Evening in Byzantium (5 page)

He tossed the envelopes onto a table in the salon and went into the bathroom and shaved carefully. Then, his face pleasingly smarting from lotion, he went back into the salon and slit open Gail McKinnon’s envelope.

There was a hand-written note on top of a pile of typed yellow pages.

“Dear Mr. Craig,” he read, “I’m writing this late at night in my hotel room, wondering what’s wrong with me. All my life people have been glad to see me, but this afternoon and evening, every time I as much as looked in your direction, on the beach and at lunch, in the lobby of the Festival Hall, at the bar, at the party, you made me feel as though I were Hurricane Gail on her way to lay waste the city. In your career you must have given hundreds of interviews. To people who were a lot more stupid than I am, I bet, and quite a few who were downright hostile. Why not to me?

“Well, if you won’t talk to me about yourself, there are a lot of people who will, and I haven’t been wasting my time. If I can’t get the man whole, I’ll get him refracted through a hundred different pairs of eyes. If he comes out not terribly happy about himself, that’s his fault and not mine.”

He recognized the reporter’s usual gambit. If you won’t tell me the truth, I will get your enemy to tell me lies. It was probably taught in the first year at all schools of journalism.

“Maybe,” he read, “I’ll do the piece in an entirely different way. Like a scientist observing the wild animal in his natural state. From afar, using stealth and a telescopic lens.
The animal has a well-developed sense of territory, is wary of man, drinks strong waters, has an inefficient instinct for survival, mates often, with the most attractive females in the herd.”

He chuckled. She would be difficult to defeat.

“I lie in wait,” the note finished. “I do not despair. I enclose some more drivel on the subject, neatly typed. It is now four
A.M
., and I will carry my pages through the dangerous dark streets of Gomorrah-by-the-sea to your hotel and cross your concierge’s palm with silver so that the first thing you will see when you wake in the morning is the name of Gail McKinnon.”

He put the note down and, without glancing at the typewritten yellow pages, picked up his daughter’s letter. Every time he got a letter from either one of his daughters, he remembered the dreadful confession Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter had written somewhere that whenever she got a letter from her father while she was in college, she would tear it open and shake it to see if a check would fall out and then toss the letter, unread, into a desk drawer.

He opened the letter. A father could do no less.

“Dear Dad,” he read, in Anne’s cramped, schoolgirlish handwriting, “San Francisco is Gloomstown. The college is just about closed down, and it might just as well be a war. The Huns are everywhere. On both sides. Springtime is for Mace. Everybody is so boringly convinced he’s right. As far as I can tell, our black friends want me to learn about African tribal dances and ritual circumcision of young ladies rather than the Romantic poets. The Romantic poets are irrelevant, see. The professors are as bad as everybody else. On both sides. Education is square, chick. I don’t even bother hanging around the campus anymore. If you do go there, twenty people ask you to lay your pure white body down in front of the Juggernaut for twenty different reasons. No matter what you do, you are a traitor to your generation. If you don’t think Jerry Rubin is the finest fruit of young American manhood, your father is a bank president or a secret agent for the CIA or, God forbid, Richard Nixon. Maybe I’ll take up simultaneous membership in the Black Panthers and the John Birch Society and show everybody. To paraphrase a well-known writer: Neither a student nor a policeman be.

“I know I was the one who wanted to go to college in San Francisco because after the years of school in Switzerland some insane superpatriot convinced me I was losing my American-ness, whatever that is, and that San Francisco was the town where the real action was. And I was planning to get a job as a waitress at Lake Tahoe this summer to see how the other half lives. I no longer give a damn how the other half lives. This may be temporary, I realize. I’m abashed how temporary so many of my ideas are. Most of them don’t last till lunch. And I couldn’t help being American, God help me, if I lived to be a hundred. What I’d like, if it wouldn’t be too much of a burden on you, would be to get on a plane and come over to Europe for the summer and let them sort things out at the college without me before the fall term begins.

