Evening in Byzantium (38 page)

“In a way,” he said.

“Hallelujah,” she said. “What do you mean, in a way?”

“Bruce Thomas wants to do a script I own.”

“Bruce Thomas,” she said, impressed. “Oo, la, la.” This was the year when everybody spoke the name of Bruce Thomas in a certain tone of voice, he noticed. He didn’t know whether he was pleased or jealous.

“What script?” Belinda asked suspiciously. “I haven’t sent you anything in three months.”

“It’s something I found in Europe,” he said. “In fact, I wrote it myself.”

“It’s about time,” she said. “It’s got to be better than the junk we’ve been getting. You might have let me know,” she said. She was hurt. “You might even have sent me a copy.”

“Forgive me,” he said. He reached over and patted her hand.

“Your hand is icy cold,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Of course,” he said shortly.

“When do we start?” she asked.

“I’ll know better after I see Thomas,” he said. “There’s no deal yet.” He looked out the window of the car at the heavy clouds weighing on the flat landscape. “Oh,” he said, “I wanted to ask you something. Do you remember a woman by the name of Gloria Talbot? I think she worked for us.”

“Just in the beginning, for a couple of months,” Belinda said. She remembered everything. “Absolutely incompetent.”

“Was she pretty?”

“I suppose men thought she was pretty. My God, it was nearly twenty-five years ago. What made you think of her?”

“She sent me a message,” Craig said. “Indirectly.”

“She’s probably on her fifth marriage,” Belinda said primly. “I spotted the type right off. What did she want?”

“It was hard to say. I imagine she just wanted to communicate,” he said. Talking, somehow, was a great effort. “If you don’t mind, Belinda,” he said, “I’m going to try to nap a little. I’m absolutely bushed.”

“You travel too much,” she said. “You’re not a baby anymore.”

“I guess you might say that.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cushions.

His room was on the twenty-sixth floor. It was misty outside, and drops of rain slid down the windowpanes. The towers of the city were glints of glass, dim tiers of light in the wispy late-afternoon grayness. The room was hygienic and impersonal and had not been furnished for Russian nobility. He could hear horns from the Hudson River a few blocks away. There was nothing in the room to remind him of the lucky time with Brenner’s play. It occurred to him that he ought to find out where Brenner was buried and lay a flower on the grave. Unpacking was an effort. The light clothes he had worn in Cannes seemed incongruous in the rainy city. There were many people whom he should call, but he decided to put it off to another day. Still, there was one call he had to make, to Bruce Thomas, who was expecting him.

He gave Thomas’s number to the operator. The brisk, cheerful American voice of the operator was welcome after the shrill, harassed voices of the
standardistes
of Cannes. Thomas was cordial when he came to the phone. “Well, now,” he said, “that was a surprise, your writing a script like that. A pleasant surprise.” Klein had spoken to him. “I don’t know exactly what we can work out, but we’ll work out something. Are you busy now? Do you want to come over?”

Thomas lived on East Seventieth Street. The thought of trying to traverse the city was fatiguing. “Let’s do it tomorrow, if you don’t mind,” Craig said. “The jet lag’s got me.”

“Sure,” Thomas said. “How about ten in the morning?”

“I’ll be there,” Craig said. “By the way, do you happen to have Ian Wadleigh’s telephone number in London?”

He could sense Thomas hesitating. “You know,” Thomas said, “I suggested Wadleigh before I knew you’d written the script.”

“I know,” Craig said. “Have you talked to him yet?”

“No,” Thomas said. “Naturally, I wanted to find out what you thought about it. But after Klein told me you didn’t mind discussing it, I tried to get in touch with him. He’s not in Cannes, and there’s no answer at his London address. I’ve sent him a cable asking him to call me here. Wait a minute, I’ll give you his number.”

When he came back to the phone and gave Craig the number, Thomas said, “If you do find him, will you tell him I’ve been trying to reach him? And would you mind if I sent him a script? I’ve had some copies Xeroxed. There’s no sense in his coming over here if for some reason or another he doesn’t want to work on it.”

