Two Weeks in Another Town (19 page)

Jack sank into an easy chair, glass in hand, sitting low, facing the boy. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s nice of you to tell me.”

“I don’t want you to have any false ideas about me,” Bresach said, in his low, pleasant, earnest voice. “I don’t want you to think that I’ve forgiven you or that you can put anything over on me.”

Jack put his glass down deliberately on the table next to his chair. Maybe, he thought, this is the moment for me to get up and go over and hit him a couple of times around the head. Hard. Administer what the French call a severe correction. Maybe that would shake some of those damned ideas out of his head. Bresach was tall, but he was skinny under the bulky coat, and the bones of his wrist, sticking out from his frayed tweed sleeves, were slender and not strong-looking. Jack hadn’t been in a fistfight since the war, but he was a powerful man, with heavy arms and shoulders and thick hands and he had had more than his share of fights as a boy. He had boxed for pleasure in gymnasiums until his wound and he was sure he hadn’t slipped back too far even now. Besides, it wouldn’t take a heavyweight champion of the world to teach Bresach a lesson. Three or four sharp blows and it would be over. Jack shook his head, rejecting the idea. If Bresach had been bigger and stronger, he could do it. But even as a boy Jack had avoided hitting anybody who wasn’t a match for him. He hated bullies, in all fields, physical and moral, and even the probability that a little violence now might ward off worse violence later couldn’t move him to stand up and cross to where Bresach was sitting and hit him.

“Good,” Jack said. “If I understand you correctly, you’re warning me that you reserve the right to murder me in the future.”

“Yes,” Bresach said.

“What made you decide to call an armistice today?” Jack asked.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Bresach said soberly. “There are some things I have to know.”

“What makes you think I’ll talk to you?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” said Bresach. “You let me in. You’re talking to me, aren’t you?”

“Look, Bresach,” Jack said, “I’m going to deliver some warnings of my own. I may pick up the phone in two minutes and tell the manager I want him to send the police to this room to pick you up. You’d be in an awful lot of trouble if I swore that you’d been threatening to kill me, you know.”

“You won’t do that,” Bresach said.

“I’m not so sure I won’t,” Jack said.

“It would all come out then,” Bresach said calmly. “It would be in the papers. Your wife would find out. The people you work for. How long would you hold your job with the government if it was all over the newspapers that you’d gotten into trouble in Rome because you were sleeping with a young Italian girl?”

Skinny or not skinny, Jack thought, maybe I ought to hit him.

“No,” Bresach said, “you’re not going to call the police.” He drank thirstily. “I figured
that
out.” He finished his drink and put the glass down. “Did you see Veronica today?”

“Yes,” Jack said. “We had lunch. Do you want the menu?”

“How is she?” Bresach leaned forward, searching Jack’s face to see if he was telling the truth.

“She is blooming,” Jack said cruelly, avenging himself for Bresach’s disquisition about his wife and his job. “She is in the first fine transports of love.”

“Don’t make fun of me.” Bresach tried to make his voice sound threatening, but the effect was hurt and sorrowful. “Where is she now? Where is she staying?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, “and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

“What did she say about me?”

Jack hesitated. His moment of cruelty had passed. “She didn’t say anything about you,” he lied.

“I don’t believe you,” Bresach said. “Don’t lie to me. I’m nervous enough as it is. If you lie to me, I won’t be responsible for what I do…”

“If you’re going to threaten me,” Jack said, “I’ll kick you out of here right now.”

“All right, all right.” Bresach spread his hands, like a coach on a baseball field motioning a runner to hold onto his base. “I’m going to be calm. I’m going to make a great effort to be calm. I didn’t come up here to fight with you. I have some questions to ask you. Perfectly reasonable questions. All I want is some honest answers. I have some rights,” he said, defiantly. “Don’t I have some rights? At least the answers to a couple of questions.”

“What do you want to know?” Jack asked. The boy was so obviously suffering, was so naked and exposed to pain, that Jack’s instinct was to soothe him as much as possible.

“First—the important question.” Bresach’s chin sank onto his chest and he mumbled almost incomprehensibly into his open collar. “Do you love her?”

Jack hesitated, trying not so much to phrase the truth, which was easy and simple to do, but to say the thing which would cause the least pain to Bresach.

