Evening in Byzantium (30 page)

“That’s up to you,” Craig said. “Isn’t it?” So that’s what had happened to her in the last six months.

She put her glass down roughly. Some of the drink spilled over on the table. She stood up. “Don’t be surprised if I’m not here when you get back from wherever you’re going,” she said.

“Just leave word where I can reach you,” he said.

“Have you got any pills?” she said. “I’m all jangled. I’ll never get any sleep tonight.”

Modern father, after having plied his daughter with drink during the evening and having listened without comment or demur to her description of her carnal relations with a young man she scorned to marry, he went into the bathroom and returned with two Seconals to assure her night’s rest. When he was twenty, he remembered, he had slept undrugged, even under bombing and occasional shell-fire. He had also been a virgin. Insomnia began with liberty. “Here,” he said, handing her the pills. “Sleep well.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said, taking the pills and throwing them into her bag. She picked up a script. “Wake me in the morning before you leave and I’ll come down and have breakfast with you.”

“That would be nice,” he said. He did not mention the possibility that there might be other company present for the same meal. Or that she might expect the waiter to look at her oddly. He took her to the door, kissed her good night, and watched her go down the corridor toward the elevator with her pills and her problems. Even now, he noticed, she was imitating, just a little, Gail McKinnon’s way of walking.

He didn’t feel like sleeping. He fixed himself a fresh drink, looked at it thoughtfully before taking the first sip. Was it possible that he did drink too much, as Anne had said. The censorious young.

He picked up a copy of
The Three Horizons
and began to read. He read thirty pages. They didn’t make much sense to him. I’ve reread it too often, he thought, it’s gone dead on me. He couldn’t tell whether he should be ashamed of it or not. At that same moment, perhaps, Walter Klein in his castle and Anne upstairs in her single room were reading the same thirty pages. He was being judged. The thought made him uneasy. He noticed that he had finished his drink as he read. He looked at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock. He still wasn’t sleepy.

He went onto the balcony and looked out. The sea was higher than before, the noise of the waves greater. The traffic on the Croisette had diminished. American voices floated up, women’s laughter. Women should be forbidden to laugh outside your window after midnight, he thought, when you are alone.

Then he saw Anne coming out from under the porte-cochère. She was wearing her raincoat over the yellow organdy dress. He watched as she crossed the street. Two or three men who were passing by glanced at her, he saw, but kept on walking. Anne went down the steps to the beach. He saw her shadowy form moving close to the water’s edge, outlined against the luminous gleam of the breakers. She walked slowly, disappeared into the darkness.

He checked an impulse to hurry after her. If she had wanted to be with him, she would have let him know. There was a certain point at which you no longer could hope to protect your child.

The young spoke candidly, endlessly, shockingly, about themselves to you, but in the long run you didn’t really know any more about them than your father in his time had known about you.

He went back into the room, had his hand on the whisky bottle, when the knock came at the door.

When he awoke the next morning in the tumbled bed, he was alone. There was a note for him in Gail’s handwriting on the desk in the living room. “Am I a better lay than my mother?” she had written.

He called her hotel, but the operator said Miss McKinnon had gone out.

All those big masculine writers were wrong, Craig thought, it was actually the vagina that was the instrument of revenge.

He picked up the phone again and called Anne’s room and told her to come down for breakfast. When she came down, in her bathrobe, he didn’t tell her he had seen her leave the hotel the night before.

When the waiter came in with the two breakfasts, he looked at Anne the way Craig had known he would look. He didn’t tip the man.

O
N a curve, a Peugeot loaded with children and going ninety miles an hour nearly hit him head on. He swerved, just avoiding the ditch alongside the road. He drove slowly and carefully after that, wary of all Frenchmen on wheels and not enjoying the views of the vineyards and olive groves through which the road ran or the occasional glimpses of the sea off to his left.

He was in no hurry to get to Marseilles. He had not yet decided what to say to Constance. If he was going to say anything. He wasn’t sure that he was a good enough actor to be able to pretend successfully that nothing had happened. He wasn’t certain that he wished to pretend that nothing had happened.

The night had shaken him. This time there had been no coquetry or refusal. Wordlessly, in the dark, with the sound of the sea outside the window, Gail had accepted him, gently, gravely. Her hands were soft, her mouth sweet, her touch delicate and slow. He had forgotten the skin of young girls. He had expected avidity, or if not that, brusqueness, or even resentment. Instead, she had been … Well, he thought, the best word he could find was welcoming, profoundly welcoming. At the back of his mind a thought flickered at the edge of consciousness—
This is better than anything I’ve had in my whole life.
He recognized the danger. But some time during the night he had said, “I love you.”

He had felt tears on her cheek.

And then in the morning there had been that harsh joke, the note on the desk. Who the hell could her mother have been?

As he approached Marseilles, he drove even more slowly.

When he got to the hotel, there was a note from Constance. She would be back some time after five, she had reserved a room adjoining hers for him, she loved him. And there was a message at the concierge’s desk. Mr. Klein had called and would like him to call back.

He followed the clerk up to his room. The door between his room and Constance’s was standing open. When the clerk had left and the porter had put down his bag, he went into Constance’s room. Her familiar comb and brush were on the bureau, and a linen dress that he recognized was hanging outside a closet door to shake out the wrinkles. The rooms themselves were dark and hot and heavily furnished. There was a great deal of noise coming in from the street, even though the windows were closed.

He went back into his own room and sat on the bed, his hand on the telephone. When he picked it up, he started to give the number of Gail’s hotel to the operator, then corrected himself and asked for Klein’s number.

