Two Weeks in Another Town (43 page)

“What were you saying,
chéri?”
Hélène said. “This damned noise.”

“Nothing,” he said.

“When do you think you’ll be coming home?”

Now, he thought. The explosion. “Things are all balled up here,” he said. “I may not get out for another six weeks.”

“Six weeks?” She sounded incredulous.

“I’ll write it all in a letter,” he said.

“But what about Joe Morrison? What about your job?”

“I’ll write him a letter, too.”

“He won’t let you do anything like this…”

“He’ll just have to,” Jack said. “Listen, this call is costing a fortune…”

“I don’t understand. What’s happened to you? Don’t hang up,” she said hurriedly. Then away from the receiver, “Please, boys, less noise, I’m talking to Rome.” Then again to him, “Jack, are you all right? You’re not making any sense. Are you drunk? You can’t stay away six weeks…”

Then he realized what had puzzled him in the beginning of her conversation. “Hélène,” he broke in, “what do you mean you read it in the paper this morning? Delaney had his attack at eleven o’clock…”

“Delaney?” Hélène said. “Who said anything about Delaney? This damned connection…”

“Hélène,” Jack said, “speak slowly and clearly. What did you read in the paper this morning?”

“Jean-Baptiste,” she said. “He was killed yesterday. In Algeria. In an ambush. Didn’t you know? Didn’t you read the newspapers this morning…?”

“No,” Jack said. “Now, listen. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll call you tomorrow…”

“Jack,” Hélène said desperately, “wait a minute. I have to talk to you. I can’t…”

He hung up. He couldn’t get a sound out of his constricted and aching throat. He sat looking at the telephone for a long time. He wanted to weep. If he could weep, the intolerable pain in his throat and behind his eyes would be eased. But no tears came. All he could do was sit hunched over on the desk and stare at the telephone. The telephone went slowly and rhythmically in and out of focus.

Then he remembered the envelope that Jean-Baptiste had given him the night of the Holts’ cocktail party, when he had gone off to his little war. The envelope was in a bureau drawer in the bedroom, under a pile of shirts. For a moment, Jack debated with himself whether or not to let it go till morning. His eyes were heavy, his bones ached, he wanted to drop, fully clothed, onto his bed and sleep. Sitting there, he wasn’t sure that he could find the energy even to move into the bedroom. But he made himself stand up and go get the envelope. When he came back into the living room, he held the envelope in his hands for a long time before he tore it open.

“Dear Dottore,” the letter began, in spiky French script. “You must not be surprised. In a murderous world it is normal to be murdered. If you are reading this, it is because I am dead. I expect it, this time. I do not know why. A feeling of bad luck, maybe. I have had the feeling of bad luck several times before, and nothing has happened to me, and perhaps this time it will be the same and I will reappear in Rome and ask you for the envelope and you will never know about my feeling of bad luck, and we will celebrate my return together, as usual. Only this time, the feeling is stronger—

“Eh, bien,
the worst is over. Now to business. You will see, included in the envelope, aside from this letter to you, quite a few manuscript pages. The manuscript is the article on your friend Delaney. It is unfinished. If you glance through it, you will see that I have said some harsh things about him. Living, I would not mind having it published. But dead, I would prefer to have it destroyed. I would not like my last words to be harmful and critical. I have already been given a big advance on this piece from the magazine and if they found what I have written they would undoubtedly have it finished in the office and publish it. The money is spent, but a dead man has the right to be slightly dishonorable. So read it or do not read it, as you like, and then destroy it. You can even go so far as to tell your friend Delaney that I admired him. This is even partly the truth.

“Finally, if I am killed in this little miserable war in Algeria, I will be very sorry. It is all shit on both sides, and one should not be asked to die in it.

“I am sorry to burden you with this, my dear Jack, but in running down my list of friends, before writing this letter, I have come to the conclusion that everybody else whom I could trust is already dead.

“Be assured (as we polite French put it at the end of our letters), my dear
Dottore,
of my sentiments devoted and distinguished.

