Evening in Byzantium (10 page)

“Maybe
he’s
not so completely friendly,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know who it was that turned me down for the part in his play.”

“He didn’t even know you then.”

“Well, he knows me now.” Ten harsh strokes of the brush. “Don’t tell me he thinks I’m the greatest actress to come to New York since Ethel Barrymore.”

“We haven’t discussed it,” Craig said lamely. “Keep your voice down.”

“I’ll bet you haven’t discussed it. I’ll bet there’re a lot of things you haven’t discussed. Like the way whenever you’re talking about anything seriously you ignore me. Just ignore me.”

“That isn’t true, Penny.”

“You know it’s true. The two great minds working as one, deciding the fate of the world, the Marshall Plan, the next elections, the atomic bomb, Stanislavsky …” The brush was going like a piston now. “Listening to me indulgently, as though I’m an idiot child …”

“You’re absolutely irrational, Penny.”

“I’m irrationally rational, Jesse Craig, and you know it.”

He had to laugh then, and she laughed, too, and he said, “Throw that damned brush away and come to bed.”

And a moment later she threw the brush away and turned out the light and came to bed. “Don’t make me jealous, Jesse,” she whispered, holding onto him. “Don’t ever leave me out. Of anything.”

And then days went by just as they had before, as though there had never been the midnight conversation on the edge of the bed, Penelope being sisterly and fond with Brenner, forcing him to eat, to put some meat on his poor bones, as she said, and being demure and quiet while the men talked and unostentatiously emptying ashtrays, bringing fresh drinks, teasing Brenner gently about the girls who called and the girls who sometimes stayed overnight and came down to breakfast the next morning asking if they could borrow a bathing suit for a dip before getting back to town.

“I’m a desirable sex object on the Côte d’Azur,” Brenner said, embarrassed but pleased at the teasing. “It was never thus in Pennsylvania or Fort Bragg.”

Then the bad evening at the end of August when Craig was packing to catch the night train up to Paris because he had to meet the head of a movie studio there to negotiate the terms for the sale of the play that was still running in New York. Penelope came in pulling a robe around her after a bath, her eyes, usually a soft brown, now harsh and dangerous. She watched him throw some shirts into his bag.

“How long’re you going to be?” she asked.

“Three days. At the most.”

“Take that son of a bitch with you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about.
Whom
I’m talking about.”

“Sssh.”

“Don’t sssh me in my own house. I’m not going to play nursemaid to that one-play genius, that … that steel-town Don Juan, for three days while you go gallivanting around the nightspots of Paris …”

“I’m not going gallivanting anywhere, Penny,” Craig said, trying to be patient. “You know that. And he’s in the middle of the third act. I don’t want him to interrupt …”

“I wish you’d be as thoughtful about your wife as you are about your holy scrounging friend. Has he bought us a dinner since he’s been here? One single dinner?”

“What difference does that make? He’s busted. You know that.”

“I certainly do. He sure as hell makes that clear. Where does he get all the money to take those tarts out five times a week? What do you do—finance him for that, too? What is it, are you getting a vicarious kick out of his scrubby little conquests?”

“I have a great idea,” Craig said quietly. “Why don’t you pack and come along with me to Paris?”

“I’m not going to be driven out of my own house by any oversexed superior leech like Edward Brenner,” Penelope said loudly, ignoring Craig’s shushing gestures, “and let him turn this place into a whorehouse, with his cheap tarts running in and out just as near naked as the law allows. You better warn him—from now on he’s got to behave himself. I’m through with behaving like the madame of a private bordello for him, taking down telephone numbers for him, saying, ‘Mr. Brenner is busy now, Yvette or Odile or Miss Big Tits, can he call you back?’”

She’s jealous, Craig thought, wonderingly. Go figure women out. But all he said was, “Don’t turn bourgeoise on me, Penny. That went out with World War One.”

“I’m bourgeoise. That’s it.” She began to cry. “Now you know it. Go complain to your elegant friend. He’ll sympathize with you. The Great Bohemian Artist who never pays for anything will offer his condolences.” She ran into the bathroom and locked the door and stayed in there so long that he was sure he was going to miss his train. But just when he heard Brenner toot warningly on the horn of the car outside, the bathroom door opened and Penelope came out, dry-eyed and smiling, fully dressed. She squeezed Craig’s arm and said, “Forgive the tantrum. I’m a little jittery these days,” and they went out to the car together.

