Evening In Byzantium Part 9
The picture didn't do much better in New York. It was before the time when movies about soldiers who were disillusioned with the American army were to the public taste.
He was sitting in his office signing checks on the scarred, fake mahogany desk. The office was small and shabby, two rooms, one for him and one for his secretary. Belinda Ewen had been with him since his first play. The furniture of the office also was the same he had started with back in 1946. Neither Belinda nor the furniture had improved with the pa.s.sage of time. Belinda had been a small, dark, furiously energetic, almost pretty young woman when he had hired her. She was still small, dark, and energetic, but now was no longer almost pretty. Her face seemed to have been honed into severe angular lines by the abrasion of the years, her lips chipped out by a blunt knife. The desk had been fake mahogany in 1946. It just looked a little more fake now.
Penelope had campaigned to be allowed to choose a larger office for him and to decorate it herself. He had refused. He didn't like the offices of men whose wives had chosen the furniture, the thick rugs, the tasteful paintings on the walls. Penelope had also tried, at least once a year throughout their marriage, to get him to fire Belinda. "She runs the office as though it's hers, not yours," Penelope had said over and over again. "And besides, she's disrespectful to me." Among Penelope's complaints about Belinda Ewen was Belinda's style of dress. "It's grotesque," Penelope had said. "She looks as though she's gotten herself up to go to Coney Island with a sailor. What do you imagine people think about you when they come into the office for the first time and they see that woman decked out in all the colors of the rainbow?" He hadn't replied, as he might have, that people came to his office to work with Jesse Craig, not to pa.s.s judgment on the choice of his secretary's clothes. But he contented himself with saying, "When she marries, I'll get someone who dresses all in black."
"Married!" Penelope had sniffed. "While you're alive, that woman will never marry."
"I hope you're right," he had said. The discussion had taken place on one of the less pleasant evenings at home.
Even so, there were times when the clashing greens and purples of some new outfit that Belinda had put together made him shake his head in wonderment. Safely behind the closed door of his own office, of course.
Penelope had also suggested, in moments of anger, that he had had an affair-was still having an affair-with the secretary. He had never touched Belinda and believed that she would run screaming through the halls if he as much as brushed her cheek. And he saw no reason, if a woman did her work as efficiently as Belinda did hers, why she had to be respectful to her employer's wife.
And finally, he was superst.i.tious. He had done well in the shabby little office with the unprepossessing, ludicrously dressed secretary; he had done better than he had ever hoped or dreamed he might do since the day when he had signed the first lease for eighty dollars a month. There was no sense in tempting fate with unnecessary signs of luxury. Although now, sitting at the old desk, in the late afternoon of an autumnal New York day, signing away at a torrent of checks after the disastrous preview in Pasadena and the neglected opening in New York, he could hardly argue that luck had made a permanent base in the bare room in which he had worked so long.
The checks he was signing were from his personal, not from his business account. For the most part they were for household bills, food, liquor, fuel, telephone, the salaries of the two maids, flowers, a bill for two thousand dollars for a sofa that Penelope had found at an antique dealer's on Madison Avenue, bills from Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman for clothes that Penelope had bought, a two-hundred-dollar bill that came in monthly from Charles of the Ritz where Penelope had her hair done. There were other bills, too-tuition for Anne's school in Lausanne, tuition for Marcia's school in Maryland, insurance and garage rent for Penelope's car, a hundred-and-eighty-dollar bill for the ma.s.seuse who visited Penelope three times weekly, a savage bill from a doctor in Hollywood for treatment of Penelope's mother, who had come out to visit her daughter soon after the marriage when Craig had been making his first movie on the Coast and had immediately fallen mysteriously ill and was taking a long time to die in the most expensive place for dying in the world.
Craig had tried setting up a household account for Penelope to handle, but she was always overdrawn or neglected to pay the telephone bill so that suddenly it would be cut off, or she would pay bills twice or be too busy to bother for months on end, and there would eventually be dunning letters on his desk to annoy him. So now he had Belinda type up the checks, and once a month, in silent fury, he signed them himself. He wondered what Belinda thought as she typed out the checks for clothes that more than equaled her entire year's salary. She must also speculate, he thought, what anybody could do to a woman's hair that was worth two hundred dollars a month.