Jean-Baptiste”

The last two lines were written in English, as though Despière had been loath to end a letter like this on a serious note. Self-mocking and ironic, skeptical of pompousness and lofty notions, Despière had signed off his life in his accustomed style.

Delaney, Jack thought, Despière. In the same day. I was warned, and now it is happening.
Jamais deux sans trois.
French proverb. Never two without a third. The night is not over. It has been prolonged by one death.

Jack made a neat pile of the manuscript pages and put them on the desk. He couldn’t bring himself to read it. Not now.

He went into the bedroom. The bed had been turned down for the night by the maid many hours before, the reversed sheet making a crisp triangle of white in the light of the bed-table lamp, reminding him of hospitals. He was too tired to undress. He took off his shoes with an effort, feeling stiff and sore, and turned off the lamp. But sleep would not come. Memories of Despière crowded in on him.

“…
and we will celebrate my return together, as usual.

There had been the return from Indochina, where Despière had nearly been killed, ingloriously, in a jeep accident. Despière had telephoned as soon as he reached his hotel and he and Jack and Hélène and the American mannequin Despière had been more or less living with at the time had gone out to dinner and to several bars and night clubs, drinking champagne all the time, toasting the driver of the jeep and the driver of the truck that had hit it, and various other people, as their names came up, so that they had all been quite drunk by two o’clock in the morning. Despière, who still was suffering from the aftereffects of concussion and whose head was bound up in a huge bandage that looked like a crooked turban had insisted upon doing a wild triumphant dance in the middle of the floor, with Hélène, even though, from time to time, Hélène had to hold onto him to keep him from slipping to the floor.

“You ought to stop him,” Jack had said to Despière’s girl. “He’s going to feel like hell in the morning.”

The girl shook her head. “Nothing’ll stop him tonight,” she said. “I tried to stop him from drinking this evening, before we met you, and I told him he’d suffer tomorrow. All he did was laugh and say, ‘Of course I will. But I must celebrate that I am alive. I am ready to pay for the joy in the morning.’”

The mannequin was married to someone else now, and living in New York, and Jack was sure that when she read about Despière in the papers at breakfast, she would remember the night club and Despière in his turban of bandage dancing crookedly and triumphantly to celebrate the fact that he was alive and saying, “I am ready to pay for the joy in the morning.”

I was warned that one would die,
Jack thought, lying in the dark room,
perhaps I should have warned him as he left the cocktail party. But I thought that it was I who was being warned
—
about myself.

He lay still, trying, with his eyes shut, to make himself realize that there would never be again the ring on the telephone, the amused voice, saying,
“Dottore,”
or
“Monsieur le Ministre,
I am once more in town. I am afraid it will be necessary to have a drink immediately.”

And then, later, I thought it was Delaney. But we are both alive. Only Jean-Baptiste…

Only Jean-Baptiste…Naturally, Jack thought, it had to be him. How could I have ever missed it? The most integral of Europeans, with his gift of languages, his drifting across borders, his history of having fought in so many different lands, in France, in Russia, in Germany, Africa…With his intelligent, pessimistic appraisal of what Europe had come to, mixed with his hard French gaiety and mocking clarity of vision. The professional spectator of the age’s violence. Finally, the spectator must be sucked in, must become an actor. Despière had long ago used up his spectator’s allowance of time and luck. The age could not continue to permit him to go on indefinitely…The atrocity editor, he had called himself. There was no final way of remaining on the edge of atrocities, removed from them…In the long run, the editor looks down at his desk and sees that the story that has been placed there that day is his own.

Now he was afraid to sleep. His blood drummed in his ears and the muscles of his neck felt rigid, as though they were straining, independently of him, to pull his head from the pillows. He sat up and turned on the light, then got off the bed and went back into the living room.

A window had swung open and the wind had blown the pages of Despière’s manuscript off the desk. There were sheets of paper scattered all over the floor, giving an impression of lunatic disorder to the room. Wearily, he shambled over the flowered rug, bumping into the furniture, bending over and retrieving each sheet. They were not numbered, and now they were in a jumble, a maze of loose paragraphs typed on an old machine with a bad ribbon that made for wavy lines and sudden dark blotches on some letters. It was written in French and Despière had crossed out some things and added a great many others in ink, to complete the confusion. Jack read at random.

