Acceptable Losses by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page B

a switchboard where everybody has to give his name and be announced.” She shook her head distractedly. “It’s so unlike him. He loves the apartment and ordinarily he hates to change anything. I’ve been after him for years to have the walls done over—the paint’s peeling all over the place—and he’s refused to hear of it or even get rid of some of the books that’re swamping us.”
    Oliver nodded. “When I suggested that it might be time for us to move into a larger office, he growled like a bear and gave me a long lecture about the beauties of modest behavior.”
    “To tell the truth,” Sheila said, “I was stunned. Two short days and I come back to a different man.” She shook her head again. “I tried to get an explanation out of him, but all he said was that it was the climate of the times and we were living in a fool’s paradise and he’d suddenly realized it. I told him it was nonsense and I didn’t believe him, and of course we had an argument and then in the middle of the night I heard him pacing the floor in the living room and I saw that he’d put on all the lights. Usually he sleeps as though someone had hit him on the head with a hammer. Frankly, I’m worried. He’s a rational man and all this is so irrational … The reason I wanted to see you was to ask if you’d noticed anything …”
    Oliver waited in silence while the waiter put their plates down in front of them. He fidgeted a little with his hands and stared soberly across the table at Sheila, his pale eyes grave. “Yes,” he said when the waiter had gone, “there is something. Yesterday morning when he came into the office, he prowled around and kept fiddling with the lock on the front door, you know we always keep it open, what’s anybody going to steal from us, a thousand rejected manuscripts? And he told Miss Walton, our secretary, to have it changed and have one of those small windows of bullet-proof glass that they have in banks, with a speaker system that you can talk through. And he said we were to stop picking up the phone when it rang—only Miss Walton was going to answer it from now on and find out who was calling and what his business was before buzzing either of us. I asked him if he thought we were going into the diamond business, and he said, ‘It’s no joking matter.’ He said offices all over town were being broken into and he knew a secretary who was raped at her desk when she was alone during lunch hour. You know Miss Walton—she’s nearly sixty and she weighs about two hundred pounds, and I said she’d probably adore it. ‘Oliver,’ he said, ‘there’s a frivolous side to your character that I’ve noticed for a long time and haven’t said anything about. I tell you now I don’t approve of it.’ So I shut up.”
    “What do you make of it?”
    Oliver shrugged again. “I don’t know. Money, perhaps. He’s not used to it. Neither am I, for that matter, but I’m not about to buy a piece of bullet-proof glass just because we happened on one book in twenty years that’s a blockbuster. Old age?”
    “A man doesn’t get old in two days,” Sheila said impatiently. “Does he have any enemies?”
    “Who doesn’t have enemies? Why do you ask that?”
    “I have a feeling somehow that he was threatened while I was away and he’s reacting.”
    “Whatever else you can say about our profession,” Oliver said, “it’s a pacific one. Writers don’t go around killing people unless they’re Hemingway, and unfortunately we don’t have any Hemingways on our list. Of course, Mailer stabbed one of his wives with a pocket-knife, but we don’t have Mailer either.” He tried to smile comfortingly and patted Sheila’s hand again. “Maybe it’s just a passing mood. Maybe he was melancholy because you were away and this is the way he’s showing it.”
    “I’ve been away longer than two days before this,” Sheila said, “and he hasn’t proposed living in a fortress because of it.”
    “Maybe