Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  “Medium,” Craig said.

  They had begun to talk then. It turned out that Brenner was from Pittsburgh and had gone to Carnegie Tech and had taken the drama course there before he was drafted—he was older than he looked—and was interested in the theatre. The next day he had shown Craig his play.

  Brenner was unprepossessing to look at—a gaunt, sallow boy with sad, dark eyes and a hesitant and guarded way of talking. Among the horde of jubilant, loud men sailing home from the war, he had been uncomfortable and unsoldierly in his ill-fitting uniform, his manner tentative, as though a little surprised that he had survived three campaigns and knew he could never survive a fourth. Craig had agreed to read his play with misgivings, trying in advance to compose anodyne comments that would not hurt Brenner’s feelings. He was unprepared for the fierceness of the emotion, the harsh unsentimentality, the rigor of the construction of the infantry private’s first dramatic work. While he himself had never done anything in the theatre, he had seen enough plays to be convinced, with youthful egotism, of the accuracy of his own taste. He had not measured his enthusiasm when he had discussed Brenner’s play with him, and by the time they had passed the Statue of Liberty, the two men were firm friends and Craig had promised Brenner that through his father he would get the play into the hands of producers.

  Brenner had to go to Pennsylvania to be discharged and then to resume at Carnegie Tech. Craig, who stayed in New York pretending to be looking for work, communicated with him only through the mails. There wasn’t much to communicate. Craig’s father had loyally approached the producers he knew, but the play had been turned down by all of them.

  “Nobody, they say,” Craig had written Pittsburgh, “wants to hear about the war. They are all idiots. Do not despair. One way or another this play will go on.”

  It went on, finally, because Craig’s father died and left twenty-five thousand dollars. “I know it’s a wild idea,” Craig had written Brenner. “I don’t know anything about producing, but I think I know more than the horse’s asses who turned down your play. And by now I know an awful lot about your play. If you’re willing to bet your talent, I’m willing to bet my dough.”

  Brenner was in New York two days later and never saw Pittsburgh again. Because he was practically penniless, he moved into the room in the Hotel Lincoln where Craig was living, and in the five months that it took to put the play on, they were together twenty-four hours a day. The year-long examination of the manuscript through the mails, with the testing and weighing of every line, had made the play their common property, and they were surprised when very occasionally their reactions to the people and ideas they had to deal with in the course of the production differed at all.

  The director, a young man by the name of Baranis, who had had some experience in the theatre and who had thought he would be treated respectfully by the two neophytes, had complained one day when a pet notion of his had been calmly voted down, almost without discussion, by them. “Christ,” Baranis had said, “I bet when you two guys go to sleep, you have the same dreams.”

  Curiously, the one time they had had a serious disagreement, it had been about Penelope Gregory, later to be Penelope Craig. She had been sent up to the office by an agent to read for a small part, and both Baranis and Craig had been favorably impressed by her beauty and by the soft, deep voice. But Brenner had been adamant. “Sure,” he said, “she’s beautiful. Sure, she has a great voice. But there’s something I don’t believe about her. Don’t ask me why.”

  They had had Penelope up to read again, but Brenner refused to change his mind, and in the end they had compromised on a plainer girl.

  During rehearsals Brenner became so nervous that he could not eat. It became part of Craig’s duties, along with arguing with the scene designer, negotiating with the stagehands’ union, and keeping the leading man from drinking, to lure Brenner into restaurants and get a minimum of nourishment into him to keep him alive until the curtain went up.

  The day the signs were put in place outside the theatre, Craig found Brenner standing on the sidewalk in his dirty raincoat, the only coat he owned, looking wonderingly at the legend “The Foot Soldier, by Edward Brenner,” and shaking as though he were suffering from a malarial attack. He laughed wildly when he saw Craig. “It’s weird, Brother,” he said, “just weird. I have the feeling somebody’s going to tap me on the shoulder and I’m going to wake up and it’s going to be Pittsburgh all over again.”