When he had finished with the last check, he threw down his pen and leaned back in his chair and looked out the streaked, dirty window of his office at the lighted windows across the street, behind which clerks and secretaries were working in the glare of neon tubes. If they had known what he had been doing at his desk for the last hour or so, they would have every right, he thought, to come storming out of their cubicles and into his office to tear his checkbook to bits. At the very least, the checkbook.
From time to time he had tried to remonstrate with Penelope about the bills she ran up, but Penelope invariably broke into tears at the mention of money. Quarreling about money was debasing. She had not dreamt when she married him that she was linking herself for life with a man who thought only in dollars and cents. In all her childhood and youth in Chicago she had never heard a word in her home about money. Listening to her, one would think that she came from a long line of landed aristocrats whose wealth was based in some ill.u.s.trious, monarchal past in which plebian matters such as debts and a.s.sets were handled only in backstairs obscurity by discreet underlings in frock coats. Actually, her father had been a traveling salesman in silks and ribbons who had died in want. Craig had had to pay for the old man's funeral.
As the discussions grew more heated, Penelope swore that she watched every cent, called on the names of wives of their friends who spent more on their clothes in one month than she did in a year, which was true, brought heaven to witness that all her efforts and expenditures were designed to make him a decent home, give him a wife he would not be ashamed to be seen with in public, bring up his children decently. He hated scenes, especially about money. Deep down he had the feeling that the large sums that had come his way in his career were not rightly his but the work of accident, luck, for doing only the things he would have happily done, anyway, for a pittance. He could not argue about money. Even in business he never dealt directly with contracts but allowed Bryan Murphy in Hollywood and his business manager on Broadway to handle that side of his affairs at all times. Not being able to d.i.c.ker with a recalcitrant actor about a percentage of the profits of a play or movie, he certainly couldn't stand up to his wife's tears when it was a question of a six-hundred-dollar telephone bill or the cost of a new coat. Still, remembering his early days living in cheap hotels, he wondered by what insidious magic he found himself signing salary checks for two maids who worked in a house in which he rarely ate more than two meals a week and from which he was absent, more often than not, five or six months a year.
Although each time Belinda brought in the checks to sign she put on what Craig had come to recognize as her steadfastly noncommittal face, he found it difficult to meet her gaze and always pretended to be busy and said gruffly, keeping his head down, "Thank you, Belinda. Just put them on the desk. I'll sign them when I have the time."
When he had first met Penelope, she had been a charming young actress of moderate talent who dressed attractively and lived in a pleasant little apartment in the Village on ninety dollars a week. He wondered where that girl had gone. From a frugal young woman who washed her own stockings and underwear each night, she had turned almost immediately into someone who ransacked galleries and antique shops, who patrolled Fifth Avenue like the advance guard of a looting army, who had to have nurses for her children, who could not conceive of living anywhere in New York City except between Sixtieth and Eighty-sixth Street on the East Side. American women, he thought, take to extravagance with all the natural talent of a dolphin to the waves of the sea.
That it was as much his fault as his wife's and that he recognized this did not make the check-signing sessions any the easier for him.
He added up the amounts of the checks he had signed, entered them neatly in the checkbook. The total came to nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-six dollars and forty-seven cents. Not bad, he thought, for a man with two flops behind him.
When he had been working with Brenner on his first play, Brenner had once said to him, "I cannot take the problems of a man who makes more than fifty dollars a week seriously." Brenner had been youthfully extreme then, but he wondered what his old friend would think about him if somehow he had wandered into the office that afternoon and happened to glance down at the repeated signatures on the sc.r.a.ps of paper scattered across the littered desk.
On an impulse he made out one last check, in his own hand, for nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-six dollars and forty-seven cents. He left the s.p.a.ce for the payee blank for a moment. Then he filled in the name of a hospital. It was the hospital in which his two daughters had been born.
He wrote a short note to the fund-raising committee of the hospital to go along with the contribution, put the note and the check into an envelope, and addressed it and sealed it.
He had balanced his accounts for the day.
He called through the door to Belinda. He had tried, briefly, installing a buzzer, but its implications had made him uneasy.
When Belinda came in, he gave her the checks and the one sealed envelope and said, "That'll do it for this afternoon, thank you."
Then he went downstairs to the bar next door and had enough to drink so that the evening ahead of him would be a blur.
