Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  “Maybe I ought to begin typing my letters,” Craig said, trying to make a joke out of it.

  “It’s not as easy as that,” she said earnestly. “There’s a professor in the psychology department who’s a handwriting expert, and I showed him two of your letters. One that I got from you four years ago and …”

  “You keep old letters of mine?” Extraordinary child. He had never kept any of his parents’ letters.

  “Of course, I do. Well, anyway, this professor was saying one day that very often, long before anything shows or there are any symptoms or anything like that or before a person feels anything at all, his handwriting sort of—well—predicts changes … disease, death even.”

  He was shaken by what she had said but tried not to show it. Anne had always been a blunt, candid child, blurting out everything that crossed her mind. He had been proud and a little amused by her unsparing honesty, finding it evidence of an admirable strength of character. He was not so amused now, now that it was he who was not being spared. He tried to pass it off lightly. “And what did that smart man have to say about your father’s letters?” he asked ironically.

  “You can laugh,” she said. “He said you’d changed. And would change more.”

  “For the better, I hope,” Craig said.

  “No,” she said. “Not for the better.”

  “God Almighty,” Craig said. “You send your children to a big fancy college for a scientific education and they come out with their heads stuffed with all kinds of medieval superstitions. Does your psychology professor read palms, too?”

  “Superstitions or not,” Anne said, “I promised myself I was going to tell you, and I told you. And when I saw you today, I was shocked.”

  “By what?”

  “You don’t look well. Not at all well.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Anne,” Craig said, although he was sure she was right. “I’ve had a couple of rough nights, that’s all.”

  “It’s more than that,” she persisted. “It’s not just a rough night or two. It’s something fundamental. I don’t know whether you’ve realized it or not, but I’ve been studying you ever since I was a little girl. No matter how you tried to disguise things, I always knew when you were angry or worried or sick or scared …”

  “And what about now?” He challenged her.

  “Now—” She ran her hand nervously through her hair. “You have a funny look. You look—uncared for—I guess that’s the best description. You look like a man who spends his life moving from one hotel room to another.”

  “I have been living in hotel rooms. Some of the best hotels in the world.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  He did know what she meant, but he did not admit it. Except to himself.

  “I made up my mind when I got your cable that I was going to deliver a speech,” Anne said, “and now I’m going to deliver it.”

  “Look at the scenery, Anne,” he said. “You can make speeches any time.”

  She ignored what he had said. “What I want to do,” she said, “is live with you. Take care of you. In Paris, if that’s where you want to be. Or New York, or wherever. I don’t want you to turn into a solitary old man eating dinner alone night after night. Like … like an old bull who’s been turned out from the herd.”

  He laughed despite himself at her comparison. “I don’t want to sound boastful,” he said, “but I don’t lack for company, Anne. Anyway, you have another year to go in college and …”

  “I’m through with education,” she said. “And education is through with me. At least that sort of education. I’m not going back, no matter what.”

  “We’ll discuss that some other time,” he said. Actually, after the years of wandering, the thought of living in an ordered household with Anne suddenly seemed attractive. And he recognized that he still suffered from the old, unworthy, and by now unmentionable belief that education was not terribly important for women.

  “Another thing,” Anne said. “You ought to go back to work. It’s ridiculous, a man like you not doing anything for five years.”

  “It’s not as easy as all that,” he said. “Nobody’s clamoring to give me a job.”

  “You!” she cried incredulously. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it,” he said. “Murphy is down here. Talk to him about the movie business.”

  “People’re still making pictures.”

  “People,” he said. “Not your father.”

  “I can’t bear it,” she said. “You talking like a failure. If you’d only make up your mind to try instead of being so damn proud and remote. I’ve talked it over with Marcia, and she agrees with me—it’s sheer, dumb, shameful waste.” She sounded close to hysteria, and he put his hand out and patted her soothingly.

  “Actually,” he said, “the same idea has occurred to me. I’ve been working for the last twelve months.”

  “There,” she said triumphantly. “You see! With whom?”

  “With nobody,” he said. “With myself. I’ve written a script. I’ve just finished it. Somebody’s reading it right now.”

