Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  Craig swished the beer around in his glass. “No,” he said.

  “This is no time to be proud, Jess,” Murphy said somberly. “You’ve been out of it, so maybe you don’t realize. The movie business is a disaster area. People who were getting seven hundred and fifty thousand a picture are offering to work for fifty. And getting turned down.”

  “I realize.”

  “If you’re over thirty, it’s don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Murphy gulped at his drink. “Everybody is looking for some longhaired kid that nobody even heard of who’ll make another Easy Rider for them for under a hundred thousand. It’s like a sudden blight has fallen from the sky.”

  “It’s only movies, Murph,” Craig said. “Your best entertainment. Don’t take it so hard.”

  “Some entertainment,” Murphy said darkly. “Still, I worry about you. Listen, I don’t like to bring up unpleasant matters, especially on a holiday, but I know you must be worrying about dough just about now …”

  “Just about now,” Craig said.

  “Your wife’s got lawyers all over the country, practically, and a pair of them have been in with a court order to look at my books to make sure I haven’t smuggled any funds out to you that she can’t get her hands on, and I know she’s taking you for half, plus the house. And what you’ve got in the market …” Murphy shrugged. “You know what the market’s like. And you’ve been living for five years with almost nothing coming in. Goddamn it, Jess, if I can swing the Greek thing, I’m going to make you do it. Just for walking around money until something breaks. Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m making as much of an impression on you as on a stone wall,” Murphy said gloomily. “You took it too hard, Jess. So you had a couple of flops. So what? Who hasn’t? When I heard you were coming to Cannes, I was delighted. Finally, I thought, he’s coming out of it. You can ask Sonia if I didn’t say just that. But you just stand there giving me the fish eye when I try to talk sense.” He drained his martini and motioned for another. “In the old days, if you had a flop, you’d come up with five new ideas that next morning.”

  “The old days,” Craig said.

  “I’ll tell you what you have to do these days,” Murphy said. “No matter how much talent you have or how much experience you have or how nice you are to your mother, you can’t just sit back and wait for people to come to you begging you to take their ten million dollars to do a picture for them. You’ve got to get out and hustle up an idea. And develop it. Get a screenplay. And a damn good screenplay. And a director. And an actor. An actor somebody still wants to see. There’re about two left. And a budget this side of a million dollars. Then I can go in and talk business for you. Not before. Those’re the facts, Jess. They’re not nice, but they’re the facts. And you might as well face up to them.”

  “Okay, Murph,” Craig said. “Maybe I’m ready to do just that.”

  “That’s better. That girl says she saw a script on the desk in your room.”

  “At this very moment,” Craig said, “there are probably scripts on the desks of a hundred rooms in the Carlton Hotel.”

  “Let’s talk about the one on yours,” Murphy persisted. “What is it—a screenplay?”

  “Uhuh. A screenplay.”

  “She asked me if I knew anything about it.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “What the hell could I tell her?” Murphy asked irritably. “I don’t know anything. Are you interested in a screenplay?”

  “I suppose you might say that,” Craig said. “Yes.”

  “Whose?” Murphy asked suspiciously. “If it’s been turned down by one studio, forget it. You’re just wasting your time. The grapevine these days is run on laser beams.”

  “It hasn’t been turned down yet,” Craig said. “Nobody’s seen it but me.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “A kid,” Craig said. “You never heard of him. Nobody ever heard of him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I’d rather not say at the moment.”

  “Even to me?”

  “Especially to you. You talk your head off. You know that. I don’t want anybody getting to him.”

  “Well,” Murphy said grudgingly, “that makes sense. Do you own it? The screenplay?”

  “I have an option. For six months.”

  “What did it cost?”

  “Peanuts.”

  “Is it about somebody under thirty years old with plenty of nude scenes?”

  “No.”

  Murphy groaned. “Christ,” he said. “Two strikes against you from the beginning. Well, let me read it, and then we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Hold off for a few days,” Craig said. “I want to go over it again and be sure it’s ready.”