When he got home, Penelope said, "Do you think I'll ever live to see the day that you'll show up for dinner sober?"
The last guests had just gone. There were empty gla.s.ses all around the living room. Penelope was in the kitchen emptying ashtrays. He looked at his watch. One-thirty. Everybody had stayed too long. He sank into an easy chair, kicked off his shoes. There had been fourteen at dinner. The dinner had been very good. The company dull. He had drunk too much wine.
Theoretically, his twelve guests were his friends. Of them all, there were only two, Robert and Alice Paine, whom he considered true friends. Robert Paine was a vice-president of a publishing house, on the business side, a portly, solid, highly educated man who spoke slowly, weighing his words, ignoring small talk. Craig had met him when he had been asked to select an anthology of plays for Paine's publishing house, and he had taken an immediate liking to the man. His wife Alice was a child psychiatrist, a large, squarish, handsome woman with mannishly clipped graying hair framing a quiet oval face. Penelope thought they were heavy going, and Craig knew that they had been invited for his sake, so that he wouldn't complain too bitterly about the rest of the list.
There had been n.o.body at the table who worked in either the theatre or the movies, although two of the men had from time to time invested in plays of his. Bertie Folsom had been there as usual. Since his wife died, Bertie Folsom was at every dinner party. Talking about the stock market. At length. Folsom was a few years older than Craig, a short, sharp-faced, balding, insignificant-looking, meticulously tailored man with a neat, round paunch who headed a big brokerage concern on Wall Street. The farther he went downtown, Craig thought, the more Bertie Folsom must gain in significance. He occasionally gave advice to Craig on stocks. Occasionally, Craig took it. Sometimes the advice was valuable. Since being widowed, he was invited to all dinners at the Craig house. Often he called at six in the evening and asked what they were doing that night. When they weren't doing anything in particular, the Craigs asked him to join them for quiet family dinners. Folsom remembered everybody's birthday, brought gifts for Anne and Marcia. Penelope felt sorry for him, she said. Craig figured that Folsom could not be worth less than two million dollars. Perhaps it was evidence of Penelope's warmth of character that she could find time to be sorry for a man who was worth two million dollars. When they had a party like the one tonight, Penelope invited various ladies for Folsom. They were the sort of ladies, usually divorced, who were always free to come to anybody's house for dinner. When Craig was out of town or working, Folsom escorted Penelope to the theatre and to parties. Somebody had once said Folsom was a useful man, one should always have a widower among one's circle of friends.
The conversation during the evening had been, aside from Bertie Folsom's dissertations on the stock market, about servants, the disastrous quality of the plays on Broadway that season, sports cars, Ferraris, Porsches, and Maseratis, the shortcomings of the young, speculation about the amours, legitimate and covert, of friends who were not present that night, the impossibility of finding a decent place anymore in the Caribbean to spend a holiday, and the comparative virtues of various ski resorts. Somehow, everybody there skied each winter. Except Craig. Penelope spent a month a year in Sun Valley and Aspen. Alone. Sitting at the head of his table in the house on the East Side of New York City, Craig felt that he had become an expert on snow. He had nothing against skiing-he wished he had had the time to take it up when he was a young man-but he believed people should ski, not talk about it. No one that evening had mentioned his last picture, or any of his pictures, except the Paines, who had come early so as to have a chance to talk to him alone for a few minutes over drinks before the rest of the guests had arrived. The Paines had liked his last picture, although Alice Paine had been bothered by the violence of a scene in a Parisian nightclub in which the hero got involved in a brawl. "Alice," Robert Paine had said affectionately about his wife, "hasn't learned yet how to stop being a psychiatrist when she enters a movie house."
There had been one interlude in the evening during which Craig had listened with some interest. The subject of Women's Liberation had come up, and Penelope, who ordinarily spoke little in company, had been eloquently vehement on the subject. She was for Women's Liberation. Craig had agreed with her. So had the other women at the table. If they had not all been so busy with fittings and arranging dinner parties and observing the schedules of hairdressers and traveling to the Caribbean and Sun Valley, they undoubtedly would have made a considerable impression on the movement.
Craig did not bother with the guest lists for parties. For one thing, he was too occupied with other matters to take the time. Occasionally, he met someone who interested him enough to suggest his or her name to Penelope, but more often than not Penelope would find some reason, usually perfectly valid, why the man or woman or couple would not fit in with the particular evening she was planning.