“I think I heard somewhere that he’s planning to come back to the States to live, anyway,” Craig said. Somewhere. Flying over France, heading toward the English Channel, the brave New World.
Dear Daddy.

“That’s interesting,” Thomas said. “Good for him. See you in the morning. Have a good night.” He was a nice man, Thomas, polite, thoughtful, with delicate manners.

Craig asked the operator for the London number and lay down on the bed to wait for the call. When he moved his head on the pillow, he felt dizzy, and the room seemed to shift slowly around him. “You travel too much,” Belinda had said. Wise woman. Twenty-three years in the service. He was terribly thirsty, but he couldn’t make himself get up and go into the bathroom for, a glass of water.

The phone rang, and he sat up, having to move slowly to keep the room from spinning around him. The operator said that there was no answer at the London number and asked him if he wanted her to try again in an hour. “No,” he said, “cancel the call.”

He sat on the edge of the bed until the room steadied, then went into the bathroom and drank two glasses of water. But he was still thirsty. He was cold now, too, from the air conditioning. He tried to open a window, but it was nailed shut. He looked at his watch. It was six-thirty. Twelve-thirty tomorrow morning in Cannes. He had been up a long time, journeyed a great distance. He didn’t remember ever having been so thirsty. An ice-cold glass of beer would do wonders for him. Maybe two. The next time he crossed the ocean, he decided, he would go by boat. America should be approached cautiously, in slow stages.

He went downstairs to the grill room, which was decorated with posters from plays. I am in a familiar arena, he thought. He remembered horns, the color of the sand in Saint Sebastian. He sat at the bar and ordered a bottle of beer, drank half the first glass in one gulp. The ache at the back of his throat subsided. He knew he should eat something, but all he wanted was more beer. He ordered another bottle, treasuring it, drinking slowly. By the end of the second bottle he felt pleasantly lightheaded. The grill room was filling up now, and he balanced the possibility of running into someone he knew and having to talk to him against the joy of one more bottle of beer. He decided to take the risk and ordered a third bottle.

It was nearly eight o’clock by the time he got back to his room. He hadn’t had to talk to anybody. It was his lucky hotel. He undressed, put on pajamas, got into bed, and turned out the light. He lay there listening to the muted hum of the city far below him. A siren screaming past reminded him that he was in his native city. Ah, he thought regretfully as he slipped off to sleep, there will be no knock on my door tonight.

He awoke in pain. His stomach was contracting spasmodically. The bed was soaked in sweat. The pains came and went, sharp and stabbing. Christ, he thought, this must be something like what women go through in childbirth. He had to go to the bathroom. He put on the light, swung his legs carefully over the side of the bed, walked slowly into the bathroom, sat on the toilet. He could feel what seemed like gallons of hot liquid gushing out of him. The pain went down, but he wasn’t sure he would be strong enough to get back to bed. When he finally stood up, he had to hold onto the shelf over the basin for support. The liquid in the toilet bowl was black. He pulled the chain. He felt a hot wetness dripping down the inside of his legs. It was blood, blackish red. There was no way in which he could control it. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. He knew he should be afraid, but all he felt was disgust at his body’s betrayal. He got a towel and stuffed it up between his legs. Leaving his stained pajama bottoms on the bathroom floor, he made his way back to the bed and dropped on it. He felt weak, but there was no pain. For a moment he thought that he had dreamt it all. He looked at his watch. It was four-thirty in the morning. New York time, he remembered. Zone of blood. It was no hour to wake anyone. If he was still bleeding by eight o’clock, he would call a doctor. Then he realized that he didn’t know the names of any doctors in New York. The penalty of health. He would figure it out in the morning. He put out the light and closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul …
Childhood formulas.

Anne’s psychology professor had seen something in his handwriting. Had he seen this night in New York?

Then he fell asleep. He slept without dreaming.

He was bone-tired when he awoke, marrow-tired. But there was no more bleeding. It was almost nine o’clock. There was pale, smog-diluted sunlight outside the window. The city shimmered in a haze of heat.

He took the towel out from between his legs. He had obviously bled for a while during his sleep, but by now the blood was caked and dry on the towel. Old, unsolved, interior murders. He moved with care, showered for a long time but did not have the courage to turn the water cold. As he dressed, his body felt broken, as though he had fallen from a great distance.

