Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  “There’s nothing definite so far,” Craig said. Murphy had been definite enough, but there was nothing to be gained by telling Green about that.

  “I saw you talking to David Teichman,” Green said. “He was something in his day, wasn’t he?”

  “He certainly was.”

  “Finished,” Green said.

  Craig didn’t like the bite of the word. “I wouldn’t be too sure,” he said.

  “He’ll never make another picture.” Green’s judgment was final.

  “Maybe he’s got some plans he hasn’t let you in on, Sid.”

  “If you’re thinking of going into business with him, forget it,” Green said. “He’s going to be dead before the year’s out.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Craig asked sharply.

  “I thought everybody knew,” Green said. “He’s got a tumor of the brain. My cousin operated on him in The Cedars. It’s just a wonder he’s still walking around.”

  “Poor old man,” Craig said. The wig had taken twenty years off his life, Teichman had said.

  “Oh. I wouldn’t waste too much pity on him,” Green said. “He had it good for a long, long time. I’d settle for his life and his tumor at his age. At least his worries’re just about over. How about you, Jesse?” The dead and dying had had their moment in Walter Klein’s rented garden. “Are you coming back?”

  “The possibility exists.”

  “Well, if you do decide to move, remember me, will you, Jesse?”

  “I will indeed.”

  “I’m underrated as a director, I’m enormously underrated,” Green said earnestly. “And that’s not only my opinion. There’s a guy in there from Cahiers du Cinéma, and he made a point of being introduced to me and telling me that in his opinion my last picture, the one I did for Columbia, was a masterpiece. Did you happen to see it?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Craig said. “I don’t go to the movies much anymore.”

  “Fanfare for Drums,” Green said. “That’s what it was called. You sure you didn’t see it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “If you want, I’ll introduce you to the guy,” Green said. “I mean the Cahiers du Cinéma guy. He’s real smart. He has nothing but scorn for most of the people in there tonight. Scorn.”

  “Some other time, maybe, Sid. I’m going to make an early night of it.”

  “Just give me the word,” Green said. “I have his address. Boy,” he said sadly, “I thought this was going to be my big year in Cannes. I had a two-picture deal with options with Apex and Eastern. That’s one of those big conglomerates. Three months ago they looked as though they had all the money in the world. I thought I was all set. I took a new apartment in the sixteenth, they’re still putting in boiserie that cost fifteen thousand bucks that I haven’t paid for yet. And my wife and I decided we could afford another kid, and she’s going to have it in December. Then everything went kaput. Apex and Eastern is in receivership, and I can’t afford orange juice in the morning anymore. If I don’t get something down here these two weeks, you can say farewell to Sid Green.”

  “Something’ll turn up,” Craig said.

  “It better,” Green said. “It just better.”

  Craig left him standing at the side of the pool, his head bent, staring despondently at the mist rising from the heated green water. At least, Craig thought, as he went inside, I don’t owe fifteen thousand dollars for boiserie, and my wife isn’t pregnant.

  He spent the rest of the evening drinking. He talked to a lot of people, but by the time he felt he ought to go back to the hotel, all he could remember was that he had looked for Natalie Sorel to take her home with him and not found her and that he had told Walt Klein that he would show him his script and Klein had said that he’d send one of his boys over to the hotel in the morning to pick it up.

  He was standing at the bar having one last drink when he saw Gail McKinnon come hurrying in, a raincoat thrown over her shoulders. He hadn’t seen her leave. She stopped for a moment at the doorway, scanning the room, then saw him and came over to him. “I’d hoped you’d still be here,” she said.

  “Have a nightcap,” he said. The evening’s drinking had made him mellow.

  “I need somebody to drive me and Joe Reynolds home,” she said. “He hurt himself. Also he’s drunk. He knocked himself out falling down the stairs outside.”

  “It couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow,” Craig said, cheered by the news. “Have a drink.”

  “The policeman out there won’t let him get into the car,” Gail said.

  “Astute,” Craig said. “The astute French police. Bloodhounds of the law. Have a drink to the noble gendarmerie of the Alpes Maritimes.”

  “Are you drunk, too?” she asked sharply.

  “Not really,” he said. “Are you? Why don’t you drive the critic home?”

  “I don’t have a license.”

  “Un-American. Don’t tell any congressman who happens to ask you. Have a drink,” he said.

  “Come on, Jesse,” she said pleadingly. It was the first time, he noticed, that she had called him by his first name. “It’s late, and I can’t handle the pain in the ass myself, and he’s howling and threatening the policeman and bleeding all over the place, and he’ll wind up in jail if we don’t get him out of here fast. I know you think I’m a pest, but this is an act of charity.” She looked around the room. It was almost empty. “The party’s over. Take us back to Cannes, please.”

  Craig drained his glass, smiled. “I will deposit the body safely,” he said. He took her arm formally and made her say good night with him to Walter Klein before going out into the drizzly night.

  Reynolds had stopped yelling at the policeman. He was sitting on the bottom step of the flagstone staircase down which he had fallen, a nasty gash on his forehead, an eye beginning to swell. He was holding a bloodstained handkerchief to his nose. He looked up blearily as Gail McKinnon and Craig approached him. “Goddamn Frog cops,” he said thickly. “Walter Klein and his thugs.”

