Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  He looked hopefully toward the tall African across the aisle, but the man’s face was averted. The engines started up, the demonic howl luxuriously muted by the sound-proofed hull. He took two Miltowns before the plane started to taxi. If he was going to crash, he was going to crash tranquilly.

  He waited until after lunch was served before he opened Anne’s letter. He knew that whatever she had to say would not improve his appetite.

  There was no date on the letter and no address. Just “Dear Daddy …”

  Dear Daddy put on his glasses. Anne’s handwriting was difficult to decipher, and this was worse than ever. It looked as though it had been written while she was running down a steep hill.

  “Dear Daddy,” she wrote, “I’m a coward. I knew you’d disapprove and argue, and I was afraid you’d try to convince me and afraid you would convince me, so I’m taking the coward’s way out. Just forgive me. Just love and forgive me. I’m with Ian. I thought a long time about it …”

  How long was it, he thought. Three days, five? Well, perhaps when you’re twenty years old, five days are a long time to figure out how to waste your life. He didn’t remember.

  “I won’t go into the details,” she wrote. “I’ll just tell you that that night in the restaurant when Ian was treated so horribly by Mr. Murphy, I felt something that I’d never felt for anybody else in my life before. Call it love. I don’t care what it’s called. I felt it. Don’t think it’s just hero worship for a writer whose books I admire. And it’s no schoolgirl crush. No matter what you may think, I’m past stuff like that. And I’m not looking for a father figure, which I’m sure you would have said if I had stayed to tell you. I have a perfectly good father. Anyway, Ian’s only forty, and look at you and Gail McKinnon.”

  I am served, he thought, and well served. He asked the stewardess for a whisky and soda. It was a letter that needed alcohol. He looked out the window. The valley of the Rhone was hidden by cloud. The clouds looked so solid that you were tempted to believe that you could jump out and swim through them. He sipped at his whisky when the stewardess gave it to him and went back to the letter.

  “Don’t think for a minute,” he read, “that I’m against anything you’ve done with Gail. I’m absolutely pro. After what you’ve gone through with Mummy, I wouldn’t blame you if you took up with the bearded lady in the circus. And, good God, Gail is one of the best people I’ve ever met in my whole life. What’s more, she told me she was in love with you. I said, of course, everybody’s in love with him. And that’s almost true. What you’re going to do with the lady in Paris is your own business. Just like Ian is my own business.

  “I know the arguments, I know the arguments. He’s too old for me, he’s a drunk, he’s poor, he’s out of fashion, he’s not the handsomest man in the world, he’s been married three times.” Craig grinned sourly at the accurate description of the man his daughter was in love with.

  “It’s not as though I haven’t taken these things into consideration,” Anne wrote. “I’ve had long serious discussions with him about it all.”

  When? Craig wondered. The night he saw her leave the hotel and walk down the beach? On getting out of bed after having offered her convincing proof to Bayard Patty? He felt a pain at the back of his head, thought of aspirin.

  “Before I told him I’d go away with him,” Craig read on without aspirin, “I laid down conditions. I’m young, but I’m not an idiot. I’ve made him promise to quit drinking, first off. And I made him promise to come back to America. And he’s going to keep his promises. He needs someone like me. He needs me. He needs to be esteemed. He’s a proud man, and he can’t go through life being derided, deriding himself, the way he’s been doing. How many scenes like that one in the restaurant can a man go through in one lifetime?”

  Oh, my poor daughter, Craig thought, how many women through the ages have ruined themselves under the illusion that they, and only they, can save a writer, a musician, a painter? The dread hold of art on the imaginations of the female sex.

  “You’re different,” Anne wrote. “You don’t need anyone’s esteem. You’re twenty times stronger than Ian, and I’m asking you to be charitable toward him. In the end, knowing you, I’m sure you will be.

  “Sex is a big tangle, anyway, and you should be the first one to admit it.” Craig nodded as he read this. But it was one thing to be forty-eight and come out with a truism like that, another to be twenty. “I know that I was mean to poor old Bayard, and I suppose he’s got to you by now and has been crying on your shoulder. But that was just flesh …”

  Craig squinted at the word, stopped on it. Flesh. It was a strange word for Anne to use. He wondered for a moment if Wadleigh had helped her write the letter.

