Nightwork (41 page)

“Montgomery Clift,” I said. “I’m not Montgomery Clift and you’re not Shelley Winters. And the picture wasn’t called
An American Tragedy
. It was
A Place in the Sun
.”

“I just said it for laughs.” She smiled sweetly at me.

“Some laughs.” But I smiled back. It wasn’t much of a joke, but it was a joke. At least it was a sign she was ready to make an effort not to be gloomy for the rest of our time in Europe. The long haul through France would have been hard to take if she just sat in her corner of the car, silent and withdrawn, as she had done on the trip that morning from Rome. After the phone call to Fabian I had told her I had to drive to Paris and asked her if she wanted to come along.

“Do you want me to?” she said.

“I want you to.”

“Then so do I,” she had said flatly.

Quadrocelli saw us as we approached the dock and jumped off the boat spryly and hurried to meet us, robust and nautical in his shapeless corduroys and bulky blue seaman’s sweater. “Come aboard, come aboard,” he said, bending to kiss Evelyn’s hand, then shaking mine heartily. “Everything is ready. I have arranged all. The sea, as you notice, is calm as a lake and the well-advertised blue. The picnic basket is secured. Cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, fruit, wine. Adequate nourishment for seagoing appetites …”

We were about twenty yards away from the boat when it blew up. Bits and pieces of wood and glass and wire flew around us as we all dove to the pavement. Then everything became deadly quiet. Quadrocelli stood up slowly and stared at his boat. The stern line had been torn away and the stern was drifting at an odd angle from the dock, as though the boat had been broken in two just aft of the helm.

“Are you all right?” I asked Evelyn.

“I think so,” she said in a small voice. “How about you?”

“Okay,” I said. I stood up and put my arm around her. “Giuliano …” I began.

He did not look at me. He kept staring at his boat. “
Fascisti
,” he whispered. “Miserable
Fascisti
.” People were now streaming out of the buildings across the wide quay and we were surrounded by a crowd of citizens, all talking at once, asking questions. Quadrocelli ignored them. “Take me home, please,” he said to me quietly. “I do not believe I trust myself to drive. I want to go home.”

We shouldered our way through the crowd to our car. Quadrocelli never looked back at his pretty little boat, which was sinking slowly now into the oily waters of the harbor.

In the car, he began to shiver. Violently, uncontrollably. Under his tan, his face took on a sickly pallor. “They could have killed you, too,” he said, his teeth chattering. “If you had arrived two minutes earlier. Forgive me. Forgive all of us.
Dolce Italia
. Paradise for tourists.” He laughed eerily.

When we reached his house, he wouldn’t let us go in with him, or even get out of the car. “Please,” he said, “I must have a discussion with my wife. I do not wish to be rude, but we must be alone.”

We watched him walk slowly, looking old, across the driveway and to the door of his house. “Oh, the poor man,” was all that Evelyn said.

We drove back to our hotel. We didn’t say anything about what had happened to anyone. They would find out soon enough. We each had a brandy at the bar. Two dead, I thought, one in New York, one in Switzerland and one near miss in Italy. Evelyn’s hand was steady as she picked up her glass. Mine wasn’t. “To sunny Italy,” Evelyn said. “
O sole mio
. Time to go, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?”

“I would,” I said.

We went up and packed our bags and were paid up and out of the hotel and on the road north in twenty minutes. We didn’t stop, except for gas, until after midnight, when we had passed the border and were in Monte Carlo. Evelyn insisted on seeing the casino and playing at the roulette table. I didn’t feel like gambling, or even watching, and sat at the bar. After a while she came back, smiling and looking smug. She had won five hundred francs and paid my bar bill to celebrate. Whoever would finally marry her would marry a woman with sound nerves.

