by Irwin Shaw
“May I walk with you?” she asked. Tip of the tongue again, he noticed.
“Of course,” Jack said, and they started walking, side by side, not touching. “I’d be delighted. If you’re not in a hurry.”
“I have nothing to do until five,” she said.
“What do you have to do then?” Jack asked.
“I work,” she said. “In a travel bureau. I send people off to places I would rather go myself.”
The sun was behind the clouds and the clouds were piling up ominously, slate black, in the north, and coming over Rome in invading formations and the wind was making torn poster edges flap against the ocher walls of the buildings with snapping, whip-like reports. It was going to rain soon.
They passed a doorway where a ragged, bent woman with a dirty child in her arms was begging. Holding her child with one arm, the woman ran after Jack, saying, “Americano, americano,” holding out her other hand, clawlike and filthy, for charity.
Jack stopped and gave her a hundred-lire piece and the woman turned, without a word of thanks, and went back to her doorway, where she crouched once more against the stone. Jack felt the woman staring after him, ungrateful, unappeased, and he had the feeling that the hundred lire he had given her did not make up for the warmth of the meal he had just eaten, for the pretty girl by his side, for the luxury of the hotel rooms he was approaching.
“It is to remind us,” Veronica said soberly. “Women like that.”
“Remind us of what?”
“Remind us of how close we are to Africa here in Italy,” she said, “and how we pay for it.”
“There’re beggars in America, too,” Jack said.
“Not the same kind,” the girl said. She was walking quickly, as though to get away from the woman and her child.
“Have you been in America?” Jack asked.
“No,” Veronica said. “But I know.”
They walked in silence for a moment, and crossed a street and turned a corner, passing a grocery window heaped with cheeses, sausages, and flasks of Chianti wrapped in straw.
“Do you mind,” Veronica asked, abruptly, her voice low, “that your wife was dancing at three o’clock this morning in Paris with another man?”
“No,” Jack said, thinking, That is not quite true.
“Americans marry better than Italians,” Veronica said. She said it flatly, but with bitterness.
Well, Jack thought, smiling inwardly, I could find you an argument on that subject.
“Anyway,” he said, “there’s a good chance she wasn’t dancing at three o’clock this morning.”
“You mean maybe Jean-Baptiste was lying?”
“Inventing,” Jack said.
“There’s a bad man there,” Veronica said. “Mixed up with a very good man.”
Then Jack felt the wetness on his lip and knew he was bleeding again. Embarrassed, he stopped and got out his handkerchief and put it to his nose.
“What is it?” Veronica looked at him, alarmed.
“Nothing,” he said, his voice muffled a little. “A nosebleed.” He tried to make a joke of it. “The Royal disease.”
“Does it do it like this all the time? For no reason?” Veronica asked.
“Only in Rome,” he said. “Somebody hit me last night.”
“Somebody hit you?” She sounded incredulous. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Jack shook his head, annoyed at the scene, at the blood, which was flowing heavily now. “As a warning.” He stood there, depressed and shaken, weighed down, all over again, on the busy daytime street, by the dreams, the premonitions, the images of the dead, the nearness of danger, the loneliness and fear of the night. “We’d better get you to your hotel quickly,” Veronica said. She hailed a taxi and helped him in, like an invalid. Her hand was firm and gentle on his arm and he was glad that he wasn’t alone this time.
At the hotel, she insisted upon paying for the taxi, and got the key from the desk and stood close to him in the elevator, watching carefully, ready to hold him, as though she were afraid he was going to fall. The blood kept coming.
In the elevator, trying to look polite, unbloody, ordinary, for the sake of the tall boy in livery who pushed the buttons with his white-gloved hand, Jack had a curious, clear after-image. He was sure that while he had been waiting in the middle of the lobby for Veronica to get the key, he had seen Despière and a woman in a blue suit, seated close together, talking earnestly, in the long, empty lounge that stretched away from the lobby. And now, rising in the gilt cage from floor to floor, he was sure that at one point Despière had looked up, recognized him, smiled, then ducked his head.