  “And flesh isn’t enough.” The scrawl dashed on. “If you’ve talked to Bayard, you must know that was impossible. Anyway, I never asked him to come to Cannes. If I’d married him, as he kept asking me to do (I nearly screamed, he was so insistent), in the long run I’d have been his victim. And I don’t want to be anybody’s victim.”

  Some day, Craig thought, I am going to make up a list for her. One thousand easy ways to be a victim.

  “Don’t be down on poor Ian for our sliding out the way we did. He wanted to stay and tell you what we were doing. I had the hardest time convincing him not to. Not for his sake but mine. He’s in something of a daze for the time being. A happy daze, he says. He thinks I’m something extra-special, and he says he fell in love with me that first day on the beach. He says I’m so absolutely different from all the other women he’s known. And he says he never dreamed I’d even look at him. He hasn’t touched a drink in two days. Even before we left Cannes. He says it’s a world record for him. And I read the part of the book he’s working on that he has finished, and it’s just wonderful, and if he doesn’t drink, it’ll be the best thing he’s ever done. I’m convinced. And don’t worry about money. I’m going to get a job, and with the money from the trust fund we can get along all right until the book is finished.”

  Craig groaned. The African with the tribal scars looked over at him politely. Craig smiled at the man, to reassure him.

  “I’m sorry if I’m causing you any pain,” Anne went on, “but later on I’m sure you’ll be happy for me. I’m happy for myself. And you have Gail. Although it’s more complicated with Gail than you think.”

  That’s what you think, Craig almost talked back aloud to the page.

  “There’s a long story about her mother,” Anne wrote, “that she told me but I haven’t the time to go into now. Anyway, she told me that she was going to explain everything to you. Whatever it is, I’m sure it can’t do you any discredit, no matter how it looks on the surface. I really am sure, Daddy.

  “I’m still cowardly enough, even now with Ian at my side, not to tell you where we’re going. Just for the moment I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing you and having you disapprove of me in that reasonable, austere way you have. But as soon as we’re settled in the States, I’ll get in touch with you, and you can come and visit us and see for yourself that all is well. Please love me, Daddy, as I love you, Anne.

  “P.S. Ian sends his best regards.”

  Best regards. Out of consideration for the African couple Craig refrained from groaning again. He folded the letter neatly and put it in his pocket. It would bear rereading.

  He thought of Ian Wadleigh in bed with his daughter. “Miss,” he said to the stewardess who was walking down the aisle, “do you have any aspirin?”

  BELINDA Ewen, his secretary, was waiting for him when he came through customs. He saw that she had not lost her disastrous taste for loud colors in her clothes since he had seen her last. She had been working for him twenty-three years, and it seemed to him that she had always been the same age. He kissed her on the cheek. She seemed happy to see him. He felt guilty because he hadn’t answered her last two letters. If a woman has spent twenty-three years of her life working for you, how do you avoid feeling guilty when you see her?
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  “I have a limousine waiting for us,” she said. She knew better than anyone that the money wasn’t coming in as it had done for so long but would have been shocked if he suggested that a taxi would have done just as well. She had a fierce sense of their joint status. She screamed over the phone at agents when she discovered that scripts they had sent to the office had first been offered elsewhere.

  It was a muggy, oppressive day, and it began to drizzle as they waited for the limousine to be brought around. He touched his hat grimly. The voices of the travelers piling into cars and taxis seemed harsh and angry to him. A child’s screaming grated on his nerves. He felt tired, and the aspirin hadn’t helped much.

  Belinda peered at him anxiously, scrutinizing him. “You don’t look well, Jesse,” she said. He had been so young when he hired her that it had been impossible to ask her to call him Mr. Craig. “At least I thought you’d have a tan.”

  “I didn’t go to Cannes to lie on the beach,” he said. The limousine drove up, and he sank gratefully onto the back seat. Standing had been an effort. He was sweating, and he had to mop his face with a handkerchief. “Has it been as warm as this all along?” he asked.

