Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Robert waited on the cliff’s edge. In the swirling, cold cloud, he felt warm, capable, powerful, curiously light-headed. For the first time in his life he understood the profound, sensual pleasure of destruction. He waved gaily at Mac and the Italian girl as they moved off together on the traverse to one of the easier runs on the other side of the mountain.

  Then the door to the station opened again and the woman who was with the German came out. She had her skis on and Robert realized that they had been so long inside because they had put their skis on in the waiting room. In bad weather people often did that, so that they wouldn’t freeze their hands on the icy metal of the bindings in the biting wind outdoors. The woman held the door open and Robert saw the man in the white cap coming through the opening. But he wasn’t coming out like everybody else. He was hopping, with great agility, on one leg. The other leg was cut off in mid-thigh and to keep his balance the German had miniature skis fixed on the end of his poles, instead of the usual thonged baskets.

  Through the years, Robert had seen other one-legged skiers, veterans of Hitler’s armies, who had refused to allow their mutilation to keep them off the mountains they loved, and he had admired their fortitude and skill. But he felt no admiration for the man in the white cap. All he felt was a bitter sense of loss, of having been deprived, at the last moment, of something that had been promised to him and that he had wanted and desperately needed. Because he knew he was not strong enough to murder a cripple, to punish the already punished, and he despised himself for his weakness.

  He watched as the man made his way across the snow with crablike cunning, hunched over his poles with their infants’ skis on the ends. Two or three times, when the man and the woman came to a rise, the woman got silently behind the man and pushed him up the slope until he could move under his own power again.

  The cloud had been swept away and there was a momentary burst of sunlight and in it, Robert could see the man and the woman traverse to the entrance to the run, which was the steepest one on the mountain. Without hesitation, the man plunged into it, skiing skillfully, courageously, overtaking more timid or weaker skiers who were picking their way cautiously down the slope.

  Watching the couple, who soon became tiny figures on the white expanse below him, Robert knew there was nothing more to be done, nothing more to wait for, except a cold, hopeless, everlasting forgiveness.

  The two figures disappeared out of the sunlight into the solid bank of cloud that cut across the lower part of the mountain. Then Robert went over to where he had left his skis and put them on. He did it clumsily. His hands were cold because he had taken off his mittens in the teleferique cabin, in that hopeful and innocent past, ten minutes ago, when he had thought the German insult could be paid for with a few blows of the bare fist.

  He went off, fast, on the run that Mac had taken with the Italian girl, and he caught up with them before they were halfway down. It began to snow when they reached the village and they went into the hotel and had a hilarious lunch with a lot of wine and the girl gave Mac her address and said he should be sure to look her up the next time he came to Rome.

  In the French Style

  Beddoes got in from Egypt in the middle of the morning. He went to his hotel and shook hands with the concierge and told him that the trip had been fine but that Egyptians were impossible. From the concierge he found out that the city was crowded, as usual, and that the price of the room had gone up once more, as usual.

  “The tourist season now lasts twelve months a year,” the concierge said, giving Beddoes his key. “Nobody stays home any more. It is exhausting.”

  Beddoes went upstairs and told the porter to put his typewriter in the closet, because he didn’t want to see it for a while. He opened the window and looked out with pleasure at the Seine flowing past. Then he took a bath and put on fresh clothes and gave Christina’s number over the telephone to the woman at the switchboard. The woman at the switchboard had an insulting habit of repeating numbers in English, and Beddoes noticed, with a smile, that that had not changed. There was the familiar hysteria on the wires as the woman on the switchboard got Christina’s number. The telephone in Christina’s hotel was down the hall from her room, and Beddoes had to spell the name slowly—Mlle. “T” for Théodore, “A” for André, “T” for Théodore, “E” for Edouard—before the man on the other end understood and went away to tell Christina an American gentleman demanded her on the telephone.

  Beddoes heard Christina’s footsteps coming down the hall toward the telephone and he thought he could tell from the sound that she was wearing high heels.

  “Hello,” Christina said. There was a sudden crackle on the wire as Christina spoke, but even so Beddoes could recognize the breathless, excited tone of her voice. Christina answered the phone as though she expected each call to be an invitation to a party.

  “Hi, Chris,” Beddoes said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “The voice of Egypt,” said Beddoes.

  “Walter!” Christina said happily. “When did you get in?”

  “This minute,” Beddoes said, lying by an hour to please her. “Are you wearing high heels?”

  “What?”

  “You’re wearing high heels, aren’t you?”

  “Wait a minute while I look,” Christina said. Then, after a pause, “Did you turn psychic in Cairo?”

  Beddoes chuckled. “Semi-Oriental fakery,” he said. “I brought back a supply. Where’re we going for lunch?”

  “Walter!” Christina said. “I’m in despair.”

  “You have a date.”

  “Yes. When are you going to learn to cable?”

  “That’s O.K.,” Beddoes said carelessly. He made a point of never sounding disappointed. He had a feeling that if he asked Christina to break the date she would, but he also made a point of never pleading for anything. “We’ll make it later.”

  “How about a drink this afternoon?”

  “We can start with that,” Beddoes said. “Five?”