Evelyn drove out to Orly with me in the rented car with a chauffeur. The Jaguar was in the garage, waiting for Fabian. Evelyn was going to stay in Paris a few more days. She hadn’t been in Paris for years and it would be a shame just to pass through, she said. Anyway, I was going to Boston and she was going directly to New York. She had been carefree and affectionate on the trip through France. We had driven slowly, stopping often to sightsee and indulge in great meals outside Lyon and in Avallon. She had taken my picture in front of the Hospice de Beaune, where we toured the wine cellars, and in the courtyard at Fontainebleau. We had spent the last night of the trip just outside Paris at Barbizon, in a lovely old inn. We had dined gloriously. Over dinner I had told her everything. Where my money had come from, how I had met up with Fabian, what our arrangement was. Everything. She had listened quietly. When I finally stopped talking, she laughed. “Well,” she said, “now I know why you want to marry a lawyer.” She had leaned over and kissed me. “Finders keepers, I always say,” she said, still laughing. “Don’t worry, dear. I am not opposed to larceny in a good cause.”

We slept all night in each other’s arms. Without saying it to each other, we both knew a chapter in our lives was coming to an end and tacitly we postponed the finish. She asked no more questions about Pat.

When we reached Orly, she didn’t get out of the car. “I hate airports,” she said, “and railway stations. When it’s not me that’s going.”

I kissed her. She patted my cheek maternally. “Be careful in Vermont,” she said. “Watch out for changes in the weather.”

“All in all,” I said, “it’s not been a bad time, has it?”

“All in all, no,” she said. “We’ve been to some nice places.”

My eyes were teary. Hers were brighter than usual, but dry. She looked beautiful, tanned and refreshed by her holiday. She was wearing the same dress she had worn when she arrived in Porto Ercole.

“I’ll call you,” I said, as I got out of the car.

“Do that,” she said. “You have my number in Sag Harbor.”

I leaned into the car and kissed her again. “Well, now,” she said softly.

I followed the porter with my luggage into the terminal. At the desk, I made sure I had all the checks for my bags.

I caught a cold on the plane and was sniffling and running a fever when we landed at Logan. The customs man who came up to me must have taken pity on my condition because he merely waved me on. So I didn’t have to pay any duty on the five Roman suits. I took it as a favorable omen to counterbalance the cold. I told the taxi driver to take me to the Ritz-Carlton, where I asked for a sunny room. I had learned the Fabian lesson of the best hotel in town, if I had learned nothing else. I sent down for a Bible and the boy brought up a paperback copy. The next three days I spent in the room, drinking tea and hot rum and living on aspirin, shivering, reading snatches from the Book of Job, and watching television. Nothing I saw on television made me happy I had returned to America.

On the fourth day my cold had gone. I checked out of the hotel, paying cash, and rented a car. The weather was wet and blustery, with huge dark clouds scudding across the sky, not a good day for driving. But by then I was in a hurry. Whatever was going to happen I wanted to happen soon.

I drove fast. The countryside in the changing northern season was dead, desolate, the trees bare, the fields muddy, shorn of the grace of snow, the houses closed in on themselves. When I stopped once for gas, a plane flew overhead, low, but unseen in the thick cloud. It sounded like a bombing raid. I had crossed this stretch of the country, at the controls of a plane, hundreds of times. I touched the silver dollar in my pocket.

I reached Burlington just before three o’clock and went directly to the high school. I parked the car across the street from the school and turned the motor off and waited, with the windows all turned up to keep out the cold. I could hear the three o’clock bell ring and watched the flood of boys and girls surge through the school doors. Finally, Pat came out. She was wearing a big, heavy coat and had a scarf around her head. With her myopic eyes I knew my car, forty yards away from her, was only a blur to her and that she couldn’t tell whether anyone was in it or not. I was about to open the door and get out and cross over to her when she was stopped by one of the students, a big fat boy in a checkered mackinaw. They stood there in the gray afternoon light, talking, with the wind whipping at her coat and the ends of her scarf. The window on my side was beginning to mist over from the condensation of my breath in the cooling car, and I rolled it down to see her better.

She and the boy seemed in no hurry to be on their way, and I sat there looking at her for what seemed like a very long time. Consciously, I made myself assess, at that one moment, what I felt, on the deepest level, as I watched her. I saw a nice enough little woman, ordinarily pretty, who in a few years would look austere, who had no connection with me, who could not move me to joy or sorrow. There was a faded, almost obliterated memory of pleasure and regret.

I turned on the ignition and started the car. As the car moved slowly past her and the boy, they were still talking. She did not look at the car. They were still standing there, on the windswept, darkening street, when I took a last look back in the rearview mirror.

