Two Weeks in Another Town (40 page)

“Signore,” the nurse said loudly, “I will call the doctor if you do not leave immediately.”

“Yes, I’ll tell her,” Jack said. “Good night.” He pulled his hand away from Delaney’s grasp.

“She’s got to understand,” Delaney whispered. “Clara…” He turned his head away on the pillow. Jack went out of the room.

“Well?” Tucino asked. He was standing just outside the door, and Jack had the impression that he had been trying to listen, through the heavy, blank surface, to what Delaney had been saying in the room. “How is he?”

“Fine,” Jack said. “Very confident.” He felt dazed. His eyes were hurting him and he seemed to have difficulty in keeping objects in focus.

“I’m sure he’s going to pull through,” Holt said. He was holding his hat now, ready for departure.

“What did he say?” Tucino demanded. “Did he say anything about the picture?”

Jack hesitated, then decided against talking. For the moment. He was too tired, and he had errands to do first. Tucino would have to wait till morning. “He wasn’t quite coherent,” Jack said, thinking, Well, that isn’t completely a lie. He picked up his coat, which was thrown across the back of one of the chairs. “I think we can all stand a little sleep,” he said.

He managed to signal to Holt to hold back and the two Italians went down by themselves in the elevator, leaving Holt and Jack alone. Swiftly, Jack explained what Delaney had asked him to do.

“Don’t worry about Tucino,” Holt said. “I’ll take care of him.” He shook Jack’s hand as he said good night.

Downstairs, Jack ran into Fogel, who was finally smoking one of his cigars.

“What a day,” Fogel said, as they went out the glass doors into the wet night. “I’m going to get something to eat. Want to join me?”

“Thanks, I can’t. I have some calls to make,” Jack said. He peered through the darkness for Guido and the car. Headlights came on suddenly, and the car came up the driveway.

“Well, we did a good job down here,” Fogel said, with satisfaction. “We were on the radio all day. All over the world. Delaney’s never had as much publicity as this in his whole life. Too bad this had to happen on a Sunday. There’re no evening papers. I bet we’d’ve made the front page in fifty cities. Ah, well, you can’t have everything.”

Jack got into the car, in front with Guido. He waved good night to Fogel, who was puffing deeply on his wet cigar, earning his money, happy in his profession, his only regret, in the middle of the century, that there were no evening newspapers on Sundays.

As Guido drove down the driveway, another car drew up to the entrance to the hospital. Two people got out. Jack was almost certain that one of the passengers was Stiles, and for a curious moment, he had the feeling that the woman with him was Carlotta. He shook his head, annoyed with his fantasies. This has been a rough day, he thought, I’m seeing things.

He sank back on the seat of the car, thinking, Six weeks…

“Monsieur Delaney is still alive?” Guido asked.

“Still alive,” Jack said.

Guido sighed. “Poor man,” he said.

“Oh, he’ll be all right,” Jack said.

“Never,” said Guido. “I know these things. The heart. A man is never a whole man after it happens. Not if he lives another fifty years. Americans,” he said. “They take things too hard. They can’t wait. They must rush up to their graves and jump in with their two feet.”

T
HE STAIRCASE WAS DARK
and the wet night wind gusted in through the broken window panes, blowing out the matches that Jack lit to see where he was going. He had forgotten on what floor Bresach lived, and he had to light matches in front of every apartment on the upper floors to peer at the brass plates that gave the names of the occupants. He passed a couple embraced in the darkness on a landing and he was followed up a flight of steps by the soft laughter of the girl when he stumbled. When, panting and exhausted, he finally got to Bresach’s door, he remembered it, though, and rang the bell impatiently, keeping his finger pressed against the button.

He heard footsteps approaching and took his finger off the button as Bresach threw the door open, a dark silhouette against a dim light high in the hallway ceiling.

Bresach didn’t invite him in immediately. He stood there, in a torn sweater, a cigarette between his lips, staring suspiciously at Jack. “What is it now?” Bresach asked.

Jack pushed past him without answering and walked down the hallway toward the room at the end of it, from which there was a spill of light. Max was in bed, sitting up and reading, by the light of a small brass lamp, with his usual muffler wrapped around his neck against the cold. Even though he was in bed, he was wearing a sweater.

