Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  Probing, Jack thought, annoyed. “No,” he said. “I’ve been asleep for hours.”

  “Well, I called at one and they said…”

  “I got in at five minutes past one. Do you want a signed statement?”

  “Now, Jack…” Her voice sounded hurt. “You’re not angry because I wanted to talk to you, are you?”

  “Of course not.” Silently, he gave thanks that Veronica’s hotel had been full and priest-ridden. If Hélène had called all night without finding him in, there would have been unpleasant explanations to follow.

  “Have you been having a good time, chéri?” Hélène asked.

  “Hilarious.”

  “Are you alone?” Her voice was turning chilly.

  “Why do you ask that?” he said, self-righteousness making him belligerent.

  “You sound funny. Not natural.”

  “You guessed it,” he said flatly. “I’m not alone. I have five Cuban musicians up here with me and we’re all smoking marijuana together.”

  “I just asked,” Hélène said, with dignity. “You don’t have to snap my head off.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “It’s just that waking up in the middle of the night like this…”

  “All right,” Hélène said. “I’ll let you go back to sleep. And I won’t call you again. You can call me…”

  “Don’t be silly, darling,” Jack said, pretending an affection that at the moment he did not feel. “You call me whenever you want.”

  “How’s the work going?”

  “All right,” Jack said. “I’m awful at it, but I guess they’ll pay me just the same.”

  “I’m sure you’re not awful at all,” Hélène said.

  “Lady,” said Jack, “I’m here on the spot and I know.”

  “Are you unhappy, chéri?”

  What if I told her, Yes, I am unhappy, he thought I have dreams of death and my blood flows and I couldn’t find a room in my mistress’s hotel tonight. What would she say then? “Not at all,” he said. “Why do you ask that?”

  “No real reason,” Hélène said. “The tone of your voice. Intuition…”

  “No,” he said, “I’m fine. Really.”

  “How is your friend?” she asked, “Mr. Delaney? Have you cured all his troubles yet?”

  “Not exactly,” Jack said. “He hasn’t told me what all his troubles are so far.”

  “What’s he waiting for?” Hélène sounded impatient.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “The psychological moment. The change of the moon. A drop in the Market. A rise in the level of pain. Don’t worry—he’ll let me know in due time what’s hurting him.”

  “Tell him to do it fast,” Hélène said. “I want you to come home.” There was a silence on the other end of the wire, as though she were waiting for him to say something. Then she continued, “I’ll tell you somebody else who wants you to get home, too. Joe Morrison. Anne tells me he’s grumbling more and more about you every day. And when I asked her if she thought that there was any danger of our being transferred someplace after the summer, she was very mysterious.”

  “Why don’t you two ladies mind your own business?” Jack said harshly. “This is between Joe Morrison and me.”

  “If you get transferred to the jungle someplace,” Hélène said, her voice rising, “don’t you think that’s my business, too? Or do you plan to leave me and the children in Paris for three or four years at a time?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said wearily. The mention of Morrison had brought back the feeling of boredom and irritation that he had had with his work for the last few months, and he had been annoyed with Hélène for reminding him of it. At the moment, he didn’t care if he ever saw Joe Morrison again, and the thought of being at the mercy of Morrison’s moods made him feel confined and resentful. “I’m afraid I’m a little jittery. Do me a favor. When you call again, don’t talk about Joe Morrison.”

  “What do you want me to talk about?” she asked, with hostility.

  “Our happy married life,” he said flatly. “Our children. By the way, how are they?”

  “All right,” Hélène said. “Except that Charlie had a scare today.”

  “What’s the matter?” Jack asked quickly, alert for trouble.

  “He thought he was pregnant this afternoon,” Hélène said.

  “WHAT?”

  “He thought he was pregnant. He came to me at lunchtime, while I was—it was the maid’s day off—and he asked me how babies are born, and I was busy, so I put him off and told him I’d let him know some other time. But he kept pestering me and I got impatient with him—after all, there’s a time and place for everything—and I said, ‘Oh, they come out of people’s ears…’”

  “That sounds like a reasonable thing to tell a child,” Jack said, gently making fun of her.

