Two Weeks in Another Town (55 page)

They fear shame,
he remembered,
and only pair at night and secretly, nor do they then rejoin the herd but first bathe in the river…
Tonight, he thought, amused, we have paired at night and secretly, nor are we rejoining the herd. We are approaching the high level of conduct of the elephant.
Consequently,
he remembered,
when the moon is new they go down to the rivers and there solemnly bathe, and after having thus saluted the planet they return to the woods
…

The moon is new tonight, he thought, my river is the Tiber.

He moved his hand to her breast, then down along her ribs and hips. Her body was no longer the magnificent young woman’s body of the California mornings. The lines had thickened, the contours were much fuller, she would always look too heavy, a little ungraceful, in fashionable clothes, and he knew that she would never regard herself in the mirror without a twinge of regret for her lost beauty. But that abundant, practiced body had this night given him an intensity of pleasure, a sense of completion, that he had never felt before.

“It isn’t like making love,” he whispered into her ear, “it’s like taking in the harvest.”

She chuckled. “There is a Spanish saying,” she said. “Men pretend otherwise, but they really like fat women, sweet wines, and the music of Tchaikovsky.”

They laughed together, under the bedsheet. The laughter was sensual, the healthy laughter of old friends, good lovers, forgivers, enjoyers. It dispelled ghosts, took the pain out of memory, threw a reasonable human light on fears and premonitions.

“Fat woman,” he said, stroking her shoulder comfortably.

“I knew this had to happen,” she said. “Somehow, sometime.”

“Yes,” he said. Now that it had happened, it seemed inevitable to him, too.

“We couldn’t let the hatred stand,” she said.

They lay quietly for a while. “You’re leaving tomorrow?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to make love to your wife tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Will you think of me?”

“No. I will think of my wife.” At that moment he knew that he desired his wife more than he had ever desired her before, and knew that he would take her into his arms with love and delight, and that he would cherish her. What had begun in his mind as an act of vengeance, Carlotta, in her lavish womanhood, had turned into an act of compassion and forgiveness. Forgiving her had finally brought down the wall that Jack had erected between him and love, between him and the belief in love, the wall that he had started building the night when London was on fire and the young pilot had said, “She was a little old, maybe thirty, but stacked and artful.”

He kissed her gently. He didn’t tell Carlotta what he was thinking, but she was moved by the gentleness of the kiss and smiled at him. “Are you pleased this happened?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have more reasons to be grateful to you than you know.”

“I’m glad,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Are we ever going to make love again, you and I?”

“I suppose so,” he said. It is no longer necessary, he thought. But he didn’t tell her that. Instead, he said, “Some time. Some town.”

She chuckled softly, a little sadly. “Some time,” she whispered. “Some town.”

In the morning, he shopped for gifts for his wife and children, using the ten-thousand-lire note the Boston lady had thrust on him as she bundled the drunk into the taxicab. He walked lightly down the busy sunlit streets of Rome, examining the shining display windows. Although he hadn’t slept more than an hour during the night, he was clear-eyed and untired, and he enjoyed taking a long time among the scarves and sweaters of the woman’s shop and among the puppets and model automobiles of the toy counters. He had Holt’s check in his pocket and he felt rich, as one should in Rome, and bought extravagant presents.

He cashed two hundred and fifty dollars in travelers’ checks at his hotel and put the lire in an envelope to give to Guido at the airport. The grateful sacrifice to the gods of the locality, he thought, gumming the envelope. He called no one during the morning, not Carlotta or Delaney or Holt or Veronica or Bresach. It all ended last night, he told himself.

His plane was due to leave at one and Guido drove him out along the Naples road in silence. Guido looked sedate and sorrowful in the brilliant noon sunlight. Jack felt that Guido liked him and was sorry that the two weeks were over. He will think of me kindly, Jack thought, when he arrives in Toulon to visit the woman in whose vineyard he worked during the war.

At the entrance to the airport, he gave Guido the envelope and asked him not to open it until he got back to Rome. Guido nodded gravely, his dark eyes emotional, and they shook hands. Jack waited outside the terminal until he saw Guido spurt away back toward Rome. Then he followed the porter with his bags into the building. He had his bags weighed and his ticket validated and was just about to go through the door marked
Dogana,
when he saw Bresach hurrying through the entrance. Bresach wasn’t wearing glasses and his eye sockets were a grievous mess of ugly little cuts and he peered shortsightedly around until he saw Jack. He hurried over.

