Evening in Byzantium (16 page)

But when he read it the next day, he liked it no better. There was no sense putting off the telephone call.

“Susan,” he said when he heard her voice. “I’m afraid I can’t do it. Do you want to hear my reasons?”

“No,” she said. “Just leave it with your secretary. I’ll pass by and pick it up.”

“Come in and say hello.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t think I want to do that.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Sue,” he said.

“So am I,” she said. “I thought you were a better man.”

He put the telephone down slowly. He started to read another script, but it made no sense to him. On an impulse he picked up the phone again and asked Belinda to get Bryan Murphy for him on the Coast.

After the greetings were over and Craig had learned that Murphy was in splendid health and was going to Palm Springs for the weekend, Murphy said, “To what do I owe the honor?”

“I’m calling about Ed Brenner, Murph. Can you get him a job out there? He’s not in good shape.”

“Since when have you been so palsy with Ed Brenner?”

“I’m not,” Craig said. “In fact, I don’t want him to know that I called you. Just get him a job.”

“I heard he was finishing a play,” Murphy said.

“He’s still not in good shape.”

“Have you read it?”

Craig hesitated. “No,” he said finally.

“That means you’ve read it and you don’t like it,” Murphy said.

“Keep your voice down, Murph, please. And don’t say anything to anybody. Will you do something for him?”

“I’ll try,” Murphy said. “But I don’t promise anything. The place is reeling. Do you want me to do something for you?”

“No.”

“Good. It was a rhetorical question, anyway,” Murphy said. “Give my love to Penny.”

“I’ll do that,” Craig said.

“I have to tell you something, Jesse,” Murphy said.

“What?”

“I love to get telephone calls from you. You’re the only client who doesn’t call collect.”

“I’m a wasteful man,” Craig said. As he hung up, he knew that the odds were a hundred to one against Murphy’s finding anything for Ed Brenner on the Coast.

He didn’t go to the opening of the Brenner play, although he had bought a ticket, because the morning of the day of the opening he received a telephone call from Boston. A director friend of his, Jack Lawton, was trying out a musical comedy there and over the phone had said that the show was in trouble and asked him to come up to Boston and look at it and see if he had any ideas as to how it could be helped.

Craig gave his ticket for the opening to Belinda and took the plane that afternoon to Boston. He avoided seeing Lawton or anybody connected with the show before the evening performance because he wanted to be able to judge it with a fresh eye. He didn’t want to go into the theatre burdened with the complaints of the producers against the director, the director’s criticisms of the producers and the stars, the star’s recriminations about everybody, the usual cannibalistic rites out of town when a show was doing badly.

He watched the performance with pity. Pity for the writers, the composer, the singers and dancers, the principals, the backers, the musicians, the audience. The play had cost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to put on, talented men in every field had worked for years to bring it on the stage, the dancers performed miracles of agility in the big numbers, the stars, who had been acclaimed again and again in other plays, sang their hearts out. And nothing happened. Ingenious sets flew in and out, the music swelled in an orgy of sound, actors grinned bravely and hopelessly as they uttered jokes at which no one laughed, the producers prowled despairingly in the back of the house, Lawton sat in the last row dictating notes in an exhausted hoarse voice to a secretary who scribbled on a clipboard with a pencil equipped with a small light. And still nothing happened.

Craig writhed in his seat, breathing the air of failure, wishing he could get up and leave, dreading the moment later on in the hotel suite when people would turn to him and say, “Well, what do you think?”

The thin desultory applause of the audience as the curtain came down was a slap in the face to everyone in his profession, and the fixed smiles of the actors as they took their bows were the grimaces of men and women under torture.

He did not go backstage but went directly to the hotel, had two drinks to restore himself before he went upstairs to the papery chicken sandwiches, the table with whisky bottles, the bitter, pasty faces of men who had not been out in the open air for three months.

He did not say what he really thought while the producers, the author, composer, and scene designer were in the room. He had no loyalty to them, no responsibility. His friend Lawton had asked him to come, not they, and he would wait until they left before he told Lawton his honest opinion. He contented himself with a few anodyne suggestions—cutting a dance here, restaging a song number slightly, lighting a love scene differently. The other men understood that he was not there to say anything valuable to them and left early.

