Evening in Byzantium (24 page)

“I don’t know what she knows,” Anne said. “I only know what she told me. She says that the lady is ridiculously young for you and looks like a manicurist and is out for your money.”

Craig laughed. “Manicurist. Obviously, she’s never seen the lady.”

“Oh, yes she has. She’s even had a scene with her.”

“Where?”

“Paris.”

“She was in Paris?” he asked incredulously.

“You bet she was. In your best interests. She told the lady what she thought of adventuring ladies who took advantage of foolish old men and broke up happy homes.”

Craig shook his head wonderingly. “Constance never said a word about it.”

“I guess it’s not the sort of thing a lady likes to talk about,” Anne said. “Am I going to meet Constance?”

“Of course,” Craig said uncomfortably. This was not the conversation he had imagined he was going to have with his daughter when he took her in his arms at the airport.

“I tell you,” Anne said, “Geneva was just pure fun all the way. I got to have dinner at the Richemonde with Mummy and her friend, along with all the other goodies.”

Craig drove silently. He didn’t want to discuss his wife’s lover with his daughter.

“Little pompous show off,” Anne said. “Ugh. Sitting there ordering caviar and yelling at the waiter about the wine and being gallant for five minutes with Mummy and five minutes with me. I suddenly knew why I’ve hated Mummy ever since I was twelve.”

“You don’t hate her,” Craig said gently. Whatever he was responsible for, he didn’t want to be responsible for alienating his daughters from their mother.

“Oh, yes I do,” Anne said. “I do, I do. Why did you tolerate that miserable, boring man around the house pretending to be your friend all those years, why did you let them get away with it for so long?”

“Betrayal begins at home,” Craig said. “I was no angel, either. You’re a big girl now, Anne, and I imagine you’ve realized quite a while ago that your mother and I have been going our separate ways for years—”

“Separate ways!” Anne said impatiently. “Okay, separate ways. I can understand that. But I can’t understand how you ever married that bitch—”

“Anne!” he said sharply. “You can’t talk like that—”

“And what I can’t understand most of all is how you can let her threaten to sue you for adultery and take all your money like that. And the house! Why don’t you put a detective on her for two days and then see how she behaves?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not? She put a detective on you.”

Craig shrugged. “Don’t argue like a lawyer,” he said. “I just can’t.”

“You’re too old-fashioned,” Anne said. “That’s your trouble.”

“Let’s not talk about it, please,” he said. “Just remember that if I hadn’t married your mother, I wouldn’t have you and your sister, and maybe I think because I do have you two, everything else is worth it, and no matter what your mother does or says I am still grateful to her for that. Will you remember?”

“I’ll try.” Anne’s voice was trembling, and he was afraid she was going to cry. She had never been an easy crier, even as a child. “One thing, though,” she said bitterly, “I don’t want to see that woman again. Not in Switzerland, not in New York, not in California. No place. Never.”

“You’ll change your mind,” he said gently.

“Wanna bet?”

Oh, Christ, he thought. Families. “There’s one fact I have to make absolutely clear to you and Marcia,” he said. “Constance had nothing to do with my leaving your mother. I left because I was bored to the point of suicide. Because the marriage was meaningless and I didn’t want to lead a meaningless life anymore. I’m not blaming your mother any more than I’m blaming myself. But whoever’s fault it was, there was no point in trying to continue. Constance was just a coincidence.”

“Okay,” Anne said. “I’ll buy that.”

Anne didn’t speak for several moments, and he drove past the Cannes racecourse, grateful for the silence. The horses of the south. Simple victories, unqualified defeats. The sprinklers were on, myriad arched fountains over the green infield.

“Now,” Anne said finally, her voice brisk, “how about you? Are you having fun?”

“I suppose you can call it that,” he said.

“I’ve been worried about you,” Anne said.

“Worried about me?” He couldn’t help sounding surprised. “I thought it was modern doctrine that nowadays no child ever worried about any parent.”

“I’m not as modern as all that,” Anne said.

“Why’re you worried about me?”

“Your letters.”

“What did I say in my letters?”

“Nothing I can pin down,” she said. “Nothing overt. But underneath—I don’t know—I had the feeling you were dissatisfied with yourself, that you weren’t sure about yourself or what you were doing. Even your handwriting …” she said.

“Handwriting?”

“It just looked different,” Anne said. “Not as firm, somehow. As though you’d lost confidence in how to make an ‘e’ or a capital ‘G’.”

