Evening in Byzantium (25 page)

He didn’t say it, but he knew now, had really always known, that the good ones weren’t made for the people in the audience on Saturday night. They were made for the necessity of making them, for the need of the people who made them, just like any other work of art. He knew that the agony and what Anne called the cruelty and capriciousness involved in the process, the maneuvering, the wooing, the money, the criticizing and wounding, the injustice, the exhaustion of nerve, was part of the pleasure, the profound pleasure of that particular act of creation. And even if you only played a small part in it, a subordinate, modest part, you shared in that pleasure. He knew now that he had punished himself for five years in denying himself that pleasure.

They were approaching Antibes now, and he turned down toward the road along the sea. “Hooked,” he said, “that’s the diagnosis. And that’s enough about me. Let me say that I’m pleased to see there’s another adult in the family.” He looked across at her and saw that she was flushing at the compliment. “Now,” he said, “what about you? Aside from being sufficiently educated and taking care of me. What are your plans?”

She shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out how to survive as an adult. Your word,” she said. “Aside from that, the only thing I’m sure of is that I’m not going to get married.”

“Well,” he said, “that seems like a promising start for a career.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” she said sharply. “You always tease me.”

“People only tease the ones they love,” he said, “but if you don’t like it, I’ll try to stop it.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “I’m not secure enough to take it.”

There was a rebuke there, he realized. If a girl of twenty was not secure, who but her father was to blame? He had learned a great deal about his daughter between Nice and Antibes, and he wasn’t certain that it was reassuring.

They were going along the outside road of the peninsula and approaching the house he had rented for the summer of 1949, the house in which Anne had been conceived. She had never been here before, but he wondered if some prenatal memory would make her look up and notice the tall white building in the garden above the road.

She did not look up.

I hope, he thought as they passed the house, that at least once she has three months like the three months her mother and I had that summer.

G
AIL McKinnon was just coming out of the hotel as they drove up, and there was no avoiding introducing her. “Welcome to Cannes,” she said to Anne. She stepped back a pace and examined Anne coolly. Insolently, Craig thought. “The family is getting handsomer as it goes along,” she said.

To stop any further discussion of the progression toward perfection of the Craig family, he said, “What’s new with Reynolds? Is he all right?”

“I imagine he’s alive,” Gail said carelessly.

“Didn’t you go to see him?”

She shrugged. “What for? If he needed help, somebody would call. See you around,” she said to Anne. “Don’t walk alone at night. See if you can’t convince your father to take us to dinner sometime.” She hardly looked at Craig and went striding off, her bag swinging from her shoulder.

“What a peculiar, beautiful girl,” Anne said as they went into the hotel. “Do you know her well?”

“I just met her a few days ago,” Craig said. The truth, as far as it went.

“Is she an actress?”

“Some kind of newspaperwoman. Give me your passport. You have to leave it at the desk.”

He registered Anne and went over to the concierge’s desk for his key. There was a telegram for him. It was from Constance. “ARRIVING MARSEILLES TOMORROW MORNING STAYING HOTEL SPLENDIDE STOP DEPENDING UPON YOU MAKE GLORIOUS ARRANGEMENTS STOP LOVE C.”

“Is it important?” Anne asked.

“No.” He stuffed the telegram in his pocket and followed the clerk who was going to show Anne her room. The manager had not been able to free the room connecting with Craig’s apartment, and Anne would be on the floor above him. Just as well, he thought, as they got into the elevator.

The short man with the paunch he had seen once before in the elevator with the pretty young girl went in with them. The man with the paunch was wearing a bright green shirt today. “It’ll never go in Spain,” he was saying as the elevator started. He looked appraisingly at Anne, then across at Craig. Was there a kind of conspiratorial smile at the corner of his lips? In a simpler world Craig would have punched him in the nose. Instead, he said to the clerk, “I’ll stop at my floor first. You take my daughter to her room, please. Anne, come down as soon as you’re settled.”

The man in the green shirt dropped his eyes. He had been holding the pretty girl’s elbow. Now he took his hand away. Craig smiled meanly as the elevator came to a halt and he went out.

In the living room he looked at the schedule of movies that were being shown that day. At three o’clock there was an Italian film he wanted to see. He picked up the phone and asked for Anne’s room. “Anne,” he said when she answered, “there’s an interesting movie this afternoon. Would you like to see it with me?”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, “I’m just putting on a bathing suit. The water looks so marvelous …”

“That’s all right,” he said. “Have a good swim. I’ll be back a little after five.”

When he had put the phone down, he reread Constance’s telegram. He shook his head. He couldn’t refuse to meet her in Marseilles. And he couldn’t take Anne with him. There were limits to the frontiers of the permissive society. But leaving his daughter alone in Cannes immediately after she had flown five thousand miles to be with him could hardly add to her sense of security. He would have to work something out with Constance so that at most he would be gone only a day or two. Glorious
arrangements.

Dissatisfied with himself, he went over to the mantelpiece and stared at his reflection in the mirror hanging there. Anne had said that he didn’t look well. It was true there were unaccustomed deep lines under his eyes, and his forehead seemed fixed in a permanent frown. His complexion now seemed pale, almost pasty, to him, and there was a slight film of sweat above his mouth. It’s a hot day, he thought, summer is coming on, that’s all.

The psychologist in California had said that there were secret predictions buried in the way your hand shaped a word on paper. Change, Anne had said, disease, death even …

His throat felt dry, he remembered that he sometimes felt slightly dizzy these days when he got up from a chair, that he had little appetite for his food …“Fuck it,” he said aloud. He had never talked to himself before. What sort of sign was that?

He turned away from the mirror.
He has a certain dry elegance,
Gail had written about him. She had not consulted Anne’s professor.

