Two Weeks in Another Town (46 page)

“All right,” Jack said, “I’ll ask Holt for more time. Right now.” He went to the telephone and called Sam Holt’s number. The telephone was answered promptly, and it was Holt’s voice, lively and pleasant, which said, “Hello?”

Jack explained swiftly what he and Bresach had been doing and about the extra week’s shooting.

“Do you guarantee that it’ll be worth it?” Holt asked.

“In something like this,” Jack said, “nobody can guarantee anything. All I can say is I
think
it’s worth it.”

“Tha’s good enough for me, Jack,” said Holt. “You’ve got your extra week. Don’t hang up. I have some more news for you. I went to see Maurice tonight, and he said he’d read a new script by this boy, Bresach, and that it’s very good and that he wants to do it as his next picture when he gets out of the hospital. Have you read it, Jack?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

“Do you agree that it’s worth doing?”

“It’s very much worth doing.”

“Good,” Holt said. “You tell the boy I want to see him sometime tomorrow in my office to arrange the terms. I’ll be there all day. Will you tell him that?”

“Yes,” Jack said. “Good night, Sam.” He went back to the table, which was littered with cigar ashes and bits of paper now. Max and Bresach had got the waiter to bring them one last brandy.

“It’s okay,” Jack said. “Holt’s giving us the week.”

“Why not?” Bresach said carelessly. “It’s only money.” He stood up. “Max, let’s get the hell to sleep.”

“One more thing,” Jack said. “He wants you to come to his office sometime tomorrow. Delaney’s told him he wants to buy your script and do it, and Holt wants to make the deal with you.”

“Robert,” Max said excitedly. “Did you hear that?”

“I heard it,” Bresach said. “Deathbed Studios, the new colossus of the Industry.”

“You’re going to make the deal, aren’t you?” Max asked.

Bresach drained the last of his brandy. “Possibly,” he said. He looked speculatively at Jack. “Did Delaney talk to you about this?”

“A little.”

“What did he say?”

Jack was sorry Bresach had posed the question, but made himself give an honest report. “He said that with some changes he had in mind it could be the best thing he ever made.”

“He intends to make some changes?”

“He said he had a thousand ideas,” Jack said. “Give it the old Delaney touch.”

“Oh, Christ,” Bresach said. “And he wants to direct it himself?”

“Yes.”

“Even so,” Max said, “it’s too big a chance to let slide, Robert.”

Bresach pushed his empty brandy glass along the tablecloth, like a man making a move in chess. “Andrus,” he said, “have you anything to say on the subject?”

“Not at the moment.”

Bresach nodded. “Not at the moment,” he said. He started walking. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve still got a lot of work to do tomorrow. Come to my place. There’s no telephone to bother us. I don’t like your place for working. It has a persistent stink of treachery in it.”

Jack ignored the jibe. “I’ll be there at twelve. We both can use a morning’s sleep.”

In silence, they went past the sleepy-eyed waiter out onto the street. It was cold and a wind was blowing, and Max said, old-maidishly, to Bresach, “Button up your coat.”

“Well,” Bresach said, taking a deep breath, “it hasn’t been a bad night’s work.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. “I’ll tell you something about yourself, Jack. I’m sorry you’re as smart as you are and as decent as you are. It is becoming more and more impossible to detest you.” He grinned, gaunt and hollow-eyed in the cold light from the street lamps. “If you hear from Veronica,” he said, “tell her to come visit the set sometime. See me in all my tinsel glory. Maybe that’s what I need to stop me from throwing up. The face of love.”

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG, AS
usual, at seven in the morning, to wake him up. Dazedly, he got out of bed and prepared to shave. It was only while he was putting the lather on his face that he remembered that he was not going to the studio that morning. He stared blearily at his reflection in the mirror, the lather making him look bearded, like a disreputable old man, broken and disfigured by a lifetime of dissipation. He washed the lather off and dried his face and looked at himself again. Now he didn’t seem like an old man any more, but his face was disagreeably webbed under his eyes and unhealthily pale. Annoyed with himself for not having remembered to cancel the operator’s call the night before, he got back into bed. He made himself stay under the covers for an hour, but he couldn’t sleep, and he finally got up and called for his breakfast.