“Did you see them?” he asked Veronica standing protectively next to him.
“See whom?”
“Despière and a woman,” Jack said. “In the lounge.”
“No,” Veronica said, looking at him strangely. “I didn’t see anybody.”
“No matter,” Jack said thickly. “No matter at all.” Now the living are haunting me, too, he thought, in broad daylight.
In the hotel bedroom, he took off his jacket and opened his collar and pulled down his tie and lay back on the bed. Veronica hung up his jacket neatly in the wardrobe, like a meticulous housewife, and found a clean handkerchief in the bureau drawer and gave it to him. Then she stood over him for a moment, her outlines vague in the dimness of the curtained room, with the sound of the new rain lashing at the windows. Then she lay down beside him, without a word, and took him comfortingly in her arms. They lay there together in silence, listening to the rain, in the warm, wavy, watery obscurity of the dark afternoon. After a while he dropped the handkerchief away from his face because he didn’t need it any more, and he turned his head and kissed her throat, pressing his lips hard against the firm, warm skin, shutting out everything that was not that room, that moment, that bed, shutting out omens and premonitions, wounds and blood, memories and loyalties.
He turned and lay on his back, her head on his shoulder, the long hair a dark blur against the dull, hidden gleam of his skin. Slowly, he returned to himself, slowly he became the visitor in apartment 654, husband, father, sane, deliberate, aloof, reasonable. He looked at Veronica’s shadowy face beside him, the face of a stranger, the face of a girl who, no more than two hours before, he had thought, looked stupid and self-satisfied. She was lying with her eyes wide-open, staring at the ceiling, a small, placid, public smile on her lips. Yes, he thought reasonably, there is something stupid about her face. He remembered his first judgment of her at the table on the street in front of the café—a glossy female brute. He smiled, thinking, What marvelous uses there are for glossy female brutes.
They lay together in the secret rain, with the noise of Rome outside the walls muffled by curtains and shutters and windows.
He chuckled softly to himself.
“Why do you laugh?” she asked, without moving, speaking next to his ear in her soft, trumpet voice.
“I was laughing because I’m so clever,” he said.
“What is so clever?”
“I had it all figured out,” he said. “At lunch. That you were going to go off, finally, with Jean-Baptiste.”
“You thought I was his girl?”
“Yes. Aren’t you?”
“No,” she said. “I am not his girl.” She took Jack’s hand and kissed it, on the palm. “I am your girl.”
“When did you decide that?” he asked, pleased and surprised by the swift declaration, thinking, How long it has been since anything like this has happened to me.
Then it was her turn to chuckle. “I decided two nights ago,” she said.
“You hadn’t even met me two nights ago,” he said. “You didn’t know I existed.”
“I hadn’t met you,” she said. “But I knew you existed. I knew very well you existed. I saw your film, you see. You were so beautiful, so capable of love, I became your girl in a half-hour, sitting alone in a movie house.”
Maybe, later, Jack thought sorrowfully, I wi
ll laugh at this when I remember it, but I don’t feel like laughing now. “But, baby,” he said, “I was twenty years younger then. I was younger than you are now.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’m not the same man now,” he said, regretfully, feeling that this lovely, simple-minded, slightly foolish girl was being cheated, cheated by time and the tricky durability of celluloid, and that somehow he was taking advantage unfairly of that trick. “Not the same man at all.”
“When I was sitting there in the movie house,” she said, “I knew what it would be like if you made love to me.”
Jack laughed harshly. “I guess I ought to give you your money back,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you were paying for something you didn’t get,” he said, withdrawing his arm from under her head, letting her head fall back on the pillow. “You were paying for a twenty-two-year-old boy who vanished a long time ago.”
