"I live in London," Wadleigh said. "Did you know that?" He asked the question harshly, daring Craig to admit that he had lost interest in his one-time friend"s activities.
"Yes," Craig said. "How is London?"
"The city of Shakespeare and Marlowe," Wadleigh said, "of Queen Elizabeth and d.i.c.kens, of Twiggy and Ian Wadleigh. Another s.h.i.t hole. I"m supposed to be down here doing a piece on the Festival for an English f.a.g magazine. On spec. They pay my hotel bill. If they take the piece, they throw me another couple of pounds. They want that old magic name Ian Wadleigh on their f.a.g cover. When they read the piece, they"ll probably puke. All I"ve seen here is s.h.i.t. And I"m going to say so. There"ll be a twitter in the dovecote. The f.a.g entertainment editor never learned how to read, so he thinks movies are today"s music of the spheres. The Art of Now. He thinks Jean-Luc G.o.dard turns out a new Sistine Chapel four times a year. Christ, he thought Blow-up was a masterpiece! What do you think of the c.r.a.p they"re showing here?"
"Some good, some bad," Craig said. "I figure by the time the thing"s over, we"ll have seen at least six good pictures."
"Six!" Wadleigh snorted. "When you make up the list, send it to me. I"ll include it in my piece. Freedom of the press. The half-dozen selections of a once-great mind."
"You"d better go back to your hotel, Ian," Craig said. "You"re being a pain in the a.s.s."
"I"m sorry." Wadleigh was genuinely contrite. "My manners have deteriorated the last few years. Along with everything else. I don"t want to go back to my hotel. There"s nothing there for me but a collection of fleas and half the ma.n.u.script of a book I"ll probably never finish. I know I"m a bitter son of a b.i.t.c.h these days, but I shouldn"t take it out on an old pal like you. Forgive me. You do forgive me, don"t you, Jess?" He was pleading now.
"Of course."
"We were friends, weren"t we?" He was still pleading. "We had some good times together, didn"t we? We put down a lot of bottles together. There"s still something left, isn"t there, Jess?"
"Yes, there is, Ian," Craig said, although there wasn"t.
"What kills me," Wadleigh said, "is what pa.s.ses for writing these days. Especially in the movies. Everybody grunting and saying, Yeah, and, Like, you know, I dig you, baby, and, Let"s f.u.c.k, and that"s supposed to be dialogue, that"s supposed to be how the n.o.ble human animal communicates with his fellow man under the eye of G.o.d. And the people who write like that get a hundred thousand a picture and win Oscars and all the girls they can handle, and I"m down to writing a c.r.a.ppy two-thousand-word piece on spec for a f.a.g English magazine."
"Come on, Ian," Craig said. "Every artist has his ups and downs. Just about everybody goes in and out of fashion in his lifetime. If he lasts long enough."
"I will be back in fashion fifty years after I die," Wadleigh said. "Posterity"s darling, Ian Wadleigh. And how about you? I haven"t seen many articles in the Sunday papers recently saying how wonderful you are."
"I"m on sabbatical leave," Craig said, "from admiration."
"It"s one h.e.l.l of a long sabbatical leave," Wadleigh said.
"So it is."
"That reminds me," Wadleigh said. "There"s a girl here by the name of McKinnon-she"s some kind of reporter-who keeps trying to pump me about you. All sorts of questions. About women. Girls. Your friends. Your enemies. She seems to know more about you than I do. Have you been talking to her?"
"A bit."
"Be careful," Wadleigh said. "She has a funny light in her eye."
"I"ll be careful."
A Fiat with two girls in it slowed down along the curb, and the girl nearest them leaned out the open window and said, "Bonsoir."
"Get the h.e.l.l out of here," Wadleigh said.
"Sal juif," the girl said. The car spurted ahead.
"Dirty Jew," Wadleigh said. "Do I look that bad?"
Craig laughed. "You must learn to be more polite with French ladies," he said. "They"ve all been brought up in convents."
