Acceptable Losses by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online

given the lady up with something like relief and there hadn’t been anyone else in the two years since they had parted.
    He had never asked Sheila about her affairs before their wedding day or after or pleaded for forgiveness. By and large, although they had had their stormy periods, they had been happy together and, as he had done tonight, he always felt a lifting of the heart when she came through the door. Selfishly, he was glad that he was so much older than she and that he would die before her.
    Now, with Sheila standing before him, safely home, he took her in his arms once more and kissed her on the lips, the familiar soft lips, which could on occasion set into stubborn harshness, sweet against his own. “Sheil,” he murmured, still holding her, but whispering in her ear, “I’m so glad you’re back. The two days felt like centuries.”
    She smiled again, touched his mouth with the tip of her finger as though to hush him and went into the bedroom. The way she walked, erect, not swaying, her head high and motionless as the rest of her moved, reminded him, not for the first time, of a girl he had liked and had an affair with just after he arrived in New York. She was a young actress, dark and, like Sheila, had an Italian mother. Somewhere in her genes, as in Sheila’s, there must have been a racial memory of women with heavy jars on their heads striding down the sun-struck paths of Calabria. Her name was Antoinetta Bradley and he was in love with her for the best part of a year, and he thought she was in love with him and they even had talked about getting married. But it turned out that she was in love with one of his best friends. Maurice Fitzgerald, with whom he shared an apartment in Manhattan. They tossed to see who would keep the apartment and Damon lost.
    “The luck of the draw,” Fitzgerald said as Damon started packing.
    Antoinetta Bradley and Maurice Fitzgerald left for London some time later and Damon heard that they had been married there and become British residents. He hadn’t seen either of them in thirty years, but he still remembered how Antoinetta walked and the way Fitzgerald had said, “The luck of the draw.”
    In the kitchen, getting the ice out for the drinks, the memory made him sigh and brought back the early days before the war and just after when he had worked as an actor and still hoped for the break that would make him a star. He didn’t do too badly and he was given enough small parts to keep him living fairly comfortably, and it had never occurred to him that he would at one time in the future try anything else but the theatre and perhaps the movies.
    It was during the rehearsals of one of the plays in the late 1940s that his life had been changed. Mr. Gray, who represented the playwright, came to the rehearsals from time to time and Damon and he had fallen into the habit of carrying on whispered conversations in the back of the darkened theatre in the long periods when Damon was not needed onstage. Mr. Gray had asked him his opinion of the play and Damon had told him frankly that he thought it was going to fail and why. Gray had been impressed and had told him he was in the wrong end of the business and had said that if he ever needed a job, there would be one open for him in the Gray office. “You’ve been honest with me about the play,” he said, “and you’re obviously an intelligent and well-educated young man and I can use you. Onstage it’s a different matter—you don’t convince me and I’m almost certain you’ll never convince an audience. If you try to continue in your career as an actor, it’s my opinion that you’re going to end up as a failed and disappointed man.”
    Two weeks after the play closed Damon was working in Mr. Gray’s office.
    Carrying the ice out of the kitchen and pouring the two drinks, Damon grimaced a little as he remembered Mr. Gray’s words. Tonight, in a manner of speaking, he would be onstage once more, with an audience of one. He