Evening in Byzantium (37 page)

A decorously dressed tall African with tribal scars and his pretty buxom wife, swathed in gorgeously colored silks, were the only other passengers in first class with him. Craig always felt guilty about paying for first class on airplanes and always paid. The African and his wife were speaking in a language he couldn’t understand. He hoped they spoke no English or French. He didn’t want to talk to anyone before he reached New York. The man smiled politely at him. He half-smiled in return, a rigidity of the lips, and looked out the window. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility, he thought, that twenty years from now they would meet again, perhaps in the final confrontation between the races, and the man, or his son or daughter, would say, “I remember you. You were the white traveler who refused the smile of friendship offered in the plane at Nice. You are a racist colonial, and I condemn you to die.”

You were the helpless addition of the accidental and unconsidered moments of your history. Unknowing, you impinged upon the population of your past. Carelessly, you made a joke about a man you had never met—oblivious of his existence, you took his mistress to dinner—for the rest of his life he did what he could to harm you. A silly, stage-struck girl wandered into your office and was hired by your secretary and was a vague, nameless presence in the background for a month or two when you were a young man. More than twenty years later you suffered—profited from?—the consequences of the acts, or the non-acts, of your early manhood. Nothing was lost, nothing forgotten. The man who had devised the first computer had merely organized the principle of inexorable memory into a circuit of wires and electrical impulses. Unnoticed passers-by noted your orbits, punched their private indestructible cards. For better or worse you were on file, the information was stored for eventual use. There was no escape. The process was perpetual. What would Sidney Green say about him among the unpaid-for
boiserie
in the Sixteenth Arrondissement? What would David Teichman’s final instructions be concerning Jesse Craig before he died? How would Natalie Sorel refer to him in the mansions of Texas? What would be the reaction of Gail McKinnon’s daughter upon hearing his name when she was twenty?

He looked hopefully toward the tall African across the aisle, but the man’s face was averted. The engines started up, the demonic howl luxuriously muted by the sound-proofed hull. He took two Miltowns before the plane started to taxi. If he was going to crash, he was going to crash tranquilly.

He waited until after lunch was served before he opened Anne’s letter. He knew that whatever she had to say would not improve his appetite.

There was no date on the letter and no address. Just “Dear Daddy …”

Dear Daddy put on his glasses. Anne’s handwriting was difficult to decipher, and this was worse than ever. It looked as though it had been written while she was running down a steep hill.

“Dear Daddy,” she wrote, “I’m a coward. I knew you’d disapprove and argue, and I was afraid you’d try to convince me and afraid you
would
convince me, so I’m taking the coward’s way out. Just forgive me. Just love and forgive me. I’m with Ian. I thought a long time about it …”

How long was it, he thought. Three days, five? Well, perhaps when you’re twenty years old, five days are a long time to figure out how to waste your life. He didn’t remember.

“I won’t go into the details,” she wrote. “I’ll just tell you that that night in the restaurant when Ian was treated so horribly by Mr. Murphy, I felt something that I’d never felt for anybody else in my life before. Call it love. I don’t care what it’s called. I felt it. Don’t think it’s just hero worship for a writer whose books I admire. And it’s no schoolgirl crush. No matter what you may think, I’m past stuff like that. And I’m not looking for a father figure, which I’m sure you would have said if I had stayed to tell you. I have a perfectly good father. Anyway, Ian’s only forty, and look at you and Gail McKinnon.”

I am served, he thought, and well served. He asked the stewardess for a whisky and soda. It was a letter that needed alcohol. He looked out the window. The valley of the Rhone was hidden by cloud. The clouds looked so solid that you were tempted to believe that you could jump out and swim through them. He sipped at his whisky when the stewardess gave it to him and went back to the letter.

