Two Weeks in Another Town (11 page)

“I was just paying him a compliment,” Miss Henken said, aggrieved. “Can’t you even pay a man a compliment any more?”

Jack caught Veronica’s eye, across the table, and Veronica smiled at him, swiftly, secretly, tilting her head. Why, Jack thought, surprised, she doesn’t think I look so bad even now.

Despière, who missed nothing, caught the almost imperceptible interchange, and he leaned back in his chair, regarding them both, his heavy eyelids almost closed, deciding, Jack realized, how he was going to make the girl and Jack pay for the moment. “Be careful what you say to the man,” he said lazily. “His wife is famously jealous. Aside from being beautiful. She is so beautiful,” Despière went on, “that when Jack leaves town she becomes the most popular lady in Paris. By the way, Jack,” he said, “did I tell you? I got a call from Paris this morning from a lady and she said she saw your wife last night. Did I tell you?”

“No,” said Jack, “you didn’t tell me.”

“She was at L’Eléphant Blanc at three in the morning,” Despière said. “Dancing with a Greek. The lady didn’t know who he was, but he was very light of foot, she said. She said Hélène looked beautiful.”

“I’m sure she did,” Jack said shortly.

“They’re the happiest married couple I know,” Despière said to the girls, his revenge completed. “Aren’t you, Jack?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I don’t know all your other married friends.”

“If there was any chance of success,” Despière said, “Hélène is just the sort of girl I would apply myself to. She herself is beautiful, and”—he nodded graciously at Jack—“her husband is amusing. It is too boring to have an affair with a woman who has a dull husband. No matter how attractive she is, it never makes up for the hours you have to spend with him, pretending to be his friend.”

Miss Henken laughed nervously, impressed by this
boulevardier
glimpse into a world where she would never be welcome, and Despière attacked his food happily, his triumph secure behind him.

Before the coffee came, he looked at his watch and jumped up, saying, “I’ve got to leave you, children, I’ve got a date. We must have lunch together every day.” With a wave, he was away from the table. The proprietor came bustling over toward him and Despière put his arm around the man’s shoulders and walked to the door with him and the proprietor went outside with him to speed him on his way, while Jack sat glaring at their disappearing backs, annoyed with himself for being so slow and letting Despière get away without paying the bill, or at least his share of the bill. He looked suddenly at Veronica, to see how she was taking being left like that by Despière, but she was eating a pear happily, unmoved.

Somewhere, Jack thought, I’ve gotten something all wrong.

And then, a few minutes later, when they had finished their coffee, and Jack called, with bad grace, for the bill, the proprietor came over and said, smiling widely, that it had already been paid, that Signor Despière had said this lunch was on him, they were all his friends that afternoon.

O
UTSIDE THE RESTAURANT, MISS
Henken said she had to go to Cinecittà to ask about a job and they found a taxi for her and she went off with the expression on her face of a woman who always leaves every place alone.

“Which way do you go?” Veronica asked, standing there, with her coat thrown back from her shoulders, in what Jack now recognized as a habitual attitude of self-display.

“I’m walking back to my hotel. It’s not far from here.” Jack prepared to say good-bye and wondered if, out of politeness, he ought to ask for her telephone number. The hell with it, he decided, I wouldn’t use it.

“May I walk with you?” she asked. Tip of the tongue again, he noticed.

“Of course,” Jack said, and they started walking, side by side, not touching. “I’d be delighted. If you’re not in a hurry.”

“I have nothing to do until five,” she said.

“What do you have to do then?” Jack asked.

“I work,” she said. “In a travel bureau. I send people off to places I would rather go myself.”

The sun was behind the clouds and the clouds were piling up ominously, slate black, in the north, and coming over Rome in invading formations and the wind was making torn poster edges flap against the ocher walls of the buildings with snapping, whip-like reports. It was going to rain soon.

They passed a doorway where a ragged, bent woman with a dirty child in her arms was begging. Holding her child with one arm, the woman ran after Jack, saying,
“Americano, americano,”
holding out her other hand, clawlike and filthy, for charity.