"Wh.o.r.es," Wadleigh said. "Wh.o.r.es everywhere. In the audience, on the screen, on the streets, in the jury room. I tell you, Jess, this is the living and eternal capital of wh.o.r.edom for two weeks each year. Spread your legs and take your money. That ought to be printed on every letterhead under the seal of the city of Cannes. And look at that. Over there." He pointed across the boulevard where there were four young men smiling professionally at pa.s.sing males. "How do you like that?"
"Not very much," Craig admitted.
"You can"t tell the players without a program anymore," Wadleigh said. "Wait till you read my piece."
"I can"t wait," Craig said.
"I"d better send you a copy of the ma.n.u.script," Wadleigh said. "Those f.a.gs"ll never print it. Or maybe I"ll turn wh.o.r.e, too, and write just what that f.a.g entertainment editor wants to hear. If I don"t get that dough, I don"t know what I"ll do."
"Maybe that"s just what those girls in the car and those boys over there on the corner say to themselves every night," Craig said. "If I don"t get that dough, I don"t know what I"ll do."
"You"re just too f.u.c.king Christian tolerant, Jess," Wadleigh said. "And don"t think it"s a virtue. The world is going to the dogs on a sickening wave of tolerance. Dirty movies, dirty business, dirty politics. Anything goes. Everything"s excused. There"s always a half-dozen something that isn"t bad."
"What you need, Ian," Craig said, "is a good night"s sleep."
"What I need," Wadleigh said, stopping on the sidewalk, "is five thousand dollars. Have you got five thousand dollars for me?"
"No," Craig said. "What do you need five thousand dollars for?"
"There"re some people making a movie in Madrid," Wadleigh said. "They have a lousy script, naturally, and they need a quick rewrite. If I can get there, it"s almost sure the job"s mine."
"It only costs about a hundred bucks to fly from here to Madrid, Ian."
"What"ll I use for the hotel?" Wadleigh demanded. "And food? And for the time it takes to sign the contract? And before the first payment? And for my lousy third wife? At this moment she"s attaching the books and typewriter I left in storage in New York for nonpayment of alimony."
"You"ve struck a responsive chord there, Brother," Craig said.
"If you go in to make a deal and the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds know you haven"t got a dime, they grind you to powder," Wadleigh said. "You"ve got to be able to get up and walk out and say, Up yours, friends. You know that. I figure five thousand is a minimum."
"Sorry, Ian," Craig said.
"Okay, can you give me three hundred? I can get to Madrid and give myself a couple of days on three hundred." The fat on his throat over his loose collar was quivering.
Craig hesitated. Unconsciously, he patted his coat over his wallet. He knew he had five hundred dollars in American money and about 2000 francs in the wallet. Superst.i.tiously, in memory of the time he had been poor, he always carried a lot of money with him. Turning down requests for loans, even from people who were strangers, was invariably painful, almost impossible, for him. He regarded this trait, rightly, as a weakness in his character. He always remembered that in War and Peace Tolstoy had used Pierre Bezouchov"s new-found ability to turn down supplicants for money as a sign of maturity and ripening intelligence. "All right, Ian," he said, "I can give you three hundred."
"Five thousand would do better," Wadleigh said.
"I said three hundred." Craig took out his wallet and extracted three one hundred dollar bills and gave them to Wadleigh.
Wadleigh stuffed the bills roughly into his pocket. "You know I"ll never pay you back," he said.
"I know."
"I won"t apologize," Wadleigh said fiercely.
"I"m not asking you to apologize."
"You know why I won"t apologize? Because you owe it to me. You know why you owe it to me? Because once we were equals. And now you"re something, and I"m nothing. Less than nothing."
"Have a good time in Madrid, Ian," Craig said wearily. "I"m going to bed. Good night."
He left Wadleigh standing there under the lamppost, with the wh.o.r.es cruising by him as he stared at Craig"s retreating back.