  “What does Mr. Murphy say?”

  “It stinks, Mr. Murphy says. Throw it away.”

  “Stupid old man,” Anne said. “I wouldn’t listen to a word he says.”

  “He’s far from stupid.”

  “You’re not listening to him, though, are you?”

  “I haven’t thrown it away yet.”

  “Can I read it?”

  “If you want.”

  “Of course, I want. Can I tell you exactly what I think of it?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Even if Mr. Murphy is right,” Anne said, “and it turns out that what you’ve done isn’t good enough or commercial enough or whatever it is they want these days, you could do something else. I mean, the movies aren’t the only thing in the world, are they? In fact, if you want to know the truth, I think you’d be a lot happier if you forgot them altogether. You have to deal with such awful people. And it’s all so cruel and capricious—one minute you’re a kind of Culture Hero and the next minute everybody’s forgotten you. And the people you have to pander to, the Great American Audience—good God, Daddy, go into a movie house, any movie house, on a Saturday night and see what they’re laughing at, what they’re crying over … I remember how hard you used to work, how you’d be half dead by the time you finished a picture … And for whom? For a hundred million goons!”

  He recognized the echo of some of his own thoughts in Anne’s tirade, but he wasn’t pleased by what she had said. Especially by the word she had used—pander. It was one thing for a man his age who had worked and won and lost in that harsh arena to have his doubts in moments of depression about the value of his efforts. It was another to hear such a sweeping condemnation from the lips of an untried and pampered child. “Anne,” he said, “don’t be so hard on your fellow Americans.”

  “Anybody who wants my fellow Americans,” she said bitterly, “can have them.”

  Another item on the agenda, he thought. Find out what happened to my daughter in her native land in the last six months. At our next meeting.

  He changed the subject. “Since you’ve been doing so much thinking about my career,” he said with mild irony, “perhaps you have a suggestion about what I should do.”

  “A million things,” she said. “You could teach, you could get a job as an editor for a publisher. After all, that’s what you’ve been doing practically all your life, editing other people’s scripts. You could even become a publisher yourself. Or you could move to a peaceful small town and run a little theatre somewhere. Or you could write your memoirs.”

  “Anne,” he said half-reprovingly, “I know I’m old, but I’m not that old.”

  “A million things,” she repeated stubbornly. “You’re the smartest man I’ve ever known, it’d be a crime if you just let yourself be thrown into the discard just because the people in the movie business or in the theatre are so st
upid. You’re not married to the movie business. Moses never came down from Sinai saying, ‘Thou Shalt Entertain,’ for Christ’s sake.”

  He laughed. “Anne, darling,” he said, “you’re making a mixed salad out of two great religions.”

  “I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Maybe you do,” he admitted. “Maybe there’s some truth in what you say. But maybe you’re wrong, too. One of the reasons I came to Cannes this year at all was to make up my mind about it, to see if it was worth it.”

  “Well,” she said defiantly, “what have you seen, what have you learned?”

  What had he seen, what had he learned? He had seen all kinds of movies, good and bad, mostly bad. He had been plunged into a carnival, a delirium of film. In the halls, on the terraces, on the beach, at the parties, the art or industry or whatever it deserved to be called in these few days was exposed in its essence. The whole thing was there—the artists and pseudo-artists, the businessmen, the con men, the buyers and sellers, the peddlers, the whores, the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year’s heroes, the year’s failures. And then the distillation of what it was all about, a film of Bergman’s and one of Buñuel’s, pure and devastating.

  “Well,” Anne repeated, “what have you learned?”

  “I’m afraid I learned that I’m hooked,” he said. “When I was a little boy, my father used to take me to the theatre, the Broadway theatre. I used to sit in my seat, not budging, waiting for the theatre to go dark and the footlights go on, afraid that something would happen and the darkness would never come and the stage lights never come on. And then it would happen. I would clench my fists with happiness and worry for the people I was going to see on the stage when the curtain went up. The only time I ever remember being rude to my father was at a moment like that. He said something to me, I don’t know what, and it was destroying that great moment for me, and I said, ‘Pop, please keep quiet.’ I think he understood because he never said a word again once they began to dim the house lights. Well, I don’t have that feeling anymore in the Broadway theatre. But I have it each time I buy a ticket and walk into a darkened movie house. That’s not a bad thing, you know—for a forty-eight-year-old man to have one repetitive thing in his life that makes him feel like a boy again. Maybe it’s because of that that I make up all sorts of excuses for movies, that I rationalize away the hateful aspects, the cheapness, the thousand times I’ve walked out disgusted, and try to convince myself that one good picture makes up for a hundred bad ones. That the game is worth the candle.”