  “Make it five-thirty,” Christina said.

  “Where’re you going to be?” Beddoes asked, minutely annoyed at the postponement.

  “Near the Étoile” Christina said.

  “Alexandre’s?”

  “Fine,” Christina said. “Will you be on time for once?”

  “Be more polite,” Beddoes said, “the first day the man comes to town.”

  “A tout à l’heure,” Christina said.

  “What did you say, Ma’am?”

  “All the kids are speaking French this year.” Christina laughed. “Isn’t it nice to have you back in town.”

  There was a click as she hung up. Beddoes put the phone down slowly and went over to the window. He stared at the river, thinking that this was the first time in a long while that Christina hadn’t come over immediately when he arrived in Paris. The river appeared cold and the trees were bare and the sky looked as though it had been gray for months. But with all that, the city looked promising. Even the sunless, snowless winter weather couldn’t prevent Paris from looking promising.

  He had lunch with a man from the A. P. who had just come back from America. The man from the A.P. said that things were in unholy shape in America and that even if you ate in drugstores it cost at least a dollar and a half for lunch and Beddoes ought to be damned glad he wasn’t there.

  Beddoes got to the café a little late, but Christina hadn’t arrived. He sat on the glass-enclosed terrace, next to the huge window, feeling it cold from the winter afternoon against his sleeve. The terrace was crowded with women drinking tea and men reading the evening newspapers. Outside, under the trees, a little parade was forming, the veterans of some World War I unit, huddling, middle-aged, and chilled in their overcoats, with their flags and decorations, preparing to walk behind an Army band up to the Arch and put a wreath on the tomb in memory of comrades who had fallen in battles that no one any longer remembered. The French, Beddoes thought sourly, because Christina was late and the aftern
oon had failed its promise, are always finding occasions to block traffic. They have an endless supply of dead to celebrate.

  He ordered a beer, because he had drunk too much at lunch. He had also eaten too much, in the first wave of gluttony after Egyptian food. His stomach felt uncomfortable, and he was suddenly very tired from all the miles he had traveled in the past twenty-four hours. After the age of thirty-five, he thought, in evening melancholy, no matter how swift the plane, how calm the air, how soft the cushion, the bones record the miles inexorably. He had turned thirty-five three months before and he had begun to reflect uneasily upon age. He stared at his face in mirrors, noticing wrinkles under his eyes and gray in his beard when he shaved. He remembered hearing that aging ballplayers shaved two and three times a day to keep managers and sportswriters from seeing the telltale flecks in beard stubble. Maybe, he thought, career men in the foreign service ought to do the same thing. Seventy minus thirty-five leaves thirty-five, he thought. It was an equation that came ominously to mind, especially late in the afternoon, more and more often after the midway anniversary. He stared out through the cold glass at the shuffling veterans, ranked shabbily behind their flags, their breath, mingled with cigarette smoke, rising in little clouds above their heads. He wished they’d start marching and get away from there. “Veteran” was a word that suddenly fell on his ear with an unpleasant sound.

  He also wished that Christina would arrive. It wasn’t like her to be late. She was one of those rare girls who always got to places exactly on the appointed hour. Irrelevantly, he remembered that she also dressed with great speed and took only a minute or two to comb her hair. She had blond hair, cut in the short Parisian manner, which left the back of her neck bare. Beddoes thought about the back of Christina’s neck and felt better.

  They would give themselves a gay evening, he thought. One should not permit himself to feel tired or old in Paris. If the feeling ever gets chronic, he told himself, I’ll move away for good.

  He thought about the evening ahead of him. They’d wander around to a couple of bars, avoiding their friends and not drinking too much, and go to a bistro in the markets where there were thick steaks and a heavy red wine, and after that maybe they’d go to the night club where there was a queer, original puppet show and three young men who sang funny songs that, unlike so many night-club songs, really did turn out to be funny. When you came out into the street after their act you were charmed and amused and you had the sense that this was the way a man should feel in Paris at two o’clock in the morning.

  The night before he left for Cairo, he had taken Christina there. The prospect of going back on this first night home gave him an unexplained but pleasant feeling of satisfactory design. Christina had looked very pretty, the prettiest girl in the room full of handsome women, he’d thought, and he had even danced, for the first time in months. The music was supplied by a pianist and a man who got quivering, rich sounds from an electric guitar, and they played those popular French songs that always made you feel how sweet was love in the city, how full of sorrow and tempered regret.

  The music had made Christina a little moony, he remembered, which was strange for her, and she had held his hand during the show, and kissed him when the lights went out between numbers. Her eyes had filled with tears for a moment and she had said, “What am I going to do without you for two months?” when he spoke of his departure the next morning. He had felt, a little warily, because he was affected, too, that it was lucky he was leaving, if she was moving into that phase. That was the pre-yearning-for-marriage phase, and you had to be on guard against it, especially late at night, in Paris, in darkened rooms where pianists and electric guitars played songs about dead leaves and dead loves and lovers who were separated by wars.

  Beddoes had been married once, and he felt, for the time being, that that was enough. Wives had a tendency to produce children, and sulk and take to drink or other men when their husbands were called away to the other side of the earth for three or four months at a time on jobs.

