by Irwin Shaw
She’s jealous, Craig thought, wonderingly. Go figure women out. But all he said was, “Don’t turn bourgeoise on me, Penny. That went out with World War One.”
“I’m bourgeoise. That’s it.” She began to cry. “Now you know it. Go complain to your elegant friend. He’ll sympathize with you. The Great Bohemian Artist who never pays for anything will offer his condolences.” She ran into the bathroom and locked the door and stayed in there so long that he was sure he was going to miss his train. But just when he heard Brenner toot warningly on the horn of the car outside, the bathroom door opened and Penelope came out, dry-eyed and smiling, fully dressed. She squeezed Craig’s arm and said, “Forgive the tantrum. I’m a little jittery these days,” and they went out to the car together.
As the train pulled out of the Antibes station, with Craig leaning out the window of the wagon-lit, Penelope and Brenner were standing side by side on the platform in the dusk waving to him.
When Craig got back from Paris, Brenner gave him the finished copy of the play and said he had to leave for New York. They made plans to meet in New York at the end of September and had a farewell party, and when Craig and Penelope put him on the train, he said that he had never had a better time in his whole life.
With Brenner gone, Craig read the final version of the play Brenner had left him. As he read the familiar pages, he was conscious of a growing unease and at the end a vast, echoing emptiness. What had seemed, as he worked with Brenner, to be funny and alive and touching now was dead on the page before him, hopeless. He realized that until then he had been deceived by the beauty of the summer, his appreciation of his friend’s real talent, the engulfing, optimistic joy of work. Now he was reading coldly and saw that the play was stillborn, irretrievable. It wasn’t merely that he was sure the play would fail commercially but with the chance that it might perhaps find a small, perceptive audience that would give him some satisfaction in being connected with it. It was doomed, he was sure, to general oblivion. If it had been anybody else’s play, he would have rejected it immediately. But with Brenner … Friend or no friend, he knew that if the play went on, Brenner would suffer. Badly.
Without telling Penelope his reaction, he gave her the script to read. She had heard them talking about it, of course, and knew what it was about, but she hadn’t read a word of it. A mediocre actress, Penelope was a shrewd judge in the theatre, intuitive and tough-minded. When she had finished reading, Penelope said, “It won’t go, will it?”
“No.”
“They’ll murder him. And you.”
“I’ll survive.”
“What’re you going to do?” she asked.
He sighed. “I’m going to put it on,” he said.
She didn’t mention it again. He was grateful for her tact. He didn’t tell her, though, that he wasn’t going to risk anybody else’s money in it, that he was going to back it completely himself.
The rehearsals were disastrous. He couldn’t get any of the actors he wanted or the director he wanted or even the scene designer he wanted because the play appealed to no one. He had to make do with worn-out hacks and inexperienced beginners, and he spent tortured nights trying to make up lies about the stream of refusals to protect Brenner’s ego. So-and-so loved the play but had signed for Hollywood, so-and-so had promised to wait for the new Williams play, so-and-so was involved in television. Brenner remained serenely certain of success. His one triumph had made him feel inviolate. In the middle of rehearsals he even got married. To a plain, quiet woman by the name of Susan Lockridge who wore her straight black hair in a severe schoolteacherly bun and who knew nothing about the theatre and who sat entranced through the rehearsals, thinking that was the way all rehearsals looked. Craig acted as best man at the wedding and gave the party and sweated as he acted the jolly, confident host, raising his glass again and again to toast the newlyweds and the success of the play. Penelope didn’t appear for the party. She was in the fourth month of her pregnancy and was sick a good deal of the time and had a plausible excuse.
A week before the opening night Craig took Susan Brenner aside and told her they were heading for disaster and that the only sensible thing was to call the whole thing off. “How do you think Eddie will take it if I tell him this?” Craig asked her.
“He’ll die,” the woman said flatly.
“Oh, come on,” Craig said.
“You heard what I said.”
“Okay,” Craig said wearily, “we’ll open. Maybe there’ll be a miracle.”
