Evening in Byzantium Page 3

  Before he could protest any further, she was gone.

  HE paced slowly around the room. Its appearance displeased him. It was a room for frivolous transients whose only decision each morning would be whether or not to go swimming and what restaurant to choose for lunch. He tapped in the top of the Scotch bottle and put the bottle away in a cabinet, then picked up his clothes and the sweating half-filled whisky glass. He took it all into the bedroom, dumped the clothes on the bed in which he had slept. The sheets and blankets were tangled. Uneasy sleeper. The second bed was neatly turned down. Whatever lady the maid had prepared it for had slept elsewhere. It made the room seem lonely. He went into the bathroom and emptied the whisky glass into the basin and rinsed it. The counterfeit of order.

  He returned to the living room and carried the little folding table with the breakfast tray out into the hall. He locked the door behind him as he went back into the apartment.

  There was an untidy pile of brochures and advertising throwaways for various films on the desk. He swept them all into the wastebasket. Other people’s hopes, lies, talents, greed.

  The letters he had tossed on the table lay next to Miss McKinnon’s manuscript. He decided on the letters. Finally, they would have to be read and answered, anyway. He tore open the letter from his accountant. First things first. That primal concern—the income tax.

  “Dear Jesse,” his accountant wrote, “I’m afraid the 1966 audit is going to be a tough one. The agent on your case has been in and out of the office five times, and he’s a bastard. I’m writing this from my home myself, on my own typewriter, so there won’t be a copy, and I advise you to burn it when you’ve read it.

  “As you know, we’ve had to waive the three-year limit of review on your 1966 return; 1966 was the last time you made any real money, and Bryan Murphy set up this deal with a European company because you shot most of the picture in France and the deal looked good to everybody because it seemed that the money your company borrowed against potential profits would be treated as capital gains rather than ordinary income. Well, the IRS is challenging the basis of the deal, and this agent is a real bloodhound.

  “Also—and this is for your eyes only—this particular agent looks like a crook to me. He as much as intimated to me that if you did business with him, he’d O.K. the return as filed. For a price. He intimated that eight thousand dollars would do it.

  “Now you know that I never touch anything like that. I know, too, that you’ve never gone in for any such shenanigans, either. But I felt that you had to know what the score was. If you want to do anything about it, you’d better come out here soonest and talk to the bastard himself. And don’t tell me what you say to him.

  “We could go to court and almost certainly win, as the deal is on the up and up and should stand scrutiny in any court of law. But I have to warn you that the legal costs would probably run you about $100,000. And considering who you are and your reputation, the papers would have a field day with a tax-avoidance case in which you were involved.

  “I think we can settle with the bastard for between sixty and seventy-five thousand. My advice is to settle and get a job quick and make it up in a year or two.

  “When you answer this, send your letter to my home address. I’ve got a big office, and you never know whom you can trust there. Aside from the fact that the Government is not averse to opening mail these days. Best regards, Lester.”

  Make it up in a year or two, Craig thought. It must have been sunny in California.

  He tore the letter into small pieces and threw them into the wastebasket. Burning it, as the accountant had suggested, would have been too melodramatic. And he doubted that the Internal Revenue Service went as far as bribing the chambermaids of the Côte d’Azur to piece together the shreds of letters they found in wastebaskets.

  Patriot, veteran, law-abider, taxpayer, he refused to think about how his sixty or seventy thousand dollars would be spent by Mr. Nixon, by the Pentagon, by the FBI, by Congress. There was a limit to the amount of moral agony a man could be expected to inflict upon himself when he was, theoretically at least, on holiday. Maybe I ought to let Gail McKinnon read my mail, he thought. The readers of Playboy would be fascinated. Diaghilev at the mercy of a postage stamp.

  He reached for the letter from his lawyer, then thought better of it. He picked up the batch of yellow sheets, weighed them, held them indecisively over the waste-basket. He shuffled through the pages at random. He is forty-eight now and looks it, he read. What does a forty-eight-year-old man look like to a twenty-two-year-old girl? Ruins. The walls of Pompeii. The trenches of Verdun. Hiroshima.

  He sat down at the desk, started reading from where he had left off when the girl had gone out of the room. See yourself as the world sees you.

  “He does not seem like a self-indulgent man,” he read, “and according to all reports he does not indulge in others.

  “Because of this, in some quarters he has a reputation for ruthlessness. He has made many enemies, and among his former collaborators there are some who speak of what they call his disloyalty. In support of this it is cited that only once has he ever done more than one play by the same author and unlike other producers has never developed a favorite roster of actors. It must be admitted that when his last two films failed, for a total loss that is estimated at more than eight million dollars, there was little sympathy shown him in the movie colony.”

  The bitch, he thought, where did she get that? Unlike most other journalists who had interviewed him and who had rarely read anything more about him than they had gleaned from studio publicity handouts, the girl had arrived well prepared. Malevolently well prepared. He skipped two pages, dropping them on the floor, and read on.

  “It is common knowledge that at least on one occasion he was offered the top position at one of the most prestigious studios in the industry. It is said he turned the offer down in a brief telegram: ‘Have already deserted sinking ship. Craig.’

