Short Stories: Five Decades (116 page)

Two college students, a boy and a girl, who made a habit of Saturday-morning visits, came in. They were unkempt and unprincipled and they rarely bought anything, at the most a paperback, and he kept a sharp eye on them, because they had a nasty habit of separating and wandering uninnocently around the shop and they both wore loose coats that could hide any number of books. It was fifteen minutes before they left and he could get back to the telephone.

He decided to forget about alphabetical order. It was an unscientific way of going about the problem, dependent upon a false conception of the arrangement of modern society. Now was the time for a judicious weighing of possibilities. As he thumbed through his address book, he thought hard and long over each starred name, remembering height, weight, coloring, general amiability, signs of flirta-tiousness and/or sensuality, indications of loneliness and popularity, tastes and aversions.

Stickney, Beulah
**. He lingered over the page. Under
Stickney, Beulah
**, in parentheses, was
Fleischer, Rebecca
, also double-starred. The two girls lived together, on East 74th Street.
Stickney, Beulah
** was actually and honestly a model and often had her photograph in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
. She had long dark hair that she wore down loose over her shoulders and a long bony sensational body and a big model’s mouth and a model’s arrogant look, as though no man alive was good enough for her. But the look was just part of her professional equipment. Whenever she came into the shop, she was friendly as could be with Christopher and squatted unceremoniously on the floor or loped up the ladder when she was looking for books that were in out-of-the way places. She was a great one for travel books. She had worked in Paris and Rome and London and while she bought books about distant places by writers like H. V. Morton and James Morris and Mary McCarthy, when she talked about the cities she had visited, her vocabulary was hardly literary, to say the least. “You’ve got to get to Paris before the Germans come in again, luv,” she would say. “It’s a gas.” Or, “You’d go ape over Rome, luv.” Or, “Marrakesh, luv! Stoned! Absolutely stoned!” She had picked up the habit of calling people luv in London. Christopher knew it was just a habit, but it was friendly and encouraging, all the same.

Fleischer, Rebecca
** was just about as tall and pretty as
Stickney, Beulah
**, with short dark red hair and a pale freckled complexion to go with it and tapering musician’s fingers and willowy hips. She was a receptionist for a company that made cassettes and she wore slacks on Saturdays that didn’t hide anything. She was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn and made no bones about it, larding her conversation with words like shmeer and schmuck and nebbish. She didn’t buy books by the reviews nor by their subject matter, she bought them after looking at the pictures of the authors on the back covers. If the authors were handsome, she would put down her $6.95. She bought the books of Saul Bellow, John Cheever and John Hersey. It wasn’t a scientific system, but it worked and she put an awful lot of good writing on her shelf that way. At least it worked in America. Christopher wasn’t so sure it would work with foreign authors. She had endeared herself to Christopher by buying
Portnoy’s Complaint
and having him gift-wrap it and send it to her mother in Flatbush. “The old bag’ll sit shiva for six months when she reads it,” Rebecca had said, smiling happily.

Christopher wouldn’t have dared send anything more advanced than the works of G. A. Henty to
his
mother and he appreciated the freedom of spirit in Miss Fleischer’s gesture. He had never gone out with a Jewish girl, not that he was anti-Semitic or anything like that but because somehow the occasion hadn’t arisen. Listening to a Jewish girl in skintight slacks who was five inches taller than he talk the way Miss Fleischer talked was intriguing, if not more. June said that Jewish girls were voracious in bed. June came from Pasadena and her father still believed
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, so her opinions on the subject could not be called scientific; but even so, whenever Miss Fleischer came into the shop, Christopher looked carefully for pleasing signs of voracity.

He hesitated over the two names. Then he decided.
Stickney, Beulah
**. A redheaded giantess who was also Jewish would be too much for the first go. He dialed the Rhinelander number.

