Acceptable Losses (3 page)

“Isn’t it marvelous?” Genevieve said. She had a small defensive voice, as though she was used to being contradicted by her husband and children on all occasions. “Week after week. It’s like a fairy tale.”

More than you’ll ever know, sweetheart, Damon thought. But, he said, “You’ve touched the marrow of readers everywhere.” Before the sale to the paperbacks he would have blushed to hear himself utter the words. “I wanted to ask you—by any chance did you get a telephone call from a man called Zalovsky?”

“Zalovsky, Zalovsky?” Genevieve sounded uncertain. “I don’t remember. So many people keep calling these days. Television, radio, interviews … My husband says he’s going to ask for an unlisted number …”

Another unlisted number, Damon thought. Succeed and hide. The American Way.

“Zalovsky …” Genevieve went on: “Why do you ask?”

“I got a telephone call. About the book. He was quite vague. He said he might call again and I thought that perhaps he preferred dealing directly with you. As you know, there’s only Oliver and myself and the secretary in the office, and since you hit it so big we find it hard to keep up with all the requests … It’s not like in some of the big offices, with dozens of people and departments and all …”

“I know. They all turned my book down before I came to you.” The voice was not defensive now, but bitter and cold. “And not with ordinary civility, either. You and Oliver were the first two true gentlemen I met since I wrote the book.”

“We try to keep in mind the old maxim, which my former partner Mr. Gray liked to repeat—publishing is a gentleman’s business. Of course that was a long time ago and times have changed. Still, it’s nice to know that one’s manners are appreciated in some quarters.” He was always uncomfortable when talking to Genevieve Dolger. His speech sounded in his ears as though it had been starched and ironed. He was disturbed that he could not speak normally to this woman whom circumstance had thrown into his life. He was not a man who dissembled. It was his policy, of which he was proud, that he said exactly what he thought to his clients, whether in praise or admonition. If they bridled at his criticism or became angry or overly defensive, he would tell them frankly that they would be happier with another office. That was the only way he could work, he explained to them. Now this woman, who had enriched him, made him speak as though he had a mouth full of marshmallows.

“Don’t think that I’ll ever forget your help or what I owe you,” Genevieve was saying, her voice quivering. “I’ll be grateful to you two all my life for what you’ve done for me.”

“I’m sure you will,” Damon said, remembering all the authors who had at one time or another said much the same thing and then gone on, sometimes shamefacedly, sometimes in anger, to the large agencies which could introduce them to movie stars, send limousines to meet them at the airport, secure tickets at the last moment for Broadway hits that had been sold out for months, arrange television publicity campaigns throughout the country and business lunches in the best restaurants in town. “Be sure to let me know when you get your unlisted number.”

“You’ll be the first one I’ll call, Roger,” she said, her voice, to Damon’s sorrow, filled with genuine emotion.

“Oh,” he said, asking the question he knew she was waiting to be asked, “how’s the new book going?”

Genevieve sighed, a soft, sad sound over the wire. “Oh, it’s just terrible,” she said, “I can’t seem to get really going. I write a page and reread it and I know it’s perfectly awful and I tear it up and then go bake a pie to keep from crying.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Damon said, much relieved by her news. “The beginnings’re always the hardest. And don’t press yourself. There’s no hurry, you know.”

“You’ll have to learn to be patient with me,” she said.

“I’m used to writers’ blocks,” Damon said, knowing that he ought to cross his fingers as he pretended to accept the woman as a practitioner of that austere and terrifying profession. “They come and go. Well, congratulations again and don’t forget—if you need me just call.”

He hung up. If he was lucky, he thought, she would bake a hundred pies before she finished the new book, and he would have long since left the office and retired to the little house in Old Lyme on the shores of the Sound. At least, he thought, as he put down the telephone, Zalovsky hadn’t gotten to her. If he had, she’d certainly have remembered the name.

