Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  The showing ended abruptly, in the middle of a sequence which Jack remembered, from reading the script, was somewhere in the last third of the story. The lights went on and Delaney turned to Jack. “Well, what you think?” he asked.

  “I can see why you want somebody else’s voice for Stiles,” Jack said.

  “The sonofabitch,” Delaney said, almost automatically. “Cirrhosis of the liver is too good for him. What about the rest of it?”

  “Well.” Jack hesitated. After all, he hadn’t seen Delaney for more than ten years and he wasn’t sure how frank he could be after the interruption in their friendship. In the old days, Delaney had used Jack as critic and sounding board for everything he did. In the world of sycophants and money-hunters in which Delaney lived, Jack had performed a great service for his friend. His standards had been youthfully strict, his taste astringent, his nose for falseness and pretension sharp, and he had been mercilessly candid with Delaney, who from time to time called him a supercilious young snot, but who listened, and more often than not redid the work of which Jack disapproved. Delaney did as much for Jack, never sparing him for a moment when he felt Jack was not doing his best. They had made three pictures together in three years, in this loose, informal, candid arrangement. The pictures had been among the best of their time and they had created the Delaney legend, on which, in a fashion, he still lived. Delaney had never approached that level again. He and Jack had had a sardonic, symbolic phrase that they used with each other, both for their own work or the work of others, when they detected the sugariness or false violence or pseudo-profundity that was so easy to get away with in the booming Hollywood of those days. “It’s terribly original,” they would say to each other, drawling the words out affectedly. Or if the offense was greater, “It’s terribly, terribly original, my dear boy….”

  Now, after seeing the film that Delaney had run for him in the projection room, Jack wanted to say, “It’s terribly, terribly original, my dear boy….” But remembering the tension in Delaney’s voice in the car the night before and the fierce appeal that had lain under the surface of his words, Jack sensed that it would be better to feel his way before he ventured any real criticism. “The script is pretty weak,” he started.

  “The script!” Delaney said bitterly. “You can say that again.”

  “Who wrote it?” Jack asked.

  “Sugarman,” Delaney said, spitting out the name as though it left a bad taste in his mouth. “The crook.”

  “That’s surprising,” said Jack. Sugarman had written three or four good plays in the past fifteen years, but there was no hint in what Jack had read the night before or seen that morning of any of the talent of his other work.

  “He came here for three months,” Delaney said, accusingly, “and went to all the museums and sat in the cafés with all the crappy, unwashed painters and writers that this town is lousy with, and he told everybody I was a stupid sonofabitch, and he wouldn’t write a line the way I could shoot it and I wound up rewriting the whole godamn thing. Writers! The same old story. You can have Sugarman.”

  “I see,” Jack said noncommittally. From the time he had begun to be successful, Delaney had fought with all the writers he had worked with and had finally taken to rewriting his scripts himself. He had the reputation around Hollywood of a director who had written himself into failure, and producers who were tempted to hire him were apt to say to his agent, “I’d take him, if I could tear the pencil out of his hand.” Until now, nobody had managed to tear the pencil out of his hand.

  “It’s still rough,” Delaney said, waving at the screen, “but I’ll whip it into shape yet. If I don’t die from Italian exasperation first.” He stood up. “Look, Jack, you stay here and run it a couple of times and get familiar with it. Maybe you might even read the script again this afternoon. Then, tomorrow at seven thirty, we start dubbing.”

  “Okay.”

  “I made a date for you with Despière,” Delaney said, shoving his dark glasses onto his face. “At Doney’s. Ten to one. He wants to get some dope from you for his piece. About my early triumphs.” Delaney smiled thinly. “Lie to him a little, like a good friend.”

  “Have no fear,” Jack said. “I’ll make you sound like a combination of Stanislavski and Michelangelo.”