  “His behavior might be explained by the fact that he is a rich man, or should be a rich man if he has handled the money he has earned in a responsible manner. A director he has worked with has put it differently. ‘He’s just a contrary son of a bitch,’ is the way the director explained it. The actress Monica Browning has been quoted in an interview as saying, ‘There is no mystery there. Jesse Craig is a simple, charming, homemade megalomaniac.’”

  I need something to drink, he thought. He looked at his watch. It was ten twenty-five. So, it’s only ten twenty-five, he thought. He got the bottle and went into the bathroom and poured a slug of whisky and ran a little water into the glass from the tap. He took a sip and carried the glass with him back into the living room.

  Glass in hand, he continued reading. “Twice Craig has been invited to serve as a member of the jury in Cannes. Twice he refused the invitation. When it became known that he had made reservations for the entire festival this year, many eyebrows were raised. For five years, after the failure of his last film, he has kept away from Hollywood and was only intermittently seen in New York. He has kept his office open but has announced no new projects. He seems to have taken to wandering restlessly for good parts of the recent years around the Continent. The reasons for his retreat are obscure. Disgust? Disillusionment? Weariness? A feeling that his work was done and the time had come to enjoy its fruits in peace in places where he had neither friends nor enemies? Or was it a failure of nerve? Is the visitor to Cannes a spent man on a nostalgic voyage to a place where he can be reminded at every turn of his earlier vigor? Or is it the sallying forth of a man who has regrouped his forces and is intent once more on conquest?

  “Does Jesse Craig, in his hundred-dollar-a-day suite overlooking the Mediterranean know the answers himself?”

  The typing stopped in the middle of the page. He put the pages face down on the bookcase, sipped once more from his drink. Christ, he thought, twenty-two years old.

  He went out on the balcony. The sun had come out, although the wind was as stron
g as ever. Nobody was swimming. The fat lady had disappeared. Having her hair done or drifted out to sea. Down below, on the terrace, there was already a sprinkling of customers around the tables. He saw the careless brown hair of Gail McKinnon, the oversized sweat shirt, the blue jeans. She was reading a newspaper, a bottle of Coca-Cola in front of her.

  While he was watching, a man came up to her table and sat down across from her. She put away her newspaper. Craig was too high up to hear what she was saying.

  “I saw him,” she was saying to the man. “He’ll bite. I’ve got the old bastard.”

  HE took a seat. The auditorium was filling rapidly. It was a young crowd, long-haired bearded boys with Indian bands around their heads and their accompanying barefooted girls dressed in fringed leather blouses and long multicolored skirts. They would have been at home in Constance’s office. The movie that morning was going to be Woodstock, the American documentary about a rock festival, and the devotees, appropriately clad for revolt, had taken over the town. Craig wondered how they all would dress when they were his age. When he was their age, he had been happy just to shed his uniform and get into a gray suit.

  He put on his glasses and spread his copy of Nice-Matin. He had awakened late, and since the movie was three and a half hours long, it had been scheduled to start at nine in the morning, and he hadn’t had time for breakfast or the paper in the hotel.

  In the warm, dull pinkish light he glanced at the front page of the newspaper. Four students had been shot and killed by the National Guard in Kent, Ohio. Murder continued, as usual, along the Suez Canal. The situation in Cambodia was confused. A French naval missile had gotten out of control and turned inland and burst near Lavandou, some miles along the coast, destroying several villas. The mayors of the adjacent towns were protesting, pointing out, reasonably enough, that this military waywardness was detrimental to le tourisme. A French movie director explained, in an interview, why he would never submit a film of his to the Festival.

  Somebody said, “Pardon,” and Craig stood up, still trying to read his newspaper. There was a rustle of a long skirt as somebody slid past him and sank into the seat beside him. He was conscious of a light scent of soap that was somehow childish.

  “Welcome to the morning,” the girl said.

  He recognized the dark glasses masking most of the face. The girl’s head was wrapped in a figured silk scarf. He was sorry that he hadn’t taken the time to shave.

  “Isn’t it wonderful,” the girl said, “how we are constantly thrown together?”

  “Wonderful,” he said. The voice, as well as the costume, was different today. Softer, without pressure.

  “I was there last night, too,” she said.

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “That’s what they all say.” The girl looked down at her program. “Were you ever tempted to do a documentary?”

  “Like everybody else.”

  “People say this one is wild.”

  “Which people?”

  “Just people.” She let the program drop to the floor. “Did you cast an eye on the stuff I sent over?”

  “I didn’t even have time to order breakfast,” he said.

  “I like movies at nine in the morning,” she said. “There’s something perverse in it. It’s in a big manila envelope. Further reflections on Jesse Craig. Cast an eye when you have time.” She began to applaud. A tall young man with a beard was standing at the bottom of the aisle in front of the stage holding up his hand for silence. “That’s the director,” she confided.

  “Do you know anything else he’s done?”

  “No.” She applauded vigorously. “I’m a director buff.”

  The director was wearing a black armband, and he began his speech by inviting the members of the audience to do the same as a sign of mourning for the four students who had been killed at Kent State. In his final sentence he said that he was dedicating his film to their memory.

