The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  By this point in the conversation I was relaxed, feeling almost at home, certainly not in the state of tongue-tied awe I had feared. And the rest of the evening—which went on until almost midnight, dinner having been brought in at 8:30—was the same. In five minutes the man had put me at ease, ministered a small dose of flattery, and set the tone as only a true director can do. Catherine clearly had his confidence, and she, unlike some of his other secretaries, who, she had told me, were often treated abominably, seemed to be immune to his broadsides. Contrary to my fears, the Scotch had simply put me in a state of momentary grace, and the food, unlike any I had eaten for months, was as superb as the wine (when I discreetly checked the label, it was a Château Latour).

  Most of the evening was spent listening to the master, who, with his otherworldly proportions, seemed more like Jove than a mere mortal. He had plans, great plans. Most immediately, getting the damn Othello finished. Then more Shakespeare and Don Quixote. I still kept looking at the door, expecting others, hordes no doubt, but it remained obstinately closed.

  Next evening, over dinner at Raffy’s, Catherine asked me what I thought.

  “Is he always that friendly and forthcoming?” I asked.

  “More often than you’d think. But he’ll also fly into rages. He does not suffer fools gladly, and he thinks a great many people—especially in the world of movies—are damn fools.”

  “He and my father should meet.” I saw that I had lost her. “Dad’s favorite expression is ‘damn fools.’ He thinks the whole world, not just the movies, is peopled with them. In any event, I found your boss as brilliant as he was gracious.”

  “He liked you,” she said. “It’s that simple.”

  Catherine and I kept seeing each other for the next couple of months, at least two or three times a week. Neither of us was in love, but we enjoyed each other’s company and felt no pressure to move beyond that. Of all my Left Bank friends she had met—for on the days when we did not see each other, I knew she was part of another life on the Right Bank, a life of diplomats and bankers and businessmen, of actors and writers and directors, and though from time to time she invited me to one of these soirees, I did not feel comfortable there and generally declined—the one who attracted and intrigued her the most was Ellsworth Kelly, with whom we had dinner once or twice at the rue du Sabot. Ellsworth also liked Catherine, whom he found intelligent and uncommonly knowledgeable about modern art. He invited her to view his work on the famous fourth-floor room on the Île St. Louis. She loved his work—the strong colors, the clean lines, the self-assurance—and was charmed by the man. “I’d like to sleep with him,” she declared one day. She didn’t feel the need to ask whether that might bother me, but later, when I posed myself the question, I realized it wouldn’t in the least. She shared her strategies with me, hoping for advice. “I’ve seen him often enough; it’s not that he’s lacked the opportunity. So what is he waiting for?” she wondered aloud. “For me to ask him?” When, gently one day, I felt compelled to tell her that Ellsworth was—how did I put it? the term “gay” had not yet been invented—not really attracted to women, she was crushed. “How do you know?” she asked. I shrugged. “I just do.” “Frankly, I don’t believe it for one minute. He’s really so … so masculine!” I agreed, but added some imbecilic remark about looks sometimes being deceiving. When later we went to bed, I felt she was not really with me. Suddenly she sat up, her pert breasts staring me in the face. “Want to bet,” she said, “that I can make it with him?” “I don’t want to take your hard-earned money.” “Chicken!” “All right: to make it meaningful, five thousand francs.” We shook. “When will the test take place?” I asked. “I’ll keep you informed,” she said. “And how will I know that a conquest truly occurred?” She looked hurt. “If you won’t take my word,” she said, “just check out the flush on Ellsworth’s cheeks next time you see him. His only problem is, he hasn’t yet met the right woman.” With that, she settled back and fell into a deep, self-satisfied sleep.

  * * *

  Roughly a week later we met for dinner. She was wearing a superb new burgundy gown—at least I had never seen it before—and a flower in her hair, all heralds of victory, I assumed. Our eyes met, I probed the depths of hers: nothing. She was making me sweat it. So what if Ellsworth had yielded to her charms for one night; it did not change the basics. But if he had, then I had lost.

  Suddenly her tightly clasped hand slid across the table, met mine, uncurled my fingers, and slipped a note into my palm. A note describing her conquest in intimate detail, blow by blow? I couldn’t wait to read it. I opened my fingers to see in my palm not a folded billet-doux but a fresh five-thousand-franc note.

  “I failed,” she said, “miserably. I could have sworn…”

  I slid my hand across the table and returned her money. “I can’t take this,” I said, “it would be like cheating.”

  She slid it back. “A bet’s a bet,” she said. “I tell you what: Can we use it to have a bottle of champagne? Waiter,” I called, “a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, bien frappé!” It wasn’t Château Latour ’29, but hey, it was pretty damn good!

  15

  Brendan Incoming

  THE NOISE WAS DEAFENING: first a loud knock, then a voice, unless the voice was first and the knock following. Sequences, when one is deep asleep, are not readily discernible, but the result is the same: supine, one bolts upward, suddenly awake but still lost in dreams, so that for the moment one has no idea where one is. Or, sometimes, even who.