  “Use your own judgment.” Delaney laughed and patted Jack’s shoulder. “Guido’s waiting for you outside with the car. And there’s a cocktail party tonight at eight o’clock. He’s got the address. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  Delaney patted his shoulder again, paternal, friendly. “See you at eight,” he said. “All right, Hilda,” he said to the secretary, and the woman stood up, docile and plain in a frayed cloth coat, and followed him out the projection-room door.

  Jack took a deep breath, then looked at the screen with distaste, envying Sugarman his three months in the museums and cafés and his escape to America. Then Jack pressed the button and the room went dark and once more the unconvincing images started passing across the screen, pretending at tragedy.

  As he watched the man whose voice he would eventually simulate, Jack thought about Delaney and the appointment he had made for Jack with Despière, and smiled to himself. It hadn’t been only chance, Jack realized now, or a desire to do Jack a good turn, or even a desire to make the picture better, that had made Delaney call Jack down to Rome, although all these considerations had gone into it. Delaney knew Jack was a friend and loyal, and that he remembered Delaney from his good days, and he wanted all that in the article that Despière was writing. For all his exterior bluffness, Delaney had always been a clever and devious man. It was clear that he hadn’t changed. He maneuvered people subtly to his advantage and, as much as he could, controlled the working of chance. But even recognizing the maneuver, Jack could only feel pity for Delaney because he believed in its necessity. When Jack first knew Delaney, a newspaperman could write that he was the Antichrist and raped choirboys and Delaney wouldn’t as much as cross the street to get the man to change a line. Age, Jack thought, failure…

  Five thousand dollars, Jack thought, watching the silly, handsome face on the screen. Five thousand dollars.

  Despière was sitting at one of the small tables outside Doney’s when Jack pushed through the slowly moving lunchtime crowd of tourists, clerks, movie people, and buxom girls on the Via Veneto. The noonday sun was warm and for an hour or two it made everybody feel that Rome was a wonderful place to be in the winter and you could see it on the faces going by and hear it in the pleased tones of the voices speaking a dozen different languages on all sides.

  “Sit down,” Despière said, touching the chair next to his, “and enjoy the sunshine of Italy.” Jack settled in the chair and ordered a vermouth from one of the white-jacketed waiters who fought their way irritably through the passers-by with their trays, carrying tiny cups of coffee and thin individual bottles of Campari and vermouth. “Dottore,” Despière said, “I was afraid for you last night. You looked like a man who was preparing to come down with something serious.”

  “No,” Jack said, lying, remembering the night he had passed, “it wasn’t anything. I was a little tired, that’s all.”

  “Are you a healthy man, Dottore?” Despière asked.

  “Of course,” Jack said.

  “You look like a rock,” said Despière. “It would be too deceiving if a man who looked like you turned out to be riddled with disease. Myself, now, that’s a different story.” He chuckled. “When scientists look at me, they rush back to their laboratories and work night and day in the search for a serum, before it’s too late to save me. Do you know that I’ve taken injections made from the placenta of women who have just given birth and from the secret cells of young men who have died in accidents?”

  “What do you do that for?” Jack asked, half believing him.

  “To prolong my life,” Despière said lightly, waving at a man and a blond woman who were walking past the table. “Don’t you
think I ought to be interested in prolonging my life?”

  “Does it work?” Jack asked.

  Despière shrugged. “I’m alive,” he said.

  The waiter put down Jack’s glass and poured the vermouth into it. Despière waved to two girls with long hair and pale faces devoid of make-up or lipstick who were parading past, on leave for the lunch hour from a movie set. He seemed to know half the people who passed the table and he greeted them all with the same languid wave of his hand and the same warm, brilliant, mocking smile.

  “Tell me, Dottore,” Despière said, slouching down in his seat, talking without taking his cigarette from his mouth, so that he had to squint a bit because of the smoke that continually blew into his eyes, “tell me, how was Delaney’s masterpiece this morning?”

  “Well,” Jack said cautiously, “it’s all in bits and pieces so far. It’s a little early to tell.”

  “You mean it’s lousy.” Despière looked amused.