  Murphy stared hard at him without speaking, and Craig was almost sure that Murphy knew he was lying. Not just how he was lying, or where, or for what purpose, but lying.

  “Okay,” Murphy said, “when you want me, I’m here. In the meantime, if you’re smart, you’ll talk to that girl. At length. And talk to every newspaperman you can get hold of. Let people know you’re alive, for Christ’s sake.” He drained his glass. “Now, let’s go back for lunch.”

  They had lunch at the cabana. The cold langouste was very good, and Murphy ordered two bottles of Blanc-de-Blanc. He drank most of the wine and did most of the talking. He quizzed Gail McKinnon roughly but good-naturedly, at least at first. “I want to find out what the goddamn younger generation is about,” he said, “before they come and slit my throat.”

  Gail McKinnon answered his questions forthrightly. Whatever she was, she was not shy. She had grown up in Philadelphia. Her father still lived there. She was an only child. Her parents were divorced. Her father had remarried. Her father was a lawyer. She had gone to Bryn Mawr but had quit in her sophomore year. She had gotten a job with a Philadelphia radio station and had been in Europe for a year and a half. Her base was London, but her job allowed her to travel a good deal. She enjoyed Europe, but she intended to go back and live in the United States. Preferably in New York.

  She sounded like a thousand other American girls Craig had met in Europe, hopeful, enthusiastic, and obscurely doomed.

  “You got a boy friend?” Murphy asked.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “Lovers?”

  The girl laughed.

  “Murph,” Sonia Murphy said reproachfully.

  “I’m not the one who invented the permissive society,” Murphy said. “They did. The goddamn young.” He turned again to the girl. “Do all the guys you interview make a pass at you?”

  “Not all,” she said, smiling. “The most interesting one was an old rabbi from Cleveland who was passing through London on his way to Jerusalem. I had to fight for my life in the Hotel Berkeley. Luckily, his plane left in an hour. He had a silky beard.”

  The conversation made Craig uncomfortable. The girl reminded him too much of his daughter Anne. He did not want to think of how his daughter talked to older men when he wasn’t there.

  Murphy rambled on about the decline of the movie industry.

  “Take Warner’s, for example,” he said. “You know who bought Warner’s? A cemetery business. How do you like that for crappy symbolism? And the age thing. They talk about revolutions devouring their young. We’ve had a revolution out there, only it’s devouring its old. I suppose you approve, Miss Smart-Face.” He was becoming belligerent with the wine.

  “Partially,” Gail McKinnon said calmly.

  “You’re eating my lobster,” Murphy said, “and you say partially.”

  “Look where the old have got us,” Gail McKinnon said. “The young can’t do any worse.”

  “I know that song and dance,” Murphy said. “I don’t have any children, thank God, but I listen to my friends’ kids. The young can’t do any worse. Let me tell you something, Gail Smart-Face, they can. They can do a lot worse. Put your tape recorder on again. I’ll
put that in the interview.”

  “Finish your lunch, Murph,” Sonia said. “The poor girl’s taken enough guff from you already.”

  “Seen and not heard,” Murphy grumbled. “That’s my motto. And now they’re giving them the vote. The foundations’re tottering.”

  Craig was relieved when the lunch was over. “Well,” he said, standing, “thanks for the grub. I’ve got to be getting back.”

  “Jesse,” Sonia said, “could you drive Miss McKinnon to Cannes with you? If she stays on and Murph talks to her anymore, the Immigration people will turn him back when he tries to get into the United States again.”

  Gail McKinnon looked at him soberly. He was reminded of his own daughters waiting for him to pick them up after a children’s party.

  “How did you get here this morning?” he asked ungraciously.

  “A friend of mine drove me over. If you mind, I’ll get a taxi.”

  “They charge outrageous prices,” Sonia said. “It’s sinful if you can get a ride with Jesse. Go in and get dressed, child,” she said firmly. “Jesse will wait.”

  Gail McKinnon looked questioningly up at Craig. “Of course,” he said.

