by Irwin Shaw
A few miles farther on his hands began to shake, his body to shiver uncontrollably. He pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, waited for the spasm to pass. He had no idea of how long it was before his hands stopped shaking. He was conscious of cold sweat on his forehead, icicles dripping down inside his clothing from his armpits. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his forehead, breathed deeply, four profound inhalations. The air in the car smelled sour. Where was he? The rows of black trees alongside the road told him nothing. He had crossed the French border not so long ago, he remembered. He was somewhere between the Bidassosa River and Saint Sebastian. He had started from Paris that morning, had not stopped except for gasoline and a cup of coffee all day. I have nearly died in sunny Spain. He had intended to drive without a halt until Madrid, sleep over, go farther south—to Malaga—the next day. A man he knew, something of a friend, a matador, really the friend of a friend, was fighting in Malaga the next afternoon. He had met the man in Alicante the year before. There was a three-day fería. Mediterranean sunshine, parading bands, fireworks, the costumes of the Spanish south, much drinking, long, crowded hangovers, the amused irresponsibility of other people’s celebrations, companions, men and women he knew well enough to enjoy on a short holiday but who meant nothing much to him, whom he only saw the four or five times in the year when he happened to go to a bullfight.
The matador was too old for the bulls. He knew it. He was a rich man. There was no sensible reason for him to go into an arena with animals who were devoted to killing him. “What can I do?” the matador had said. “It is the only thing that deeply amuses me. It is my only playground. I am lucky. I have a playground. Most people do not have one. So—I cannot permit them to drive me from it.”
There were many ways of dying in Spain. Horns, falling asleep at the wheel.
It was the third time that year he had fallen asleep driving at night. Once outside Salzburg. Once on the autostrada near Florence. Tonight. He had been lucky. Or had he been? Anyway, he had opened his eyes in time. In the last years he had taken to driving nine hundred, a thousand miles at a stretch. What had he wanted to do in Salzburg, what had he planned to see in Florence? His friend the matador would be fighting in thirty different places all season. Why had he felt it was necessary to go to Malaga? He no longer remembered. He liked driving at night, the solitude, the numbing, hypnotic onrush of lights, the satisfaction of leaving a place he felt he had been in too long, the pleasure of moving through the deserted, dark streets of a new city, the accomplishment of distance.
Suicide was in every garage. He was sane enough to understand that.
He started the car, drove slowly into Saint Sebastian, found a hotel. He would not reach Madrid that night.
A bar was open near the hotel. He ordered a brandy, then another. He wasn’t hungry. There were some men arguing at a table in Spanish. He listened. Their heads were bent together over the table, their voices fell to a conspiratorial hush. They might have been planning to murder Franco, free a priest, bomb the prefecture of police, take a chance on a lottery. He did not understand the language. He was soothed by his ignorance.
He called Paris from the hotel. It took a long time, and he undressed and got into bed waiting for the call to be put through. Constance answered. He had left her early in the morning. They had made love in the dawn. She had been sleepy and warm. Her lovemaking was robust as usual, generous and easy. She gave freely, took without stint, there were no favors exchanged, no debts to be paid off in bed. She never said, “Why do you have to go?” when he announced without warning that he was off to Zurich or the Côte Basque or New York. He would not have been able to answer her truthfully if she had asked.
Every once in a while they went on trips together, but that was different. They were holidays when she had time off from work. When he drove off by himself, it was not a holiday. If she was in the car with him, he drove slowly, chatting with her, playing word games, enjoying the scenery, stopping often for brandies. She liked to drive, too. She was an erratic driver, but lucky. She had never had an accident, she boasted. She should have had twenty. He had laughed once as they teetered around a curve on the wrong side of the road. She hated being laughed at. She had stopped the car and got out and said she wouldn’t drive with him anymore and started walking back toward Paris. He had waited, and she had come back a half hour later, trying unsuccessfully to look imperious, and gotten into the car, and he had let her drive, and she’d stopped the car at the first café, and they’d had a brandy.
That morning, when he had left her, he had gone back to his hotel and packed his bag and sped through the early-morning traffic toward the auto route south. Once she had asked him why he bothered keeping a hotel room since almost every night he was in Paris he stayed at her place. He had said, “I’m used to hotels.” She hadn’t asked again.
The phone rang on the table beside the bed. The room was an immense one, with dark, high furniture. He always went to the best hotel in town, avoiding the other guests. He didn’t like the ordinary run of guests in the best hotel in any town.
“Are you in Madrid already?” she asked. He might have just awakened her, but you never could tell with Constance. Five seconds after she was roused, she sounded as though she had just come, bubbling and fresh, from a cold shower.
“No,” he said, “I stopped in Saint Sebastian for the night.”
“How is it in Saint Sebastian?”
“They’re speaking Spanish,” he said.
“What a surprise.” She laughed. “What made you change your mind?”
If he had been honest, he would have said, “I didn’t want to die tonight.” Instead, he said, “It was raining.”
