Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  Jack heard Delaney’s voice, at a distance, “Clara,” Delaney said, “for Christ’s sake, shut up.”

  “I’ll shut up when I’m good and ready,” Clara said, in full flood. Then, again to Jack, “Don’t think you’re going to be able to squirm out of this. Maurice has already spoken to Holt. You’re off the picture and that crazy boy, too. Tucino’s taking over tomorrow morning and he’s finishing it up, and you can go back where you belong, with the other clerks…”

  “I want to talk to Maurice, please,” Jack said.

  “You’ll never talk to him again as long as you live,” she said.

  “Oh, Christ—” It was Delaney’s voice. “Give me the phone.”

  For a moment, there was only the sound of Clara’s harsh breathing, then Delaney’s voice came over the line, weary, toneless. “What do you want to say to me, Jack?” he asked.

  “Is it true that you told Holt you wanted Tucino to finish the picture?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Listen carefully, Maurice,” Jack said. “It’s not for me I’m saying this, it’s for you. I’m going to get Holt to keep Tucino away and let Bresach and me finish the picture for you. It hasn’t got a chance any other way…”

  Delaney sighed. “Jack,” he said flatly, “if I hear you’re anywhere near that set tomorrow I’m going to get out of bed and come down and get behind the camera myself.”

  “Maurice,” Jack said, “this may be the last chance I get to talk to you—maybe the last chance anybody’ll get to talk to you—so you’ll have to listen to the truth for once. You’ve ruined yourself out of vanity, Maurice, and you’re completing the ruin tonight. And your wife serves your vanity, because she wants you in ruins. Because then you come to her, because when you’re sore and hurting, you’re all hers. She told me that herself the third night I was in Rome, Maurice. You’re a man teetering on the edge of a cliff, and everybody knows it. Everybody but you, Maurice. I’ve done everything I can to pull you back—there’s still a chance you can be saved—There’s still a lot to be saved. You proved it when I talked to you this evening in the hospital. Don’t throw it away…”

  “You finished?” Delaney said.

  Jack sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m finished.”

  “Get out of town, Jack,” Delaney whispered. “Fast.”

  Slowly, Jack put the telephone down. There was a little mechanical click and then the room was silent.

  Lost, he thought. And I thought tonight I had rescued him. Jack remembered his self-satisfaction that evening and shook his head sadly. There was one more thing to be done. He picked up the phone again and asked for Holt’s number. He’ll be awake, Jack thought. Tonight everybody is awake.

  “Sam,” he said, when he heard Holt’s voice, “I suppose you know why I’m calling.”

  “Yes,” Holt said. “Mrs. Delaney did me the honor of telephoning me fifteen minutes ago.”

  “I guess that winds it all up then,” Jack said.

  “Not necessarily,” Holt said. “I’d like to respect Maurice’s wishes as much as possible, Jack, but there’re many other people involved and a great deal of money. If you’ll agree, we’ll continue just as we are now, with you as director, and hope that Maurice finally will listen to reason.”

  “No, Sam,” Jack said. “He won’t listen to reason and I won’t continue. He got me down here and he’s given the signal to go. And I’m going.”

  “I understand,” Holt said. “I’m terribly sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “I’m going to get the first plane out of here I can,” Jack said. “Will you get hold of Bresach and explain it all to him?”

  “Of course, Jack.”

  “If you ever come through Paris, look me up, Sam. I’ll take you and Bertha to dinner.”

  “I certainly will,” Holt said. “You can depend on that. What time is your plane?”

  “I think there’s one around one o’clock I can get on.”

  “I’ll have your check at your hotel during the morning,” Holt said.

  Jack laughed ruefully. “You’re not getting much for your money, are you, Sam?”

  “I’m in the oil business,” Holt said. “I’m used to gambling. And losing.”

  “Are you going to go on with the deal with Delaney and Tucino?” Jack asked, curiously.

