Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

  “No,” I said. “To tell the truth, this is the first time in my life I ever bought a painting.”

  “Holy man,” Quinn said. “You broke your maiden. Keep at it. You’ve got a good eye, though I’m not the one who should say so. Have another coffee on me. You’ve made my day.”

  I took the check around to Bonelli’s the next day and had a good half hour looking at the pictures I’d bought. Bonelli promised to hold them for me if I couldn’t get back in time to claim them when the show closed. All in all, I thought, as I drove up toward Porto Ercole on Friday afternoon, I had to consider my first visit to Rome a successful one.

  22

  THERE WERE FEW GUESTS AT the Pellicano and I was given a large airy room, fronting on the sea. I had the girl at the desk call the Quadrocelli home. Mr. Quadrocelli was not expected back until tomorrow morning, she told me. I told her to leave word that I would be at the hotel all day.

  I had bought some tennis things in Rome and my blister had healed and the next morning I played polite mixed doubles with some elderly English people who were staying at the hotel. After the tennis and a shower, I was sitting on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean when the girl from the desk came out with a short dark man dressed in shapeless corduroy pants and a sailor’s high-necked, navy blue sweater. “Mr. Grimes,” the girl said, “this is Dottore Quadrocelli.”

  I stood up and shook hands with Dottore Quadrocelli. His hand was hard and callused, like a laborer’s. He looked like a peasant, deeply tanned, with a round strong body. His hair and eyes were deep black, his movements quick and vivacious. There were deep lines around his eyes as though he had laughed a great deal in his lifetime. I guessed that he was about forty-five.

  “Welcome, welcome, my dear friend,” he said. “Sit down, sit down. Enjoy the morning. What do you think of our magnificent view?” He said it as though the view, the rocky sweep of the coast of the Argentario Peninsula, the sunlit sea, and the island of Genuttri that bulked in the distance were all part of his personal estate. “May I offer you a drink?” he asked as we seated ourselves.

  “Not yet, thank you,” I said. “It’s a little early for me.”

  “Ah, excellent,” he said. “You are going to present me with a good example.” His English had almost no trace of an accent and he spoke rapidly, as though his thoughts tumbled over each other in his head and he could only keep up with himself by speaking at top speed. “And how is the delightful Miles Fabian? What a pity he couldn’t come with you. My wife is desolate. She is hopelessly in love with him. Also my three daughters.” He laughed gaily. His mouth was small, the lips curved, almost like a girl’s, but his laughter was loud and robust and masculine. “Ah, what a history of amour his life must be. And unmarried, to boot. Wisdom, wisdom. He has the sagacity of a philosopher, our friend Miles. Wouldn’t you agree, Signore Grimes?”

  “I don’t know him all that well,” I said. “We’ve only met recently.”

  “Time only improves him. As compared to the rest of us poor mortals.” Quadrocelli laughed again. “Are you here alone?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  He made a little sad grimace. “You have my pity. In a place like this …” He made a wide gesture, saluting the glory of our surroundings. “You are not married?”

  “No.”

  “I will introduce you to my three daughters. One is beautiful, even if it is a doting father who says so, and the others have character. Each soul to its own virtues. But I treat them equally. When Miles called me on the telephone from Gstaad, he spoke very highly of you. He said that you were the best of companions. You possessed intelligence and rectitude, he said. Two characteristics that do not often go together in one person in these naughty days. I would say the same about Miles.”

  I didn’t think I had to inform my new friend that he was too generous by half in his judgment.

  “How did you happen to meet Miles?” Quadrocelli asked.

  “We were on the plane together coming from New York.” This was true, even though I hadn’t seen him on the flight and he had never mentioned having seen me. But it would help stop further questions.

  “And you hit it off together just like that?” Quadrocelli snapped his fingers.

  Hit was the appropriate word, I thought, remembering the lamp I broke on Fabian’s head. “Just like that,” I said.

  “Like marriages,” Quadrocelli said, “partnerships are made in heaven. Have you any experience in wine, Mr. Grimes?”

