Acceptable Losses by Irwin Shaw

before.
    That night, although it was warm and New York was already seized by summer, Damon lit a fire in his living room and fed Solo Voyage page by page into the flames. It was the least he could do in honor of his friend’s memory.
    Remembering all this, Damon stared down at the glass of brandy on the bar, sighed, picked up the glass and finished the drink, paid the barman and went out of the hotel.
    For once he did not walk the two miles to home. Facing the long night that lay ahead of him with his wife, with its explanations, confessions, fears and alarms, he was in no mood to meet any others of his familiar dead on the streets of the city.
    Hailing a taxi, he drove downtown in silence.

CHAPTER
    SEVEN
    W HEN HE KISSED SHEILA good-bye the next morning on his way to work, she looked sober and drawn. It had been an exhausting night, which had begun as he came through the door, with the question, “What’s all this about a pistol?”
    “Where did you hear anything about a pistol?” he had asked, already sorry that even for a day he had left her in ignorance of what was happening.
    “I had lunch with Oliver,” she said. “He’s as worried about you as I am.”
    “All right,” he said. “Sit down. We have some talking to do. Quite a lot of talking.”
    Then, in the same words he had used at lunch to Elaine, he told her about the midnight telephone call. He also told her most, but not all, of what Elaine had said about making lists of people who might wish him harm. Out of fear of wounding her and making her feel he mistrusted her, he omitted Elaine’s advice to get Sheila to make her own private list. For other reasons he also omitted the name of the woman he had been involved with long ago, who had called him from Chicago recently and whose family or who herself might be tempted by the idea of revenge, either by violence or in cold cash.
    “I hate to ask this question, Sheil,” he had said after hours of discussion and speculation that went round and round and ended, as far as he could tell, in no decisions, “but is it possible that somebody has something against you and is getting at you through me?”
    “Did Elaine suggest that?” Sheila asked suspiciously.
    “Something of that kind.”
    “She would,” Sheila said bitterly. “Did she ask for money again?”
    “No. She has a rich boy friend now.”
    “Thank heaven for small mercies,” Sheila said ironically. “Let me see if I can count my enemies. Yes, there’s a five-year-old boy in one of my classes who said he hated me because I stood him in the corner for ten minutes for making a little girl cry.” She smiled. “Ah, my head is weary and it’s late. Let’s go to bed and maybe things will look clearer in the morning.”
    But it was morning now, an ordinary working day and she was saying good-bye looking careworn and distressed, and he could tell that she had not slept well because of the lines under her eyes. He himself had not slept all that well either, and once more he had had the dream about his father standing at the marble balustrade holding the toy horse and smiling and waving invitingly to him.
    They kissed again, lingeringly, at the door and she said, “Take care,” and he said, “Of course,” and went down the stairs and out of the house into a howling cold spring wind. At other times he would have thought it bracing weather for the long walk uptown, but today he huddled into his raincoat, with the collar up around his ears and walked as fast as he could to try to keep warm. The faces of the people he passed looked pinched and hostile and if en masse the faces represented anything it was a generalized and all-encompassing hatred and an inner certainty that all men, or at least all New Yorkers, were their enemies.
    In the office it wasn’t much better. When Oliver came in, Damon shut the door that separated the room in which they worked from the outer room to keep Miss Walton from hearing what he had to say. Then, harshly, he