by Irwin Shaw
The evening passed as he had expected. He bought some roses at the station for Narcisse, but he couldn’t tell her about the alligator bag left on his desk, because he figured, correctly, that that would only compound the morning’s offense. He even suggested that they return to the city for an anniversary dinner, but Narcisse had had the whole day alone to augment her self-pity and brood upon her martyrdom, and she insisted on eating the fish, which had cost ninety-three cents a pound. By ten-thirty she was crying.
Hugh slept badly and got to the office early the next morning, but even the sight of the alligator bag, left squarely in the middle of the desk by the cleaning woman, did not raise his spirits. During the day he forgot the names of three of Sophocles’ plays (Oedipus at Colonus, Trachiniae, and Philoctetes) and the telephone number of his dentist.
It started that way. Hugh began to make more and more frequent trips to the reference library on the thirteenth floor, dreading the trip through the office, because of the way his fellow-workers commenced to look at him, curious and puzzled, as he traversed the room again and again in the course of an hour. One day he forgot the titles of the works of Sardou, the area of Santo Domingo, the symptoms of silicosis, the definition of syndrome, and the occasion of the mortification of Saint Simeon Stylites.
Hoping it would pass, he said nothing about it to anyone—not even to Jean, in the little bar on Lexington Avenue.
Mr. Gorsline took to standing for longer and longer periods behind Hugh’s desk, and Hugh sat there, pretending to be working, pretending he didn’t look haggard, his jowls hanging from his cheekbones like gallows ropes, his brain feeling like a piece of frozen meat that was being nibbled by a wolf. Once, Mr. Gorsline muttered something about hormones, and once, at four-thirty, he told Hugh to take the afternoon off. Hugh had worked for Mr. Gorsline for eighteen years and this was the first time Mr. Gorsline had told him to take an afternoon off. When Mr. Gorsline left his office, Hugh sat at his desk, staring blindly into terrifying depths.
One morning, some days after the anniversary, Hugh forgot the name of his morning newspaper. He stood in front of the news dealer, staring down at the ranked Times and Tribunes and News and Mirrors, and they all looked the same to him. He knew that for the past twenty-five years he had been buying the same paper each morning, but now there was no clue for him in their makeup or in their headlines as to which one it was. He bent down and peered more closely at the papers. The President, a headline announced, was to speak that night. As Hugh straightened up, he realized he no longer remembered the President’s name or whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. For a moment, he experienced what could be described only as an exquisite pang of pleasure. But he knew it was deceptive, like the ecstasy described by T. E. Lawrence on the occasion when he was nearly beaten to death by the Turks.
He bought a copy of Holiday, and stared numbly at the colored photographs of distant cities all the way down to the office. That morning, he forgot the date on which John L. Sullivan won the heavyweight championship of the world, and the name of the inventor of the submarine. He also had to go to the reference library because he wasn’t sure whether Santander was in Chile or Spain.
He was sitting at his desk that afternoon, staring at his hands, because for an hour he had had the feeling that mice were running between his fingers, when his son-in-law came into the office.
“Hi, Hughie, old boy,” his son-in-law said. From the very first night his son-in-law had appeared at the house, he had been unfalteringly breezy with Hugh.
Hugh stood up and said “Hello—” and stopped. He stared at his son-in-law. He knew it was his son-in-law. He knew it was Clare’s husband. But he couldn’t remember the man’s name. For the second time that day he experienced the trilling wave of pleasure that he had felt at the newsstand when he realized he had forgotten the name and political affiliations of the President of the United States. Only this time it seemed to last. It lasted while he shook hands with his son-in-law and all during the trip down in the elevator with him, and it lasted in the bar next door while he bought his son-in-law three Martinis.
“Hughie, old boy,” his son-in-law said during the third Martini, “let’s get down to cases. Clare said you had a problem you wanted to talk to me about. Spit it out, old boy, and let’s get it over with. What have you got on your mind?”
Hugh looked hard at the man across the table. He searched his brain conscientiously, but he couldn’t think of a single problem that might possibly involve them. “No,” Hugh said slowly. “I have nothing in particular on my mind.”
His son-in-law kept looking at Hugh belligerently while Hugh was paying for the drinks, but Hugh merely hummed under his breath, smiling slightly at the waitress. Outside, where they stood for a moment, his son-in-law cleared his throat once and said, “Now, look here, old boy, if it’s about—” but Hugh shook his hand warmly and walked briskly away, feeling deft and limber.
