Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  Jack put the pages on the desk, with an ashtray to hold them in place. The dead, he thought, are attacking the dying in Rome tonight. I’ll read it through some other time, he thought, when all our wounds are cured.

  He went into the bedroom. This time he undressed. He lay down carefully, hoping by the slowness of his movements, to keep his blood from drumming in his ears. It worked. He closed his eyes and slept.

  He thought he heard a telephone ringing in his sleep, but when he woke up, the room was silent. His nose was bleeding, not much, but steadily, and he went into the bathroom for a towel and went back to sleep with the towel bunched up under his nose and over his mouth, so that, dozing uneasily, he had the impression of drowning. He had only one dream that he remembered in the morning, and it was a brief and inconsequential one. In the dream the telephone rang again and a voice said, “Zurich is calling, Zurich is calling.” There was music over the wire and then a woman’s voice, light and clear, said, “Jamais deux sans trois.”

  22

  “SO,” DELANEY SAID, “TELL me all about everything. How did it go?”

  It was eight thirty in the evening. Delaney still had the oxygen tube strapped to his cheek, and he was lying in the same position as the night before, and once more the nurse was sitting in the shadows in the corner of the room. But Delaney’s voice sounded stronger, and his color, as far as Jack could see in the lamplight, was almost restored. Delaney said that he felt fine, that he had no pain, and that if it weren’t for the doctor, he would get up and go home. There was a good chance that he was lying, out of pride, but there was no doubt that, for the time being at least, he was much improved. His first words were not about his wife, or about Barzelli, but about the movie.

  “What was it like on the set today?” he asked. “Don’t skip any of the details.”

  “It went okay,” Jack said. “Better than anyone had a right to expect.” Actually, Jack had been grateful for the tension and confusion of a movie set and the necessity of concentrating on the problems of actors and soundmen and electricians. It had kept him from thinking about Despière all day. Now that the day was over, he found that he was beginning to accept the fact of Despière’s death. He had decided not to say anything about it to Delaney. There was no telling how Delaney, in his present state, would react to the news. “I found I knew a lot more about directing than I thought I did,” he said.

  “I told you,” Delaney said. “Nine out of ten directors don’t know anything. How about the kid—Bresach—is he panning out?”

  “He’s very useful,” Jack said.

  “I knew it,” Delaney said, with satisfaction. “I had a hunch about that kid.”

  The truth was that Bresach had been a good deal more than useful. While Jack had worked with the cameraman setting up the lights and the camera movements, Bresach had rehearsed the actors, especially Barzelli and Stiles. When the time had come to put the scene on film, the results of his work had been electrifying. Barzelli, who had started the day with the worst grace possible, had played her scene with more feeling than she had shown at any other point in the picture. But it was Stiles who had been the most surprising. Somehow, whispering to the actor in a corner of the set, Bresach had coaxed Stiles into new depths, and Stiles had played with a credibility and sense of pathos that had started a spate of surprised whispers from everybody else on the set. And it hadn’t only been a lucky accident. Jack had allowed Bresach to work with the actors all day, while he purposely fussed longer than was necessary with the mechanics of shooting, and by the end of the day the actors and Tucino, himself, were saying that Bresach was better than Delaney ever was. But there was no need to tell the sick man that. It probably wasn’t completely true, either. Bresach wasn’t better than Delaney ever had been—he was merely better than Delaney ever would be again. But that was no news to break in a hospital room. All the violence of emotion, the rawness of manner and instability of mood that Jack had come to associate with Bresach had seemed to vanish the moment he was confronted with actors. In their place there was patience, and a searching, almost tender interest, that the actors had responded to immediately. Where Bresach had learned what he knew about directing for the camera, Jack had no idea. Perhaps he had been born with it. Perhaps, in the twentieth century, a new gene had been added to the human collection—the movie gene.

  “Aside from everything else,” Jack said, “he pulled a miracle this afternoon.”

  “What kind of miracle?”

  “The hardest kind,” Jack said. “He got Stiles to stop drinking at lunch.”

  “What?” Delaney turned his head in surprise. “How did he do that?”

  “Very simply,” Jack said. “He saw Stiles pour himself a glass of wine in the studio restaurant and he went over, without a word, and knocked the glass out of his hand.”

  Delaney made a sound of disbelief. “With everybody watching?”

  “With two hundred people watching.”

  “Did Stiles hit him?” Delaney asked. Stiles was well known as a brawler. He was a big, powerful man, who was that curiosity, a drunk who picked fights and then won them.

  “No, he didn’t hit him,” Jack said. “He went pale, then he laughed a little, and asked the waitress for a glass of water.”

  “God damn it,” Delaney said. “And I had to miss it.” He moved painfully in the bed. “Listen, Jack—there’s something I have to talk to you about. Holt sent me a note this morning. About talking to you about coming in with us as executive producer…”

  “Take it easy,” Jack said. “All this can wait…”

  “Now I can tell you, Jack,” Delaney said, ignoring the interruption. “I planted the idea when we started talking about setting up a company. That’s the real reason I asked you to come to Rome. So Holt could get to know you. It worked out just the way I hoped it would. He’s crazy about you…Remember, Jack, back in California, I told you one day we’d work together again, I told you to leave a forwarding address…”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “I remember.” He didn’t want to talk about it now. Not in a sickroom, not with this feverish, distraught man, not this week. “Take it easy, Maurice, there’s plenty of time…”

  Delaney lifted his head from the pillow and stared at Jack. “You’re going to take the job, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Jack said.

