Evening in Byzantium (17 page)

For a moment Craig wondered if Alice Paine had been hiding something all these years from him and all of her other friends. She fiddled with her gloves, her strong hands, with no polish on the fingernails, uneasy on the table. “I hope I haven’t interrupted something important,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Nothing much is happening in the office at the moment.”

She put her hands in her lap under the table. “I haven’t had a drink in the middle of the day since my wedding,” she said.

“I wish I could say the same.”

“Are you drinking too much these days, Jesse?” She glanced quickly at him.

“No more than usual,” he said. “Too much.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you you’re an alcoholic,” she said. She was speaking more quickly than ordinarily, her voice a little higher in tone.

“Why?” he asked. “Have you heard anyone saying I was an alcoholic?”

“Not really,” she said. “Oh, well, Penelope. Sometimes she seems to infer …”

“Wives,” Craig said.

The waiter came over and placed the drinks before them. They raised their glasses, and Craig said, “Cheers.”

Alice made a face as she sipped her martini. “I suppose I’ll never find out what people see in these things,” she said.

“Courage,” he said. “Nepenthe.” By now he knew that Alice had not called him merely because she happened to be in the neighborhood that afternoon. “What is it, Alice?” he said.

“Oh, dear,” she said, fiddling with her glass. “It’s so hard to know where to begin.”

He was sure that Alice Paine hadn’t said, “Oh, dear,” since her wedding day, either. She was not that sort of woman. She was also not the sort of woman who didn’t know where to begin.

“Begin in the middle,” he said, “and we’ll work it around.” Her nervousness made him uncomfortable.

“You believe that we’re your friends?” she said. “I mean Robert and myself.”

“Of course.”

“I mean, that’s important,” she said. “I wouldn’t like you to think that I’m a meddlesome woman, or malicious, or anything like that.”

“You couldn’t be meddlesome or malicious if you tried.” By now he was sorry he had been in the office when she had called.

“We had dinner at your house last night,” she said abruptly. “Robert and I.”

“I hope you had a good meal.”

“It was perfect. As usual,” she said. “Except that you weren’t there.”

“I’m not home very much these days.”

“So I gathered,” Alice said.

“How was the guest list?”

“Unbrilliant.”

“As usual,” Craig said.

“Bertie Folsom was there.”

“As usual,” Craig said.

She glanced quickly at him again. “People are beginning to talk, Jesse.”

“People are always beginning to talk,” he said.

“I don’t know what sort of arrangement you and Penelope have,” Alice said, “but they’re seen together everywhere.”

“I don’t know what sort of arrangement we have, either,” he said. “I guess you could call it a large, loose nonarrangement. Is that what you came to tell me—that Penelope and Bertie have been seen together?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. First, I want to tell you that Robert and I aren’t coming to your house anymore.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “Why?”

“It goes a long way back. Four years, to be exact.”

“Four years?” He frowned. “What happened four years ago?”

“Do you think I could ask for another martini?” she said. She sounded like a little girl asking for a second ice cream cone.

“Of course.” He waved to the waiter and ordered two more drinks.

“You were out of town somewhere,” Alice said. “We were giving a little dinner party. We invited Penelope. Then, to round out the table, we had to find an extra man. Somehow, it always turns out that the extra man is Bertie Folsom.”

“What else is new?” Craig said lightly.

“The trouble with tall men like you,” Alice said severely, “is that they never take small men seriously.”

“It’s true,” Craig said, “he’s a very small man. So—he sat next to Penelope at dinner.”

“He took her home.”

“Zounds! He took her home.”

“You think I’m a silly, gossipy woman …”

“Not really, Alice,” he said gently. “It’s just that …”

“Sssh,” she said, and gestured toward the waiter, who was approaching with their drinks.

They sat in silence until the waiter had gone back to the bar.

“All right,” Alice said. “This is what happened. The next morning I received a dozen red roses. Anonymously. No card.”

“That could mean anything,” Craig said, although by now he knew it couldn’t mean anything.