But back in his office, looking down at his cluttered desk, his sense of well-being left him. He had moved on to the “T”s by now, and as he looked at the scraps of paper and the jumble of books on his desk, he realized that he had forgotten a considerable number of facts about Tacitus and was completely lost on the subject of Taine. There was a sheet of notepaper on his desk with the date and the beginning of a salutation: “Dear …”
He stared at the paper and tried to remember who it was he had been writing to. It was five minutes before it came to him; the letter was to have been to his son, and he had meant, finally, to enclose the check for the two hundred and fifty dollars, as requested. He felt in his inside pocket for his checkbook. It wasn’t there. He looked carefully through all the drawers of his desk, but the checkbook wasn’t there, either. Shaking a little, because this was the first time in his life that he had misplaced a checkbook, he decided to call up his bank and ask them to mail him a new book. He picked up the phone. Then he stared at it blankly. He had forgotten the telephone number of the bank. He put the phone down and opened the classified telephone directory to “B.” Then he stopped. He swallowed dryly. He had forgotten the name of his bank. He looked at the page of banks. All the names seemed vaguely familiar to him, but no one name seemed to have any special meaning for him. He closed the book and stood up and went over to the window. He looked out. There were two pigeons sitting on the sill, looking cold, and across the street a bald man was standing at a window in the building opposite, smoking a cigarette and staring down as though he were contemplating suicide.
Hugh went back to his desk and sat down. Perhaps it was an omen, he thought, the thing about the checkbook. Perhaps it was a sign that he ought to take a sterner line with his son. Let him pay for his own mistakes for once. He picked up his pen, resolved to write this to Alabama. “Dear …” he read. He looked for a long time at the word. Then he carefully closed his pen and put it back in his pocket. He no longer remembered his son’s name.
He put on his coat and went out, although it was only three-twenty-five. He walked all the way up to the Museum, striding lightly, feeling better and better with each block. By the time he reached the Museum, he felt like a man who has just been told that he has won a hundred-dollar bet on a fourteen-to-one shot. In the Museum, he went and looked at the Egyptians. He had meant to look at the Egyptians for years, but he had always been too busy.
When he got through with the Egyptians, he felt wonderful. He continued feeling wonderful all the way home in the subway. He no longer made any attempt to buy the newspapers. They didn’t make any sense to him. He didn’t recognize any of the people whose names appeared in the columns. It was like reading the Karachi Sind Observer or the Sonora El Mundo. Not having a paper in his hands made the long ride much more agreeable. He spent his time in the subway looking at the people around him. The people in the subway seemed much more interesting, much more pleasant, now that he no longer read in the newspapers what they were doing to each other.
Of course, once he opened his front door, his euphoria left hi
m. Narcisse had taken to looking at him very closely in the evenings, and he had to be very careful with his conversation. He didn’t want Narcisse to discover what was happening to him. He didn’t want her to worry, or try to cure him. He sat all evening listening to the phonograph, but he forgot to change the record. It was an automatic machine and it played the last record of the second Saint-Saëns piano concerto seven times before Narcisse came in from the kitchen and said, “I’m going out of my mind,” and turned it off.
He went to bed early. He heard Narcisse crying in the next bed. It was the third time that month. There were between two and five more times to go. He remembered that.
The next afternoon, he was working on Talleyrand. He was bent over his desk, working slowly but not too badly, when he became conscious that there was someone standing behind him. He swung in his chair. A gray-haired man in a tweed suit was standing there, staring down at him.
“Yes?” Hugh said curtly. “Are you looking for someone?”
The man, surprisingly, turned red, then went out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Hugh shrugged incuriously and turned back to Talleyrand.
The elevator was crowded when he left for the day, and the hall downstairs was thronged with clerks and secretaries hurrying out of the building. Near the entrance, a very pretty girl was standing, and she smiled and waved at Hugh over the heads of the homeward-bound office workers. Hugh stopped for an instant, flattered, and was tempted to smile back. But he had a date with Jean, and anyway he was too old for anything like that. He set his face and hurried out in the stream of people. He thought he heard a kind of wail, which sounded curiously like “Daddy,” but he knew that was impossible, and didn’t turn around.
He went to Lexington Avenue, enjoying the shining winter evening, and. started north. He passed two bars and was approaching a third when he slowed down. He retraced his steps, peering at the bar fronts. They all had chromium on them, and neon lights, and they all looked the same. There was another bar across the street. He went and looked at the bar across the street, but it was just like the others. He went into it, anyway, but Jean wasn’t there. He ordered a whisky, standing at the bar, and asked the bartender, “Have you seen a lady alone in here in the last half hour?”
The bartender looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “What’s she look like?” he asked.
“She—” Hugh stopped. He sipped his drink. “Never mind,” he said to the bartender. He laid a dollar bill on the counter and went out.
Walking over to the subway station he felt better than he had felt since he won the hundred-yard dash at the age of eleven at the annual field day of the Brigham Young Public School in Salt Lake City on June 9, 1915.
The feeling lasted, of course, only until Narcisse put the soup on the table. Her eyes were puffed, and she had obviously been crying that afternoon, which was curious, because Narcisse never cried when she was alone. Eating his dinner, conscious of Narcisse watching him closely across the table, Hugh began to feel the mice between his fingers again. After dinner, Narcisse said, “You can’t fool me. There’s another woman.” She also said, “I never thought this would happen to me.”
By the time Hugh went to bed, he felt like a passenger on a badly loaded freighter in a winter storm off Cape Hatteras.