  Still shaking, he had allowed Craig to lead him to a drugstore and order a milk shake for him. “I’ve got a crazy double feeling,” he confided over the milk shake. “I can’t wait for the thing to open, and at the same time I hate to see it open. It’s not only because I’m afraid its going to flop. It’s just that I don’t want it all to end.” He had gestured vaguely over the furniture of the soda fountain. “The rehearsals. The goddamn room in the Hotel Lincoln. Baranis. Listening to you snore at four o’clock in the morning. I know I’ll never have anything like this again. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Sort of,” Craig said. “Finish your milk shake.”

  When the first reviews came in over the phone the night of the opening, Brenner had thrown up all over the floor of the hotel room, had apologized, had said, “I will love you until the day I die,” had had eight Scotches, and passed out until Craig had awakened him the next day with the evening newspapers.

  “What was he like then?” Gail McKinnon was saying. “Edward Brenner? When you first saw him?”

  “Just another GI who had had a hard war,” Craig said. He slowed the car down and pointed up the bluff to his left at a white villa set among the pine trees. “That’s where I lived. The summer of 1949.”

  The girl stared at the broad, low building set behind a terrace on which an orange awning shaded some garden furniture from the intense sunlight. “How old were you then?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Not bad for twenty-seven,” she said. “A house like that.”

  “No,” Craig said. “Not bad.”

  What did he remember about that summer?

  Scattered images.

  Penelope water-skiing on the bay of La Garoupe, slim and tan, her hair flying, determinedly graceful in a one-piece black bathing suit as she broke through the wake of the speedboat. Brenner beside him in the boat taking home movies of Penelope clowning precarious ballet positions against the pull of the line and waving for the camera.

  Brenner, himself, attempting to learn how to water-ski, trying doggedly again and again to stand up and never making it, a skinny, clumsy figure, all bones and knuckles, long, sad nose and starved shoulders burned painfully red from the sun, having to be fished out of the water finally, almost drowned from all the water he had swallowed, saying, “I am a goddamn useless intellectual,” as Penelope, now aiming the camera at him like a weapon, laughed in the rocking boat.

  Dancing in the open square on a velvety night in the walled town of Haut-de-Cagnes, moving to tinny French music in and out of the light of the lanterns hung along the old stone walls, Penelope, small, neat, and weightless in his arms, kissing him under the ear, smelling of sea and jasmine, whispering, “Let’s not go back anywhere. Ever.” And Brenner sitting at a table, too self-conscious to dance, pouring wine and trying to communicate with a hard-faced French lady he had picked up the night before in the casino at Juan-les-Pins, saying, with effort, one of the ten French phrases he had learned since his arrival, “Je suis un fameux écrivain à New York.”

  Driving home in the green dawn from Monte Carlo where among them they had won 100,000 francs (at 650 francs to the dollar), Craig at the wheel of the small open car, Penelope between the two men, her head on Craig’s shoulder, and Brenner shouting in his croaking voice into the wind, “Here we are, Scott, on the Grand Corniche,” and all of them trying to sing “Les Feuilles Mortes,” which they had heard for the first time the night before.

  Lunch on the terrace of the white villa under a huge orange awning, all three of them
fresh from the morning’s swim, Penelope, trim in white cotton slacks and a sailor’s blue jersey, her wet hair piled up on top of her head, softly and insistently sensual, rearranging the flowers in the vase on the white iron luncheon table with brown soft hands, touching the bottle of wine in the ice bucket to make sure it was cold enough, as the old lady who served as cook and who had come with the house shuffled out with the cold loup and salad on a big clay platter from Vallauris just down the coast. What was the old lady’s name? Hélène? Perpetually in black, in mourning for ten generations of her family who had died within the walls of Antibes, and who fussed lovingly over the three of them whom she called, “Mes trois beaux jeunes Américains,” none of whom had ever had a servant before then, and putting red, white, and blue flowers on the breakfast table for the Fourth of July and Bastille Day.

  The piercing, sharp odor of the pine forest behind them in the noonday sun.