Another year. Five years ago. He was standing in the lobby of a movie theatre in Pasadena. There had been a sneak preview of the last picture he had made. The movie had been shot in France, its hero a young lieutenant in the American army in Germany who had deserted and had a disastrous affair with a French woman before turning himself in. The director, Frank Baranis, was in the lobby with him, sunk in a large polo coat, depressed because the audience had coughed and been inattentive throughout the film. They had been friends ever since Baranis had directed Edward Brenner’s play nearly twenty years before. Baranis had been the best man at Craig’s wedding. During the shooting of the film, Craig had received an anonymous letter in a woman’s handwriting saying that Baranis had been sleeping with Penelope before the marriage, the very day before, the letter had said, and probably for a long time after. Craig had ignored the letter, had said nothing about it either to Penelope or Baranis. On the strength of an anonymous letter, probably from a jilted and vengeful woman, you did not ask the man who was your friend and was working day and night for you on a complicated and demanding task whether or not he had slept with your wife the day before your wedding seventeen years ago.
Craig was suddenly aware of how old Baranis looked, like a fearful, wizened monkey. He was lightly pockmarked, but he had large liquid dark eyes and a disdainful, offhand way with women that was, Craig heard, effective.
“Well,” Baranis said, “we bombed. What do we do now?”
“Nothing,” Craig said. “That was the picture we wanted to make, and we made it.”
A man and his wife, in the crowd coming out of the auditorium through the lobby, passed nearby. The woman was short and dowdy. If she had been on sale, you would have been able to find her in gross lots on the shelves of a supermarket at clearance prices. The man was burly, bursting out of his clothes, and looked like a football coach whose team had just lost a game and was furious with his players. His face was red and flushed, his eyes glared behind rimless glasses. “What a load of shit,” he was saying as he passed the spot where Craig and Baranis were standing. “They think they can get away with anything these days.”
“Harry,” the woman said in her supermarket voice. “Your language.”
“I repeat,” the man said. “A load of shit.”
Craig
and Baranis looked silently at each other. They had worked for nearly two years on the picture.
After a while Baranis said, “Maybe it isn’t a picture for Pasadena. Maybe it’ll be different in New York.”
“Maybe,” Craig said. Then, since it was that kind of night, anyway, he said, “Frank, a couple of months ago I got an anonymous letter that said you’d had an affair with Penelope before we were married. That you’d gone to bed with her the day before, even. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Baranis said. It was still that kind of night.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“You never asked,” Baranis said. “How the hell was I to know when it started you wanted to marry her?” He pulled the collar of the polo coat up around him, half-buried his face in it. He looked like a small, trapped, dying animal. “Anyway, if I had told you, you’d have married her just the same. You’d have forgiven her and hated me. You’d never have talked to me again.”
“I suppose so,” Craig said.
“Look at you and Ed Brenner,” Baranis said. He sounded angry. “You never see him anymore, do you?”
“No.”
“See?”
“You knew about Brenner and Penny?” Craig asked flatly.
“Everybody knew.” Baranis shrugged impatiently. “So what good would it have done if I’d opened my big mouth?” Baranis sank deeper in his coat.
“No good.” Craig nodded reasonably. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll drive you home.”
The picture didn’t do much better in New York. It was before the time when movies about soldiers who were disillusioned with the American army were to the public taste.
He was sitting in his office signing checks on the scarred, fake mahogany desk. The office was small and shabby, two rooms, one for him and one for his secretary. Belinda Ewen had been with him since his first play. The furniture of the office also was the same he had started with back in 1946. Neither Belinda nor the furniture had improved with the passage of time. Belinda had been a small, dark, furiously energetic, almost pretty young woman when he had hired her. She was still small, dark, and energetic, but now was no longer almost pretty. Her face seemed to have been honed into severe angular lines by the abrasion of the years, her lips chipped out by a blunt knife. The desk had been fake mahogany in 1946. It just looked a little more fake now.
Penelope had campaigned to be allowed to choose a larger office for him and to decorate it herself. He had refused. He didn’t like the offices of men whose wives had chosen the furniture, the thick rugs, the tasteful paintings on the walls. Penelope had also tried, at least once a year throughout their marriage, to get him to fire Belinda. “She runs the office as though it’s hers, not yours,” Penelope had said over and over again. “And besides, she’s disrespectful to me.” Among Penelope’s complaints about Belinda Ewen was Belinda’s style of dress. “It’s grotesque,” Penelope had said. “She looks as though she’s gotten herself up to go to Coney Island with a sailor. What do you imagine people think about you when they come into the office for the first time and they see that woman decked out in all the colors of the rainbow?” He hadn’t replied, as he might have, that people came to his office to work with Jesse Craig, not to pass judgment on the choice of his secretary’s clothes. But he contented himself with saying, “When she marries, I’ll get someone who dresses all in black.”
“Married!” Penelope had sniffed. “While you’re alive, that woman will never marry.”
“I hope you’re right,” he had said. The discussion had taken place on one of the less pleasant evenings at home.
Even so, there were times when the clashing greens and purples of some new outfit that Belinda had put together made him shake his head in wonderment. Safely behind the closed door of his own office, of course.