  “SEAVER! I’m looking for RICHARD SEAVER. HIMSELF! I know you’re in there, SO OPEN UP!”

  The dim bed light, now on, showed barely half past twelve, so it could have been anyone of the male species. The voice at the door was deep baritone, more toward bass. And had I detected, in the words still ringing, still roaring, more than a touch of the Irish? Drunken Irish? Or was that a redundancy?

  “Who is it?” I ventured, suddenly ashamed at being caught asleep so early by one of my night-owl friends, of whom there were many. A dozen flashed through my mind, sitting in all the old familiar places, the evening just getting into high gear, red wine flowing, pot boiling, dried hemp hallucinating, with weary me, long prostrate, more recently supine, now on the vertical frantically stuffing legs into trousers.

  “WHO IS IT?” I shouted, trying hard to match the door-side decibels.

  “BRENDAN,” the voice said. “BRENDAN BEHAN’S THE NAME. SO OPEN THE FUCK UP! WE NEED TO TALK.”

  Wary, I unlatched the door to see a hulk virtually filling the frame. Full, round faced, body rotund but still young, eyes glowing, with life or drink. Doubtless both, for the undeniable odor of whiskey, perhaps Scotch but on second thought more likely Irish, the difference for me is virtually indiscernible but for those two peoples—I refer to the Scots and the Irish—as distinctive as race, followed him in. (I trust you have unraveled the syntax.)

  “What took you so long?” he said. “I was out there in the cold for a fucking fifteen minutes.”

  “Cold?” I said. “It’s fucking August.” I’ve mentioned I tend to lapse into the vernacular of those around me, a failure, I know. I was now fully awake.

  “I go by the mercury, not the month,” he said, taking a seat. “I tell you, it’s fucking cold outside … And you know why you didn’t answer right away? You were fucking fast asleep!”

  “I was fucking reading!” I lied.

  “Show me the book!” he roared.

  I’d only known the guy for a scant minute, and already I felt his prisoner, under deep interrogation, sure to screw up and be led directly to the nearest jail. Still, I pulled the book from the hastily shoved-together covers and handed it to him. He looked at the front, disdainfully at the back, and tossed it to me.

  “French!” he said. “I don’t read fucking Frog language.”

  It was time to turn the tables. “I was just getting ready to go out,” I proclaimed. “I tend to sleep by day and operate by night. You might say my nights are
white…”

  “Can’t you fucking speak English?” he countered, and suddenly I felt that, though not even actually acquainted, we were moving quickly toward the endgame, my king in severe jeopardy, my queen cowering, despite her wealth of twenty-seven possible moves. Who was this Gaelic monster who had just invaded my den, my world? “Anyway,” he added, struggling to his feet and almost falling in the effort, so that I realized he had been drinking most of the day, “since you’re going out, fetch your wallet and let’s go.”

  We repaired to the Royal. My fear we might run into the gang was offset by the thought that this well-lit place would close in under two hours, and I could easily lose this Behan by pretending I had a romantic rendezvous at which he was unwelcome. A surefire strategy. Sursum corda, Seaver, you’ve dealt with stranger types before. Or had I? For his visit was not random, as I had first assumed.

  “Read your piece in Merlin,” he was saying, “about this man Beckett. I’d never heard of him. If he’s half as good as you make him out, I have to meet him.”

  I must confess, despite my early-morning antipathy, the endearing brogue was eroding my ire, especially after Mr. Behan had ordered us a second round of whiskey, his neat, mine tempered with a touch of soda.

  “You mean, on the basis of that piece you came all the way from Ireland just to meet Beckett?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I missed Joyce. I hated that fucking Yeats. Flann O’Brien leaves me cold. He’s so fucking Irish. The same goes for John Millington, who stuck his fucking ear to the fucking wall to overhear how the peasants really talk, then put it into his fucking plays as though he’d made it up himself! Damned thief! Anyway, from what you wrote about Beckett, he sounds like the real thing. So tell me how I find him.”

  I shook my head. “Actually, I’ve never met him—”

  “What? And I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “Believe it or not, it’s true. I’ve read everything he’s written, but he’s a very private person. Very hard to get to.”

  “But I assume he’s read your fuckin’ piece about him.”

  “I don’t know. I sent it to him, but I’ve never heard back. He may have hated it.”

  “Hated it? How could he, when you make him out a fuckin’ genius? Better than Joyce, didn’t you say? When I first read that, I thought you were fuckin’ crazy. Then I thought: What if he’s fuckin’ right?”

  Mr. Behan, I noticed, had begun to drop the g from his favorite term. Did this linguistic progress mean we had moved to a newer, higher plane in our budding relationship? Or was it a downward, merely more familiar move? In any event, he was continuing, assuming he had ever paused.

  “So you sent it to him. That means you know his address.” His right index finger pointed skyward, in Gaelic triumph.

  I shook my head, feeling suddenly very protective of this mythic creature I had never met. I knew I was procrastinating at best, lying at worst, for I did know exactly where the man lived. But revealing that arcane knowledge would somehow be a betrayal. “No, I sent it to him via his French publisher,” I said. “Now that I think of it, I have no way of knowing if the publisher even forwarded it. He may have thought it not worthy of his favorite author.”