  Although Craig did not doubt the young man’s sincerity, the speech and the somber decoration made him vaguely uncomfortable. In another place, perhaps, he would have been touched. He certainly was as saddened by the death of the four youths as anybody there. After all, he himself had two children of his own who might be brought down in a similar massacre. But he was in an auditorium that was gilded and luxurious, seated among an audience that was festive and there to be amused. He could not rid himself of the feeling that the whole thing smacked of showmanship, not grief.

  “Are you going to wear black?” the girl asked him, whispering.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Nor I,” she said. “I don’t dignify death.” She sat up, straight and alert, enjoying herself. He tried to pretend he didn’t know she was sitting beside him.

  As the house lights went down and the film began, Craig made a conscious effort to rid himself of all preconceptions. He knew that his distaste for beards and long hair was foolish and arose only because he had grown to manhood at a different time, accustomed to different styles. The manner of dress of the young people around him was at worst merely unsanitary. Fashions in clothes came and went, and a single glance at an old family album sufficed to show how ridiculous once thoroughly conservative garb could seem to later eyes. His father had worn plus fours on a holiday at the beach. He still remembered the photograph.

  “Woodstock,” he had been told, spoke for the young. If it actually did, he was ready to listen.

  He watched with interest. It was immediately clear that the man who had made the picture had considerable talent. A professional himself, Craig appreciated the quality in others, and there was no hint of amateurism or idle playfulness in the way the film was shot and put together. The evidence of hard thought and painstaking labor was everywhere. But the spectacle of four hundred thousand human beings gathered together in one place, no matter who they were or in what place they had congregated, or for what purpose, was distasteful to him. There was a maniacal promiscuity reflected on the screen that depressed him more and more as the film went on. And the music and the performances, with the exception of two songs sung by Joan Baez, seemed coarse and repetitive to him and inhumanly loud, as though the whisper or even the ordinary tone of daily conversation had dropped from the vocal range of young Americans. For Craig the film was a succession of orgiastic howls without the release of orgasm. When the camera discovered a boy and a girl making love, undisturbed by the fact that their act was being recorded, he averted his eyes.

  He watched in disbelief as one of the performers, like a cheerleader before a crowd at a football game, shouted out, “Give me an F!” Four hundred thousand voices gave him an F. “Give me a U!” Four hundred thousand voices gave him a U. “Give me a C!” Four hundred thousand voices responded with a C. “Give me a K!” Four hundred thousand voices gave him a K. “What’s that spell?” the cheerleader shouted, his voice limitlessly magnified by the public address system.

  “FUCK!” came the response in a hoarse, Nurembergrally tidal wave of sound. Then a wild cheering. The audience in the theatre applauded. The girl beside him, Craig noticed, sat with her hands primly clasped in her lap. He liked her the better for it.

  He sat quietly in his seat but paid little attention to the film after that. Who could say what that gigantic many-throated FUCK! meant? It was a word like any other, and he used it himself, although not often. It was neither ugly nor beautiful in itself, and its use was now so widespread that it had almost no meaning or so many different meanings that it was no longer valid linguistic coin. In the voices of the giant choir of the young in the film it had a primitive derision, it was a slogan, a weapon, a banner under which huge destructive battalions could march. He hoped that the fathers of the four students who had been shot at Kent State would never see Woodstock and know that a work of art that had been dedicated to their dead children contained a passage in which nearly half a million of their children’s contemporaries had mourned their death by shouting FUCK! in unison.

  The film had mo
re than an hour yet to run when he left the theatre. The girl didn’t seem to notice that he was going.

  The sun was shining over the blue sea, and the flags of the nations represented in the festival snapped brightly at their poles on the theater’s façade. Even with the continuous traffic of cars along the waterfront and the passage of the crowds on the sidewalk and promenade, it was blessedly quiet. For this morning, at least, Cannes remembered that it was supposed to look like a Dufy.

  Craig went down to the beach and walked by the water’s edge, unaccompanied, a private man.

  He went up to his room to shave. In the mailbox there was the large manila envelope with his name scrawled on it in a slanting, bold woman’s hand and a letter postmarked San Francisco from his daughter Anne.

  He tossed the envelopes onto a table in the salon and went into the bathroom and shaved carefully. Then, his face pleasingly smarting from lotion, he went back into the salon and slit open Gail McKinnon’s envelope.

  There was a hand-written note on top of a pile of typed yellow pages.

  “Dear Mr. Craig,” he read, “I’m writing this late at night in my hotel room, wondering what’s wrong with me. All my life people have been glad to see me, but this afternoon and evening, every time I as much as looked in your direction, on the beach and at lunch, in the lobby of the Festival Hall, at the bar, at the party, you made me feel as though I were Hurricane Gail on her way to lay waste the city. In your career you must have given hundreds of interviews. To people who were a lot more stupid than I am, I bet, and quite a few who were downright hostile. Why not to me?

  “Well, if you won’t talk to me about yourself, there are a lot of people who will, and I haven’t been wasting my time. If I can’t get the man whole, I’ll get him refracted through a hundred different pairs of eyes. If he comes out not terribly happy about himself, that’s his fault and not mine.”