by Irwin Shaw
He was sitting up straight in the bed, smiling and healthy-looking, when Jack went out.
25
HE WAS BUBBLINGLY CHEERFUL as he drove back to the hotel. He felt a holiday desire to mark the occasion. The fears and hesitations of the last few days seemed remote and without foundation, now that the decision was finally made. He felt relieved that the event had proved he had underrated Delaney’s honesty and sense of justice, and he was grateful that his friend had lived up to an earlier estimate of his qualities. Mingled with all this was a sense of self-satisfaction. He had been called on for help, and he had come through. Although matters had swiftly become more complex than anyone had contemplated, and more dangerous, as Jack thought of Delaney now, he regarded him as a rescued man. And the rescue was Jack’s doing. It was very seldom, throughout his whole life, that Jack had been satisfied with himself, so this moment had an added dividend of originality to it.
Physically, he was fresh, and agreeably conscious of his hunger. He looked forward to the three martinis he was going to drink in Delaney’s honor and the dinner with Bresach and Holt. The sorrow over Despière’s death was as keen as ever, but it was pushed back in his consciousness by the optimism and excitement that came with the realization that he was making a new start in life. The risks he was running—the security he was giving up by leaving the government service, the pension he was forfeiting, the danger that none of the three pictures would ever be any good and that he would be left jobless and a failure as he approached fifty, only served, at that moment, to enhance his sense of youthful well-being. Risks lightly taken, dangers gaily run, were part of being young. Maybe the best part.
It is not difficult for Rome to seem the fairest city in the world in which to live, and that evening Jack was convinced it was exactly that. He decided to get Hélène down as soon as possible and start her looking for a house for the family. A house out in the Campagna, close enough to the city for daily visits, he decided, with a garden. Olive trees, vines (the warm, Biblical dream that haunts northerners), the sound of the children speaking Italian to the gardeners and maids, the easy access to the beaches in the hot weather. It would be nice to be rich again, too, after the long years of not being rich at all, not to have to worry about whether or not they could afford a new car, new clothes, a holiday…The independence and informality of his new job, where he would be more or less his own boss, able to speak on equal terms with anyone, promised an exhilarating change, after the years of being weighed down by the bulk of the governmental pyramid, the years of worrying whether some word he had said, some paper he had prepared, would unwittingly give aid to the Russians or incur some higher-up’s displeasure. There are more third-rate people among politicians and civil-servants and generals, he decided, with what he considered was newborn clarity, than among the people who make movies, and it is more difficult to avoid them and to keep yourself but of their power.
He sat erect on the front seat next to Guido, looking out happily at the city of Rome, its streets still busy under the street lamps, and even the blare of the car radio, playing “Volare, cantare,” could not dampen his spirits. He didn’t even ask Guido to turn the radio off.
When he got to the hotel, he told Guido he was going to bathe and change his clothes and would be down in fifteen minutes. He was whistling under his breath as he strode into the lobby, thinking of the bath that awaited him and the fresh clothes as fitting elements of the rites of purification and renewal before the next episode in his life.
As he came near the desk, he stopped.
Veronica was standing there.
Her head was down and she didn’t see him because she was scribbling a note on a piece of the hotel stationery.
Even with his first glance, he saw that she seemed very different from his memory of her. She was wearing a pale beaver coat that was obviously new, and her hair was combed upward and she was wearing a hat. She looked older than the girl to whom Despière had introduced him, less showy, but much more carefully groomed. After a moment, Jack walked up to the desk and stood next to Veronica, who did not look up from her writing. “Six fifty-four, please,” he said.
At the sound of his voice, Veronica stopped writing. She stared down at the piece of paper in front of her, then crumpled it and put it in an ashtray on the desk. Only then did she turn to face Jack. “It was for you,” she said. “This note. There’s no need now, is there?”
“No,” Jack said. He took the key from the man behind the desk. “Do you want to come upstairs with me?”
“No,” Veronica said. “Not with you.” She was speaking in quick whispers, without looking directly at him, so that, from a little distance, it would hardly seem that they were talking to each other. “I’ll follow you. I’ll take the back elevator. In two minutes.”
“What’s going on here?” Jack asked. “You don’t have to talk to me at all, if you don’t want to.”
“I must not be seen with you,” she said. “I am married now. I must be careful. I am going to leave here now and walk around the block once.”
“Oh, God,” Jack said. “Do you remember the number of my room?”
“I remember, I remember,” she said, and walked swiftly toward the door. Jack watched her, for a moment. Married or not married, her way of walking had not changed.
The knock on the door came promptly, and she came into the room with a little smile, at home, familiar, swinging her new fur coat, touching her smartly arranged hair. She looked around her casually, standing in the middle of the room. “Nothing much has changed here, has it?” she said. “Are you glad to see me?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I haven’t sorted out my feelings yet. At the moment, I’m exasperated. Do you want to take your coat off?”
“I’m terribly sorry. I can’t,” Veronica said, her voice that of a polite, false guest at a cocktail party. “I only have a minute. I have to meet my husband at the Hassler. He had a late appointment, or I wouldn’t have been able to pass by at all. You shouldn’t say that you’re exasperated.” She made a small, unpleasant pout. “You’ll make me sorry I came to see you.”