He went into the bedroom, stared down at the bed, now neatly made, which he had shared, if you could call it that, with the girl the night before. Would she share it again tonight? Would he be fool enough to open the door for her once more? He remembered the silken feel of her skin, the fragrance of her hair, the clean swell of her hip as she lay beside him. He would open the door if she knocked. “Idiot,” he said aloud. It might be a symptom of some obscure aberration, a warning of eventual senescence, but the sound of his own voice in the empty room somehow relieved him. “Goddamn idiot,” he said, looking down at the bed.

He bathed his face with cold water, changed his shirt, which was damp with sweat, and went to see the Italian movie.

The movie was disappointing, plodding, and serious and dull. It was about a group of immigrant anarchists in London, led by a Sicilian revolutionary, in the beginning of the century. It was probably as authentic as the writer and director had been able to make it, and it was plain that the people who were responsible for the film had a laudable hatred for poverty and injustice, but Craig found the violence, the shooting, the deaths, melodramatic and distasteful. So many of the other films he had seen since he arrived in Cannes had dealt with revolution of one kind or another, millions of dollars handed over by the most Republican of bankers to be invested in the praise of violence and the overthrow of society. What motivated those neat, prosperous men in the white shirts and narrow suits behind the wide, bare desks? If there was a dollar to be made in a riot, in the bombing of a courthouse, in the burning of a ghetto, did they feel that they, honorable accruers, owed it to their stockholders to offer the fortunes from their vaults, regardless of the consequences? Or were they more cynical than that? Wiser than lesser men, with their hands on the levers of power, did they know that no movie had ever brought about public upheaval, that no matter what was said in a theatre, no matter how long the lines were in front of the ticket offices for the most incendiary of films, nothing would change, no shot would be fired? Did they laugh in their clubs at the grown-up children who played their shadowy celluloid games and whom they indulged with the final toy—money? He himself had never gone raging out into the streets after any film. Was he any different from the others?

Was it a sign of age that he was unconvinced, that he believed these reckless calls to action could only lead to worse abuses than the ones they sought to correct?

If he were twenty, like Anne, or twenty-two, like Gail, would he be encouraged to revolt, would he not glory in plotting the destruction of cities?

He remembered Murray Sloan’s tumbrels, Versailles the night before the fall of the Bastille. Whose side would he be on the day the tumbrels rolled down his street? Where would Anne be riding? Constance? Gail McKinnon? His wife?

The Italian film was a bad one for a man to see just after he had told his daughter he was hooked on making films. It was stillborn from the beginning, worthless or evil as art, finally boring. It didn’t even have the true tragic advantage of reducing his own predicament to scale, of making his own small, private concerns, his entanglements with women, his professional drifting, seem picayune or comfortingly inconsequential.

He left before the end, and as he went out of the theatre to restore himself, he tried to remember, frame by frame, the films of Buñuel and Bergman he had seen that week.

The sun was still high over the horizon, and on the chance that Anne hadn’t gone in yet, he went down the steps to the Carlton beach to look for her. She was at a table near the bar in the briefest of bikinis, broad-shouldered and opulently shaped. A father, he would have preferred a less revealing costume. Seated next to her was Ian Wadleigh in swimming trunks. Across the table from the two of them was Gail McKinnon, wearing the scant, pink, two-piece bathing suit she had worn at the Murphys’ cabana. Craig felt guilty for allowing Anne to go off on her own, not providing her with other company.

Wadleigh had obviously not been wasting his time seeing too many films. He was as brown as the two girls. In his ill-fitting clothes he had seemed ungracefully shaped, almost tumescent, but stripped for the beach as he was now, his flesh was solid, and he looked powerful and dominating. He was laughing and gesturing with a glass he held in his hand. None of the three noticed Craig for the moment, and he half-resolved to turn and walk away. There was something too reminiscent in the group for him, it was too much like the Italian actor on the beach showing his teeth in a smile, the two girls listening to him.

But he fought down the impulse as bad-tempered and childish and went up to the table. Gail was fiddling with her tape recorder, and for a second Craig was seized by the uneasy thought that she had been interviewing Anne. He had neglected to warn Anne to keep her mouth shut. But as he came up to the table, he heard Gail saying, “Thanks, Ian. I’m sure they’ll like it back in the States. I’m not so sure that you’ll ever be allowed back in Cannes again, though.”

“Down with double talk,” Ian said. “Screw
politesse.
Name the whores and their works, that’s my motto.”

Oh, Christ, Craig thought, he’s still on that kick. “Good evening, folks,” he said.

“Hi, Jess,” Ian boomed out, his voice as imperial as his bronze body. With an audience of two pretty girls, he was transformed. “I was just instructing these charming young women on the inner workings of film festivals,” Wadleigh said. “Who sells what, who buys whom, in what sweat and slime Golden Palms are traded across secret counters. Sit down, Father. What’ll you have? Waiter.
Garçon
!”

“Nothing, thank you,” Craig said. Wadleigh’s “Father” had a derisive ring to it. He sat down next to Gail, facing Anne. “What are you drinking?” he asked Anne.

“Gin and tonic,” she said.

He had never seen her drink before. When he had offered her wine at meals, she had refused, saying she didn’t like the taste. Gin, perhaps, was more suitable to youthful palates.

“It’s awfully good of you, Father,” Wadleigh said, “to import admirers, at great personal expense, across continents and oceans.”

“What’re you talking about?” Craig asked.

“I read his novels,” Anne said. “They were assigned in a Modern Lit course.”

“Hear that,” Wadleigh said, “I am a fixture in Modern Literature. Nubile scholars from coast to coast burn the midnight oil in honor of Ian Wadleigh. Imagine, on the bleak and desperate shingle of Cannes, I have found a reader.”