by Irwin Shaw
“Thanks for the drinks,” Gretchen said.
“On the house.”
“Drop me a postcard. From Singapore or Valparaiso or wherever.”
“Sure.” Dwyer laughed, a dry little laugh.
She nursed her drink. She had the feeling that if she left Dwyer alone, he would break down, sit on the deck and weep. She didn’t want Wesley to find him like that when he got back. “I’ll just finish my drink and …”
“You want another one? I’ll go get you one.”
“This’ll do, thanks.”
“I’ve become a whiskey drinker,” Dwyer said. “What do you know about that?” He shook his head. “Do you believe in dreams?” he asked abruptly.
“Sometimes.” She wondered if Dwyer had ever heard of Freud.
“I had a dream last night,” Dwyer said. “I dreamed Tom was laying on a floor—I don’t know where it was—he was just laying on the floor looking dead. I picked him up and I knew I had to carry him someplace. I wasn’t big enough in the dream to carry him in my arms so I laid him across my back. He’s a lot taller than me, so his legs were dragging on the floor, and I put his arms around my neck so I could get a strong hold on him and I began to walk, I don’t know where, someplace I just knew I had to take him. You know how it is in a dream, I was sweating, he was heavy, he was a deadweight around my neck, on my back. Then, all of a sudden, I felt he was getting a hard-on against my ass. I kept on walking. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what to say to a dead man with a hard-on. The hard-on kept getting bigger and bigger. And I felt warm all over. And even in my dream I was ashamed. You know why I was ashamed? Because I wanted it.” He shook his head. He had been talking dreamily, compulsively. He shook his head angrily. “I had to tell someone,” he said harshly. “Excuse me.”
“That’s all right, Bunny,” Gretchen said softly. “We’re not responsible for our dreams.”
“You can say that, Mrs. Burke,” he said.
This time she did not correct him and tell him to call her Gretchen. She could not bear to look at Dwyer, because she was afraid she could not control what her face would tell him. The best she might manage would be pity and she feared what her pity might do to the man.
She reached out and touched his hand. He gripped it hard, in his tough seaman’s fingers, then in a swift, instinctive movement, brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. He let her hand go and turned away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said brokenly. “It was just … I don’t know … I …”
“You don’t have to say anything, Bunny,” she said gently. Silence now would heal wounds, staunch blood. She felt confused, helpless. What if she said, Take me down to your cabin, make love to me? Womanly thought, the central act. Would her body be a consolation or a rebuke? What would it mean to her? An act of charity, a confirmation of continuing life or a last, unworthy cry of despair? She looked at the neat, muscular back of the small man who had kissed her hand and turned away from her. She almost took a step toward him, then pulled back, a psychic retreat rather than a physical one.
The hand with which she still held the whiskey glass was cold from the melting ice. She put the glass down. “I’ve got to be getting on,” she said. “There are so many things to decide. Tell Wesley to call me if he needs anything.”
“I’ll tell him,” Dwyer said. He wasn’t looking at her, was staring, his mouth quivering, toward the entrance to the port. “Do you want me to go to the café and call a taxi?”
“No, thank you. I think I’ll walk; I could stand a little walk.”
She left him there in the bow of the Clothilde, barefooted and neat in his white jersey, with the two empty glasses.
She walked slowly away from the ships, into the town, up the narrow street, the night looming threateningly ahead of her. She looked into the window of an antique shop. There was a brass ship’s lamp there that attracted her. She would have liked to buy it, take it home with her; it would brighten the corner of a room. Then she remembered she had no real home, had come from an apartment rented for six months in New York; there was no room of hers for a lamp to brighten.
She went deeper into the town, thronged with people buying and selling, reading newspapers at café tables, scolding children, offering them ice-cream sandwiches, no one concerned with death. She saw the advertisement for a movie house, saw that an American picture, dubbed into French, was playing that night, resolved to have dinner in town alone and see it.
She passed in front of the cathedral, stopped for a moment to look at it, almost went in. If she had, she would have found Wesley on a bench, far back in the empty nave, his lips moving in a prayer he had never learned.
