Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  While he was waiting for the operator to reach the Carlton, he shaved and took a shower. He should look and smell his best for Constance. It was the least he could do.

  He had to climb out of the shower when he heard the telephone ring. As he stood dripping, waiting for the operator at the Carlton to connect him with Anne’s room, he looked at his wet, high-arched footprints on the worn carpet. At least I’m not flatfooted, he thought. A man could be vain about the most idiotic things.

  There was no answer from Anne’s room. If she needed advice, she was getting it elsewhere. From Gail, most likely. He wondered what Gail would have to say to his daughter, how much she would tell her. What if she told her everything? And what, exactly, was everything? Cross that bridge when you come to it.

  He went back into the bathroom and stood under the cold water rinsing the soap off. He dried himself and dressed quickly. He needed a drink, he told himself. He hadn’t brought a bottle along, and he would have to go to the bar. There was a certain amount of cowardice involved there, he acknowledged to himself. He didn’t want to greet Constance in their rooms. Where she might expect him to get into bed with her immediately. Immediately was not for today.

  The bar was dark red, blood-colored. There were two small Japanese men in identical dark suits looking over a thick bundle of mimeographed sheets of paper and speaking Japanese earnestly, in voices just above a whisper. Were they planning to bomb the harbor of Marseilles? He wondered how he could have hated small neat polite men like that as much as he had when he was a young man. Banzai.

  He was on his second Scotch when Constance came into the bar. Red was not her color. He rose and kissed her. Her hair was a little damp from the heat. He should not have noticed. “You look beautiful,” he said. Everything else could wait.

  “Welcome, welcome,” she said.

  The word had an echo he would have preferred not to hear.

  “I need a Tom Collins,” she said. “He knows how to make them.” She gestured toward the barman. She had been there before. With whom? Had there been tears on her cheek recently?

  He ordered the Tom Collins and another Scotch for himself. “How many does that make?” she asked lightly.

  “Only three,” he said. Anne was not the only one who was concerned about his drinking. Next month he would go on the wagon. Just wine.

  “I knew I would find you in the bar,” she said. “I didn’t even bother to ask the concierge.”

  “I have no mystery left for you,” he said. “It’s a bad sign.”

  “You have plenty of mystery,” she said. “Never fear.”

  They were uneasy with each other. She picked up her bag and put it down, her fingers fiddling with the clasp.

  “What’re you doing in Marseilles, anyway?” he asked. Klein had asked him the same question. Was it possible that all the million inhabitants of the city asked each other every morning, “What are you doing in Marseilles?”

  “One of my darling Youths is in trouble,” she said. Verbally, she always capitalized Youth. “The police picked him up in the Vieux Port with two pounds of hash in his rucksack. I pulled some wires, and they told me in Paris that if I came down and flung my charms around liberally, I might be able to get the idiot out of the French pokey some time before the end of the century. I’ve been flinging my charms around liberally for the whole afternoon. The Youth’s father has also promised to cable an interesting selection of money for the support of the French narcotic squad from St. Louis. We’ll see. I’ll have to hang around at least two days. God, I need a drink. And God, I’m glad to see you.” She reached out and took his hand, squeezed it. She had strong fingers, smooth palms. Delicately made, she was a strong, smooth woman. Damp hair and all. Bold, intelligent, inquisitive features, direct, humorous green eyes, dark now in the red light of the bar. Much sought after by men. He had been told that by friends. Also by her. Active in the service. She had a bad temper, a sunny smile, was easily hurt, quick to hurt in return. Always something for a man to think about. Take nothing for granted. How many men had she abandoned? He would have to ask some day. Not in Marseilles.

  They touched glasses before they drank. “I needed that,” she said after the first long draft. “Now tell me everything.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “We are surrounded by Japanese spies.” Postpone with a joke.

  She grinned. “Glad you came?” she asked.

  “All my life,” he said, “I have dreamt of meeting a girl in Marseilles. Now that I’ve done it, let’s go someplace else. If you’ve got to hang around a day or two, anyway, there’s no sense in staying here. If the money comes from St. Louis, they can call you.”

  “I suppose so,” she said doubtfully.

  “This hotel is death,” he said. “And there’s so much noise outside, we won’t sleep all night.”

  “I didn’t know you’d come here to sleep,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  She smiled. “Where can we go? No Cannes.”

  “Forget Cannes. There’s a place I’ve heard of,” he said, “in a village called Meyrague. Somebody told me about it. It’s a converted chateau on a hill. We can get there in under two hours.”

  “Have you ever been there with anybody else?”

  “No,” he said truthfully.

  “On to Meyrague,” she said.

  They packed hurriedly, no time for love. It would be dark before they got to Meyrague as it was. He was afraid the telephone would ring before they got out of the room. The telephone didn’t ring. The clerk at the cashier’s desk was sullen but resigned. He was used to guests leaving his hotel suddenly. “You understand,” he said in French, “I am obliged to charge you for the full night.”

  “I understand,” Craig said. He paid both bills. The least he could do for an American Youth in the hands of the French police.

