Two Weeks in Another Town (6 page)

At ten fifteen
A.M.
the next day, Jack was James Royal. He hadn’t liked the name then and he had never grown to like it, but it had seemed innocuous enough, and the head of the studio had kept his promise and had put the name up in lights in all the major cities, as he had phrased it, and on enormous billboards along all the major arteries of travel. The head of the studio had also kept his promise about the money, and for a few years Jack had been richer than he had ever thought he could possibly be. He had never changed his name legally and when he went into the Army, he enlisted, with a sense of relief and homecoming, as John Andrus.

The other names on the list of credits and in the cast of characters swam up out of the past, names he hadn’t thought of for many years. Walter Bushell, Otis Carrington, Genevieve Carr, Harry Davies, Charles McKnight, Lawrence Myers, Frederick Swift, Boris Ilenski (not very American, that, but he was a musician and a musician did not have to have his name in lights or strike the native ear), Carlotta Lee, a dozen others, the names of people who had died or who had failed or who had become famous or disappeared from sight, and the name of the woman he had married and divorced. Sitting there in the darkness, he had an almost irrepressible desire to flee. If he had been alone, he knew he would have gotten up and run out of the theatre, but he looked over at Delaney, slumped in the seat beside him, loudly chewing his gum, squinting coldly through his glasses at the screen, and he thought, If he can take it, so can I.

Then the picture started and he didn’t look over at Delaney again.

The story was about a young boy in a small town who fell in love with an older woman who ran a bookshop. In the third reel, after the stolen midnight which gave the movie its title, and the discreet fade-out for the censors in the dark backroom of the bookshop, their sin was discovered and the scandal started, and the woman was attacked and there was some foolish melodrama about a crime that the boy committed to get money to help her stay in town and there was a kindly and philosophic judge who set the boy to rights and showed him where his duty lay, and a sorrowful parting between the boy and the older woman, and a standard ending in which the boy returned to the wholesome girl who had remained true to him through all his troubles. But the foolishness of the story and the familiarity of the ingredients didn’t make any difference. Jack was swept up in it, not because it was himself as a boy of twenty-two that he was watching (the boy seemed as strange to him and as remote as any of the other people on the screen), and not because he saw again, in the slightly comic clothes of another period, the beautiful woman who had been his wife and whom he had once loved and later hated, but because of the swiftness, the assurance, the sense of vigor and reality that Delaney had brought to every scene, the silly ones as well as the good ones, the quiet, true scenes between the boy and the older woman and the scenes of melodrama and sentimentality that the industry had imposed on them all. The picture had a clipped, tumbling style that carried everything along with it, and even now Jack could see why it had been so successful, could see how Delaney had made a star of him, even if that hadn’t lasted very long, could see why the picture had survived and had been played again and again, all over the world, for so many years.

Watching himself, he was surprised that he had been so good. He was a little old for the part (he was supposed to be a boy of nineteen in the picture, just out of high school), but somehow he had caught the slippery movements of a complicated adolescent emerging, in fits and starts, into maturity. He was funny when he had to be and pitiable when he had to be and he seemed to be looking within himself at all times and dragging out of himself, with pain and with laughter, the accurate report on himself.

He hadn’t remembered that he had been that good. After that he had been as good again only in the two other pictures he had made with Delaney, and his memory of himself from that time was overlaid with recollections of worse performances under other directors. This was Delaney’s best picture, too, made when he was in his prime, confident of his luck and savagely scornful of everything in the world but his own talent, before he had begun to repeat himself, before the many wives, before the big money and the interviews and the troubles with the income tax.

When the climax of the picture came, the scene at night at the railroad station, shadowy and deserted in a lonely drizzle, when the boy appeared out of the murk to wait with the woman he had loved for the train which was to take her away and out of his life, Jack forgot that he was in a foreign city, five thousand miles and more than twenty years away from the buried innocent America of small-town railroad stations, of distant whistles across plowed farm lands, of lighted diner windows, Negro baggage handlers, old taxis waiting, dripping in the rain, with their drivers’ smoking cigarettes in the darkness and speaking in flat, desultory, unlovely voices of baseball scores and women and hard times.

