Evening in Byzantium (29 page)

A car with two women in it came up alongside the quai and slowed down. The woman nearest them smiled invitingly. Craig ignored her, and the car moved off.

“They’re prostitutes,” Anne said, “aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“In the temples of ancient Greece,” Anne said, “they prostituted themselves to strangers before the altars.”

“The altars have changed since then,” Craig said. Don’t walk alone at night, Gail had told Anne when they had met on the steps of the hotel. Don’t walk with your father, either, she should have added. Even whores, he thought angrily, should observe
some
rules.

“Have you ever gone with one of them?” Anne asked.

“No,” he lied.

“If I were a man,” Anne said, “I think I’d be tempted to try.”

“Why?”

“Just once, to see what it was like,” she said. Craig remembered a book he had read when he was young,
Jurgen,
by James Branch Cabell. He had read it because it was supposed to be dirty. The hero kept saying, “My name is Jurgen, and I will taste any drink once.” Poor Cabell, who had been sure of his fame (“Tell the rabble/My name is Cabell,” he had announced from what he had considered his enduring and disdainful eminence), poor Cabell, dead, discounted, forgotten even before his death, might now find consolation in the fact that a whole generation so many years later was living by his hero’s disastrous slogan, was tasting any drink once, trying any drug once, any political position, any man or woman, once.

“Maybe,” Anne said with a gesture of her head for the disappearing red lights of the whores’ car, “maybe it would help define things.”

“What things?”

“Love, maybe.”

“Do you think that needs definition?”

“Of course,” Anne said. “Don’t you?”

“Not really.”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “If you really believe that. Do you think they’re having an affair?”

“Who?” Craig asked, although he knew whom she meant.

“Gail and Ian Wadleigh.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The way they behave together. As though there’s something between them.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Actually, he thought, I refuse to think so.

“She’s a cool girl, isn’t she, Gail?” Anne said.

“I don’t know what people mean by cool anymore,” he said.

“She goes her own way,” Anne said, “she doesn’t depend on anyone. And she’s beautiful, and she doesn’t make anything of it. Of course, I only met her today, and I may be way off base, but she gives you the feeling that she makes people live up to the way she wants them to be.”

“Do you think she wanted Wadleigh to end up the night puking his guts out because he behaved like a fool?”

“Probably,” Anne said. “Indirectly. She cares for him, and she wanted him to see for himself what a dead end he’d reached.”

“I think you’re giving her more credit than she deserves,” he said.

“Maybe,” Anne admitted. “Still, I wish I could be like her. Cool, above things, knowing what she wants. And getting it. And getting it on her own terms.” She paused for a moment. “Are you having an affair with her?”

“No,” he said. “Why would you think so?”

“I just asked,” Anne said offhandedly. She shivered a little. “It’s getting cold, I’d like to go back to the hotel and go to bed. I’ve had a long day.”

But when they got back to the hotel, she decided it was too early to go to bed and came up to his apartment with him for a nightcap. She also wanted to get a copy of his script, she said.

If Gail knocked on the door while Anne was there, Craig thought ironically as he poured the whiskies and soda, they could have a nice little family get-together. He could start the evening off on the right foot by saying, “Gail, Anne has some interesting questions she’d like to ask you.” Gail would probably answer them, too. In detail.

Anne was staring at the title page of the script when he brought her her drink. “Who’s Malcolm Harte?” she asked.

“A man I knew during the war,” Craig said. “He’s dead.”

“I thought you said you wrote the script yourself.”

“I did.” He was sorry that he had been so careless on the trip back from the airport and had told her he had done the writing himself. Now he would be forced to explain.

“Then what’s another man’s name doing on it?”

“I guess you could call it my
nom de plume
,” he said.

“What do you need a
nom de plume
for?”

“Business reasons,” he said.

She made a face. “Are you ashamed of it?” She tapped the script.

“I don’t know. Yet,” he said.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “There’s something shady about it.”