  The traffic was bad as they started out, and Craig had to pay attention to the driving, and there was no chance for talking until they were outside the city limits, going north in the direction of Aix-en-Provence.

  He sorted out the subjects in his head as they drove. Fidelity, parenthood, career, his wife, his daughter, Klein, Gail McKinnon. The mother of Gail McKinnon. Not necessarily in that order.

  Constance sat beside him, her short hair blowing in the wind of their passage, a small contented smile on her lips, the tips of her fingers on his leg.

  “I love going on trips with you,” she said. They had been to the Loire Valley together, to Normandy and to London. Small, delightful voyages. Simpler than this one. He wondered if he was glad or sorry she had refused to come to Cannes with him.

  “Did you talk to David Teichman?”

  “Yes,” Craig said.

  “Isn’t he a nice man?”

  “Very.” He didn’t tell her what he had heard about the old man. Keep death out of the conversation on the road from Marseilles. “I said I’d be in touch. His plans’re vague.” He hurried past the subject of David Teichman. “Actually, somebody else may be interested in the script. I’ll probably know when I get back to Cannes.” He was preparing for departure. Constance took her fingers away from his leg.

  “I see,” she said. “What else? How’s your daughter?”

  “It would take all night to tell you,” he said. “She’s after me to quit the movie business. Altogether. She says it’s cruel and capricious and the people’re awful.”

  “Did she convince you?”

  “Not quite. Although I more or less agree with her. It is cruel and capricious, and most of the people are awful. Only it’s no worse and probably better than most other businesses. You get more bootlicking and lying in one day in any army, for example, than in a year in every studio in Hollywood combined. And there’s more throat-cutting and double-dealing in politics, say, or selling frozen foods than there ever possibly could be on a movie set. And the end product, no matter how bad it is, can’t do any more harm than generals and senators and TV dinners.

  “I take i
t you told her you’d hang in there.”

  “More or less. If they let me.”

  “Was she happy about it?”

  “At her age I think that she believes the idea of being happy is a betrayal of her generation.”

  Constance laughed ruefully. “God, I have it all ahead of me with my kids.”

  “So you do,” he said. “Another thing my daughter told me—she’s been to see her mother.” He could feel Constance tense slightly beside him. “Her mother told her she’d been to see you.”

  “Oh dear,” Constance said. “You don’t have a bottle stashed away in the car somewhere, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Should we stop somewhere for a drink?”

  “I’d rather not,” he said.

  Constance moved a little toward her side of the car. “I hadn’t planned to tell you,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I thought it might disturb you.”

  “It does,” he said.

  “She’s an attractive woman,” Constance said. “Your wife.”

  “She did a very unattractive thing.”

  “I suppose you could say that. The Youths in the office got an earful.” Constance shrugged. “I don’t know what I would do if I’d been married to a man for over twenty years and he left me for another woman.”

  “I didn’t leave her for another woman,” Craig said. “I left her for her.”

  “It’s hard for a woman to believe that,” Constance said. “When you reach her age, in a situation like that, you’re not likely to be completely reasonable. She wants you back, and she’ll do everything she can to get you back.”

  “She’s not going to get me back. Did she insult you?”

  “Naturally. Can’t we talk about something else? This is holiday time.”

  “My lawyer says she’s threatening to name you in the suit for divorce,” Craig said. “In the end she probably won’t because I’ll pay her off not to do it. But I thought you’d better know.”

  “Don’t pay her off on my account,” Constance said. “My reputation will survive.”

  He chuckled dryly.

  “Isn’t it dreary to think of—a poor little French detective standing outside my window all night while we tossed and turned in the steamy raptures of middle-aged passion?” Her tone was mocking and bitter. His wife, Craig realized, had accomplished at least part of her mission in the scene with Constance.

  “You’re not middle-aged,” he said.

  “I don’t feel middle-aged,” she said. “Tonight.” They were passing a roadside sign. “Aix-en-Provence,” she said. “Minstrels at the court singing to the sound of lutes. Tournaments of Love.”

  “I’ll tell you if anything happens,” he said.

  “Do,” she said. “Keep me posted.”

  Unreasonably, he felt, she was blaming him. No. Reasonably. After all, it was his wife. He had had more than twenty years to train her to behave politely to his mistresses.

  A car came in from a side road, and he had to jam on the brakes. Constance put out her hand to brace herself against the glove compartment. “Would you like me to drive?” she said. “You’ve been driving all day, and you must be tired.”

  “I’m not tired,” he said shortly. He stepped on the accelerator, although he knew he was driving too fast. For a while in the car, it was not holiday time.

  The hotel was a chateau on top of a wooded hill, and it was warm enough to eat outdoors, by the light of candles, on a flagstone terrace overlooking the valley. The food was very good, and they had two bottles of wine and finished off the meal with champagne. It was the kind of place and the kind of dinner that made you understand why, for some part of your life, it was imperative to live in France.

  After dinner they wandered down the road through the little forest, through patches of moonlight, into the village and had coffee in a tiny café where the proprietor had the week’s football scores chalked up on a slate.