He sighed, not actually knowing why he did so. He heaved himself out of the chair and walked in his stockinged feet across the thick pale carpet to the sideboard where the bottles were ranged and poured himself a whisky. Penelope came in from the kitchen, glanced at the gla.s.s in his hand. When she did that, he always felt guilty. He picked up the bottle and added another ounce to his drink, splashed some soda into it, and went back to the easy chair. He watched Penelope move about the big, comfortable room in the subdued lamplight that shone in soft creamy pools on the polished wood of end tables, the brocade of chairs, the bra.s.s pots full of flowers. Penelope could not stand strong light. It was always difficult in any house she inhabited, even houses they rented for a summer, to find a place where it was possible to read.
She was dressed in a long, loose red velvet robe that swung gracefully around her slender, still youthful figure as she touched a bunch of flowers, put a magazine back in the rack, closed the cover of a silver cigarette box. Her taste was sure. Things looked better after she had touched them. There was nothing ornate or showy about her house, but, Craig thought, it was a wonderful place to live in, and he loved it. With the gla.s.s of whisky in his hand, he watched his wife move around the warm, welcoming room, and he forgot the dull departed guests. At that moment, admiring her in the midnight silence, he knew he loved her and felt completely married. He knew her faults. She was a liar, extravagant, cunning, often pretentious; she filled his house with second-rate people because she feared the compet.i.tion of wit, beauty, intelligence; she had been unfaithful to him and at the same time made him suffer from the blackmail of her jealousy; when things went wrong, she invariably found a way to pa.s.s the blame onto other shoulders, usually his; often she bored him. Still, he loved her. No marriage was all of one piece. Each partner paid some price. He had no illusions about his own perfection. He was sure that in her secret heart Penelope's list of his failings was much longer than the account of his own judgments on her.
He put his gla.s.s down, stood up, went over to her, kissed the back of her neck. She stiffened as though the gesture had caught her by surprise.
"Let's go to bed," he said.
She pulled away. "You go to bed," she said. "I still have things to do down here."
"I want to go to bed with you," he said.
She walked quickly across the room, put a chair between them as though for defense. "I thought that was just about over," she said.
"Well, it isn't."
"It is for me," she said.
"What did you say?"
"I said it's over for me. Permanently. I don't want to go to bed with you or with anybody." Her voice was low, even, without emotion.
"What brought that on?" He tried to keep his anger from showing.
"You," she said. "Everything. Leave me alone."
He went over and got his gla.s.s and took a long drink.
"When you sober up in the morning," she said, "you'll find your pa.s.sion has been neatly filed away in the back of the vault. Along with a lot of other things."
"I'm not drunk," he said.
"Every night," she said.
"Do you mean what you just said?"
"Yes."
"All of a sudden like that?"
"It isn't so sudden," she said, still behind the barrier of the chair. "You've been bored with me for years. And you've shown it. Tonight you did everything but yawn in the face of all my friends."
"You must admit, Penny," he said, "that it was a drab collection tonight."
"I don't admit anything."
"That Bertie Folsom, for G.o.d's sake ..."
"A lot of people think he's a most intelligent, attractive man."
"A lot of people thought Hitler was an intelligent, attractive man." He took a step toward her. He could see her knuckles whiten as she gripped the back of the chair, and he stopped.
"Come on, Penny," he said gently. "Don't let a pa.s.sing mood make you say things you'll be sorry for later."
"It isn't any pa.s.sing mood." Her mouth pulled down severely. Even in the soft light she now looked her full age. "I've been thinking about this for a long time."
He finished his drink, sat down, looked searchingly at her. She returned his glance unflinchingly, the enmity plain in her eyes.
"Well," he said, "I suppose this calls for a divorce. And a drink." He stood up and carried his gla.s.s to the sideboard.
"There's no need for a divorce," she said. "You don't want to get married again, do you?"
He laughed shortly and poured himself a stiff drink.
"I don't want to get married, either," she went on.
"What do we do-live together just as though nothing had happened?" he demanded.
"Yes. If only for Marcia and Anne. Anyway, it shouldn't be any great hardship. Nothing very much has happened between us for years now. Every once in a while, when you're not bombed to extinction, or you've got a case of insomnia or one of your other girls isn't available, you remember you have a wife, and you come crawling around."