“Americans,” he read, “artists included, differ from Europeans in that they believe in the continuing upward curve, rather than in a rhythmic beat of accomplishment…”

God, Jack thought, dead or alive that sentence would have to be rewritten to get past an editor.

“That is,” Jack read, “an American, starting at any given point, believes that his career must go from success to success. In the American artist, of any kind, it is the equivalent of the optimistic businessman’s creed of the continually expanding economy. The intermittent failure, the cadenced rise and fall of the level of a man’s work, which is accepted and understood by the European artist, is fiercely rejected as a normal picture of the process of creation. A dip is not a dip to an American artist, it is a descent into an abyss, an offense against his native
moeurs
and his compatriots’ most dearly held beliefs. In America, the normal incidence of failure, either real or imagined, private or public, which must be expected in such a chancy and elusive endeavor as writing novels or putting on plays or directing motion pictures is regarded, even by the artist himself, as evidence of guilt, as self-betrayal. The look of disaster which we see in the eyes of American artists, their sense of being outside the approval of the American culture, is not there by accident. They cannot keep on their countrymen’s continually mounting curve, and they take to spectacular and desperate innovations, or to drink or to commerce because of it. In quite a few cases, they have taken to suicide. Some artists, being of stronger stuff, merely keep up a violent pretense that they have never failed. These artists will contend that their public has failed and their critics—never themselves. Maurice Delaney, who twenty years ago, made two or three of the best pictures of that time, is one of these…”

Jack put the pages on the desk, with an ashtray to hold them in place. The dead, he thought, are attacking the dying in Rome tonight. I’ll read it through some other time, he thought, when all our wounds are cured.

He went into the bedroom. This time he undressed. He lay down carefully, hoping by the slowness of his movements, to keep his blood from drumming in his ears. It worked. He closed his eyes and slept.

He thought he heard a telephone ringing in his sleep, but when he woke up, the room was silent. His nose was bleeding, not much, but steadily, and he went into the bathroom for a towel and went back to sleep with the towel bunched up under his nose and over his mouth, so that, dozing uneasily, he had the impression of drowning. He had only one dream that he remembered in the morning, and it was a brief and inconsequential one. In the dream the telephone rang again and a voice said, “Zurich is calling, Zurich is calling.” There was music over the wire and then a woman’s voice, light and clear, said,
“Jamais deux sans trois.”

“S
O,” DELANEY SAID, “TELL
me all about everything. How did it go?”

It was eight thirty in the evening. Delaney still had the oxygen tube strapped to his cheek, and he was lying in the same position as the night before, and once more the nurse was sitting in the shadows in the corner of the room. But Delaney’s voice sounded stronger, and his color, as far as Jack could see in the lamplight, was almost restored. Delaney said that he felt fine, that he had no pain, and that if it weren’t for the doctor, he would get up and go home. There was a good chance that he was lying, out of pride, but there was no doubt that, for the time being at least, he was much improved. His first words were not about his wife, or about Barzelli, but about the movie.

“What was it like on the set today?” he asked. “Don’t skip any of the details.”

“It went okay,” Jack said. “Better than anyone had a right to expect.” Actually, Jack had been grateful for the tension and confusion of a movie set and the necessity of concentrating on the problems of actors and soundmen and electricians. It had kept him from thinking about Despière all day. Now that the day was over, he found that he was beginning to accept the fact of Despière’s death. He had decided not to say anything about it to Delaney. There was no telling how Delaney, in his present state, would react to the news. “I found I knew a lot more about directing than I thought I did,” he said.

“I told you,” Delaney said. “Nine out of ten directors don’t know
anything.
How about the kid—Bresach—is he panning out?”

“He’s very useful,” Jack said.

“I knew it,” Delaney said, with satisfaction. “I had a hunch about that kid.”