Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  “Of course, some people snickered. The sight of an eighty-two-year-old man doting over a nineteen-year-old girl as though it was his first love and he was taking her out to her first ball … But I saw him once in a while, and I was touched. It was as though a miracle had made time reverse for him. He’d gone back. Not all the way, of course, not to twenty or thirty, but to fifty-five, sixty—”

  “He died, you said,” Craig said.

  “Yes. She met that young man you just saw her with and stopped seeing Jarvis. And he found out that they’d been married only when he saw it in the newspapers. He dropped the paper to the floor and took to his bed and turned his face to the wall, and three days later he was dead.”

  “It’s a nice sensible story,” Craig said.

  “I think so,” she said. “At his funeral a friend of his said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? In this day and age to be able to die for love at the age of eighty-two?’”

  “In this day and age.”

  “He couldn’t have wanted anything better, could he, the old man?” Constance said. “He’d had a glorious, foolish, lively eight months or so and a noble exit. No oxygen tent, no doctors hovering around, no pipes and kidney machines and transfusions, just love. Nobody blamed the girl, of course. Just envied her husband. And the old man. Both. You have a funny light in your eye.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “If somebody came to me with a play or a movie script based on the old man’s story,” he said, “I think I’d be tempted to try to do it. Only nobody has.”

  Constance finished her glass of champagne. “Why don’t you take a shot at writing it yourself?” she said.

  It was the first time that she had tried to push him in any direction whatever, the first time that he realized that she knew that he couldn’t keep going on the way he had been.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, and ordered two more drinks.

  He walked along the sea front of Saint Sebastian in the morning. The rain had stopped. The wind was blustery, the air washed, the big rock far out in the bay a beleaguered fortress, the waves pounding. When he crossed the bridge, the tide in the river was fierce, foaming water, the clash between ocean and land at the land’s gates. Half-remembering where he was from other visits, he walked in the direction of the big bullring. Empty now, out of season, immense, it looked like a deserted temple to a forgotten bloody religion. A door was open. He heard the sound of workmen hammering somewhere, the noise reverberating hollowly in the dark caverns under the stands.

  He went up through a passageway, leaned against the barrera. The circle of sand was not golden, as in other rings, but ash-colored, the color of death. He remembered the matador’s words—“It is the only thing that still amuses me. It is my only playground.” Too old for the bulls, his friend, sword in hand, blood on his suit of lights, a fixed, rapt smile on his handsome, scarred young-old face, would be facing the horns later that day hundreds of miles to the south. He would have to send a telegram. “Many ears. Abrazo.”

  Opening-night telegrams. Different formulas for different cultures.

  He should send a telegram to Jack Lawton, ulcer-ridden, in Boston, to Edward Brenner, his arm around his wife on the dark stage in New York, to Kenneth Jarvis, buying flowers for a nineteen-year-old-girl, all in their arenas, all facing their particular horns, all faithful to their only playgrounds.

  A caretaker, dressed in a kind of imitation uniform, appeared on the other side of the ring, waved at him threateningly, shook his fist, shouted with thin authority as though he suspected Craig of being ready to leap into the ring, a crazed, middle-aged spontaneo planning to interrupt a ghostly faena, cite a bull who would not appear for another two months.

  Craig gestured courteously to him, a lover of the fiesta brava, observing its rules, visiting its holy places, and turned and went down under the stands and out into the ragged sunlight.

  By the time he had walked back to his hotel he had made a decision.

  He drove back to France slowly, carefully, not stopping at the spot where he had nearly been killed the night before. When he reached Saint-Jean-de-Luz, quiet in the preseason lull, he registered in a small hotel, went out and bought a ream of paper. I am now armed, he thought, as he carried the paper back to the hotel, I am re-entering my playground. By a different entrance.

  He stayed in Saint-Jean-de-Luz two months, working slowly and painfully, trying to shape the story of Kenneth Jarvis, who had died at the age of eighty-two, three days after he had read in a newspaper that the girl of nineteen whom he loved had married another man. He had started it as a play, but bit by bit it had slid into another form, and he had gone back to the beginning and started it all over again as a film script. He had worked since his first days in the theatre with writers, suggesting changes, whole scenes, the addition of new themes, but it was one thing to work on the basis of another man’s ideas and quite another to have a blank page in front of you and only yourself to try to bring it to life.

  Aside from two weekend visits from Constance, he kept to himself, spending long hours at the desk in the hotel room, taking solitary walks along the beach and around the harbor, eating alone in the hotel dining room.

  He told Constance what he was doing. She voiced neither approval nor disapproval. He didn’t show her what he had written. Even after two months’ work there would have been very little to show anyone—just a disconnected jumble of scenes, bald ideas, sketches of possible sequences, notes for characters.

  By the end of the two months he realized that simply telling the story of the old man and the young girl was not enough. It wasn’t enough because it didn’t leave room for him, Jesse Craig, in it. Not the actual Jesse Craig, not the recital of the history that lay behind the man who sat day after day at the desk in the quiet hotel room, but his beliefs, his temperament, his hopes, his judgment on the time through which he had lived. Without all that, he came to realize, whatever he finally accomplished would be fragmentary, useless.