CHAPTER 3
FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—
MY FATHER WAS IN PARIS ONCE, WHEN THEY LET HIM OUT OF THE HOSPITAL JUST AFTER THE WAR. HE HAD NOT YET MET MY MOTHER. HE SAID HE WAS TOO DRUNK FOR THE THREE DAYS HE WAS THERE TO REMEMBER ANYTHING ABOUT IT. HE SAID HE WOULDN’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PARIS AND DAYTON, OHIO. HE DIDN’T TALK MUCH ABOUT THE WAR, WHICH MADE HIM A LOT BETTER COMPANY THAN SOME OF THE OTHER VETERANS I’VE BEEN EXPOSED TO. BUT ON SOME OF THE WEEKENDS THAT I SPENT WITH HIM UNDER THE TERMS OF THE DIVORCE, WHEN HE HAD HAD ENOUGH TO DRINK, WHICH USUALLY WAS EARLY ON, HE’D MAKE FUN OF WHAT HE DID AS A SOLDIER. I WAS MOSTLY CONCERNED WITH RED CROSS GIRLS AND MY PERSONAL SAFETY, HE’D SAY; I WAS IN THE AIR FORCE AND FLEW A TIGHT DESK, TAPPING OUT STORIES FOR HOMETOWN NEWSPAPERS ABOUT THE BRAVE BOYS WHO FLEW THE MISSIONS.
STILL, HE “DID” ENLIST, HE “DID” GET WOUNDED, OR ANYWAY, HURT, ON THE WAY BACK FROM A MISSION. I WONDER IF I WOULD HAVE DONE AS MUCH. THE ARMY, AS I SEE IT FROM HERE AND FROM WHAT I READ IN THE PAPERS ABOUT VIETNAM, IS A MACABRE PRACTICAL JOKE. OF COURSE, AS EVERYONE SAYS, THAT WAS A DIFFERENT WAR. WITH THE COLONEL I ASSUME AN EXTREME MILITARY POSE, BUT IF WAR IN EUROPE DID BREAK OUT, I’D PROBABLY DESERT THE FIRST TIME I HEARD A SHOT FIRED.
NATO IS FULL OF GERMANS, ALL VERY PALSEY AND COMRADES-INARMS, AND THEY’RE NOT MUCH DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHER ANIMALS. MONIKA, WHO IS GERMAN, IS ANOTHER STORY.
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It was almost dark when Rudolph left the consulate. The consul had been an agreeable man, had listened thoughtfully, made notes, called in an aide, promised he would do everything he could to help, but it would take time, he would have to call Paris, get legal advice, he was not convinced that the lawyer in Antibes had been on sure ground when he had told Rudolph to ignore the French, there would have to be a determination from higher authorities as to what documents would be needed to transfer the ownership of the Clothilde and free the bank accounts. The death of an American in a foreign country always presented knotty problems, the consul had said, his tone hinting that it bordered on treason to commit an act of such importance on alien soil. That day, Rudolph thought, hundreds of Americans had died in Vietnam, which might be considered a foreign country, but the deaths had not produced knotty problems for consuls anywhere.
The demise of Thomas Jordache was going to be even more complicated than usual, the consul warned; it could not be solved overnight. Rudolph had gone out into the gathering dusk feeling hopeless, trapped in a dark web of legalisms which would entangle him ever more tightly with every move he made to free himself. Trapped once more, he thought, self-pityingly, in other people’s necessities.
What did they do, Rudolph wondered as he left the consulate behind him, in the old days in the American wilderness when the leader of the tribe was killed in battle? Who got the wampum, the wives, custody of the children, the tepee, the warbonnets, the eagle feathers, the lances and arrowheads? What clever nonwarrior, what shaman or medicine man, took the role of administrator and justifier?
He had left his car along the shore, in front of the Hôtel Negresco on the Promenade des Anglais because he hadn’t wanted to risk getting lost in the streets of the unfamiliar city and had taken a taxi to the consulate. On foot now, not knowing exactly where he was going, not caring, he went in the general direction of the Negresco, not paying att
ention to the people around him hurrying home to dinner. Suddenly he stopped. His cheeks were wet. He put his hand to his eyes. He was crying. He had been crying without knowing it as he walked blindly toward the sea. Oh, God, he thought, I had to come all the way from the Hudson River to Nice to cry for the first time since I was a boy. None of the passersby seemed to notice his tears; there were no curious stares. It could be that the French were used to seeing grown men walking weeping through their streets; maybe it was a national custom. Perhaps, he thought, after what their country had gone through since Louis the Sixteenth, there was plenty to cry about.