By the time he had reached his hotel, Craig had caught a chill and was shivering a little. He went into the bar, which was nearly empty at this hour between dinner and the end of the showing in the Festival Hall. He sat at the bar and ordered a hot grog for his health"s sake. While he was drinking it, the bartender showed him a photograph of his son. The son was dressed in the archaic uniform of the Escadre Noir of the French cavalry school at Saumur. In the photograph the young man was taking a fine black horse over a jump, his seat perfect, his hands secure. Craig admired the picture for the father"s pleasure, thinking the meanwhile how wonderful it must be to devote your life to something as pretty and useless as a French cavalry squadron in 1970.
Still shivering a little and beginning to feel the advent of fever, he paid for his drink, said good night to the father of the cavalryman, and went to the lobby to get the key for his room. There was an envelope in his box, and he recognized Gail McKinnon"s handwriting. Now he regretted not having asked her to have dinner with him. Wadleigh would not have spoken as he had if the girl had been at his side. Wadleigh had shaken him more than he cared to admit to himself. And he would have been three hundred dollars richer because Wadleigh wouldn"t have brought himself to ask for money in front of a witness. Irrationally, too, he felt that the chill he was suffering from, and the mounting fever, could be traced to his encounter with the writer. The cold wind from the depths of Cannes.
In his room he put on a sweater and poured himself a whisky, again for his health"s sake. It was too early to go to sleep, fever or no fever. He opened Gail McKinnon"s envelope and in the yellowish glow of the gla.s.s chandelier read what she had written to him.
"Dear Mr. Craig," he read, "I persist. With optimism. This afternoon, at lunch and in the car, I sensed that you were becoming more friendly. You are not really as remote a man as you try to appear. As we pa.s.sed the house where you told me you spent a summer on the Cap d"Antibes, I felt that you wanted to say more than you allowed yourself to say. Perhaps it was out of caution, not wanting to reveal something on the spur of the moment that you would regret later seeing in print. So what I"m doing here is writing out some questions that you can read at your leisure and then write out your replies to the ones you choose to answer in exactly the terms that please you. You can edit as you will, free of any fear of slips of the tongue that an unscrupulous newspaperman or newspaperwoman might take advantage of.
"Here goes-"
He read the first question and stopped. It was a simple one. "Why are you in Cannes?" Well, he thought, that"s a good beginning. And a good end. Intelligent girl. The all-inclusive, everlasting inquiry. Why are you anyplace? The answer to this question is to determine your general knowledge of the subject. You have thirty minutes, or twenty-four hours, or forty-eight years in which to complete the examination.
Why are you in this city and not in another? Why are you in this bed with this woman and not another? Why are you alone here or in a crowd there? How have you come to be kneeling before this altar at this time? What has driven you to say no to that journey and yes to the one on which you find yourself? What has possessed you to cross that river yesterday, board this plane this morning, kiss this child this evening? What has driven you to this lat.i.tude? What friends, enemies, successes, failures, lies, truths, calculations of time and geography, what reading of maps, what detours and highways have deposited you in this room at this evening hour?
A fair question deserved a fair answer.
He went over to the desk and sat down and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen. "Why am I in Cannes?" he wrote slowly. He hesitated. Then, without really thinking of what he was doing or writing, he wrote, almost automatically, "I am in Cannes to save my life."
HE stared at the sentence that he had written. That is not my handwriting, he thought. He put the pen down. He knew he was not going to write anything more that night. Anything you say may be used against you. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
There was a brilliant, painful light shining, a wild, loud howling somewhere. He opened his eyes. Through the wet smear of the windshield wipers two damp moons were hurtling straight at him. His hands were still loosely on the wheel. He yanked at the wheel, slid past the other car by inches on the gleaming black road. The wail of the other car"s horn faded like a funeral cry behind him. He felt calm, drove alertly, not stopping, peering carefully through the streaked gla.s.s at the curves ahead of him.