But there wasn’t any miracle. Only half the audience was left when the curtain came down on opening night. In Sardi’s, where they went to wait for the reviews, Brenner said to Craig, “You son of a bitch. You sabotaged it. Susan told me what you told her. You never had any faith in it, and you did the whole thing on a shoestring, and it looks it …”
“Why would I want to sabotage it?” Craig asked.
“You know as well as I do, Brother,” Brenner said, standing up. “Come on, Sue, let’s get out of here.”
It was only many years later, long after the birth of Anne and Marcia, that Craig had an inkling of what Brenner had been talking about that night. It was in the middle of an argument with Penelope, when things had been going badly between them for more than a year, after a party at which, Penelope said, he had been hanging all over a pretty and notorious young actress, that Penelope supplied the missing clue. In the three days he had been in Paris, the summer at Antibes, she had slept with Edward Brenner. She meant to hurt him, and she managed it.
He was at the wheel in the bright afternoon sunshine with the sea below him to his right and the white villa falling out of sight behind him. He turned and took a last look at the house.
Not bad for twenty-seven. Anne had been conceived there, in the great bed in the cool, high room overlooking the sea, the room that had been the haunt of pleasure for three dreamlike months. He didn’t tell Gail McKinnon about Anne or Brenner or the three months or the death of friendship or the secret undermining of love.
What had happened to all the home movies they had taken that summer? He had no idea where the spools of aging, brittle film might be. Somewhere among the old theatre programs, old magazines, broken tennis racquets in the cellar of the house of Seventy-eighth Street he had bought so as to have room for the arrival of Anne, the house he had not visited since he had told Penelope he wanted a divorce, the house he would be able to walk through unerringly in total darkness until the day he died.
He stepped on the accelerator, and the villa disappeared beyond a bend of the road. Lesson—Stay away from the places where you have been happy.
The girl was silent for a moment. When she spoke, it was as though she knew exactly what he had been thinking of. “Murphy says your wife is a very beautiful woman.”
“Was,” Craig said. “Is, perhaps. Yes.”
“Is it a friendly divorce?”
“As divorces go.”
“The divorce in my family was silent and polite,” Gail McKinnon said. “Obscene. My mother just wandered away. When I was sixteen. She had wandered away before. Only this time she didn’t come back. When I was eighteen, I asked my father why. He said, ‘She is searching for something. And it isn’t me.’” The girl sighed. “She sends me a card at Christmas. From various parts of the world. I must look her up some day.”
She was momentarily silent, leaning back now against the seat. Then she said, “Mr. Murphy’s not what you expect a Hollywood agent to be like, is he?”
“You mean he’s not small and fat and Jewish, with a funny way of talking?”
The girl laughed. “I’m glad to see you read me so carefully. Did you read what I left for you this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Any comments?”
“No.”
Again, she was quiet for a little while. “He’s an intelligent man, Mr. Murphy,” she said. “Before you came, he told me if your last picture were to come out today, it would be a hit. It was before its time, he s
aid.”
Craig paid attention to his driving, slowed down to avoid a family group in bathing suits crossing the road.
“I agreed with him,” the girl said. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been a hit, at least in Mr. Murphy’s terms, but people would’ve recognized how original it was.”
“You saw it?” Craig couldn’t help sounding surprised.
“Yes. Mr. Murphy said the big mistake you made was not becoming a director. He says it’s a director’s business now.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“Mr. Murphy said it would have been easy any time until 1965 to get you a picture to direct …”
“That’s probably true.”
“Weren’t you tempted?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Laziness, maybe.”
“You know that’s not true.” The girl sounded aggrieved at his evasiveness.
“Well, if you must know,” Craig said, “I felt I didn’t have the talent for it. At best, I would have just been pretty good. There would have been fifty better men than I at the job.”
“Weren’t there fifty better men working as producers?” Now her tone was challenging.
“Maybe five,” he said. “And maybe if I was lucky, they would die off or go on the booze or lose their touch.”
“If you had it to do all over again,” the girl said, “would you do something else?”