“Maybe I ought to begin typing my letters,” Craig said, trying to make a joke out of it.

“It’s not as easy as that,” she said earnestly. “There’s a professor in the psychology department who’s a handwriting expert, and I showed him two of your letters. One that I got from you four years ago and …”

“You keep old letters of mine?” Extraordinary child. He had never kept any of his parents’ letters.

“Of course, I do. Well, anyway, this professor was saying one day that very often, long before anything shows or there are any symptoms or anything like that or before a person feels anything at all, his handwriting sort of—well—
predicts
changes … disease, death even.”

He was shaken by what she had said but tried not to show it. Anne had always been a blunt, candid child, blurting out everything that crossed her mind. He had been proud and a little amused by her unsparing honesty, finding it evidence of an admirable strength of character. He was not so amused now, now that it was he who was not being spared. He tried to pass it off lightly. “And what did that smart man have to say about your father’s letters?” he asked ironically.

“You can laugh,” she said. “He said you’d changed. And would change more.”

“For the better, I hope,” Craig said.

“No,” she said. “Not for the better.”

“God Almighty,” Craig said. “You send your children to a big fancy college for a scientific education and they come out with their heads stuffed with all kinds of medieval superstitions. Does your psychology professor read palms, too?”

“Superstitions or not,” Anne said, “I promised myself I was going to tell you, and I told you. And when I saw you today, I was shocked.”

“By what?”

“You don’t look well. Not at all well.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Anne,” Craig said, although he was sure she was right. “I’ve had a couple of rough nights, that’s all.”

“It’s more than that,” she persisted. “It’s not just a rough night or two. It’s something fundamental. I don’t know whether you’ve realized it or not, but I’ve been studying you ever since I was a little girl. No matter how you tried to disguise things, I always knew when you were angry or worried or sick or scared …”

“And what about now?” He challenged her.

“Now—” She ran her hand nervously through her hair. “You have a funny look. You look—uncared for—I guess that’s the best description. You look like a man who spends his life moving from one hotel room to another.”

“I
have
been living in hotel rooms. Some of the best hotels in the world.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

He did know what she meant, but he did not admit it. Except to himself.

“I made up my mind when I got your cable that I was going to deliver a speech,” Anne said, “and now I’m going to deliver it.”

“Look at the scenery, Anne,” he said. “You can make speeches any time.”

She ignored what he had said. “What I want to do,” she said, “is live with you. Take care of you. In Paris, if that’s where you want to be. Or New York, or wherever. I don’t want you to turn into a solitary old man eating dinner alone night after night. Like … like an old bull who’s been turned out from the herd.”

He laughed despite himself at her comparison. “I don’t want to sound boastful,” he said, “but I don’t lack for company, Anne. Anyway, you have another year to go in college and …”

“I’m through with education,” she said. “And education is through with me. At least
that
sort of education. I’m not going back, no matter what.”

“We’ll discuss that some other time,” he said. Actually, after the years of wandering, the thought of living in an ordered household with Anne suddenly seemed attractive. And he recognized that he still suffered from the old, unworthy, and by now unmentionable belief that education was not terribly important for women.

“Another thing,” Anne said. “You ought to go back to work. It’s ridiculous, a man like you not doing anything for five years.”

“It’s not as easy as all that,” he said. “Nobody’s clamoring to give me a job.”

“You!” she cried incredulously. “I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” he said. “Murphy is down here. Talk to him about the movie business.”

“People’re still making pictures.”

“People,” he said. “Not your father.”

“I can’t bear it,” she said. “You talking like a failure. If you’d only make up your mind to
try
instead of being so damn proud and remote. I’ve talked it over with Marcia, and she agrees with me—it’s sheer, dumb, shameful waste.” She sounded close to hysteria, and he put his hand out and patted her soothingly.

“Actually,” he said, “the same idea has occurred to me. I’ve been working for the last twelve months.”

“There,” she said triumphantly. “You see! With whom?”

“With nobody,” he said. “With myself. I’ve written a script. I’ve just finished it. Somebody’s reading it right now.”

“What does Mr. Murphy say?”

“It stinks, Mr. Murphy says. Throw it away.”

“Stupid old man,” Anne said. “I wouldn’t listen to a word he says.”

“He’s far from stupid.”

“You’re not listening to him, though, are you?”

“I haven’t thrown it away yet.”