  “It’s all right, monsieur,” Craig said in French to the policeman who was standing politely next to Reynolds. “I’m his friend. I’ll drive him home.”

  “He is in no state to drive,” the policeman said. “That is evident to the naked eye. No matter what the gentleman says.”

  “I absolutely agree,” Craig said. He was careful to keep his distance from the policeman. He didn’t want to chance the man’s smelling his breath. “Upsydaisy, Joe,” he said to Reynolds, grabbing him under the armpit and hauling him up. Reynolds let the handkerchief fall from his nose, and a fresh gush of blood spattered Craig’s trousers. Reynolds smelled as though he had been steeped, with all his clothes, in whisky for days.

  With Gail helping on the other side, they got Reynolds to Craig’s car and pushed him into the back seat where he promptly went to sleep. Craig drove out of the parking lot under the dripping trees with exaggerated care, for the watching policeman’s benefit.

  Except for the sound of Reynold’s wet and bubbling snoring in the back of the car, they drove in silence to Cannes. Craig concentrated at the wheel, driving slowly, conscious that the road seemed to have a tendency to blur somewhat in the beam of the headlights on the curves. He was ashamed of the amount of liquor he had drunk that night and promised himself that in the future he would abstain completely when he knew he had to drive a car after an evening out.

  When they reached the outskirts of Cannes, the girl told Craig the name of Reynolds’ hotel. It was about six blocks away from the Carlton, inland, behind the railroad tracks. When they got there, Reynolds, now awake, said thickly, “Thank you, everybody. Don’t bother to go in with me. Perfectly all right. Good night.”

  They watched him walk stiffly and self-consciously into the darkened hotel.

  “He doesn’t need any more to drink,” Craig said, “but I do.”

  “So do I,” said Gail McKinnon.

  “Don’t you live in that hotel, too?” Craig asked.
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br />   “No.”

  He felt a foolish sense of relief.

  All the bars they passed were closed. He hadn’t realized how late it was. Anyway, stained as they were from Reynolds’ blood, they would have been a disturbing sight for any late-drinking patrons. Craig stopped the car in front of the Carlton but left the motor running. “I have a bottle,” he said. “Do you want to come up?”

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  He parked the car, and they went into the hotel. Luckily, there was nobody there. The concierge, from whom Craig got the key to his apartment, had been trained since boyhood not to change his expression at anything he saw in the lobby of any hotel.

  In the apartment Gail McKinnon took off her coat and went into the bathroom while Craig poured the whiskies and soda. There was the pleasant domestic sound of running water from the bathroom, sign of another presence, a barrier against loneliness.

  When she came back, he saw that she had combed her hair. She looked fresh and clean, as though nothing had happened to her that night. They raised their glasses to each other and drank. The hotel was quiet around them, the city sleeping.

  They sat facing each other on large brocaded armchairs.

  “Lesson for the day,” Craig said. “Don’t go out with drunks. If he hadn’t had the good sense to fall down those steps, you’d have probably wound up wrapped around a tree.”

  “Probably.” She shrugged. “The hazards of the machine age.”

  “You could have asked me to drive you home before the fall,” Craig said, forgetting that he had been perhaps just as drunk as Reynolds.

  “I had decided never to ask you anything again,” she said.

  “I see.”

  “He was raving against you when he made his swan dive. Reynolds.” The girl giggled.

  “Just for one little nasty crack eight years ago?” Craig shook his head, marveling at the persistence of vanity.

  “That and a lot of other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “You once took a girl away from him in Hollywood.”

  “Did I? Well, if I did, I didn’t know about it.”

  “That makes it even worse for somebody like Joe Reynolds. He hit her, and out of spite she told him how all-round marvelous you were and what other women had told her about you and about how intelligent and sensitive and funny you were. What do you expect him to feel about you? And you were such a big shot out there when he was a pimply-faced boy just breaking in.”

  “Well, he must feel better about me now,” Craig said.

  “A little,” the girl said. “But not enough. He’s given me a lot of the information that’s in the stuff I’ve written so far about you. And he’s suggested a title for the piece.”

  “What is it?” Craig asked, curious.

  “The Once and Future Has Been,” the girl said flatly.

  Craig nodded. “It’s vulgar,” he said, “but catchy. You going to use it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said.

  “What does it depend on?”

  “You. What you seem like to me finally when I get really to know you. If I ever get to know you. How much guts I think you still have. Or will. Or talent. It would help if you let me read the script you’re giving to Walt Klein tomorrow.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Sam Boyd is a friend of mine.” Sam Boyd was one of Klein’s bright young men. “He told me he was coming over here in the morning to pick up a script you owned. We’re having breakfast together.”

  “Tell him to come for the script after breakfast,” Craig said.

  “I’ll tell him.” She held out her glass. “It’s empty,” she said.

  He got up and carried both glasses over to the table where the bottle was. He made the two drinks and carried them back. “Thanks,” she said, looking up at him soberly as she accepted the glass. He leaned over and kissed her gently. Her lips were soft, welcoming. Then she averted her head. He stepped back as she stood up.