  She stood. “I won’t be a minute,” she said, and went into the cabana to change.

  “Smart little girl,” Murphy said, pouring the last drops of the wine from the bottle into his glass. “I like her. I don’t trust her. But I like her.”

  “Don’t talk so loud, Murph,” Sonia whispered.

  “Let ’em know my sentiments,” Murphy said. “Let ’em know where I stand.” He drained the wine. “Let me read that script, Jess. The sooner the better. If it’s any good, I’ll get it set up for you with two telephone calls.”

  Two telephone calls, Craig thought. No matter what he says, after lunch and two bottles of wine he thinks it’s still 1960 when Bryan Murphy was still Bryan Murphy and Jesse Craig still Jesse Craig. He glanced worriedly toward the rear of the cabana where the girl was dressing behind a flimsy wooden wall. Murphy’s voice carried. “Maybe in a couple of days, Murph,” he said. “Don’t broadcast until then, please.”

  “Still as a grave, my boy,” Murphy said. “Grave as Warner’s.” He chuckled at the aptness of his simile. “I did have a good time today,” he said. “Old friends and new girls and lobster for lunch and the Blue Mediterranean. Do you think the rich live better than we do, Jess?”

  “Yes,” Craig said.

  Gail McKinnon came out, her bag swinging on its long strap from her shoulder. She had on white hip-hugger jeans and a short-sleeved navy blue polo shirt. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere, and Craig noted the small, round breasts jutting firmly out against the blue cotton cloth. She had put away the dark glasses for the moment. She looked nautical, sea-fresh, pure, and undangerous. She made her thanks to her hosts demurely and politely and bent to pick up the tape recorder, but Craig reached for it first and said, “I’ll carry that.”

  Murphy was stretching out for his siesta as they started climbing the path toward the pool and the parking lot. The plump woman Craig and Murphy had passed on the way to the bar was still lying on her stomach absorbing the sun, her legs still widespread and inviting. With a sigh, as though she were suffering, the woman turned over. She stared peevishly at Craig and the girl, her privacy destroyed. Her face was thick and heavily made up. Dark blue mascara had run in the sweat of the sun. She was no longer young, and the features were marked by self-love, lust, greed, a sly and corrupt worldliness. The face made a shocking contrast with the healthy peasant fullness of the body. Craig found her hideous and averted his eyes. He couldn’t have borne it if she had spoken aloud.

  He let Gail McKinnon walk in front of him and followed her, protecting her. In her sandals she drifted noiselessly over the scoured stones. Her long hair blew cleanly in the sea wind. Suddenly he remembered what had troubled him when he first saw her in the Murphy’s patio standing in sunlight with the sea behind her. She had reminded him of his wife Penelope on a June day on the Long Island shore, girlish and rosy, poised on a dune, outlined against the incoming tide.

  The Danish mother was propped up against the rocks beside the pool reading, her child sitting with her blonde head on her mother’s shoulder.

  A dangerous coast.

  Take an old man’s advice. Try.

  Walking to the car, Gail McKinnon put on the ridiculous dark glasses again.

  WHEN he drove the car out of the gate of the hotel grounds, he turned, out of an old memory, in the wrong direction, toward Antibes, instead of toward Juanles-Pins and Cannes. The year after his marriage he had rented a villa for a summer on the coast between the Cap and Antibes, and the habit of turning toward it, he realized a little ruefully, had remained with him all this time.

  “I hope you’re not in a hurry,” he said to the girl beside him. “I’m going the long way round.”

  “I have nothing better to do today,” Gail McKinnon said, “than to go the long way round with Jesse Craig.”

  “I used to live down this road,” he said. “It was nicer then.”

  “It’s nice now.”

  “I suppose so. There’re just more houses.” He drove slowly. The road wound along the sea. A regatta of small sails glittered far out on the blue water. An old man in a striped shirt was fishing off the rocks. Above them a Caravelle was losing altitude, coming in to land at Nice.

  “When were you here before?” Gail McKinnon asked.