“Don’t think for a minute,” he read, “that I’m against anything you’ve done with Gail. I’m absolutely pro. After what you’ve gone through with Mummy, I wouldn’t blame you if you took up with the bearded lady in the circus. And, good God, Gail is one of the best people I’ve ever met in my whole life. What’s more, she told me she was in love with you. I said, of course, everybody’s in love with him. And that’s almost true. What you’re going to do with the lady in Paris is your own business. Just like Ian is my own business.

“I know the arguments, I know the arguments. He’s too old for me, he’s a drunk, he’s poor, he’s out of fashion, he’s not the handsomest man in the world, he’s been married three times.” Craig grinned sourly at the accurate description of the man his daughter was in love with.

“It’s not as though I haven’t taken these things into consideration,” Anne wrote. “I’ve had long serious discussions with him about it all.”

When? Craig wondered. The night he saw her leave the hotel and walk down the beach? On getting out of bed after having offered her convincing proof to Bayard Patty? He felt a pain at the back of his head, thought of aspirin.

“Before I told him I’d go away with him,” Craig read on without aspirin, “I laid down conditions. I’m young, but I’m not an idiot. I’ve made him promise to quit drinking, first off. And I made him promise to come back to America. And he’s going to keep his promises. He needs someone like me. He needs
me.
He needs to be esteemed. He’s a proud man, and he can’t go through life being derided, deriding himself, the way he’s been doing. How many scenes like that one in the restaurant can a man go through in one lifetime?”

Oh, my poor daughter, Craig thought, how many women through the ages have ruined themselves under the illusion that they, and only they, can save a writer, a musician, a painter? The dread hold of art on the imaginations of the female sex.

“You’re different,” Anne wrote. “You don’t need anyone’s esteem. You’re twenty times stronger than Ian, and I’m asking you to be charitable toward him. In the end, knowing you, I’m sure you will be.

“Sex is a big tangle, anyway, and you should be the first one to admit it.” Craig nodded as he read this. But it was one thing to be forty-eight and come out with a truism like that, another to be twenty. “I know that I was mean to poor old Bayard, and I suppose he’s got to you by now and has been crying on your shoulder. But that was just flesh …”

Craig squinted at the word, stopped on it. Flesh. It was a strange word for Anne to use. He wondered for a moment if Wadleigh had helped her write the letter.

“And flesh isn’t enough.” The scrawl dashed on. “If you’ve talked to Bayard, you must know that was impossible. Anyway, I never asked him to come to Cannes. If I’d married him, as he kept asking me to do (I nearly screamed, he was so insistent), in the long run I’d have been his victim. And I don’t want to be anybody’s victim.”

Some day, Craig thought, I am going to make up a list for her. One thousand easy ways to be a victim.

“Don’t be down on poor Ian for our sliding out the way we did. He wanted to stay and tell you what we were doing. I had the hardest time convincing him not to. Not for his sake but mine. He’s in something of a daze for the time being. A happy daze, he says. He thinks I’m something extra-special, and he says he fell in love with me that first day on the beach. He says I’m so absolutely different from all the other women he’s known. And he says he never dreamed I’d even look at him. He hasn’t touched a drink in two days. Even before we left Cannes. He says it’s a world record for him. And I read the part of the book he’s working on that he has finished, and it’s just wonderful, and if he doesn’t drink, it’ll be the best thing he’s ever done. I’m convinced. And don’t worry about money. I’m going to get a job, and with the money from the trust fund we can get along all right until the book is finished.”

Craig groaned. The African with the tribal scars looked over at him politely. Craig smiled at the man, to reassure him.

“I’m sorry if I’m causing you any pain,” Anne went on, “but later on I’m sure you’ll be happy for me. I’m happy for myself. And you have Gail. Although it’s more complicated with Gail than you think.”

That’s what
you
think, Craig almost talked back aloud to the page.

“There’s a long story about her mother,” Anne wrote, “that she told me but I haven’t the time to go into now. Anyway, she told me that she was going to explain everything to you. Whatever it is, I’m sure it can’t do you any discredit, no matter how it looks on the surface. I really am sure, Daddy.