“I think you’re being a little too fine.” He was embarrassed by the turn the conversation had taken. “It’s in an old and honorable tradition. After all, a pretty good writer by the name of Samuel Clemens signed his books Mark Twain.” He saw by the set of her lips that this had not convinced her. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “It comes from uncertainty. Put it more bluntly. From fear. I’ve never written anything before, and I haven’t the faintest notion of how good or bad it is. Until I get some opinions on it, I feel safer hiding behind another man’s name. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“I can understand it,” she said. “But it still strikes me as wrong.”

“Let me be a judge of what’s right and what’s wrong, Anne,” he said with a firmness he didn’t feel. At this stage of his life he was not prepared to live up to the dictates of his twenty-year-old daughter’s stainless-steel conscience.

“Okay,” Anne said, hurt, “if you don’t want me to say what I think, I’ll shut up.” She put the script down on the desk.

“Anne, darling,” he said gently, “of course I want you to say what you think. And I want to say what I think. Fair enough?”

She smiled. “You think I’m a brat, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I guess I am,” she said. She kissed his cheek. “Sometimes.” She raised her glass. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” he said.

She took a long swallow of her whisky. “Mmmm,” she said appreciatively. He remembered watching her drink her milk before bedtime when she was a little girl. She looked around at the large room. “Isn’t this awfully expensive?”

“Awfully,” he said.

“Mummy says you’re going to wind up a pauper.”

“Mummy is probably right.”

“She says you’re wildly extravagant.”

“She should know,” he said.

“She keeps asking me if I take drugs.” Anne was obviously waiting for him to ask the same question.

“I take it for granted, from all I see and hear,” he said, “that every student in every college in America has smoked pot at one time or another. I imagine that includes you.”

“I imagine it does,” Anne said.

“I also imagine that you’re too smart to fool around with anything else. And that takes care of that,” he said. “And now let’s call a moratorium on Mummy, shall we?”

“You know what I was thinking all through dinner, looking at you?” Anne said. “I was thinking what a handsome man you are. With all your hair and not fat and those lines of wear and tear in your face. Like a retired gladiator, a little delicate now from old wounds.”

He laughed.

“
Noble
wear and tear,” she said quickly. “As though you’d learned a lot and that’s why the lines were there. You’re the best-looking man I’ve seen since I came here—”

“You’ve only been here a few hours,” he said. But he couldn’t help sounding pleased. Fatuously pleased, he told himself. “Give yourself a couple of days.”

“And I wasn’t the only one,” she said. “Every lady in that restaurant looked at you in that certain way ladies have—that little butterball, Miss Sorel, that fabulous French actress, even Sonia Murphy, even Gail McKinnon.”

“I must say, I didn’t notice it.” He was being honest. He had had other problems to think about during and after dinner.

“That’s one of the great things about you,” Anne said earnestly. “You don’t notice it. I love coming into a room with you and everybody is looking at you like that and you not noticing it. I have a confession to make—” she said, sinking back luxuriously in an easy chair. “I never thought I’d grow up enough to be able to talk to you the way I’ve done today and tonight. Are you glad I came?”

For an answer he went over and leaned down and kissed the top of her hair.

She grinned, looking suddenly boyish. “Someday,” she said, “you’re going to make some girl a good father.”

The telephone rang. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. He didn’t move. The telephone rang again.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Anne asked.

“I’ll probably be happier if I don’t,” he said. But he went over and picked up the instrument. It was the concierge. He wanted to know if Miss Craig was with him, there was a call for her from the United States.

“It’s for you, Anne,” he said. “From the United States.” He saw Anne’s face become sullen. “Do you want to take it here or in the bedroom?”

Anne hesitated, then stood up and placed her drink carefully on the table beside her chair. “In the bedroom, please.”

“Put it on the other phone, please,” Craig told the concierge.

Anne went into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. A moment later he heard the phone ring there and then the muffled sound of her voice.

Holding his glass, he went to the window, opened it, and stepped out onto the balcony to make sure he didn’t overhear Anne’s conversation. The Croisette was still full of people and cars, but it was too cold for anybody to be sitting on the terrace. There was a long swell coming in, and the sea was breaking heavily on the beach, the white of the foam ghostly in the reflected lights of the city.
Sophocles, long ago,/ Heard it on the Aegean,
he recited to himself,
and it brought,/Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.
What ebbing and flowing and turbidity would Sophocles be reminded of listening to the sea in Cannes tonight? Who was ebbing, who flowing? Was Sophocles his real name? Or did he, too, use a
nom de plume
?
Oedipus at Colonus,
by Malcolm Harte, now dead.