“If I do come to Europe, I’d like to avoid Mother as much as I can. I suppose you know she’s in Geneva this month. She writes me dire letters about how impossible you are and that you are out to destroy her and that you’re a libertine and suffering from the male menopause and I don’t know what all. And ever since she found out I take the Pill, she treats me as though I’m Fanny Hill or a character out of the Marquis de Sade, and the evenings will be long on the banks of Lac Léman if I visit her.

“Your favorite daughter Marcia writes from time to time from Arizona. She is very happy there, she says, except for her weight. Obviously, no news gets through to the University of Arizona, and it is still like those old college musicals with panty raids and pillow fights you see on the Late Late Show. She is putting on weight, she says, because she eats compulsively because our happy home has been broken up. Freud, Freud, in the ice cream parlor.

“I’ve made a lot of jokes in this letter, I see, but Daddy, I don’t feel funny. Love, Anne.”

He sighed as he put his daughter’s letter down. I will go someplace without an address, he thought, without a post office, without a telephone. He wondered what his letters home to his mother and father, written during the war, would sound like to him if he read them now. He had burned them all when he had found them in a trunk, neatly bound, after his mother’s death.

He picked up Gail McKinnon’s yellow pages. Might as well get all the day’s reading done at one time before facing the day.

He carried the pages out to the balcony and sat down on one of the chairs in the sun. Even if he gained nothing else from the expedition to Cannes, he would have a suntan.

“Item,” he read, “he is a formal man, a keeper of distances. Dressed in a slightly old-fashioned dinner jacket at a party in the ballroom off the Winter Casino, given after the evening showing, he seemed ambassadorial, remote. In the hothouse atmosphere of this place, where effusive camaraderie is the rule of the game, where men embrace and women kiss people they barely know, his politeness can be chilling. He spoke to no one for more than five minutes at a time but moved constantly around the room, not restlessly but with cool detachment. There were many beautiful women present, and there were two at least with whom his name had been linked. The two ladies, magnificently gowned and coiffed, seemed, to this observer, at least, to be eager to keep him at their side, but he allotted them only his ceremonial five minutes and moved on.”

Linked, he thought angrily.
With whom his name has been linked.
Someone has been feeding her information. Someone who knows me well and who is not my friend. He had seen Gail McKinnon at the party across the room and had nodded to her. But he had not noticed that she had followed him around.

“It was not the economic condition of the Craig family that prevented Craig from going to college, as the family was comparatively well-off. Craig’s father, Philip, was the treasurer of several Broadway theatres until his death in 1946, and while he was undoubtedly under some financial strain during the Depression, he certainly could have afforded to send his only child to college when he reached the age to apply. But Craig chose instead to enlist in the army shortly after Pearl Harbor. Although he served for nearly five years and rose to the rank of technical sergeant, he won no decorations aside from theatre and campaign ribbons.”

There was an asterisk after this, indicating a footnote.

On the bottom of the page, under another asterisk, he read the footnote. “Dear Mr. C., this is all desperately dull stuff, but until you unbutton, all I can do is amass facts. When the time comes to put everything together, I shall mercilessly trim so as to keep the reader from dying of boredom.”

He went back to the paragraph above the footnote. “He was lucky enough to come out of the war unscathed and even luckier to have in his duffel bag the script of a play by a young fellow enlisted man, Edward Brenner, which, a year after Craig’s discharge from the army, he presented under the title
The Foot Soldier.
The elder Craig’s theatrical connections undoubtedly aided considerably in allowing a very young and completely unknown beginner to manage so difficult a coup.

“Brenner had two more plays on Broadway in later years, both disastrous flops. One of them was produced by Craig. Brenner has since completely dropped out of sight.”

Maybe out of your sight, young lady, Craig thought, but not out of his or out of mine. If he ever reads this, I will hear from my young fellow enlisted man.

“On the subject of his rarely working with creative people more than once, he is reputed to have said, not for quotation, ‘It is generally believed in literary circles that everybody has at least one novel in him. I doubt that. I have found a few men and women who do have one novel in them, but the greatest number of people I have met have perhaps a sentence in them or at the very most a short story.”

