Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  “Don’t expect much,” Jack said. “You know, I haven’t read a line of dialogue for more than ten years.”

  “Three days after they bury you,” Delaney said, “you’ll be a better actor than the boy I have in there now.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” Jack asked. “I always thought he was pretty good.”

  “The bottle,” Delaney said. “Six fathoms deep in Scotch. He looks all right, although that’ll go in another year or two, but you can’t understand a word he says. All I want you to do is put in the sound track—simple, clear, sexy, and comprehensible to the twelve-year-old mind.” He grinned. Then he spoke more seriously. “You’ve got to be good, kid,” he said. “You’ve got to be like the old days, Jack…”

  “I’ll try,” Jack said uneasily. For a moment he was disturbed by the intensity of the expression in the cold blue eyes. There was a desperate, veiled signal there, a fierce appeal, that was out of all proportion with the actual job that Delaney wanted him to perform. For the first time in his life, Jack had the feeling that Maurice Delaney might one day break down.

  “You’ve got to do more than try, Jack boy,” Delaney said quietly. “What you do will make or break the whole thing. It’s the keystone of the picture. That’s why I hunted all over the place to find you, because you’re the only one who can do it. You’ll see when you read it and when you run the stuff we’ve shot so far tomorrow.”

  “Maurice,” Jack said, trying to lighten the sudden tension that had sprung up in the car, “you’re still taking movies too seriously.”

  “Don’t say that,” Delaney said harshly.

  “But after all these years,” Jack protested, “you could let up a little…”

  “The day I let up a little,” Delaney said, “they can come for me and pack me away. With my permission.”

  “They’ll never pack you away,” Jack said.

  “That’s what you say.” Delaney granted savagely. “Have you read some of the reviews of my last few pictures? Have you seen the financial reports?”

  “No,” Jack said. He had read some reviews, but he had decided on tact. And he had not seen the financial reports. That, at least, was true.

  “There’s a good friend.” Delaney smiled widely, with monkey-cynicism and mischief. “One more thing.” He looked around him as though afraid that he was being overheard. “I’d be grateful if you kept this to yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Delaney said, “we’ve still got more than a week’s shooting to do and if Stiles catches on we’re not using his own famous golden voice he may turn sullen.”

  “Can you keep something like that quiet in Rome?”

  “For one week,” Delaney said. “With luck. Yes. After that, let him scream. We don’t get onto the set until eleven thirty in the morning, and you and I’ll do our dirty work before then. Do you mind getting up at dawn?”

  “You forget, I work for the government,” Jack said.

  “Does the government get up early these days?” Delaney said. “It never occurred to me. God, what a life you must lead.”

  “It’s not too bad,” Jack said, vaguely defending the last ten years.

  “Anyway, it’s good of them to let you off for me. Tell them I’ll pay an extra hundred thousand bucks in taxes next year to show my appreciation.”

  “Don’t bother.” Jack smiled. Delaney’s troubles with the Internal Revenue Department had been widely recounted in the newspapers, and someone had figured out that if he lived until the age of ninety, giving all his salary to the department, he would still be in debt for over two hundred thousand dollars at the end. “They owe me months of back leave,” Jack said. “And I was getting so nasty everybody in Paris cheered when I took off.” He had no intention of burdening Delaney with the story of the dangers he was running with Morrison by his insistence on coming to Rome.

  “Working hard protecting civilization as we know it, kid?” Delaney asked.

  “Only day and night,” Jack said.

  “Do you think the Russians’re working day and night, too?”

  “That’s what the man tells me,” Jack said.

  “God,” Delaney said, “maybe we ought to blow the whole thing up and get it over with. Do you think when it blows they’ll get the income-tax records?”

  “No,” Jack said, “it’s all on microfilm in underground vaults.”

  “Ah,” Delaney said, “not even that hope. There’s no escape. Say,” he said, “just what do you do with all those soldiers in Paris?”