He didn’t open the newspapers that the waiter brought in with him, in case there was anything in them about the funeral of Despière. The less he thought about Despière today and in the days to come, the better for the control of his nerves. As he drank his coffee, it occurred to him that he had nearly four hours to wait before his appointment with Bresach. He thought of the other guests of the hotel, breakfasting, like him, at this hour in their rooms, and preparing to set out and enjoy the wonders of the city. This morning, he thought, for a few hours, I, too, will be a tourist. It may be the last chance I get. He went over to the desk and got the old 1928 Baedeker and propped it on the table in front of him as he sipped his coffee and ate his sugared roll.

The idea of touring Rome, even for a morning, by the aid of a guidebook that had been published in 1928 was a pleasant one. In the stiff, proper prose, the city of thirty years ago seemed more orderly, more leisurely, more substantial than the city of today. In that city nothing very bad could happen to you. The only real danger in 1928, it seemed, was that you might overtip the natives.

He read at random, Under Churches and Learned Institutions, there was a paragraph headed Guide-Lecturers (English or English-speaking)
Prof. L. Reynaud,
Via Flavia 6;
Signora P. Canali,
Via Vittorio Veneto 146;
Mr. T. B. Englefield,
Via Cesare Beccaria 94;
Miss Grace Wonnacott,
Via dei Gracchi 134…

That’s what I need, he thought, in this city—a guide-lecturer (English or English-speaking) to explain it all. What would
Signora P. Canali
have to say, across the thirty years, about her compatriots Veronica Rienzi and Barzelli and Tucino, how would
Miss Grace Wonnacott,
that English lady of Via dei Gracchi 134, describe that complex descendant of Irish immigrants, Maurice Delaney?

Lead me among the monuments,
Mr. T. B. Englefield,
show me the stones where love and ambition are buried, take me to the very spots where the rape, the crucifixion took place, where the last cries were uttered, where rose the shouts of triumph, where the kings marched before their assassins, where the gladiators amused the multitudes. I have friends who amuse the multitudes, and in not too different a way, and who also pay an extreme price when they lose.

Idly, Jack turned the page.

PLAN OF VISIT

2nd day. Walk from
Sant’Onofrio
through the
Passeggiata Margherita
to
San Pietro in Montorio
and there await the sunset…

And there await the sunset.

How peaceful, Jack though, sipping his coffee, to await the sunset in 1928 at San Pietro in Montorio.

The telephone rang. It had a tinny, impatient sound, as though the operator hadn’t slept well the night before and was irritated with the world this morning. Jack leaned over and picked up the phone.

It was Carlotta. “I’m sorry to call you so early,” she said, speaking quickly, crowding the words in, “but I wanted to get hold of you before you went out. They haven’t let me in to see Maurice yet and I wondered…”

“He’s all right,” Jack said. “He got your roses.”

“Jack,” she said, “don’t be so short with me. Please. I want to see you. It’s ridiculous, both of us in the same hotel, after so many years…Will you take me to lunch?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I have an appointment at noon.”

“What’re you doing until then?”

“Sightseeing.”

“Where?”

“The Sistine Chapel.” It was the first thing that came into his head.

“Isn’t that remarkable,” Carlotta said. “That’s just where I’m going this morning.”

“When did you decide that?”

“Two seconds ago.” She laughed. Her laughter was composed and friendly. “May I come along with you?”

Why not, Jack thought. Everything else has happened to me in Rome, I might as well visit the Sistine Chapel with my ex-wife. “I’ll be down in the lobby in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Can you be ready?”

“Of course,” she said. “You remember how fast I dress.”

Remember, Jack thought, as he hung up. Women use that word as a club.

He went into the bathroom, and for the second time that morning, put the old man disguise of lather on his face.

She was in the lobby when he came out of the elevator. She was talking to another woman and she didn’t see him for a moment and he had an opportunity to study her and observe what the years had done to her. She had put on weight and the old, flickering sharpness of her face was gone. Her beauty had diminished, but without leaving signs of bitterness in the process. By some magic of time, the jittery neurotic she had been when he had last seen her had been transformed into a robust and sunny matron. As he looked at her, conversing brightly with the other woman, it occurred to Jack that if he were asked to describe her now he would use the old-fashioned phrase, a comely woman.