He wondered if Penelope had also read the
Tribune
that day and what she had felt, if she had felt anything at all, when she had come across the name of Edward Brenner, another dead writer.

He heard the living-room door open and went in from the balcony. Anne’s face was still sullen. Without a word she picked up her drink and finished it with one swig. Maybe, he thought, I am not the only one in the family who drinks too much.

“Anything serious?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said, but the expression on her face didn’t match her words. “It’s just a boy I know in school.” She poured herself another drink. With very little soda, he noted. “Ah, Christ,” she said. “Nobody leaves you alone.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“He thinks he’s in love with me. He wants to marry me.” She plumped herself down despondently in the easy chair, cradling her drink, her long brown legs stretched out in front of her. “Prepare for visitors,” she said. “He said he’s coming over. Air fares’re ridiculously cheap these days, that’s the trouble. Anybody can follow anybody. One of the reasons I asked you to let me come here was to get away from him. You don’t mind, do you?”

“It’s as good a reason as any,” Craig said noncommitally.

“I thought I was in love with him, too,” she said. “For a hot month. I liked going to bed with him, maybe I still like going to bed with him. But marriage, for God’s sake!”

“I know I’m being old-fashioned,” Craig said, “but what’s so awful about a boy wanting to marry a girl he’s in love with?”

“Everything. You don’t see Gail McKinnon rushing off and getting married to any half-baked jock college boy, do you? You don’t see
her
sitting at home and popping television dinners into the oven, waiting for dear little hubby to come home from the office on the five-thirty commuters’ train, do you?”

“No, you don’t,” he said.

“I’m going to be my own woman first,” Anne said. “Like her. And then if I want to get married, my husband’ll know what the rules are.”

“Can’t you be your own woman, married?”

“Not with that stupid jock,” she said. “He’s not even a good jock. He got a scholarship to play football, he was all-state in high school, or all-idiot, or something like that, and the first week in practice with the varsity team, he tore his knee to bits, and he can’t even play football anymore. That’s the kind of fellow he is. Ah, maybe I
would
marry him if he was smart or ambitious, if I thought he was going to amount to something. His father owns a grain and feed business in San Bernardino, and all he wants is to go into the grain and feed business in San Bernardino. San Bernardino, for God’s sake! Bury me not on the lone prairie. He says he’s not against women working. Until they have children, of course. In this day and age! With all the things happening in the world, wars, revolutions, crazy men with hydrogen bombs, Blacks being gunned down, women finally standing up and asking to be treated like human beings. I know I sound adolescent and naïve, and I don’t know what the hell I expect I can do about any of it, but I know I don’t want to wind up teaching kids the multiplication table in San Bernardino just because some big California lunk has got a fix on me. I tell you, Daddy, sex is the biggest goddamn trap ever invented, and I’m not having any of it. The worst thing is, when I heard his voice on the telephone saying, ‘Anne, I can’t bear it,’ I felt as though all my insides were melting into one big stupid syrupy lump. Ah, shit! I wouldn’t care if he didn’t have a penny, if he walked around barefooted, if he only wanted to
do
something, join a commune and bake organic bread or run for Congress or be a nuclear physicist or an explorer or anything. I’m not all that freaked out myself, but I’m not all that square, either.” She stopped, stared at Craig. “Am I? Do you think so?”

“No,” Craig said. “I don’t think so.”

“I just don’t want to live in the nineteenth century. Ah, what a day,” she said bitterly. “He had to come over and sit next to me in the library. Limping from his goddamn knee. With long hair and a blond beard. You can’t tell what people are like from the way they look anymore. And now he’s coming over here to moon away at me with his big baby-blue eyes, flexing his goddamn biceps and walking around the beach looking as though he ought to be on a marble pedestal somewhere in Thrace. What do you think I ought to do—run away?”