Klein answered himself. He was a man who was never more than five feet from a telephone. “How’s the great man?” Klein asked. “And what is he doing in Marseilles?”

“It’s the heroin center of the world,” Craig said. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Listen, Jesse,” Klein said, “hold on a minute. I have to go to another phone. There’re a lot of people in here with me and …”

“I’ll hold,” Craig said. There were always a lot of people in there with Klein.

A moment later he heard the click as Klein picked up the other phone. “Now we can talk,” Klein said. “You’re coming back to Cannes, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“In a couple of days or so.”

“You’ll get back before everybody breaks camp, won’t you?”

“If necessary,” Craig said.

“I think it’ll be useful,” Klein said. “Look, I read that Harte script you sent me. I like it. I think I may be able to put something together. Right here. This week. Are you interested?”

“It all depends.”

“It all depends on what?”

“On what you mean by putting something together.”

“I think I may have a lead,” Klein said. “With a director. I won’t tell you his name because he hasn’t said yes or no yet. But he’s read it. And nobody’s said a word so far about money. And there’s many a slip et cetera … You understand.”

“Yes,” Craig said. “I understand.”

“What I mean,” Klein said, “is that I think it’d be worth your while to get back here as soon as possible. But there’re no promises. You understand that, too, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Another thing,” Klein went on. “I think the script needs work.”

“I never heard of a script that didn’t,” Craig said. “If Shakespeare showed up with the manuscript of Hamlet, the first man he showed it to would say, ‘I think this script needs work.’”

“I don’t know who this fellow Harte is, but he’s no Shakespeare,” Klein said. “And I have the feeling he’s shot his load on this draft. I mean, I think whatever director agrees to do it would want to bring in another writer for a second version. Before I talk to the director, I have to know what you think about that.”

Craig hesitated. Maybe, he thought, this was the moment to announce that there was nobody named Malcolm Harte. But he said, “I’d have to talk it over with whoever was finally going to do it. See what his ideas are.”

“Fair enough,” Klein said. “One more thing. Do you want me to tell Murphy I’m handling this, or will you? He’s bound to hear. And soon.”

“I’ll tell him,” Craig said.

“Good,” Klein said. “It’s going to be a rough ten minutes.”

“Let me worry about it.”

“Okay. Worry. Can I reach you at the Marseilles number if something comes up?”

“If I move,” Craig said, “I’ll let you know.”

“I don’t know what’s so great about Marseilles, for Christ’s sake,” Klein said. “We’re having a ball here.”

“I bet.”

“Keep your fingers crossed, kid,” Klein said, and hung up. Craig looked at the telephone. He who lives by the telephone, he thought irrelevantly, dies by the telephone. He supposed he should have been elated by Klein’s reaction to the script. Not wildly elated but cautiously, quietly elated. Even if nothing ever came of it in the end, here was some proof that he hadn’t been wasting his time entirely.

He picked up the phone again and asked for the Carlton. Anne must have read the script by now, and it might help to know what she thought of it. Also, good father, having left her with the problem of the young man arriving from California, perhaps he could offer some useful advice. If she asked him for any.

While he was waiting for the operator to reach the Carlton, he shaved and took a shower. He should look and smell his best for Constance. It was the least he could do.

He had to climb out of the shower when he heard the telephone ring. As he stood dripping, waiting for the operator at the Carlton to connect him with Anne’s room, he looked at his wet, high-arched footprints on the worn carpet. At least I’m not flatfooted, he thought. A man could be vain about the most idiotic things.

There was no answer from Anne’s room. If she needed advice, she was getting it elsewhere. From Gail, most likely. He wondered what Gail would have to say to his daughter, how much she would tell her. What if she told her everything? And what, exactly, was everything? Cross that bridge when you come to it.

He went back into the bathroom and stood under the cold water rinsing the soap off. He dried himself and dressed quickly. He needed a drink, he told himself. He hadn’t brought a bottle along, and he would have to go to the bar. There was a certain amount of cowardice involved there, he acknowledged to himself. He didn’t want to greet Constance in their rooms. Where she might expect him to get into bed with her immediately. Immediately was not for today.

The bar was dark red, blood-colored. There were two small Japanese men in identical dark suits looking over a thick bundle of mimeographed sheets of paper and speaking Japanese earnestly, in voices just above a whisper. Were they planning to bomb the harbor of Marseilles? He wondered how he could have hated small neat polite men like that as much as he had when he was a young man.
Banzai.

He was on his second Scotch when Constance came into the bar. Red was not her color. He rose and kissed her. Her hair was a little damp from the heat. He should not have noticed. “You look beautiful,” he said. Everything else could wait.

“Welcome, welcome,” she said.

The word had an echo he would have preferred not to hear.

“I need a Tom Collins,” she said. “He knows how to make them.” She gestured toward the barman. She had been there before. With whom? Had there been tears on her cheek recently?

He ordered the Tom Collins and another Scotch for himself. “How many does that make?” she asked lightly.

“Only three,” he said. Anne was not the only one who was concerned about his drinking. Next month he would go on the wagon. Just wine.

“I knew I would find you in the bar,” she said. “I didn’t even bother to ask the concierge.”

“I have no mystery left for you,” he said. “It’s a bad sign.”

“You have plenty of mystery,” she said. “Never fear.”

They were uneasy with each other. She picked up her bag and put it down, her fingers fiddling with the clasp.

“What’re you doing in Marseilles, anyway?” he asked. Klein had asked him the same question. Was it possible that all the million inhabitants of the city asked each other every morning, “What are you doing in Marseilles?”