“I wanted to say good-bye,” he said, without preliminary. “Holt told me you were leaving. Among other things.”

“How’s it going at the studio?” Jack asked.

Bresach laughed sourly. “Chaos. Everybody’s yelling at everybody else. There’re meetings everywhere. Even in the men’s rooms. Stiles is drinking again. Tucino is roaring. He fired me twice this morning. Nobody has shot a foot of film. I have a feeling they won’t finish this picture until next Christmas. Ah—the hell with it.” He shrugged. “I have something for you.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and took out the clasp knife, closed. “Here, take this,” he said. He sounded bitter and unhappy.

Jack took the knife. He hefted it once and slid it into his topcoat pocket.

“I should’ve used it,” Bresach said, his face twitching. “On someone. Maybe on myself.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Jack said tolerantly.

“I should’ve killed her last night,” Bresach said. “Veronica. Nobody should be allowed to go unpunished for the things she’s done to me. To a man who loved her the way I did…Instead,” he said, “I pulled that idiotic gag with the champagne…”

Jack smiled. “Actually,” he said, “it was kind of funny. And maybe it was good for the marriage. It started it off on a realistic basis.”

“And then I let myself be led off like a baby,” Bresach said with bitter self-loathing. “Two weeks ago, a week ago, I’d have stayed there and fought, even if they’d killed me…And that’s the worst thing. You know why I let Max take me away?”

“Why?”

“Because even as I was standing there, even as that bastard was hitting me, I was thinking, ‘If I fight, they’ll give me to the police, they’ll lock me up, maybe they’ll kick me out of Italy, I’ll never get a chance to finish the picture, do my own…’”

“Well,” Jack said, “that might be true.”

“I’ve turned cozy, I’ve turned careful,” Bresach said, his face pale and tortured and the raw little scars looking redder than ever against the white skin. “One little whiff of success, one tiny puff, and look what it’s done to me. A month from now I’ll laugh at the whole thing. Just like everybody else. And it turned out it was all for nothing. It serves me right. I deserved it. In five years what sort of man will I be? What the hell is going to happen to me?”

“You’ll survive,” Jack said. “Just like everybody else.”

“Jack…” Bresach sounded hesitant, uncomfortable. “If I ever need you again—will you help me?”

Jack looked thoughtfully at the boy, standing there in the ruins of his hopes, near-sighted and in despair, with the ugly little wounds around his eyes. He had a surprising desire to cry. “Sure,” he said. “Call me. I’m easy to find.” He tried to smile at him.

“In the meanwhile,” Bresach said, “have you got any advice for me?”

Jack ran his fingers through his hair, taking time, trying to find the one word that would help. Then he remembered Carrington, that marvelous man, and what he had told the young actor who had come to him and asked for advice on how to be a good actor.

“Be delighted,” Jack said. He touched the boy’s shoulder with his hand, then went through the door into customs, leaving Bresach standing there alone.

Fifteen minutes later, the plane took off. It rose above the green of the race track, banked across the winding river, with its reflection of small, fleeing white clouds. Jack was at the window. He bent over for a last look. Below him, under the mild Mediterranean sky, the lovely city, busy and golden, glittered in the sun.

The plane straightened in its course. Jack leaned back in his chair, and unhooked the safety belt as the plane climbed north toward the Alps.

Well, he thought, I have saluted the planet.

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel
The Young Lions
(1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the
New Yorker
to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.

Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.

“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the
Dick Tracy
radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play,
Bury the Dead
. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as
The Big Game
(1936) and
The Talk of the Town
(1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the
New Yorker
, he also penned
The Gentle People
(1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.

World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.

The Young Lions
(1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
, Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
, and
The Caine Mutiny
by Herman Wouk,
The Young Lions
stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.

In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel
Two Weeks in Another Town
(1960).

Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels.
Rich Man, Poor Man
(1970) and
Beggerman, Thief
(1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries.
Nightwork
(1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel
The Magic Mountain
.

Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.