He moved restlessly around the apartment. He had brought a long manuscript home with him to read during the weekend and picked it up and tried to read a few pages, but they made no sense to him and he tossed it aside. He went into the bedroom and carefully made the bed, something he hadn’t done since the day he was married. Genevieve Dolger with her pies, he with his bed. He looked at his watch. Sheila wouldn’t be home for another six hours. Sundays without her were pointless. He decided to go out and take a walk until it was time to eat lunch. But just as he was putting on his coat the phone rang. He let it ring six times without moving toward the instrument, staring at it, hoping that whoever it was would get tired of waiting and stop. But the phone rang a seventh time. He picked it up, expecting to hear the heavy, hoarse voice. But it was the woman whose manuscript he had brought home with him and which he couldn’t read for the moment.

“I just wanted to know if you’d finished reading my book,” the woman said. Her voice was the best thing about her—deep and musical. He had had a brief affair with her two years before. Sheila had said, when she was informed of it by a friend, that the woman had flung herself at his head. Sheila’s phrases. For once the phrase had been accurate. After their second meeting the woman had said, “I must tell you. You have the sexiest face of any man I’ve ever met. When you come into a room it’s like a bull coming into the arena.” She had spent a year in Spain and she had read too much Hemingway and her speech was sprinkled with Iberian images. If she had used the word
cojones
he would not have touched either her or her manuscript. But she refrained and he had succumbed, even though he had never thought of himself in the terms in which she described him. Actually, he thought that when he came into a room he shambled. And he had never seen a bull with pale gray eyes like this. Look into the mirror and see an alien face.

The woman was fairly pretty and fairly intelligent and not a bad writer and kept her body in trim by going to a gym class daily. He had been flattered that such a woman would go to such lengths to get him into her bed. At his age. Well, sixty something was not the edge of the grave. In one of her rare bitter moments, Sheila had said to him, “You
squander
yourself on women.” Marriage had not cured him of that particular weakness. The liaison had been agreeable, no more than that.

“I like what I’ve read so far,” he said. He had an image of her lying naked on the bed, the breasts taut, the gym legs muscled. He nearly invited her to have lunch with him, then decided against it. Do not add to whatever testimony anyone is amassing against you. “I’ll try to finish it by tonight. I’ll call you,” he said.

Then he went out and walked aimlessly around the streets of Greenwich Village. Nobody seemed to be following him. Usually, on Sundays, he and Sheila had late lunch at a small Italian restaurant which they both liked.
Buon giorno
,
Signor
,
Signora
,
va bene?
A gangster had been shot there several years before. Spaghetti with clam sauce. Cozy Sunday afternoons when they could unwind together and forget the stresses of the week behind them and the week ahead over a bottle of Chianti.

The restaurant was crowded and he had to wait for a table and the owner had asked after the health of the missing signora. The noisy people at the other tables made him feel lonelier than ever and the half-bottle of wine did not improve matters. As he ate, he wondered what it was like to be shot in a small Italian restaurant.

CHAPTER

THREE

W
HEN HE GOT BACK
after lunch there was a sheet of paper half-stuffed into the slot of his mailbox. He looked at it apprehensively, hesitated before he touched it, then pulled it out. The piece of paper had been torn from a sketch block and the message on it, scrawled in heavy black pencil, was from Gregor. “We were passing by,” the message read, “and rang your bell. We are rebuffed. Do you hide from us? Friends should be home on Sunday. We are celebrating. I will tell you about it when I see you. We wish to share our joy with our comrades. If you read this before midnight come to us. It will be a festa Hungarian style. There will be wine and women and hard sausage. At least
one
woman and
one
sausage. Avanti.”

Damon smiled as he read the note, then, as he climbed the stairs to the apartment, looked at his watch. It was not yet three o’clock and Sheila wasn’t due home until six. He always enjoyed seeing Gregor Khodar and his hospitable and talented wife. Besides, Damon represented a playwright whose play was to go into rehearsal in September and he hoped Gregor could do the sets. Gregor, in his account of the process of his Americanization, had told him that he had started walking west when the Russians came into Budapest in 1956 and hadn’t stopped until he reached New York. “Whatever happened,” Gregor had once confided to Damon, “I knew it would be bad for human beings. So I asked myself question—am I, Gregor Khodar, human being? I examined pros and cons. I decided, yes, maybe not highest class human being, but still in category.”

