Evening in Byzantium (12 page)

“I thought it was time to see a couple of movies,” Craig said.

“I live in London,” Wadleigh said. “Did you know that?” He asked the question harshly, daring Craig to admit that he had lost interest in his one-time friend’s activities.

“Yes,” Craig said. “How is London?”

“The city of Shakespeare and Marlowe,” Wadleigh said, “of Queen Elizabeth and Dickens, of Twiggy and Ian Wadleigh. Another shit hole. I’m supposed to be down here doing a piece on the Festival for an English fag magazine. On spec. They pay my hotel bill. If they take the piece, they throw me another couple of pounds. They want that old magic name Ian Wadleigh on their fag cover. When they read the piece, they’ll probably puke. All I’ve seen here is shit. And I’m going to say so. There’ll be a twitter in the dovecote. The fag entertainment editor never learned how to read, so he thinks movies are today’s music of the spheres. The Art of Now. He thinks Jean-Luc Godard turns out a new Sistine Chapel four times a year. Christ, he thought
Blow-up
was a masterpiece! What do
you
think of the crap they’re showing here?”

“Some good, some bad,” Craig said. “I figure by the time the thing’s over, we’ll have seen at least six good pictures.”

“Six!” Wadleigh snorted. “When you make up the list, send it to me. I’ll include it in my piece. Freedom of the press. The half-dozen selections of a once-great mind.”

“You’d better go back to your hotel, Ian,” Craig said. “You’re being a pain in the ass.”

“I’m sorry.” Wadleigh was genuinely contrite. “My manners have deteriorated the last few years. Along with everything else. I don’t want to go back to my hotel. There’s nothing there for me but a collection of fleas and half the manuscript of a book I’ll probably never finish. I know I’m a bitter son of a bitch these days, but I shouldn’t take it out on an old pal like you. Forgive me. You do forgive me, don’t you, Jess?” He was pleading now.

“Of course.”

“We were friends, weren’t we?” He was still pleading. “We had some good times together, didn’t we? We put down a lot of bottles together. There’s still something left, isn’t there, Jess?”

“Yes, there is, Ian,” Craig said, although there wasn’t.

“What kills me,” Wadleigh said, “is what passes for writing these days. Especially in the movies. Everybody grunting and saying, Yeah, and, Like, you know, I dig you, baby, and, Let’s fuck, and that’s supposed to be dialogue, that’s supposed to be how the noble human animal communicates with his fellow man under the eye of God. And the people who write like that get a hundred thousand a picture and win Oscars and all the girls they can handle, and I’m down to writing a crappy two-thousand-word piece on spec for a fag English magazine.”

“Come on, Ian,” Craig said. “Every artist has his ups and downs. Just about everybody goes in and out of fashion in his lifetime. If he lasts long enough.”

“I will be back in fashion fifty years after I die,” Wadleigh said. “Posterity’s darling, Ian Wadleigh. And how about you? I haven’t seen many articles in the Sunday papers recently saying how wonderful
you
are.”

“I’m on sabbatical leave,” Craig said, “from admiration.”

“It’s one hell of a long sabbatical leave,” Wadleigh said.

“So it is.”

“That reminds me,” Wadleigh said. “There’s a girl here by the name of McKinnon—she’s some kind of reporter—who keeps trying to pump me about you. All sorts of questions. About women. Girls. Your friends. Your enemies. She seems to know more about you than I do. Have you been talking to her?”

“A bit.”

“Be careful,” Wadleigh said. “She has a funny light in her eye.”

“I’ll be careful.”

A Fiat with two girls in it slowed down along the curb, and the girl nearest them leaned out the open window and said, “
Bonsoir.”

“Get the hell out of here,” Wadleigh said.

“
Sal juif
,” the girl said. The car spurted ahead.

“Dirty Jew,” Wadleigh said. “Do I look
that
bad?”

Craig laughed. “You must learn to be more polite with French ladies,” he said. “They’ve all been brought up in convents.”

“Whores,” Wadleigh said. “Whores everywhere. In the audience, on the screen, on the streets, in the jury room. I tell you, Jess, this is the living and eternal capital of whoredom for two weeks each year. Spread your legs and take your money. That ought to be printed on every letterhead under the seal of the city of Cannes. And look at that. Over there.” He pointed across the boulevard where there were four young men smiling professionally at passing males. “How do you like that?”