“No,” Veronica said slowly, “I wasn’t paying for anything. And he didn’t vanish as you say, the twenty-two-year-old boy. When I sat in the restaurant, listening to you tell about Mr. Delaney and that poor friend of yours with the play, I saw that boy was still there.” Then she chuckled and moved closer to him, turning her head and whispering into his ear. “No, I am not telling the whole truth. It is not exactly the same as I imagined in the movie house. It is better, much better.”
Then they laughed together. Thank God for fans, Jack thought basely. He put his arm around her again, his hand caught in the rough, dark hair. Well, he thought, delighted, and I thought I had received my salary for that picture long ago. Now it turns out that I have what the Screen Actors Guild calls residual rights. Rich residual rights.
He turned toward her and put his hand on her.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
“Something particularly Italian,” he said. “Is this particularly Italian?”
7
HE WAS AWARE OF a knocking. He opened his eyes reluctantly. The room was dark and for a moment he was floating in time, not knowing where he was, what hour of the day or night it was, and not caring, happy in soft, clockless depths. Then the knocking came again, timidly, and he saw the door from the living room open a crack and a thin shaft of yellow light slant into the bedroom, and he knew he was in his bed in apartment 654 in the hotel in Rome and he knew he was alone.
“Come in,” he said, pulling the covers up around his neck, because he was naked under the twisted sheets and blankets.
The door opened wider and he saw it was the chambermaid, the old lady, with his jacket. She stood there, smiling, gap-toothed, holding the jacket up on its hanger like a trophy of the chase, See what I have caught today in the Roman jungle: one American jacket, stained with American blood.
“La giacca,” she said, in a happy whine. “La giacca del signore. E pulita.”
She shuffled across the carpet, in a thin aroma of old-lady sweat, and hung the suit up in the wardrobe, stroking and fondling it as though it were her dearest pet. Jack would have liked to give her a tip, but he couldn’t get out of bed naked in front of the old lady. It wouldn’t shock the old lady, he was sure (what scenes she must have come upon, walking into the hotel bedrooms of Rome for thirty years, with a towel over her arm, what surprised nakedness of body and soul), but she would have to wait for another time for her hundred lire.
“Grazie,” Jack said, hunching under the covers, conscious of the slight perfume of Veronica’s body that clung to the sheets. “Grazie tanto.”
“Prego, prego,” she whined, her eyes roving around the room, taking it all in, cognizant of everything, no clues ever lost on her, Holmes with dugs, in a blue apron, compiling her endless backstairs thunderous dossier in this Christian city. She backed out of the room, deprived of her hundred lire, her face an accusation of the everlasting meanness of the rich, poverty once more, and not unexpectedly, further impoverished. She didn’t close the door, and Jack heard her going out through the living room grumbling to herself, the dying sound of her passage a grandmother’s echo of the roar the crowd must have made outside the Kremlin walls in 1917. He heard the salon door close behind her and he stretched luxuriously in the warm bed, listening to the chug of the steam in the radiators, allowing the memory of the afternoon to flood deliciously over him. Well, now, he thought lazily, it wasn’t such a bad thing that the nose began to bleed, or else what excuse would she have been able to make to come up to the room? The next time I see the drunk who hit me, maybe I’ll shake the bastard’s hand.
He reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, and looked at his watch. Seven o’clock. Insomnia, there are cures available. There was no sign that Veronica had been there, unless you accepted the frail, close fragrance that clung to the sheets as a sign. He wondered when she had left. He remembered hearing a Frenchwoman say once that it was rude for a man to fall asleep after making love. Oh, you rude, uncultivated American, he thought comfortably, oh you Comanche.
