Manfred Weinstein. Weinstein had come to visit him, walking heavily and using a cane, the first day he was released from the hospital, with his leg more or less healed. He had lost quite a bit of weight and his cheeks were not as rosy as they had been, but it was obviously not his time to go.

  Weinstein was not one to mince words. Looking down at Damon’s wasted face, he said, “Christ, Roger, who shot you?”

  “The American Medical Association,” Damon said. “When’re you going to be able to throw away that cane?”

  Weinstein grimaced and it reminded Damon of how Weinstein’s face had looked when he returned to the bench after he had struck out with the winning run on third when he was seventeen years old. “I’m not going to steal many bases this season,” Weinstein said. He was going out to California to visit his son, but promised he’d be back as soon as he heard that Damon was getting out of the hospital. He was furious because the New York police department had confiscated his pistol since he only had a license for it in Connecticut. “Cops,” he said scornfully. “I’m lucky they didn’t put me in jail because I was trying to keep an old friend from being murdered.”

  He had talked to Schulter several times, but there was no trace of Zalovsky. The gun had provided no clues. It was Schulter’s theory that Zalovsky had been more badly wounded than they had thought and had probably died of his wounds and been quietly buried by the members of whatever family of the Mafia he belonged to. Weinstein thought that he was most likely out of the country, in South America or Sicily or Israel. It was Weinstein’s conviction that all organized crime was in the hands of Italians, Cubans or Jews and that Zalovsky, whatever his real name was, had been a mere pawn in a minor extortion racket.

  “Get well, old cock,” he said to Damon before he left. “I want to have something to show for this fucking knee.” But Damon could tell by the expression on his friend’s face that Weinstein felt that they would never see each other again.

  Oliver pleaded the case of Genevieve Dolger, who twice a week sent huge baskets of flowers to the sick room and who had miraculously given up baking pies and finished a new novel called Cadenza while Damon was in the hospital. Her publishers had quadrupled her advance, and Oliver was negotiating with the paperback people and the movies for enormous sums. She insisted, Oliver said, upon see
ing Damon at least once to thank him for everything he had done for her. Before it’s too late—Damon finished the sentence in his head. “She says she’s wildly in love with you,” Oliver said, raising his almost invisible eyebrows incredulously. “She says you’re the only man in her whole life who made her feel really like a woman.”

  Damon groaned, but said he’d see her. It was only fair, he thought—he wouldn’t be in a private room with day and night nurses caring for him without Genevieve Dolger and there wouldn’t be any Dr. Zinfandel coming in solicitously every morning at one hundred dollars a visit week after week except for Threnody and now Cadenza.

  “Okay,” he said. “But tell her only ten minutes. And tell her I’m too frail to hear that she’s in love with me.”

  But before he had to endure the affection of Genevieve Dolger, Damon had another lady to contend with.

  “Your ex-wife, Elaine What’s-her-name, called twice yesterday,” Sheila was saying. She had just come from the floor reception desk, where they generously took messages for her and Damon, now that Damon had had the telephone removed from the room. “She says she just has to see you.”

  “Sparman,” Damon said. “She married a man called Sparman. Divorced a long time ago.”

  “What should I tell her?” Sheila had never met Elaine and Damon could tell that she didn’t want to meet her now. But he felt that if he was going to die, which seemed like a looming possibility, he owed it to a woman he had once thought he had loved and with whom he had been briefly happy when they both were young, to give her the satisfaction of a last farewell. Besides, with her gambler boy friend and his dubious connections, perhaps she had a clue about who Zalovsky was and what he wanted that she could only tell him in person. And she had always managed to amuse him, in one way or another, sometimes wittingly and sometimes not so wittingly, and he felt he could use a little amusement.

  “Tell her I’d love to see her,” Damon said. He could tell that his answer did not please Sheila, but he could not deny his entire past because of a fleeting moment of his wife’s displeasure. Sheila started to say something, but at that moment one of the doctors who was on the staff of the specialist for pulmonary diseases came into the room. The doctor was a good-looking young man with an outdoor complexion and beautifully cut and combed long mahogany hair. He came in regularly every day, looked at Damon cursorily from a distance and inevitably said, “Why don’t you get the nurse to wheel you out to the roof terrace where you can get some fresh air?” and left. He, too, charged a hundred dollars a day, although Damon never took his advice, as the benefits of a few gasps of New York smog and gasoline fumes did not seem to him to offer any lasting beneficial effects for his racked lungs.

  When Elaine came into the room the following afternoon, he regretted that he had annoyed Sheila by telling her to allow his ex-wife to visit him. She was dressed completely in black and for the first time since they had met, he saw her face absolutely devoid of makeup of any kind. The fact that it improved her appearance was outweighed by the funereal aspect of her widow’s weeds and the doleful expression on her face. Sheila had tactfully left the room when the floor nurse came in to announce that a Mrs. Sparman was at the desk.

  “My poor darling,” Elaine said, and started to bend toward him to kiss his forehead, but he turned his head away roughly. “I would have come sooner, but I didn’t know. We were in Vegas, then down in Nassau, and I just got back to New York two days ago. What a trauma …”

  “Elaine,” he said, “you look like a crow in those goddamn clothes. It depresses me. Why don’t you go home now and come back some other day in spangles or a bikini or something else a little more cheerful?”