“God damn it, Andrus,” Bresach said loudly, “don’t sit there making up stories. All you have to say is yes or no.”

“Well, then—no,” Jack said.

“So,” Bresach said, “for you she’s just a—an entertainment.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Jack said, “having you hanging around like this is making it a lot less entertaining.”

“Have you told her?” Bresach persisted.

“Told her what?”

“That you don’t love her.”

“The question hasn’t come up,” Jack said.

“I love her,” Bresach said, flatly. He peered at Jack as though waiting for Jack’s reaction to this. Jack kept quiet. Bresach rubbed his hands together nervously, warming them against each other. “Aren’t you going to say something?” Bresach demanded.

“What do you want me to say?” Jack said. “Hallelujah, you love her?”

“I want her to marry me,” Bresach whispered. “I’ve asked her ten times. It’s only a technicality that we aren’t married now.”

“What?” Jack asked, puzzled.

“A technicality. She’s a Catholic. Her family’s devout. I’m an atheist. Even for her I wouldn’t go through that hypocritical crap…”

“I see,” said Jack, remembering Holt and his wife. Religion, he thought, is more complicated in Rome than anyplace else in the world.

“But she was wavering,” Bresach said. “She goes to see her family in Florence every weekend and they gabble at her and drive her to Mass. But it was just a question of time. It’s just that one thing. She knows I’d do anything else for her. She knows I can’t live without her.”

“Nonsense,” Jack said, sharply. “Anybody can live without anybody.”

“That’s disgusting,” Bresach said. He jumped up, and began striding erratically around the room. “Disgusting. It’s cynical. Heartless. That’s one of the things I hate about getting old like you,” he said. “I’d kill myself before I let myself get cynical and cold like that. If that’s the way I’m going to feel, I’d rather die before I’m thirty. When you were young, when you were my age, I bet you weren’t like that. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you in your pictures. Before you became rotten.”

Jack watched Bresach carefully, prepared for any sudden, dangerous move, now that Bresach was on his feet and loose from his chair. He felt himself growing angry again. Part of the reason he was angry was that in a way Bresach was right—when he was twenty-five he wouldn’t have said anybody could live without anybody. “Be careful of your language,” Jack warned the boy. “I’m ready to listen to you—although I don’t know quite why—but I’m not going to let you insult me.”

“She was a virgin when I met her,” Bresach said loudly, the words tumbling over each other. “It was four months before I even tried to kiss her. The day she moved into my room, I felt, Now, finally, my life is worth while. Then she meets you and in a half-hour you take her away from me. Somebody old like you,” he sneered at Jack, with his mouth pulled down in the tic that affected him when he was excited, “fat, married…” Bresach made the word married sound like the secret name of a loathsome perversion. “Complacent. A clerk in an office. A man who had a big talent, a real talent, and didn’t have the guts to stick with it. A man who surrendered. A man who sits in an office all day figuring out ways of blowing up the world…”

“I think,” Jack said, “you have a slightly lurid notion of what I do in NATO. Maybe you’ve been reading the communist papers too much.”

“And it all shows in your face,” Bresach went on wildly, striding up and down the room. “The surrender, the corruption, the tricks, the sensuality. You’re ugly!” He shouted. “You’re an ugly old man! And she left me for you! I’m going to tell you something,” he shouted crazily. “I’m beautiful! Ask her yourself, ask her if she hasn’t told me I’m beautiful.”

Jack laughed, the sound forced out of him by the surprising description Bresach was giving of himself.

“That’s right—laugh,” Bresach said, standing threateningly over Jack. “That’s what I ought to expect from a man like you. Any real word—any real description of the way things are embarrasses you, so you laugh. That cocktail-party laugh, that barroom laugh, that diplomatic laugh, that worn-out laugh. One day that godamn laugh is going to be stuffed back into everybody’s throat.”

“You’re raving, boy,” Jack said quietly. “I think you’d better get out of here.”