He thought of his wife and tested himself for guilt. He felt a lot of things, lying there in the warm tumbled bed, but he didn’t feel guilty. In the eight years that he had been married to Hélène, he had had nothing to do with other women. He had thought of it often enough, of course, and approached it once or twice, but had always pulled back at the last moment. Not from a sense of morality—his moral sense was involved in other ways, and he had been through too much marriage and seen too much of other marriages to be able to believe that physical fidelity was the rule rather than the exception, in the age and in the places in which he lived. He had been faithful until that afternoon to Hélène because—Because he loved her? There were times, like the afternoon at the airport, when he didn’t love her at all. Because he felt guilty at not being able to love her enough, and scrupulously kept to the form of the marriage, hoping that one day the substance would materialize? Because he was grateful to her for her goodness and her beauty and her love for him? Because he had been married too often and had suffered and had made others suffer too much? Because, after all the riot, he was satisfying himself with comfort and routine and cannily renouncing passion? Well, he thought, this afternoon, comfort and routine had been forgotten, and well forgotten. Still, if there had been any danger of his falling in love with Veronica, he told himself, he would not have let her come up to the room. But this way—he moved lazily in the bed, turning toward the place where Veronica’s head had lain and where two long dark hairs webbed the pillow—this way (O, benevolent accident) no harm would come to anyone, and maybe a great deal of good. What the hell, he thought, it’s only two weeks.
As for Hélène (dancing—one reported, one invented, one telephoned, one lied or didn’t lie—in a night club at three in the morning)—he wasn’t sure what she did, at all. She was Parisienne, her religion was fashionable French, in other words, almost nonoperative on questions like this—she was beautiful and attractive to men, she had had several affairs he knew of, before marrying him, and probably others he didn’t know of, she was out of the house almost every afternoon on the hazy and flexible errands women invent for themselves in Paris, and he made no investigation of how she used her time. He knew that if he were to come into a Paris drawing room and see her for the first time, he would take it for granted that she was a woman who took lovers. Well, if she does, he thought, with the tolerance of recent pleasure warm in his veins, and if she doesn’t tell me about it, and if it makes her feel as good as I do now, more power to her.
He threw back the covers and got out of bed, whistling tunelessly under his breath. He flipped on the switch for the chandelier and. looked at the bureau for a note from Veronica. There was nothing there. He was certain she wouldn’t have gone without leaving her address and telephone number and he padded, barefooted and naked, into the salon to search for it. But there was nothing there, either. He shrugged, undisturbed. Maybe it’s better that way, he thought, love and farewell, maybe she’s smarter than I give her credit for being.
<
br /> He went back through the bedroom, still whistling. Then he recognized what he was whistling. Walkin’ My Baby Back Home. He stopped whistling and went into the bathroom to turn the water on for a bath. When he switched on the light he saw, scrawled in lipstick on the mirror over one of the basins, a large crimson V. He grinned, looking at it. No, he thought, that doesn’t mean farewell. The phone will ring eventually.
Happily, he turned on the water for the bath. There was a wide full-length mirror in the bathroom and he stopped in front of it and regarded himself thoughtfully, standing there naked, with the steam of the bath rising in clouds behind him. When he was young, he had spent considerable time looking at his body in the mirror. He had played football in high school and part of his freshman year in college, until he had torn a cartilage in his knee and the doctors had told him he had to quit or risk being lame for life. He had had the body of an athlete then, and he had stared into the glass with almost embarrassed pride in the sloping powerful shoulders, the flat ridges of muscle across the stomach, the long, heavy legs so finely conditioned that with each move you would see the small play of the tendons under the smooth skin. And when he had gone into the theatre he worked out in the gymnasium four times a week, on the bags, sparring, on the bars, so that no matter what claims any role might make on him, his body would be able to respond completely and with grace. But after the war, after the time in the hospital, with all the muscles gone slack and soft from the morphia months, and the scars from the grafting still red on his skin, and the curious, thick disarrangement of his jaw, he had avoided looking at himself, to spare himself pain. And since then, when a mirror happened to surprise him, in a locker room or in a strange bedroom, he had observed himself with distaste, noting critically the growing heaviness, the thickening of the years. He had recovered completely—the invalid’s flabbiness had disappeared, and his body looked powerful and healthy—but the grace and suppleness had gone, he felt. The body of the boy who had raced down the field under punts and leaped high into the air for passes was only a memory, submerged in the grossness of time.