  “None. Until I came to Europe, I hardly ever touched it. Beer was my drink.”

  “Of no importance. Miles has the palate for all three of us. I tell you, it was a day of great honor for my wine when Miles suggested he would be interested in sending it out into the world with my name on the bottle. Every time an American will say, ‘I would like to order a Chianti Quadrocelli,’ I will have a little thrill of pride. I am not a vain man, but vanity is not unknown to me. And it will be an honest wine. That I promise you. It will not be mixed with Greek rotgut or Sicilian acid. Ah, the things they do here in Italy. Bull’s blood, chemicals. I am ashamed for my country. So much of our wine is like so much of our politics. Debased. Devalued, like our lire. And not only Italy. If the truth would get out about France! You and I and our friend Miles will be able to look any man in the face and say, ‘You have not been deceived in buying our product.’ And we will be enriched in the process. Greatly enriched, my dear friend. The thirst is insatiable. I will show you the figures after lunch—you will have lunch with me and my wife, please—”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It is one of the few things our idiotic government cannot ruin,” Quadrocelli said. “My wine. I have a printing business in Milan. You have no idea of how difficult they make it just to keep the head above water. Taxes, strikes, red tape …Bombings.” His face grew sober. “Dolce Italia. I have to have an armed guard at my plant in Milan twenty-four hours a day. I print, at cost, some harmless tracts for some Socialist friends of mine and I am constantly being threatened. Do not believe it, Mr. Grimes, when you are told Mussolini is dead. My father had to flee to England in 1928—there was one consolation, of course—I learned your beautiful language—and I would not be surprised if one day I will have to flee, too. From the right, from the left, from above, from below.” He made an impatient gesture, as though he was annoyed at himself for this show of pessimism. “Ah, you must be careful not to take everything I say too seriously. I swing from extreme to extreme. My family came from the South. In our family, we all cried and laughed on the same day.” He laughed gaily, fond of his family’s range of emotions. “You are here to talk about wine, not our insane politics. The eternal grape. Not even the politicians and the bully boys can keep grapes from growing. And the yeasts never go on strike. You and Miles have picked the one business that might be considered a reasonable risk in all of Italy. When Miles spoke to me on the phone, he talked of a death.”

  I began to see that I would have to be on the alert for sudden switches of subjects in Mr. Quadrocelli’s conversation. “A friend of ours,” I said.

  “I hope it was not too painful.”

  “I don’t believe it was,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, “we are all mortal.” He hugged himself, as if to reassure himself that his body was still there. “Let us talk of more cheerful things. Have you ever been in Italy before?”

  “No.” I didn’t think I had to count the trip to Florence hunting for Miles Fabian.

  “I will be your guide. It is a wonderful country, full of surprises. Some of them even happy ones.” He laughed. He was not shy at laughing at his own jokes. I had begun to like the man already, his vitality and bouncing health and cynical honesty. “We are no longer great, but we are the inheritors of greatness. We are poor caretakers, but everything is all there, even if it is crumbling a little. I will take you to my home near Firenze. You will see the vineyards with your own eyes. You will drink your wine in the place where it is grown. I have some bott
les in my cellar that will make the tears come to your eyes. That I promise you. Do you like the opera?”

  “I’ve never been.”

  “I will take you to La Scala, in Milan. You will be introduced to rapture. Do you plan to stay long in Italy?”

  “That depends somewhat on Miles.”

  “Do not be in a hurry to leave, I beg of you. I do not want our relationship to be merely a business one,” he said earnestly. “I know it sounds foolish, but it will be bad for the wine. Are you a good sailor?”

  “I’ve only been in small boats on a lake back home.”

  “I have a twenty-five-foot little power cruiser in the harbor. We will visit Genuttri.” He gestured toward the island, which now looked like a small, wispy cloud on the horizon. “It is still wild and unspoiled. That is a great deal to say about a place in these naughty days. It is too bad it is too cold to swim. The water is like sapphires. We will take a picnic and get sunburned. You will want to live the rest of your life here. Where is your home in America?”

