Short Stories: Five Decades (27 page)

Dora didn’t say anything. She hung onto him tightly as they went down the street. They turned at the corner and walked down Madison Avenue. After a while they stopped at a shop that had phonographs and radios in the window. “That’s what I want.” Paul pointed at a machine. “A Capehart. It plays two symphonies at a time. You just lie on your back and out come Brahms and Beethoven and Prokofieff. That’s the way life should be. Lie on your back and be surrounded by great music, automatically.”

Dora looked at the phonograph, all mahogany and doors and machinery. “Do you really think there’s going to be a war?” she said.

“Sure. They’re warming up the pitchers now. They’re waiting to see if the other side has right-handed or left-handed batters before they nominate their starting pitchers.”

They continued walking downtown.

“But it’s in Europe,” Dora said. “Do you think we’ll get into it?”

“Sure. Read the papers.” He glanced at the window they were passing. “Look at those nice tables. Informal luncheons on your terrace. Metal and glass for outdoor feeding. That would be nice, eating out on a terrace off those wonderful colored plates, rich food with green salads. With a view of mountains and a lake, and inside, the phonograph.”

“That sounds good,” Dora said quietly.

“I could get an extra speaker,” Paul said, “and wire it out to the terrace, so we could listen as we ate. I like Mozart with dinner.” He laughed and drew her to a bookstore window.

“I always get sad,” Dora said, “when I look in a bookshop window and see all the books I’m never going to have time to read.”

Paul kissed her. “What did you think the first time you saw me?” he asked.

“What did
you
think?”

“I thought, ‘I must get that girl!’”

Dora laughed, close to him.

“What did you think?” Paul asked.

“I thought”—she giggled—“I thought, ‘I must get that man!’”

“Isn’t New York marvelous?” Paul said. “Where did you say you come from?”

“Seattle,” Dora said. “Seattle, Washington.”

“Here we are on Madison Avenue, holding hands, shopping for the future.…”

“Even if there was a war,” Dora said after a while, “why would you have to get mixed up in it? Why would the United States have to get mixed up in it?”

“They got into the last one, didn’t they?” Paul said. “They’ll get into this one.”

“They were gypped the last time,” Dora said. “The guys who were killed were gypped.”

“That’s right,” said Paul. “They were killed for six-per-cent interest on bonds, for oil wells, for spheres of influence. I wish I had a sphere of influence.”

“Still,” said Dora, “you’d enlist this time?”

“Yop. The first day. I’d walk right up to the recruiting office and say, ‘Paul Triplett, twenty-six years old, hard as nails, good eyes, good teeth, good feet; give me a gun. Put me in a plane, so I can do a lot of damage.”

They walked a whole block in silence.

“Don’t you think you’d be gypped this time, too?” Dora said. “Don’t you think they’d have you fighting for bonds and oil wells all over again?”

“Uh huh.”

“And even so, you’d sign up?”

“The first day.”

Dora pulled her hand away from him. “Do you
like
the idea of killing people?”

“I hate the idea,” Paul said slowly. “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I think the idea of war is ridiculous. I want to live in a world in which everybody sits on a terrace and eats off a metal-and-glass table off colored plates and the phonograph inside turns Mozart over automatically and the music is piped out to an extra loud-speaker on the terrace. Only Hitler isn’t interested in that kind of world. He’s interested in another kind of world. I couldn’t stand to live in his kind of world, German or homemade.”

“You wouldn’t kill Hitler,” Dora said. “You’d just kill young boys like yourself.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you like that?”

“I’m really not interested in killing Hitler, either,” Paul said. “I want to kill the idea he represents for so many people. In years to come I’ll cry over the young boys I’ve killed and maybe if they kill me, they’ll cry over me.”

“They’re probably just like you.” They were walking fast now.

“Sure,” Paul said. “I’m sure they’d love to go to bed with you tonight. I bet they’d love to walk along the fountains with the bronze statues in Rockefeller Plaza, holding hands with you on a spring Saturday evening and looking at the sports clothes in the windows. I bet a lot of them like Mozart, too, but still I’ll kill them. Gladly.”