Beulah sat under the drier in the living room of the three-room flat, with kitchen, that she shared with Rebecca. Rebecca was painting Beulah’s nails a luminous pearly pink. The ironing board on which Rebecca had ironed out Beulah’s hair into a straight shining sheet of living satin was still in place. Beulah kept looking nervously over Rebecca’s bent head at the clock on the mantelpiece of the false fireplace, although the plane wasn’t due in at Kennedy until 3:15 and it was only 10:40 now. The girls did each other’s hair and nails every Saturday morning, if other amusements didn’t intervene. But this was a special Saturday morning, at least for Beulah, and she’d said she was too nervous to work on Rebecca and Rebecca had said that was OK, there was nobody she had to look good for this weekend, anyway.

Rebecca had broken with her boyfriend the week before. He worked in Wall Street and even with the way things were going down there, he had an income that was designed to please any young girl with marriage on her mind. Her boyfriend’s family had a seat on the stock exchange, a
big
seat, and unless Wall Street vanished completely, which was a possibility, of course, he had nothing to worry about. And, from all indications, he was approaching marriage, like a squirrel approaching a peanut, apprehensive but hungry. But the week before, he had tried to take Rebecca to an orgy on East 63rd Street. That is, he
had
taken Rebecca to an orgy without telling her that was what it was going to be. It had seemed like a superior party to Rebecca, with well-dressed guests and champagne and pot, until people began to take off their clothes.

Then Rebecca had said, “George, you have brought me to an orgy.”

And George had said, “That’s what it looks like, honey.”

And Rebecca had said, “Take me home. This is no place for a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn.”

And George had said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, when are you going to stop being a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn?” He was taking off his Countess Mara tie as she went out the front door. So she had nobody this Saturday to look good for and she was putting in some extra time on Beulah’s nails, because Beulah had somebody to look good for, at precisely 3:15 that afternoon, to be exact, if the goddamn air-traffic controllers didn’t keep the plane from Zurich in a holding pattern between Nantucket and Allentown, Pennsylvania, for five hours, as they sometimes did.

The picture of the man who was arriving at Kennedy that afternoon was in a silver frame on an end table in the living room and another picture of him, in a leather frame, was on the dresser in Beulah’s bedroom. In both pictures he was in ski clothes, because he was a ski instructor by the name of Jirg in St. Anton, where Beulah had spent a month the previous winter. In the picture in the living room he was in motion, skis beautifully clamped together, giving it that old Austrian reverse shoulder, a spray of snow pluming behind him. He was at rest in the bedroom, brown, smiling, long hair blowing boyishly in the wind, like Jean-Claude Killy, all strong white teeth and Tyrolean charm. Even Rebecca had to admit he was luscious, Beulah’s word for Jirg, although Rebecca had said when Beulah had first reported on him, “John Osborne says in some play or other that having an affair with a ski instructor is vulgar.”

“Englishmen,” Beulah had said, hurt, “’re jealous of everybody. They’ll say anything that comes into their heads, because they zilched the Empire.” It hadn’t been vulgar at all. On the contrary. It hadn’t been like getting involved with a man in the city, worrying about finding a taxi in the rain to get there on time and waking up at seven o’clock in the morning to go to work and eating lunch alone in Hamburger Heaven and worrying if the man’s stuffy friends would think your clothes were extreme and listening to him complain about the other men in the office. In the mountains everybody lived in ski pants and it was all snow like diamonds and frosty starlight and huge country feather beds and rosy complexions and being together day and night and incredibly graceful young men doing dangerous, beautiful things to show off for you and eating in cute mountain huts with hot wine and people singing jolly Austrian songs at the next table and all the other girls trying to get your ski teacher away from you both on the slopes and off, and not managing it, because, as he said in his darling Austrian accent, wrinkling that dear tanned face in an effort to speak English correctly. “It is neffer come my way before, a girl so much like you.”

Beulah hadn’t seen him since St. Anton, but his influence had lingered on. She hadn’t been pleased with any man she’d gone out with since she’d come back to America and she’d been saving her money so that she could spend three months at least this winter in the Tirol. Then the letter had come from Jirg, telling her that he’d been offered a job at Stowe starting in December and would she be glad to see him? Beulah had written back the same day. December was too far off, she wrote, and why didn’t he come to New York immediately? As her guest. (The poor boys were paid a pitiful pittance in Austria, despite their great skills, and you always had to show practically inhuman delicacy about paying when you went anywhere with them, so as not to embarrass them. In the month in St. Anton she had become one of the most unobtrusive bill payers the Alps had ever seen.) She could afford it, she told herself, because this winter she wasn’t going on an expensive jaunt to Europe but would be skiing at Stowe.