The last to go were the producers, two small, bitter men, jumpy with false nervous energy, rude with Lawton, almost openly scornful with Craig because he, too, had so clearly failed them.

“Probably,” Lawton said as the door closed behind the two men who had come to Boston with high hopes and glittering visions of success, “probably they’re going to sit down now and call a dozen other directors to come up here and replace me.” Lawton was a tall, harassed man with thick glasses who suffered horribly from ulcers every time he staged a play, whether it went well or badly. He sipped from a glass of milk continually and swigged every few minutes at a bottle of Maalox. “Talk up, Jesse.”

“I say, close,” Craig said.

“It’s as bad as that?”

“It’s as bad as that.”

“We still have time to make changes,” Lawton said defensively.

“They won’t help, Jack. You’re flogging a dead horse.”

“God,” Lawton said, “you’re always surprised at how many things can go wrong at once.” He wasn’t young, he had directed over thirty plays, he had been highly praised, he was married to an enormously wealthy woman, but he sat there, bent over his ulcer pain, shaking his head like a general who had thrown in his last reserves and lost them all in one evening. “Christ,” he said, “if only my gut would let up.”

“Jack,” Craig said, “Why don’t you just quit?”

“You mean on this show?”

“On the whole thing. You’re driving yourself into the hospital. You don’t
have
to go through all this.”

“No,” Lawton said, “I suppose I don’t.” He sounded surprised at his own admission.

“Then?”

“What would I do? Sit in the sun in Arizona with the other old folks?” His face twisted, and he put his hand on his stomach as a new pang gripped him. “This is the only thing I know how to do. The only thing I
want
to do. Even a shitty, dead piece of nothing like this silly show tonight.”

“You asked me what I thought,” Craig said.

“And you told me,” said Lawton. “Thanks.”

Craig stood up. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “And I advise you to do the same.”

“I will, I will,” Lawton said almost petulantly. “There’re just one or two notes I want to put down while they’re still fresh in my mind. I’ve called a rehearsal for eleven.”

He was working on the script even before Craig left the room, jabbing furiously at the pages open before him as though each stroke of his pen was going to transform everything tomorrow by the eleven o’clock rehearsal, make the jokes funny, the music clever, the dances ecstatic, the applause thunderous, as though by his efforts, in his pain, even Boston would be a different city tomorrow night.

When Craig got to his office the next morning, Belinda had the reviews of Brenner’s play on his desk. He didn’t have to read them. He could tell by the expression on her face that things had gone badly the night before. When he read the reviews, he knew there was no hope, that the play would close by Saturday night. Even Boston had been preferable.

He was in the theatre Saturday night for the last performance. The theatre was only half-full, most of it, he knew, paper. Brenner, he noted with relief, was not in the audience.

When the curtain came up and the first lines were uttered, he had an odd sensation. He had the feeling that something beautiful was about to happen. The actors were intent and fervent and performed with a contagious belief in the value, the importance, of the words that Brenner had written for them to speak. There was no sign that any of them was affected by the knowledge that the play had been discourteously dismissed as boring or confused by the critics only three days before and that when the curtain came down that night that would be the end of it, the sets dismantled, the theatre dark, and they themselves out on the street looking for other jobs. There was a gallantry about their devotion to their profession that brought tears to Craig’s eyes even though, as he watched, he saw the faults in casting, direction, and interpretation that had obscured the subtle, multiple intentions of the play and brought down the critics’ wrath on Brenner’s head.

As he sat in the darkened theatre, with gaping rows of empty seats behind him, watching what he recognized was a flawed and inadequate production, Craig realized that somehow he had been in error in his judgment of Brenner’s script. For the first time in a long while his attention was fully awakened in a theatre. Almost automatically, a list of things that could be done to make the play work, bring out its virtues, eliminate its flaws, began to form in his mind.

