Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  Then, as was almost inevitable, she had become a lawyer’s creation, striking for gain, advantage, revenge. Now he regretted not having read her letter more carefully.

  On an impulse, he picked up the phone, gave the operator the number of the house in New York. Then, after he had put the instrument down, he remembered from his daughter’s letter that Penelope was in Geneva.

  Foolish woman, he thought, as he got the operator back and canceled the call, this is one night she should have been at home.

  HE poured himself a fresh drink, paced the room holding the glass in his hand, angry with himself for submitting himself to the past, torturing himself with the past. Whatever he had come to Cannes for, it had not been for that. Gail McKinnon had a lot to answer for. Well, he had come so far, he thought, he might as well go all the way. Go over all the mistakes, all the wrong turnings, all the betrayals. If masochism was to be the order of the day, enjoy it. Listen to the ghosts, remember the weather of other seasons …

  He sipped at his drink, sat hunched over at the desk, allowed the past to invade him.

  He was in his office, back from three months in Europe. The trip had been neither good nor bad for him. He felt suspended in time, not unpleasantly, postponing all decisions.

  There was a pile of scripts on his desk. He leafed through them without interest. Before the breakup with Penelope, or the semibreakup, or whatever it was, it had been his custom to do most of his reading in the small studio he had fixed for himself at the top of his house where he had no telephone and could not be interrupted. But since he had come back from Europe, he had taken a room at a hotel near his office and only occasionally visited the house or slept there. He hadn’t moved his clothes or any of his books, and when his daughters were at home, which was rarely, he was there. He did not know how much they knew about the breach between him and their mother, and there were no indications that they had noticed any change. They were so concerned with the problems of their adolescence—dates, school, diets,—that Craig doubted that they would have paid much attention even if their parents had staged Macbeth before their eyes in the living room, complete with bare dagger and real blood. On the surface, he thought, Penelope and he behaved much as they had always done, perhaps a shade more politely than formerly. There had been no further scenes or arguments. They asked each other no questions about their comings and goings. It was a period in which he felt strangely peaceful, like an invalid who is very slowly recovering from a long illness and knows that no great efforts can be demanded of him.

  Occasionally, they went out together. Penelope gave him a present on his forty-fourth birthday. They went down to Maryland to see a school play in which Marcia acted a small part. They slept in the same room in a hotel in the town.

  None of the play scripts he was offered seemed worth doing, although there were one or two that he was sure would succeed. When they were done by other men and were hits, he felt no sense of loss or opportunity wasted.

  He had given up reading the dramatic pages of the newspapers and had canceled his subscriptions to the trade papers. He avoided restaurants like Sardi’s and Downey’s, which had been favorite places of his and which were always filled with theatrical and movie people, most of whom he would know.

  He had not been in Hollywood since the week of the preview in Pasadena. Every once in a while Bryan Murphy would call him and tell him he was sending him a script or a book that might interest him. When they arrived, he read them dutifully, then called Murphy and said he was not interested. After about a year, Murphy only called to find out how he was. He always said that he was fine.

  There was a knock on the door, and Belinda came in carrying a playscript with a sealed envelope clipped to the cover. She had a peculiar, wary expression on her face. “This just came in,” she said. “By hand.” She put the script on his desk. “It’s Eddie Brenner’s new play.”

  “Who brought it in?” He kept his voice noncommittal.

  “Mrs. Brenner,” Belinda said.

  “Why didn’t she come in and say hello?”

  “I asked her to. She said she preferred not to.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and slit the envelope. Belinda closed the door softly behind her.

  The letter was from Susan Brenner. He had liked her and was sorry events had made it impossible for him to see her anymore.

  He read the letter. “Dear Jesse,” Susan Brenner had written, “Ed doesn’t know I’m showing you his play, and if he finds out, I’m going to be in for a rough half hour with him. But no matter. Whatever happened between you and him must be ancient history by now, and all I’m interested in is getting the play on in the best way possible. He’s been mixed up with mediocre people in recent years, and they’ve hurt him and his work, and I have to try to keep him out of their hands this time.

  “I think this is the best thing Ed has written since The Foot Soldier. It has some of the same feeling, as you will see when you read it. The only time any of Ed’s plays has received the production it deserved was that once when he worked with you and Frank Baranis, and I’m hoping that the three of you can get together again. Maybe the time has come when you all need each other again.

  “I have faith in your talent and integrity and your desire to do things in the theater that are worthwhile. I am sure that you’re too reasonable and honorable a man to allow a painful memory to interfere with your devotion to excellence.

  “When you’ve read the play, please call me. Call me in the morning around ten o’clock. Ed rents a little office nearby where he works, and he’s out of the house by then. As ever, Sue.”

  Loyal, innocent, optimistic wife, he thought. As ever. Too bad she hadn’t been around that summer in Antibes. He stared at the script on his desk. It had not been typed or bound professionally. Probably Susan Brenner had faithfully typed it herself. Brenner, he knew, could hardly afford hiring a service to do it for him. A painful memory, Susan Brenner had written. It wasn’t even that anymore. It was buried under so many other memories, painful and otherwise, that it was like an anecdote told about a stranger in whom he was only remotely interested.