He had been twenty then, a penniless art student, and there had been some dreadful times, of which he never spoke, before he established himself in New York. And he never disclosed whether or not he had left any family behind him.

Although he was proud of being Hungarian (a civilized people always caught in the wrong century was his way of describing his compatriots) he was not sentimental about it. “Middle Europa,” he said, “is like those coral atolls in the Pacific. The tide comes in—you don’t see it. The tide goes out—it is there. The best that you can say for it is that it is peril to navigation. When I drink Tokay wine and I am little drunk I think there is after-taste of blood and sea water.”

With his high brow and receding sparse black hair, bland, archaic smile and round, comfortable middle-aged paunch, he looked, Damon had once told him, like a Buddha, contemplating mischief.

He spoke with a soft, peculiar accent, his dark Magyar face lit by deep, mocking eyes, his lips, with an extra little upturned curl like an ornamental bow which was meant to be hung on a wall but not for killing, making it seem that nothing he said was to be taken seriously. However, he was a dedicated and gifted artist and aside from his paintings, which had been exhibited in galleries all over the country, had done the scenery for many Broadway plays. He painted slowly and painstakingly and turned down commissions for plays by the dozen because they did not please him, so he could not afford to live like a rich man but made a jest of his poverty as compared to the affluence of his more accommodating colleagues.

His wife, Ebba, a large, lanky, sweet woman with a frontierswoman’s worn face, came from Swedish stock in Minnesota and was a theatrical costume designer. Between them, aside from forming a devoted and socially most rewarding couple, they combined to make an extremely useful working team.

Damon had no idea what Gregor was celebrating, but a few hours of noise and conversation in their big loft near the Hudson River which the Khodars had converted into a studio in which they could both work and live would certainly be better than brooding through the long Sunday afternoon by himself.

Just in case Sheila arrived ahead of schedule he left a note saying that he was at Gregor’s and for her to call. Sheila liked the couple and had even for once sat still enough for Gregor to paint her portrait the previous summer when the Khodars had visited them in Connecticut. Gregor had not been satisfied with his work and kept it on an easel in his studio so that he could keep dabbing at it from time to time. “The problem, Sheila,” he had told her, “is that you are noble, face, figure, character, everything, and they don’t make paints anymore in the modern age to express nobility. At least not in human beings. People just don’t look noble anymore. Only certain dogs, Newfoundlands, golden retrievers, Irish setters. Give me time, give me time. I must go back to the fifteenth century. It is not a short subway ride.”

Gregor greeted Damon with a hug and Ebba with a shy kiss on the cheek. Gregor, who had his own ideas about how an artist should dress, was wearing a checked flannel shirt with a large bright orange wool necktie and baggy corduroy pants. He had on a thick chocolate brown tweed jacket, which he wore in even the hottest weather. It was as though at one time in his life he had been so chilled that he would never be warm enough again.

Unlike other artists’ studios there were no examples of Gregor’s work on exhibition. Sheila’s portrait on the easel was covered with a cloth and all his other canvases were stacked faces to the wall. “I am afraid,” Gregor had explained, “to look at what I have already done when I am doing something else. If I am tired or in rough passage, there would be great temptation to take easy way out—plagiarize myself. When I am drunk, late at night, all work done for the day, I look at them. I laugh or I cry, then I hide them again.”

Damon was relieved to see that it was not a large party, just a Mr. and Mrs. James Franklin, whom he had met several times before with Gregor. They were owners of a gallery they ran together on Madison Avenue. Both the Franklins were wearing No Nuke buttons and Damon remembered reading that there had been a demonstration that day against nuclear weapons.

There was also a pleasant, handsome lady by the name of Bettina Lacey of about sixty who had a divorced husband in her past and ran an antique store. They were all drinking wine, as Gregor had promised, and there were slim slices of hard Hungarian sausage arranged on a large platter, garnished with radishes.

After the greetings, and they had seated themselves, European fashion, around a large, scrubbed wood circular table, Damon asked, “What’s this about a celebration?”