Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  He put the key into the lock and went into the room, bachelor-like, without children, that he was sure he had never visited before, smelling the eucalyptus and the laurel. The glass on the etchings of Rome reflected the light from the glass chandelier coldly, cutting medieval Rome into chaotic fragments, rhomboid battlements, polygonal towers, unrecognizable to the dead men who had built it.

  He went into the bathroom and stared at his face, first over one basin, then over the other. One for me and one for whoever. He almost recognized himself, like the ghost watchers coming out of theatres year after year, and his name was on the tip of his tongue. I bet it’s him, he said, in a girl’s voice.

  He went into the bedroom and looked at the picture of his wife and his son and his daughter. The picture had been taken in the Alps, on a skiing holiday, and a whole family was smiling there in the mountain sunshine, the sunny claims of memory. The helicopter was down, in a swirl of snow, on the ledge at three thousand meters, with the dead men in it, in polite attitudes, waiting to be photographed. He sat on the bed and looked at the telephone and thought of himself picking the instrument up and saying, “I will take the midnight plane, or the dawn plane, or the unscheduled plane.” But he didn’t touch the telephone.

  He undressed, hanging his clothes up carefully (the liars who advertised valises that did not crease three suits). He lay naked in the darkness between the sheets, saying to himself, Morning, morning.

  He thought of the red shoes and the red German hands, handling lire and flesh. Then he slept.

  4

  THE BULL ROARS IN his pen, but the president, in a black mask, and wearing a Berber headdress, comes into the ring and declares the bull unsuitable. The crowd attempts to pour gasoline over him. It is imperative, for a reason that is not clear, to get the bull out of his pen without permitting him to enter the arena. Two attendants, dressed in white, goad a white cow, theoretically in heat, into the passageway, lit by a glass chandelier, before the entrance to the bull’s pen. The cow is frightened and makes difficulties and wedges herself across the passageway. The white-clothed attendants struggle with the white cow to straighten her out and present her most appetizing, or bull-baiting, view to the pen entrance. The bull roars underground. The cow lows, tenor, then contralto, tosses her head from side to side, supplicating the chandelier. The president, still dressed in black, appears, unharmed, legally elected, and raises the iron door to the bull’s pen. The bull comes out, black, humped, wide-horned, like a wave going over sand. The froth, the spume, the wrack, the curl of the breaker, the suck of the tide, is Attendant Number One, impaled, then trampled, no longer white.

  After humanity, the animal kingdom. The bull regards the white, supplicating cow, theoretically in heat, opts for death as against procreation, bunches his legs delicately, drives the horns into the white, frantic flank, so appetizing on other occasions. The white cow is no longer white, no longer standing, her flank no longer frantic, her supplication finished. The bull stands beside her, dreaming under the glass chandelier.

  Humanity’s turn again. Attendant Number Two, dressed in white, races down the corridor, past the box stall where I am hidden, crouched behind the bolted iron door, next to a man whose face is averted and whose name is on the tip of my tongue.

  The attendant’s feet on the corridor make a sandy, dragging noise, like the sound of the wire brush on a drummer’s traps. From his throat comes a noise. Water glugging down a tin rain pipe. Attendant Number Two flees into the stall next to mine and bolts the door, breathing rainily. The bull trots up to the door and surveys it without malice. Then he breaks it down. From the next stall come the sounds one might expect to hear, loud, explicit, intermingled with calls on Christ, as the bull does the work he has been bred to do.

  Then Attendant Number Two is as silent as Attendant Number One, as silent as the white cow.

