Evening in Byzantium (2 page)

“My dear young lady …” I sound ninety years old, he thought, irritated.

“I mean I’ve been watching you,” she said, “for three days, and you haven’t been with anybody. Any female body, I mean.” While she spoke, the dark glasses swept the room. He was conscious that her glance held for an extra fraction of a second when she saw the script on the desk.

“What are you?” he asked. “A detective?”

The girl smiled. At least her teeth smiled. There was no way of telling what her eyes were doing. “Have no fear,” she said. “I’m a kind of a journalist.”

“There’s no news in Jesse Craig this season, miss. I bid you good morning.” He took a step toward the door, but she did not move.

There was a knock, and the waiter came in carrying the tray with the orange juice and coffee, croissants and toast, and the little folding table.

“
Bonjour, m’sieur et ’dame
,” the waiter said with one swift look at the girl. The French, Craig thought, can leer instantaneously and without the slightest change of expression. He was conscious of the girl’s costume, fought down an impulse to correct the leer. Shamelessly, he wanted to say to the waiter, “I can do better than
that,
for God’s sake.”

“I sought zere eez on’y wan breakfast,” the waiter said.

“There is only one breakfast,” Craig said.

“Why don’t you break down, Mr. Craig,” the girl said, “and ask for another cup?”

Craig sighed. “Another cup, please,” he said. He had been ruled all his life by his mother’s instructions about manners.

The waiter set up the table and arranged two chairs. “Eeen wan moment,” he said, and left to get the second cup.

“Please be seated, Miss McKinnon,” Craig said, hoping that the girl would realize that the formality was ironic. He held the chair for her with one hand while he clutched the robe closed with the other. She looked amused. At least from the nose down she looked amused. She dropped into the chair, placing her bag on the floor beside her. “And now, if you’ll forgive me,” he said, “I’ll go in and put on some clothes more suitable for the occasion.”

He picked up the script and tossed it into the desk drawer, refused to collect his jacket and shirt, and went into the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind him. He dried his hair and brushed it back, ran his hand over his jaw, thought of shaving and shook his head. He put on a white tennis shirt and blue cotton slacks and stepped into a pair of moccasins. He looked at himself briefly in the mirror, not liking the opaque ivory of the whites of his eyes.

When he went back into the living room, the girl was pouring coffee for both of them.

He drank his orange juice in silence. The girl seemed in no hurry. How many women, he thought, have I sat at a breakfast table with in my life not wanting them to talk. “Croissant?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I’ve eaten.”

He was glad he had all his teeth as he bit into a piece of toast.

“Well, now,” the girl said, “isn’t this friendly? Gail McKinnon and Mr. Jesse Craig at a relaxed moment in the wild whirl of Cannes.”

“Well …” he said.

“Does that mean I am to begin asking you questions?”

“No,” he said, “it means I am going to begin asking you questions. What sort of journalist are you?”

“I’m a radio journalist. Part of the time,” she said, holding her cup poised below her mouth. “I do five minute spots of people,” she said, “on tape, for a syndicate that sells them to independent stations in America.”

“What sort of people?”

“Interesting people. At least the syndicate hopes so.” Her voice was flat and slurred, as though she was impatient with questions. “Movie stars, directors, artists, politicians, criminals, athletes, racing-car drivers, diplomats, deserters, people who believe that homosexuality should be legalized or marijuana, detectives, college presidents … Want any more?”

“No.” Craig watched while she poured him more coffee, the lady of the house. “You said part of the time. What do you do the rest of the time?”

“I try to write interviews in depth for magazines. You’re making a face. Why?”

“In depth,” he said.

“You’re right,” she said. “Deadly jargon. You fall into it. It shall never pass my lips again.”

“The morning has not been wasted,” Craig said.

“Interviews like the ones in
Playboy.
Or that Falacci woman,” she said. “The one who got shot by the soldiers in Mexico.”

“I read a couple of hers. She cut up Fellini. And Hitchcock.”

