Two Weeks in Another Town (22 page)

Jack would have left then, even though it was still too early to meet Veronica, but he saw Delaney beckoning him to come over. He made his way through the perfume and conversation, passing two doctors who were drinking grapefruit juice in champagne glasses. “There’s a man here,” one of the doctors was saying, in the accents of Minnesota, “who claims to have extraordinary cures with colitis. He feeds them mashed potatoes for five days. Every two hours for five days. Nothing else. Four kilos a day.”

“What was the bastard telling you?” Delaney asked as Jack came up to him and smiled at Tucino and Barzelli and Tasseti. “Stiles?”

“He complained because he wasn’t invited tonight,” Jack said.

“That didn’t stop the bastard from coming, did it?” Delaney said. “Did he say anything else?”

“He offered to pay me to clear out of town tonight,” Jack said. “To stop the dubbing.”

“Oh, he knows,” Delaney said.

“Maurice,” said Tucino, smiling tolerantly. “Whatch’yu want? This is Rome. Nobody has kept a secret in Rome for three thousand years.”

“If he gives me any more trouble on the set,” Delaney said, lowering at Stiles’s distant figure, planted in front of the long window, “I’m going to slug him.”

Tucino glanced negligently at Stiles. “The actor will not give trouble,” he said. “I am behind a month on his salary. He will starve.”

“If I had it to do all over again,” said Delaney, “I would vote for Prohibition. Especially for actors and writers. He shrugged, dismissing Stiles. “And Clara,” he said belligerently. “I saw her filling your ear. What’s on
her
mind?”

“She’s thinking of hiring a good cook,” Jack said, “so that you’ll have something to come home to at night. A nourishing meal.”

“Oh, my God,” Delaney said, as Barzelli laughed softly. “A cook. I tell you, finally I’m going to retire to a hermit’s cell and only come out for the first day’s shooting.”

“I bet,” Jack said.

“Jack, my friend,” Tucino said, stroking Jack’s sleeve, “I am very ’appy. Maurice tells me you are doing very good with the dubbing, very passionate.”

“Maurice is a liar,” Jack said.

“We all know that,” Tucino said. “Maurice is a liar. Otherwise, what would he be doing in Rome?” He laughed, delighted with his city.

“Hi, Jack.” Unobserved, Brutton, the actor who could no longer work in Hollywood, had joined the group. He clapped Jack heartily and nervously on the shoulder and stood there, his hand outstretched, an uncertain smile on his dark, tense face. “You remember me, don’t you, Jack?”

“Of course,” Jack said. He shook the proffered hand.

“I heard you were in Rome,” Brutton said. His voice was hoarse and rushed and you could tell that he meant it to be hearty and full of easy confidence and that he was fooling nobody, especially himself. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He gave the impression of a man who was trying to get into a sporting event with a forged ticket. “Everybody winds up in Rome these days, don’t they, Jack?” Brutton said. He laughed windily and Jack could tell that he regretted the sound he was making. “Hi, Mr. Delaney.” He turned toward Maurice, offering his hand. “I’ve been wondering when you were going to decide you needed a good actor and would call me. I still speak English, you know.”

“Hello, Brutton,” Maurice said, without inflection. He ignored the proffered hand.

The sweat glittered on Brutton’s forehead and he blinked his eyes erratically. “My hand is out, Mr. Delaney,” he said.

“I see it,” Delaney said.

Tasseti moved in a little closer to Delaney, watching with pleasure and interest. These were the scenes for which Tasseti lived and he smiled gently, ready to protect his masters, administer punishment, fulfill his watchdog destiny.

Brutton dropped his hand. He took in two or three short, whistling breaths. “Jack shook my hand,” Brutton said shrilly. “He’s not too proud. And he’s in the government, besides.”

“Jack’s a diplomat,” Delaney said, staring coldly at Brutton. “He has to shake the hand of any sonofabitch who asks him.”

“Now be careful,” Brutton said loudly and emptily. “I don’t let people talk to me like that.”

Delaney turned his back on Brutton and said to Barzelli, touching her arm affectionately, “You look beautiful tonight,
carissima.
I like the new way you’re doing your hair.”