  “Not at all,” Jack said. Despière was his friend, but so was Delaney, and there was no need to sacrifice one for the other just for a magazine article. “I think it’s liable to turn out to be a pretty good picture.”

  “It better be,” Despière said.

  “What do you mean by that?” This morning, Despière was making Jack uncomfortable.

  “You know as well as I do, Dottore,” Despière said, “that our friend Delaney is staggering against the ropes. One more stinker and he won’t be able to make a picture anyplace. Not in Hollywood, not in Rome, not in Peru…”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Jack said shortly. “I haven’t kept up with the fan magazines.”

  “Oh,” Despière said ironically, “if I had his gift of commanding loyalty from my friends.”

  “Listen, Jean-Baptiste,” Jack said, “what’s this piece going to be like, anyway? Are you going to cut him up?”

  “Me?” Despière touched his chest in elaborate surprise. “Am I known as a man who would do things like that?”

  “You’re known as a man who would do a lot of things,” Jack said. “What’re you going to say about him?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” Despière grinned teasingly. “I am just a poor, honest newspaperman, serving the interests of truth, like poor, honest newspapermen everywhere.”

  “What’s it going to be like?”

  Despière shrugged. “I’m not going to cover him with roses, if that’s what you mean. He hasn’t made a decent picture in ten years, you know, even though he still behaves as though he’s the man who invented the motion-picture camera. Let me ask you something. Was he always like that?”

  “Always like what?” Jack asked, purposely not understanding.

  “You know what I mean. Lordly, impatient of the small, mean minds he’s forced to work with, gluttonous for flattery, deaf to criticism, turning out crap and thinking it’s great, not giving credit to anyone else for anything, jealous of anybody else’s work, splurging other people’s dough like Nero with his violin, grabbing other people’s women as though he had a license from the Irish National Stud to screw every pretty dame in sight…”

  “You can stop now,” Jack said. “I get the idea.” He had a swift bleak vision of what Delaney’s face was going to look like when the article came out and he got somebody to translate it from the French for him. He would have to warn Delaney to stay away from Despière or try to handle him differently. He wondered what Delaney had done to Despière to unleash this venom and wondered, too, what he himself could do to repair the damage.

  Despière was grinning at him, squinting over the cigarette burning down small in his long, thin lips, rubbing his St-Germain-des-Prés hair forward on his forehead, enjoying the glimpse of destruction and rage he was giving Jack, looking, with all that, like a sallow, unhealthy, handsome small boy, successfully baiting the grown-up world.

  “Tell me, Dottore,” he said, “am I a dirty, untrustworthy Frenchman?”

  “You don’t know him, really,” Jack said. “He’s not like what you think, at all. Or at least, if he is, that’s only part of it. The worst part.”

  “All right, Jack,” Despière said. “I’m open. Tell me about the bastard’s good parts.”

  Jack hesitated. He was tired and his mind felt dull and heavy from the night’s wakefulness and he was conscious that people were looking strangely at his bruised nose and the small dark swelling under one eye and he wasn’t in the mood to defend anyone today. He felt like telling Despière that he didn’t like the breezy, quick malice with which newspapermen served up victims to the public. Then he remembered Delaney in the theatre the night before, after the picture, saying harshly, “I was a great man,” and his hollow, shaky confidence in himself that morning in the projection room, when he had said, “Lie to him a little, like a good friend.”

  “I met him,” Jack began, “before the war, in 1937, when I was in a play that was being tried out in Philadelphia…”

  He stopped. Despière was smiling up at two girls who were standing in front of the table. With his deliberate absence of manners, Despière did not stand, but talked across the table in Italian, looking up at the girls. The sun was behind them and Jack couldn’t get a clear impression of what they looked like. He was annoyed that Despière talked to them at such length, purposely, Jack thought, to postpone the anecdote about Delaney. Jack stood up abruptly.