  There was a long pause on the line. “I honestly don’t believe so, Jack,” Holt said. “I guess I’ll stick to the oil business. I seem to be able to handle it better.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jack said. “Well—take care of my friend Delaney for me, Sam.”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much I can do there,” Sam said quietly. “Or anybody. Good night, Jack.”

  “Good night.” Jack put down the phone.

  Finito, he thought. In my best Italian.

  He looked around the empty room, dark except for the cone of light from the desk lamp, shining on the telephone. It was cheerless and cold, falsely luxurious, a place for travelers, for loneliness and lost hopes. A bottle of Scotch, half-filled, stood on a table near the door, with an opened bottle of soda and some glasses. Jack poured himself a shot with a little of the soda. The soda was flat, but it didn’t make any difference. He sipped at the drink, standing up, still wearing his coat with the collar turned up.

  Friendships end, he thought, love dies. With a mechanical click.

  He didn’t feel like going to sleep. Still holding the glass, he went into the bedroom and put on the light and got out his two bags and began to pack. Pack it all away, he thought, pack up the city. He threw the 1928 Baedeker (and there await the sunset) into the bottom of the bag which he had once gripped to use as a weapon against Bresach’s knife. Then he tossed in Catullus (Look, where the youths are coming…) and rifled the drawers of the bureau and carelessly piled shirts in on top of the books. He noticed dark wet drops on the shirts and realized his nose was bleeding, not much, but bleeding. He held a handkerchief up to his face and drank some more and continued packing.

  Pack it all up.

  In this room, in the middle hours of the night, death had touched him, had fingered him over, had whispered a dubious warning, had counted over for him lost friends, suicides, the fallen in battle, those who had died of disappointment or injustice or debauchery or merely because it had been their time to die. Carrington, Despière, Davies, the men who had played poker while London was burning, Myers, Kutzer—that mortal assembly, answering, “Here,” to the cry of memory, “Here,” from the graves in California and Africa and France.

  He drank some more and pushed the bloody handkerchief against his face and laid the three suits into the ingenious, patented, useless American valise, like three ghosts in the Roman night, and thought of the dreams he had dreamt in this bed, of the girl he had loved there, of the knife and the crumpled sheet, of the moment when, for a second or two which he never would be able to forget or deny to himself, he had cherished the idea of dying.

  He had not died in Rome. Delaney had come close, and perhaps would come closer. Despière had died, although outside the city. Despière, whose soul had recognized the city as he had come through the Flaminia Gate for the first time, and who had always been ready to celebrate and pay for his joy in the morning.

  Drink and bleed and pack it up.

  Where was the gypsy singing tonight? What was his wife, that pleasurable woman, as Despière had once put it, doing at this very moment?

  He thought of women lying in their beds this night. His wife, secure, he thought, in her love for him, but with her own secrets, sleeping neatly, who would welcome him home and say, as she did each time he had been away, “Did you enjoy yourself, chéri?” What if he asked her, “Did you enjoy yourself, chérie?” and she answered him truly. Would he be able to bear that?

  Veronica, in her marriage bed, that full, ecstatic body, newlywed passion, after whatever cunning explanations she had devised to allay her husband’s suspicions. The cuckold’s champagne dry now on that well-brushed A
lpine head.

  “Oh, God,” he said bitterly and went into the salon and poured himself another drink.

  Bertha Holt, ladylike, soaked in alcohol, under her husband’s faithful, loving eye, happily dreaming of baby carriages, nurses, bibs, diapers, waiting for rich Italian loins to produce the infant who was to save her and give a meaning to her life.

  Clara Delaney, demented on a cot in the dark hospital room, in full fierce possession of the ruins around her, dissolving what was left of her husband in the acid of her love.

  Barzelli, whose image floated through the dreams of countless men each night throughout the world, asleep, remorseless, casual, powerful, amused, in her gilt Appian palace, handling love and money and fame with the rough hard-headedness of a peasant woman handling a brood of noisy, beautiful children.