Brutton moved so that he was facing Delaney again and Jack saw Tasseti’s fingers twitching hopefully, waiting for the first moment of violence. “I’ll tell you what I think about you,” Brutton said hoarsely to Delaney. “I think you’re a secret Communist sympathizer. There’re still plenty like you left in Hollywood, don’t think there aren’t. The last time I was there, I was in Chasen’s, and I was passing a table, and I had my head turned and somebody threw a drink all over me…There were six of them there, big men in the industry, contributors to the Republican party, and when I asked them to tell me who did it, they just laughed…”

“Calm down,” Jack said, ashamed for Brutton, ashamed for the movie business, for Americans at home and abroad. He put his hand on Brutton’s sleeve. The man was trembling. “Delaney wouldn’t know how to be a secret anything. And everybody knows he was against the Communists for years while you were going to the meetings every Tuesday night. Why don’t you go home?”

“The Committee gave me a clean bill of health,” Brutton went on, obsessed. “When I testified, they shook my hand, they said I was a loyal, patriotic American, who had recognized his mistake and had courageously rectified it. I can show you the letter.”

“The Committee would give a clean bill of health to a typhus bug,” Delaney said, “if he turned in the other typhus bugs, the way you did. If you want to know something, Brutton, I think deep in your heart you’re
still
a Communist, if you’re anything. You’re just stupid enough. You’re a loyal, patriotic coward, and you screamed to save your own skin, and you denounced a lot of poor bastards who used to be your best friends and who never did anything worse than sign a paper saying hooray for the Russian Army in 1944. I pity you, but I don’t shake hands out of pity. If you’re busted and need a handout, come to my office tomorrow and I’ll give you a few bucks. Because in principle I think I ought to try to keep all actors alive, even bad ones like you, since I make my living off them. Now get out of here, you’ve made enough noise.”

“I ought to hit you,” Brutton whispered, but keeping his hands at his sides.

“Try it,” Delaney said flatly. “Some day.” He turned to Barzelli. “Let’s go get a drink,
carissima,”
he said. He took her arm and walked over toward the bar.

Tasseti smiled gently, observing Brutton with pleasure. Tucino shrugged. “I tell you,” he said, “I will never understand America.”

Brutton wiped his forehead with a green silk handkerchief, his eyes shifting, near tears, from face to face. “He’s an egomaniac,” Brutton said loudly. “Wait till it all catches up with him.” He smiled, baring his teeth painfully. “What’s the sense in taking an egomaniac seriously.” He waved, in a hideous attempt to be debonair. “See you around, Jack. I’ll invite you to dinner. Show you how the poor people live.” For a last time he glanced swiftly, appealingly around him. Nobody said anything. Tasseti put his hands in his pockets, disappointed that there was no need for violence. Brutton turned and walked with a crippled attempt at jauntiness over to a corner of the room where two Italian starlets were speaking to each other, and put his arms possessively around their shoulders as he began to talk to them. His laugh came harshly across the room, high over the noise of conversation.

“What is it?” Tasseti asked in his almost incomprehensible Sicilian French. “Did Delaney take a girl away from the actor?”

“Probably,” Jack said. “One time or another.” He shook hands with Tucino and Tasseti and made his way to the door. He had had enough of the party.

Out in the hall, waiting for his coat, he saw one of the pretty young American college girls seated on a marble bench against the wall, bent over, sobbing. Her lip was bleeding and she kept dabbing at it with a piece of pink Kleenex. Two of her friends were standing in front of her, looking grave and trying to shield her from the eyes of the guests arriving and departing. Politely, Jack avoided looking at her after the first moment, and it was only the next day that he heard that she’d been in a bedroom with one of the young Italians, Count Something, who had thrown her on the bed and had bit her lip when she tried to keep him from kissing her. It took two stitches to sew the wound.

S
TREAKED BY A QUARTER
moon, the Mediterranean shushed gently into the beach. Jack and Veronica sat against a dune, protected from the sporadic wind, warm in their coats in the unseasonably balmy air. It was nearly midnight, and only a few lights shone in the winter-deserted colony of houses down the beach. When Veronica had suggested going to Fregene for dinner, the prospect had seemed attractive to Jack, after the heat and confusion of the Holts’ party. They had dined in a little country
trattoria,
eating simply and drinking a carafe of raw red wine, and had then driven on the edge of the pine forest along the beach to this lonely stretch of sand. The mingled fragrance of salt and pine enveloped them as they sat, Jack’s arm around Veronica’s waist, looking out at the mild shimmer of the moon on the water in front of them.

