Evening in Byzantium (34 page)

“How do you think she’s been brought up, Bayard?” Craig honestly wanted to know.

“Fancy school in Lausanne. Speaking French. Famous father. All the money in the world. Talking to high-flying people all her life. I must look like a big Mr. Nobody to her. I suppose I ought to have more sense. Only when I think about her, I don’t have any sense at all. You must have
some
idea, Mr. Craig—do you think she’ll come back here or not?”

“I really don’t know,” Craig said.

“I have to be back in California in a week,” Patty said. “They’re operating on my knee again. They promise me I’ll be able to walk okay in three months. So it’s not as though she’d be marrying a cripple or anything like that. One year ago, if anybody’d told me that me, Bayard Patty, would fly six thousand miles across the Pole to come to France to see a girl for one week, I’d have told them they were crazy. I tell you, Mr. Craig, I don’t think I can live without her.” There were tears in the bright, clear blue eyes. “I sound dramatic, don’t I?” he said, pushing an enormous hand at his eyelids.

“A little.”

“I mean every word I say,” Patty said. “She’s got to get in touch with you, doesn’t she?”

“Eventually.”

“Will you tell her that she’s got to phone me?”

“I’ll pass on the word.”

“What do you think of me, Mr. Craig? Honestly. You’ve lived through a lot. You’ve seen people come and go. Am I so bad?”

“I’m sure not.”

“I’m not the smartest guy in the world. But I’m not the dumbest, either. It’s not as though I’d be dragging her down. I’d respect her tastes. I’d be happy to respect her tastes. You’ve been married, Mr. Craig. You know. It isn’t as though marriage has to be a prison, for God’s sake. That’s what she said, Anne, prison.”

“I’m afraid my marriage hasn’t given my daughters a very encouraging example,” Craig said.

“I know you’re separated,” Patty said, “and I know you and your wife aren’t on very good terms …”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Craig said.

“But that doesn’t mean
every
marriage has to break up,” Patty said doggedly. “Hell, my father and mother have had some pretty rough times. Still have. You should hear some of the arguments around my house. But that hasn’t scared me off. Even having four sisters hasn’t scared me off …”

“You’re a brave man, Bayard.”

“I’m not in the mood for jokes, sir,” Patty said.

“I wasn’t really joking,” Craig said soothingly. It occurred to him that if Patty ever got angry, he’d be a ferocious man to deal with.

“Anyway,” Patty said, partially placated, “if you’d put in a good word for me with Anne when you hear from her, I’d deeply appreciate it.”

“I’ll put in a word,” Craig said. “Whether it will be good or not only time will tell.”

“It helps me to talk to you, Mr. Craig,” Patty said. “It’s a, well—a kind of connection with Anne. I don’t like to impose, but I’d be honored if you’d allow me to take you to dinner tonight.”

“Thank you, Bayard,” Craig said. He felt he had to repay some devious family debt. “That’d be very nice.”

There was a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Gail was standing there in the same print dress she had worn at Klein’s party. They stared at each other for a moment in silence. “Buy me a drink,” she said.

“Do you know Bayard Patty?” Craig said. “Gail McKin—”

“Yes, we’ve met,” Gail said. The man who was sitting next to Craig got up from his stool, and Gail swung up and sat down, putting her bag on the bar.

“Good evening, Miss McKinnon,” Patty said. “Anne introduced us,” he explained to Craig.

“I see.” Craig wished that Patty would disappear. “What are you drinking?” he asked Gail.

“Champagne, please,” she said. She looked fresh, demure, as though she had never drunk a glass of champagne in her life or was ever capable of asking a man if she was as good a lay as her mother.

Craig ordered the champagne. “Bayard tells me that Anne left this morning. Do you happen to know anything about it?”

Gail looked at him queerly. She didn’t speak for a moment but shifted her bag on the bar. “No,” she said finally. “Nothing. Did you have a good time in Marseilles?”

“How did you know I was in Marseilles?”

“All movements are charted,” she said. “Walt Klein was spastic because he couldn’t reach you.”

“It’s a charming town, Marseilles. I recommend it to you,” Craig said. “Yes, I had a good time.”

Gail sipped at her champagne. “Are you staying on here in Cannes, Mr. Patty?”

“Call me Bayard, please. I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything.”

