Evening in Byzantium (6 page)

“Politics, as they say, is the art of the possible. I saw
you
write out a check.”

“Bravado,” she said. “I live from hand to mouth. It’s because the young like him. Maybe they know something.”

“That’s as good a reason as any, I suppose,” he said.

“You don’t live in Paris.”

“New York,” he said, “if anyplace. I’m just passing through.”

“For long?” She looked at him thoughtfully over the raised glass.

He shrugged. “My plans are indefinite.”

“I followed you out here, you know.”

“Did you?”

“You know I did.”

“Yes.” Surprised, he felt the trace of a blush.

“You have a brooding face. Banked fires.” She chuckled, the disturbing, incongruous low sound. “And nice wide skinny shoulders. I know everybody else in the place. Do you ever come into a room and look around and say to yourself, ‘My God, I know everybody here!’ Know what I mean?”

“I think so,” he said. She was standing close to him now. She had doused herself with perfume, but it was a fresh, tart smell.

“Are you going to kiss me now?” she said, “or are you going to wait for later?”

He kissed her. He hadn’t kissed a woman for more than two years, and he enjoyed it.

“Sam has my phone number,” she said. Sam was the friend who had brought him along. “Use it the next time you come through. If you want to. I’m busy this time. I’m shedding a fella. I have to go now. I have a sick child at home.” The green dress flowed toward the hall where the coats were piled.

He stood alone at the bar and poured himself another drink, remembering the touch of her lips on his, the tart aroma of her perfume.

On the way home he had gotten her telephone number from his friend Sam, probed delicately for information, had not reported the full scene in the dining room.

“She’s a man-killer,” Sam had said. “A benevolent man-killer. She’s the best American girl in Paris. She has some weird job with kids. Did you ever see such legs?” Sam was a lawyer, a solid man not given to hyperbole in his conversation.

The next time he came through Paris, after Bobby Kennedy had been killed and the election over, he had called the number Sam had given him.

“I remember you,” she said. “I shed the fella.”

He took her to dinner that night. Every night thereafter while he stayed in Paris.

She had been a great beauty out of Texas, had conquered New York, then Paris, a tall, slender, willful girl with a tilted, narrow dark head. Dear men, her presence demanded when she entered a room, what are you doing here, are you worth the time?

With her he saw Paris in its best light. It was her town, and she walked through it with joy and pride and mischief, lovely legs making a carnival of its pavements. She had small teeth, a dangerous temper. She was not to be taken lightly. She was a Puritan about work, her own and that of others. Fiercely independent, she scorned inaction, parasitism. She had come to Paris as a model, during, as she put it, the second half of the rule of Charlemagne. Unschooled, she was surprisingly bookish. Her age was anybody’s guess. She had been married twice. Vaguely, she said. Both men, and others, had made off with money. She bore them no ill-will, neither the husbands nor the others. She had tired of modeling, gone with a partner, male, an ex-University professor from Maine, into the exchange-student business. “The kids have to know about each other,” she said. “Maybe they finally won’t be able to be talked into killing each other.” A much older, beloved brother had been lost at Aachen, and she was furious against war. When she read the news from Vietnam, and it was particularly bad, she cursed in barracks language, threatened to move to the South Seas with her son.

As she had said the first night, she lived from hand to mouth, but dressed extravagantly. The couturiers of Paris loaned her clothes, knowing that in the places to which she was invited neither she nor their confections would go unnoticed. She left whatever bed she was in promptly at seven each morning to make breakfast for her children and send them off to school. Regardless of the night she had spent, she was at her desk promptly at nine
A.M
. Although Craig kept a suite in a hotel, the wide bed in her room overlooking a garden on the Left Bank became his true Paris address. Her children grew fond of him. “They’re used to men,” she explained. She had outgrown whatever morality she had been exposed to in Texas and ignored whatever conventions were in practice in the society or societies she adorned in Paris.

She was straightforward, funny, demanding, unpredictable, gloriously formed for lovemaking, affectionate, eager and enterprising, only serious at those moments that demanded seriousness. He had been dormant. He was dormant no longer.

He had fallen into the dull habit of not noticing or appreciating women as women. Now he was immediately conscious of beauty, a sensual smile, a way of walking; his eye had been re-educated, was youthful again, was quick and innocently lascivious for the flick of a skirt, the curve of a throat, womanly movements. Faithful to one, once more he enjoyed the entire sex. It was not the least of the gifts Constance had brought him.

She talked candidly of the men who had come before him, and he knew there would be others after him. He contained his jealousy. Now he knew that he had been suffering from deep wounds when he had met her. The wounds were healing.

In the quiet room, suffused only with the mild sound of the sea outside the window, he waited anxiously for the ring of the telephone, the darting, husky tones of her voice. He was prepared to say, “I am taking the first plane back to Paris,” sure that if she had any other engagement that evening she would break it for him.

Finally the phone rang. “Oh, you,” she said. The tone was not affectionate.

“Darling,” he began.

“Don’t darling me, Producer. I’m no little starlet wriggling her hot little ass for two weeks on a couch.” He heard voices in the background—her office, as usual, was probably full, but she was not one to postpone rage because of an audience.

“Now, Connie …”

“Now, Connie balls,” she said. “You said you were going to call me yesterday. And don’t tell me you tried. I’ve heard that before.”

“I didn’t try.”

“You haven’t even got the grace to lie, you son of a bitch.”

“Connie.” He was pleading now.

“The only honest man in Cannes. Just my goddamn luck. Why didn’t you try?”

“I was …”

“Save your goddamn excuses. And you can save your telephone calls, too. I don’t have to hang around waiting for any goddamn phone to ring. I hope you’ve found somebody to hold your hand in Cannes because sure as Christ your franchise has run out in Paris.”