  The bull reappears in the corridor, in a dim light, and snuffs intelligently at the door to the stall in which I crouch, next to the man whose face is averted. I hunch against the iron, not breathing, seeing both sides of every question, every door. The other man remains rigid and motionless. The bull decides that the shoes outside the door are data of no importance and turns to seek more interesting diversions. But the man with the averted face has passed his limit of silence and immobility. He moves, he makes a noise, he sighs, he bubbles, he moans. I jab him sharply in reproof, my index finger going in up to the knuckle, between the fourth and fifth ribs. The bull stops, comes back to the door, discovers humanity on the other side of the iron, Columbus off the coast of Hispaniola, land birds, the smell of flowers, sweet water. The bull charges the door. It clangs, but it holds. The bull charges again and again, the horns splintering, sparks flying, the door groaning, the rhythm increasing, becoming intolerable, the dust like rain, the noise like the scream of a jet in close support. I throw my weight against the door, flesh against iron, shuddering with each assault, howling wordlessly. The other man sits on the yellow straw of the stall, his face averted.

  The door holds.

  The bull backs off, considering.

  Then he begins to leap, a lion with horns, athletic, ambitious, an iron gazelle, his hooves reaching higher with each leap, his horns like torches in the open space above the door. Finally, he gets his front legs over the top of the door. He hangs there, filling the space between the door and the ceiling beams. He looks down at me and the other man, who has turned his back and sits regarding the rear wall of the stall.

  The bull stares down reflectively, with mild, fatal eyes, and I know that now is the time for distraction, for song and dance and laughter. I go to stage center, squarely in the middle of the stall, and looking winningly at the bull, who has paid his entrance fee and deserves the best, I begin to dance and sing: tap, soft-shoe, buck and wing, modern, classic. Petrouchka, entrechats, Swan Lake, Fancy Free, my head lolling from side to side, the sweat all over, the music wailing from my throat, drums, violins, French horn, triangle, as the bull watches with intelligent interest, bemused, hung by his horns to the rafters, his front legs, neatly slung over the top of the door, front row in the balcony.

  I am singing the chorus of “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” for the third time when I sense that the man behind me has turned and no longer has his face averted. I have to see the man’s face, I have to say, “Oh, friend, don’t die with your head averted—” and for a hundredth of a dream I look away from the appreciative, placid eyes of the bull, to know the face of my partner.

  Then the bull moves, the door trembles…

  These are the dreams of the Roman night

  He awoke.

  The room was dark and quiet and no light came in through the cracks in the shutters or through the split between the curtains. The curtains rustled softly in a light breeze.

  He lay tight between the sheets, cold with the sweat of the dream, on the lip of death. He had the feeling that if the dream had gone on a moment more he would have seen the man’s face and that the face would have been that of the drunk who had hit him earlier that night. In another room in Rome the drunk was snoring, smiling in his sleep, content with the night’s work.

  Why bulls? Jack thought. I haven’t been in Spain for three years.

  He sat up and turned on the light and looked at the clock on the table beside the bed. It was four fifteen. He reached for a cigarette and lit it. He rarely smoked and he hadn’t smoked in the middle of the night for many years, but he had to have something to do with his hands. He was surprised that his hands did not shake as he held the match.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, his bare feet touching the hotel carpet, thinking about his dream, still in the presence of death. It missed me that time, he thought. It will get me the next.

  The horned lion, he remembered, the white cow.

  The Presence in the room. It was no good, being alone with it, at four fifteen in the morning, and a cigarette was no weapon against it. He looked at the telephone and thought of calling his wife in Paris.
Only what could he say to her? I have had a bad dream. Mother, Mother, I have had a bad dream in my Roman crib, and next time the horns will get me.

  He thought of the oceanic confusion of the Italian telephone system and the high irritated voices of the operators in the Paris central and the erratic ringing in the apartment on the quai and his wife getting out of bed and going out into the hall where the telephone was, frightened, with the dead light of dawn at the windows. He gave up the idea of telephoning.

  He looked at the rumpled bed and thought of sleeping. Then he gave up the idea of sleeping.

  Walter Bushell, he remembered, Carrington, Carr, McKnight, Myers, Davies, Swift, Ilenski, Carlotta Lee. The movie that night had called the roster of the past and he was confronted by names that had sunk away in his memory, confronted by the shapes and voices of people who had died or failed or become famous or who had disappeared from sight.

