Two Weeks in Another Town (23 page)

“Despière,” Jack said, “told me that Bresach once tried to commit suicide.” He felt Veronica stiffen beside him. “Is that true?”

“In a way,” she said. “Yes.”

“Was it because of you?”

“Not really,” she said. “He was going to a psychiatrist here long before he met me. To get talked out of killing himself. An Austrian from Innsbruck. Dr. Gildermeister.” She made her voice heavy and Teutonic to pronounce the name, derisively. “I had to go see him, too, after I moved in with Robert. You know what he said to me—‘I must warn you, young lady, Robert is a very finely balanced mechanism.’ That was news,” she said, sounding suddenly American. “Hot from Innsbruck.”

“What else did he say?”

“That Robert was potentially violent—that his violence might turn against himself—or against me.
‘Volare
—
cantare…’”
she sang. She turned and put her arms around Jack and pulled, making him fall across the top of her body as she sank back into the sand. “I didn’t come out with you tonight,” she whispered, “to talk about anybody else.” She kissed him and touched his cheek with her fingers. “Do you know what I’d like?” she said. “I’d like you to make love to me. Here. Now.”

For a moment, Jack was tempted. Then he thought of lying naked in the cold sand, and the grit in his clothes later and the possibility of being stumbled upon by somebody walking along the beach. No, he thought, that’s for the younger trade. He kissed Veronica lightly, and sat up. “Some other time, darling,” he said. “Some warm night, some summer.”

Veronica lay back, motionless, her arms behind her head, staring up at the stars. Then, with a brisk movement, she jumped up. “Some summer,” she said, standing over him. “Be careful. There will come a day when I will stop making all the advances.” Her tone was flat and angry, and she brushed carelessly at her skirt, flicking the sand off, not looking at Jack, as he stood up, too, irresolutely, already beginning to regret his caution. Without a word, Veronica turned and began to walk swiftly across the dunes to where the car was parked under a tree. Jack followed her more slowly, admiring, despite his irritation with her and himself, the swinging, easy way she moved across the soft sand, barefooted, holding her shoes in her hand.

They got into the car and Jack started the engine. He had given Guido the night off when Veronica had suggested driving out to the sea. The lights tunneling into the darkness ahead of the car made the trees on both sides seem engulfing and menacing. The road was narrow and bumpy and he drove slowly, not talking, conscious of Veronica leaning against the right-hand door, carefully keeping her distance from him.

It was only after he had turned into the main highway to Rome that she spoke. “Tell me,” she said, “how many times have you been married?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“Three times.”

“Good God,” she said.

“That’s it,” Jack said. “Good God.”

“Is that normal in America?”

“Not exactly,” Jack said.

“What was your first wife like?”

“Why do you want to know?” Jack asked.

“I’d like to know how you’re going to talk about me when we are finished,” Veronica said. “What was she like? Pretty?”

“Very pretty,” Jack said. There was a car howling up behind him, going very fast, its lights blinking, and Jack waited until it was safely past before he continued. “She was also a disaster.”

“Is that what you’re going to say about me, too, later on?” Veronica asked.

“No,” Jack said. “I’ve never said it about my other women. Just my first wife.”

“Why did you marry her?”

“I couldn’t get her any other way,” Jack said, squinting along the headlight beams, peering down into the dead past, with its incomprehensible decisions, its unprofitable sacrifices, its imperious, dead desires.

“You didn’t know she was a disaster then?” Veronica curled her legs under her on the seat, facing him, interested, enjoying the revelations he was making, the gleam of female gossip in her eye.

“I had intimations,” Jack said. “But I made myself ignore them. Anyway, I thought after we were married, I could change her.”

“Change her from what?”

“From being stupid, narrow, grasping, jealous, untalented…”

“Did you?”

“Of course not.” Jack chuckled remotely. “She became worse.”

“And she really wouldn’t sleep with you unless you married her?” Veronica asked incredulously.

“No.”

“What was she—Italian?”

Jack laughed aloud and patted Veronica’s knee. “You’re a funny girl,” he said. “You have a feeling that if something is bad enough, it must be Italian.”