  “A little bit of everything,” Jack said. “I brief visiting congressmen when my boss is busy, I draw up reports, I lie to newspapermen, I escort newsreel photographers and keep them away from secret installations, I write speeches for generals…”

  “Since when have you learned how to write?”

  “I haven’t,” Jack said. “But anybody who knows enough to spell deterrent with two r’s can write a speech for a general.”

  Delaney laughed hoarsely. “How the hell did you ever get mixed up in anything like that?”

  “By accident,” Jack said. Just the way I’ve gotten mixed up with everything else in my life, he thought. With Delaney, too. “I was playing tennis at St.-Germain one Sunday,” Jack said, “and my partner turned out to be an Air Force colonel. We won. He wanted to keep me as a partner, so he offered me a job.”

  “Come on now,” Delaney said. “Even the Air Force can’t be as sloppy as that. He must have known something about you.”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “He knew that I’d been mixed up with the movies at one time or another and there was a project on foot to make a documentary about the NATO forces, and one thing led to another…”

  “Guido!” Delaney shouted at the driver, who had just missed a taxi, “you’ll never forgive yourself if you get me killed. Remember that!”

  The driver turned his head and smiled widely, his teeth perfect and gleaming and happy, his eyes changelessly dark and full of sorrow.

  “Does he understand English?” Jack asked.

  “No. But he’s Italian. He’s sensitive to emotional intonations. Tell me,” Delaney asked, “how’s your family? How many kids you got now? Three?”

  “Out of how many marriages?” Jack said.

  Delaney grinned. “Out of the current one. I know how many you have by the previous ones.”

  “Two,” Jack said. “A boy and a girl.”

  “Happy?” Delaney eyed him inquisitively.

  “Uh-huh,” Jack said. Except at airports, he thought, and certain other places, at certain other times.

  “Maybe I should have married a Frenchwoman,” Delaney said. He had been married four times and his third wife had once shot at him in a parking lot with a hunting rifle.

  “Try it some day,” Jack said.

  “When I finish the picture maybe I’ll visit you in Paris,” Delaney said. “I could use a little Paris. And a short vision of domestic bliss. If I ever finish the picture.”

  “What’s it about?” Jack touched the pink cardboard cover on the seat beside him.

  “The usual.” Delaney made a face. “Ex-G.I. comes back to Rome, his life all fouled up, and meets the girl he loved on the way up from Salerno. Mediterranean passion and Anglo-Saxon guilt. God, stories are getting wearier and wearier these days.” He fell silent and stared moodily out the window at the bustling evening traffic.

  Jack looked out the window on his side. They were passing the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, massive and forbidding.

  “Some day,” Jack said, “I’m going to stop off on the way in from the airport and actually see what’s inside that building.”

  “This is the one town,” Delaney said, “I’m never tempted to go into a church.” He chuckled drily. “Believe it or not,” he said, “I went to confession in 1942. But that was in California. A heart man told me I was going to die in six months.”

  They rode in silence for a moment, the church disappearing behind them
.

  “Ah,” Delaney said, “we had a hot run together for a few years, you and me.”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “God, we were lucky for each other,” Delaney said. “For a little while it looked as though there was a federal law prohibiting us from doing anything wrong.” He chuckled a little sadly. “Then the godamn war had to happen.” He shook his head. “Maybe we can still be lucky for each other. Again. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “It’s possible,” Jack said.

  “Jesus,” Delaney said, “you were a marvelous boy in those days.” He sighed. “The godamn war,” he repeated softly. Then he looked around him more brightly. “Well, anyway, we’re both alive,” he said. “This isn’t a bad place to be alive, Rome. You ever been here before?”

  “Two or three times,” Jack said. “Just for a few days at a time.”

  “Listen,” Delaney said, “have you got anything on for tonight?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “No full-breasted little Italian starlet notified to be on the alert for the Big Night?”

  “I have to keep reminding you,” Jack said mildly, “that I work for the government now. All that is behind me.”