  The siestas in the afternoons, Penelope in his arms in the great bed in the high-ceilinged, shadowed room, traversed here and there by light broken into thin lances by the shutters that were closed against the heat. The daily love-making, complete, potent, accepting, tender, the two locked, grateful, familiar youthful bodies, cleansed and salty, the joys of double possession, equal surrender, the fruit smell of wine on their lips as they kissed, the low chuckles as they whispered in the fragrant gloom, the insidious, arousing touch of Penelope’s long nails as they moved capriciously over the hard ridges of his belly.

  The night in August, Penelope and he seated after dinner on the terrace, the sea smooth in the moonlight below them, the forest quiet, Brenner off somewhere with one of his girls, when Penelope had told him she was pregnant. “Glad or sorry?” she had asked, her low voice tremulous. He leaned over and kissed her. “I guess that answers it,” she said.

  He went into the kitchen and brought out a bottle of champagne from the icebox, and they toasted themselves in the moonlight and decided to buy a house in New York when they went back because now that they would be a family the apartment in the Village would not be big enough for them. “Don’t tell Ed,” Penelope said.

  “Why not?”

  “He’ll be jealous. Don’t tell anybody. They’ll all be jealous.”

  The routine of the mornings. After breakfast, he and Brenner sprawled in swimming trunks in the sun, the manuscript of Brenner’s new play open on the table between them and Brenner saying, “What about as the curtain comes up on the second act, the stage is dark, and she comes in, goes over to the bar, you only see her in silhouette, she pours herself a drink, sobs, then knocks the whole drink down in one gulp …?”

  Both of them squinting against the Mediterranean light, envisaging the dark stage, the actress moving in the hushed, full theatre on a cold winter’s night in the welcoming city across the ocean as they worked on the revisions of Brenner’s second play, which Craig had already announced for production in November.

  Craig had produced two other plays since The Foot Soldier, and they had both been successes. One was still running, and he had rewarded himself with the season in France as a belated honeymoon for himself and Penelope. Brenner had spent most of the royalties he had made on The Foot Soldier, which had not turned out to be all that much finally, and he was practically penniless again, but they had high hopes for the new play. Anyway, that year Craig had enough for everybody and was learning how to live luxuriously.

  Behind them in the house there was the murmur of Penelope’s voice working on her French with the cook and the occasional ringing of the telephone as friends called, or one of Brenner’s girls, to be told by Penelope that the men could not be disturbed, they were working. It was surprising how many friends had found out where they were spending the summer and how many girls knew Brenner’s telephone number.

  At noon, Penelope coming out in her bathing suit, announcing, “Swim call.” They swam off the rocks in front of the house in deep, cold, clear water, splashing each other, Penelope and Craig, who were good swimmers, hovering close to Brenner, who once had alarmingly begun to sink, thrashing his arms and blowing desperately, in need of rescue, the performance half-real, half-play-acting. “Oh,” he had said when they had hauled him out, and he was lying, pink and slippery, beached on the rocks, “oh, you aristocrats who know how to do everything, who will never drown.”

  Images of pleasure.

  Memory, of course, if given the opportunity, plays false. No time, even the month or the week that you remember later as the happiest of your life, is all of one piece, all pleasure.

  There was the argument with Penelope that broke out late one night two or three weeks after they had moved into the villa. About Brenner. In the shuttered bedroom, so that they had to talk in whispers to keep Brenner from overhearing, although he was at the other end of the hall and the walls were thick. “Isn’t that man ever going to leave?” Penelope demanded. “I’m getting tired of never being able to make a move without seeing that sad long face hanging over your shoulder.”

  “Keep it low, please,” Craig said.

  “I’m getting tired of having to keep everything low, too,” Penelope said. She was sitting up on the edge of the bed naked, brushing her blonde hair. “As though I’m in somebody else’s house.”

  “I thought you liked him,” Craig said, surprised. He had been half-asleep, waiting for her to finish with her hair and turn out the lamp and get in beside him. “I thought you were friends.”

  “I like him.” Penelope brushed savagely at her hair. “I’m his friend. But not twenty-four hours a day. When I married, I wasn’t told I was marrying a team.”

