Evening in Byzantium (11 page)

He smiled, rewarding her manners. “I’ll be around,” he said vaguely.

He watched her stride off along the Croisette carrying her tape recorder, Murphy isolated in a capsule. Her long brown hair shone over the blue polo shirt. Standing there in the bright sunshine, he felt deserted. He didn’t want to be alone that afternoon, remembering what it had been like when he was twenty-seven. He had the impulse to hurry after her, touch her arm, walk beside her. But he fought the impulse down. He went into the bar, drank a pastis, then wandered fretfully over to the rue d’Antibes and saw half a dirty movie. It had been made in Germany and featured bosomy lesbian ladies in high leather boots in rural settings, glades and waterfalls. The theatre was crowded. He left and went back toward his hotel.

Two hard-faced whores on the corner near the tennis courts stared at him aggressively. Maybe I should do it, he thought. Maybe it would solve something.

But he merely smiled gently at the two women and walked on. There was applause coming from the tennis courts, and he went in. A tournament was being played, for juniors. The boys were wild but moved with dazzling speed. He watched for a few minutes, trying to remember the time when he had moved that fast.

He left the courts and went around the corner to the hotel, avoiding the terrace, which already had the beginning of the evening assembly of drinkers.

When he picked up his key, the concierge gave him some messages that had come in for him in his absence. He had to sign for a registered letter from his wife that had been forwarded from his hotel in Paris. He stuffed the messages and the letter into his pocket without reading them.

In the elevator a short man with a paunch wearing an orange shirt was saying to a pretty young girl, “This is the worst festival of all times.” The girl could have been a secretary or a starlet or a whore or the man’s daughter.

When he reached his apartment, he went out onto the balcony and sat down and regarded the sea for a while. Then he took the messages out of his pocket and read them at random. He kept his wife’s letter for last. Dessert.

Mr. B. Thomas and his wife would like to dine with Mr. Craig tonight. Would Mr. Craig be good enough to call back? They were at the Hotel Martinez and would be in until seven.

Bruce Thomas was a man whom he didn’t know well but liked. He was a director and had had three hits in a row. He was about forty years old. He was one of the men Craig had been thinking about when he had told Gail McKinnon why he had never been tempted to direct. Tomorrow he would tell Thomas that he had returned to the hotel too late to call him back. He didn’t want to dine that night with a man who had had three hits in a row.

Sidney Green had called and wanted to know if he could have a drink with Mr. Craig before dinner tonight. He would be in the bar at eight. Sidney Green was a man who had directed three or four movies and who had been hired by an independent company to prepare a series of pictures. The independent company had stopped operations a month before, and Green was in Cannes looking for a job, beseeching everyone he met to put in a good word for him. He would drink alone at the bar tonight.

Miss Natalie Sorel had called and would Mr. Craig please call back. Natalie Sorel had been one of the two magnificently gowned and coiffed ladies at the party the night before whom Gail McKinnon had noticed and celebrated. She was a fairly well-known movie actress, originally from Hungary, who played in three or four languages. She had been his mistress for a few months, five or six years ago, when he had been doing the picture in Paris, but he had lost sight of her. She was going on forty now, still lush and beautiful, and when he had seen her at the party, he had wondered why he had ever broken with her. They had spent a weekend together, he remembered, at Beaulieu, out of season, and it was one of the most satisfactory memories of his life. At the party she had told him she was getting married. Miss Natalie Sorel represented too many complications at the moment, he decided. Her phone would not ring.

There was a hand-written note from Ian Wadleigh. He and Wadleigh had had some drunken evenings together in New York and Hollywood. Wadleigh had written a novel that had been widely acclaimed in the early 1950s. At that time he had been a boisterous, witty man who argued loudly in bars with strangers. Since then he had written several disappointing novels and had worked on a lot of screenplays and had gone through three wives and become a drunk. Craig hadn’t seen Wadleigh’s name in print or on the screen for years, and he was surprised to see Wadleigh’s signature on the envelope.

“Dear Jess,” Wadleigh wrote in a loose scrawl, “I heard you were here and thought maybe it would be heartwarming to tie one on together, for old time’s sake. I’m in a flea bag near the old port where the poor folk lead their short, nasty, brutish lives, but they’re pretty good at taking messages. Call when you have the time. Ian.”

Craig wondered what Wadleigh was doing in Cannes. But he wasn’t curious enough to call the number Wadleigh had noted at the bottom of the page.

He opened his wife’s registered letter. She had typed it herself. She was two days late in getting her monthly check, she wrote, and she was notifying her lawyer and his lawyer. If she did not receive the check within one day, she would instruct her lawyer to take the appropriate steps.

He stuffed all the loose bits of paper into his pocket and sat back and watched the darkening sea as the sun set.

The sky clouded over, and the sea turned a stony gray, and a light rain began to fall. The wind rose, and the fronds of the palm trees along the waterfront clashed with a mechanical dry noise. A white yacht, pitching in the swell, its running lights on, made for the old harbor.

He went in off the balcony and flicked the switch on the living-room wall. The lights came on, pale and watery. In the yellowish glow the room looked shabby and unwelcoming. He got out his checkbook and sat down at the desk and wrote out a check for his wife. He hadn’t added up his balance in the checkbook for weeks, and he didn’t do it now. He put the check in an envelope and wrote the address. Now a stranger’s house, although still full of his books and papers and the furniture of half a lifetime.

He pulled open the drawer of the desk and took out the script, one of six copies that were lying there. It had no cover, and the title was on the top page—
The Three Horizons.
There was no author’s name under the title. Craig took out a pen and leaned over the desk. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote, “by Malcolm Harte.” It was as good a name as any. Let the work be judged entirely on its own merits, with an unknown name on its cover. The reactions would be purer. His friends would not be tempted to be lenient, his foes unaware of a new opportunity for derision. He recognized the cowardice there, but the good sense, too, the search for accuracy.