“We’re having dinner together, Bayard and I,” Craig said. “Would you like to join us?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m waiting for Larry Hennessy. They’re showing his picture tonight, and he’s too nervous to sit through it. I promised I’d have dinner with him and hold his hand. Some other night, perhaps?” Her tone was flat, deliberately provocative.

“Perhaps,” Craig said.

“There’s going to be a party in his rooms after the showing,” Gail said. “I’m sure he’d be delighted if you two gentlemen came along.”

“We’ll see how we feel,” Craig said.

“I’m doing a piece on him,” Gail said. “The other piece I was doing seems to have fallen through. He’s a sweet man. And wonderfully cooperative.” She sipped her champagne. “With other people it’s so uphill. Ah, there he is.” She waved toward the door. “Oh, dear, he’s being waylaid by bores. I’d better go and rescue him. Thanks for the wine.” She slipped off her stool and strode toward the door where Hennessy was talking volubly to two women and not seeming bored at all.

“I don’t like to say this, Mr. Craig,” Patty said, “and I only met her yesterday, but I have the feeling that girl isn’t a good influence on Anne.”

“They hardly know each other,” Craig said shortly. “Look, I have to go up and shower and change. I’ll meet you in the lobby in half an hour.”

“Do you think I ought to put on my suit for dinner?” Patty asked.

“Yes,” Craig said. Let him suffer, too, that evening, with a tie around that bull neck. Craig paid for all the drinks and went out through the terrace entrance so that he wouldn’t have to pass the door where Hennessy stood talking jovially, his arm around Gail McKinnon’s shoulders.

It was almost an hour later that he went down to the lobby. Before starting to get dressed, he had picked up a copy of
The Three Horizons
and had glanced through it. Knowing that other people had read it, had liked it well enough to start the whole intricate and exhausting process of bringing it to life on the screen, made him review his work with fresh eyes. Despite himself, he felt the old excitement run through him as he read the pages. They were not dead to him anymore. Ideas for casting, for changes in the writing, for using the camera, for the kind of music for specific scenes, flooded through his mind. He had to wrench himself away from the script to shave and take his shower and dress. He couldn’t leave poor Bayard Patty standing in the lobby all night, bereft and pitiful in his suit, waiting for him.

He was annoyed with Anne’s behavior but not much more than that. He wasn’t really worried about her. She was a grown girl and could take care of herself. She had been cruel to Patty, and not being cruel himself, he disapproved. When he saw her, he would make that clear. Going to bed with the boy and then disappearing the next morning was a monstrous thing to do, but she was not the first girl to waver, then run away from a problem. Nor the first man, either. Nor the first member of the Craig family, if it came to that.

He called Klein and got Bruce Thomas’s address in New York. Pleased with his own impatience, he told Klein that he would take the plane the next day.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Klein said. “Get the wheels moving. This Festival has run out of gas, anyway. You’re not missing anything.” There was the babble of many voices over the telephone. Klein was giving a cocktail party. He was getting his money’s worth out of his five-thousand-dollars-a-month rent. Craig felt benevolent and unwontedly friendly toward the man. The world was full of useful people, and Klein was one of them. He would have to get Murphy to stop calling him that little punk.

He wrote out a cable to Thomas telling him he was arriving in New York and would call as soon as he landed. He thought of sending a telegram to Constance canceling their lunch date on Monday, then decided against it. He would call her in the morning and explain. He knew she’d understand. And approve. And New York was closer to San Francisco.

In the lobby, with Bayard Patty standing next to him in a dark blue suit and necktie, he gave the cable to Bruce Thomas to the concierge and asked him to reserve a seat on a plane the next day from Nice to New York.

Patty looked forlorn as he listened to Craig’s conversation with the concierge. “You’re leaving so soon?” he said. “What if Anne comes back?”

“You’ll have to take care of her,” Craig said.

“Yeah,” Patty said without conviction.