  “It’s not twenty-four hours a day,” Craig said, knowing he sounded foolish. “Anyway, he’ll probably leave when we finish getting the script ready.”

  “That script won’t be ready until the day the lease runs out,” Penelope said bitterly. “I know that man.”

  “That doesn’t sound completely friendly, Penny.”

  “Maybe he’s not so completely friendly,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know who it was that turned me down for the part in his play.”

  “He didn’t even know you then.”

  “Well, he knows me now.” Ten harsh strokes of the brush. “Don’t tell me he thinks I’m the greatest actress to come to New York since Ethel Barrymore.”

  “We haven’t discussed it,” Craig said lamely. “Keep your voice down.”

  “I’ll bet you haven’t discussed it. I’ll bet there’re a lot of things you haven’t discussed. Like the way whenever you’re talking about anything seriously you ignore me. Just ignore me.”

  “That isn’t true, Penny.”

  “You know it’s true. The two great minds working as one, deciding the fate of the world, the Marshall Plan, the next elections, the atomic bomb, Stanislavsky …” The brush was going like a piston now. “Listening to me indulgently, as though I’m an idiot child …”

  “You’re absolutely irrational, Penny.”

  “I’m irrationally rational, Jesse Craig, and you know it.”

  He had to laugh then, and she laughed, too, and he said, “Throw that damned brush away and come to bed.”

  And a moment later she threw the brush away and turned out the light and came to bed. “Don’t make me jealous, Jesse,” she whispered, holding onto him. “Don’t ever leave me out. Of anything.”

  And then days went by just as they had before, as though there had never been the midnight conversation on the edge of the bed, Penelope being sisterly and fond with Brenner, forcing him to eat, to put some meat on his poor bones, as she said, and being demure and quiet while the men talked and unostentatiously emptying ashtrays, bringing fresh drinks, teasing Brenner gently about the girls who called and the girls who sometimes stayed overnight and came down to breakfast the next morning asking if they could borrow a bathing suit for a dip before getting back to town.

  “I’m a desirable sex object on the Côte d’Azur,” Brenner said, embarrassed but pleased at the teasing. “I
t was never thus in Pennsylvania or Fort Bragg.”

  Then the bad evening at the end of August when Craig was packing to catch the night train up to Paris because he had to meet the head of a movie studio there to negotiate the terms for the sale of the play that was still running in New York. Penelope came in pulling a robe around her after a bath, her eyes, usually a soft brown, now harsh and dangerous. She watched him throw some shirts into his bag.

  “How long’re you going to be?” she asked.

  “Three days. At the most.”

  “Take that son of a bitch with you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Whom I’m talking about.”

  “Sssh.”

  “Don’t sssh me in my own house. I’m not going to play nursemaid to that one-play genius, that … that steel-town Don Juan, for three days while you go gallivanting around the nightspots of Paris …”

  “I’m not going gallivanting anywhere, Penny,” Craig said, trying to be patient. “You know that. And he’s in the middle of the third act. I don’t want him to interrupt …”

  “I wish you’d be as thoughtful about your wife as you are about your holy scrounging friend. Has he bought us a dinner since he’s been here? One single dinner?”

  “What difference does that make? He’s busted. You know that.”

  “I certainly do. He sure as hell makes that clear. Where does he get all the money to take those tarts out five times a week? What do you do—finance him for that, too? What is it, are you getting a vicarious kick out of his scrubby little conquests?”

  “I have a great idea,” Craig said quietly. “Why don’t you pack and come along with me to Paris?”

  “I’m not going to be driven out of my own house by any oversexed superior leech like Edward Brenner,” Penelope said loudly, ignoring Craig’s shushing gestures, “and let him turn this place into a whorehouse, with his cheap tarts running in and out just as near naked as the law allows. You better warn him—from now on he’s got to behave himself. I’m through with behaving like the madame of a private bordello for him, taking down telephone numbers for him, saying, ‘Mr. Brenner is busy now, Yvette or Odile or Miss Big Tits, can he call you back?’”