“Oh, Christ,” Jack said.
“Did you miss me?” she asked.
“Sit down.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Well, then, I’ll sit down,” Jack said. He dropped back onto the couch and put his feet up on the low coffee table in front of it. Veronica stood in the middle of the room, facing him, her coat thrown back in a position that he remembered. He also remembered the V of lipstick on the bathroom mirror and the first afternoon they had made love and the night on the beach at Fregene, and he felt shaken and unsure of himself and resentful of her husband, whoever he might be.
“I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to see you at all,” Veronica said. “We only arrived this morning. And we’re flying to Athens tomorrow. On our honeymoon. It was my idea, stopping off for a day. I had to see you,” she said. She licked the corner of her mouth nervously. “I felt I owed you an explanation.”
“I think the best place to explain anything is in there.” Jack gestured with his head toward the bedroom. “Take off that godamn coat.” He knew it sounded brutal, and he wanted to be brutal.
“If you’re going to talk like that,” she said, “I’m going to have to leave right now.”
“All right,” he said, “I won’t talk like anything. Explain.”
“Although,” she said, smiling, “I am glad you still want me. I was afraid by now you’d have forgotten me.”
“I am not glad I still want you,” he said. “And if you’re going to tease me, you can get out right now.”
“You’re not as nice as you were two weeks ago,” she said sulkily. “Not at all as nice.”
“That’s true. Every two weeks I take a turn for the worse.”
She looked at her watch nervously. It was a new watch, set in diamonds, and Jack didn’t remember having seen it on her wrist before. Naturally, he thought, i
f she’s just come from Switzerland.
“Well,” she said, “actually it’s silly for me to stand like this.” She sat down in the easy chair at the end of the couch farthest from Jack. She crossed her legs with a noise of silk, and once more Jack felt himself swept, almost angrily, by the wave of generalized and impersonal lust that the sight of those rosy and perfect legs and those pointed Roman shoes had given rise to in him when he had first met her.
“I can bear everything about you,” he said, “but your presence.”
“What?” Veronica asked puzzledly. “What did you say?”
“Never mind.”
“It sounded insulting.”
“In a way perhaps it was,” he said. He made certain that he sat absolutely still.
“I wanted everything to be clear and clean between us,” Veronica said, with her hint of a pout. “That’s why I came here. But if you’re going to say mean things…”
“All right,” he said. “I won’t say mean things. Didn’t you say something about being married? Give me a clear and clean description of your marriage.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done,” Veronica said petulantly, like a schoolgirl caught coming in through a hallway window after hours. “I did what I had to do to save myself.”
“Whom are you married to?” Jack asked. “Do I know the gentleman?”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “And I won’t tell you his name.”
“Does he know me?”
“No.”
“Does he know anything about me?”
“Of course not,” she said calmly, recrossing her legs. “And he’s not going to.”
“I see you’re well launched on a happy marriage,” Jack said.
“You can say anything you want,” she said. “Your cynicism can’t affect me.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s thirty-one years old,” she said. “Very nice-looking. He’s Swiss. He comes from one of the best families in Zurich. I’ve known him for nearly two years. He wanted to marry me from the beginning, but he couldn’t…”
“Why not—was he married?” Jack said. “What did he do, poison his wife last week?”
“No, he wasn’t married,” Veronica said. She sounded childishly triumphant at having scored this point. “He’s never been married. But he couldn’t marry me until he was thirty-one.”
“What is that?” Jack asked. “An old Swiss law?”
“Don’t make fun of me, Jack,” Veronica said in a low voice. “Please. I’ve had such a bad two weeks…”
“You’re not the only one,” he said. Then he was sorry for his tone, and spoke more gently. “I won’t interrupt any more,” he said. “Tell it any way you want.”
“It’s all so complicated,” Veronica said. “We met here in Rome when he came into the agency to ask about flying to Munich. His family owns a big insurance company and they do business all over the world. I’m going to travel with him wherever he goes. He’s promised me. At least until we have children. Finally, I’m going to get out of Italy.” The tone of victory, of an almost hopeless desire at last fulfilled, resounded in her voice. “But he couldn’t marry me before. On account of his family. His father’s dead, but he has an awful mother and three stuffy uncles and they wouldn’t have approved of his getting married to me. After all—a little Italian girl with no money who worked in a travel agency and a Catholic besides. And by the terms of his father’s will, until he was thirty-one, his mother and his oldest uncle could have cut him off almost without a penny if they disapproved of him. And they would have, too. You don’t know those big Swiss families. They wanted him to marry someone else, a girl from another big Zurich family, and he had to make believe he was on the verge of proposing to her….We had to hide the fact that we even knew each other. We only saw each other on weekends, in Florence, secretly, in a hotel…”
“Oh,” Jack said, “that’s the mother you went to visit in Florence.”
“What do you know about that?” she asked suspiciously.
“Bresach,” Jack said. “He told me.”
“How did he happen to tell you that?”
“We’ve become very chummy,” Jack said. “On the days he’s not threatening to murder me.”