Penelope had also suggested, in moments of anger, that he had had an affair—was still having an affair—with the secretary. He had never touched Belinda and believed that she would run screaming through the halls if he as much as brushed her cheek. And he saw no reason, if a woman did her work as efficiently as Belinda did hers, why she had to be respectful to her employer’s wife.
And finally, he was superstitious. He had done well in the shabby little office with the unprepossessing, ludicrously dressed secretary; he had done better than he had ever hoped or dreamed he might do since the day when he had signed the first lease for eighty dollars a month. There was no sense in tempting fate with unnecessary signs of luxury. Although now, sitting at the old desk, in the late afternoon of an autumnal New York day, signing away at a torrent of checks after the disastrous preview in Pasadena and the neglected opening in New York, he could hardly argue that luck had made a permanent base in the bare room in which he had worked so long.
The checks he was signing were from his personal, not from his business account. For the most part they were for household bills, food, liquor, fuel, telephone, the salaries of the two maids, flowers, a bill for two thousand dollars for a sofa that Penelope had found at an antique dealer’s on Madison Avenue, bills from Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman for clothes that Penelope had bought, a two-hundred-dollar bill that came in monthly from Charles of the Ritz where Penelope had her hair done. There were other bills, too—tuition for Anne’s school in Lausanne, tuition for Marcia’s school in Maryland, insurance and garage rent for Penelope’s car, a hundred-and-eighty-dollar bill for the masseuse who visited Penelope three times weekly, a savage bill from a doctor in Hollywood for treatment of Penelope’s mother, who had come out to visit her daughter soon after the marriage when Craig had been making his first movie on the Coast and had immediately fallen mysteriously ill and was taking a long time to die in the most expensive place for dying in the world.
Craig had tried setting up a household account for Penelope to handle, but she was always overdrawn or neglected to pay the telephone bill so that suddenly it would be cut off, or she would pay bills twice or be too busy to bother for months on end, and there would eventually be dunning letters on his desk to annoy him. So now he had Belinda type up the checks, and once a month, in silent fury, he signed them himself. He wondered what Belinda thought as she typed out the checks for clothes that more than equaled her entire year’s salary. She must also speculate, he thought, what anybody could do to a woman’s hair that was worth two hundred dollars a month.
When he had finished with the last check, he threw down his pen and leaned back in his chair and looked out the streaked, dirty window of his office at the lighted windows across the street, behind which clerks and secretaries were working in the glare of neon tubes. If they had known what he had been doing at his desk for the last hour or so, they would have every right, he thought, to come storming out of their cubicles and into his office to tear his checkbook to bits. At the very least, the checkbook.
From time to time he had tried to remonstrate with Penelope about the bills she ran up, but Penelope invariably broke into tears at the mention of money. Quarreling about money was debasing. She had not dreamt when she married him that she was linking herself for life with a man who thought only in dollars and cents. In all her childhood and youth in Chicago she had never heard a word in her home about money. Listening to her, one would think that she came from a long line of landed aristocrats whose wealth was based in some illustrious, monarchal past in which plebian matters such as debts and assets were handled only in backstairs obscurity by discreet underlings in frock coats. Actually, her father had been a traveling salesman in silks and ribbons who had died in want. Craig had had to pay for the old man’s funeral.
As the discussions grew more heated, Penelope swore that she watched every cent, called on the names of wives of their friends who spent more on their clothes in one month than she did in a year, which was true, brought heaven to witness that all her efforts and expenditures were designed to make him a decent home, give him a wife he would not be ashamed to be seen with in public, bring up his children decently. He hated s
cenes, especially about money. Deep down he had the feeling that the large sums that had come his way in his career were not rightly his but the work of accident, luck, for doing only the things he would have happily done, anyway, for a pittance. He could not argue about money. Even in business he never dealt directly with contracts but allowed Bryan Murphy in Hollywood and his business manager on Broadway to handle that side of his affairs at all times. Not being able to dicker with a recalcitrant actor about a percentage of the profits of a play or movie, he certainly couldn’t stand up to his wife’s tears when it was a question of a six-hundred-dollar telephone bill or the cost of a new coat. Still, remembering his early days living in cheap hotels, he wondered by what insidious magic he found himself signing salary checks for two maids who worked in a house in which he rarely ate more than two meals a week and from which he was absent, more often than not, five or six months a year.
Although each time Belinda brought in the checks to sign she put on what Craig had come to recognize as her steadfastly noncommittal face, he found it difficult to meet her gaze and always pretended to be busy and said gruffly, keeping his head down, “Thank you, Belinda. Just put them on the desk. I’ll sign them when I have the time.”
When he had first met Penelope, she had been a charming young actress of moderate talent who dressed attractively and lived in a pleasant little apartment in the Village on ninety dollars a week. He wondered where that girl had gone. From a frugal young woman who washed her own stockings and underwear each night, she had turned almost immediately into someone who ransacked galleries and antique shops, who patrolled Fifth Avenue like the advance guard of a looting army, who had to have nurses for her children, who could not conceive of living anywhere in New York City except between Sixtieth and Eighty-sixth Street on the East Side. American women, he thought, take to extravagance with all the natural talent of a dolphin to the waves of the sea.