“You’re crazy,” Rebecca had said when she learned about the invitation. “I wouldn’t pay for a man to lead me out of a burning building.” Sometimes Rebecca’s mother showed through a little in her daughter’s attitudes.

“I’m giving myself a birthday gift, luv,” Beulah had said. Her birthday was in November. “One beautiful brown, energetic young Austrian who doesn’t know what’s hit him. It’s my money, luv, and I couldn’t spend it better.”

Jirg had written that he liked the idea and as soon as he was finished with his summer job, he would be happy to accept his old pupil’s invitation. He had underlined pupil roguishly. He had some clean outdoor job on a farm in the summer. He had sent another picture, to keep his memory green. It was of himself, winning a ski teachers’ race at the end of the season. He was wearing goggles and a helmet and was going so fast that the picture was a little blurred, but Beulah was certain she would have recognized him anyway. She had pasted the picture in a big scrapbook that contained photographs of all the men she had had affairs with.

There was one thing really worrying Beulah as she sat in her robe in the living room, watching Rebecca buff her nails. She hadn’t yet decided where to put Jirg. Ideally, the best place would be the apartment. She and Rebecca had separate rooms and the bed in her room was a double one and it wasn’t as though she and Rebecca were shy about bringing men home with them. And stashing Jirg away in a hotel would cost money and he wouldn’t always be on hand when she wanted him. But Rebecca had had an unsettling effect on some of her boyfriends, with her red hair and white skin and that brazen (that was the only word for it, Beulah thought), that brazen Brooklyn camaraderie with men. And let’s face it, Beulah thought, she’s a wonderful girl and I’d trust her with my life, but when it comes to men, there isn’t a loyal bone in her body. And a poor gullible ski teacher who’d never been off the mountain in his life and used to avid girls coming and going in rapacious batches all winter long.… And sometimes Beulah had to work nights or go out of town for several days at a time on a job.…

She had been puzzling over the problem ever since she got the letter from Jirg and she still hadn’t made up her mind. Play it by ear, she decided. See what the odds are on the morning line.

“There you are,” Rebecca said, pushing her hand away. “The anointed bride.”

“Thanks, luv,” Beulah said, admiring her nails. “I’ll buy you lunch at P.J.’s” There were always a lot of extra men who ate lunch at P.J.’s on Saturday, with nothing to do for the weekend and an eye out for companionship or whatever, and maybe she could make a connection for Rebecca and get her out of the apartment at least for the afternoon and evening. With luck, for the whole night.

“Naah,” Rebecca said, standing and yawning. “I don’t feel like going out. I’m going to stay home and watch the game of the week on the tube.”

Shit
, Beulah said to herself.

Then the phone rang.

“Miss Stickney’s residence,” Beulah said into the phone. She always answered that way, as though she were a maid or the answering service, so that if it was some pest, she could say, “Miss Stickney’s not at home. Can I take a message?”

“May I speak to Miss Stickney, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Mr. Bagshot.”

“Who?”

“From the Browsing—”

“Hi, luv,” Beulah said. “My book on Sicily come in yet, you know the one?”

“It’s on order,” Christopher said. He was disappointed with this commercial prelude, even though she called him luv. “What I’m phoning for, beautiful,” he said daringly, suddenly deciding to be racy and familiar, put himself right up there on her level, so to speak, “what I’m phoning for is what do you say you and me hit the town tonight?”

“Hit what?” Beulah asked, puzzled.

“Well, I thought I just happen to be free and maybe you’re hanging loose yourself and we could go to some joint for dinner and then split off downtown to the Electric—”

“Oh, shit, luv,” Beulah said, “I’m prostrate with grief. This is Drearsville Day for me. I’ve got an aunt coming into Kennedy from Denver this
P.M.
and God knows when I can get rid of her.” It was standard policy on her part never to admit that she even
knew
another man when asked for a date.

“Oh, that’s all right.…”