As the train pulled out of the Antibes station, with Craig leaning out the window of the wagon-lit, Penelope and Brenner were standing side by side on the platform in the dusk waving to him.

When Craig got back from Paris, Brenner gave him the finished copy of the play and said he had to leave for New York. They made plans to meet in New York at the end of September and had a farewell party, and when Craig and Penelope put him on the train, he said that he had never had a better time in his whole life.

With Brenner gone, Craig read the final version of the play Brenner had left him. As he read the familiar pages, he was conscious of a growing unease and at the end a vast, echoing emptiness. What had seemed, as he worked with Brenner, to be funny and alive and touching now was dead on the page before him, hopeless. He realized that until then he had been deceived by the beauty of the summer, his appreciation of his friend’s real talent, the engulfing, optimistic joy of work. Now he was reading coldly and saw that the play was stillborn, irretrievable. It wasn’t merely that he was sure the play would fail commercially but with the chance that it might perhaps find a small, perceptive audience that would give him some satisfaction in being connected with it. It was doomed, he was sure, to general oblivion. If it had been anybody else’s play, he would have rejected it immediately. But with Brenner … Friend or no friend, he knew that if the play went on, Brenner would suffer. Badly.

Without telling Penelope his reaction, he gave her the script to read. She had heard them talking about it, of course, and knew what it was about, but she hadn’t read a word of it. A mediocre actress, Penelope was a shrewd judge in the theatre, intuitive and tough-minded. When she had finished reading, Penelope said, “It won’t go, will it?”

“No.”

“They’ll murder him. And you.”

“I’ll survive.”

“What’re you going to do?” she asked.

He sighed. “I’m going to put it on,” he said.

She didn’t mention it again. He was grateful for her tact. He didn’t tell her, though, that he wasn’t going to risk anybody else’s money in it, that he was going to back it completely himself.

The rehearsals were disastrous. He couldn’t get any of the actors he wanted or the director he wanted or even the scene designer he wanted because the play appealed to no one. He had to make do with worn-out hacks and inexperienced beginners, and he spent tortured nights trying to make up lies about the stream of refusals to protect Brenner’s ego. So-and-so loved the play but had signed for Hollywood, so-and-so had promised to wait for the new Williams play, so-and-so was involved in television. Brenner remained serenely certain of success. His one triumph had made him feel inviolate. In the middle of rehearsals he even got married. To a plain, quiet woman by the name of Susan Lockridge who wore her straight black hair in a severe schoolteacherly bun and who knew nothing about the theatre and who sat entranced through the rehearsals, thinking that was the way all rehearsals looked. Craig acted as best man at the wedding and gave the party and sweated as he acted the jolly, confident host, raising his glass again and again to toast the newlyweds and the success of the play. Penelope didn’t appear for the party. She was in the fourth month of her pregnancy and was sick a good deal of the time and had a plausible excuse.

A week before the opening night Craig took Susan Brenner aside and told her they were heading for disaster and that the only sensible thing was to call the whole thing off. “How do you think Eddie will take it if I tell him this?” Craig asked her.

“He’ll die,” the woman said flatly.

“Oh, come on,” Craig said.

“You heard what I said.”

“Okay,” Craig said wearily, “we’ll open. Maybe there’ll be a miracle.”

But there wasn’t any miracle. Only half the audience was left when the curtain came down on opening night. In Sardi’s, where they went to wait for the reviews, Brenner said to Craig, “You son of a bitch. You sabotaged it. Susan told me what you told her. You never had any faith in it, and you did the whole thing on a shoestring, and it looks it …”

“Why would I want to sabotage it?” Craig asked.

“You know as well as I do, Brother,” Brenner said, standing up. “Come on, Sue, let’s get out of here.”