  The Night Watchman will whisper the roll call, on a scratched sound track.

  The dead, the missing, the wounded, the replacements, the fit for duty, appropriately dressed, wearing all decorations. Star with bar, the celluloid cross, the canceled check, the toupee, the pancake, the iron wreath of immortelles. Andrus First Corps (or was it the Second or Third or Ninth?), sometimes called Royal’s Foot, the survivors of the crossing of the Los Angeles River, drawn up on the sound stage, at parade rest.

  All present and unaccounted for.

  The heroes first, those Who Had Made the Supreme…

  Carrington. Dressed in a black suit and a black tie, philosophic, judgelike. Dead in Berlin, several years ago, on location, working on a picture (in all the papers—it had meant eighteen days of re-shooting, an extra cost of $750,000). A tall, soft-spoken, ambassadorial-looking man, white-haired, beak-nosed, Roman in lineament, who had been a matinée idol and who had had to fight the drink all his life and who had been the lover of great beauties for thirty years and who had died in the arms of an assistant cutter in a hotel room, among the rebuilt ruins (“Kiss me, Hardy,” in the bloody surgery off Trafalgar), sitting up in bed and calling out the name of a girl he had known when he was twenty years old, a hundred women away.

  McKnight, small, hypochondriacal, violent in drawing rooms and on the edges of swimming pools. Killed in the war, run over by a tank. At the time they were making Stolen Midnight he had been a bit-part actor, trying to act like Cary Grant, whom he resembled faintly. “I have the gift of the comic spirit,” McKnight said, repeated, insisted, pleaded. “I would have been great in the twenties, when people still really knew how to laugh.” He was too short to be a star and he had nearly been killed when he had been thrown from a horse during the shooting of a Western picture at Universal, but he had been reserved for the tank in the Atlas Mountains, dislocated in time, the comic spirit.

  Lawrence Myers was dead, too. Sallow, dome-headed, in need of a haircut, with the shaky hands of a man of eighty. He had written the script and had fought bitterly with Delaney, who changed every line. He was married to a woman who was crazily jealous and who cut off the sleeves of the jackets of his suits with a knife when he failed to get home at seven o’clock in the evening. Myers was gaunt and sickly-looking and had tuberculosis. He squandered all his money and he died at the age of thirty-three, when he got up out of bed, leaving an oxygen tent, to go to a story conference at MGM for a musical comedy.

  Those were the dead, or at least the known dead, the remembered dead, and did not include grips, secretaries, cutters, publicity men, studio policemen, script girls, waitresses in the studio commissary, all of whom were alive, pushing, hopeful, with plans for the future, at the time the picture was made, and who might also be expected to have succumbed in a predictable ratio to the wear and tear of twenty years, in accordance with Jack’s mortality tables.

  To say nothing of the living…

  First among the living, Carlotta…

  Hell, Jack thought, sitting on the edge of the bed, with the cigarette between his lips, I’m not going to go through that again. He stood up briskly, like a man who knew what he was doing, and went, barefooted, dragging a blanket, to get away from the bedroom, the dream, the unleashed dead. He put on all the lights in the living room, the glass chandelier, the desk lamps, the wall brackets, and picked up the pink-covered script Delaney had asked him to read.

  He made himself comfortable on the couch, shivering a little under the blanket, and opened the script.

  FADE IN, AFTER CREDITS

  A four-motor plane landing at the Ciampino Airport, Rome.

  It has been raining and the runways are still wet.

  THE AIRPLANE taxis toward the point of disembarkation and the workmen run out with the ramp.

  THE DOOR OPENS and the passengers begin to come out. Among the passengers is ROBERT JOHNSON.