“Connie, will you for God’s sake be reasonable?”

“As of now. As of this minute I am purely, coldly,
glacially
reasonable. The phone’s off the hook, laddie boy. Don’t bother trying to get the number. Ever.”

There was the angry sound as she slammed the instrument down six hundred miles away. He shook his head ruefully as he put the phone down in its cradle. He smiled a little, thinking of the dumb quiet that must have fallen among the young at her office and the frantic, professorial eruption from the adjoining room of her partner, galvanized out of his usual somnolence by her tirade. It was not the first time she had yelled at him. It would not be the last. From now on he would call her when he promised if it took hanging on the phone all day.

He went down to the terrace, had his photograph taken with a lion cub, wrote on it, “I have found a mate for you,” and put it in an envelope and mailed it to her.
Express.

It was time for his lunch with the Murphys, and he went out under the porte-cochère and asked for his car. The doorman was occupied with a peeling bald man in a Bentley and ignored Craig. The parking space in front of the hotel was crowded, with the best places reserved for the Ferraris, the Maseratis, and the Rolls-Royces. Craig’s rented Simca was shunted around by the doorman to spots less exposed to public view, and sometimes, when the spate of expensive hardware was intense, Craig would find his car parked a block away on a side street. There had been a time in his life when he had gone in for Alfas and Lancias, but he had given all that up many years ago, and now, as long as a car carried him where he wanted to go, he was satisfied. But today, when the doorman finally told him that his car was parked behind the hotel and he trudged on the hunt for it past the tennis courts toward the corner where the whores loitered in the afternoon, he felt vaguely humiliated. It was as though the employees of the hotel had a subtle knowledge of him, that they were letting him know, in their scornful treatment of his humble rented car, that they did not believe he really belonged in the palace whose walls they guarded.

They will be surprised at the size of their tip when the time comes, he thought grimly as he turned the key in the ignition and started toward the Cap d’Antibes and his luncheon date with Bryan Murphy.

M
R. and Mrs. Murphy were down at their cabana, the concierge told him, and were expecting him.

He walked through the fragrant piney park toward the sea, the only sound that of his own footsteps on the shaded path and the crackle of cicadas among the trees.

He stopped before he reached Murphy’s cabana. The Murphys were not alone. Seated in the small patio in front of the cabana was a young woman. She wore a scanty pink bathing suit, and her long hair hung straight down her back, glistening in the sunlight. When she half-turned, he recognized the dark glasses.

Murphy, in flowered swimming trunks, was talking to her. Lying on a deck chair was Sonia Murphy.

Craig was about to go back to the hotel to call Murphy on the telephone and tell him to come up because he didn’t like the company at the cabana when Murphy spotted him. “Hey, Jess,” Murphy called, standing up. “We’re over here.”

Gail McKinnon did not turn around. She stood up, though, when he approached.

“Hi, Murph,” he said, and went over and shook Murphy’s hand.

“My boy,” Murphy said.

Craig leaned over and kissed Sonia Murphy’s cheek. She was fifty but looked about thirty-five, with a trim figure and a gentle, unlined, non-Hollywood face. She was covered with a beach towel and was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep from being sunburned. “It’s been too long, Jesse,” she said.

“It certainly has,” Craig said.

“This young lady,” Murphy said, gesturing toward Gail McKinnon, “tells me she knows you.”

“We’ve met,” Craig said. “Hello, Miss McKinnon.”

“Hello.” The girl took off her glasses. The gesture was deliberate, like the lowering of a disguise at a masquerade ball. Her eyes were wide, jewel-blue, but somehow evasive and uncertain, prepared for pain. Face grave and open, body not quite ripe, flesh satiny, she could have been sixteen, seventeen. He had a peculiar feeling that the rays of the sun were concentrated on her, a downfall of light, that he was looking at her from a distance, himself shadowed by a cloud with a dark promise of rain. She was perfect for the moment, poised quietly against the sea, the dazzle of the reflections from the water celebrating her youth, the richness of her skin, her almost-angular shapeliness.

He had the troubling sense of having already been a witness at the scene—a girl perfect for a moment in bright sun with the sea behind her. He could not tell whether he was oppressed or exhilarated.

She reached down, not completely graceful, her long hair swinging, and he saw that there was a tape recorder at her feet. As she bent to the machine, he couldn’t help but notice the soft roundness of her belly over the pink cloth of the tiny bikini, the adolescent jut of bones on generous hips. He wondered why she had disfigured herself the morning before with the absurd oversized sweat shirt, the affectation of the blank expanse of dark glass.

“She’s been interviewing me,” Murphy said. “Against my will.”

“I bet,” Craig said. Murphy was famous for giving interviews to anybody on any subject. He was a big, heavyset, squarely built man of sixty, with a shock of dyed black hair, a whisky complexion, shrewd, quick eyes, and an easy, bluff Irish manner. He was known as one of the toughest negotiators in the business and had done very well for himself while enriching his clients. He had no written contract with Craig, just a handshake, although he had represented Craig for more than twenty years. Since Craig had stopped making movies, they had only seen each other infrequently. They were friends. But, thought Craig meanly, not as close friends as when I was riding high.

“How’re your girls, Jesse?” Sonia asked.

“When last heard from, they seemed okay,” Craig said. “Or as okay as girls can be at that age. Marcia, I hear, has put on weight.”

“If they’re not up on a possession or pushing charge,” Murphy said, “consider yourself a happy parent.”

“I consider myself a happy parent,” Craig said.

“You look pale,” said Murphy. “Put on a suit and get some sun.”

Craig glanced at the slender tan body of Gail McKinnon. “No, thanks,” he said. “My season hasn’t started yet. Sonia, why don’t you and I take a walk and let them finish their interview in peace?”