  He stood up and opened the door. Belinda was at her desk reading a novel. “Belinda,” he said, “no calls until I ask for them.” She nodded. Actually, the telephone rang very seldom these days in the office. He had spoken out of old habit.

  He sat down at his desk and read the unevenly typed script. It took him less than an hour. He had wanted to like it, but when he put it down, he knew that he didn’t want to do it. The play, like Brenner’s first one, was about the war but not about combat. It was about troops of a division that had fought in Africa and was now in England preparing for the invasion of Europe. It seemed to Craig that it attempted too much and accomplished too little. There were the veterans, hardened or pushed near the breaking point by the fighting they had already seen, contrasted with the green replacements being whipped into shape, in awe of the older men, uncertain of their courage, ignorant of what to expect when their time came to go under fire. Along with that, and the conflicts engendered by the clash of the two groups, there were scenes with the local English, the girls, British soldiers, families, in which Brenner tried to analyze the difference between the two societies thrown together for a few months by the hazards of war. In style, Brenner varied from tragedy to melodrama to wild farce. His first play had been simple, all of one piece, fiercely realistic, driving in one straight line toward an inevitable bloody conclusion. The new play wandered, moralized, jumped from place to place, emotion to emotion, almost haphazardly. Brenner’s maturity, Craig thought, if that was what it was, had deprived him of his useful early simplicity. The telephone conversation with Susan Brenner was not going to be a pleasant one. He reached for the phone, then stopped. He decided to reread the play the next day after he had thought about it for twenty-four hours.

  But when he read it the next day, he liked it no better. There was no sense putting off the telephone call.

  “Susan,”
he said when he heard her voice. “I’m afraid I can’t do it. Do you want to hear my reasons?”

  “No,” she said. “Just leave it with your secretary. I’ll pass by and pick it up.”

  “Come in and say hello.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think I want to do that.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Sue,” he said.

  “So am I,” she said. “I thought you were a better man.”

  He put the telephone down slowly. He started to read another script, but it made no sense to him. On an impulse he picked up the phone again and asked Belinda to get Bryan Murphy for him on the Coast.

  After the greetings were over and Craig had learned that Murphy was in splendid health and was going to Palm Springs for the weekend, Murphy said, “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “I’m calling about Ed Brenner, Murph. Can you get him a job out there? He’s not in good shape.”

  “Since when have you been so palsy with Ed Brenner?”

  “I’m not,” Craig said. “In fact, I don’t want him to know that I called you. Just get him a job.”

  “I heard he was finishing a play,” Murphy said.

  “He’s still not in good shape.”

  “Have you read it?”

  Craig hesitated. “No,” he said finally.

  “That means you’ve read it and you don’t like it,” Murphy said.

  “Keep your voice down, Murph, please. And don’t say anything to anybody. Will you do something for him?”

  “I’ll try,” Murphy said. “But I don’t promise anything. The place is reeling. Do you want me to do something for you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. It was a rhetorical question, anyway,” Murphy said. “Give my love to Penny.”

  “I’ll do that,” Craig said.

  “I have to tell you something, Jesse,” Murphy said.

  “What?”

  “I love to get telephone calls from you. You’re the only client who doesn’t call collect.”

  “I’m a wasteful man,” Craig said. As he hung up, he knew that the odds were a hundred to one against Murphy’s finding anything for Ed Brenner on the Coast.

  He didn’t go to the opening of the Brenner play, although he had bought a ticket, because the morning of the day of the opening he received a telephone call from Boston. A director friend of his, Jack Lawton, was trying out a musical comedy there and over the phone had said that the show was in trouble and asked him to come up to Boston and look at it and see if he had any ideas as to how it could be helped.

  Craig gave his ticket for the opening to Belinda and took the plane that afternoon to Boston. He avoided seeing Lawton or anybody connected with the show before the evening performance because he wanted to be able to judge it with a fresh eye. He didn’t want to go into the theatre burdened with the complaints of the producers against the director, the director’s criticisms of the producers and the stars, the star’s recriminations about everybody, the usual cannibalistic rites out of town when a show was doing badly.

  He watched the performance with pity. Pity for the writers, the composer, the singers and dancers, the principals, the backers, the musicians, the audience. The play had cost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to put on, talented men in every field had worked for years to bring it on the stage, the dancers performed miracles of agility in the big numbers, the stars, who had been acclaimed again and again in other plays, sang their hearts out. And nothing happened. Ingenious sets flew in and out, the music swelled in an orgy of sound, actors grinned bravely and hopelessly as they uttered jokes at which no one laughed, the producers prowled despairingly in the back of the house, Lawton sat in the last row dictating notes in an exhausted hoarse voice to a secretary who scribbled on a clipboard with a pencil equipped with a small light. And still nothing happened.

  Craig writhed in his seat, breathing the air of failure, wishing he could get up and leave, dreading the moment later on in the hotel suite when people would turn to him and say, “Well, what do you think?”