Caught in the sorrow of the fictional moment on the screen, watching the scratched old print, listening to the uneven sound track as the two lovers walked slowly down the platform, appearing and reappearing in the dim patches of light of the spaced station lamps, hearing the half-sentences of heartbreak and farewell, he was no longer conscious that it was himself he was watching, doing an actor’s job, no longer conscious that it was a woman he had lived with and who had been false to him who walked brokenly, for a last, despairing two minutes, beside the boyish shadow on the screen. For that moment, he was that age again, and he knew what it was like to be young and bereft in a place like that. And he felt, all over again, with all its old trouble, the powerful and endless desire for the body of the woman whose image, full and youthful and untouched by time, appeared and reappeared under the station lamps, the desire that he had thought had vanished forever in betrayal and recriminations and divorce courts.

When the lights came up, he sat silently for a moment. Then he shook his head, to clear away the past. He turned to Delaney, who was slumped in his seat, his hand up to the earpiece of his glasses, looking tough and bitter, like an old catcher who had just lost a close game.

“Maurice,” he said gently, loving him, and meaning what he said, “you’re a great man.”

Delaney sat without stirring, almost as if he hadn’t heard Jack. He took off the heavy, thick-rimmed glasses and stared down at them, symbol of pride outraged, vanity at bay, of vision clouded and distorted by age.

“I
was
a great man,” he said harshly. “Let’s get out of here.”

Despière was waiting on the sidewalk outside the theatre. When he saw Jack and Delaney coming out with the last stragglers from the audience, he hurried over to them, beaming. “I saw it,
Maestro,”
he said.
“Jolissimo.
The tears still flow from my eyes.” He threw his arms around Delaney and kissed him on both cheeks. Sometimes it amused Despière to behave like a Frenchman on the stage. Two or three of the people who had been in the theatre stared curiously at the three men, and Jack heard a girl say, “I bet it’s him,” and knew, as usual, that he had been half recognized. “You must tell me just how it felt to be sitting there,” Despière was saying, “after all this time, watching reel after marvelous reel pass by.”

“I won’t tell you a godamn thing,” Delaney said, pulling away. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to eat. I’m hungry.” He peered out into the street, looking for the car and the driver.

“Delaney,” said Despière, “you must learn to be more charming to your admirers among the journalists.” He turned to Jack and held him affectionately by the arms.
“Dottore,”
he said, “I had no idea you were so beautiful when you were young. My God,
Dottore,
how the girls must have dropped.” Despière spoke Italian, English, German, and Spanish, aside from French, and when he was with Jack in Italy, he paid tribute to the manners of the country by calling Jack
Dottore.
In France, it was
Monsieur le Ministre,
in ironic recognition of Jack’s diplomatic status. “Weren’t you overflowing with pride of yourself in there tonight?” Despière gestured toward the theatre.

“Overflowing,” Jack said.

“You don’t want to talk about it?” Despière said, surprised.

“No.”

“Imagine that,” Despière said. “If I’d made that picture, I’d walk up and down the streets of Rome with sandwich boards on my back, announcing, I, Jean-Baptiste Despière, am totally responsible.”

Despière was a nimble, slender man, his narrow, rectangular shape disguised by nipped-in suits with padded shoulders that had clearly been made for him in Rome. His face was sallow and brilliantly alive, with a cynical, narrow French mouth and large, luminous gray eyes. His hair was black and cut short and worn brushed forward in a style that came from the cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés. It was hard to judge his age. Jack had known him for more than ten years and he hadn’t seemed to have grown a day older in that time, but Jack guessed he was somewhere in his late thirties. He had lived in America, and while his accent was unmistakably French, he had soaked up a good deal of American slang, which he used knowingly and without affectation. He had been in the Free French Air Force during the war, after escaping to London at the time of the surrender, and had served as a navigator in a Halifax, in a squadron that had been sent to Russia. He had come back from Russia with a ruined stomach, and he was constantly inquiring, especially of Americans, for a cure for ulcers which would not interfere with his drinking. He was a successful journalist and worked for one of the best magazines in France, but was always in debt, partly because of his carelessness with money and his easy generosity, but also because for long periods at a time he refused to work. He knew where all the restaurants were, and who was in what town at what time, and the first names of all the pretty girls of the crop of the current year. He was invited everywhere and given inside information by cabinet ministers and staff officers and movie stars and he paid his way with his wit and high energy and he had a surprising number of enemies. The car drove up and they all got in. Delaney didn’t ask them where they would like to eat, but growled out the name of a restaurant and then subsided in his corner. He was silent and didn’t seem to be listening to either Despière or Jack all the way to the restaurant.