Jack stopped and gave her a hundred-lire piece and the woman turned, without a word of thanks, and went back to her doorway, where she crouched once more against the stone. Jack felt the woman staring after him, ungrateful, unappeased, and he had the feeling that the hundred lire he had given her did not make up for the warmth of the meal he had just eaten, for the pretty girl by his side, for the luxury of the hotel rooms he was approaching.

“It is to remind us,” Veronica said soberly. “Women like that.”

“Remind us of what?”

“Remind us of how close we are to Africa here in Italy,” she said, “and how we pay for it.”

“There’re beggars in America, too,” Jack said.

“Not the same kind,” the girl said. She was walking quickly, as though to get away from the woman and her child.

“Have you been in America?” Jack asked.

“No,” Veronica said. “But I know.”

They walked in silence for a moment, and crossed a street and turned a corner, passing a grocery window heaped with cheeses, sausages, and flasks of Chianti wrapped in straw.

“Do you mind,” Veronica asked, abruptly, her voice low, “that your wife was dancing at three o’clock this morning in Paris with another man?”

“No,” Jack said, thinking, That is not quite true.

“Americans marry better than Italians,” Veronica said. She said it flatly, but with bitterness.

Well, Jack thought, smiling inwardly, I could find you an argument on that subject.

“Anyway,” he said, “there’s a good chance she wasn’t dancing at three o’clock this morning.”

“You mean maybe Jean-Baptiste was lying?”

“Inventing,” Jack said.

“There’s a bad man there,” Veronica said. “Mixed up with a very good man.”

Then Jack felt the wetness on his lip and knew he was bleeding again. Embarrassed, he stopped and got out his handkerchief and put it to his nose.

“What is it?” Veronica looked at him, alarmed.

“Nothing,” he said, his voice muffled a little. “A nosebleed.” He tried to make a joke of it. “The Royal disease.”

“Does it do it like this all the time? For no reason?” Veronica asked.

“Only in Rome,” he said. “Somebody hit me last night.”

“Somebody hit you?” She sounded incredulous. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” Jack shook his head, annoyed at the scene, at the blood, which was flowing heavily now. “As a warning.” He stood there, depressed and shaken, weighed down, all over again, on the busy daytime street, by the dreams, the premonitions, the images of the dead, the nearness of danger, the loneliness and fear of the night. “We’d better get you to your hotel quickly,” Veronica said. She hailed a taxi and helped him in, like an invalid. Her hand was firm and gentle on his arm and he was glad that he wasn’t alone this time.

At the hotel, she insisted upon paying for the taxi, and got the key from the desk and stood close to him in the elevator, watching carefully, ready to hold him, as though she were afraid he was going to fall. The blood kept coming.

In the elevator, trying to look polite, unbloody, ordinary, for the sake of the tall boy in livery who pushed the buttons with his white-gloved hand, Jack had a curious, clear after-image. He was sure that while he had been waiting in the middle of the lobby for Veronica to get the key, he had seen Despière and a woman in a blue suit, seated close together, talking earnestly, in the long, empty lounge that stretched away from the lobby. And now, rising in the gilt cage from floor to floor, he was sure that at one point Despière had looked up, recognized him, smiled, then ducked his head.

“Did you see them?” he asked Veronica standing protectively next to him.

“See whom?”

“Despière and a woman,” Jack said. “In the lounge.”

“No,” Veronica said, looking at him strangely. “I didn’t see anybody.”

“No matter,” Jack said thickly. “No matter at all.” Now the living are haunting me, too, he thought, in broad daylight.

In the hotel bedroom, he took off his jacket and opened his collar and pulled down his tie and lay back on the bed. Veronica hung up his jacket neatly in the wardrobe, like a meticulous housewife, and found a clean handkerchief in the bureau drawer and gave it to him. Then she stood over him for a moment, her outlines vague in the dimness of the curtained room, with the sound of the new rain lashing at the windows. Then she lay down beside him, without a word, and took him comfortingly in her arms. They lay there together in silence, listening to the rain, in the warm, wavy, watery obscurity of the dark afternoon. After a while he dropped the handkerchief away from his face because he didn’t need it any more, and he turned his head and kissed her throat, pressing his lips hard against the firm, warm skin, shutting out everything that was not that room, that moment, that bed, shutting out omens and premonitions, wounds and blood, memories and loyalties.