“Gladly?”

“Yes, gladly.” Paul wiped his eyes with his hands, suddenly tired. “Gladly today. I’ll weep for them in years to come. Today they’re guns aimed at me and the world I want. Their bodies protect an idea I have to kill to live. Hey!” He stretched out his hands and caught hers. “What’s the sense talking about things like this tonight?”

“But it’s all a big fraud,” Dora cried. “You’re being used and you know it.”

“That’s right,” Paul said. “It’s all a big fraud, the whole business. Even so, I got to fight. I’ll be gypped, but by a little bit I’ll do something for my side, for Mozart on a terrace at dinner. What the hell, it’s not even heroism. I’ll be dragged in, whatever I say.”

“That’s too bad,” Dora said softly, walking by herself. “It’s too bad.”

“Sure,” Paul said. “Some day maybe it’ll be better. Maybe some day the world’ll be run for people who like Mozart. Not today.”

They stopped. They were in front of a little art store. There was a reproduction of the Renoir painting of a boating party on the river. There was the woman kissing the Pekinese, and the man in his underwear with a straw hat and his red beard, solid as earth, and the wit with his cocked derby hat whispering to the woman with her hands to her ears, and there was the great still life in the foreground, of wine and bottles and glasses and grapes and food.

“I saw it in Washington,” Paul said. “They had it in Washington. You can’t tell why it’s a great picture from the print. There’s an air of pink immortality hanging over it. They got it in New York now and I go look at it three times a week. It’s settled, happy, solid. It’s a picture of a summertime that vanished a long time ago.” Paul kissed her hand. “It’s getting late, darling, the hours’re dwindling. Let’s go home.”

They got into a cab and went downtown to his apartment.

The City Was in
Total Darkness

D
utcher stood at the bar, feeling clean after his shower and still thirsty, looking at the girls, glad that he was alone, listening with one ear to the conversation around him. “The British and French,” a man in a hound’s-tooth-check jacket was saying, “will shuttle back and forth over Germany from Paris to Warsaw. And besides, he has no oil. Everybody knows Hitler has no oil.”

“‘Darling,’ she says to me,” a large blonde woman said loudly to another large blonde woman, “‘darling, I haven’t seen you in for
ever
. Where’ve you been—in the summer theater?’ She knows goddamn well I just finished two pictures for Fox!”

“It’s a bluff,” the man in the hound’s-tooth-check said. “He’s going to back down, Russia or no Russia. He has no oil. Where are you today without oil?”

“Mr. Dutcher.” The barman brought over a phone and plugged it in. “For you.”

It was Machamer on the phone. “What’re you doing tonight, Ralph?” Machamer asked, his voice, as always, grating and noisy.

“I’m drinking tonight,” Dutcher said. “I’m drinking and waiting for something good to happen to me.”

“We’re going to Mexico,” Machamer said. “Want to come along?”

“Who’s we?”

“Dolly and me. Want to come along?”

“What part of Mexico?” Dutcher asked. “What distant part of that verdant land? Vera Cruz, Mexico City …?”

Machamer laughed. “Tia Juana. I got to be back on Tuesday to look for a job. Just overnight. For the races. Want to go?”

“Without oil,” the man in the check was saying, “a war is absolutely impractical.” Dutcher looked gravely at him, considering whether or not he wanted to go to Mexico. He had avoided people after playing tennis in the afternoon, because he’d wanted to be alone, by himself, with the decks clear for something special and significant to happen to him on this special and significant week end.

“Have they got bullfights in Tia Juana?” he asked Machamer.

“Maybe,” Machamer said. “They have them sometimes. Come on, this is Labor Day, there’s nobody in Hollywood.”

“I’m tired,” Dutcher said. “I’ve been listening to the radio for seven nights and I played tennis and I’m thirsty.”

“You can lie down in the back of the car, with a bottle,” Machamer said. Machamer was a young writer and very impressed with Dutcher’s two novels and constantly was after him. “I’ll drive.”

“I never saw a bullfight,” Dutcher said. “Did you ever see one there?”