“Good evening, Mr. Andrus,” Max said, putting his book down, and making a motion as though to get out of bed. “I’ll be dressed in a…”

Jack waved at him impatiently. “Don’t bother. I’m just going to stay a minute.” He turned toward Bresach, who was leaning against the wall near the door, regarding him with a puzzled expression on his face.

“What’s the matter, Jack?” Bresach said. “They throw you out of your hotel? We have plenty of room here, as you see…” He grinned malevolently, enjoying his poverty, Jack thought, feeling superior and holy because of it.

“Can you be at the studio tomorrow morning at nine?” Jack said.

“What for?” Bresach asked suspiciously.

“You’ve got a job.”

“With whom?”

“With me,” Jack said. “I’m finishing the picture for Delaney. You’ll be my assistant.”

Bresach looked sullen now, and walked restlessly back and forth in the small room. “What the hell do you know about directing?” he asked.

“Anything I don’t know,” Jack said sardonically, “you can tell me. That’s the whole idea.”

“What’s this?” Bresach asked. “A joke? Is Delaney getting even with me for what I told him this morning?”

“It was love at first sight this morning,” Jack said. “You reminded him of what he was like at your age. Insufferable.”

Bresach grunted. “There’s a lot more to the old bastard than I thought there was,” he said.

“He told me to pick your brains,” Jack said. “So, any ideas you have about acting or staging or cutting or anything, speak up.”

“Don’t worry,” Bresach said. “I’ll have plenty of ideas. Hey…” He came up close to Jack. “I thought you were supposed to go home in a couple of days.”

“I was supposed to,” Jack said, “but it turns out I’m not.”

“Can you stand having me around, whispering into your ear day after day?” Bresach said.

“I’m not in this for my own amusement,” Jack said. “I’m here to try to save Delaney’s life.” He did not tell Bresach that only by fulfilling every wish of Delaney’s, every instruction, to the letter, did he feel that he was making amends for the years of neglect, for the friendship which he had selfishly allowed to lapse, for the ruin that he had done nothing to avert. “Well,” he said, “I’m in a hurry. Are you going to be there at nine in the morning or not?”

Bresach rubbed his cheeks with his two hands, making a rasping, unshaven sound in the still room, as he decided. Max leaned over in bed and picked up the book he had been reading and turned down a corner of a page to mark his spot and put the book neatly on the floor. Jack saw the title. It was
The Possessed.
Max saw Jack glancing at the book. “It is not the language for Dostoevski,” Max said, apologizing. “But it is good for my study of Italian.”

“There’s one thing I hate about this whole business,” Bresach said.

“What’s that?” Jack turned back to him.

“Finally you’re going to think that I ought to be glad you came to Rome.”

“I promise you that I will never think that you ought to be glad I came to Rome,” Jack said wearily. “Make up your mind. I have to go.”

“All right,” Bresach said sullenly. “I’ll be there.”

“Good.” Jack started out.

“Wait a minute,” Bresach said. “I better have a script right now…”

Jack hadn’t thought about that. He reflected for a moment. “You’d better get hold of Delaney’s script. Here…” He took an old envelope from his pocket and wrote Hilda’s address and telephone number on it. “This is his secretary. Call her and tell her I want you to have Delaney’s script tonight. Then get a taxi and go and get it. She lives on the Via della Croce.”

“No.” Bresach was shaking his head. “I can’t do it.”

“What do you mean you can’t do it?” Jack’s voice rose in exasperation.

“I don’t have the money for a taxi.” Bresach leered at him, as if he had just told a good joke.

Jack took some bills out of his pocket and thrust them into Bresach’s hand.

“I owe you three thousand lire,” Bresach said. “I’ll pay you back at the end of the week. When I’m rich and famous.”

Jack turned and went out of the room without answering. The lovers were still on the landing. Jack could hear their heavy breathing all the way down to the ground floor.

“No,” Clara was saying loudly, “I won’t go to see him. I won’t go near him. I don’t care if he’s dying.” She was sitting on the edge of one of the twin beds in her room at the Grand. It was a small room, at the back of the hotel. Clara was living austerely, so that, in her bare room, she could think of her husband in the opulent, overfurnished apartment on the Circus Maximus and have one more reason for self-pity. Her skin was yellower than ever. Her hair was in curlers and she was wearing a long, pink woolen robe, like the robes young girls wear in college dormitories in magazine advertisements. She had kicked off her mules, and Jack could see the little flash of red from her painted toenails.