"That's a word I'm going to remember, Penny," he said. "Crawling."
She ignored his warning. "Four or five nights a year," she said, "there won't be any games at home. That's all. I think we both can stand it."
"I'm forty-four years old, Penny," he said. "I don't see myself remaining celibate for the rest of my life."
"Celibate!" She laughed harshly. "There's another word for you. You can do whatever you want. Just the way you always have."
"I think," he said quietly, "tomorrow will be just the day for me to go on a nice long trip. Europe might be just the thing."
"The girls're coming home for Christmas," she said. "The least you owe them is to be here when they come. Don't take it out on them."
"All right," he said. "Europe can wait until after Christmas."
He heard a telephone ringing. Still dislocated in time, he almost called out, "Penny, will you take that, please?" Then he shook himself, looked around, realized where he was, at an ornate, fake antique desk in a hotel room facing the sea, and reached over and picked up the phone. "Craig speaking," he said.
There was a faraway howling over the wires, American voices jumbled and speaking too low to be understood, then, weirdly, a few notes of a piano, then a click and silence. He frowned, put the phone down, looked at his watch. It was past midnight, between three and six in the afternoon on the continent of America. He waited, but the phone did not ring again.
He stood up and poured himself a drink. He felt a wetness on his cheek. He looked disbelievingly at himself in the mirror. He had been weeping. He brushed the tears roughly away with the back of his hand, drank half the whisky, glared at the telephone. Who had tried to reach him, what message had been baffled in its course to him in midocean?
Perhaps it had been the one voice that could have made everything clear-tell him where he stood, what were his a.s.sets, what his debts, what he owed, what was owed him. On what side of the ledger he might enter his marriage, his daughters, his career. Let him know once and for all if he was morally bankrupt or ethically solvent, announce whether his loving had been a defensible expense, answer the question of whether or not, in an age of wars and endless horror, his preoccupation with fictions and shadows had been a callous waste of honor.
The telephone did not ring. There was no message from America. He finished his drink.
When he had been away from her, Penelope had had the habit of calling him almost every night just before she went to bed. "I don't sleep happily," she had said, "unless I hear your voice and know that you're all right."
The telephone bills had been enormous.
Sometimes he had been irritated by her calls, at other times moved by husbandly tenderness at the sound of the low, familiar, musical voice from a distant city, the other sh.o.r.e of a continent. He had been irritated when he thought that she had been checking on him, testing his fidelity, even though after what had happened between them he felt that he owed her no fidelity, or at least not that form of fidelity. He had been unfaithful to her occasionally. Without a sense of guilt, he told himself. Nor did he underestimate the continuing pleasure his indulgence made possible. But he had never allowed himself to become seriously involved with another woman. To that extent, he had felt he had protected his marriage. For the same reason he had refrained from inquiring into his wife's relations with other men. He had never checked on her. She had secretly rifled through all his papers, he knew, hunting for women's names, but he had never picked up a letter addressed to her or questioned her about whom she had seen or where she had gone. Again, without examining this facet of his behavior closely, he had felt that it would have been demeaning to him, a belittling blow to his pride. He had recognized the female cunning in Penelope's late-night telephone calls but for the most part had tolerated them, even been fondly amused by them, flattered by them. Now he knew he had been wrong. He and his wife had avoided candor, and they had drained their marriage.
He had been angry that morning when he had received her letter and had made out the monthly check, and he had reflected on her rapacity and meanness of spirit. But now, after midnight, alone, the memories that had been aroused by pa.s.sing the house on the Cap d'Antibes that afternoon working within him and the frustrating sounds of the indecipherable voices on the wires still echoing in his ears, he couldn't help but remember better times, gentler encounters.
For Craig, at least, the marriage worked best at times of stress-when late at night, after long hours in the theatre, he would return from the chaos of rehearsals, the savage clash of wills and temperaments whose tensions it was his job as producer to absorb and accommodate, and find Penelope waiting up for him, ready to make a drink for him in the beautifully ordered living room of their house and listen to him pour out his recapitulation of the day's work, the day's problems, the small tragedies, the day's insane comedies, the fears for the morrow, the disputes that remainded to be solved. She was sympathetic, cool, understanding. Her intuition and intelligence could be relied on. Invariably, she was helpful, the most reliable of partners, the most useful of advisers, steadfastly faithful to his interests. Out of all the memories of his marriage, all the good times, the summer in Antibes, the deeply satisfying moments with his daughters, even the long-shared pleasure of their love-making, it was those countless quiet midnight conversations in which they shared the best of themselves with each other that in retrospect were the real texture of their marriage, the most painful to have to forget.