  “Well, anyway, he went to school and when he came home he said he wasn’t feeling well and he lay down on his bed. I went in an hour later and he was holding his ear. It turns out his ear had been hurting him for the last two days—he got water in it in his bath—and he said to me, ‘Now I know why my ear hurts. I’m going to have a baby!’”

  Jack laughed helplessly. After a moment, Hélène laughed, too. “I hope you set him straight,” Jack said.

  “I tried to,” Hélène said. “I gave him all the exact information. But I don’t think he believed me. He was still holding his ear when he went to sleep tonight.”

  Jack laughed again. “Tell him I’ll explain everything when I get home.”

  “I wish you were home right now,” Hélène said softly.

  “Me, too,” he said. “Well, it won’t be long, dearest…”

  “Take care of yourself,” she whispered. “Sleep well. Have a good time…Sois sage.”

  “Kiss the children for me,” he said.

  He put the telephone down slowly.

  The call, with its reminder of old, continuing claims, responsibilities, worries, disturbed him. Hélène was unlike most women in that she took no pleasure in argument and rarely brought fundamental issues to the surface. Shrewd and intuitive, she preferred to let trouble lie buried, to act obliquely, to set up countercurrents, to permit time to do its healing work. But now the telephone call, with its edge of sharpness and rebuke, made Jack remember the time, a year before, when Hélène, uncharacteristically, had forced them both into a scene from the results of which neither of them had as yet fully recovered.

  They had been having dinner with Anne and Joe Morrison in a bistro behind the Théatre Sarah Bernhardt, and Joe Morrison had had too much wine to drink. He didn’t drink often, but when he did, it made him louder than usual and harsh in his judgments. He was a tall, thin man who at a distance looked somewhere between thirty-five and forty, but up close his face revealed a network of fine lines that no man under fifty could have acquired.

  “Jack,” he was saying, leaning over the table, playing with his glass, “you’re an enigma. Anne, don’t I always tell you Jack’s an enigma?”

  “Only when you’ve had too much to drink,” Anne Morrison said placidly.

  “The enigma is—why does a man like you, with so much on the ball—as smart as you are—stay in one place.” Morrison peered shrewdly, almost with hostility, at Jack. “Everywhere around you, you see men on the move, going up, men with half your ability, but punching away, doing the necessary, planning the moves for ten years ahead, getting ahead…while you…” He shook his head. “You’re like a runner that everybody knows has a big burst of speed and never bothers to use it. What is it?”

  “I do the necessary,” Jack said placatingly.

  “Not really,” Morrison said. “Or only superficially.”

  “Don’t you think I do my job?” Jack asked.

  “Sure you do,” Morrison said. “As well as anybody. Maybe better than anybody. But not as well as you could. I’ll tell you what—you’re not—not—” He searched for the word. “You’re not involved. You’re remote. You make the proper pl
ay, but you give the impression that it doesn’t matter a damn whether it gains ground or not.” Morrison had played football when he was young and when he drank, locker room images filled his speech. “Sometimes, for Christ’s sake, it’s hard to tell whether you’re in the game or up in the stands, not even bothering to cheer for the team. What the hell is it, Jack, what the hell is it with you?”

  “I’m cool, man, cool,” Jack said, hoping to shut Morrison up with his flippancy. He had noticed Hélène nodding, almost imperceptibly, through Morrison’s speech, and he wanted to shut that off, too. “All the kids’re like that these days. We refuse to flip.”

  “Ah, Christ,” Morrison said angrily. He turned to Hélène. “What about you?” He demanded. “You’re married to the man. What do you think?”

  Hélène hesitated for a moment, regarding Jack curiously. Then she laughed. “I think Anne had the last word, Joe,” she said. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

  “Okay, okay,” Morrison said resignedly, leaning back. “You don’t want to talk about it. Okay. But one day, you’re going to have to face it. Both of you.”

