A Choice of Enemies by Mordecai Richler

filled his glass again. “We want you to treat this place like your own home.”
    “Do you think you’ll like it here?” Norman asked.
    “We’ll adore it,” Joey said.
    “Wait till I tell you about Rinky-Dinky Winkleman. A few days in London and I’ve as good as got a film contract in the bag. Not bad, huh?”
    “Please, darling. He hasn’t even taken an option yet.”
    “Am I or am I not seeing him first thing tomorrow morning?”
    “Charlie’s right. Sonny likes his script a lot. He told me so himself.”
    “I’ll believe it when I see the cheque. Not before.”
    “Thank you, Madame Defarge.” Charlie turned to Norman. “You didn’t have to go to her hotel, old chap. You could have brought Sally here. We’re very liberal-minded.”
    Norman slept on the sofa in his little study, and there, he remembered Sally’s freshly washed smell. He recalled her wild blond hair – the creamy smile – and all at once he felt foolish. He had made an unsuccessful pass at the sweetheart of the Sigma Something. No more. That kind of stuff was O.K . for Nicky, but not for a man of his age.
    I shouldn’t have told her about Hornstein, he thought, just before he fell asleep.
VIII
    But the next morning at nine-thirty, Norman, feeling uncomfortably like a college boy again, was waiting for Sally in her hotel lobby. They ate breakfast together.
    Sally was small, no more than five feet four, and she was cursed with a plump figure and the most useless big feet. Her blessings – Sally considered them few – were her streaky blond hair and slender ankles. But what attracted Norman most were her warm, quizzical blue eyes, and the absence of hardness about her. They were extremely polite with each other. Norman intimidated Sally.His long narrow face was solemn; his manner was exacting. She felt that she was being examined like a potential sexual belligerent, and this she found disquieting.
    After breakfast they walked through Soho, down Charing Cross Road, and to the Strand. They ate an enormous lunch at Simpson’s. Then, because Sally was momentarily panicked by the strangeness of it all – the streets of little black cars and sexless black men and old blackened buildings – they hurried back to Leicester Square and went to see an American film. Inside, Sally pretended she was in Montreal again. Norman fell asleep half-way through the film and that, oddly enough, made her like him much better.
    From there they went to the Arts Theatre Club bar for drinks and, her assurances regained, Sally was very cheerful indeed. They exchanged old and tested anecdotes that were, all the same, fresh to each other, and whenever Sally laughed – and she laughed spontaneously and often – her head fell against his shoulder. They were so happy together that they did not realize they were being loud and conspicuous. As the crowd in the bar thickened they reached that point of intimacy where a nod of the head for a foolish face discovered, a nudge for a pompous snatch of conversation overheard, was enough to send them off into further fits of laughter. At dinner Norman squeezed her knee under the table and Sally leaned over and kissed him once.
    Later, at the Theatre, East Stratford, they joined the Winklemans and Charlie and Joey to see a new play by a left-wing theatre group. Norman began to sober up. A fuzzy-haired Jewess with a wide red mouth sat beside him. Her boy friend, a skinny boy with a little sandpaper face, chewed his nails endlessly. The play, a political comedy, was spiked with puerile jokes about Eden, Rhee, Dulles, and the rest of them, but the audience responded with laughter wild and febrile. Tense, thick faces. Partisans. A kinky West Indian with a flash of pink tongue. A hunchback in a corduroy cap with a smile like a clenchedfist. Young girls in rumpled clothes hand in hand with boys who required beards just as older, sunnier men needed desks before them. The virtuous failures; the good people. A middle-aged woman made in