  He didn’t say it, but he knew now, had really always known, that the good ones weren’t made for the people in the audience on Saturday night. They were made for the necessity of making them, for the need of the people who made them, just like any other work of art. He knew that the agony and what Anne called the cruelty and capriciousness involved in the process, the maneuvering, the wooing, the money, the criticizing and wounding, the injustice, the exhaustion of nerve, was part of the pleasure, the profound pleasure of that particular act of creation. And even if you only played a small part in it, a subordinate, modest part, you shared in that pleasure. He knew now that he had punished himself for five years in denying himself that pleasure.

  They were approaching Antibes now, and he turned down toward the road along the sea. “Hooked,” he said, “that’s the diagnosis. And that’s enough about me. Let me say that I’m pleased to see there’s another adult in the family.” He looked across at her and saw that she was flushing at the compliment. “Now,” he said, “what about you? Aside from being sufficiently educated and taking care of me. What are your plans?”

  She shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out how to survive as an adult. Your word,” she said. “Aside from that, the only thing I’m sure of is that I’m not going to get married.”

  “Well,” he said, “that seems like a promising start for a career.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” she said sharply. “You always tease me.”

  “People only tease the ones they love,” he said, “but if you don’t like it, I’ll try to stop it.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “I’m not secure enough to take it.”

  There was a rebuke there, he realized. If a girl of twenty was not secure, who but her father was to blame? He had learned a great deal about his daughter between Nice and Antibes, and he wasn’t certain that it was reassuring.

  They were going along the outside road of the peninsula and approaching the house he had rented for the summer of 1949, the house in which Anne had been conceived. She had never been here before, but he wondered if some prenatal memory would make her look up and notice the tall white building in the garden above the road.

  She did not look up.

  I hope, he thought as they passed the house, that at least once she has three months like the three months her mother and I had that summer.

  GAIL McKinnon was just coming out of the hotel as they drove up, and there was no avoiding introducing her. “Welcome to Cannes,” she said to Anne. She stepped back a pace and examined Anne coolly. Insolently, Craig thought. “The family is getting handsomer as it goes along,” she said.

  To stop any further discussion of the progression toward perfection of the Craig family, he said, “What’s new with Reynolds? Is he all right?”

  “I imagine he’s alive,” Gail said carelessly.

  “Didn’t you go to see him?”

  She shrugged. “What for? If he needed help, somebody would call. See you around,” she said to Anne. “Don’t walk alone at night. See if you can’t convince your father to take us to dinner sometime.” She hardly looked at Craig and went striding off, her bag swinging from her shoulder.

  “What a peculiar, beautiful girl,” Anne said as they went into the hotel. “Do you know her well?”

  “I just met her a few days ago,” Craig said. The truth, as far as it went.

  “Is she an actress?”

  “Some kind of newspaperwoman. Give me your passport. You have to leave it at the desk.”

  He registered Anne and went over to the concierge’s desk for his key. There was a telegram for him. It was from Constance. “ARRIVING MARSEILLES TOMORROW MORNING STAYING HOTEL SPLENDIDE STOP DEPENDING UPON YOU MAKE GLORIOUS ARRANGEMENTS STOP LOVE C.”

  “Is it important?” Anne asked.

  “No.” He stuffed the telegram in his pocket and followed the clerk who was going to show Anne her room. The manager had not been able to free the room connecting with Craig’s apartment, and Anne would be on the floor above him. Just as well, he thought, as they got into the elevator.