  “Quite a few times,” he said. “In 1944, for the first time, when the war was still on …”

  “What were you doing then?” She sounded surprised.

  “You said you did your homework,” he teased her. “I thought my past was an open book to you.”

  “Not that open.”

  “I was in a jeep,” he said, “in an army camera unit. The Seventh Army had landed in the South of France, and we were sent down from Paris to make some film of the action down here. Our line was based near Menton, just a few miles from here. You could hear the artillery on the other side of Nice …”

  Old soldier’s maundering, he thought, and stopped. Ancient history. Caesar ordered the camp to be set up on the hills overlooking the river. The Helvetii were in line of battle on the other bank of the river. For the girl beside him Caesar’s line and the line of young Americans before Menton were equally lost in the gulf of time. Did they even teach Latin anymore?

  He looked sidelong at her. The glasses, which protected her and revealed him, annoyed him. Her youth annoyed him. Her ignorance, which was the innocent function of her youth, annoyed him. There were too many advantages on her side. “Why do you wear those damn things?” he asked.

  “You mean my shades?”

  “The glasses. Yes.”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “No.”

  With a single gesture she took them off and tossed them out of the car. She smiled at him. “That better?”

  “Much.”

  They both laughed. He was no longer sorry Sonia Murphy had forced him into taking the girl along with him to Cannes.

  “And what about that ghastly sweat shirt yesterday?” he asked.

  “I experiment with different personalities,” she said.

  “What was today’s personality?” He was amused now.

  “Nice, scrubbed, virginally coquettish, in an up-to-date Women’s Lib kind of way,” she said. “For Mr. Murphy and his wife.” She raised her arms as though to embrace the sea, the rocks, the pines shadowing the road, the entire Mediterranean afternoon. “I’ve never been here before, but I feel I’ve known this coast since I was a little girl.” She pulled her legs up and turned in her seat to face him. “I’m going to come back here. Again and again and again. Until I’m an old lady with a big wide sun hat and a cane. When you were here during the war, did you ever think you’d come back?”

  “When I was here during the war,” he said, “all I thought about was getting home alive.”

  “Did you know then that you were going int
o the theatre and the movies?”

  “I don’t really remember.” He tried to recall exactly that September afternoon long ago, the jeep moving toward the sound of the guns, the four helmeted soldiers with their cameras and carbines bumping along the lovely wild coast none of them had ever seen before, past the blown pillboxes and the camouflaged villas facing the sea. What were the names of the other three men in the jeep? The driver’s name was Harte. He remembered that. Malcolm Harte. He had been killed in Luxembourg a few months later. He couldn’t remember the names of the other two men. They had not been killed.

  “I guess,” he said, “I must have thought it was possible I’d have something to do with the movies after the war. After all, I had a movie camera in my hands. The army had taught me how to be a cameraman, and the Signal Corps was full of men who had worked in Hollywood. But I wasn’t much of a cameraman. Just manufactured for the war. I knew I couldn’t do that once the war was over.” There was a melancholy pleasure in having an occasion to remember that distant time when he was a young man in the uniform of his country, in no danger, for that afternoon at least, of being shot at. “Actually,” he went on, “my going into the theatre was an accident. On the troopship going back to the States from Le Havre I met Edward Brenner in a poker game. We became friendly, and he told me he’d written a play while he had been waiting in the redeployment depot at Reims to be shipped home. I knew a little about the theatre, of course, because of my father—he’d been taking me to see plays since I was nine years old—and I asked Brenner if I could read it.”

  “That was a lucky poker game,” the girl said.

  “I suppose so,” Craig said.

  Actually, it had not been during the poker game that they had come together but on deck, on a sunny day when Craig had been able to find a corner out of the wind and was reading a collection of the ten best American plays of 1944 that his father had sent him. (What was the APO number? It was an address he had thought he would never forget.) Brenner had passed him twice, had eyed the book in his hand, had finally crouched down, farmer-style, on his heels beside him, and had said, “How are they? The plays, I mean.”