“Nobody has it to do all over again,” Craig said. “Now enjoy the scenery, please.”
“Well, anyway,” the girl said placidly, “it was a nice lunch.”
After that, she asked no more questions, and they drove in silence along the sea and through the town of Antibes, sleepy in the sun, and on the busy highway back to Cannes.
He offered to drive her to her hotel, but she said it wasn’t necessary, it was only two minutes from the Carlton, and she enjoyed walking.
There was a parking place open in front of the Carlton between a Jaguar and an Alfa. He swung the Simca into it and turned off the motor. He was sure it wouldn’t be there when next he needed it.
“Thank you for the ride,” the girl said, getting out of the car. “I like your friends the Murphys. And I’m sure I’d like you if I ever got the chance.”
He smiled, rewarding her manners. “I’ll be around,” he said vaguely.
He watched her stride off along the Croisette carrying her tape recorder, Murphy isolated in a capsule. Her long brown hair shone over the blue polo shirt. Standing there in the bright sunshine, he felt deserted. He didn’t want to be alone that afternoon, remembering what it had been like when he was twenty-seven. He had the impulse to hurry after her, touch her arm, walk beside her. But he fought the impulse down. He went into the bar, drank a pastis, then wandered fretfully over to the rue d’Antibes and saw half a dirty movie. It had been made in Germany and featured bosomy lesbian ladies in high leather boots in rural settings, glades and waterfalls. The theatre was crowded. He left and went back toward his hotel.
Two hard-faced whores on the corner near the tennis courts stared at him aggressively. Maybe I should do it, he thought. Maybe it would solve something.
But he merely smiled gently at the two women and walked on. There was applause coming from the tennis courts, and he went in. A tournament was being played, for juniors. The boys were wild but moved with dazzling speed. He watched for a few minutes, trying to remember the time when he had moved that fast.
He left the courts and went around the corner to the hotel, avoiding the terrace, which already had the beginning of the evening assembly of drinkers.
When he picked up his key, the concierge gave him some messages that had come in for him in his absence. He had to sign for a registered letter from his wife that had been forwarded from his hotel in Paris. He stuffed the messages and the letter into his pocket without reading them.
In the elevator a short man with a paunch wearing an orange shirt was saying to a pretty young girl, “This is the worst festival of all times.” The girl could have been a secretary or a starlet or a whore or the man’s daughter.
When he reached his apartment, he went out onto the balcony and sat down and regarded the sea for a while. Then he took the messages out of his pocket and read them at random. He kept his wife’s letter for last. Dessert.
Mr. B. Thomas and his wife would like to dine with Mr. Craig tonight. Would Mr. Craig be good enough to call back? They were at the Hotel Martinez and would be in until seven.
Bruce Thomas was a man whom he didn’t know well but liked. He was a director and had had three hits in a row. He was about forty years old. He was one of the men Craig had been thinking about when he had told Gail McKinnon why he had never been tempted to direct. Tomorrow he would tell Thomas that he had returned to the hotel too late to call him back. He didn’t want to dine that night with a man who had had three hits in a row.
Sidney Green had called and wanted to know if he could have a drink with Mr. Craig before dinner tonight. He would be in the bar at eight. Sidney Green was a man who had directed three or four movies and who had been hired by an independent company to prepare a series of pictures. The independent company had stopped operations a month before, and Green was in Cannes looking for a job, beseeching everyone he met to put in a good word for him. He would drink alone at the bar tonight.
Miss Natalie Sorel had called and would Mr. Craig please call back. Natalie Sorel had been one of the two magnificently gowned and coiffed ladies at the party the night before whom Gail McKinnon had noticed and celebrated. She was a fairly well-known movie actress, originally from Hungary, who played in three or four languages. She had been his mistress for a few months, five or six years ago, when he had been doing the picture in Paris, but he had lost sight of her. She was going on forty now, still lush and beautiful, and when he had seen her at the party, he had wondered why he had ever broken with her. They had spent a weekend together, he remembered, at Beaulieu, out of season, and it was one of the most satisfactory memories of his life. At the party she had told him she was getting married. Miss Natalie Sorel represented too many complications at the moment, he decided. Her phone would not ring.