  “Okay,” Delaney said. “I’ll call for you in an hour. Give you a chance to take a bath and wipe the dust of travel off your face. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “What it is?” Jack asked as they drove up to the hotel and the doorman opened the door of the car.

  “You’ll see,” Delaney said mysteriously, as Jack got out “Be prepared for a funny evening. I’ll see you in the bar in about an hour.”

  The driver already had Jack’s bags out and the doorman was putting them to one side, under the portico, as the car drove off. Jack waved at the rear window and turned and started up the steps of the hotel. Two women and a man were coming out through the revolving door and Jack waited for a moment, as they stood abreast, blocking the entrance. The two women were holding the man solicitously, each by an elbow, as though he were ill, and the taller of the women had her arm around the man’s waist. When Jack started to move past them, the man suddenly broke away from the women and rolled uncertainly across to Jack. He looked at Jack for an instant, smiling loosely, bareheaded, his hair uncombed, his eyes bloodshot. Then he swung and hit Jack on the nose.

  “Sanford!” one of the women wailed, and the other woman said, “Oh, God!”

  Jack stumbled back, the tears starting in his eyes from the blow. He would have fallen if it hadn’t been for a pillar of the portico behind him. He shook his head once, clearing his eyes, and straightened himself, raising his fists instinctively and taking a step toward the man who had hit him. But it was too late. The man had slid down in front of the revolving door, and was sitting there, his legs sprawled under him, smiling foolishly up at Jack, his hands waving languorously in the air, like a bandleader conducting a waltz.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jack stood over the man, touching him with the point of his shoe, wanting him to get up so he could hit him.

  “Arrivederci, Roma,” the man said.

  The women fluttered around him, pulling limply at his armpits, making little murmurs of disapproval, not budging him. They were all Americans, the women in their forties and dressed like matrons at a flower show, the man about thirty-five, stocky and rumpled.

  “Oh, Sanford,” the taller of the women said, near tears, “why do you do things like that?” She was wearing a hat with two artificial gardenias sewed on it, flat across her head.

  “Should I call a policeman, sahr?” It was the doorman, looking grave, standing at Jack’s shoulder. “There’s one on the corner.”

  “Oh, please…” the woman with the gardenias cried.

  “Just let the sonofabitch stand up,” Jack said. He felt his nose and his hand came away bloody.

  The man sprawled on the steps looked up at Jack, his head rocking, the cunning and triumphant smile on his lips. “‘Arrivederci, Roma,’” he sang.

  “He’s drunk,” the short woman said. “Please don’t hit him.” She and the other woman managed to haul the man to his feet and fussed around him protectively, straightening his clothes, supporting him, whispering to him, pleading with Jack and the doorman, standing between Jack and the drunk. “He’s been drinking ever since we got to Europe. Oh, Sanford, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” The woman with the hat spoke rapidly, in all directions. “My dear man, you’re bleeding horribly. I do hope you have a handkerchief, you’re ruining that nice gray suit.”

  Before Jack could break in, the woman had whipped out a handkerchief and thrust it into his hand. As Jack put it to his nose, the shorter woman pushed the drunk back a little farther away from danger, murmuring, “Oh, Sanford, you promised you’d be good.”

  Jack could feel the handkerchief, which was soft and fragrant, soaking quickly in his hand. Even through the blood the perfume on it smelled familiar and he puzzled about it as he stood there, snuffing uncertainly.

  A taxi drew up under the portico and the man and the woman who dismounted from it stared curiously, first at Jack and then at the two women and the drunk, as the man paid the fare. Their disapproving cool eyes made Jack feel, stupidly, that, out of a sense of social responsibility, he owed it to them to explain what had happened.

  The woman with the hat fumbled once more in her bag, talking all the while. “Prudence,” she said in a loud Bostonian whisper, “put that bad boy right in that cab. This is becoming a scene.” She took a ten-thousand-lire note from her bag and crumpled it into Jack’s pocket. “There’s no need to call the police, is there now? I’m frightfully sorry. That’s for cleaning the suit, of course.”

