Acceptable Losses by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

would give the best performance he could, but the years had not improved his acting and he was almost sure that now as then he would not be convincing. There would be a long night ahead.
    “Oliver,” Sheila was saying to Oliver Gabrielsen after they had given their luncheon order to the waiter in the restaurant downtown, where Sheila knew there was no chance of bumping into her husband, “the reason I called you at home so early in the morning yesterday, just after Roger had left for the office, was that I didn’t want him to know why I had to see you.” She had asked Oliver to have lunch with her that noon, but he had an appointment he couldn’t break and now it was Tuesday.
    “My wife was suspicious,” Oliver said. “She isn’t used to ladies calling me at breakfast to make a date with me. She says you’re devastatingly beautiful. In an old-fashioned way.” He smiled and touched Sheila’s hand across the table. “The most dangerous kind, she says. And that I’m always looking for a mother to get into bed with. She envies you and tries to copy you. Did you notice that since last year she’s had her hair done the way you wear yours?”
    “I noticed. If you must know the truth, I thought it was a little severe for that youngish face,” Sheila said. She did not add the word empty to the description although it would have made the image more accurate. She was not too fond of Doris Gabrielsen and thought that she was not worthy of Oliver.
    “And once I caught her practicing walking like you in front of a mirror,” Oliver said.
    “She’ll never manage it,” Sheila said, briefly annoyed with this vision of another marriage. “She’s got a built-in sashay. Forgive me for being bitchy. She reminds me of how old I am.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Oliver said. “She’s sometimes bitchy about you. This morning she said it was damned odd you wanting to see me alone. She was quite cross when I told her I had no idea what it was about, and she said she knew I was lying. She says that you and Roger and herself and me are not a quartet—we’re a trio and a half and she’s the half.”
    “I’m sorry,” Sheila said.
    Oliver shrugged. “Do her good. Helps keep the necessary tension in the marriage.”
    “Well, make up some story but don’t tell her the truth because it’s about Roger,” Sheila said.
    “I guessed that.”
    “And it’s strictly between you and me. I was away two days and something must have happened while I was gone. He acted most peculiarly—for him. You know how he likes to walk everywhere …”
    Oliver nodded. “I suffer from it. When we have an appointment outside the office, even if it’s halfway across town, he refuses to take a taxi and he despises buses. I told him I’m buying a pair of hiking boots to wear in the office, and he walks so fast I arrive everywhere panting and covered with sweat. It keeps him fit, but it just reminds me that all the males in my family died early of heart trouble.”
    “Well,” Sheila said, “fit or not, on Sunday night when we went out to dinner, he insisted on taking a taxi, even though the restaurant was only a ten-minute walk away and then a taxi back. He said the streets have become too dangerous to walk around these nights. Then when we got home, he began talking about the landlord’s not having the buzzer fixed and anybody being able to get into the house at all hours of the day and night. And he said he was going to have a new door to the apartment put in, a steel door with a chain and real locks and a peep-hole. And changing our phone to an unlisted number. You know, he’s not a fearful man—I’ve seen him break up fights on the street between two huge ruffians—and I couldn’t get out of him what he was so suddenly worried about. He even said he thought we ought to move—to one of those big new dreadful apartment houses with what they call a security system—you know, television in the elevators and two men at the door and