  Carlotta, who had somehow learned to conquer herself, who had found that she was meant to be happy after forty, who had lived for love or sex, or whatever combination of the two she could grasp in her hunger, and who had emerged into tranquility, against all odds…Alone, who had not wanted to be alone…

  The lines of love, webbing the night, leading where? To Bresach with the blood around his eyes, to Despière, dead for a salary, to Holt and the burden of his wife’s bottle, on the hunt for other men’s children, to Delaney, caught in the cage of his wife’s jealousy, cut off from his friends, cut off from the woman in whose arms he had lain in joy and innocence, and who had, by his report, made him flower through the long nights of the Italian winter. The lines of love, leading in Jack’s case, to his divided life, three wives, triple anguish, doubt, disappointment, anger, hatred, routine. “You know, you haven’t made love to me for more than two weeks.” The soft, accusing voice at the airport. (Why didn’t she shut the gypsy up?)

  The clutch of women. Delaney’s words.

  Agony everywhere.

  What was the anodyne? Work, ambition…? Holt had worked, Maurice Delaney was still ambitious. And as far as the worth of what they had accomplished—who was there to say that in some eternal scale of values, the two or three good movies that Delaney had made when he was young did not more than balance Holt’s thousand oil wells? In the silent, totalizing hours of the night of man, was Holt assuaged by the thought of his oil, was Delaney cured by the memory of two or three beautiful hours of film he had created in another age?

  Despière, dead in Africa, had been ambitious in his own way, had worked, had fought. That specialist and almost-survivor of wars, who could only say, much later, as he moved up for the last time, to the sound of the guns, “It is all shit on both sides.”

  Death, death, the voices had whispered to him. The song the sirens sing in Rome, making oblivion alluring, nothingness a delight. Tied to no mast, his ears not stoppered by wax, he had listened, had reached out his hand in the direction of the music.

  It was incredible that it had happened to him. Not for that healthy and responsible man, John Andrus, the sly look at the open sixth-story window, at the full bottle of sleeping pills. Not for him the envy of the dead who had, one way or another, solved their problems, who no longer had to measure themselves daily against what they had been when they were young, no longer had to test themselves at each move, with every decision, for decline and compromise.

  Only it had been for him.

  In the past two weeks, something had happened to him that had never happened before—he had begun to long to die.

  There had been many reasons for it—the wanton blow on the steps of the hotel as he arrived, to tell him that he had been singled out of all the men in Rome that night for punishment or warning (“That’s what they sang when the Doria went down” and ladylike laughter in the taxicab), the flow of blood, the stained jacket (Whose was it—the murderer’s or his victim’s?)—the bull hanging above the doorway—the boy with the knife—the dream of the bald men in aprons dismembering his own body in the forest—the German priests frustrating his love, making his love disappear—the names of the dead in the movie theatre and that slender boy who had been himself and for all intents and purposes was also dead—(“Eh, bien,” Despière had written, himself racked by premonitions, “the worst is over. You must not be surprised. In a murderous world it is normal to be murdered.”)—Delaney toppling into the gravel at the riding ring, unrescued, unrescuable…The right and left hand of Christ at the Last Judgment. The Companions of the Right Teat under Fortune’s whip. The First and Last and Only Important Judgment.

  Jack shook his head. Don’t inquire further. There were many reasons, but whatever they were, now he was standing alone in a city of tombs and memorials, in a cold, dark room which belonged to no one and welcomed no one, and it was after midnight and long before dawn, and he was struggling with the feeling that perhaps it would have been better if he had never been dragged out of the burning building, if Wilson, in the wild flight down the hospital corridors with the wheelchair, had never found the colonel’s office.

  He turned on the light of the chandelier and poured himself another drink and went over to the mirror hanging on the wall and coldly examined himself. God’s monkey, strapped onto the universal vivisection table. The mirror is the knife.