“Chaos begins at the top,” Despière was saying, across the table, in the quiet restaurant. “In the big, official buildings, with the statues of Reason and Justice and ancient heroes in the halls. Where would you find a private citizen foolish enough to attack the Suez Canal without any reserve of oil?” He chuckled happily. “One day’s fighting and they had to ration gasoline for a year. You have to be carefully selected by your fellow citizens to run a government to be able to be that splendidly idiotic. The most inept of kings, let us say Louis the Sixteenth, would never have pulled off a master stroke like that. Or maybe it is only France…” He shrugged. He looked around him with pleasure at the other diners. “Ah,” he said, “you have no idea how enjoyable it is to sit in a restaurant and be reasonably sure nobody will throw a bomb through the front door.”

“What do you mean by that?” Delaney asked. He had been sullen and untalkative, drinking his wine and picking lightly at the plate of
pasta
in front of him and crumbling bread-sticks absently on the tablecloth.

“In the last five years,” Despière said, eating with relish, “I’ve been in Korea, Indochina, Cyprus, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, Egypt. I am like a doctor in an ambulance. I run to all emergencies.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days,” Delaney said.

“Maestro,”
said Despière, “brutality is your chief charm.” He smiled benignly, his teeth strong, squarish, tobacco-stained, behind the thin lips. “The last time was in Philippeville about six months ago. Three Arabs drove past in an open taxi and machine-gunned a fashion show.”

“A what?” Jack asked, incredulously.

“A fashion show,” Despière poured himself another glass of wine. “Eight beautiful girls showing the latest French dresses. That is how one liberates one’s country these days.”

“What the hell were they doing in Philippeville?” Delaney asked.

“Bringing the Paris message to our overseas possessions,” Despière said. “Chic for all occasions. Teas, sieges, Communist rallies, ambushes, state dinners, parades by the Foreign Legion, receptions for visiting American statesmen…They just drove past the front of the hotel and sprayed away. Imagine the corruption of the mind of a man who would shoot eight beautiful girls.”

“Did they hit any of them?” Jack asked.

“No. But they killed six people sitting in a café next door.”

“How about you?” Delaney asked. “Were you really there?”

“I was there. On the floor, behind a table,” Despière said, smiling. “I am getting very quick at dropping behind tables. It would not surprise me if I was told I held the world’s record. I was also present in Casablanca when the crowd poured gasoline over two gentlemen they didn’t like and set them on fire. I am highly paid,” he said, “because I have a knack of being on the spot at those moments when modern civilization expresses itself in a typical manner.” He held his glass up and looked at it critically. “I do like Italian wine. It’s’ simple. It is what it is. It does not pretend to be velvet like French wine. I also like Italian colors. When I saw the color of the walls of Rome for the first time on a summer morning, I knew I had been longing for the city all my life, although I was only seventeen at the time. I recognized the city from the beginning. The first time I came to Rome, with my father, when I was a boy, I entered the city through the Flaminia Gate, into the Piazza del Popolo. There were hundreds of people all over the piazza. My father stopped the car and took me to a café on a corner for coffee. The prettiest girl in the world was behind the cashier’s counter, selling those little tickets you give to the man who works the
espresso
machine. I sat there, in love with the girl behind the counter, and I said to myself, immediately, ‘What a wonderful place to live, surrounded by Italians. I will come here to drink coffee for the rest of my life. I have found the city for me.’ There are cities that your soul recognizes at first glance. Am I right,
Dottore?”
He turned to Jack.