“What did you promise her?” Bresach demanded. His face was dead white, except for two small, round spots of burning color on his cheekbones, and for a moment Jack wondered if the boy were sick, if the real reason he had come to Rome was because he suffered from tuberculosis. Keats on his deathbed in the room over the Spanish steps, the rouged English ladies, talking too brightly in the tearooms, avoiding the murderous London winters, coughing nervously into their handkerchiefs. He had an impulse to tell the boy he ought to go see a doctor. “What did you offer her at that godamn lunch?” Bresach shouted. “What tricks did you use? What did you do—get her drunk? What did you give her—money, jewels? What lies did you tell her? Did you tell her you would divorce your wife and marry her and take her back with you to America?”

“Let’s get this straight,” Jack said correctively, standing up. “I didn’t tell her anything and I didn’t offer her anything. It never even occurred to me that I wanted her. If you’re so crazy about the truth, here it is—she put herself in my bed without being asked. If you must know,” Jack said astringently, advancing on the boy, wanting to get rid of him once and for all, “she was a volunteer. An enthusiastic volunteer.”

Bresach glared at him, then sprang suddenly, swinging. The blow was wild and slow and Jack automatically went inside it and punched Bresach on the side of the head. Even as he swung, Jack pulled back a little, not wishing to hurt Bresach too much. But even the half blow shook the boy. He didn’t go down, but wobbled, put out his hands blindly in front of him, low, trying to hold his balance, and staggered backwards, turning. He wound up against the wall, under one of the etchings of medieval Rome, his head tilted sidewise against the wall, his cheek twisted by the pressure.

“Oh, Christ,” Jack said, watching him, ashamed of what he had done, the defensive reflex which had made him strike out.

Bresach remained in the strange, twisted position against the wall, bent over, recovering, his back to Jack, gasping painfully.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. He touched the thick material of the duffel coat on Bresach’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean…”

“You’re so lucky,” Bresach whispered, talking into the wall, not moving his head, pressed against the plaster. “You’ve got everything. I haven’t got anything. She doesn’t mean anything to you. You don’t even want her. There’re ten thousand girls in Rome. Prettier girls. Why don’t you give her back to me?”

At the moment, alone in the room with the suffering boy whom he’d hit, Jack felt that he would gladly give Veronica back to him, if he could. Or at least say that he would try to send her back. At that moment, he didn’t have the slightest interest in Veronica. It was only when she was there, next to him, with her bold eyes, and her little tricks of swinging her hair, of licking the corner of her mouth, of reaching out and stroking his hand with her soft, long fingers that he wanted her. If he didn’t see her again, he thought, he would forget her in two days. At the moment he was more annoyed with her than anything else, for getting him involved in this ludicrous embroilment with Bresach. But of course, he couldn’t say that, either to her or to the boy. And he couldn’t tell the boy either, no matter how magnanimous he would have liked to be, that he could deliver his girl over to him. After what Veronica had said about Bresach at lunch, it was hard to imagine her going back to him. There are some possessions, he thought sadly, that even the most generous of us can never transform into gifts.

“Do you want another drink?” Jack asked lamely, touching Bresach’s shoulder again.

Bresach straightened up, then turned around and faced Jack. The left side of his face was raw and red. “I don’t want anything from you,” he whispered. “I made a mistake. I made a big mistake today. I should’ve brought my knife.”

He put the collar of his coat up around his ears and walked out of the apartment. Jack sighed and rubbed the knuckles of his right hand. They had stung for a moment, but the blow had been so light that his hand now felt normal. He went to the window and looked down at the narrow Roman street, where an Alfa Romeo was growling like a hunting lion at a red light, and a girl in a waitress’s uniform was hurrying along the pavement bearing three small cups of black coffee on a silver tray.

He thought of going out and leaving a note for Veronica saying that he had been called away. Then it occurred to him that perhaps the reason he was weighing this withdrawal was connected to Bresach’s last threat, and an almost childish sense of defiance in the face of a dare made him decide to stay and wait for her.

“You ugly old man,” he murmured, remembering. Curiously, he went over to the big mirror over the mantelpiece and looked at himself. It was growing dark and the reflection of his face was shadowy and mysterious. His face was sad, thoughtful, lined by experience, and his eyes were clear and alive. No, he thought, I’m not an ugly old man. He searched his face for complacency, cynicism, surrender. No, he thought, the boy’s’ lying. Or anyway, half lying. Or, with bad luck, prophesying a face that might, if care were not taken, emerge in the future. Well, then, he said to himself, we will take care.