  I hesitated. “In Vermont. But I move around a lot.”

  “Vermont.” He shivered. “I never can understand why people who do not have to do it live in ice and snow. Like Miles, with his crazy skiing. I have told him that there is a house just next to mine that is for sale. A beautiful house and I could get it at a price. And with his Italian …He could live like a king. At his age there is a good chance he could live his life out before everything went down in ruins. He seems to have come into some money …” Quadrocelli looked at me shrewdly, his eyes narrowing. “Am I right or wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “As I told you I only met him recently.”

  “Ah, good,” he said, “you are a discreet gentleman. If Miles wishes to tell me, he can tell me himself. Is that it?”

  “More or less.”

  “If I may ask, Mr. Grimes …Ah!” He made an impatient gesture. “What is your first name?”

  “Douglas.”

  “And I am Giuliano. So that is settled. If I may ask, Douglas, what is your business?”

  I hesitated again. “Mostly investments,” I said.

  “I will not pry.” Quadrocelli put his hands out in front of him in a braking motion, as though physically stopping himself from going too far. “You are a friend of Miles and that is enough for me. Or any man.” He stood up. “And now it is time for lunch. Pasta and fresh fish. Simple fare. I have never had a stomachache since the day I married my wife. I am overweight, my doctor says, but I tell him I do not plan to be a movie star.” He laughed again.

  I got up and he linked my arm in his as we started toward the door of the hotel. But before we reached it, the door opened and out into the bright Italian sunshine stepped Evelyn Coates.

  “Lorimer called me,” she said. “He told me you might be here. I hope I’m not intruding.”

  “You’re not intruding,” I said.

  It might have been the springtime Mediterranean weather or the fact that she was on a holiday or merely being away from Washington, but whatever the reason, Evelyn was a changed woman. The harshness and abrasive authority that had offended me in my first introduction to her were no longer in evidence. She was gentler, careful not to wound, relaxed. When we made love, I no longer had the feeling that she was on a desperate search for something she would never find. Even on the last Sunday night in Washington, with all the tenderness, I realized now, there had been the same underlying tension. We spent hours alone together, basking in the sun, holding hands, talking desultorily, laughing easily, childishly, at little things, like our attempts to talk Italian to a waiter or posing for each other in extreme positions in snapshots that we took with a camera that Evelyn had brought along with her.

  When she arrived, Mr. Quadrocelli had left us tactfully alone, saying, “You must have many things you wish to talk about with your beautiful American friend. We can have lunch tomorrow, instead of today. My wife will understand. And my three daughters.” He laughed, his rumbling, robust laugh. “I do not pity you anymore, Douglas.” He winked as he said it. “Not at all.”

  Then he had called during the afternoon, full of apologies, to say that he had received a telephone call, that he had to fly to Milan that evening, there had been sabotage at the plant. “Imagine,” he said, “even on Saturday.” But he would return as soon as possible, he said. I was to give his salutations to the beautiful American. His call had come after lunch, when Evelyn and I were in bed together, in the warm, pretty room overlooking the sea, all our hungers for the moment sated. Although I was sorry Quadrocelli’s plant had been sabotaged, I was not sorry that I wouldn’t have to spend time with him, nice as he was, time that I otherwise could devote to Evelyn.

  The hotel was practically empty in this off season, and it was like having a luxurious country house, equipped with a friendly and highly efficient staff, all to ourselves. The large terrace that came with our room was shielded from observation, and we lay naked side by side for hours in the warm sunshine, tanning ourselves. It seemed to me that Evelyn’s body had grown softer and rounder. In Washington it had been hard and taut, trained for competition, the body of a woman who religiously went through strenuous calisthenics and expensive massages daily to keep in shape. We talked of many things, but never about Washington or her work there. I didn’t ask her how long she could stay with me and she didn’t mention when she would have to leave. I did not report my conversation with Lorimer at the Tre Scalini.