“I have my reasons,” Veronica said.
“Was
she Italian?”

“No.”

Veronica shook her head wonderingly. “I had the feeling things like that never happened in America.”

“Everything happens in America,” Jack said. “Just like every place else.”

“Was it worth it—finally?” Veronica asked curiously. “I mean, getting married for it…?”

“No,” Jack said. “Of course not.”

“What did you do when you fell in love with somebody else?”

“I took the plane—I was in Hollywood and my wife and child were in New York—” Jack began.

“Oh,” Veronica said. “There was a child.”

“Yes. I took the plane and went to New York and told my wife that I’d found somebody else and that I was about to begin a love affair with her.”

“Wait a minute,” Veronica said incredulously. “You mean you told your wife
before
it happened?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

“Why?”

“I had a peculiar sense of honor,” Jack said. “In those days.”

“And she gave you a divorce—just like that?”

“Of course not,” Jack said. “I told you she was stupid and narrow and grasping. She gave it to me six months later, when she wanted to marry someone else.”

“And the child. Is it a boy?”

Jack nodded.

“Where is he now?” Veronica asked.

“The University of Chicago. He’s twenty-two years old.”

“What is he like?”

Jack didn’t answer for a moment. That’s a question, he thought—what’s your son like? “He’s very intelligent,” Jack said evasively. “He’s taking a Ph.D. in physics.”

“Ph.D…” Veronica said. “What’s that?”

“Doctor of Philosophy.”

“Does he love you?”

Jack hesitated again. “No,” he said. “Not really. Doctors of Philosophy don’t love their fathers these days. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Why? Does talking about your son give you pain?”

“I suppose so,” Jack said.

“What about that woman in the movie?” Veronica asked. “What’s her name?”

“Carlotta Lee.”

“Weren’t you married to her?”

“Yes.”

“Did she please you?”

Jack smiled at the way Veronica had asked the question, translating literally from the Italian. “Yes,” he said, “she pleased me very much.”

“Yet you divorced her, too?” Veronica shook her head, puzzled. “It must be painful to divorce a woman as beautiful as that.”

“Not so painful,” Jack said. “For one thing, she wasn’t as beautiful as all that when we separated. Remember, there’d been a war in between. And she was older than I was to begin with…”

“Even so…”

“She found ways to make it less painful,” Jack said. “Like sleeping with all my friends, all my enemies, all my acquaintances, all
anybody’s
acquaintances…”

“She must have been very unhappy,” Veronica said softly.

“On the contrary,” Jack said. “It made her very happy, indeed.”

“You hate her now,” Veronica said.

“Maybe,” Jack said. “Anyway, I remember that I hated her then.”

“And your wife now?”

“I thought you didn’t want me to talk about her.”

“I have changed my mind,” Veronica said. “Don’t tell me how much you love her. Just tell me what she is like.”

“She is small, beautiful, with a soft, musical French voice,” Jack said, “and she’s hard-headed, tricky, feminine, loving. She takes care of me and maneuvers me and makes the children behave sedately when necessary and when I first met her she seemed to me to combine all the virtues of France and the French character.”

“And now?” Veronica asked. “What do you think of her now?”

“I haven’t changed my opinion,” Jack said, “—too much.”

“And yet you sleep with other women,” Veronica said challengingly.

“No,” said Jack.

“Now, Jack…” It was the first time Veronica had called him by name. “Remember to whom you are talking.”

“I remember,” Jack said. “You’re the first.”

Veronica shook her head wonderingly. “How long have you been married?”

“Eight years.”

“And nothing in all that time?”

“Nothing,” Jack said. “Until you.”

“And then, with me,” she said, “after knowing me only for an hour and a half…?”