“Every year, on the same date,” Alice said, “October fifth, I get a dozen red roses. Anonymously. Of course he knows I know who sends them. He
wants
me to know. It’s so vulgar. I feel tainted—like an accomplice—every time I go to your house and see him there eating your food, drinking your liquor. And I’ve felt like such a coward, not saying anything to him, not telling you. And last night, seeing him there sitting at the head of the table pouring the wine, acting the host, staying on after everybody had left—I talked it over with Robert, and he agreed with me, I couldn’t keep quiet anymore.”

“Thanks for today,” Craig said. He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

“I don’t know what kind of code we all go by,” Alice said. “I know we’re not supposed to take adultery seriously anymore, that we laugh when we hear about our friends playing around—I’ve heard some stories about you, too.”

“I’m sure you have,” he said. “Most of them no doubt true. My marriage has hardly been a model of felicity for a long time.”

“But this particular thing I can’t take,” Alice said. There was a catch in her voice. “You’re an admirable man. A decent friend. And I can’t stand that awful little man. And to tell the truth, I’ve come to dislike Penelope. There’s something false and hard about her with all her charming hostessy tricks. If I
do
have a code, I suppose it’s that I think that certain people don’t deserve what they have to endure, and if they’re my friends, I finally have to do something about it. Are you sorry I’ve told you all this, Jesse?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said slowly. “Well, anyway, I’ll see to it that you’re not bothered by any more roses.”

The next day he sent a letter to his wife telling her he was seeing a lawyer about a divorce.

Another bar. In Paris now. In the Hotel Crillon, just across from the Embassy. He had fallen into the habit of meeting Constance there when she got through working. It gave a fixed point to his day. The rest of the time he spent wandering around the city, going into galleries, strolling through open-air markets and among the young people of the Latin Quarter, practicing his French in shops, sitting at café tables reading the newspapers, occasionally having lunch with one or two of the men who had been with him on the movie he had made in France and who were sensitive enough not to ask him what he was working on these days.

He liked the room, with its knots of English and American newspapermen arguing at the bar and its shifting population of polite, well-dressed, elderly Americans with New England accents who had been coming to the hotel since before the war. He liked, too, the looks of admiration on the faces of the other drinkers when Constance came hurrying into the bar.

He stood up to greet her, kissed her cheek. Although she had spent a whole day in a stuffy office chain-smoking cigarettes, she always smelled as though she had just come from a long walk in a forest.

She had a glass of champagne, to get the taste of youth out of her mouth, she said. “I’m always surprised,” she said, sipping her champagne, “to find you sitting here when I come in.”

“I told you I’d be here.”

“I know. Still, I’m surprised. Every time I leave you in the morning, I have the feeling that
this
is going to be the day you’re going to meet someone irresistibly attractive or hear about an actor or actress in London or Zagreb or Athens you just have to see perform that night.”

“There’s nobody in London or Zagreb or Athens I want to have anything to do with, and the only irresistibly attractive woman I’ve seen all day,” he said, “is you.”

“Aren’t you a nice man.” She beamed. She had a childish love of compliments.

“Now tell me what you did all day,” she said.

“I made love three times to the wife of a Peruvian tin tycoon …”

“Yeah, yeah.” She grinned. She enjoyed being teased. But not too much.

“I had my hair cut. I ate in a small Italian restaurant on the rue de Grenelle, I read
Le Monde,
I went into three galleries and nearly bought three paintings, I had a glass of beer at the Flore, I went back to my hotel, and …” He stopped. He was conscious that she wasn’t listening to him. She was staring at a young American couple that was passing the table, going toward the back of the room. The man was tall, with a pleasant, open face, as though he had never known doubt or deprivation and that it was inconceivable to him that anybody anywhere could be his enemy or wish him harm. The girl was a pale, tall beauty with dead black hair, wide, dark eyes, something Irish or Spanish in her background, moving with deliberate grace, a dark sable coat rippling about her, smiling at something her husband had just said, touching his arm as they walked between the bar and the tables alongside the windows. They did not seem to see anyone else in the room. It was not discourteous. It was merely that they were so absorbed in themselves that even a careless haphazard glance, the necessity to see or possibly recognize another face, would be a waste, a loss of a precious moment of contact with each other.