He awoke early, conscious that it was a sunny day outside. He lay in bed, feeling warm and healthy. There was a noise from the next bed, and he looked across the little space. There was a woman in the next bed. She was middle-aged and was wearing curlers and she was snoring and Hugh was certain he had never seen her before in his life. He got out of bed silently, dressed quickly, and went out into the sunny day.
Without thinking about it, he walked to the subway station. He watched the people hurrying toward the trains and he knew that he probably should join them. He had the feeling that somewhere in the city to the south, in some tall building on a narrow street, his arrival was expected. But he knew that no matter how hard he tried he would never be able to find the building. Buildings these days, it occurred to him suddenly, were too much like other buildings.
He walked briskly away from the subway station in the direction of the river. The river was shining in the sun and there was ice along the banks. A boy of about twelve, in a plaid mackinaw and a wool hat, was sitting on a bench and regarding the river. There were some schoolbooks, tied with a leather strap, on the frozen ground at his feet.
Hugh sat down next to the boy. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly.
“Good morning,” said the boy.
“What’re you doing?” Hugh asked.
“I’m counting the boats,” the boy said. “Yesterday I counted thirty-two boats. Not counting ferries. I don’t count ferries.”
Hugh nodded. He put his hands in his pockets and looked down over the river. By five o’clock that afternoon he and the boy-had counted forty-three boats, not including ferries. He couldn’t remember having had a nicer day.
The Man Who Married
a French Wife
The habit had grown on him. Now it had assumed the shape of a nightly ritual. When he sat down in the commuters’ train at Grand Central, he opened the French newspaper first. He read with difficulty, because he had only begun to teach himself the language after he had come back from Europe, and that was more than a year ago. Finally, he read almost the entire paper, the list of accidents and crimes on the second page, the political section, the theatrical section, even the sports page. But what he turned to first, always, was the account of the attentats, and plastiquages, the assassinations and bombings and massacres that were being perpetrated in Algeria and throughout France by the Secret Army, in rebellion against the government of General de Gaulle.
He was looking for a name. For more than a year he hadn’t found it. Then, on a rainy spring evening, as the crowded train, full of suburbia’s prisoners, pulled out of the station, he saw it. There had been eleven bombings in Paris the night before, the paper reported. A bookshop had been blown up, a pharmacy, the apartments of two officials, the home of a newspaperman. The newspaperman had been cut around the head, but his days, as the phrase went in French, were not in danger.
Beauchurch put the paper under the seat. This was one newspaper he wasn’t going to take home with him.
He sat staring out the window, now sluiced with rain, as the train came up from the tunnel and raced along Park Avenue. Matters hadn’t worked out exactly as predicted, but close enough, close enough. He stared out through the window and the year vanished and the tenements and rainy roofs of New York were replaced by the afternoon streets of Paris.…
Beauchurch went into a tabac and by means of pantomime and pointing got the cigar he wanted. It was the second cigar of the afternoon. At home he never smoked a cigar until after dinner, but he was on holiday, and he had had a fine lunch with two old friends, and Paris was brisk and strange and amusing around him, and the second cigar gave him an added feeling of luxury and well-being. He lit the cigar carefully and strolled along the rich street, admiring the shop windows and the way the women looked and the last light of the autumn sun on Napoleon atop his high green pillar. He looked into a famous jeweler’s shop and half-decided to be terribly extravagant and buy a clip for his wife. He went in and priced the clip and came out shaking his head. A little farther on he stopped at a bookshop and bought her a large, beautifully printed volume containing colored prints of the École de Paris. The book was expensive, but it felt like a bargain after the clip.
Ginette wasn’t crazy about jewelry, anyway. Luckily. Because until the last year or so, when Beauchurch had been taken in as a partner in the law firm for which he had worked ever since he’d gotten his degree, he and Ginette had had to be very canny about money. What with the children and taxes and building the house near Stamford, there was very little left over for things like diamond clips. Besides, Beauchurch thought, she’s so beautiful and smart she doesn’t need diamonds. He smiled to himself at this clever and flattering rationalization.
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Then, a half-block from the hotel, he saw her. She was about twenty yards ahead of him and there were quite a few people between them, but there was no mistaking that bright, neat head and the straight, disciplined way she held herself as she walked. But she wasn’t alone. She was with a man in a raincoat and a soft green Tyrolian kind of hat, and she was holding his arm as they walked slowly toward the hotel on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli. They were talking earnestly, Ginette’s face turned to the man, as he guided her among the pedestrians, and from time to time they stopped, as though the gravity of their conversation had halted them.
As he watched them, Beauchurch felt his sense of well-being, of luxury, of pleasure at being in this city for the first time in his life, suddenly sliding away from him. She was so obviously involved with the man in the raincoat, so fixed, concerned, intimate, so patently oblivious of everything else around her, that she gave Beauchurch the feeling that if he went up to her and stood in front of her it would be some time before she would recognize him or acknowledge him as her husband. After nearly thirteen years of marriage, the intensity of his wife’s connection with a stranger on a foreign street made Beauchurch feel lost, disavowed, and for one moment he faced the realization that it was possible that one day she would leave him.