  “Even the coffee is good,” Craig said.

  “Even everything,” Constance said. She was wearing the blue linen dress because she knew he liked her in blue. “Happy you’re here?” she asked.

  “Uhuh.”

  “With me?”

  “Well,” he said slowly, as though he was considering the question very carefully, “I suppose if you have to be in a place like this with a girl, you’re as good a choice as any.”

  “Why, that’s the nicest thing anybody has said to me all day,” she said.

  They both laughed.

  “Spell Meyrague,” he said.

  “J-e-s-s-e C-r-a-i-g.”

  They laughed again. She looked at the slate with the scores on it. “Isn’t it wonderful that Monaco won?” she said.

  “It makes my week,” he said.

  “We’ve both had too much to drink,” she said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would say.” He gestured to the proprietor behind the bar. “Deux cognacs, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Aside from everything else,” she said, “it speaks French.”

  “Among its many accomplishments,” he said.

  “Tonight,” she said, “you look twenty years old.”

  “Next year,” he said, “I’m going to vote.”

  “For whom?”

  “Muhammad Ali.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” she said.

  They drank to Muhammad Ali.

  “Whom are you going to vote for?” he asked.

  “Cassius Clay.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” he said.

  They drank to Cassius Clay. She giggled. “Aren’t we being foolish?” she said.

  “I’ll drink to that,” he said. He gestured toward the bar. “Encore deux cognacs, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Eloquent, eloquent,” she said. “In several Romantic languages.”

  He stared across the table at her. Her face became grave, and she reached across to grasp his hand as if for reassurance. He was on the verge of saying, Let’s stay here all week, all month. And after that we’ll take a year to cross the roads of France in the sunshine. But he didn’t say anything, just gripped her hand a little more tightly.

  “Did I spell Meyrague correctly?” she said.

  “It’s never been spelled better,” he said.

  On the way up the hill he said, “Walk in front of me for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to admire your glorious legs,” he said.

  She walked ahead of him through the woods. “Admire,” she said.

  The bed was huge. The moonlight came in through the open windows and the smell of the pine forest. He lay on his back in the silvery darkness listening to Constance moving around in the bathroom. She never undressed in front of him. It was a good thing, he thought, that Gail was not one of those girls who raked a man with her nails in the act of love. He had been marked in his time. Then he was displeased with himself for thinking of it. The treachery of memory, eroding the body’s pleasure. He was determined not to feel guilty. Tonight’s choice was not last night’s choice. Each night to its own innocence. He had never sworn fidelity to Constance or she to him.

  She glided across the room, a pale shadow, slipped into the bed beside him. Her body was precious to him, generous and familiar. “Home again,” he whispered to her, erasing other memories.

  But later on, lying still, side by side, she said, “You didn’t really want me to come to Cannes.”

  He hesitated. “No,” he said.

  “It wasn’t only because of your daughter.”

  “No.” He had been marked. Somehow.

  “There’s somebody else there.”

  “Yes.”

  She was silent for a moment. “A serious somebody else or an accidental somebody else?”

  “I would say accidental,” he said. “But I’m not sure. Anyway, it happened accidentally. That is, I didn’t go to Cannes to meet her. I didn’t know she was alive until a few days ago.” Now that she had broached the su
bject, he was relieved that he could talk about it. She was too dear to him for lying. “I don’t really know how it happened,” he said. “It just happened.”

  “I didn’t stay home alone in Paris every night since you were gone,” she said.

  “I won’t ask you what you mean by that,” he said.

  “It means what it means.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re not bound to each other,” she said, “by anything else but what we feel for each other at any given moment.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

  “I always mind if anybody smokes a cigarette.”

  “I promise not to come down with cancer tonight.” She got out of bed, put on a robe, and went to the dresser. He saw the flare of the match. She came back to the bed and sat on its edge, her face from time to time lit by the glow of the cigarette tip when she inhaled. “I have some news for you tonight, too,” she said. “I was going to save it for another time, but I’m in a chatty mood.”

  He laughed.

  “What’re you laughing at?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just laughing. What’s the news?”

  “I’m leaving Paris,” she said.

  Unreasonably, he felt that this was a blow aimed at him. “Why?”

  “We’re setting up a branch in San Francisco. There’s been a big movement of the Youth back and forth to and from the East. Exchange scholarships—stuff like that. We’ve been negotiating with an organization in California for months, and it finally came through, and I’m elected. I’m going to be our private Window on the Awakening Orient.”

  “Paris won’t be the same place without you.”

  “I won’t be the same lady without Paris,” she said.

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “About living in San Francisco? Curious. It’s a pretty city, and I hear it’s seething with cultural aspiration.” Her tone was mocking. “It’ll probably be good for my kids. Improve their English. A mother has to think about improving her children’s English from time to time, doesn’t she?”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “When are you going to make the move?”

  “Sometime this summer. A month or two.”

  “I have lost another home,” he said. “I will wipe Paris off my itinerary.”