by Irwin Shaw
“You know what I was thinking all through dinner, looking at you?” Anne said. “I was thinking what a handsome man you are. With all your hair and not fat and those lines of wear and tear in your face. Like a retired gladiator, a little delicate now from old wounds.”
He laughed.
“Noble wear and tear,” she said quickly. “As though you’d learned a lot and that’s why the lines were there. You’re the best-looking man I’ve seen since I came here—”
“You’ve only been here a few hours,” he said. But he couldn’t help sounding pleased. Fatuously pleased, he told himself. “Give yourself a couple of days.”
“And I wasn’t the only one,” she said. “Every lady in that restaurant looked at you in that certain way ladies have—that little butterball, Miss Sorel, that fabulous French actress, even Sonia Murphy, even Gail McKinnon.”
“I must say, I didn’t notice it.” He was being honest. He had had other problems to think about during and after dinner.
“That’s one of the great things about you,” Anne said earnestly. “You don’t notice it. I love coming into a room with you and everybody is looking at you like that and you not noticing it. I have a confession to make—” she said, sinking back luxuriously in an easy chair. “I never thought I’d grow up enough to be able to talk to you the way I’ve done today and tonight. Are you glad I came?”
For an answer he went over and leaned down and kissed the top of her hair.
She grinned, looking suddenly boyish. “Someday,” she said, “you’re going to make some girl a good father.”
The telephone rang. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. He didn’t move. The telephone rang again.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Anne asked.
“I’ll probably be happier if I don’t,” he said. But he went over and picked up the instrument. It was the concierge. He wanted to know if Miss Craig was with him, there was a call for her from the United States.
“It’s for you, Anne,” he said. “From the United States.” He saw Anne’s face become sullen. “Do you want to take it here or in the bedroom?”
Anne hesitated, then stood up and placed her drink carefully on the table beside her chair. “In the bedroom, please.”
“Put it on the other phone, please,” Craig told the concierge.
Anne went into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. A moment later he heard the phone ring there and then the muffled sound of her voice.
Holding his glass, he went to the window, opened it, and stepped out onto the balcony to make sure he didn’t overhear Anne’s conversation. The Croisette was still full of people and cars, but it was too cold for anybody to be sitting on the terrace. There was a long swell coming in, and the sea was breaking heavily on the beach, the white of the foam ghostly in the reflected lights of the city. Sophocles, long ago,/ Heard it on the Aegean, he recited to himself, and it brought,/Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery. What ebbing and flowing and turbidity would Sophocles be reminded of listening to the sea in Cannes tonight? Who was ebbing, who flowing? Was Sophocles his real name? Or did he, too, use a nom de plume? Oedipus at Colonus, by Malcolm Harte, now dead.
He wondered if Penelope had also read the Tribune that day and what she had felt, if she had felt anything at all, when she had come across the name of Edward Brenner, another dead writer.
He heard the living-room door open and went in from the balcony. Anne’s face was still sullen. Without a word she picked up her drink and finished it with one swig. Maybe, he thought, I am not the only one in the family who drinks too much.
“Anything serious?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said, but the expression on her face didn’t match her words. “It’s just a boy I know in school.” She poured herself another drink. With very little soda, he noted. “Ah, Christ,” she said. “Nobody leaves you alone.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“He thinks he’s in love with me. He wants to marry me.” She plumped herself down despondently in the easy chair, cradling her drink, her long brown legs stretched out in front of her. “Prepare for visitors,” she said. “He said he’s coming over. Air fares’re ridiculously cheap these days, that’s the trouble. Anybody can follow anybody. One of the reasons I asked you to let me come here was to get away from him. You don’t mind, do you?”
“It’s as good a reason as any,” Craig said noncommitally.
“I thought I was in love with him, too,” she said. “For a hot month. I liked going to bed with him, maybe I still like going to bed with him. But marriage, for God’s sake!”
“I know I’m being old-fashioned,” Craig said, “but what’s so awful about a boy wanting to marry a girl he’s in love with?”
“Everything. You don’t see Gail McKinnon rushing off and getting married to any half-baked jock college boy, do you? You don’t see her sitting at home and popping television dinners into the oven, waiting for dear little hubby to come home from the office on the five-thirty commuters’ train, do you?”
“No, you don’t,” he said.
“I’m going to be my own woman first,” Anne said. “Like her. And then if I want to get married, my husband’ll know what the rules are.”
“Can’t you be your own woman, married?”