There was a hand-written note from Ian Wadleigh. He and Wadleigh had had some drunken evenings together in New York and Hollywood. Wadleigh had written a novel that had been widely acclaimed in the early 1950s. At that time he had been a boisterous, witty man who argued loudly in bars with strangers. Since then he had written several disappointing novels and had worked on a lot of screenplays and had gone through three wives and become a drunk. Craig hadn’t seen Wadleigh’s name in print or on the screen for years, and he was surprised to see Wadleigh’s signature on the envelope.
“Dear Jess,” Wadleigh wrote in a loose scrawl, “I heard you were here and thought maybe it would be heartwarming to tie one on together, for old time’s sake. I’m in a flea bag near the old port where the poor folk lead their short, nasty, brutish lives, but they’re pretty good at taking messages. Call when you have the time. Ian.”
Craig wondered what Wadleigh was doing in Cannes. But he wasn’t curious enough to call the number Wadleigh had noted at the bottom of the page.
He opened his wife’s registered letter. She had typed it herself. She was two days late in getting her monthly check, she wrote, and she was notifying her lawyer and his lawyer. If she did not receive the check within one day, she would instruct her lawyer to take the appropriate steps.
He stuffed all the loose bits of paper into his pocket and sat back and watched the darkening sea as the sun set.
The sky clouded over, and the sea turned a stony gray, and a light rain began to fall. The wind rose, and the fronds of the palm trees along the waterfront clashed with a mechanical dry noise. A white yacht, pitching in the swell, its running lights on, made for the old harbor.
He went in off the balcony and flicked the switch on the living-room wall. The lights came on, pale and watery. In the yellowish glow the room looked shabby and
unwelcoming. He got out his checkbook and sat down at the desk and wrote out a check for his wife. He hadn’t added up his balance in the checkbook for weeks, and he didn’t do it now. He put the check in an envelope and wrote the address. Now a stranger’s house, although still full of his books and papers and the furniture of half a lifetime.
He pulled open the drawer of the desk and took out the script, one of six copies that were lying there. It had no cover, and the title was on the top page—The Three Horizons. There was no author’s name under the title. Craig took out a pen and leaned over the desk. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote, “by Malcolm Harte.” It was as good a name as any. Let the work be judged entirely on its own merits, with an unknown name on its cover. The reactions would be purer. His friends would not be tempted to be lenient, his foes unaware of a new opportunity for derision. He recognized the cowardice there, but the good sense, too, the search for accuracy.
Methodically, he repeated the inscription, writing it neatly on the remaining five copies. He put a copy of the script in a manila envelope and wrote Bryan Murphy’s name on it.
He thought of calling Constance. She should be home by now. And cooled down after the outburst of the morning. But if she weren’t home, he knew it would sadden him, so he didn’t pick up the telephone.
He went down to the crowded lobby, smiled without warmth at two people he knew but did not wish to talk to. At the concierge’s desk he mailed the check to his wife and asked to have the script delivered immediately by messenger to Bryan Murphy at the Hotel du Cap. Then he wrote out a cable to Anne telling her to get on the next plane to Nice. If he was going to be unsettled by the young, it might as well be his own flesh and blood.
HE went to a small restaurant on the old port for dinner. Alone. He had spoken to enough people that day. The restaurant was one of the best in town, expensive and usually crowded. But tonight, except for himself and two loud parties of English, the men florid and excessively barbered, the women overdressed and bejeweled, the room was empty. The English groups were not connected with the Festival but were vacationing in Cannes. He had seen them all the night before at the casino, men and women alike playing for high stakes. The women were sopranoing about other holiday places, Sardinia, Monte, as they called it, Capri, St. Moritz, the compulsory stations of the rich. The men were complaining about the Labor government, currency restrictions, the bank rate, devaluation, their voices booming over the high trill of their wives.