“I’m still cowardly enough, even now with Ian at my side, not to tell you where we’re going. Just for the moment I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing you and having you disapprove of me in that reasonable, austere way you have. But as soon as we’re settled in the States, I’ll get in touch with you, and you can come and visit us and see for yourself that all is well. Please love me, Daddy, as I love you, Anne.

“P.S. Ian sends his best regards.”

Best regards. Out of consideration for the African couple Craig refrained from groaning again. He folded the letter neatly and put it in his pocket. It would bear rereading.

He thought of Ian Wadleigh in bed with his daughter. “Miss,” he said to the stewardess who was walking down the aisle, “do you have any aspirin?”

B
ELINDA Ewen, his secretary, was waiting for him when he came through customs. He saw that she had not lost her disastrous taste for loud colors in her clothes since he had seen her last. She had been working for him twenty-three years, and it seemed to him that she had always been the same age. He kissed her on the cheek. She seemed happy to see him. He felt guilty because he hadn’t answered her last two letters. If a woman has spent twenty-three years of her life working for you, how do you avoid feeling guilty when you see her?

“I have a limousine waiting for us,” she said. She knew better than anyone that the money wasn’t coming in as it had done for so long but would have been shocked if he suggested that a taxi would have done just as well. She had a fierce sense of their joint status. She screamed over the phone at agents when she discovered that scripts they had sent to the office had first been offered elsewhere.

It was a muggy, oppressive day, and it began to drizzle as they waited for the limousine to be brought around. He touched his hat grimly. The voices of the travelers piling into cars and taxis seemed harsh and angry to him. A child’s screaming grated on his nerves. He felt tired, and the aspirin hadn’t helped much.

Belinda peered at him anxiously, scrutinizing him. “You don’t look well, Jesse,” she said. He had been so young when he hired her that it had been impossible to ask her to call him Mr. Craig. “At least I thought you’d have a tan.”

“I didn’t go to Cannes to lie on the beach,” he said. The limousine drove up, and he sank gratefully onto the back seat. Standing had been an effort. He was sweating, and he had to mop his face with a handkerchief. “Has it been as warm as this all along?” he asked.

“It’s not so warm,” Belinda said. “Now will you tell me why in the name of heaven you asked me to put you into the Manhattan Hotel? On Eighth Avenue, of all places!” He usually stayed at a quiet, expensive hotel on the East Side, and he could tell that in Belinda’s eyes the change represented a demeaning attempt at economy. “I thought it would be more convenient,” he said, “to be closer to the office.”

“You’re lucky if you’re not mugged every time you go out the front door,” Belinda said. “You don’t know what Eighth Avenue is like these days.” She had a sharp, aggressive voice. She had always had a sharp, aggressive voice, and for a while he had toyed with the idea of suggesting to her that she might go to a speech teacher. He had never quite had the courage. Now, of course, it was too late. He didn’t tell her he had decided to go to the Manhattan only at the last moment, as he was writing out the cable to her in the Nice airport. The Manhattan was a brassy commercial hotel that he would ordinarily avoid, but he had suddenly remembered that he had lived there while he was putting on Edward Brenner’s first play. With Edward Brenner. Now no longer writing plays. It had been called the Hotel Lincoln then. Presidents everywhere were being downgraded. He had been lucky at the Hotel Lincoln. He wished he could remember the number of the room. But he couldn’t tell any of that to Belinda. She was too sensible a woman to pamper her employer’s superstitions.

“You certainly didn’t give me much warning,” she said, aggrieved. “I just got your cable three hours ago.”

“Something came up suddenly,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Anyway—” she smiled forgivingly. She had sharp little teeth, like a puppy’s. “—anyway, I’m glad to have you back. The office has been like a morgue. I’ve been going mad with boredom. I even have taken to keeping a bottle of rum in my desk. I nip at it in the afternoons to keep sane. Don’t tell me you’ve finally condescended to go to work again.”