  It was a marvelous, in-between kind of time, sensual and carefree, untroubled by clock or calendar, in a beautiful country whose language we could not speak and whose problems were not our problems. We read no newspapers and never listened to the radio and made no plans for the future. Fabian called me several times to say things were going swimmingly in New York and that we were growing richer daily but that because of certain complications that he wouldn’t bother to explain to me over the phone he would have to stay in the States longer than he had expected. Quadrocelli had sent over the figures on the wine deal before he had left, and I had mailed them to Fabian without looking at them. They were fine, Fabian said, and when Quadrocelli got back to Porto Ercole, I could tell him his terms were acceptable.

  “Incidentally,” I said, “how was the funeral?”

  “Pure pleasure,” Fabian said. “Oh—I nearly forgot—your brother came to New York to visit me. He’s a very different kettle of fish from you, isn’t he?”

  “I guess, you might put it that way,” I said.

  “Still, he says the company you and he are in on looks very promising. He told me about his eyes and I sent him to my man in New York and he’s being treated with some new drug and the doctor says he’ll be fine. Lily sends her love.”

  It was a week in which nothing could go wrong.

  We drove down to Rome to get my five suits and stayed at a hotel overlooking the Spanish Steps and like good tourists we walked everywhere, had lunch in the Piazza Navona and drank the wine of Frascati and visited the Vatican and the Forum and the Borghese Museum and heard Tosca at the opera. Evelyn said she admired my suits and pretended that all the girls we passed looking longingly at me. I was not blind to the fact that practically all the Italian men we passed looked longingly at her.

  On one of our walks I steered her to Bonelli’s gallery. The painting of the American small-town main street was still in the window, with my little red tab on the frame. I didn’t tell Evelyn that it belonged to me. I was curious about what she thought about it. She was much more sophisticated than I and sharing an apartment with a gallery-owner, she must have been exposed, even if it was only by this association, to a good deal of modern art. I stood silently by her side as we both studied the painting. If she said it was worthless, I probably would never claim the painting and never admit that I had bought it.

  “What do you think of it?” I finally asked.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Absolutely beautiful. Let’s go in and see the whole show. I must write Brenda about t
his man.”

  But it was lunch hour or hours and the gallery was closed, so we couldn’t go in. It was just as well, I thought. She might not have liked any of the other paintings and Bonelli would have undoubtedly spoken to me, thanking me for the check I had given him and I would have felt diminished in her eyes. I knew that after the days we had spent together since she had arrived at Porto Ercole I wanted her always to have a high opinion of me. In all fields.

  The next day, I went down to the gallery to collect the two paintings. Evelyn had an appointment with a friend at the embassy and I was alone. Bonelli seemed happier than when I had last seen him. There were three more red tabs on the paintings on the walls and I supposed that accounted for the improvement in his spirits. As he wrapped my canvas he hummed a tune that I recognized as an aria from Tosca. Quinn was not there. “He has had a sudden seizure of talent,” Bonelli said when I asked about him. “Since you talked to him, he has been home painting night and day.”

  Further wanderings of father, I thought, coming up.

  “I think you must take some of the credit, Mr. Grimes,” Bonelli said. “He was very despondent, sitting around here from opening to closing, looking at more than a year’s work on the walls and nothing happening, nothing. An artist, especially a young artist, becomes desperate for a little encouragement.”

  “Not only artists,” I said.

  “Of course you’re right,” Bonelli agreed. “Despondency is not only the privilege of artists. I myself sometimes have days when I wonder if I have not totally wasted my life. Even in America, I suppose …” He shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  “Even in America,” I said.

  When I got back to the hotel, Evelyn had not yet returned, and I put the paintings side by side on the mantelpiece, with a note on which I merely wrote, “To Evelyn. In gratitude, Rome,” and the date. Then I went out and walked down to the Via Veneto and sat at Downey’s on the terrace, drinking coffee and watching the crowds walk by. I wanted Evelyn to see the pictures and the note without me.