“And I don’t believe he’s dying,” Clara went on, picking nervously at a curler above her forehead. “He’s perfectly capable of doing it as a trick…”

“Now, Clara…” Jack protested.

“You don’t know him the way I do. It’s a way of bringing me to my knees. One more time.” She stood up and went over to the bureau with a rustle of bare feet on the carpet. She opened a drawer and took out a half-empty bottle of Scotch which had been concealed under a pile of nightgowns. “Do you want a drink? I need one,” she said defiantly.

“Thanks, Clara.”

She went into the bathroom for glasses and water. She kept talking, her voice flat and complaining over the sound of the running water and the clink of glass. “That’s another thing we can put to the credit of Mr. Maurice Delaney,” she said, out of sight in the bathroom, her voice echoing off the old-fashioned marble walls. “He’s turning me into a solitary drinker.” There was silence for a moment, broken only by the sound of the water running from the tap. Then Clara began again, in another, harsher tone, “He can’t kid me. He’s not going to die. He has the resistance of a bull. Even at his age—he can work twelve hours a day for eight months at a time and spend hours in bars talking to every bum he meets and visit women who live on the top floor of five-story buildings without elevators and…” She reappeared, carrying the two glasses half full of water, Medusa in curlers, playing barmaid, the scrubbed yellowish folds of her face set in implacable, vengeful lines. She poured the whisky carefully, not like a drinker, but like a housewife. “Enough?” she said, holding up Jack’s glass.

“Plenty,” he said.

She gave him the glass and sat down again on the edge of the bed. She put her glass on the bedside table without tasting it. “This time,” she said feverishly, “I’m going to teach him a lesson. He can’t have me on any old terms. If he’s going to have me, it’s going to be on my own terms…”

“Clara,” Jack said gently, “don’t you think it would be wiser to wait to settle all this later, when he’s better?”

“No,” she said. “Because he won’t settle it when he’s better. The only time you ever get anything out of Maurice Delaney is when he’s hurting and sorry for himself. You don’t know him the way I do. Failure’s the only thing that makes him human. Even before all this, if I wanted a new coat or an addition to the house or a trip to New York, I used to wait until he had a sore throat or a pain in his gut so he’d think he had cancer, or after he got panned in the newspapers. When he’s feeling good he’s got a heart of cement.”

“He’s going to be sick a long time,” Jack said.

“Good,” she said. “Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Maybe now my fourteen years of hell will be over.”

“What do you want, Clara?” Jack asked curiously. “A divorce?”

“I’ll never divorce him,” she said. She looked at her glass on the table beside her as though she had just remembered it, and took an old-maidish sip of the whisky. “Never as long as he lives.”

“Why?”

“Because I love him,” she said flatly.

“Love…” Jack shook his head wonderingly. Clara Delaney’s concept of love seemed better suited for the basis of the regulations of a penal battalion than for a marriage.

“I see you shaking your head. Don’t think I don’t. What do you know about love?” Clara said contemptuously. “Every time a woman gets on your nerves for ten minutes you move on to the next one…”

“Now, Clara,” Jack protested mildly, “that isn’t exactly accurate.”

“I know about you, I know about you,” she said, accusing in him all that was easy and pleasurable and self-preserving in love. “You don’t know anything, because you walk away from it every time it begins to hurt. I know,” she said, her voice rising crazily, “and I’m the only one who does. You know what love is?” she demanded. “Love is endurance.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Jack said. “All I know is that Maurice asked to see only one person—you.”

“Well, isn’t that tender, isn’t that melting?” she said. “Doesn’t that come as a whopping surprise, after everything I’ve done for him?”

“What do you want from him, Clara?” Jack asked. “What do you want me to tell him?”

“You tell him that when I’m convinced that he’s given up Barzelli—and all the other Barzellis—I’ll take him back.”

Jealousy is a form of faith, Jack thought. The true believers feel that the general infliction of pain is right and holy in the free exercise of their religion. He stood up. “Well,” he said, “anything else you want me to say to him?”

“Say anything you want,” Clara said flatly. “Tell him exactly what I said.”

“I don’t think you realize how sick he is, Clara,” Jack said. “The doctor says he’s to be kept as quiet as possible, he’s to be spared any kind of excitement…”