  “Now, see here,” Jack said, taking the note out of his pocket and trying to give it back to her. “I don’t want…”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” the woman said, recoiling. She produced a thousand-lire note and gave it to the doorman, while the new arrivals went slowly past them, into the hotel, staring. “For being so kind,” she said grandly. “Now you get into that taxi, Sanford. And apologize to the man.”

  “That’s what they sang,” the drunk said, nodding and grinning, “when the Doria went down.”

  “There’s just nothing to be done with him when he drinks,” the woman said. With athletic dexterity she bundled the drunk into the cab and slammed the door behind them.

  “‘Arrivederci, Roma,’” the man’s voice floated back as the cab drove off. “Italian navigation. While the crew went off in the. lifeboats. The bastard had it coming to him. Did you see his face when I gave it to him? Did you see it?”

  Surprisingly, from the open windows of the taxi, came the sound of women’s laughter, high, shrill, uncontrollable, over the coughing of the old engine and the whining tires.

  “Are you hurt badly, sahr?” the doorman asked.

  “No,” Jack said, shaking his head, watching the cab as it turned into the street and vanished. “It’s nothing.”

  “Is the gentleman a friend of yours?” The doorman gently held Jack’s elbow as Jack went toward the entrance, almost as though he were afraid that Jack, reacting slowly, might finally drop at his feet.

  “No, I never saw him before in my life. Do you know who he is?”

  “This is the first time I saw the gentleman,” said the doorman. “Or the ladies. I’m terribly sorry it happened, sahr.” His long, military face over the smart flared coat grew anxious. “I trust there will be no results, sahr?”

  “What’s that?” Jack turned at the revolving door, not understanding. “What do you mean, results?”

  “I mean complaints to the management, sahr, inquiries into how it happened, and so on, sahr,” the doorman said.

  “No,” Jack said. “Don’t worry. There won’t be any results.”

  “You understand, sahr,” the doorman said delicately, “they were not Italian.”

  Jack smiled. “I know. Forget it.”

  The doorman, relieved at this national abs
olution, bowed stiffly. “I am very grateful, sahr, for your attitude. I trust your nose suffers no permanent damage.”

  He started the door revolving, and Jack went into the hotel lobby, holding the bloody handkerchief to his nose, sniffing the perfume. As he crossed to the desk, he recognized it. It was the same perfume his wife used. Femme, he said to himself, Femme.

  When he gave his name at the desk, and his passport, the clerk bowed and smiled warmly at him. “Yes, Mr. Andrus, there’s a suite reserved for you.” He rang for a porter and, while waiting, stared sympathetically at Jack. “Have you hurt yourself, sir?” he asked, earning his money, gravely solicitous for the welfare of guests who had suites reserved for them.

  “No,” Jack said, tentatively taking the handkerchief away from his nose. “I have a tendency to nosebleeds. It’s a family weakness.”

  “Ah,” said the clerk, sympathetic for Jack’s entire family.

  The blood was still dripping, so Jack had to go up in the elevator holding the stained handkerchief in front of his face. He stared grimly at the porter’s back, pretending he didn’t notice the two young women who were in the elevator with him and who were looking at him curiously and whispering to each other in Spanish.

  There were flowers in the salon of the suite and Renaissance drawings of Rome on the high walls, and Jack, remembering the children-cluttered small apartment with the stained ceilings in Paris, smiled with pleasure at the severe, empty, elegant room. He had been home for so long that he had forgotten the bachelor joy of being alone in a hotel room. He tipped the porter and gave him the letter to his son and inspected the bedroom and the huge marble bathroom, with the two basins. One for me, he thought idly, and one for whoever. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw that his nose was beginning to swell. He pushed it experimentally. A little jet of blood spurted out into the white bowl of the basin, staining it dramatically. But the nose didn’t feel broken and it didn’t look as though he was going to get a black eye.