Well, he had plenty of problems tonight, he could use advice. Despite everything, he knew he longed for the sound of her voice. When he had written her to tell her he was taking steps for a divorce, she had written him a long letter pleading with him not to break up their marriage, with all the reasons, pa.s.sionate and sensible and homely, for keeping it alive. He had barely glanced at it, afraid, perhaps, that it would sway him, and coldly sent her a note telling her to find a lawyer.
Then, as was almost inevitable, she had become a lawyer's creation, striking for gain, advantage, revenge. Now he regretted not having read her letter more carefully.
On an impulse, he picked up the phone, gave the operator the number of the house in New York. Then, after he had put the instrument down, he remembered from his daughter's letter that Penelope was in Geneva.
Foolish woman, he thought, as he got the operator back and canceled the call, this is one night she should have been at home.
HE poured himself a fresh drink, paced the room holding the gla.s.s in his hand, angry with himself for submitting himself to the past, torturing himself with the past. Whatever he had come to Cannes for, it had not been for that. Gail McKinnon had a lot to answer for. Well, he had come so far, he thought, he might as well go all the way. Go over all the mistakes, all the wrong turnings, all the betrayals. If masochism was to be the order of the day, enjoy it. Listen to the ghosts, remember the weather of other seasons ...
He sipped at his drink, sat hunched over at the desk, allowed the past to invade him.
He was in his office, back from three months in Europe. The trip had been neither good nor bad for him. He felt suspended in time, not unpleasantly, postponing all decisions.
There was a pile of scripts on his desk. He leafed through them without interest. Before the breakup with Penelope, or the semibreakup, or whatever it was, it had been his custom to do most of his reading in the small studio he had fixed for himself at the top of his house where he had no telephone and could not be interrupted. But since he had come back from Europe, he had taken a room at a hotel near his office and only occasionally visited the house or slept there. He hadn't moved his clothes or any of his books, and when his daughters were at home, which was rarely, he was there. He did not know how much they knew about the breach between him and their mother, and there were no indications that they had noticed any change. They were so concerned with the problems of their adolescence-dates, school, diets,-that Craig doubted that they would have paid much attention even if their parents had staged Macbeth before their eyes in the living room, complete with bare dagger and real blood. On the surface, he thought, Penelope and he behaved much as they had always done, perhaps a shade more politely than formerly. There had been no further scenes or arguments. They asked each other no questions about their comings and goings. It was a period in which he felt strangely peaceful, like an invalid who is very slowly recovering from a long illness and knows that no great efforts can be demanded of him.
Occasionally, they went out together. Penelope gave him a present on his forty-fourth birthday. They went down to Maryland to see a school play in which Marcia acted a small part. They slept in the same room in a hotel in the town.
None of the play scripts he was offered seemed worth doing, although there were one or two that he was sure would succeed. When they were done by other men and were hits, he felt no sense of loss or opportunity wasted.
He had given up reading the dramatic pages of the newspapers and had canceled his subscriptions to the trade papers. He avoided restaurants like Sardi's and Downey's, which had been favorite places of his and which were always filled with theatrical and movie people, most of whom he would know.
He had not been in Hollywood since the week of the preview in Pasadena. Every once in a while Bryan Murphy would call him and tell him he was sending him a script or a book that might interest him. When they arrived, he read them dutifully, then called Murphy and said he was not interested. After about a year, Murphy only called to find out how he was. He always said that he was fine.
There was a knock on the door, and Belinda came in carrying a playscript with a sealed envelope clipped to the cover. She had a peculiar, wary expression on her face. "This just came in," she said. "By hand." She put the script on his desk. "It's Eddie Brenner's new play."
"Who brought it in?" He kept his voice noncommittal.
"Mrs. Brenner," Belinda said.
"Why didn't she come in and say h.e.l.lo?"
"I asked her to. She said she preferred not to."