A few miles farther on his hands began to shake, his body to shiver uncontrollably. He pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, waited for the spasm to pa.s.s. He had no idea of how long it was before his hands stopped shaking. He was conscious of cold sweat on his forehead, icicles dripping down inside his clothing from his armpits. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his forehead, breathed deeply, four profound inhalations. The air in the car smelled sour. Where was he? The rows of black trees alongside the road told him nothing. He had crossed the French border not so long ago, he remembered. He was somewhere between the Bida.s.sosa River and Saint Sebastian. He had started from Paris that morning, had not stopped except for gasoline and a cup of coffee all day. I have nearly died in sunny Spain. He had intended to drive without a halt until Madrid, sleep over, go farther south-to Malaga-the next day. A man he knew, something of a friend, a matador, really the friend of a friend, was fighting in Malaga the next afternoon. He had met the man in Alicante the year before. There was a three-day fera. Mediterranean sunshine, parading bands, fireworks, the costumes of the Spanish south, much drinking, long, crowded hangovers, the amused irresponsibility of other people"s celebrations, companions, men and women he knew well enough to enjoy on a short holiday but who meant nothing much to him, whom he only saw the four or five times in the year when he happened to go to a bullfight.
The matador was too old for the bulls. He knew it. He was a rich man. There was no sensible reason for him to go into an arena with animals who were devoted to killing him. "What can I do?" the matador had said. "It is the only thing that deeply amuses me. It is my only playground. I am lucky. I have a playground. Most people do not have one. So-I cannot permit them to drive me from it."
There were many ways of dying in Spain. Horns, falling asleep at the wheel.
It was the third time that year he had fallen asleep driving at night. Once outside Salzburg. Once on the autostrada near Florence. Tonight. He had been lucky. Or had he been? Anyway, he had opened his eyes in time. In the last years he had taken to driving nine hundred, a thousand miles at a stretch. What had he wanted to do in Salzburg, what had he planned to see in Florence? His friend the matador would be fighting in thirty different places all season. Why had he felt it was necessary to go to Malaga? He no longer remembered. He liked driving at night, the solitude, the numbing, hypnotic onrush of lights, the satisfaction of leaving a place he felt he had been in too long, the pleasure of moving through the deserted, dark streets of a new city, the accomplishment of distance.
Suicide was in every garage. He was sane enough to understand that.
He started the car, drove slowly into Saint Sebastian, found a hotel. He would not reach Madrid that night.
A bar was open near the hotel. He ordered a brandy, then another. He wasn"t hungry. There were some men arguing at a table in Spanish. He listened. Their heads were bent together over the table, their voices fell to a conspiratorial hush. They might have been planning to murder Franco, free a priest, bomb the prefecture of police, take a chance on a lottery. He did not understand the language. He was soothed by his ignorance.
He called Paris from the hotel. It took a long time, and he undressed and got into bed waiting for the call to be put through. Constance answered. He had left her early in the morning. They had made love in the dawn. She had been sleepy and warm. Her lovemaking was robust as usual, generous and easy. She gave freely, took without stint, there were no favors exchanged, no debts to be paid off in bed. She never said, "Why do you have to go?" when he announced without warning that he was off to Zurich or the Cte Basque or New York. He would not have been able to answer her truthfully if she had asked.
Every once in a while they went on trips together, but that was different. They were holidays when she had time off from work. When he drove off by himself, it was not a holiday. If she was in the car with him, he drove slowly, chatting with her, playing word games, enjoying the scenery, stopping often for brandies. She liked to drive, too. She was an erratic driver, but lucky. She had never had an accident, she boasted. She should have had twenty. He had laughed once as they teetered around a curve on the wrong side of the road. She hated being laughed at. She had stopped the car and got out and said she wouldn"t drive with him anymore and started walking back toward Paris. He had waited, and she had come back a half hour later, trying unsuccessfully to look imperious, and gotten into the car, and he had let her drive, and she"d stopped the car at the first cafe, and they"d had a brandy.
That morning, when he had left her, he had gone back to his hotel and packed his bag and sped through the early-morning traffic toward the auto route south. Once she had asked him why he bothered keeping a hotel room since almost every night he was in Paris he stayed at her place. He had said, "I"m used to hotels." She hadn"t asked again.