  HE walks a little apart from the other passengers, HE seems to be searching for something, HE approaches the camera and we see that he. is a man of about thirty-five, very handsome, with piercing, intelligent eyes. Jack sighed as he read the stale, familiar words, and thought again, in recurrent pain, of his dream, trying to sort out the symbols. The bull, dealing death, appeased momentarily by song and dance, deterred from his sinister intention by clowning and vaudeville tricks. What was that? The public? Unreasonable, brutelike, deadly—kept at bay only so long as you could jig and caper and howl amusingly? Jack remembered how he had felt before the curtain went up on opening nights and how shaky he had been, seated among the audiences at the previews of films in which he had acted—dry-mouthed, sweating, with electric-like little shivers in his elbows and knees. Was it because, after so many years, he was coming back to all that, even if it was only for two weeks and as the anonymous, paid voice of a shadow on the screen, that he had had the dream?

  And what about the man with the averted face, the enemy locked in the same place, confronted with the same danger, paralyzed by terror? And when you turned to know the face of the enemy, the face of fear, just at the moment of knowledge, of recognition, the doors broke down…

  He shook his head wearily. I will buy a dream book tomorrow, he told himself mockingly, in Italian. I will find out that I am to avoid traveling by water or by air or by land and that an uncle of whom I have never heard is on the verge of leaving me a large ranch in the Argentine.

  Maybe what it all means, he thought, is merely to get the hell out of here, leave the five thousand dollars, leave Delaney, leave my youth, leave the buried life buried. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

  But he read on dutifully, feeling pity and a little shame for all the souls, himself included, searching for fame or money or escape or amusement in this sad enterprise. He read through to the end, rapidly, in an impatient shuffle of pages, then dropped the script onto the floor and stood up, feeling bruised by the night, and went over to the windows. He threw the windows open and looked, without pleasure, at the dawn breaking cold and green over the narrow, yellowish Roman street. God, he thought, nagged by memories and premonitions, I wish these two weeks were over.

  5

  THEY SAT IN THE darkened projection room, Delaney, Jack, and Delaney’s secretary, watching the running of the film. Delaney had called for Jack at seven thirty in the morning. He had asked how Jack was feeling and had peered shrewdly and a little worriedly into Jack’s bloodshot eyes, but had grunted in satisfaction when Jack told him, falsely, that he was feeling all right.

  “Good,” Delaney had said. “We can get right to work.”

  Because Delaney wanted to keep Stiles, the actor whose voice Jack was dubbing, from finding out what was being done, they had gone to another studio than the one where Delaney was shooting the picture. Delaney had put on dark glasses and pulled his cap down low in a conspiratorial attempt to remain incognito, although everyone he passed on the lot said, loudly, “Buon giorno, Signor Delaney.” He hadn’t introduced Jack to anyone, not even to the slender middle-aged woman in flat shoes who was working as his secretary and who sat just behind Jack in the projection room.
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  As the roughly cut sequences flickered past on the screen, Jack could see that, despite Delaney’s complaints the night before, he was enjoying himself watching what he had shot. He grunted approvingly, he laughed aloud two or three times, short, harsh bursts, he nodded, half-unconsciously, at the climax of two scenes. Only when the image of Stiles appeared on the screen, did Delaney seem to be suffering. He wriggled in his seat, he lowered his head and glared up at the screen from beneath his brows, as though he were protecting his eyes from a blow. “The son of a bitch,” he kept muttering, “the swilling son of a bitch.”

  Jack found the picture very little better than the script he had read. There were felicitous inventions here and there on the part of Delaney, and happy moments in the performances of some of the actors, especially that of Barzelli, the girl who played the leading part, but the general effect was heavy and lifeless and there was a leaden feeling that everybody concerned had done the same thing many times before. Stiles, as Delaney had said, looked all right, but his speech, when it wasn’t slippery and almost incomprehensible from drink, was stilted and wooden and even the rudimentary indications of passion and intelligence which the script had offered were wiped out in his performance.

  “The godamn Italians,” Delaney said. “They can’t resist a bargain. They got him for half his usual salary, so they didn’t ask any questions and they signed him. Why don’t you shut up?” he growled at the screen, where Stiles was telling the girl that he loved her but that he felt he had to leave her for her own good.