  They had left the restaurant soon after, and Jack and Hélène had gone home. There was a feeling of tension in the car and, although neither of them spoke, a sense of opposition and dispute.

  Jack was lying in bed, in the room on the quai, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to take a pill, to make sure he would sleep, when Hélène came in from the bathroom, in pajamas, combing her hair. Jack didn’t look at her, even after she came over to the bed and sat down on the edge, next to him, still running the comb through her short dark hair.

  Outside, on the quai, there was the soft intermittent swish of cars swiftly passing along the river, the noise hushed by the shutters and the drapes.

  “Jack,” she said, “you know, Joe Morrison was right tonight…”

  “About what?” Jack made himself sound sleepy, uninterested.

  “About you.” There was the sound of the comb going through her hair. “And not only about your work.”

  “Was he? Why didn’t you tell him you agreed with him when he asked you.”

  “You know I wouldn’t do that,” she said softly.

  “I know.”

  “Jack,” she said, pulling his head around gently so that he would have to look up at her. “Why did you marry me?”

  “To brush up on my French.”

  “Jack…” She ran her fingers lightly under his eyes, touching the lines of sleeplessness, age, trouble. “Don’t joke. Why did you marry me?”

  “Look in the mirror,” he said. “There’s a pretty good answer there.”

  She sighed, took her hand away from his face, and went over to the vanity table and began cleaning her face with cold cream, her back to him. He looked speculatively at her, troubled by her question. It was the first time in seven years of marriage that she had said anything like that. Why had he married her? Loneliness, fatigue, boredom with the constant repetitive predictable gambits that a man inevitably ran through when he was unmarried and yet liked women and went out with them? He had desired her. That he knew. He had admired her. That he knew. Among the women he had met she most of all had had a sane, practical, possible, healthy goal for her life. She was undivided. She wanted to love and be loved, she wanted to be loyal and claim loyalty, she had no doubts about the validity of the happiness that could be obtained out of marriage, the care of a husband, the birth of children. And with all that she was merry and quick, a comfortable, amusing companion, a dear lover, an unflurried arranger and manager of domestic crises.

  But if he had been forced to say at the time of his marriage that he loved her, he could not honestly have said it. And perhaps he couldn’t say it now, either. At least, if he were to judge love by what he had felt in the first years with Carlotta, he could not say it.

  From the vanity table, with her back to him, Hélène said, “You’re not involved, Joe said. And he was right, Jack.”

  “I saw you nodding,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But it’s true. And when he said you’re remote, he was right about that, too. Thoughtful and remote. Sometimes I wish you weren’t so unfailingly thoughtful. It’s as though you’re making up for something you feel guilty about. Sometimes, I have the feeling that I’m whispering to you across a big wide open field and we can’t cross it to each other and we can’t quite hear what we are saying to each other—or on other sides of a big thick wall…”

  He closed his eyes in pain, shutting out the sight of the slender smooth back, the uplifted lovely arms, the small pretty head…

  “What is it, Jack?” she asked quietly, echoing Joe Morrison. “Is it my fault? Is there anything I can do?”

  He kept his eyes closed, and because it wasn’t her fault, and because there was nothing she could do, he said, brutally, “Get me a sleeping pill, please.”

  “God damn you,” she said.

  He sighed in the Roman bed, considering how he had failed the people he loved. Darkness would be better. As he was reaching to put out the light, he heard steps approaching along the corridor outside his room. Whoever it was seemed to hesitate opposite the door. Bresach, Jack thought, tensing. But then the steps continued on, and all was quiet.

  For another moment, Jack left the light on, while he listened. On the bureau he saw the bulky envelope that Despière had left in his care, and he told himself he would have to remember to put it in a safe place the first thing in the morning. He was wide-awake now, and he felt like reading, but the only book in the room was Catullus and Catullus was not to his taste for the time being.