  “Look, Jean-Baptiste,” he said, breaking in, “I’ll talk to you some other time. You’re busy now and I…”

  “Now, now,” Despière put his hand out and gripped Jack’s arm. “Don’t be so impatient. You’re in Rome now, remember, not New York. Dolce far niente. Anyway, the girls want to meet you. They saw your picture and they’re overflowing with admiration. Aren’t you, girls?”

  “Which picture?” Jack asked stupidly.

  “Stolen Midnight,” Despière said. “Miss Henken. Signorina Rienzi.”

  “How do you do?” Jack said, with minimum politeness. He changed his position slightly, to get the sun out of his eyes, and saw the girls clearly for the first time. Unpatriotically, he assumed that the plainer of the two girls was the American. She had sandy hair, and a dry, streaked complexion and a half-bitter smile on her thin lips, as though she had tried many cities and all kinds of men in her thirty years and was resigned to the fact that she had been treated badly by all of them. The other girl was Italian, younger, with liquid dark eyes and long black hair and olive skin. She was a tall girl and she had a beige wool coat thrown back from her shoulders because of the heat of the sun and she stood dramatically before the table, conscious, Jack was sure, of the striking effect her long hair and full figure were making on the men passing by. She smiled often, her eyes darting back and forth, noting and evaluating the other people sipping their drinks at the tables, and she had a little trick of tipping her head that let her hair swing loose and which Jack was sure some man had told her was provocative and pretty. He also felt that there was something self-satisfied and stupid in the long, healthy face and the soft, deep body. A glossy female brute, he decided, displeased with her, on the everlasting, profitable prowl. Her voice was rapid and musical, and there was a note in it that reminded Jack of a trumpeter playing, low and muted, in a night club. She had a habit, too, of wetting the corner of her mouth often with the tip of her tongue. Jack was sure she practiced this particular bit of business cold-bloodedly before a mirror at home, conscious of the little hint and promise of sensuality that it evoked.

  Despière pulled a chair over from the vacant table next to theirs and the waiter got a chair for the sandy girl and they sat down brightly and there was nothing for Jack to do but sit down, too.

  “You ought to have a lot to talk about with Felice, Jack,” said Despière. “You’re in the same line of business.”

  “Which one is Felice?” Jack asked ungraciously.

  “Me,” said the sandy girl. “An unpleasant surprise, isn’t it?” She smiled painfully.

  “She does dubbi
ng for the movies, too,” Despière said. “English versions.”

  “Oh.” Jack wondered momentarily if Despière knew that his job in Rome was supposed to be kept secret. Then he decided that Despière knew it and was spreading the word around to start trouble because he was mean that day, and anti-Delaney. “This is my first and last time,” Jack said, with a feeling that he was being misrepresented by Despière for some reason of his own. “Actually, I forge checks for a living.”

  “Don’t be stuffy with the girls, Dottore,” Despière said. “They adore you. Don’t you adore him, girls?”

  “Mr. Royal,” the Italian girl said, in English, “I’ve seen your picture three times already this week. I weep like a baby.” Her English was slower than her Italian, harsher, not as musical, not so much like a trumpet playing muted late at night, and from her accent it was clear that she had been around many Americans.

  “My name isn’t Royal,” Jack said, wondering how he could get out of there. “It’s Andrus.”

  “He leads a double life,” Despière said. “In his spare time, he selects sites for hydrogen-bomb launchers.”

  The girls smiled, politely confused.

  “I search for the other pictures of yours,” the Italian girl said, tilting her head, her hair flipping down to one shoulder, “but nobody seems to know where they are playing.”

  “They’re not playing anywhere,” Jack said. “I haven’t acted for more than ten years.”

  “What a pity,” the girl said. She said it as though she meant it. “There are so few people who have anything at all, the ones who do must not stop.”

  “I outgrew the sport,” Jack said. “Look, Jean-Baptiste, give me a ring later in the afternoon and we’ll…”

  “I’m busy later,” Despière said. “Jack was telling me about Mr. Delaney.” He turned toward the two girls. “About the days a hundred years ago when he was a younger man. Go ahead, Jack. I’m sure the girls’d love to hear.”