When he reached his car it was already dark. He had wandered through back streets, changed direction aimlessly. Bella Nizza, he remembered. The Italians had taken it back in the Second World War. Briefly. In the Italian equivalent of the Pentagon there probably was a plan for recapturing it at some belligerent future date. Good neighbors. They were growing jasmine and roses for the moment on all battlefields, waiting for the next war to come along. Poor, hopeful, doomed Italian generals. Not worth the trouble, not worth the bones of a single Calabrian peasant. It wasn’t Bella Nizza anymore, it was a modern, junked-up commercial city, a peeling jumble of tenements, with rock music blaring from the loudspeakers of music shops, promoting its past loveliness in fake tourist brochures. All things became worse.
The lamps of the Promenade des Anglais were lit, reflecting off the roofs of the endless stream of cars, twinkling in the polluted sea murmuring against the meager strip of gravelly beach. In his conversation with the consul the man had said that Nice was a good post in the Foreign Service. The consul must know something about Nice that was not evident to the naked eye. Or perhaps he had been stationed in the Congo or Washington and even Nice would look good after that. Rudolph wondered if he had passed his brother’s murderer somewhere between the consulate and the sea. Entirely possible. Murderers were constantly being arrested by the police in Nice. He speculated about what he would do if a man sat down next to him in a café and recognized him and said, calmly, “Bonjour, monsieur, you may be interested to know that I am the one who did it.”
He opened the door to his car, then stood there, not getting in, thinking of the night ahead of him, going back to the hotel in Antibes, having to explain to Jean that they would have to plan on staying on in the place that had become a horror for them, having to explain to Kate and Wesley and Dwyer that nothing was settled, that everything was in abeyance, that they were tied indefinitely to death, that there was no way of knowing when they could get on with the business of living.
He closed the door of the car. He could not face what was ahead of him in Antibes. As unattractive as Nice was it was better this evening than Antibes. At least he had stopped crying.
Careful in the traffic, his nostrils assailed by the fumes the scientists of his country had assured him were deadly to the human race, he crossed to the other side of the Promenade des Anglais, bright with illuminated storefronts and the lights of cafés. He went into a café, seated himself at a table on the terrasse, ordered a whiskey and soda. Time-hallowed cure, palliative, nepenthe, transient unraveler of knotty problems. When the whiskey came, he drank slowly, glad that Jean was not with him, since he could not drink in her presence. Sometimes he felt he could not breathe in her presence—a condition to be dealt with at another time. He took another sip of his drink.
Suddenly, he was ravenously hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast and then only a croissant and coffee. The body had its own rhythms, made its own uncomplicated, imperative claims. His hunger drove all other thoughts from his mind. He sat back in his chair sipping his whiskey, luxuriously composing the menu for the evening meal. Melon with a dash of port to begin with, then fish soup, he decided, specialty of the region, with garlicked croutons and a sprinkling of grated cheese, steak and salad, slab of Brie, strawberries for dessert. A half bottle of blanc de blancs with the soup and a half bottle of heavy red wine of Provence with the steak and cheese. The evening stretched out ahead of him in gluttonous splendor. He never had to worry about getting fat, but he knew that he would have been ashamed to order so self-indulgent a meal at a time like this if he were not alone. But he knew nobody in Nice. The mourners were in another town. He paid for his whiskey and went along the promenade to the Negresco and asked the concierge for the name of the best restaurant in Nice. He walked to the address he was given, striding out briskly, his eyes dry.
The best restaurant in Nice was lit by candles, decorated with glowing bouquets of pink roses, with just the right faint aroma of good cooking from the kitchen. There were not many diners, but they looked prosperous and well-fed. The room was quiet, the atmosphere fittingly serious, the headwaiter a smiling Italian gentleman with brilliant teeth who spoke English. Perhaps, Rudolph thought, he is a spy for the Italian Army, goes home every night to draw up plans of the harbor to be microfilmed by an accomplice. Bella Nizza.
Seated at a table with a gleaming white tablecloth, breaking a crisp roll and spreading butter over it, Rudolph felt that perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that the town was not worth the bones of a single Calabrian peasant. He knew no one in Calabria.