He turned and lay on his back, her head on his shoulder, the long hair a dark blur against the dull, hidden gleam of his skin. Slowly, he returned to himself, slowly he became the visitor in apartment 654, husband, father, sane, deliberate, aloof, reasonable. He looked at Veronica’s shadowy face beside him, the face of a stranger, the face of a girl who, no more than two hours before, he had thought, looked stupid and self-satisfied. She was lying with her eyes wide-open, staring at the ceiling, a small, placid, public smile on her lips. Yes, he thought reasonably, there
is
something stupid about her face. He remembered his first judgment of her at the table on the street in front of the café—a glossy female brute. He smiled, thinking, What marvelous uses there are for glossy female brutes.

They lay together in the secret rain, with the noise of Rome outside the walls muffled by curtains and shutters and windows.

He chuckled softly to himself.

“Why do you laugh?” she asked, without moving, speaking next to his ear in her soft, trumpet voice.

“I was laughing because I’m so clever,” he said.

“What is so clever?”

“I had it all figured out,” he said. “At lunch. That you were going to go off, finally, with Jean-Baptiste.”

“You thought I was his girl?”

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

“No,” she said. “I am not his girl.” She took Jack’s hand and kissed it, on the palm. “I am your girl.”

“When did you decide that?” he asked, pleased and surprised by the swift declaration, thinking, How long it has been since anything like this has happened to me.

Then it was her turn to chuckle. “I decided two nights ago,” she said.

“You hadn’t even met me two nights ago,” he said. “You didn’t know I existed.”

“I hadn’t met you,” she said. “But I knew you existed. I knew very well you existed. I saw your film, you see. You were so beautiful, so capable of love, I became your girl in a half-hour, sitting alone in a movie house.”

Maybe, later, Jack thought sorrowfully, I will laugh at this when I remember it, but I don’t feel like laughing now. “But, baby,” he said, “I was twenty years younger then. I was younger than you are now.”

“I know,” she said.

“I’m not the same man now,” he said, regretfully, feeling that this lovely, simple-minded, slightly foolish girl was being cheated, cheated by time and the tricky durability of celluloid, and that somehow he was taking advantage unfairly of that trick. “Not the same man at all.”

“When I was sitting there in the movie house,” she said, “I knew what it would be like if you made love to me.”

Jack laughed harshly. “I guess I ought to give you your money back,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you were paying for something you didn’t get,” he said, withdrawing his arm from under her head, letting her head fall back on the pillow. “You were paying for a twenty-two-year-old boy who vanished a long time ago.”

“No,” Veronica said slowly, “I wasn’t paying for anything. And he didn’t vanish as you say, the twenty-two-year-old boy. When I sat in the restaurant, listening to you tell about Mr. Delaney and that poor friend of yours with the play, I saw that boy was still there.” Then she chuckled and moved closer to him, turning her head and whispering into his ear. “No, I am not telling the whole truth. It is not exactly the same as I imagined in the movie house. It is better, much better.”

Then they laughed together. Thank God for fans, Jack thought basely. He put his arm around her again, his hand caught in the rough, dark hair. Well, he thought, delighted, and I thought I had received my salary for that picture long ago. Now it turns out that I have what the Screen Actors Guild calls residual rights. Rich residual rights.

He turned toward her and put his hand on her.

“What do you want?” she whispered.

“Something particularly Italian,” he said. “Is this particularly Italian?”

H
E WAS AWARE OF
a knocking. He opened his eyes reluctantly. The room was dark and for a moment he was floating in time, not knowing where he was, what hour of the day or night it was, and not caring, happy in soft, clockless depths. Then the knocking came again, timidly, and he saw the door from the living room open a crack and a thin shaft of yellow light slant into the bedroom, and he knew he was in his bed in apartment 654 in the hotel in Rome and he knew he was alone.

“Come in,” he said, pulling the covers up around his neck, because he was naked under the twisted sheets and blankets.

The door opened wider and he saw it was the chambermaid, the old lady, with his jacket. She stood there, smiling, gap-toothed, holding the jacket up on its hanger like a trophy of the chase,
See what I have caught today in the Roman jungle: one American jacket, stained with American blood.