“Maybe they cut themselves up.”

“Should I take that as a warning?”

“If you want.”

There was something disturbing about the girl. He had the impression that she wanted something more than she was asking for.

“This town,” he said, “is overrun at the moment by hordes of publicity-hungry folk who are dying to be interviewed. People your readers, whoever they are, drool for information about. I’m somebody nobody has heard from for years. Why pick on me?”

“I’ll tell you some other time, Mr. Craig,” she said. “When we get to know each other better.”

“Five years ago,” he said, “I would have kicked you out of this room ten minutes ago.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t have interviewed you five years ago.” She smiled again, owl-like.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You show me some of the magazine pieces that you’ve done on other people, and I’ll read them and decide if I want to take a chance on you.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I haven’t published any.” She chuckled briefly, as though what she had said had delighted her. “You’ll be my first.”

“Good God, Miss,” he said, “stop wasting my time.” He stood up.

She remained seated. “I will ask fascinating questions,” she said, “and you will give such fascinating answers that editors will tumble madly over themselves to publish the article.”

“The interview is closed, Miss McKinnon. I hope you enjoy your stay on the Côte d’Azur.”

Still she didn’t move. “It can only do you good, Mr. Craig,” the girl said. “I can help you.”

“What makes you think I need help?” Craig said.

“In all these years you never came to Cannes for the Festival,” the girl said. “All the years you were turning out one picture after another. Now, when you haven’t had your name on a movie since 1965, you arrive, you install yourself in a big plush suite, you’re seen every day in the Hall, on the terrace, at the official parties. You want something this year. And whatever it is, a big splashy piece about you might just be the thing to help you get it.”

“How do you know this is the first time I came for the Festival?”

“I know a lot about you, Mr. Craig,” she said. “I’ve done my homework.”

“You’re wasting your time, miss,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. I have a busy day ahead of me.”

“What are you going to do today?” Infuriatingly, she picked up a croissant and took a small bite out of it.

“I am going to lie on the beach,” he said, “and listen to the waves roll in from Africa. There’s an example of the fascinating answers I’m likely to give you.”

The girl sighed like a mother humoring a recalcitrant infant. “All right,” she said. “It’s against my principles, but I’ll let you read something.” She reached down into her bag and pulled out a batch of yellow paper covered with typescript. “Here,” she said, offering him the pages.

He kept his hands behind his back.

“Don’t be childish, Mr. Craig,” she said sharply. “Read it. It’s about you.”

“I detest reading anything about myself.”

“Don’t lie, Mr. Craig,” she said, impatient again.

“You have a remarkable way of ingratiating yourself with potential interviewees, miss,” he said. But he took the pages and went over to the window where the light was better because he’d have had to put on his glasses to read in the shadowed room.

“If I do it for
Playboy
,” the girl said, “what you have there will be in the form of an introduction, before the actual questions and answers begin.”

At least, he thought, the girls in
Playboy
have their hair done before they present themselves.

“Do you mind if I pour myself another cup of coffee?” she asked.

“By all means.” He heard the china clink of the spout against the cup rim as he began to read.

“To the general public,” he read, “the word ‘producer’ usually has pejorative connotations. The cliché about a movie producer is that he is likely to be a portly Jewish gentleman with a cigar in his mouth, a peculiar vocabulary, and a distasteful penchant for starlets. Or for that small group who have been influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s romantic idealization of the late Irving Thalberg in his unfinished novel
The Last Tycoon,
he is a mysteriously gifted dark figure, a benevolent Svengali, half-magician, half-master politician, who strangely resembles F. Scott Fitzgerald himself in his more attractive moments.

“The popular image of the theatrical producer is somewhat less colorful. He is less likely to be thought of as Jewish or fundamentally gross, although the admiration with which he is regarded is limited. If he is successful, he is envied as a lucky man who by chance one day picks up a script that happens to be lying on his desk, scrambles around for other people’s money to back the production, and then coasts happily forward to fame and fortune on the talents of artists whose work he most often tries to corrupt in an attempt to please the Broadway market.