The phone rang on the table beside the bed. The room was an immense one, with dark, high furniture. He always went to the best hotel in town, avoiding the other guests. He didn"t like the ordinary run of guests in the best hotel in any town.
"Are you in Madrid already?" she asked. He might have just awakened her, but you never could tell with Constance. Five seconds after she was roused, she sounded as though she had just come, bubbling and fresh, from a cold shower.
"No," he said, "I stopped in Saint Sebastian for the night."
"How is it in Saint Sebastian?"
"They"re speaking Spanish," he said.
"What a surprise." She laughed. "What made you change your mind?"
If he had been honest, he would have said, "I didn"t want to die tonight." Instead, he said, "It was raining."
Another year. Five years ago. He was standing in the lobby of a movie theatre in Pasadena. There had been a sneak preview of the last picture he had made. The movie had been shot in France, its hero a young lieutenant in the American army in Germany who had deserted and had a disastrous affair with a French woman before turning himself in. The director, Frank Baranis, was in the lobby with him, sunk in a large polo coat, depressed because the audience had coughed and been inattentive throughout the film. They had been friends ever since Baranis had directed Edward Brenner"s play nearly twenty years before. Baranis had been the best man at Craig"s wedding. During the shooting of the film, Craig had received an anonymous letter in a woman"s handwriting saying that Baranis had been sleeping with Penelope before the marriage, the very day before, the letter had said, and probably for a long time after. Craig had ignored the letter, had said nothing about it either to Penelope or Baranis. On the strength of an anonymous letter, probably from a jilted and vengeful woman, you did not ask the man who was your friend and was working day and night for you on a complicated and demanding task whether or not he had slept with your wife the day before your wedding seventeen years ago.
Craig was suddenly aware of how old Baranis looked, like a fearful, wizened monkey. He was lightly pockmarked, but he had large liquid dark eyes and a disdainful, offhand way with women that was, Craig heard, effective.
"Well," Baranis said, "we bombed. What do we do now?"
"Nothing," Craig said. "That was the picture we wanted to make, and we made it."
A man and his wife, in the crowd coming out of the auditorium through the lobby, pa.s.sed nearby. The woman was short and dowdy. If she had been on sale, you would have been able to find her in gross lots on the shelves of a supermarket at clearance prices. The man was burly, bursting out of his clothes, and looked like a football coach whose team had just lost a game and was furious with his players. His face was red and flushed, his eyes glared behind rimless gla.s.ses. "What a load of s.h.i.t," he was saying as he pa.s.sed the spot where Craig and Baranis were standing. "They think they can get away with anything these days."
"Harry," the woman said in her supermarket voice. "Your language."
"I repeat," the man said. "A load of s.h.i.t."
Craig and Baranis looked silently at each other. They had worked for nearly two years on the picture.
After a while Baranis said, "Maybe it isn"t a picture for Pasadena. Maybe it"ll be different in New York."
"Maybe," Craig said. Then, since it was that kind of night, anyway, he said, "Frank, a couple of months ago I got an anonymous letter that said you"d had an affair with Penelope before we were married. That you"d gone to bed with her the day before, even. Is that true?"
"Yes," Baranis said. It was still that kind of night.
"Why didn"t you say something?"
"You never asked," Baranis said. "How the h.e.l.l was I to know when it started you wanted to marry her?" He pulled the collar of the polo coat up around him, half-buried his face in it. He looked like a small, trapped, dying animal. "Anyway, if I had told you, you"d have married her just the same. You"d have forgiven her and hated me. You"d never have talked to me again."
"I suppose so," Craig said.
"Look at you and Ed Brenner," Baranis said. He sounded angry. "You never see him anymore, do you?"
"No."
"See?"
"You knew about Brenner and Penny?" Craig asked flatly.
"Everybody knew." Baranis shrugged impatiently. "So what good would it have done if I"d opened my big mouth?" Baranis sank deeper in his coat.
"No good." Craig nodded reasonably. "Come on, let"s get out of here. I"ll drive you home."