  The short man with the paunch he had seen once before in the elevator with the pretty young girl went in with them. The man with the paunch was wearing a bright green shirt today. “It’ll never go in Spain,” he was saying as the elevator started. He looked appraisingly at Anne, then across at Craig. Was there a kind of conspiratorial smile at the corner of his lips? In a simpler world Craig would have punched him in the nose. Instead, he said to the clerk, “I’ll stop at my floor first. You take my daughter to her room, please. Anne, come down as soon as you’re settled.”

  The man in the green shirt dropped his eyes. He had been holding the pretty girl’s elbow. Now he took his hand away. Craig smiled meanly as the elevator came to a halt and he went out.

  In the living room he looked at the schedule of movies that were being shown that day. At three o’clock there was an Italian film he wanted to see. He picked up the phone and asked for Anne’s room. “Anne,” he said when she answered, “there’s an interesting movie this afternoon. Would you like to see it with me?”

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “I’m just putting on a bathing suit. The water looks so marvelous …”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Have a good swim. I’ll be back a little after five.”

  When he had put the phone down, he reread Constance’s telegram. He shook his head. He couldn’t refuse to meet her in Marseilles. A
nd he couldn’t take Anne with him. There were limits to the frontiers of the permissive society. But leaving his daughter alone in Cannes immediately after she had flown five thousand miles to be with him could hardly add to her sense of security. He would have to work something out with Constance so that at most he would be gone only a day or two. Glorious arrangements.

  Dissatisfied with himself, he went over to the mantelpiece and stared at his reflection in the mirror hanging there. Anne had said that he didn’t look well. It was true there were unaccustomed deep lines under his eyes, and his forehead seemed fixed in a permanent frown. His complexion now seemed pale, almost pasty, to him, and there was a slight film of sweat above his mouth. It’s a hot day, he thought, summer is coming on, that’s all.

  The psychologist in California had said that there were secret predictions buried in the way your hand shaped a word on paper. Change, Anne had said, disease, death even …

  His throat felt dry, he remembered that he sometimes felt slightly dizzy these days when he got up from a chair, that he had little appetite for his food …“Fuck it,” he said aloud. He had never talked to himself before. What sort of sign was that?

  He turned away from the mirror. He has a certain dry elegance, Gail had written about him. She had not consulted Anne’s professor.

  He went into the bedroom, stared down at the bed, now neatly made, which he had shared, if you could call it that, with the girl the night before. Would she share it again tonight? Would he be fool enough to open the door for her once more? He remembered the silken feel of her skin, the fragrance of her hair, the clean swell of her hip as she lay beside him. He would open the door if she knocked. “Idiot,” he said aloud. It might be a symptom of some obscure aberration, a warning of eventual senescence, but the sound of his own voice in the empty room somehow relieved him. “Goddamn idiot,” he said, looking down at the bed.

  He bathed his face with cold water, changed his shirt, which was damp with sweat, and went to see the Italian movie.

  The movie was disappointing, plodding, and serious and dull. It was about a group of immigrant anarchists in London, led by a Sicilian revolutionary, in the beginning of the century. It was probably as authentic as the writer and director had been able to make it, and it was plain that the people who were responsible for the film had a laudable hatred for poverty and injustice, but Craig found the violence, the shooting, the deaths, melodramatic and distasteful. So many of the other films he had seen since he arrived in Cannes had dealt with revolution of one kind or another, millions of dollars handed over by the most Republican of bankers to be invested in the praise of violence and the overthrow of society. What motivated those neat, prosperous men in the white shirts and narrow suits behind the wide, bare desks? If there was a dollar to be made in a riot, in the bombing of a courthouse, in the burning of a ghetto, did they feel that they, honorable accruers, owed it to their stockholders to offer the fortunes from their vaults, regardless of the consequences? Or were they more cynical than that? Wiser than lesser men, with their hands on the levers of power, did they know that no movie had ever brought about public upheaval, that no matter what was said in a theatre, no matter how long the lines were in front of the ticket offices for the most incendiary of films, nothing would change, no shot would be fired? Did they laugh in their clubs at the grown-up children who played their shadowy celluloid games and whom they indulged with the final toy—money? He himself had never gone raging out into the streets after any film. Was he any different from the others?