The title of this picture, Jack thought, pleasurably, is Two Lovers by the Side of the Sea. For the moment, Delaney and Barzelli and Stiles and Brutton, all feuds and problems, seemed distant and inconsequential.

“I have been thinking,” Veronica said. “Maybe I should come to Paris.”

She waited a moment, her head against Jack’s shoulder, and he knew that she was waiting for him to say, Yes, you should come to Paris. But he didn’t say it.

“I am getting tired of Rome,” she said. “And, anyway, I won’t be able to keep out of Robert’s way forever. And finally, he will make my life miserable.”

“At the party,” Jack said, “Despière told me that he saw Bresach hit you once, in a restaurant. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Veronica laughed, briefly. “Once.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him that if he ever did it again, I would leave him,” she said. “He never did it again, but I have left him just the same.” She laughed again. “He might as well have given himself the pleasure.” She gathered some sand in her free hand and then, hour-glass fashion, let it sift slowly down in a thin stream, back onto the beach. “I speak French,” she said. “I could get a job in a travel agency. Millions of French come to Italy every year.” She hesitated briefly. “I’ve always wanted to live in Paris. I could find a little flat and you could come and visit me.”

Jack moved a little, uneasily. He had a vision of himself hurrying to get away from his office early, swearing at the wheel of his car in the octopus-clutch of evening Parisian traffic, climbing the rickety steps of a crumbling St.-Germain-des-Prés apartment building, making love to Veronica, trying not to look at his watch, then, too soon for a lover, and not early enough for a husband, taking leave of her (regret and blame, voiced or unvoiced at the half-open door) to rush back home in time to kiss Hélène and say good night to the children before they went to bed, and making the proper, shielded answers when Hélène asked, over the pre-dinner drink, “What sort of a day did you have?”
Cinq á sept,
the French called it and, men and women both, seemed to manage it deftly and with pleasure.

“You prefer it if I do not come to Paris,” Veronica said.

“Of course not,” Jack said, and he wasn’t exactly lying. “Why do you say that?”

“You kept quiet in a funny way,” Veronica said.

Oh, God, Jack thought, another woman to weigh my silences.

“I’m foolish,” Veronica said. “I do not want to accept our limits.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jack asked.

“The moment that I take you to Ciampino and put you on the plane, that is our limit.” She smiled in the darkness. “What the geography books call a natural boundary. The Rhine, the Alps. Ciampino is our Rhine, our Alps, isn’t it?”

“Look, Veronica,” Jack said, speaking carefully, “I have a wife in Paris. And I love her.” For the purposes of this conversation, Jack thought, the phrase is accurate enough.

Veronica made a disdainful noise. “I am getting tired,” she said, “of men who sleep with me and tell me how much they love their wives.”

“The rebuke is noted,” Jack said. “I will never again tell anybody how much I love my wife.”

“Well, at least it’s different from Italian men,” Veronica said. “They always tell you how much they hate their wives. And the truth is, they usually do. There’s no divorce in Italy, so they can afford to tell their mistresses they hate their wives. Americans have to be more careful.”

They sat quietly for a moment, uncomfortable and opposed. Then Veronica began to hum, low, gently.
“‘Volare,’”
Veronica sang,
“‘oh, oh! Cantare…oh, oh, oh, oh! nel blù, dipinto di blù, felice di stare lassù
…I’m flying, I’m singing…’” She laughed harshly. “Love songs for the tourist trade.” She whistled two or three bars derisively, purposely flat, then took her hand out of Jack’s, and let the song slide away into silence.

Jack felt himself beginning to get angry with the girl, with her shifting and increasing claims, her quick mockery of both him and herself. “You said something just a minute ago,” he said, “that I’d like to ask you about.”

“What’s that?” Veronica said carelessly.

“You said you were getting tired of men who sleep with you and tell you how much they love their wives.”

“That’s right,” Veronica said. “Does that offend you?”

“No,” Jack said. “It’s only that Bresach said that you were a virgin when he met you.”

Veronica laughed. “Americans,” she said, “will believe anything. It’s their form of optimism. Why?” she asked challengingly. “Would you have preferred it if I’d been a virgin when I met Robert?”

“I don’t see that it has anything to do with me at all,” Jack said. “I was just curious. Do you mind that I ask you these questions?”

“Of course not,” Veronica said. She picked up his hand and kissed his fingers, lightly.