“Oh, nuts!” Machamer said. “Dolly and I’ll be over in fifteen minutes to pick you up.”

“Tonight,” Dutcher said, “I would like to have a startling adventure.”

“Oh, nuts,” Machamer said. “Fifteen minutes.”

Dutcher gravely put the phone back on its pedestal. “I’ve got to find another bar,” he said to the barman. “Whenever people want to find me they call me here. It’s bad for the reputation. In two years nobody’ll give me a job.” The barman grinned. “Another Rum Collins,” Dutcher said, looking steadfastly at a slender girl down the bar who had long thick black hair and tremendous full breasts that jutted out like pennants in front of her. The barman looked too. “Doesn’t it break your heart?” the barman said.

“California,” Dutcher said. “Specialty of the country.”

“That cameraman,” one of the blonde ladies was saying, “he made me look like William S. Hart’s mother. I told him, too, but
loud!
”

In Poland, now, the tanks were roaring over the dusty plains. German boys were climbing into bombers now, Dutcher thought, fiddling with the controls, peering at the instruments, thinking in this one minute when they were waiting and there was nothing to do, “Is this the last time?” and then getting the signal and sweeping off the field toward Warsaw. Cavalry, Dutcher remembered, the Poles had wonderful cavalry. He could just see a wonderful Polish cavalryman sitting heavily on his plodding mount, retreating, sleepless, from the border, stinking from the horse, listening to the bombers overhead, thinking of sleep and home and the English air force, kicking his horse wearily, saying, “Son of a bitch.” And the rich and their women, like the rich and their women everywhere, leaving quietly out the back way, while the dawn broke and the light came up and the boy in the bomber could get a good clear view of the cavalryman on the long, open road below.

Dutcher looked at the girl with breasts like pennants. He sat at the bar, making believe he was staring blankly ahead, making believe nothing was happening inside him, feeling lust rise within him as definitely as water rising in a filling glass. General, non-particular lust, he thought, looking at the girl, pretty, with her black hair and long throat and bright print dress and that amazing bosom. I ought to be ashamed, Dutcher thought. The reader of Spinoza, the admirer of John Milton, the advocate of moral and economic reforms, a sufferer from general and indiscriminate lust ten times daily at the sight of a face, a ruffle, at the sound of a woman’s laugh.

“We live on two planes,” Dutcher said to the bartender. The bartender smiled weakly.

Hollywood, Dutcher thought, Hollywood had a great deal to do with it. It was the product of the neighborhood, and everywhere you went it was pushed in your face like cheese in Wisconsin, and you tried to keep yourself from thinking about
Murder at Midnight
and sex rushed in to fill the vacuum.
Murder at Midnight
was the picture he was writing. It had a long complicated story about a night-club singer who got drunks to spend money on her but who was genuine, all the way through, as everyone always said in the conferences. She had a small son from whom she bravely tried to conceal the tawdriness of her profession, and she got mixed up in a murder and she fled town in the rain with the son and the cops picked up an innocent man.… Dutcher shook his head. He never could get the story straight. Anyway, this was the week end. And he’d be through in two weeks and have enough money for eight months in New York. Why’m I kidding myself? he thought. I look at them in New York, too.

Hollywood, you could always blame everything on Hollywood. That was the nicest thing about Hollywood.

“Sacred and profane,” he told the bartender. “That’s the whole explanation.”

Machamer came in with Dolly. “On to Mexico,” Machamer said.

“Sit down,” Dutcher said, “and give me some good arguments. Dolly, you look beautiful.” Dolly looked as thin and as plain and nervous as ever, and Dutcher was always very careful, in this city of magnificent women, to be gallant and flattering to her. “Give me Dolly,” he said to Machamer, “and I’ll go to Mexico.”

Dolly laughed. Her laugh was high and very nervous and always made Dutcher a little uncomfortable.

“Poor Dutcher,” Dolly said. “Poor lonesome Dutcher.”

“Get me a girl,” Dutcher said, suddenly, not thinking about it or why he was saying it, “and I’ll go with you.”