To put an even keener edge to his appetite he ordered a martini. The martini came to the table, pale and icy cold. He fished out the olive and nibbled at it. It tasted of juniper and Mediterranean sunlight. He waved away the menu that the headwaiter offered him. “I know what I want,” he said.
The meal, when it came, did justice to the concierge’s estimate of the restaurant’s cuisine. Rudolph ate and drank slowly, feeling newly restored with every bite of the food, every drop of the wines. Sometimes, he thought, the best of holidays can be fitted into only two hours of your life.
When he had finished with the strawberries he asked for the check. He wanted to take a stroll, replete, nameless, unencumbered, sit at a café table and watch the evening traffic on the promenade while having his coffee and a brandy. He tipped the maitre d’hôtel and the waiters grandly and sauntered out into the balmy night air. He walked the few minutes to the beach. Oldest sea. Ulysses had survived it. Strapped to the mast, his sailors’ ears stopped by wax against the songs. Many brave men asleep in the deep. Tom now among them. Rudolph stood on the stony strand a few yards from where the gentle waves slid into France in a small lace of foam. It was a moonless night, but the stars were brilliant, and along the curve of the dark coast thousands of pinpoints of light made jeweled strings against the hills.
He breathed deeply of the salt air. Even though there was the mumble of traffic behind his back he felt beautifully alone, the beach deserted except for him, with nothing before him but the dark expanse of water. Tomorrow, he knew, would be a day of guilt and turmoil, but that was tomorrow. He leaned down and picked up a smooth round stone and threw it, skipping, along the surface of the sea. It skipped three times. He chuckled. If he had been a younger man, a boy, he would have sprinted like a halfback down the beach, along the water’s edge, dodging the irregular ebb and flow of the waves. But at his age, in his black suit, it did not seem advisable, even in his mellow after-dinner state, to draw attention to himself from the strollers on the walk above the beach.
He went back to the promenade and entered a brightly lit café, seating himself so that he could watch the crowded pavement, the sauntering men and women, their day’s work done or their tourists’ duties performed, now just enjoying the climate, the momentary exchange of glances, the opportunity to walk, unhurried in the soft night, arm in arm with a loved one.
The café was not crowded. At a table, just one removed from his, a woman was reading a magazine, her head bent so that he could not see her face. She had looked up when he came in, then quickly gone back to her magazine. She had a half-full glass of white wine on the table in front of her. She had dark hair, nice legs, he noticed, was wearing a light blue dress.
He was conscious of another, unspecific hunger.
Don’t spoil the evening, he warned himself.
&n
bsp; He ordered a brandy and coffee from the waiter, in English. The woman, he noted, looked up again when he spoke. He detected, or thought he detected, a momentary glimmer of a smile on her face. She was not young, in her late thirties, he would have said, somewhere around his age, carefully made up, eye shadow. A little old for a prostitute, but attractive just the same.
The waiter put down his coffee and brandy and the little stamped check and went back toward the bar inside. Rudolph took a sip of the coffee, strong and black. Then he lifted the small glass of brandy and sniffed it. Just as he was about to drink, the woman raised her glass of wine to him. This time there was no doubt about it. She was smiling. She had a full red mouth, dark gray eyes, black hair. Politely, Rudolph raised his glass a little higher in salute, drank a little.
“You’re American, aren’t you?” She had only a slight accent.
“Yes.”
“I knew as soon as you came in,” she said. “The clothes. Are you here on a pleasure trip?”
“In a way,” he said. He didn’t know whether he wanted to continue the conversation or not. He was not easy with strangers, especially strange women. She didn’t look like the prostitutes he had seen prowling the streets of New York, but he was in a foreign country and he wasn’t sure how French prostitutes dressed and spoke. He was not used to being accosted by women. There was something forbidding about him, his friend and lawyer, Johnny Heath, had said, austere. Johnny Heath was accosted wherever he went, on the street, in bars, at parties. There was nothing austere about Johnny Heath.
From adolescence Rudolph had developed an aloof, cool manner, believing that it gave him the air of belonging to another class than that of the boys and men he had grown up among, with their easy comradeship, their loud, plebeian conviviality. Perhaps, he thought, looking at the woman at the other table, I have overdone the act.