“Can I read it?”

“If you want.”

“Of course, I want. Can I tell you exactly what I think of it?”

“Naturally.”

“Even if Mr. Murphy is right,” Anne said, “and it turns out that what you’ve done isn’t good enough or commercial enough or whatever it is they want these days, you could do something else. I mean, the movies aren’t the only thing in the world, are they? In fact, if you want to know the truth, I think you’d be a lot happier if you forgot them altogether. You have to deal with such awful people. And it’s all so cruel and capricious—one minute you’re a kind of Culture Hero and the next minute everybody’s forgotten you. And the people you have to pander to, the Great American Audience—good God, Daddy, go into a movie house, any movie house, on a Saturday night and see what they’re laughing at, what they’re crying over … I remember how hard you used to work, how you’d be half dead by the time you finished a picture … And for whom? For a hundred million goons!”

He recognized the echo of some of his own thoughts in Anne’s tirade, but he wasn’t pleased by what she had said. Especially by the word she had used—pander. It was one thing for a man his age who had worked and won and lost in that harsh arena to have his doubts in moments of depression about the value of his efforts. It was another to hear such a sweeping condemnation from the lips of an untried and pampered child. “Anne,” he said, “don’t be so hard on your fellow Americans.”

“Anybody who wants my fellow Americans,” she said bitterly, “can have them.”

Another item on the agenda, he thought. Find out what happened to my daughter in her native land in the last six months. At our next meeting.

He changed the subject. “Since you’ve been doing so much thinking about my career,” he said with mild irony, “perhaps you have a suggestion about what I should do.”

“A million things,” she said. “You could teach, you could get a job as an editor for a publisher. After all, that’s what you’ve been doing practically all your life, editing other people’s scripts. You could even become a publisher yourself. Or you could move to a peaceful small town and run a little theatre somewhere. Or you could write your memoirs.”

“Anne,” he said half-reprovingly, “I know I’m old, but I’m not
that
old.”

“A million things,” she repeated stubbornly. “You’re the smartest man I’ve ever known, it’d be a crime if you just let yourself be thrown into the discard just because the people in the movie business or in the theatre are so stupid. You’re not
married
to the movie business. Moses never came down from Sinai saying, ‘Thou Shalt Entertain,’ for Christ’s sake.”

He laughed. “Anne, darling,” he said, “you’re making a mixed salad out of two great religions.”

“I know what I’m talking about.”

“Maybe you do,” he admitted. “Maybe there’s some truth in what you say. But maybe you’re wrong, too. One of the reasons I came to Cannes this year at all was to make up my mind about it, to see if it was worth it.”

“Well,” she said defiantly, “what have you seen, what have you learned?”

What had he seen, what had he learned? He had seen all kinds of movies, good and bad, mostly bad. He had been plunged into a carnival, a delirium of film. In the halls, on the terraces, on the beach, at the parties, the art or industry or whatever it deserved to be called in these few days was exposed in its essence. The whole thing was there—the artists and pseudo-artists, the businessmen, the con men, the buyers and sellers, the peddlers, the whores, the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year’s heroes, the year’s failures. And then the distillation of what it was all about, a film of Bergman’s and one of Buñuel’s, pure and devastating.

“Well,” Anne repeated, “what have you learned?”

“I’m afraid I learned that I’m hooked,” he said. “When I was a little boy, my father used to take me to the theatre, the Broadway theatre. I used to sit in my seat, not budging, waiting for the theatre to go dark and the footlights go on, afraid that something would happen and the darkness would never come and the stage lights never come on. And then it would happen. I would clench my fists with happiness and worry for the people I was going to see on the stage when the curtain went up. The only time I ever remember being rude to my father was at a moment like that. He said something to me, I don’t know what, and it was destroying that great moment for me, and I said, ‘Pop, please keep quiet.’ I think he understood because he never said a word again once they began to dim the house lights. Well, I don’t have that feeling anymore in the Broadway theatre. But I have it each time I buy a ticket and walk into a darkened movie house. That’s not a bad thing, you know—for a forty-eight-year-old man to have one repetitive thing in his life that makes him feel like a boy again. Maybe it’s because of that that I make up all sorts of excuses for movies, that I rationalize away the hateful aspects, the cheapness, the thousand times I’ve walked out disgusted, and try to convince myself that one good picture makes up for a hundred bad ones. That the game is worth the candle.”