“Not with that stupid jock,” she said. “He’s not even a good jock. He got a scholarship to play football, he was all-state in high school, or all-idiot, or something like that, and the first week in practice with the varsity team, he tore his knee to bits, and he can’t even play football anymore. That’s the kind of fellow he is. Ah, maybe I would marry him if he was smart or ambitious, if I thought he was going to amount to something. His father owns a grain and feed business in San Bernardino, and all he wants is to go into the grain and feed business in San Bernardino. San Bernardino, for God’s sake! Bury me not on the lone prairie. He says he’s not against women working. Until they have children, of course. In this day and age! With all the things happening in the world, wars, revolutions, crazy men with hydrogen bombs, Blacks being gunned down, women finally standing up and asking to be treated like human beings. I know I sound adolescent and naïve, and I don’t know what the hell I expect I can do about any of it, but I know I don’t want to wind up teaching kids the multiplication table in San Bernardino just because some big California lunk has got a fix on me. I tell you, Daddy, sex is the biggest goddamn trap ever invented, and I’m not having any of it. The worst thing is, when I heard his voice on the telephone saying, ‘Anne, I can’t bear it,’ I felt as though all my insides were melting into one big stupid syrupy lump. Ah, shit! I wouldn’t care if he didn’t have a penny, if he walked around barefooted, if he only wanted to do something, join a commune and bake organic bread or run for Congress or be a nuclear physicist or an explorer or anything. I’m not all that freaked out myself, but I’m not all that square, either.” She stopped, stared at Craig. “Am I? Do you think so?”
“No,” Craig said. “I don’t think so.”
“I just don’t want to live in the nineteenth century. Ah, what a day,” she said bitterly. “He had to come over and sit next to me in the library. Limping from his goddamn knee. With long hair and a blond beard. You can’t tell what people are like from the way they look anymore. And now he’s coming over here to moon away at me with his big baby-blue eyes, flexing his goddamn biceps and walking around the beach looking as though he ought to be on a marble pedestal somewhere in Thrace. What do you think I ought to do—run away?”
“That’s up to you,” Craig said. “Isn’t it?” So that’s what had happened to her in the last six months.
She put her glass down roughly. Some of the drink spilled over on the table. She stood up. “Don’t be surprised if I’m not here when you get back from wherever you’re going,” she said.
“Just leave word where I can reach you,” he said.
“Have you got any pills?” she said. “I’m all jangled. I’ll never
get any sleep tonight.”
Modern father, after having plied his daughter with drink during the evening and having listened without comment or demur to her description of her carnal relations with a young man she scorned to marry, he went into the bathroom and returned with two Seconals to assure her night’s rest. When he was twenty, he remembered, he had slept undrugged, even under bombing and occasional shell-fire. He had also been a virgin. Insomnia began with liberty. “Here,” he said, handing her the pills. “Sleep well.”
“Thanks, Daddy,” she said, taking the pills and throwing them into her bag. She picked up a script. “Wake me in the morning before you leave and I’ll come down and have breakfast with you.”
“That would be nice,” he said. He did not mention the possibility that there might be other company present for the same meal. Or that she might expect the waiter to look at her oddly. He took her to the door, kissed her good night, and watched her go down the corridor toward the elevator with her pills and her problems. Even now, he noticed, she was imitating, just a little, Gail McKinnon’s way of walking.
He didn’t feel like sleeping. He fixed himself a fresh drink, looked at it thoughtfully before taking the first sip. Was it possible that he did drink too much, as Anne had said. The censorious young.
He picked up a copy of The Three Horizons and began to read. He read thirty pages. They didn’t make much sense to him. I’ve reread it too often, he thought, it’s gone dead on me. He couldn’t tell whether he should be ashamed of it or not. At that same moment, perhaps, Walter Klein in his castle and Anne upstairs in her single room were reading the same thirty pages. He was being judged. The thought made him uneasy. He noticed that he had finished his drink as he read. He looked at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock. He still wasn’t sleepy.
He went onto the balcony and looked out. The sea was higher than before, the noise of the waves greater. The traffic on the Croisette had diminished. American voices floated up, women’s laughter. Women should be forbidden to laugh outside your window after midnight, he thought, when you are alone.
Then he saw Anne coming out from under the porte-cochère. She was wearing her raincoat over the yellow organdy dress. He watched as she crossed the street. Two or three men who were passing by glanced at her, he saw, but kept on walking. Anne went down the steps to the beach. He saw her shadowy form moving close to the water’s edge, outlined against the luminous gleam of the breakers. She walked slowly, disappeared into the darkness.
He checked an impulse to hurry after her. If she had wanted to be with him, she would have let him know. There was a certain point at which you no longer could hope to protect your child.
The young spoke candidly, endlessly, shockingly, about themselves to you, but in the long run you didn’t really know any more about them than your father in his time had known about you.
He went back into the room, had his hand on the whisky bottle, when the knock came at the door.
When he awoke the next morning in the tumbled bed, he was alone. There was a note for him in Gail’s handwriting on the desk in the living room. “Am I a better lay than my mother?” she had written.
He called her hotel, but the operator said Miss McKinnon had gone out.
All those big masculine writers were wrong, Craig thought, it was actually the vagina that was the instrument of revenge.
He picked up the phone again and called Anne’s room and told her to come down for breakfast. When she came down, in her bathrobe, he didn’t tell her he had seen her leave the hotel the night before.
When the waiter came in with the two breakfasts, he looked at Anne the way Craig had known he would look. He didn’t tip the man.