  “It’s not so warm,” Belinda said. “Now will you tell me why in the name of heaven you asked me to put you into the Manhattan Hotel? On Eighth Avenue, of all places!” He usually stayed at a quiet, expensive hotel on the East Side, and he could tell that in Belinda’s eyes the change represented a demeaning attempt at economy. “I thought it would be more convenient,” he said, “to be closer to the office.”

  “You’re lucky if you’re not mugged every time you go out the front door,” Belinda said. “You don’t know what Eighth Avenue is like these days.” She had a sharp, aggressive voice. She had always had a sharp, aggressive voice, and for a while he had toyed with the idea of suggesting to her that she might go to a speech teacher. He had never quite had the courage. Now, of course, it was too late. He didn’t tell her he had decided to go to the Manhattan only at the last moment, as he was writing out the cable to her in the Nice airport. The Manhattan was a brassy commercial hotel that he would ordinarily avoid, but he had suddenly remembered that he had lived there while he was putting on Edward Brenner’s first play. With Edward Brenner. Now no longer writing plays. It had been called the Hotel Lincoln then. Presidents everywhere were being downgraded. He had been lucky at the Hotel Lincoln. He wished he could remember the number of the room. But he couldn’t tell any of that to Belinda. She was too sensible a woman to pamper her employer’s superstitions.

  “You certainly didn’t give me much warning,” she said, aggrieved. “I just got your cable three hours ago.”

  “Something came up suddenly,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Anyway—” she smiled forgivingly. She had sharp little teeth, like a puppy’s. “—anyway, I’m glad to have you back. The office has been like a morgue. I’ve been going mad with boredom. I even have taken to keeping a bottle of rum in my desk. I nip at it in the afternoons to keep sane. Don’t tell me you’ve finally condescended to go to work again.”

  “In a way,” he said.

  “Hallelujah,” she said. “What do you mean, in a way?”

  “Bruce Thomas wants to do a script I own.”

  “Bruce Thomas,” she said, impressed. “Oo, la, la.” This was the year when everybody spoke the name of Bruce Thomas in a certain tone of voice, he noticed. He didn’t know whether he was pleased or jealous.

  “What script?” Belinda asked suspiciously. “I haven’t sent you anything in three months.”

  “It’s something I found in Europe,” he said. “In fact, I wrote it myself.”

  “It’s about time,” she said. “It’s got to be better than the junk we’ve been getting. You might have let me know,” she said. She was hurt. “You might even have sent me a copy.”

  “Forgive me,” he said. He reached over and patted her hand.

  “Your hand is icy cold,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course,” he said shortly.

  “When do we start?” she asked.

  “I’ll know better after I see Thomas,” he said. “There’s no deal yet.” He looked out the window of the car at the heavy clouds weighing on the flat landscape. “Oh,” he said, “I wanted to ask you something. Do you remember a woman by the name of Gloria Talbot? I think she worked for us.”

  “Just in the beginning, for a couple of months,” Belinda said. She remembered everything. “Absolutely incompetent.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “I suppose men thought she was pretty. My God, it was nearly twenty-five years ago. What made you think of her?”

  “She sent me a message,” Craig said. “Indirectly.”

  “She’s probably on her fifth marriage,” Belinda said primly. “I spotted the type right off. What did she want?”

  “It was hard to say. I imagine she just wanted to communicate,” he said. Talking, somehow, was a great effort. “If you don’t mind, Belinda,” he said, “I’m going to try to nap a little. I’m absolutely bushed.”

  “You travel too much,” she said. “You’re not a baby anymore.”

  “I guess you might say that.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cushions.

  His room was on the twenty-sixth floor. It was misty outside, and drops of rain slid down the windowpanes. The towers of the city were glints of glass, dim tiers of light in the wispy late-afternoon grayness. The room was hygienic and impersonal and had not been furnished for Russian nobility. He could hear horns from the Hudson River a few blocks away. There was nothing in the room to remind him of the lucky time with Brenner’s play. It occurred to him that he ought to find out where Brenner was buried and lay a flower on the grave. Unpacking was an effort. The light clothes he had worn in Cannes seemed incongruous in the rainy city. There were many people whom he should call, but he decided to put it off to another day. Still, there was one call he had to make, to Bruce Thomas, who was expecting him.