“Well,” Veronica said defensively, “I had to tell Robert something. I couldn’t tell him I was going to meet my fiancé every weekend, could I?”
“No,” Jack said. “Of course not. Incidentally, just for my own information—where is your mother?”
“She lives with a sister in Milan.”
“No wonder the telegram came back,” Jack said.
“You mean you tried to send me a telegram?” Veronica sounded surprised,
“Bresach and me. Not to you. To your mother.”
“Why in the world would you want to do that?”
“We were foolish,” Jack said. “We were curious about whether you were alive or dead.”
“I wanted to call you…” Her voice had lost its self-assurance now, and was wavery, threatened with sobs. “But I was afraid if I heard your voice I’d change my mind. And it was all so much in a hurry…Georg had arranged everything with the mayor of a little town outside Zurich. I’d already sent all my papers to him weeks before, before I ever met you…And then, that night, you couldn’t get into the hotel with me and you were so cool and superior when we were on the beach together…”
“You mean,” Jack said, keeping his voice reasonable, “that if I had made love to you that night, you wouldn’t have gotten married…?”
“Maybe,” she said, fighting back the tears. “Who knows? Remember, I told you I wanted to come to work in Paris and you made it plain…?”
“I remember,” Jack said, cutting her off. He tried to smile gently and absolvingly at her, but he had no idea how the expression came out.
“You didn’t want me,” she said harshly, no trace of tears now. “Or you only wanted me for a few minutes at a time, at your convenience. And Robert wanted to devour me. And the others—all the others I haven’t told you about. Men don’t take me out just to amuse themselves or entertain me—they want to tear me apart—”
Jack nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I see what you mean. But it’s your own fault.”
“Whosever fault,” she said bitterly, “I’m the one who suffers. And each time it was getting worse. I lied to you. I’m not as young as I said I was. I’m twenty-seven. I went upstairs in that hotel and I sat in my room alone and I thought, If this is what love is like, I don’t want love, I can’t handle it. I’m too romantic not to be married. I give too much. That’s right, smile if you want to. But it’s the truth, and I realized it that night. And the next morning I was on the plane for Zurich. Finally, I was protecting myself, I was behaving sensibly. Is there anything wrong in that? You don’t know what it’s like, being a girl alone in this town—hardly earning enough to pay the rent and buy stockings—going from man to man—with everything depending upon accidents—whom I met, whom I had dinner with, whom I made love with—if I hadn’t walked past the table at the moment you happened to be sitting with Jean-Baptiste…” She stopped, panting. All her composure was gone. Her face was tortured and the fashionable bright little hat over it seemed incongruous and pitiful. “I read about it the morning I got married. I cried at the wedding, and Georg made fun of me, but I wasn’t crying because I was a bride. I was crying because I kept remembering the first time we were together and you said you thought I was Jean-Baptiste’s girl and I said I wasn’t, I was your girl…” She stood up. Her lips were trembling. “I can’t cry. I can’t go meet my husband with my eyes red. Poor Jean-Baptiste. He was so gay that afternoon, so sly…And I said, ‘There’s a bad man there, mixed up with a very good man.’ Nobody knew what was going to happen. To any of us. I’ve got to go. I must go.” She moved her head and her arms, erratically, as though freeing them from restraining bonds. “Say good-bye to me.”
Jack stood up slowly, trying to control his face, trying not to sho
w to her how much she was moving him. One soft word, he thought, one kiss, and she won’t leave. She won’t ever leave. He was frightened by the fierceness of his desire to keep her there, keep her from leaving. In the time that she had been gone, his desire for her had grown secretly within him, unknown to him. Now her presence was like a brilliant light suddenly switched on, revealing it to him, nakedly, with harsh precision. “Good-bye,” he said, his voice flat and toneless. He held out his hand.
Her face was pale and hurt and childish. “Not like that,” she said, whimpering. “Not like ice.”
“Your husband is waiting for you at the Hassler,” he said, with purposeful cruelty. “Have a good time in Athens.”
“I don’t care about my husband,” she said. “I don’t care if I never see Athens. I want us to say good-bye like human beings…” The tears were close to the surface. “With generosity.”
She moved toward him. He stood there, motionless, abstracted, as though he were viewing the scene from a great distance. She put her arms around him and kissed him. He kept his eyes open, unblinking. He kept his body rigid, unresponsive, as he felt her lips on his. The remembered taste. The remembered softness. He stood there, still, wanting to put his arms around her, hold her, thinking, Why not? Why not? The beginning of a new life. Why not begin it with something I want this much? I will count to ten, he thought crazily, and then I will tell her I love her (later, we will discover the truth), that she must not go. A new life. This was the day of the beginning of the new life. He made himself count. He reached six, dizzied, assaulted.
Then she broke away from him.
“It’s hopeless,” she said quietly. “I’m a fool.”
He stood where he was for a long time after she had left the room.
The telephone rang. He let it ring again and again before he answered it. It was Bresach. “We’re eating dinner at the Hosteria dell’Orso,” Bresach said. “It’s a party. Tucino, Barzelli, the Holts. We’re drinking champagne. I think they’re launching me. Are you coming?”