Where the hell did she get it? he thought angrily. He remembered having said something like that once as an abrasive joke to brush off a bore, although he couldn’t remember where or when. And even if in a rough way he half-believed it, having it in print was not going to enhance his reputation as a lover of mankind.

She’s goading me, he thought, the little bitch is goading me into talking to her, trading with her, bribing her to leave the antipersonnel mines unexploded.

“It would be interesting,” the article continued, “to get Jesse Craig to make a list of the people he has worked with, categorizing them by the above standards. Worth a novel. Worth a short story. Worth a sentence. Worth a phrase. Worth a comma. If ever I get to speak to him again, I shall attempt to induce him to supply me with such a list.”

She is out for blood, he thought. My blood.

The rest of the page was covered in handwriting. “Dear Mr. C., It’s late now, and I’m getting groggy. I have tomes more to go but not tonight. If you wish to comment on anything you’ve read, I’m madly available. To be continued in the next installment. Yours, G. McK.”

His instinct was to crumple the pages and toss them over the edge of the balcony. But he held onto them, reasonably. After all, as the girl had said, she had a carbon. And would have a carbon of the next installment. And the next.

A liner was swinging at anchor out in the bay, and for a moment he thought of packing his bag and getting on it, no matter where it was going. But it wouldn’t do any good. She’d probably turn up at the next port, typewriter in hand.

He went into the living room and tossed the yellow sheets onto the desk.

He looked at his watch. It was still too early for the Murphy’s lunch. He remembered that yesterday he had promised Constance he’d phone her. She had said she wanted a blow-by-blow report. It had been partly due to her that he had come to Cannes. “Go on down there,” she had said. “See if you can hack the action. You might as well find out now as later.” She was not a woman who temporized.

He went into the bedroom and put in a call for Paris. Then he lay on the unmade bed and tried to doze while waiting. He had drunk too much the night before and had slept badly.

He closed his eyes but couldn’t sleep. The thousand-fold amplified electric guitars of the movie he had just seen echoed in his ears, the orgiastic bodies writhed behind his hooded eyelids. If she’s in, he thought, I’m going to tell her I’m taking the plane back to Paris this afternoon.

He had met her at a fund-raising party for Bobby Kennedy when he was on a visit to Paris in ’68. He, himself, was registered to vote in New York, but a friend in Paris had taken him along. The people at the party had been attractive and had asked intelligent questions of the two eloquent and distinguished gentlemen who had flown from the United States to ask for money and emotional support for their man from Americans abroad, most of whom were not permitted to vote. Craig was not as enthusiastic as the others in the room, but he had signed a check for five hundred dollars, feeling that there was something mildly comic in his offering money to anybody in the Kennedy family. While the intense political discussion was still going on in the large handsome salon whose walls were splattered with dark, nonobjective paintings that he suspected would soon be sold at prices considerably lower than his hosts had paid for them, he went into the empty dining room where a bar had been set up.

He was pouring himself a drink when Constance followed him in. He had been conscious of her staring at him from time to time during the speeches. She was a striking-looking woman, dead pale, with wide greenish eyes and jet hair cut unfashionably short. At least it would have been unfashionable on anyone else. She was wearing a short lime-green dress and had dazzling legs.

“Are you going to give me a drink? I’m Constance Dob-son. I know who you are,” she said. “Gin and tonic. Plenty of ice.” Her voice was husky, and she spoke quickly, in bursts.

He made the drink for her.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked, sipping at her drink. “You look like a Republican.”

“I always try to look like a Republican when I’m abroad,” he said. “It reassures the natives.”

She laughed. She had a rumbling laugh, almost vulgarly robust, unexpected in a woman as slender and as carefully put together as she was. She played with a long gold chain that hung down to her waist. Her bosom was youthful and high, he noticed. He had no idea how old she was. “You didn’t seem as crazy as the others about the candidate,” she said.

“I detect a streak of ferocity in him,” Craig said. “I’m not partial to ferocious leaders.”

“I saw you write out a check.”