Her hair, which had gone through the usual spectrum of Hollywood colors, now seemed a faded and natural blonde, and she filled, a little too completely, with an outmoded generosity of flesh, her smart dark gray suit. Looking at the smiling, firm-skinned, full face and the over-womanly body, Jack remembered the choice that a Frenchwoman had once told him ladies over thirty-five had to make—between the face and the derrière. Either you dieted and exercised, the woman had said, and kept your behind slender and allowed your face to grow haggard and lined, or you opted for your face and let your behind spread. Carlotta had clearly opted for her face. Wisely, Jack thought.

When he came up to her, the fuss of introductions to the other woman, a Princess Miranello, who had a long upper lip and prominent gums and a Back Bay accent, made the meeting conventional and without embarrassment.

“I’ll meet you at one o’clock for lunch,” Carlotta said to the other woman.

“Well,” the princess said, making what Jack imagined she thought was an arch face in his direction, “if you have a better offer…”

“I have no better offers,” Carlotta said. “See you at one.” She put her hand lightly on Jack’s arm and they started out of the hotel together.

“Who’s the princess?” Jack asked.

“Maggie Fahnstock, of Boston. She’s an old friend of mine. She knows all about you. She thinks it’s awfully moving, our meeting each other like this in Rome, after so long…” Carlotta’s tone was light and amused. “Are you awfully moved?”

“Awfully,” Jack said. He saw Guido waiting beside the Fiat across the street and waved to him. Guido jumped into the car and started to turn against the traffic toward the hotel.

“She’s seen you before,” Carlotta said. “In a restaurant the other night, with two men. She examined you carefully. She said you looked like a happy man.”

“Good old Maggie,” Jack said. “That sterling judge of Character.”

“She also thought you looked very handsome,” Carlotta said, without coquetry. “She said you looked as though you’d be good for another twenty years. She asked me why I left you.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I told her that I didn’t leave you,” Carlotta said. “You left me.”

“It’s amazing,” Jack said, “how many different opinions eyewitnesses can have of the same accident.”

Guido drove up to the door and Jack helped Carlotta into the car, before getting in himself.

“Cinecittà?” Guido asked.

“San Pietro,” Jack said.

Guido looked up into the rear-view mirror, to make sure that Jack was not joking. Then, reassured, he put the car into gear and swung out into the street.

On the way to the Vatican, Carlotta talked about herself. She talked in a chatty, friendly way, as though Jack were an old acquaintance, and no more than that, with whom she could gossip freely and inconsequentially. She had married Kutzer, the head of the studio, she told Jack, a year after her divorce from Jack had become final. Jack nodded. He had read about it and had debated with himself about sending a cablegram. He had not sent the cablegram.

Kutzer had divorced his wife, settling close to a million dollars on her, and married Carlotta. “I was at the bottom,” she said, but flatly, without emotion. “I was in despair about you. The only parts I could get were degrading and my reputation was so bad that even in Hollywood the only parties I could get invited to were for drunks and fairies and dope addicts.” She laughed lightly, without regret or self-criticism, like a woman speaking of some innocent failing she remembered from her childhood. “He was the most faithful man I ever met,” Carlotta said. “I was his girl for seven years and then he waited nearly another ten years for me to finish with you—and in all the time I was with you he never as much as held my hand or talked to me about anything but work, when I was on the lot—and then one day he called me and said it was absurd for me to ruin myself the way I was doing and that he wanted to marry me. I had a terrible hangover that morning and I would’ve done anything to be left alone so I said yes. And it turned out that he gave me the happiest years of my life until he died. You knew about that, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Jack said. He had read in the newspapers two or three years before that Kutzer had dropped dead walking up the stairs to his office one evening after dinner. Taciturn, brutal, intelligent, rich, faithful, overworked. A thousand people had turned out for his funeral, most of them glad that he was dead. The happiest years of Carlotta’s life…

“People have different periods of their life when they are made to be happy,” Carlotta was saying. “Some people between twenty and thirty. Others between thirty and forty. Others never, I suppose. I found out that I was made to be happy after forty.”