  “Thinking about it?” Delaney said harshly. “What the hell is there to think about? You’ll make at least three times the dough you’re making now—just to begin with. You won’t have the crappy government on your back all the time. You’ll have the chance of winding up a rich man. You’ll be a hundred times freer, your own boss. You’re the only man I’ve ever been able to work with and not despise at the end. That’s true, Jack. You know it’s true. Holt won’t interfere at all. We can make just the kind of pictures we want…”

  We, Jack thought. Is there a we here? There is the kind of pictures you want, and there is the kind of pictures I want—if I want any kind of pictures, and that still has to be decided.

  “It’s the chance of a lifetime, Jack,” Delaney was pleading now, his voice hoarser than it had been, and trembling a little. “It’s what I’ve been waiting for since I was a kid…”

  “I know,” Jack said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it. I just said I was thinking.”

  “Look, Jack,” Delaney said, speaking rapidly, “I know just what I want to do. Bresach’s script. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I read it. It can be beautiful. You read it. Don’t you think it can be beautiful?”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “We’ll buy it from him. We’ll work with him on it. It’s rough now, but I’ve got a thousand ideas on it already. Give it the old Delaney touch. It could be the best picture I ever made. Christ, I wish I could get out of here tomorrow. It’s just the kind of thing that’s right for me. Even Clara said so. I sent it over to her to read, even though she was sore at me. That’s the last word I got from her, t
he night before this happened. ‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been as excited about anything for twenty years…’”

  “Don’t talk so much,” Jack said, wondering why the nurse, in her corner, let Maurice go on like that. “I promised the doctor I’d do all the talking.”

  “Screw the doctor,” Delaney said. “I told Clara some of the ideas I had for changes. You can ask her what they are, you’ll see what I’ll do with it…”

  “Has she been here yet?” Jack asked. “Clara?”

  Delaney grunted. “No.” Suddenly, now that they were no longer talking about Bresach’s script, he was calm again. “Did you talk to her?”

  “I talked to her. Or rather, she talked to me.”

  “Anything new?”

  Jack shook his head. “The usual,” he said. “When she’s sure you’re through with Barzelli—and all the other Barzellis—she’ll come back.”

  “The hell with her,” Delaney said. “Let her stay away, if that’s the way she feels about it.” Having lived through the night and the day, and confident now of his survival, Delaney was falling back more and more to his normal tone. “Marriage,” he said gloomily. “She knew what she was getting. What the hell, she’d been my secretary for five years before we got married. The beauties of my character couldn’t have come as a complete surprise to her.” He twisted restlessly. “Did you go to Barzelli?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Don’t worry,” Jack said, carefully. “She won’t come to visit you.”

  “Did she understand?” Delaney demanded. “Did you make her understand?”

  “I think so,” Jack said.

  “She’s a marvelous woman. You don’t know how marvelous she is.”

  “I have to tell you one thing she told me,” Jack said, speaking now not for Delaney, but for his own sake, his own enlightenment.

  “What’s that?” Delaney sounded wary.

  “She said you never made love to her.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “Yes. She said I could tell that to Clara if I wanted to.”

  “Did you tell it to Clara?”

  “No. Do you want me to?”

  Delaney put up his hand in a weary, defensive gesture. Then he let his hand drop limply on the blanket. He shook his head against the pillow and closed his eyes and lay there without moving, the sound of his breathing through the tube the only noise in the still room. The nurse sat quietly in her corner. Jack had the feeling that she was dozing, not making the effort to understand the snatches of conversation that drifted over to her. The watcher at so many sickbeds, so many deathbeds, she had heard all confessions, all conversations. Her curiosity was now confined only to such things as pulse and temperature. The doctor had said that Jack could stay for fifteen minutes. He still had six or seven minutes to go. Before his time was up, the nurse would not interfere, no matter what she heard or understood or half understood.

  “It’s true,” Delaney said. “I didn’t make love to her. I held her in my arms naked, night after night, but I didn’t make love to her. I never did anything like that before with any woman.” His voice was low and tired. His eyes were still closed. “I don’t know why that’s all I did. Maybe I wanted it to be completely different with her than with anyone else…When I held her in my arms, it made me feel the way I felt when I was a young man. She renewed me, she made me flower…I would leave her at three, four in the morning, and I’d drive back home, and somehow, I’d feel I was beginning all over again, like when I was a kid in New York, as though nothing could stop me. As though by denying myself my pleasure, I made myself a better man. As though I was really, finally, beginning to get the idea of love…” Now he opened his eyes and turned his head to stare at Jack. The eyes were bright and glittering in the haggard, unshaven face. “The one woman I wanted in my whole life that I could have had and I didn’t take, and she made me flower. Go understand that. Go understand anything. Go make my wife understand that…”

  The Irish Antaeus, Jack thought, falling back nightly on the shapely Italian earth. Who am I to crush the illusions of renewal of a sick and burn-out man? If he feels his wounds cured, is it the business of a friend to say he still sees blood, more blood than before?