  He became aware of a curious sound. It was low and hoarse and animal-like, rising and falling, the lament of a beast in agony. It was coming from the street, and Jack moved away from the mirror and pulled back the curtains and stepped out onto the little balcony. He looked down. A bareheaded man was standing with his coat open and his arms flung up, in the middle of the dark, empty street, shouting, the same words over and over, to the sky, to the dark, shuttered windows, to the blind walls of the city of Rome. Near him, two prostitutes had stopped to watch him. At first Jack couldn’t make out what the man was saying, or even what language he was using. Then he heard, in English, the words thickened by drink and terror, “Oh, God, I’m all alone. Oh, God, isn’t there anyone to help me? Oh, my God…”

  One of the prostitutes laughed. Her laughter floated up, pure and girlish, in the slot between the buildings.

  For a moment, looking at the solitary American figure with the arms upflung and the coat flapping in the wind, Jack was sure that it was the drunk who had hit him the first night in Rome. Then the man put his arms down, and, moaning incoherently, staggered along the middle of the street until he reached a lamppost. In the light, Jack could see more clearly. It was not his man.

  “Oh, God,” the man lamented, wailing, staggering now onto the sidewalk and against the dark walls of a building, “Oh, God, I’m all alone….Won’t anyone help me?”

  Then he stopped moving for a second or two. He ran his fingers through his hair, took a deep breath, looked around him slyly. Then he buttoned his coat briskly and, head back, with his arms swinging at his sides like a soldier on parade, walked quickly to the corner and disappeared.

  Jack blinked. The whole thing had happened so quickly, had been so bizarre and fleeting, that it was hard to believe that it hadn’t been an apparition, a walking dream. For a moment longer, Jack stared at the corner around which the man had disappeared, wondering if he still heard on the restless night wind that shifted the curtains uneasily behind him, the echo of the lamenting voice, calling, “Alone…alone…”

  The prostitute laughed again, then the two women hurried away.

  He went back into the room, closing the window behind him. He paced around the carpeted room, glass in hand.

  The night was harsh and dangerous. Cries of agony were uttered in the streets. The room had too many mirrors and was saddened by a regiment of memories. The gilt hotel clock ticked too loudly over the doorway and made intolerable suggestions. The drunk’s, “Alone,” was a presence in the room, a judgment, a threat.

  Jack knew he could not spend this night in these cold rooms. Suddenly he remembered the sound of the woman’s laughter from the street. Now, irrationally, he was sure that he recognized her, that it was the German with the red shoes. He started to go toward the door. That’s the way to end it all
up, he thought, end up Rome in the arms of the German whore. Why not? To this bitter voyage put a bitter end. At least he would not spend the rest of the night alone.

  Then he stopped. The word. It had been used once before that night. “—that whore of a wife—” Clara’s demented voice.

  Even better, Jack thought, vengefully. Why leave the building? We have a whore in the family.

  He went to the phone. “Miss Carlotta Lee, please,” he said, cunningly sounding like a reasonable and responsible man, so as to keep his reputation unclouded at the telephone switchboard. He looked at the clock. Ten minutes past three. Here’s a test of a divorce, he thought, waking an ex-wife at ten after three in the morning.

  “Yes?” Carlotta said. Her voice was drowsy.

  “Carlotta,” Jack said, “it’s ten minutes past three. May I come and see you?”

  There was silence for a moment. Then she said, “The number is three twenty-four. The door will be open.”

  But then there was no revenge at all. It wasn’t that way at all.

  They lay side by side in the dark on the wide bed. The room was small, enclosed, the warm air fragrant with perfumes he thought he had forgotten and which now swept him back to rooms which he had left long ago.

  They had made love gravely, like people who had sworn to fulfill a solemn commandment. They had made love slowly, lingeringly. They had made love tenderly, as though each of them were conscious of a precious secret fragility in themselves and in each other that had to be protected. They had made love obsessively, as though the years had built up in them a riotous hunger that no single act of love could ever possibly assuage. They had made love with the comfort and knowledgeableness of familiars and the delight and shock of a first confrontal. They were at home and in a foreign land, lovers and strangers, ecstatic and matter-of-fact. Finally, they had made love with joy and forgiveness and long, absolving pleasure in each other.