Acceptable Losses by Irwin Shaw Page A

up to now, my dear husband,” she had said. “Integrity is all very well, but it doesn’t pay any bills. If you’d ever had to deal with abused, bewildered, violent children, like me, you’d know what it’s like to have to do the meanest and ugliest of jobs to keep from starving.”
    “Don’t be melodramatic.”
    “You’re the one who’s being melodramatic. Sacrificing everything to keep the holy flame of literature alive. Okay, remain pure and three cheers for Roger Damon’s precious integrity. I know you too well to think for a minute that you’d change anything just to please me. Go back to that seedy shrine of an office of yours and smoke your pipe and wait for the next T. S. Eliot to come through the door and anoint you with a signed contract.”
    “Sheila,” he had said sadly, disturbed by this echo of what Mr. Gray had told him of his last conversation with his son and the son’s contempt when he said that his father was content to live in a corner on crusts all his life. “Sheila, you’re not talking like yourself.”
    “There’s one thing I can guarantee you, my dear husband,” Sheila said harshly, “and that is that poverty is one sure way of changing the tone of a lady’s voice.”
    It was after that he took to drink and late nights with the boys, as Sheila sardonically called them. Any excuse in a storm, he thought, too honest with himself to be able to shift all the blame.
    Remembering all this and the stubborn resentment on Sheila’s face that had persisted now for months, he thought, She looks like a peasant and she’s acting like a peasant. It was ugly and he didn’t like it and although he wasn’t sure how it would turn out in the end he was certain he wasn’t going to endure it any longer.
    He had been sitting at his desk, unhappily going over his accounts and thinking resentfully of how Sheila had pushed his hand away in bed the night before, when the phone rang and he picked it up. It was Julia Larch. He had tried to keep the surprise out of his voice when she announced her name. “I’ve been thinking how nice it was to meet you last night,” she said, “and how much nicer it would be to meet you again.”
    “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Uh … Mrs. Larch,” Damon said.
    “I dreamed about you just before I woke up this morning.” She laughed softly. “That’s just about ten minutes ago.”
    “I hope the dream was a pleasant one,” Damon said, beginning to feel embarrassed and hoping that Oliver at his desk couldn’t guess what was being said at the other end of the telephone line.
    She laughed again. “It was very sexy,” she said.
    “That’s good news.”
    “And I thought, Wouldn’t it be a good way to end my holiday in New York if you’d come up to my room right away, before I could forget the dream, and make love to me.”
    “Well, I … I,” Damon stuttered. “It’s very tempt …”
    “I’m at the Hotel Borden. It’s on East Thirty-ninth Street. The room number is 426. The door will be open.” And she hung up.
    Damon put the phone down slowly, painfully aware, after weeks of abstinence, of how much the low voice over the phone had aroused him.
    “Anything important?” Oliver asked.
    “Just somebody saying good-bye.” He sat for five minutes more looking at the dire figures listed on the page before him, then stood up and went out of the office and walked across town to East Thirty-ninth Street and the hotel door that would be open for him.
    He was still thinking about that call almost eleven years ago and the day that had followed it as he made his way through the heavy noontime pedestrian traffic of Sixth Avenue. In bed, Julia Larch had proved to be neither pale nor washed out or shy and by the time night fell he had had more orgasms than he had ever had in one day or one night, even when he was a youth of eighteen.
    Whether it was a coincidence or not, after that his fortunes improved abruptly. A client whose previous two books had been