He went downstairs and had breakfast among the tourists and traveling salesmen in the coffee shop. The factory taste of frozen orange juice. No Mediterranean outside the window, no daughter, no mistress across the table, no leer from the waitress. The coffee of his homeland was like dishwater. He made himself eat two pieces of toast for strength. No croissants, no brioches. Had he come to the wrong country?

He read
The New York Times.
The casualty count was down in Vietnam. The vice-president had made a provocative, alliterative speech. A plane had fallen. He was not the only one who traveled too much. A critic he had never heard of scolded a novelist he had never read. Teams that had not been created when he still went to baseball games had won and lost. A pitcher who was nearly as old as he still made a living throwing the knuckle ball. The men and women who had died the day before were people he had not known. Informed now, he faced the day.

He went from the world of air conditioning out into the climate of New York. He winced on the sidewalk. Remembering his secretary’s warning, he was wary of muggers. If he announced, I have bled this night, would a boy scout find him a taxi? He had no quarter for the doorman, so he gave him a dollar bill. He remembered when doormen were grateful for dimes.

Getting into the taxi was like climbing a cliff. He gave the address on East Seventieth Street. The taxi driver was an old man with a greenish complexion who looked as though he were dying. From the permit on the back of the driver’s seat, Craig saw that the man had a Russian name. Did the driver regret that he, or his father before him, had left Odessa?

The taxi inched, spurted, braked, missed other cars by inches on its way across town. Near death, the driver had nothing to lose. Forty-fourth Street, going East was his Indianapolis. He was high in the year’s standings for the Grand Prix. If he survived the season, his fortune would be made.

Bruce Thomas lived in a brownstone with newly painted window frames. There was a little plaque near the front door that announced that the house was protected by a private patrol service. Craig had been there several times before, to big parties. He remembered having enjoyed himself. He had wandered once into Bruce’s study on the second floor. The shelves of the study had been laden with statues, plaques, scrolls, that Thomas had won for his movies. Craig had won some statues, scrolls, and plaques himself, but he didn’t know where they were now.

He rang the bell. Thomas opened the door himself, dressed in corduroy slacks and an open-necked polo shirt. He was a neat, graceful, slight man with a warm smile.

“Bruce,” Craig said as he went into the hallway, “I think you’d better get me a doctor.”

He sat down on a chair in the hall because he couldn’t walk any farther.

H
E was still alive after three days. He was in a bright room in a good hospital, and Bruce Thomas had found him a soft-voiced old doctor who was soothing and taciturn. The chief surgeon of the hospital, a cheerful round man, kept dropping in as though he just wanted to chat with Craig about the movies and the theatre, but Craig knew that he was watching him closely, looking for symptoms that would mean that an emergency operation might be necessary at any moment. When Craig asked him what the chances were after an operation like that, the surgeon said flatly, without hesitation, “Fifty-fifty.” If Craig had had any relatives the doctor could talk to, the doctor would probably have told them instead of the patient, but the only people who had come to his room so far were Thomas and Belinda.

He was under light sedation and suffering from no real pain except for the bruised places on his arms where the needles had been placed for five transfusions and for the varying intravenous feedings of glucose and salt. For some reason the tubes kept clogging, and the needles kept falling out. The veins in his arms had become increasingly difficult to find, and finally the hospital expert, a lovely Scandinavian girl, had been called in to see what she could do. She had cleared the room, even shutting the door on his private day nurse, a tough old ex-captain in the Nursing Corps, a veteran of Korea. “I can’t stand an audience,” the expert had said. Talent, in a hospital as elsewhere, Craig saw, had its imperious prerogatives. The Scandinavian girl had pushed and prodded, shaking her neat blonde head, and then with one deft stroke had inserted the needle painlessly into a vein on the back of his right hand and adjusted the flow of solution to it. He never saw her again. He was sorry about that. She reminded him of the young Danish mother by the side of the pool in Antibes. Fifty-fifty, he marveled, and that’s what a man thinks of.