“Not very much,” Craig admitted.

“You can’t tell the players without a program anymore,” Wadleigh said. “Wait till you read my piece.”

“I can’t wait,” Craig said.

“I’d better send you a copy of the manuscript,” Wadleigh said. “Those fags’ll never print it. Or maybe I’ll turn whore, too, and write just what that fag entertainment editor wants to hear. If I don’t get that dough, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Maybe that’s just what those girls in the car and those boys over there on the corner say to themselves every night,” Craig said. “If I don’t get that dough, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You’re just too fucking Christian tolerant, Jess,” Wadleigh said. “And don’t think it’s a virtue. The world is going to the dogs on a sickening wave of tolerance. Dirty movies, dirty business, dirty politics. Anything goes. Everything’s excused. There’s always a half-dozen something that isn’t bad.”

“What you need, Ian,” Craig said, “is a good night’s sleep.”

“What I need,” Wadleigh said, stopping on the sidewalk, “is five thousand dollars. Have you got five thousand dollars for me?”

“No,” Craig said. “What do you need five thousand dollars for?”

“There’re some people making a movie in Madrid,” Wadleigh said. “They have a lousy script, naturally, and they need a quick rewrite. If I can get there, it’s almost sure the job’s mine.”

“It only costs about a hundred bucks to fly from here to Madrid, Ian.”

“What’ll I use for the hotel?” Wadleigh demanded. “And food? And for the time it takes to sign the contract? And before the first payment? And for my lousy third wife? At this moment she’s attaching the books and typewriter I left in storage in New York for nonpayment of alimony.”

“You’ve struck a responsive chord there, Brother,” Craig said.

“If you go in to make a deal and the bastards know you haven’t got a dime, they grind you to powder,” Wadleigh said. “You’ve got to be able to get up and walk out and say, Up yours, friends. You know that. I figure five thousand is a minimum.”

“Sorry, Ian,” Craig said.

“Okay, can you give me three hundred? I can get to Madrid and give myself a couple of days on three hundred.” The fat on his throat over his loose collar was quivering.

Craig hesitated. Unconsciously, he patted his coat over his wallet. He knew he had five hundred dollars in American money and about 2000 francs in the wallet. Superstitiously, in memory of the time he had been poor, he always carried a lot of money with him. Turning down requests for loans, even from people who were strangers, was invariably painful, almost impossible, for him. He regarded this trait, rightly, as a weakness in his character. He always remembered that in
War and Peace
Tolstoy had used Pierre Bezouchov’s new-found ability to turn down supplicants for money as a sign of maturity and ripening intelligence. “All right, Ian,” he said, “I can give you three hundred.”

“Five thousand would do better,” Wadleigh said.

“I said three hundred.” Craig took out his wallet and extracted three one hundred dollar bills and gave them to Wadleigh.

Wadleigh stuffed the bills roughly into his pocket. “You know I’ll never pay you back,” he said.

“I know.”

“I won’t apologize,” Wadleigh said fiercely.

“I’m not asking you to apologize.”

“You know why I won’t apologize? Because you owe it to me. You know why you owe it to me? Because once we were equals. And now you’re something, and I’m nothing. Less than nothing.”

“Have a good time in Madrid, Ian,” Craig said wearily. “I’m going to bed. Good night.”

He left Wadleigh standing there under the lamppost, with the whores cruising by him as he stared at Craig’s retreating back.

By the time he had reached his hotel, Craig had caught a chill and was shivering a little. He went into the bar, which was nearly empty at this hour between dinner and the end of the showing in the Festival Hall. He sat at the bar and ordered a hot grog for his health’s sake. While he was drinking it, the bartender showed him a photograph of his son. The son was dressed in the archaic uniform of the Escadre Noir of the French cavalry school at Saumur. In the photograph the young man was taking a fine black horse over a jump, his seat perfect, his hands secure. Craig admired the picture for the father’s pleasure, thinking the meanwhile how wonderful it must be to devote your life to something as pretty and useless as a French cavalry squadron in 1970.