  He gave Thomas’s number to the operator. The brisk, cheerful American voice of the operator was welcome after the shrill, harassed voices of the standardistes of Cannes. Thomas was cordial when he came to the phone. “Well, now,” he said, “that was a surprise, your writing a script like that. A pleasant surprise.” Klein had spoken to him. “I don’t know exactly what we can work out, but we’ll work out something. Are you busy now? Do you want to come over?”

  Thomas lived on East Seventieth Street. The thought of trying to traverse the city was fatiguing. “Let’s do it tomorrow, if you don’t mind,” Craig said. “The jet lag’s got me.”

  “Sure,” Thomas said. “How about ten in the morning?”

  “I’ll be there,” Craig said. “By the way, do you happen to have Ian Wadleigh’s telephone number in London?”

  He could sense Thomas hesitating. “You know,” Thomas said, “I suggested Wadleigh before I knew you’d written the script.”

  “I know,” Craig said. “Have you talked to him yet?”

  “No,” Thomas said. “Naturally, I wanted to find out what you thought about it. But after Klein told me you didn’t mind discussing it, I tried to get in touch with him. He’s not in Cannes, and there’s no answer at his London address. I’ve sent him a cable asking him to call me here. Wait a minute, I’ll give you his number.”

  When he came back to the phone and gave Craig the number, Thomas said, “If you do find him, will you tell him I’ve been trying to reach him? And would you mind if I sent him a script? I’ve had some copies Xeroxed. There’s no sense in his coming over here if for some reason or another he doesn’t want to work on it.”

  “I think I heard somewhere that he’s planning to come back to the States to live, anyway,” Craig said. Somewhere. Flying over France, heading toward the English Channel, the brave New World. Dear Daddy.

  “That’s interesting,” Thomas said. “Good for him. See you in the morning. Have a good night.” He was a nice
man, Thomas, polite, thoughtful, with delicate manners.

  Craig asked the operator for the London number and lay down on the bed to wait for the call. When he moved his head on the pillow, he felt dizzy, and the room seemed to shift slowly around him. “You travel too much,” Belinda had said. Wise woman. Twenty-three years in the service. He was terribly thirsty, but he couldn’t make himself get up and go into the bathroom for, a glass of water.

  The phone rang, and he sat up, having to move slowly to keep the room from spinning around him. The operator said that there was no answer at the London number and asked him if he wanted her to try again in an hour. “No,” he said, “cancel the call.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed until the room steadied, then went into the bathroom and drank two glasses of water. But he was still thirsty. He was cold now, too, from the air conditioning. He tried to open a window, but it was nailed shut. He looked at his watch. It was six-thirty. Twelve-thirty tomorrow morning in Cannes. He had been up a long time, journeyed a great distance. He didn’t remember ever having been so thirsty. An ice-cold glass of beer would do wonders for him. Maybe two. The next time he crossed the ocean, he decided, he would go by boat. America should be approached cautiously, in slow stages.

  He went downstairs to the grill room, which was decorated with posters from plays. I am in a familiar arena, he thought. He remembered horns, the color of the sand in Saint Sebastian. He sat at the bar and ordered a bottle of beer, drank half the first glass in one gulp. The ache at the back of his throat subsided. He knew he should eat something, but all he wanted was more beer. He ordered another bottle, treasuring it, drinking slowly. By the end of the second bottle he felt pleasantly lightheaded. The grill room was filling up now, and he balanced the possibility of running into someone he knew and having to talk to him against the joy of one more bottle of beer. He decided to take the risk and ordered a third bottle.

  It was nearly eight o’clock by the time he got back to his room. He hadn’t had to talk to anybody. It was his lucky hotel. He undressed, put on pajamas, got into bed, and turned out the light. He lay there listening to the muted hum of the city far below him. A siren screaming past reminded him that he was in his native city. Ah, he thought regretfully as he slipped off to sleep, there will be no knock on my door tonight.