  He had been a little surprised at Christina. Yearning was not in her line. He had known her, although until recently not very well, almost from the time she arrived from the States four years before. She did some modeling for photographers and was pretty enough to have done very well at it, except that, as she said, she felt too silly making the fashionable languorous, sexy grimaces that were demanded of her. She knew how to type and take dictation and she found odd jobs with American businessmen who had work for a month or two at a time in Paris. She had picked up French immediately, and drove a car, and from time to time she got curious little jobs as a companion for old American ladies who wanted to tour through the château country or into Switzerland. She never seemed to need any sleep (even now she was only about twenty-six) and she would stay up all night with anybody and she went to all the parties and had had, to Beddoes’ knowledge, affairs with two friends of his—a free-lance photographer and an Air Transport Command pilot who had been killed in a crash outside Frankfurt. You could telephone her at any hour of the day or night without making her angry and you could introduce her into any group and be pleased with the way she behaved. She always knew which bistro was having a rage at the moment and who was singing at which night club and which new painter was worth seeing and who was in town and who was going to arrive next week and which little hotels outside Paris were pleasant for lunch or a weekend. She obviously didn’t have much money, but she dressed charmingly, French enough to amuse her French friends and not so French that she made Americans feel she was trying to pretend she was European. All in all, while she was not a girl of whom your grandmother was likely to approve, she was, as Beddoes had once told her, an ornament to the wandering and troubled years of the second half of the twentieth century.

  The veterans started to move off, the banners flapping a little in the dusk as the small parade turned past the TWA office and up the Champs-Elysèes. Beddoes watched them, thinking vaguely of other parades, other banners. Then he saw Christina striding diagonally across the street, swift and sure of herself in the traffic. She could live in Europe the rest of her life, Beddoes thought, smiling as he watched her, and all she’d have to do would be to walk ten steps and everybody would know she had been born on the other side of the ocean.

  He stood when she opened the door into the terrace. She was hatless, and Beddoes noticed that her hair was much darker than he remembered and she was wearing it longer. He kissed her on both cheeks as she came up to the table. “Welcome,” he said. “In the French style.”

  She hugged him momentarily. “Well, now,” she said, “here’s the man again.”

  She sat down, opening her coat, and smiled across the table at him. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold and her eyes were shining and she looked glitteringly young.

  “The spirit of Paris,” Beddoes said, touching her hand on the table. “American division. What’ll it be to drink?”

  “Tea, please. I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Tea?” Beddoes made a face. “Anything wrong?”

  “No.” Christina shook her head. “I just want tea.”

  “That’s a hell of a drink to welcome a traveler home on,” Beddoes said.

  “With lemon, please,” Christina said.

  Beddoes shrugged, and ordered one tea from the waiter.

  “How was Egypt?” Christina asked.

  “Was I in Egypt?” Beddoes stared at Christina, enjoying her face.

  “That’s what it said in the papers.”

  “Oh, yes,” Beddoes said. “A new world struggling to be born,” he said, his voice deep and expert. “Too late for feudalism, too early for democracy …”

  Christina made a face. “Lovely phrases for the State Department archives,” she said. “I mean over a drink how is Egypt.”

  “Sunny and sad,” Beddoes said. “After two weeks in Cairo you feel sorry for everybody. How is Paris?”

  “Too late for democracy,” Christina said, “too early for feudalis
m.”

  Beddoes grinned and leaned across the little table and kissed her gently. “I mean over a kiss,” he said, “how is Paris?”

  “The same,” Christina said. She hesitated. “Almost the same.”

  “Who’s around?”

  “The group,” Christina said carelessly. “The usual happy exiles. Charles, Boris, Anne, Teddy …”

  Teddy was the free-lance photographer. “You see much of him?” Beddoes asked, very lightly.

  “Uh?” Christina smiled, just a little, at him.

  “Merely checking.” Beddoes grinned.

  “No, I haven’t,” Christina said. “His Greek’s in town.”

  “Still the Greek?”

  “Still the Greek,” Christina said.

  The waiter came and placed the tea in front of her. She poured it into the cup and squeezed the lemon. She had long, competent fingers, and Beddoes noticed that she no longer used bright nail polish.

  “Your hair,” he said. “What happened?”

  Christina touched her hair absently. “Oh,” she said. “You noticed?”

  “Where’re the blondes of yesteryear?”

  “I decided to go natural.” Christina stirred her tea. “See what that was like for a change. Like it?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. It’s longer, too.”

  “Uh-huh. For the winter. The back of my neck was cold. People say it makes me look younger.”

  “They’re absolutely right,” Beddoes said. “You now look exactly eleven.”

  Christina smiled and lifted her cup to him. “To those who return,” she said.

  “I don’t accept toasts in tea,” Beddoes said.

  “You’re a finicky, liquor-loving man,” Christina said, and placidly sipped at her tea.

  “Now,” Beddoes said, “the evening. I thought we might skip our dear friends and go to that place in the markets for dinner, because I’m dying for a steak, and after that—” He stopped. “What’s the matter? Can’t we have dinner together?”