  With a decisive gesture he turned out the light. He had to be up by a quarter to seven in the morning and be fresh enough, at least, to try to follow Delaney’s directions in the dubbing room. Whatever else he did or was involved in during these two weeks, love, recrimination, murder, he had to try to earn his five thousand dollars. I have a bourgeois sense of commercial honesty, he thought, mocking himself, value given for value received.

  He closed his eyes conscientiously, for Delaney’s sake. But he had never felt more awake. He remembered Hélène’s voice over the phone, the small, unobtrusive, delightful lilt of France embedded in the English language. (“I’m getting tired of men who sleep with me,” said the other voice, “and tell me how much they love their wives.”) In the darkness, he thought of Hélène, still awake in the Continental darkness a thousand miles away, thinking of him, disturbed for him, obscurely informed by love’s telepathy that all was not well with him. He pictured her lying neatly in her bed, in her boy’s pajamas, small, lovely, warm, with her hair in curlers (she always took advantage of his trips to pay attention to her hair), thinking about him, linked to him by their thousand lines and strands, listening to the sounds from the next room, where the children slept. Solid, competent, and wary, his wife lay at the warm center of the family web, worrying, protecting, loving, enjoying, offering up her secret nighttime prayers against the perils of absence, offering up prayers for his return, for health, safety, normalcy, love…If he had been in the bed beside her, he told himself, he would not have played that ghostly poker game, he would not have seen the bald men in aprons at their sinister labors.

  Jack pushed the soaked handkerchief gently against his face. The bleeding seemed to be coming to an end. He remembered his dream, thinking, How wise of wives to pray in the uneasy hours after midnight.

  Hating to examine the dream, with its dead players who were once his friends, and the hideous meaning of the body on the table, he made himself think of his son, sleeping this moment with his hand to his threatened ear. Jack smiled, death pushed back now by that small hand. He remembered an evening during the winter when he came back from work and went into the bathroom where his son was drying himself after his bath. He kissed the damp head, watched thoughtfully as the boy dabbed inaccurately with the towel at the sturdy, smooth body. Suddenly the boy turned to him with a conspiratorial smile. �
��Daddy,” he said, touching the tip of his penis with one finger, speaking resonantly, proudly, “This is me.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Jack said gravely. “That’s you.”

  At the age of five, we draw wisdom from the air, revelations from the wind, the sages of the race whisper confidently in our ears.

  Lying awake in the shadowed, dream-haunted room, Jack touched himself. “This is me,” he whispered, smiling, joining his son in the magic male incantation, turning back the powers of darkness, using the secret ceremony that his son, in his wisdom and innocence, had discovered, to put down the foul and cowardly temptations of oblivion.

  But the magic was not potent enough. When he closed his eyes he could not sleep and the memories stirred by the dream and by the conversation in the car with Veronica began to crowd in on him…

  “There were several men killed in our army, too…”

  The farmhouse was burning. It was built of stone, but there were a surprising number of filings in it that had started burning when the shell hit. He had been asleep on the kitchen floor and when he woke up he had somehow been blown through a wall and his leg was broken and a blanket was on fire around his head and none of the other men who had been in the farmhouse with him were to be seen. They had been luckier than he. They had escaped, in the darkness. In the confusion they had missed him, and after that it was too late, nobody could get near the house.

  It took him five hours to crawl across the room to the window. He passed out again and again, with the stink of his own burning hair and flesh in his nostrils, and his foot twisted completely around and the smoke smothering him. But he was very sure he didn’t want to die and he used the fingernails of his good hand to draw himself along the splintered farmhouse floor, and finally, he got to the window and pulled himself up so that he could look out over the sill. The field in front of the house was being sporadically explored by machine-gun fire, but someone saw his head poking above the window sill and came and got him. He didn’t remember any of that, because when he was pulled out over the window sill, he passed out again. Then they gave him morphine and the next few weeks were a vague, floating blur, and he never found out who had come to get him and whether he was alive or dead. And then the two years in all the hospitals and the eighteen operations and the young doctor who said, “That hand will never be any good again…” And Carlotta, with her huge telegraphed bouquets of flowers, and not much else…”