  So he invented other characters, other pairs of lovers, to people the great house he had imagined on the north shore of Long Island for the summer in which he hoped to concentrate all the action of the film. He had transposed the locale of the story from Normandy. He didn’t know enough about Normandy to write about it, and he knew about Long Island. He brought in a grandson, aged nineteen, in the first raptures of passion, taken with a promiscuous girl three or four years older than he. And drawing on more recent experience, he involved a comfortably adulterous couple of forty.

  Using everything he had learned from his reading, his working on other men’s plays and films, on his own observation of his friends, enemies, acquaintances, he tried to intertwine his characters naturally and dramatically so that in the end, without ever speaking in his own voice or in using anything but his characters’ words and actions, the final result might be Jesse Craig’s statement of what, in the second half of the twentieth century in America, it was like to love as a young man or woman, a middle-aged man or woman, and an old man on the brink of death, with all the interplay, the compromising, the wounding, of money, moral stances, power, position, class, beauty and the lack of it, honor and the lack of it, illusion and the lack of it.

  After two months the town began to fill up, and he decided it was time to pack and move on. On the long drive north toward Paris, thinking about how he had spent the two months, he knew that he would be lucky if he could get the script written in a year. Maybe lucky if he could ever get it written at all.

  It took him the full twelve months. He had written bits and pieces of it in Paris, in New York, on Long Island. Whenever he had come to a point in the script where he couldn’t see his way ahead, he had packed and restlessly moved on. But he hadn’t once fallen asleep at the wheel on any of his trips.

  Even when he had finished it, he showed it to no one. He, who had passed judgment on the work of hundreds of other men, couldn’t bear thinking of strangers’ eyes reading the wor
ds he had written. And any reader, he felt, was a stranger. When he sent it off to be typed, he put no author’s name under the title. Merely the legend, Property of Jesse Craig. Jesse Craig, once the boy wonder of Broadway and Hollywood, once known as a keen judge of the dramatic and cinematic art. Jesse Craig, who had no notion whether or not a year of his work was worth anybody’s attention for two hours and dreaded to hear either a yes or a no.

  When he put the six copies of the script into the valise the day he took the plane to Cannes, there was still no author’s name under the title The Three Horizons.

  The telephone rang. He shook his head dazedly, like a man being suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. Once more he had to remind himself where he was, where the telephone was. I am in my room in the Carlton, he thought, the telephone is on the table on the other side of the big chair. The telephone rang again. He looked at his watch. It was one-thirty-five. He hesitated, almost decided not to answer. He didn’t want to hear any more incoherent messages from America. Finally, he picked up the phone.

  “Craig speaking,” he said.

  “Jess.” It was Murphy. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “You didn’t wake me.”

  “I just finished reading your script.”

  “Yes?”

  “That kid Harte can write,” Murphy said, “but he’s been seeing too many old French movies. Nobody’s interested in an eighty-two-year-old man, for Christ’s sake. You’ll never get off the ground with it, Jess. Forget it. I wouldn’t even show it around. It’ll do you more harm than good, believe me. Drop the option and forget it. Let me work on the Greek thing for you, and we’ll keep our eyes peeled for something good for later on.”

  “Thanks, Murph,” Craig said, “for reading it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” He hung up, stared at the phone for a long time. Then he went back to the desk at which he had been sitting. He looked down at the typed list of questions Gail McKinnon had given him, read once more the first question. “Why are you in Cannes?”

  He chuckled dryly to himself, picked up the pile of papers and tore them into small bits, dropped them into the wastebasket.

  Then he took off his sweater, put on a jacket, and went out. He took a taxi to the casino where he knew the bar would be open all night. He bought some chips, sat down at a chemin de fer table, ordered a double whisky, and played and drank until six in the morning. He won thirty thousand francs, nearly six thousand dollars, mostly from two of the Englishmen who had been in the restaurant with Picasso that evening. It was unfortunate for Ian Wadleigh that he wasn’t patrolling the Croisette as Craig walked, almost steadily, through the growing dawn toward his hotel. At that hour Wadleigh would have gotten his five thousand for Madrid.

  POLICEMEN with flashlights were guiding the cars toward an open field where many cars were already parked. The air was heavy and cold. When Craig turned off the ignition and stepped out, his shoes squished on the wet grass. He walked up the path toward the big, chateaulike house from which came the sound of an orchestra. The house was on a hill beyond Mougins, and it dominated the land around it like a small fortress.

  He was sorry that Anne had not yet arrived. She would have enjoyed going into a house like that on her father’s arm, to the sound of a French song, attended by policemen who were diligently engaged in lighting the way for you under dark old trees rather than lobbing tear-gas bombs in front of the Administration Building. He had Anne’s cable in his pocket. Surprisingly, she had decided to visit her mother in Geneva and would be coming down to Cannes the next day.