I drove to the Howard Johnson Lodge and put in a call for Sag Harbor.

“Love, love!” Fabian was saying disgustedly. We were in the living room of his suite in the St. Regis. As usual, as in anyplace he lived even for a day, it was littered with newspapers in several languages. We were alone. Lily had had to go back to England. I had driven directly to New York. I had told Evelyn on the phone that I would get to Sag Harbor the next day. “I thought that you had at least gotten over
that
,” Fabian was saying. “You sound like a high-school sophomore. Just when everything is going so smoothly, you’ve got to blow up the whole thing. …”

Remembering the morning on the dock at Porto Ercole, I was displeased with his choice of words. But I said nothing. I was going to let him talk himself out.

“Sag Harbor, for Christ’s sake,” he said. He was pacing up and down, from one end of the big room to another. Outside there was the sound of the traffic on Fifth Avenue, reduced to a rich hum by thick walls and heavy drapes. “It’s just a couple of hours from New York. You’ll wind up with a bullet in your head. Have you ever been in Sag Harbor in the winter, for God’s sake? After the first fine flush of passion dies down, what do you expect to do there?”

“I’ll find something,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just read. And let you work for me.”

He snorted and I smiled.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’ll probably be safer in America surrounded by millions of other Americans than in Europe. You saw for yourself—I stick out like a lighthouse among Europeans.”

“I had hoped to be able to teach you to blend into the scenery.”

“Not in a hundred years, Miles,” I said. “You know that.”

“You’re not that unreachable,” he said. “I saw certain signs of improvement even in the short time we were together. By the way, I see you went to my tailor.”

I was wearing one of the suits from Rome. “Yes,” I said. “How do you like it?” I flipped the lapel of the jacket.

“A welcome change,” he said, “from the way you looked when I met you. You got a haircut in Rome, too, I see.”

“You never miss anything, do you?” I said. “Good old Miles.”

“I dread to think of what you’re going to look like after a visit to the barber at Sag Harbor.”

“You make it sound as though I’m going to live in the wilderness. That part of Long Island is one of the swankiest places in the United States.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, still pacing, “there are no swanky places, as you so elegantly put it, in the United States.”

“Come on, now,” I said. “I remember you come from Lowell, Massachusetts.”

“And you come from Scranton, Pennsylvania,” he said, “and we both should do our damndest to forget the two misfortunes. Righto, marriage. I grant you that. You’re pleased at the prospect of having a son. I’ll grant you
that
, even though it’s against all my principles. Have you ever taken a good look at American kids today?”

“Yes. They’re endurable.”

“That woman must have bewitched you. A lady lawyer!” He snorted again. “God, I should have known I should never have left you alone. Listen, has she ever been to Europe? I mean before this—this episode?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why don’t you make this proposition to her—You get married. Righto. But she tries living in Europe with you for a year. American women love living in Europe. Men chase them until they’re seventy—especially in France and Italy. Let her talk to Lily. Then she can decide. Nothing could be fairer than that, could it? Do you want me to talk to her?”

“You can talk to her,” I said, “but not about that. Anyway, it’s not only the way she feels. It’s the way
I
feel. I don’t want to live in Europe.”

“You want to live in
Sag Harbor
.” He groaned melodramatically. “Why?”

“A lot of reasons—most of them having very little to do with her.” I couldn’t explain to him about Angelo Quinn’s paintings and I didn’t try.

“At least can I meet the lady?” he asked plaintively.

“If you don’t try to convince her,” I said. “About anything.”

“You’re some dandy little old partner, partner,” he said. “I give up. When can I meet her?”

“I’m driving out tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t make it too early,” he said. “I have some delicate negotiations starting at ten.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“I’ll explain everything I’ve been doing over dinner. You’ll be pleased.”

“I’m sure I will,” I said.

And I was, as he talked steadily across the small table late that evening at a small French restaurant on the East Side, where we had roast duckling with olives and a beautiful, full Burgundy. I was considerably richer, I learned, than when I had watched his plane take off from Cointrin with Sloane’s coffin in the hold. And so, of course, was Miles Fabian.