  “So you know his publisher!” Behan went on, looking more and more like the bulldog he was, on a newly hot scent. “Just give me his name and I’ll go see him, since you won’t help me—”

  “Damn it, Behan,” I said, “it’s not that I won’t help you. It’s simply that I can’t.” But I knew that, too, was a lie.

  “To tell the truth,” Behan was saying, “I didn’t actually come here of me own free will. Me fuckin’ countree expelled me from its hallowed shores. You see, I’ve spent most of me life in jail. I was a Borstal boy at sixteen, then spent the next seven years in one penal institution or another…”

  Suddenly I pictured the young man beside me wielding a butcher knife or an ax—guns were forbidden—as he committed one heinous crime after another. And I had opened my door to him without so much as asking who sent him?

  “Politics,” he said. “I was part of the IRA, starting when I was a fuckin’ kid. They let me out six years ago, but I knew they were watching me every move. I managed to keep them guessing all that time, but they simply kicked me out and deported me to France.”

  “So it wasn’t my Beckett piece that brought you…”

  “Yes and no. I’d read the essay and decided I must meet the man—only the Irish can understand the Irish, you know—but the timing wasn’t me choice. You see, I’m a playwright in me own right—pretty funny, that, no? ‘playwright’ … ‘right’?—and I gather this Beckett fellow is, too. So we have a lot to talk about.”

  The waiters had already begun stacking chairs on tables, a none too subtle sign. Time for me to look at my watch and talk of my romantic rendezvous, but again he took me by surprise.

  “Listen, Seaver, you look tired, so I don’t want to keep you up any longer. By the way, you didn’t fool me with this white-night shit. You were asleep when I knocked, and you’re ready to return to the arms of Morpheus”—I couldn’t believe he had actually used the term, but checking, there it fucking was—“so, let us pay and go.” I took note of the word “us” and glanced to see if he was reaching for his wallet, as I was. No, not the slightest movement. I paid, rose to my full height, and extended my hand, my not very subtle indication that the night was over. Taking it, he looked almost boyish—bad-boyish, but nonetheless—and for a very brief moment, I felt that under other circumstances, I might have found a new friend, whom I would like to see again in a year or two, perhaps three, when with a sly grin he said: “Good God, man, it’s going on three, and I haven’t a place to stay. Would it be all right if I bunked with you tonight? I saw you had an extra bed. Just till I find a place tomorrow first thing.”

  What could a man do? If loving one’s enemies was part of the Christian creed—a dubious part, but still—could I, even agnostically, if not atheistically, turn this mad Irishman away at such hour? I nodded, and side by side we made our way unsteadily back to the rue du Sabot. As we passed 7, rue Bernard Palissy, I started to say, “That’s Beckett’s publisher,” but caught myself just in time. Safely home, I pulled from the cupboard a pillow, blanket, and sheets, quickly made up the spare bed, and turned toward my own, when a suddenly seductive voice behind me said: “Sure and I wouldn’t mind a nightcap before I turn in. I do hope you’ll join me.” If I’d had a gun, I might well have shot him. I did have a hammer, but would that have made any impression on his thick skull? Instead, I pulled an almost full bottle of Scotch from its hiding place and poured us each a final drink, his neat, mine laced with an ounce or two of water.

  “You wouldn’t by chance have anything to eat handy?” he inquired as the hands moved past three into four.

  I rummaged and found some saucisson, which I carefully—very carefully—sliced, and some Camembert cheese, well over the hill, ready to run.

  “Food,” he said between munches, “is the great enabler.”

  I thought that profound, but asked what it meant.

  “To get on with the drinking,” he slurred. “Without food you pass out much too quickly.”

  “Ah,” I said, “of course … What did you do with the bottle?”

  “Last time I looked, you fuckin’ had it,” he murmured. “I t’ink it rolled under the fuckin’ bed.” He got down on all fours and peered. “There it is! You see, I never yet have lost sight of a bottle … Ah”—his voice was tinged with sadness—“it’s fuckin’ almost empty. How could that be?” He shook it, as if to restore life. At best there was a faint swish.

  He suggested the hour was perhaps appropriate for song. “Song?” I inquired. “At quarter to four?” “When better?” he asked, clearing his throat. “No, no!” I said with a vigorous shake of the head. “There are people living upstairs. Lots of people. Working people. They anger quickly when their sleep is disturbed. Call flics. Flics drag Irishman and American friend to
station across from St. Germain. Not good.” He seemed to get the message. “Maybe just one,” he said, “a simple Irish ballad. One of my favorites,” and the first line came out before I forced a halt by offering “one last snort.”

  Rosy-fingered dawn found us both in a state of deep slumber, not in our respective beds, but in the selfsame chairs wherein we had downed the last dregs of the trusty bottle, now supine, if not prostrate—it was hard to tell—on the harsh cement floor of my humble abode.