“Uh-huh.” An old man on a bicycle loomed up on the side of the road and Jack swung around him carefully, slowing down. He didn’t try to explain to Veronica, or even to himself, what had happened to him, after the eight years, on the rainy afternoon following the lunch with Despière and Miss Henken. It had seemed inevitable, correct, necessary, it had happened without his willing it or foreseeing it. “After knowing you for only an hour and a half,” he repeated. He stopped. Whatever else he was going to do tonight, he was not going to expose the intricacies of his relationship with his wife—his inability, from the beginning, to give himself completely, the dragging sense of guilt because he didn’t love her enough, the frequent sense of boredom, of being stifled and baffled by the net of domesticity and conjugal routine she cunningly threw around him. He was not going to tell this girl about his surge of relief when he had left Hélène at the airport or about not feeling the least flicker of desire for her for the two weeks before his departure, or about the other similar periods that lay like dead gray patches on his life with Hélène. Vaguely, he felt that these facts discredited him and would discredit him even more, in his own eyes and in the eyes of Veronica, if he was disloyal enough to voice them at a time like this.

“Are you going to tell your wife about me when you go back to Paris?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack said.

“You are not as peculiarly honorable these days, as you were when you were young.” Veronica’s voice had taken on an edge of harshness, mockery. “Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Jack said. “I’m not a lot of things now that I was when I was young.”

“Would your wife leave you if she found out?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. He grinned. “Remember, she’s French.”

Veronica was silent for several moments. “It would have been nice, I think,” she said softly, “to know you when you were young.”

“Probably not,” Jack said. “I was arrogant and opinionated and I was so interested in being honest to myself that I never hesitated to hurt people…”

“Robert’s like that.” Veronica laughed drily. “Just like that. Do you mean you were like him?”

“Probably. In some ways,” Jack said. “Except that I never threatened to kill anybody. And I never tried to kill myself.”

Veronica leaned closer to him, regarding him closely, seriously, in the flaring brief light of headlights sweeping down toward them on the other side of the road. “What happened to you,” she said, “I wonder.”

“I wonder, too,” Jack said. “Very often.”

“Are you disappointed in yourself?” she asked.

“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t think so.”

“Would you do it differently, if you had it to do over again?”

He laughed. “What a question to ask. Of course I would. Wouldn’t everybody?”

“Do you think it would come out better?”

“No. Probably not.”

“But you changed your life completely,” she said. “I mean, you started out as an actor, and now you’re something entirely different, a…a bureaucrat, a kind of politician…”

“A drunken actor tonight,” Jack said, remembering Stiles, “called me a clerk.”

“Whatever you are,” Veronica persisted, “you have given up the thing you were in the beginning, the thing at which you were a success, famous…”

“I didn’t exactly give it up,” Jack said. “It more or less gave me up. When I came back from the war my face was twisted into a knot on one side. At least, the camera made it look twisted. And I’d been gone a long time. People’d just about forgotten me.”

“Still,” she said, “after a while you could have found parts…I’m sure.”

“I suppose so. Yes,” he said definitely, “I could have hung on if I wanted to. I found I wasn’t interested any more. The divine Hollywood fire,” he said ironically, “had burned out. After the war, and nearly two years in the hospital—after Carlotta…” He shrugged at the wheel. “The war turned my interests to other things. Europe—I’d never been in Europe before—and after the war it kept pulling at me—Anyway, it’s not so unusual. A lot of people are artists of one kind or another when they’re young. Then, if they’re lucky, and they realize that for them, at least, all it is, is part of being young, like being able to run fast and stay up all night seven nights in a row—they close the door on it.”

“Without regrets?” Veronica asked.

“There’s almost nothing I’ve ever done in my whole life I don’t regret—one way or another,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Aren’t you like that, too?”

“I don’t think so,” Veronica said. “No.”

“Don’t you regret breaking with Robert, for example? Or starting with Robert? Later on, won’t you regret me?”

“No. Not the way you mean.” She ran the point of her fingernail down his arm from his shoulder to his wrist, scratching the cloth of his sleeve. “Do you regret your first wife?”

“Of course. A hundred different ways.”

“Carlotta?”

“Hideously.”

“Also a hundred different ways?”

“A thousand.”

“And how many others? How many other women?”

Jack laughed. “Hordes,” he said.

“You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you, in your time?” She pouted now, reminding him unpleasantly of his first impression of her the first ten minutes after he met her.

“I’ve been a very bad boy in my time,” he, said, “and I’ll never tell you about it.”