Still shivering a little and beginning to feel the advent of fever, he paid for his drink, said good night to the father of the cavalryman, and went to the lobby to get the key for his room. There was an envelope in his box, and he recognized Gail McKinnon’s handwriting. Now he regretted not having asked her to have dinner with him. Wadleigh would not have spoken as he had if the girl had been at his side. Wadleigh had shaken him more than he cared to admit to himself. And he would have been three hundred dollars richer because Wadleigh wouldn’t have brought himself to ask for money in front of a witness. Irrationally, too, he felt that the chill he was suffering from, and the mounting fever, could be traced to his encounter with the writer. The cold wind from the depths of Cannes.

In his room he put on a sweater and poured himself a whisky, again for his health’s sake. It was too early to go to sleep, fever or no fever. He opened Gail McKinnon’s envelope and in the yellowish glow of the glass chandelier read what she had written to him.

“Dear Mr. Craig,” he read, “I persist. With optimism. This afternoon, at lunch and in the car, I sensed that you were becoming more friendly. You are not really as remote a man as you try to appear. As we passed the house where you told me you spent a summer on the Cap d’Antibes, I felt that you wanted to say more than you allowed yourself to say. Perhaps it was out of caution, not wanting to reveal something on the spur of the moment that you would regret later seeing in print. So what I’m doing here is writing out some questions that you can read at your leisure and then write out your replies to the ones you choose to answer in exactly the terms that please you. You can edit as you will, free of any fear of slips of the tongue that an unscrupulous newspaperman or newspaperwoman might take advantage of.

“Here goes—”

He read the first question and stopped. It was a simple one. “Why are you in Cannes?” Well, he thought, that’s a good beginning. And a good end. Intelligent girl. The all-inclusive, everlasting inquiry. Why are you anyplace?
The answer to this question is to determine your general knowledge of the subject. You have thirty minutes, or twenty-four hours, or forty-eight years in which to complete the examination.

Why are you in this city and not in another? Why are you in this bed with this woman and not another? Why are you alone here or in a crowd there? How have you come to be kneeling before this altar at this time? What has driven you to say no to that journey and yes to the one on which you find yourself? What has possessed you to cross that river yesterday, board this plane this morning, kiss this child this evening? What has driven you to this latitude? What friends, enemies, successes, failures, lies, truths, calculations of time and geography, what reading of maps, what detours and highways have deposited you in this room at this evening hour?

A fair question deserved a fair answer.

He went over to the desk and sat down and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen. “Why am I in Cannes?” he wrote slowly. He hesitated. Then, without really thinking of what he was doing or writing, he wrote, almost automatically, “I am in Cannes to save my life.”

H
E stared at the sentence that he had written. That is not my handwriting, he thought. He put the pen down. He knew he was not going to write anything more that night.
Anything you say may be used against you.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

There was a brilliant, painful light shining, a wild, loud howling somewhere. He opened his eyes. Through the wet smear of the windshield wipers two damp moons were hurtling straight at him. His hands were still loosely on the wheel. He yanked at the wheel, slid past the other car by inches on the gleaming black road. The wail of the other car’s horn faded like a funeral cry behind him. He felt calm, drove alertly, not stopping, peering carefully through the streaked glass at the curves ahead of him.

A few miles farther on his hands began to shake, his body to shiver uncontrollably. He pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, waited for the spasm to pass. He had no idea of how long it was before his hands stopped shaking. He was conscious of cold sweat on his forehead, icicles dripping down inside his clothing from his armpits. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his forehead, breathed deeply, four profound inhalations. The air in the car smelled sour. Where was he? The rows of black trees alongside the road told him nothing. He had crossed the French border not so long ago, he remembered. He was somewhere between the Bidassosa River and Saint Sebastian. He had started from Paris that morning, had not stopped except for gasoline and a cup of coffee all day.
I have nearly died in sunny Spain.
He had intended to drive without a halt until Madrid, sleep over, go farther south—to Malaga—the next day. A man he knew, something of a friend, a matador, really the friend of a friend, was fighting in Malaga the next afternoon. He had met the man in Alicante the year before. There was a three-day
fería.
Mediterranean sunshine, parading bands, fireworks, the costumes of the Spanish south, much drinking, long, crowded hangovers, the amused irresponsibility of other people’s celebrations, companions, men and women he knew well enough to enjoy on a short holiday but who meant nothing much to him, whom he only saw the four or five times in the year when he happened to go to a bullfight.