Methodically, he repeated the inscription, writing it neatly on the remaining five copies. He put a copy of the script in a manila envelope and wrote Bryan Murphy’s name on it.

He thought of calling Constance. She should be home by now. And cooled down after the outburst of the morning. But if she weren’t home, he knew it would sadden him, so he didn’t pick up the telephone.

He went down to the crowded lobby, smiled without warmth at two people he knew but did not wish to talk to. At the concierge’s desk he mailed the check to his wife and asked to have the script delivered immediately by messenger to Bryan Murphy at the Hotel du Cap. Then he wrote out a cable to Anne telling her to get on the next plane to Nice. If he was going to be unsettled by the young, it might as well be his own flesh and blood.

H
E went to a small restaurant on the old port for dinner. Alone. He had spoken to enough people that day. The restaurant was one of the best in town, expensive and usually crowded. But tonight, except for himself and two loud parties of English, the men florid and excessively barbered, the women overdressed and bejeweled, the room was empty. The English groups were not connected with the Festival but were vacationing in Cannes. He had seen them all the night before at the casino, men and women alike playing for high stakes. The women were sopranoing about other holiday places, Sardinia, Monte, as they called it, Capri, St. Moritz, the compulsory stations of the rich. The men were complaining about the Labor government, currency restrictions, the bank rate, devaluation, their voices booming over the high trill of their wives.

There will always be an England, Craig thought as he ate his salade niçoise.

Pablo Picasso came in with a party of five, and the handsome woman who owned the restaurant fussed him into a table along the opposite wall. Craig looked at him once, admired the bull-like vitality radiating from the small stocky figure, the great naked head, the dark eyes that were somehow gentle and fierce at the same time. Then he averted his glance. Picasso, he was sure, enjoyed his fame, but he had the right to spoon his soup without having his every gesture noted by a middle-aged, prying American whose only claim to the artist’s attention was that he had once hung a lithograph of a dove on the wall of a house he no longer owned.

The two English groups had stared briefly and incuriously at Picasso and his party as they entered the restaurant, then went back to their steaks and their champagne.

Later, the proprietress came over to his table. “You know who that is, don’t you?” she said in a low voice.

“Of course.”

“They …” There was a little sardonic gesture of her head for her British customers. “They don’t recognize him,” she said.

“Art is long,” Craig said, “and recognition is fleeting.”

“
Comment
?” The proprietress looked puzzled.

“An American joke,” Craig said.

When he had finished his dinner, the proprietress gave him a brandy on the house with his coffee. If the English had recognized Picasso, he would have had to pay for his own brandy.

As he went out of the restaurant, he passed Picasso’s table. Their eyes met briefly. He wondered what the old man’s eyes really saw. An abstraction, an angular, ugly product of the American machine? A murderer standing over a slain Asian peasant counting bodies? A mournful, displaced clown at an alien, sad carnival? A lonely fellow human being moving painfully across an empty canvas? He deplored the conventions that ruled his conduct. How satisfactory it would be to go over to the old man and say, “You have enriched my life.”

He went out of the restaurant and crossed the street to the quay to walk past the moored yachts bobbing gently in the quiet, black water. Why are you not all at sea? he wondered.

As he neared the turn of the harbor, he saw a familiar figure approaching under the lamplights. It was Ian Wadleigh, walking, shambling loosely and wearily, his head down. At the last moment Wadleigh saw him and straightened up sprucely and smiled at him. Wadleigh had grown fat and bulged out of his unpressed clothes. His collar was open to accommodate the thick, flabby throat, and a tie hung, carelessly low and askew, down the rumpled shirt. He needed a haircut, and the uncombed thick hair, going in all directions over the high, bulging forehead, gave him a wild, prophetic air.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” Wadleigh said loudly. “My friend, the boy wonder.” Wadleigh had met Craig when he had just turned thirty. The phrase was now meant to hurt, and it did.

“Hello, Ian,” Craig said. They shook hands. Wadleigh’s palm was sweaty.

“I left a note for you,” Wadleigh said accusingly.

“I was going to call you tomorrow.”

“Who knows where I’m going to be tomorrow?” Wadleigh’s voice was a little thick. He had been drinking. As usual. He had started to drink when his books had begun to go badly. Or his books had started to go badly when he had begun to drink. The cause and effect of Ian Wadleigh.

“Aren’t you here for the whole festival?” Craig asked.

“I am nowhere for nothing,” Wadleigh said. He was drunker than Craig had first thought. “What are you doing?”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Just taking a walk.”

“Alone?” Wadleigh peered around him suspiciously, as though Craig were hiding some dubious companion among the upturned dories and the fishing equipment on the dark quay.

“Alone,” Craig said.

“The loneliness of the long-distance producer,” Wadleigh said. “I’ll walk with you. Two comrades, veterans of the retreat from Sunset Boulevard.”

“Do you always talk in movie titles, Ian?” Craig asked. He was annoyed by the writer’s assumption that they were linked in disaster.

“The Art of Now,” Wadleigh said. “Print is dead. Read any Canadian philosopher. Lead me to the nearest bar, boy wonder.”

“I’ve had enough to drink for tonight.”

“Lucky man,” Wadleigh said. “Anyway, I’ll walk with you. You’ve got to be going in a better direction than I am.

They walked side by side, Wadleigh self-consciously straight-backed and springy. He had been a handsome man, with bold, lean features, but his face had been destroyed by drink and fat and self-pity. “Tell me all about yourself, boy wonder,” he said. “What are you doing in this shit hole?”