  “Those flowers came from Carlotta,” Delaney said abruptly, as though he regretted the confidences he had revealed and hoped Jack would forget them. He indicated a huge bunch of red roses in a glass vase. “She was here last night, but they wouldn’t let her in. She sent me a note. She asked me if I need anything.” He laughed briefly, bitterly. “If you see her, tell her, yes, I need something—a new heart. Have you spoken to her?”

  “Only for a minute,” Jack said. “On the phone.”

  “Imagine her flying from England,” Delaney said. “Of all the women I’ve known…Ah, God, what a tangle. You know what I’ve been lying here thinking all day, Jack…I’d like to see everybody I’ve loved or hurt or used or befriended or hated and explain myself to them. Explain why I did what I did, explain how they hurt me, or how they helped me. Disentangle myself…”

  “You’d need a cop in the room to handle the traffic,” Jack said, purposely making light of the idea. It certainly couldn’t help prop up Delaney’s morale to lie in bed like that totting up final accounts.

  “Most people think I’m a sonofabitch,” Delaney said flatly. “All my life, it’s been the same. Even as a kid. And all my life I’ve pretended I didn’t mind. Pretended…”

  “I’ll put out a circular,” Jack said. “Maurice Delaney is not a sonofabitch. It’ll save a lot of time.”

  “About women, for example…” Delaney went on, ignoring Jack’s flippancy. “When I was a kid I was ugly and I never got the girls I wanted. Or any girls, for that matter. Then I got to be a big shot, and all of a sudden it turned out I wasn’t ugly at all, I was witty and charming and so irresistible it was Standing Room Only for months in advance.” He chuckled drily. “If I didn’t look in the mirror, I could damn near make myself believe I was six feet tall and beautiful as a picture. So I made up for lost time. I guess I was making up for the girls I didn’t get when I was young and ugly. I guess I was always afraid that one day the dream’d be over and some woman would look at me and laugh and say, ‘Why I know you, you’re that little ugly runt, Maurice Delaney, from the south side in Chicago.’ There was once a girl out on the Coast who tried to kill herself on account of me—because I left her. They saved her all right, but not by much, and when I heard the news, the first thought I had wasn’t, Thank God she’s alive, it was, How do you like that, there’s a woman who thinks I’m worth dying for. I’ll tell you something—for one second, until civilization set in—I was pleased. Well, I suppose the people who say I’m a sonofabitch aren’t far wrong…” He sighed. “I guess I’m getting tired…” he said, his voice trailing off. “I’d better sleep. Thanks for coming…Don’t let me down, Jack. We can knock them dead, you and me. Be a good lad, leave a forwarding address…” He closed his eyes, allowing his weakness, in the evening hush of the great hospital, to take possession of him.

  Jack stood up and nodded to the nurse, immobile in her corner, and went quietly out of the room.

  There were newspapers all over the salon, five or six French newspapers and the Mediterranean edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Despière was on the front page of the French papers and on the second page of the Tribune. The story was brief, routine, and pointless, and Jack had read it and reread it again and again. Despière had gone out on a patrol, there had been an ambush, a grenade had been thrown. All the papers has his age wrong, for some reason. Thirty-two, the papers said. His only surviving relative, the newspapers said, was a sister in Bayonne. He was going to be buried, with military honors, in Algiers, the next day. Despière had liked soldiers, and had considered them childish, and the idea of a military funeral would have amused him.

  Jack collected all the newspapers and stuffed them into the wastebasket, so that he
wouldn’t read the story over and over again. The manuscript of Despière’s article on Delaney was still on the desk, under the ashtray. Jack opened the desk drawer and put the manuscript in it. Despière had written that he wanted it destroyed, but Jack couldn’t bring himself to do it—yet.

  He picked up the shooting script of the picture and tried to concentrate on it. There was to be no work on the set the next day, because it was a holiday of some kind. For once, Jack was grateful for the abundance of holidays in Catholic Europe. It took some of the pressure off and made it possible for him to prepare more thoroughly. But the mimeographed words ran into a meaningless blur under his eyes, and a list of names pounded in a weary, repetitive rhythm through his head—Delaney, Despière, Veronica, Hélène, Carlotta, Barzelli, Clara, Bresach, Delaney, Despière, Veronica, Hélène, Carlotta, Barzelli, Clara, Bresach…

  It is like a run on a bank, he thought. All the demands for payment come in at once. Panic. The attack is from all sides. No event is single or simple or clear or uninvolved with any other event. He made himself study the script on the desk in front of him. That was one of the things that was false about the script. Event followed event in a reasonable and logical order. That was the thing that was false about all movies, all novels, all stories. They were orderly and therefore untrue.

  The telephone rang, but it was a wrong number, a drunken American voice asking for Marylou MacClain, and refusing to believe that Marylou MacClain was not there.