  “I didn’t want you to think that I was being frivolous,” Elaine said, hurt.

  “You are frivolous,” he said. “That’s the only thing I still cherish about you.”

  “I know about invalids,” Elaine said. “In their pain they strike out at their nearest and dearest.”

  “I am not in pain,” Damon said wearily, “and you are not my nearest and dearest.”

  “I refuse to be offended,” Elaine said with dignity. “But if this simple little dress displeases you, I left my coat outside and it’s not black.”

  “Go put it on,” Damon said. Dying would be easy, he thought, if they only left you alone.

  “I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Elaine stalked out of the room, the well-rounded calves of her legs gleaming, falsely youthful, in her sheer black stockings.

  When she came back, she was wearing a bright orange coat with a red fox collar.

  There is no end to the indignities a man who is lying in bed must suffer, Damon thought, blinking as a stray beam of sunlight from the one window in the room lit his ex-wife up like a Christmas decoration. “That better?” she asked.

  “Much.”

  “You always had a flippant streak in you,” Elaine said. “I thought maybe, at a moment like this …” She left the sentence unfinished.

  “Let’s not talk about moments like this, if you don’t mind, Elaine,” Damon said.

  “I prayed for you this morning before coming here,” Elaine said.

  “I hope your prayers have mounted to heaven.”

  “In St. Patrick’s,” Elaine said, always one to let people know she understood the importance of a good address.

  “You’re not even a Catholic,” Damon said.

  “I was walking past on Fifth Avenue. Catholics believe in God, too.” Elaine was ecumenical, to say the least. If everybody shared her flexible theocratic opinions, Damon thought, there would be an end to religious wars.

  “So they say,” Damon said. “Now let me ask you a question. In all your travels with your boy friend, did you hear anything about my … uh … my problem?”

  “Freddie asked everywhere. Everyone he could and he knows some big important people on the … well … on the wrong side of the law, is one way of putting it.” Elaine pursed her wide, fleshy, unrouged lips delicately. “He got some very funny looks, he told me. It was risky for him, I can tell you, it’s not the sort of circles where it’s safe to ask too many questions, but Freddie would walk through fire for me …

  “Did he hear anything?” Damon said impatiently.

  “Nothing,” Elaine said.

  “Okay,” Damon lay back and closed his eyes. “I’m awfully tired, Elaine. It was sweet of you to visit me, but I think I’d like to try to take a nap now.”

  “Roger …” Elaine hesitated. She was not ordinarily a hesitant woman. “There’s one favor …”

  “What is it?” He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want to look at the orange coat anymore.

  “Remember that photograph I gave you on your birthday, the first year we were married … ?”

  “The only year we were married.” He still didn’t open his eyes.

  “The one of us together on the beach, that I had blown up and put in that silver frame? You remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “You were so young and handsome then. It has so many associations. I long to have it. Do you think you can find it?”

  “I’ll leave it to you in my will.”

  Elaine sobbed and he opened his eyes to see if she was faking or not. Tears were rolling down the pale cheeks. She wasn’t faking. “That isn’t what I meant,” she said reproachfully, between sobs.

  “You’ll get it, dear,” he said and reached out gently and patted her hand.

  “Please get well, Roger,” she said, her voice tremulous. “Even if you never want to see me again, I want to know that you’re around and happy.”

  “I’ll try,” Damon said softly. Then he lay back and closed his eyes. When he opened them a few moments later, Elaine was gone.

  When the nurse came in the next day to announce that there was a Mrs. Dolger who was at the reception desk, he told the nurse to bring her in, but added he wanted the nurse to stay in the room all the time that Mrs. Dolger was there.

  When the authoress who had made h
is old age, if he was going to have one, secure came in, he had to suppress a gasp of surprise. The dumpy little suburban housewife had vanished and in her place was a svelte, beautifully dressed lady in carefully coiffed tinted hair. She was wearing a handsome green tweed suit that looked as though it came from Paris and carrying a green alligator handbag to match, and she must have lost twenty pounds since he had seen her last. He wondered what torments she was putting her husband and children through.

  Her voice, however, had remained the same, modest and pleading and grateful. “Oh, Roger,” she said, “I kept calling every day and they kept saying you were on the critical list.”

  “I’m off it now. You look beautiful, Genevieve.”

  “I took hold of myself,” she said firmly. “I dieted and I went to gym classes and I started reading Vogue, and I wouldn’t allow myself to go to bed at night until I had written at least ten pages. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am to you and Oliver. He’s been a tower of strength on Cadenza … Although,” she added hastily, “there’ll never be anyone like you.”

  “I’ll go over the proofs when you get them,” Damon said, hoping that they would come in late and the editors would resist any changes because they were weeks behind for their publishing date.

  “First,” she said, “you have to get well. That’s the important thing. I brought you a little gift.” Dashing tweed suit and alligator handbag and weighing twenty pounds less than when he’d last seen her, she still spoke shyly. She had put a square baker’s box down on a table when she came in, and now she took it up and opened it. “I know how awful hospital food is,” she said, “so I baked a pie for you myself. It’s apple. Do you like apple?” she asked anxiously.

  “I love apple.” He didn’t tell her that he hadn’t been able to get any solid food down in almost two months.

  “Do you think we could get a plate and a knife and fork?” Mrs. Dolger asked the nurse. “I’d like to see him eat a piece with my own eyes.”