ON a curve, a Peugeot loaded with children and going ninety miles an hour nearly hit him head on. He swerved, just avoiding the ditch alongside the road. He drove slowly and carefully after that, wary of all Frenchmen on wheels and not enjoying the views of the vineyards and olive groves through which the road ran or the occasional glimpses of the sea off to his left.
He was in no hurry to get to Marseilles. He had not yet decided what to say to Constance. If he was going to say anything. He wasn’t sure that he was a good enough actor to be able to pretend successfully that nothing had happened. He wasn’t certain that he wished to pretend that nothing had happened.
The night had shaken him. This time there had been no coquetry or refusal. Wordlessly, in the dark, with the sound of the sea outside the window, Gail had accepted him, gently, gravely. Her hands were soft, her mouth sweet, her touch delicate and slow. He had forgotten the skin of young girls. He had expected avidity, or if not that, brusqueness, or even resentment. Instead, she had been … Well, he thought, the best word he could find was welcoming, profoundly welcoming. At the back of his mind a thought flickered at the edge of consciousness—This is better than anything I’ve had in my whole life. He recognized the danger. But some time during the night he had said, “I love you.”
He had felt tears on her cheek.
And then in the morning there had been that harsh joke, the note on the desk. Who the hell could her mother have been?
As he approached Marseilles, he drove even more slowly.
When he got to the hotel, there was a note from Constance. She would be back some time after five, she had reserved a room adjoining hers for him, she loved him. And there was a message at the concierge’s desk. Mr. Klein had called and would like him to call back.
He followed the clerk up to his room. The door between his room and Constance’s was standing open. When the clerk had left and the porter had put down his bag, he went into Constance’s room. Her familiar comb and brush were on the bureau, and a linen dress that he recognized was hanging outside a closet door to shake out the wrinkles. The rooms themselves were dark and hot and heavily furnished. There was a great deal of noise coming in from the street, even though the windows were closed.
He went back into his own room and sat on the bed, his hand on the telephone. When he picked it up, he started to give the number of Gail’s hotel to the operator, then corrected himself and asked for Klein’s number.
Klein answered himself. He was a man who was never more than five feet from a telephone. “How’s the great man?” Klein asked. “And what is he doing in Marseilles?”
“It’s the heroin center of the world,” Craig said. “Haven’t you heard?”
“Listen, Jesse,” Klein said, “hold on a minute. I have to go to another phone. There’re a lot of people in here with me and …”
“I’ll hold,” Craig said. There were always a lot of people in there with Klein.
A moment later he heard the click as Klein picked up the other phone. “Now we can talk,” Klein said. “You’re coming back to Cannes, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In a couple of days or so.”
“You’ll get back before everybody breaks camp, won’t you?”
“If necessary,” Craig said.
“I think it’ll be useful,” Klein said. “Look, I read that Harte script you sent me. I like it. I think I may be able to put something together. Right here. This week. Are you interested?”
“It all depends.”
“It all depends on what?”
“On what you mean by putting something together.”
“I think I may have a lead,” Klein said. “With a director. I won’t tell you his name because he hasn’t said yes or no yet. But he’s read it. And nobody’s said a word so far about money. And there’s many a slip et cetera … You understand.”
“Yes,” Craig said. “I understand.”
“What I mean,” Klein said, “is that I think it’d be worth your while to get back here as soon as possible. But there’re no promises. You understand that, too, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Another thing,” Klein went on. “I think the script needs work.”
“I never heard of a script that didn’t,” Craig said.
“If Shakespeare showed up with the manuscript of Hamlet, the first man he showed it to would say, ‘I think this script needs work.’”
“I don’t know who this fellow Harte is, but he’s no Shakespeare,” Klein said. “And I have the feeling he’s shot his load on this draft. I mean, I think whatever director agrees to do it would want to bring in another writer for a second version. Before I talk to the director, I have to know what you think about that.”
Craig hesitated. Maybe, he thought, this was the moment to announce that there was nobody named Malcolm Harte. But he said, “I’d have to talk it over with whoever was finally going to do it. See what his ideas are.”
“Fair enough,” Klein said. “One more thing. Do you want me to tell Murphy I’m handling this, or will you? He’s bound to hear. And soon.”
“I’ll tell him,” Craig said.
“Good,” Klein said. “It’s going to be a rough ten minutes.”
“Let me worry about it.”
“Okay. Worry. Can I reach you at the Marseilles number if something comes up?”
“If I move,” Craig said, “I’ll let you know.”
“I don’t know what’s so great about Marseilles, for Christ’s sake,” Klein said. “We’re having a ball here.”
“I bet.”
“Keep your fingers crossed, kid,” Klein said, and hung up. Craig looked at the telephone. He who lives by the telephone, he thought irrelevantly, dies by the telephone. He supposed he should have been elated by Klein’s reaction to the script. Not wildly elated but cautiously, quietly elated. Even if nothing ever came of it in the end, here was some proof that he hadn’t been wasting his time entirely.
He picked up the phone again and asked for the Carlton. Anne must have read the script by now, and it might help to know what she thought of it. Also, good father, having left her with the problem of the young man arriving from California, perhaps he could offer some useful advice. If she asked him for any.