Constance kept watching them until they had disappeared in the restaurant section in the rear. She turned back to Craig. “Forgive me,” she said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t listening. They’re people I once knew.”

“They’re a handsome couple.”

“They are that,” Constance said.

“How old is that girl?”

“Twenty-four,” Constance said. “She was responsible for the death of a friend of mine.”

“What?” It was not the sort of thing you expected to hear in the bar of the Crillon.

“Don’t look so alarmed,” Constance said. “People are responsible for the death of other people all the time.”

“She hardly looks like your average murderess.”

Constance laughed. “Oh, it wasn’t anything like that. A man I knew was in love with her, and he read in the newspapers that she had just been married, and three days later he died.”

“What an old-fashioned story,” Craig said.

“He was an old-fashioned man,” Constance said. “And he was eighty-two years old.”

“How did you happen to know an eighty-two-year-old man?” Craig asked. “I know you like older men, of course, but wasn’t that pushing it a bit?”

“The old man’s name was Jarvis,” Constance said. “Kenneth Jarvis.”

“Railroads.”

“Railroads.” She nodded. “Among other things. Many other things. I had a beau who worked with Jarvis’s grandson. Don’t glower, dear. It was before your time, long before your time. The old man liked to have young people around him. He had a great big house in Normandy. At one time he owned a racing stable. He gave big weekend parties, twenty, thirty people at a time. The usual thing, tennis, swimming, sailing, drinking, flirting, whatever you call it. They were always fun. Except for the old man. When I first met him, he was already senile. He’d drop food all over himself when he ate, he’d forget to button his fly, he’d fall asleep at table and snore, he’d tell the same story three times in ten minutes.”

“You paid for your fun,” Craig said.

“People who’d known him when he was younger didn’t seem to mind,” Constance said. “He’d been a charming, generous, cultivated man. A great collector of books, paintings, pretty women. His wife had died when they were both young, and he’d never remarried. The man I used to go to his place with said that you had to repay some of the pleasure a man like that had distributed all through his life, and watching him dribble a little on his necktie or listening to the same story over and over again was a small price to pay. Especially since the house and the food and drink and entertainment were exactly as they’d always been. Anyway, only stupid people laughed at him behind his back.”

“God spare me,” Craig said, “from reaching eighty.”

“Listen to the rest of the story. One weekend an old mistress of Jarvis’s came down. With her daughter. The girl you just saw pass with her husband.”

“God spare me,” Craig said, “from reaching seventy.”

“He fell in love with her,” Constance said. “Real old-fashioned love. Letters every day, flowers, invitations to mother and daughter for cruises, the whole thing.”

“What was in it for the mother? Or the daughter?” Craig asked. “Money?”

“Not really,” Constance said. “They were comfortably enough off. I suppose they got to know a lot of people they otherwise would never have met—that sort of thing. The mother had kept the girl on a tight rein. Her only prize. When I first met the girl, she was nineteen, but she acted fifteen. You half-expected her to curtsy when anybody was introduced to her. Jarvis made her grow up. And then it was flattering. To be the hostess at grand dinner parties, to be the center of attention, to escape her mother. To be adored by a man who in his time had known everybody, had anecdotes about everybody, had ordered the lives of thousands of people, had had affairs with all the famous beauties. She liked the old man, loved him in her own way, maybe, was delighted by her power over him. And overnight, he’d changed completely, he’d become young, vital. He never forgot anything he’d said, he walked erectly, where he used to shuffle, his voice sounded robust, where it used to be a wheeze, he dressed impeccably, he’d stay up all night and be spruce and full of energy in the morning.

“Of course, some people snickered. The sight of an eighty-two-year-old man doting over a nineteen-year-old girl as though it was his first love and he was taking her out to her first ball … But I saw him once in a while, and I was touched. It was as though a miracle had made time reverse for him. He’d gone back. Not all the way, of course, not to twenty or thirty, but to fifty-five, sixty—”