Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  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 o
f 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.”

  “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 bor
e 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.