They got into the car, and Craig drove to Golfe Juan where they ate in a seafood restaurant built right on the beach. The sea was rough and growled at the pilings on which the restaurant was built. Patty drank more wine than was good for him and was garrulous. By the end of the meal Craig knew all about his family, his politics, his ideas of love and student revolt. (“I’m not a typical jock, Mr. Craig, I’ll tell you that. Most of the things the kids are complaining about, they’re right. But I don’t go along with taking over buildings and bombing banks and crazy stuff like that. At least that’s one thing Anne and I agree about. My father thinks I’m a wild-eyed Red, but I’m not. And there’s one thing about my father—you can stand up to him like a man and he listens to you and tries to see your point of view. When you get out to California, you’ve got to meet him. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Craig, I’m a lucky man to have a father like that.”) At no point did he say that Anne was a lucky girl to have a father like Craig. He had seen two of Craig’s movies and was polite about them. He was a polite young man. By the end of the meal Craig was certain that, politics or no politics, it would be disastrous for Bayard Patty if his daughter married him, but he didn’t think he had to tell the boy that.

By the time they had had their coffee, it was still too early to go to the Hennessy party, which wouldn’t begin until around midnight. And Craig wasn’t sure that he wanted to go to the party or that Patty would be at ease there.

“How old are you?” he asked as they went out of the restaurant toward the car. (Patty had insisted on paying for the dinner.) “Over twenty-one?”

“Just,” Patty said. “Why?”

“Have you got your passport with you?”

“What do you want me to do?” Patty asked in a flare of belligerence. “Prove it to you?”

Craig laughed. “Of course not. I thought we might take in the casino. You ought to see some of the sights, anyway, as long as you’re here. And you need your passport to get in.” At the gambling tables he would be spared the boy’s dejected confidences for an hour or two.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Patty said. “Sure. I have it in my pocket.”

“Would you like to go?”

“What have I got to lose?”

“Money,” Craig said. “That’s all.”

In the casino, Craig explained briefly about roulette and put Patty next to a croupier to help him out. He himself sat down at a chemin de fer table. He had only played the one time since coming to Cannes, the night he had loaned Wadleigh the three hundred dollars, the night Murphy had told him to forget the idea of putting on
The Three Horizons.
He chuckled to himself, remembering Murphy on the phone. As he sat down at the table, he thought comfortably, I’m thirty thousand francs ahead, I can afford to fool around.

From time to time, when they were making up a new shoe at his table, Craig went over to where Patty was playing. There was a sizable pile of chips in front of Patty and an intent and fascinated glint in his eyes. I have introduced him to a new vice, Craig thought. But at least, putting his money on the numbers and on the red or black, he wasn’t mooning about Anne.

A place fell vacant at his table opposite his, and a woman sat down at it. She was a buxom woman in a bare-shouldered white silk dress that left a good deal of craftily engineered bosom showing. Her hair was marvelously set, and there was a considerable amount of heavy eye shadow. Thin, incongruous lips in the round, lacquered face were filled out dramatically in gleaming red. The deeply tanned skin of shoulders and bosom shone as though it had been oiled. Her fingers, armed with long curved crimson nails, were heavy with diamonds, which Craig, who was not expert at such matters, took for authentic. She had carried a pile of big chips from another table and placed them geometrically in front of her, tapping possessively on them with the long painted fingertips. She looked across at him and smiled cunningly, without warmth.

Now he recognized her. It was the plump woman who had been sunning herself when he and Murphy had passed on the way to the bar at the Hotel du Cap. He remembered the sweaty makeup, the naked, spoiled expression, the marks on the ill-tempered, self-loving face, he had thought, of grossness, devouring lust. The other side of the sensual coin. He was sorry she had come to the table.

He was sure she would win. She did. After a few hands he got up from the table, carrying his winnings. The pile of chips in front of Patty had grown somewhat, and Patty was hunched over the table in deep concentration on the spinning wheel.

“I’ve had it, Bayard,” Craig said. “I’m cashing in. How about you?”

Patty seemed to come back from a long distance as he turned at the sound of Craig’s voice. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I might as well quit while I’m ahead.”

At the cashier’s desk Craig saw that Patty had won a little over a thousand francs. “How much is that in dollars?” Patty asked.

“About two hundred and fifty.”

“What do you know,” Patty said wonderingly. “As easy as that. Well, like they say, lucky in love …”

“Oh, come on now, Bayard,” Craig said.

“Anyway,” the boy said, “it helps pay for the trip.” He folded the bills neatly and put them into an ostrich-skin wallet with gold corners. He stared mournfully at the wallet. “Anne gave this to me,” he said. “In better days. It has my initials on it.”