It was only many years later, long after the birth of Anne and Marcia, that Craig had an inkling of what Brenner had been talking about that night. It was in the middle of an argument with Penelope, when things had been going badly between them for more than a year, after a party at which, Penelope said, he had been hanging all over a pretty and notorious young actress, that Penelope supplied the missing clue. In the three days he had been in Paris, the summer at Antibes, she had slept with Edward Brenner. She meant to hurt him, and she managed it.

He was at the wheel in the bright afternoon sunshine with the sea below him to his right and the white villa falling out of sight behind him. He turned and took a last look at the house.

Not bad for twenty-seven.
Anne had been conceived there, in the great bed in the cool, high room overlooking the sea, the room that had been the haunt of pleasure for three dreamlike months. He didn’t tell Gail McKinnon about Anne or Brenner or the three months or the death of friendship or the secret undermining of love.

What had happened to all the home movies they had taken that summer? He had no idea where the spools of aging, brittle film might be. Somewhere among the old theatre programs, old magazines, broken tennis racquets in the cellar of the house of Seventy-eighth Street he had bought so as to have room for the arrival of Anne, the house he had not visited since he had told Penelope he wanted a divorce, the house he would be able to walk through unerringly in total darkness until the day he died.

He stepped on the accelerator, and the villa disappeared beyond a bend of the road.
Lesson—Stay away from the places where you have been happy.

The girl was silent for a moment. When she spoke, it was as though she knew exactly what he had been thinking of. “Murphy says your wife is a very beautiful woman.”

“Was,” Craig said. “Is, perhaps. Yes.”

“Is it a friendly divorce?”

“As divorces go.”

“The divorce in my family was silent and polite,” Gail McKinnon said. “Obscene. My mother just wandered away. When I was sixteen. She had wandered away before. Only this time she didn’t come back. When I was eighteen, I asked my father why. He said, ‘She is searching for something. And it isn’t me.’” The girl sighed. “She sends me a card at Christmas. From various parts of the world. I must look her up some day.”

She was momentarily silent, leaning back now against the seat. Then she said, “Mr. Murphy’s not what you expect a Hollywood agent to be like, is he?”

“You mean he’s not small and fat and Jewish, with a funny way of talking?”

The girl laughed. “I’m glad to see you read me so carefully. Did you read what I left for you this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Any comments?”

“No.”

Again, she was quiet for a little while. “He’s an intelligent man, Mr. Murphy,” she said. “Before you came, he told me if your last picture were to come out today, it would be a hit. It was before its time, he said.”

Craig paid attention to his driving, slowed down to avoid a family group in bathing suits crossing the road.

“I agreed with him,” the girl said. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been a hit, at least in Mr. Murphy’s terms, but people would’ve recognized how original it was.”

“You saw it?” Craig couldn’t help sounding surprised.

“Yes. Mr. Murphy said the big mistake you made was not becoming a director. He says it’s a director’s business now.”

“Maybe he’s right.”

“Mr. Murphy said it would have been easy any time until 1965 to get you a picture to direct …”

“That’s probably true.”

“Weren’t you tempted?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Laziness, maybe.”

“You know that’s not true.” The girl sounded aggrieved at his evasiveness.

“Well, if you must know,” Craig said, “I felt I didn’t have the talent for it. At best, I would have just been pretty good. There would have been fifty better men than I at the job.”

“Weren’t there fifty better men working as producers?” Now her tone was challenging.

“Maybe five,” he said. “And maybe if I was lucky, they would die off or go on the booze or lose their touch.”

“If you had it to do all over again,” the girl said, “would you do something else?”

“Nobody has it to do all over again,” Craig said. “Now enjoy the scenery, please.”

“Well, anyway,” the girl said placidly, “it was a nice lunch.”

After that, she asked no more questions, and they drove in silence along the sea and through the town of Antibes, sleepy in the sun, and on the busy highway back to Cannes.

He offered to drive her to her hotel, but she said it wasn’t necessary, it was only two minutes from the Carlton, and she enjoyed walking.

There was a parking place open in front of the Carlton between a Jaguar and an Alfa. He swung the Simca into it and turned off the motor. He was sure it wouldn’t be there when next he needed it.

“Thank you for the ride,” the girl said, getting out of the car. “I like your friends the Murphys. And I’m sure I’d like you if I ever got the chance.”