“Curiously enough, in a related field, that of the ballet, honor is given where honor is due. Diaghilev, who as far as is known never danced a step or choreographed a
pas de deux
or painted a décor, is recognized everywhere as a giant innovator of the modern ballet. While Goldwyn (Jewish, whip-thin, no cigar) and Zanuck (non-Jewish, with cigar, wiry) and Selznick (Jewish, portly, cigarettes) and Ponti (Italian, plump, no cigar) are not perhaps what magazines like
Commentary
and the
Partisan Review
call seminal figures in the art that they served, the films that they have produced and that plainly bear their individual marks have influenced the thinking and attitudes of populations all over the world and certainly prove that they came to their tasks equipped with something more than luck and money or an influential family devoted to nepotism.”

Well, he thought grudgingly, you can’t fault her grammar. She’s been to school
someplace.
But he was still irritated by the offhand manner in which Gail McKinnon had broken into his morning. And irritated even more by her cool assumption that he would perform obediently. Craig would have liked to put the yellow pages down and order her from the room. But his vanity was aroused, and he wondered how she would place the name of Jesse Craig in her roster of heroes. He had to make an effort not to glance in her direction and examine her more closely. He read on.

“In the American theatre,” he read, “the case is even clearer. In the 1920s Lawrence Langner and Terry Helburn, with their Theatre Guild, opened new horizons of drama, and as late as the 1940s, still functioning not as directors or writers but solely as producers, they transformed that most American of theatrical forms, the musical comedy, with
Oklahoma.
Clurman, Strasberg, and Crawford, the ruling trio of the Group Theater, while sometimes directors in their own right, made their chief contribution in their choice of controversial plays and the method of training actors in ensemble playing.”

She wasn’t lying, Craig thought. She had done her homework. She wasn’t even born when any of this was going on. He looked up. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” she said. “Does it make any difference?”

“It always makes a difference,” he said. He read on with ungenerous respect. “More recent names are not hard to find, but there is no need to belabor the point. There was almost certainly someone, whatever he was called, who took on the task of assembling the talents for the festivals in which Aeschylus and Sophocles competed, and Burbage saw to it that the Globe Theatre was a running concern when Shakespeare brought in
Hamlet
for him to read.

“In this long and honorable list we now come to Jesse Craig.”

Brace yourself, he thought. This is where the brick drops.

“In 1946,” he read, “Jesse Craig, then aged twenty-four, first commanded attention when he presented
The Foot Soldier,
still one of the few viable dramatic works about World War Two. Between 1946 and 1965 Craig produced 10 more plays and 12 movies, a high proportion of them both critical and commercial successes. Since 1965 no production bearing his name has been seen either on the stage or screen.”

The phone rang. “Excuse me,” he said, picking it up.

“Craig speaking,” he said.

“Did I wake you?”

“No.” He glanced guardedly at the girl. She slouched in her chair, absurd in the oversized sweat shirt.

“Did you dream lascivious dreams of me all the terrible night?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Brute. Are you having a good time?”

“Yes.”

“Double brute,” Constance said. “Are you alone?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

“You know better than that.”

“Anyway, you can’t talk at the moment?”

“Not exactly. How is Paris?”

“Sweltering. And the French as usual intolerable.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“The office.”

He could picture her in her office—a small, cramped room on the rue Marbeuf, usually crowded with a dozen young men and women who looked as though they had rowed across the Atlantic instead of arriving on the freighters and steamships and aircraft for student tours that her business was to arrange for them. Anyone under the age of thirty, in whatever state, seemed to be welcome there, and it was only when Constance got a whiff of marijuana that she would rise dramatically from the desk, point fiercely at the door, and clear the room.

“Aren’t you afraid someone’s listening?” he asked.

Constance was intermittently suspicious that her telephone was tapped—by the French tax people, by the American narcotics people, by ex-lovers highly placed in various embassies.