  The thin desultory applause of the audience as the curtain came down was a slap in the face to everyone in his profession, and the fixed smiles of the actors as they took their bows were the grimaces of men and women under torture.

  He did not go backstage but went directly to the hotel, had two drinks to restore himself before he went upstairs to the papery chicken sandwiches, the table with whisky bottles, the bitter, pasty faces of men who had not been out in the open air for three months.

  He did not say what he really thought while the producers, the author, composer, and scene designer were in the room. He had no loyalty to them, no responsibility. His friend Lawton had asked him to come, not they, and he would wait until they left before he told Lawton his honest opinion. He contented himself with a few anodyne suggestions—cutting a dance here, restaging a song number slightly, lighting a love scene differently. The other men understood that he was not there to say anything valuable to them and left early.

  The last to go were the producers, two small, bitter men, jumpy with false nervous energy, rude with Lawton, almost openly scornful with Craig because he, too, had so clearly failed them.

  “Probably,” Lawton said as the door closed behind the two men who had come to Boston with high hopes and glittering visions of success, “probably they’re going to sit down now and call a dozen other directors to come up here and replace me.” Lawton was a tall, harassed man with thick glasses who suffered horribly from ulcers every time he staged a play, whether it went well or badly. He sipped from a glass of milk continually and swigged every few minutes at a bottle of Maalox. “Talk up, Jesse.”

  “I say, close,” Craig said.

  “It’s as bad as that?”

  “It’s as bad as that.”

  “We still have time to make changes,” Lawton said defensively.

  “They won’t help, Jack. You’re flogging a dead horse.”

  “God,” Lawton said, “you’re always surprised at how many things can go wrong at once.” He wasn’t young, he had directed over thirty plays, he had been highly praised, he was married to an enormously wealthy woman, but he sat there, bent over his ulcer pain, shaking his head like a general who had thrown in his last reserves and lost them all in one evening. “Christ,” he said, “if only my gut would let up.”

  “Jack,” Craig said, “Why don’t you just quit?”

  “You mean on this show?”

  “On the whole thing. You’re driving yourself into the hospital. You don’t have to go through all this.”

  “No,” Lawton said, “I suppose I don’t.” He sounded surprised at his own admission.

  “Then?”

  “What would I do? Sit in the sun in Arizona with the other old folks?” His face twisted, and he put his hand on his stomach as a new pang gripped him. “This is the only thing I know how to do. The only thing I want to do. Even a shitty, dead piece of nothing like this silly show tonight.”

  “You asked me what I thought,” Craig said.

  “And you told me,” said Lawton. “Thanks.”

  Craig stood up. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “And I advise you to do the same.”

  “I will, I will,” Lawton said almost petulantly. “There’re just one or two notes I want to put down while they’re still fresh in my mind. I’ve called a rehearsal for eleven.”

  He was working on the script even before Craig left the room, jabbing furiously at the pages open before him as though each stroke of his pen was going to transform everything tomorrow by the eleven o’clock rehearsal, make the jokes funny, the music clever, the dances ecstatic, the applause thunderous, as though by his efforts, in his pain, even Boston would be a different city tomorrow night.

  When Craig got to his office the next morning, Belinda had the reviews of Brenner’s play on his desk. He didn’t have to read them. He could tell by the expression on her face that things had gone badly the night before. When he read the reviews, he knew the
re was no hope, that the play would close by Saturday night. Even Boston had been preferable.

  He was in the theatre Saturday night for the last performance. The theatre was only half-full, most of it, he knew, paper. Brenner, he noted with relief, was not in the audience.

  When the curtain came up and the first lines were uttered, he had an odd sensation. He had the feeling that something beautiful was about to happen. The actors were intent and fervent and performed with a contagious belief in the value, the importance, of the words that Brenner had written for them to speak. There was no sign that any of them was affected by the knowledge that the play had been discourteously dismissed as boring or confused by the critics only three days before and that when the curtain came down that night that would be the end of it, the sets dismantled, the theatre dark, and they themselves out on the street looking for other jobs. There was a gallantry about their devotion to their profession that brought tears to Craig’s eyes even though, as he watched, he saw the faults in casting, direction, and interpretation that had obscured the subtle, multiple intentions of the play and brought down the critics’ wrath on Brenner’s head.

  As he sat in the darkened theatre, with gaping rows of empty seats behind him, watching what he recognized was a flawed and inadequate production, Craig realized that somehow he had been in error in his judgment of Brenner’s script. For the first time in a long while his attention was fully awakened in a theatre. Almost automatically, a list of things that could be done to make the play work, bring out its virtues, eliminate its flaws, began to form in his mind.

  When the play was over, there was only a thin scattering of applause from the audience, but Craig hurried backstage, moved and excited, hoping to find Brenner, praise him, reassure him.

  The old man at the stage door recognized Craig and said mournfully, “Isn’t it all a shame, Mr. Craig?” as they shook hands. Brenner, the old man said, was on the stage saying good-by to the company and thanking them, and Craig waited unseen in the wings until Brenner had made his little speech and the actors began to troop off to their dressing rooms, defiantly noisy beneath the drab work light.