When the play was over, there was only a thin scattering of applause from the audience, but Craig hurried backstage, moved and excited, hoping to find Brenner, praise him, reassure him.

The old man at the stage door recognized Craig and said mournfully, “Isn’t it all a shame, Mr. Craig?” as they shook hands. Brenner, the old man said, was on the stage saying good-by to the company and thanking them, and Craig waited unseen in the wings until Brenner had made his little speech and the actors began to troop off to their dressing rooms, defiantly noisy beneath the drab work light.

For a moment Craig did not move but watched Brenner standing alone in the empty set that was supposed to be the corner of a temporary shabby barracks in wartime England. Brenner’s face was in deep shadow, and Craig could not see its expression. Brenner was much thinner than when Craig had seen him last and was dressed in a baggy tweed jacket with a long wool scarf thrown around his neck. He looked like a fragile old man who had to think about every step he took for fear of falling. Brenner’s hair was thinning, Craig noted. A bald spot gleamed.

The curtain slowly went up, and Brenner raised his head and stared out at the dark, empty theatre. There was a rustle beside Craig, and Susan Brenner went past him. Susan Brenner came up to her husband, took his hand, and raised it and kissed it. He put his arm around her. They were standing like that, silently, when Craig finally walked out of the wings.

“Hello,” he said.

The man and the woman looked at him without speaking.

“I saw the play tonight,” Craig said, “and I want to tell you I was wrong when I read it.”

Still neither of the others spoke.

“It’s a beautiful play,” Craig went on. “It’s the best thing you’ve done.”

Brenner chuckled. It sounded as though he was strangling.

“Susan,” Craig said, “you were right. I should have done it, and Baranis should have directed it.”

“Thanks for the memory,” Susan said. She was wearing no makeup and looked pale and gaunt, depleted in the bare light.

“Listen to me, please,” Craig went on earnestly. “You got the wrong production for it, and it came between the play and the audience. That doesn’t mean that’s the end of it. Wait for a year, work on it, cast it correctly—you never had a chance with all those fancy, overblown sets, with that man in the lead—he’s too old, too sophisticated. A year from now we can put it on downtown, off-Broadway—it doesn’t belong on Broadway, anyhow—recast it, do it with lights, a structural bare set, use music, it cries for music, get tapes of speeches by politicians, generals, radio announcers, to play between the scenes, frame them in time—” He stopped, conscious that he was rushing too fast, saying more than Brenner could possibly assimilate at this moment. “Do you see what I mean?” he asked lamely.

The Brenners stared blankly at him. Then Brenner chuckled again, the same choking sound. “A year from now,” he said ironically.

Craig understood what was going through Brenner’s mind. “I’ll give you an advance. Enough to live on. I’ll …”

“Does Ed get another chance to sleep with your wife, Mr. Craig?” Susan said. “Is that included in the advance?”

“Keep quiet, Sue,” Brenner said wearily. “I think you’re right, Jesse. I think we made a lot of mistakes in the production, a good many of them mine. I agree it should have been done off-Broadway. I think Baranis would know what I was driving at. I think we could make a go of it …” He took a deep breath. “And I also think you ought to get out of here, Jesse. Get out of my life. Come on, Sue.” He took his wife’s hand. “I left a briefcase in the dressing room,” he said. “We won’t be coming back, and we’d better get it now.”

Side by side the Brenners went off the stage. There was a long run in one of Susan Brenner’s stockings that Craig hadn’t noticed before.

Alice Paine was waiting in the almost-empty bar for him. He had been surprised when she had called him and said she was in the neighborhood and wondered if he had the time to have a drink with her. He had never seen her without her husband except occasionally, by accident. He had also never seen her take more than one drink an evening, and she was not the sort of woman you’d expect to find in a bar at three o’clock in the afternoon.

She was finishing a martini as he came to the table at which she was sitting. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She smiled up at him, a little nervously, he thought. He signaled to a waiter as he sat down on the banquette beside her. “I’ll have a Scotch and soda, please,” he said to the waiter. “Alice?”

“I think I’d like another martini,” she said.