  Walter Klein, the host, was standing in the hallway greeting his guests. He had rented the house for a month, choosing it because it was large enough for parties. Klein was a small, powerfully built, youngish man with a deceptively easygoing manner. In the turbulent breaking up and realignments of agencies that had been taking place in the last few years, he had walked away from a decaying organization, taking with him a list of stars and directors, and while other agencies and movie companies were collapsing, he had accommodated himself to the new conditions of the industry so shrewdly that a good proportion of the movies being prepared or shot in America or England at any given moment had one or more clients of his in some key spot or were indebted to him in some way for financing or distribution. Where others cried havoc, he smiled and said, “Kids, we’ve never had it so good.” Unlike Murphy, who had grown to affluence in an easier time, and who scornfully kept aloof from the soul-like atmosphere of Cannes during these two weeks, Klein could be seen at all hours talking earnestly in corners with producers, distributors, money men, directors, actors, wheeling and dealing, promising, signing. For his lieutenants he chose soft-spoken and personable young men who had never known the fat, easy old days, who matched him in avidity and ambition, and who, like their boss, hid their honed-down sharpness under a careful display of charm.

  When Klein had met Craig in New York some time before, he had said lightly, “Jess, when are you going to leave that old dinosaur Murphy and come to my office?”

  “Never, I guess, Walt,” Craig had said. “Murph and I have sworn our bond in blood.”

  Klein had laughed. “Your loyalty does you credit, Jess,” he said. “But I miss your name on the old silver screen. If you ever decide you want to come where the action is, give me a call.”

  Now Klein was standing in the marble front hallway of the mansion talking to some other people who had just arrived. He was dressed in a black velvet jacket, a ruffled shirt, and a bright red bow tie. Beside him was an anxious-looking woman who ran public relations for his firm. It was she who had sent out the invitations for the evening, and she looked pained when she saw Craig standing there in slacks and a blue blazer. Most, but not all, of the other guests were in evening clothes, and Craig could tell by the look on the woman’s face that she sensed a small betrayal in his choice of clothing.

  Klein shook his hand warmly, smiling. “Ah,” he said, “the great man. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.” He didn’t explain why he was afraid Craig would not come but introduced him to the people whom he had been talking to. “You know Tonio Corelli, of course, Jess,” he said.

  “By sight.” Corelli was the beautiful young Italian actor from the Hotel du Cap swimming pool, now resplendent in a jet black, Roman-tailored dinner jacket. They shook hands.

  “And if you will introduce the ladies, carino,” Klein said. “I didn’t quite catch your names, dears,” he added apologetically.

  “This is Nicole,” Corelli said, “and this is Irene.”

  Nicole and Irene smiled dutifully. They were as pretty and tan and well-shaped as the girls who had been with Corelli at the pool, but they were not the same girls.

  He goes in for matched pairs, Craig thought, he must run them in and out on a schedule. Craig recognized envy as easily in himself as in the next man.

  “Honey,” Klein said to the public relations woman, “take them in and get them a drink. If you want to dance,” he said to the girls, “be careful you don’t catch pneumonia. The band’s outside. I couldn’t make a deal on the weather, and winter came up. The merry month of May.”

  The trio, led by the public relations woman, drifted beautifully away.

  “The only thing to be,” Klein said, “is Italian.”

  “I know what you mean,” Craig said. “Though you don’t seem to be doing so badly.” He made a gesture to take in the luxury of his surroundings. He had heard that Klein was paying five thousand dollars for the month he had rented the house.

  “I’m not complaining. I go with the flow,” Klein said, grinning. He took an honest pleasure in his wealth. “It’s not an uncomfortable little pad. Well, Jesse, it’s good seeing you again. How’re things going?”

  “Fine,” Craig said. “Just fine.”

  “I invited Murphy and his frau,” Klein said, “but they declined with thanks. They don’t mingle with the lower orders.”

  “They’re here for a rest,” Craig said, lying for his friend. “They’re g
oing to bed early this week, they told me.”

  “He was a great man, Murphy,” Klein said. “In his day. You’re still with him, of course?”

  “Of course.”

  “As I once told you,” said Klein, “your loyalty does you credit. Is he working on something for you?” He threw away the line carelessly, turning his head as he spoke to survey his guests through the archway that gave into the great living room.

  “Not that I know of,” Craig said.

  “You have anything on the fire yourself?” Klein turned back toward him.

  Craig hesitated. “Maybe,” he said. He had told no one but Constance and Murphy that he was considering doing a picture again. And Murphy had made his position clear. More than clear. Craig dropped his hint deliberately now. Of all the men gathered for the Festival, Klein, with his energy and his labyrinthine network of contacts, could be the most useful. “I’m playing with an idea.”

  “That’s great news.” The enthusiasm in Klein’s voice was almost genuine. “You’ve been away too long, Jess. If you need any help, you know where to come, don’t you?” Klein put an affectionate hand on his sleeve. “Anything for a friend. We put combinations together these days that make even my mind whirl.”

  “So I’ve been told. Maybe I’ll give you a call one of these days and we can talk some more.” Murphy would be hurt if he heard. He was a man proud of his acumen, and he took it ill if clients and friends didn’t follow his advice. Murphy was contemptuous of Klein. “That punk little hustler” was Murphy’s description of Klein. “In three years he won’t even be a memory.” But Murphy these days did not come up with combinations that made the mind whirl.