  “That’s enough of that,” she said. “I’m going home.”

  He put out his hand to touch her arm.

  “Leave me alone!” she said sharply. She put down her glass, seized her coat, and ran toward the door.

  “Gail …” he said, taking a step after her.

  “Miserable old man,” she said as she pulled open the door. The door slammed after her.

  He finished his drink slowly, then put out the lights and went to bed. Lying naked on the sheets in the warm darkness, he listened to the occasional rubber swish of a car on the Croisette and the tumble of the Mediterranean on the shore. He couldn’t sleep. It had been a full night. The liquor he had drunk drummed at his temples. Bits and pieces of the evening formed and reformed kaleidoscopically in his brain—Klein, in his velvet jacket, introducing everybody to everybody, Corelli and his two girls, Green pissing forlornly on the expensive green grass, Reynolds’ blood …

  Add to the mixture … The game (was it a game?) of Gail McKinnon. Her flickering young-old sensuality. Invitation and rejection. Remember and regret the lushness of Natalie Sorel, try to forget David Teichman, death under the studio wig.

  Craig moved uneasily in the bed. It had been like a gigantic Christmas office party. Except that in other businesses they weren’t held twice a week.

  Then there was the soft, half-expected knock on the door. He got up, put on a robe, and opened the door.

  Gail McKinnon was standing in the dim corridor.

  “Come in,” he said.

  HE was aware that it was light, that he was not yet awake, that there was soft breathing somewhere beside him, that the phone was ringing.

  Without sitting up or opening his eyes, postponing the day, he groped for the phone on the bedside table. A faraway voice, through a curtain of mechanical buzzing, said, “Good morning, darling.”

  “Who’s this?” he said. His eyes were still closed.

  “How many people call you darling?” the thin, distant voice said.

  “I’m sorry, Constance,” he said. “You sound a million miles away.” He opened his eyes, turned his head. The long brown hair was on the pillow beside him. Gail stared at him, the blue-flecked eyes fixed gravely on him. He was half-out from the sheet that covered her, and he had an enormous erection. He didn’t remember ever having seen his cock that size. He had to suppress a ludicrous impulse to grab at the sheet and cover himself.

  “You’re still in bed,” Constance was saying. Distant electronic accusation across six hundred miles of inaccurate cable. “It’s past ten o’clock.”

  “Is it?” he said idiotically. His cock swelled malevolently. He was conscious of the level glance from the next pillow, the shape of the body under the sheet, the neatly turned-down second bed in the room, still unslept in. He regretted having spoken Constance’s name, any name. “This is a late town,” he said. “How’re things in Paris?”

  “Deteriorating. How’re things with you?”

  He hesitated. “Nothing new,” he said.

  Gail did not smile or change her expression. The weight of her glance was almost palpable on the insanely stalwart penis towering into the golden morning air like a permanent and shameless feature of the landscape. Gail reached over slowly, deliberately, and ran one experimental finger from its base to its flaming crown. A convulsion racked him as though he had been touched by a high-tension wire.

  “Holy man,” she whispered.

  “First of all,” the wavery, mechanical, almost unrecognizable voice was saying in the telephone, “I want to apologize …”

  “I can hardly hear you,” he said, making an agonizing effort to speak calmly. “Maybe we’d better hang up and call the operator again and …”

  “Is this better? Can you hear me now?” Suddenly the voice was clear and strong, as if Constance were in another room of the hotel or around the corner.

  “Yes,” he said reluctantly. Desperately, he tried to think of something to say to Constance that would hold her off, give
him time to put on some clothes and go into the living room and wait there for her to call back. But for the moment he didn’t trust himself with anything more ambitious than a monosyllable.

  “I said I wanted to apologize,” Constance said, “for being so bitchy the other day. You know how I am.”

  “Yes,” he said. Nothing had changed below.

  “And thanks for the picture of the lion. It was a nice thought.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I have some good news,” Constance said. “At least I hope you’ll think it’s good news.”

  “What’s that?” Slyly, surreptitiously, he had managed to cover himself almost entirely from the waist down with the sheet. The sheet still stuck up, though, like a circus tent.

  “I may have to be in your part of the world tomorrow or the day after. Marseilles,” she said.

  “Marseilles?” he asked. For the moment he couldn’t quite remember where Marseilles was. “Why Marseilles?”

  “I can’t say over the phone.” Her suspicion of the French telephone system was as strong as ever. “But if things work out up here, I’ll be there.”

  “That’s fine,” Craig said, his mind on other things.

  “What’s fine?” Now Constance was beginning to sound irritated.

  “I mean maybe we can see each other …”

  “What do you mean maybe?” The tone was becoming ominous.

  He felt the shift in the bed beside him. Gail stood up, walked slowly, naked, slender-waisted, pearly-hipped, gently swelling tanned calves, into the bathroom, without a backward glance. “Well, there is a complication …”

  “This is another damned unsatisfactory conversation, lad,” Constance said.

  “My daughter Anne is arriving here today,” Craig said, grateful that Gail was no longer in the room. The erection went down suddenly, and he was grateful for that, too. “I sent her a cable inviting her.”