Two Weeks in Another Town (5 page)

Jack unpacked while waiting for the waiter to come back with the ice. He hung up the other suits, hoping the creases would disappear by themselves by morning, and put the leather-framed photograph of his wife and his two children on the dresser in the bedroom. There was a little balcony outside the bedroom window and he stepped out on it, but the suite was at the rear of the hotel and all he could see were the windows of the buildings across the narrow street, rain-washed and gray against the night sky, which reflected the multicolored neon of Rome. From below came the sound of a radio playing, loudly, a brassy, insistent tune with a rock-and-roll beat. It was cold on the balcony and there was still rain in the air, and with the nondescript silhouette of the buildings across the street, and the neon and the rough, unpleasant beat of the music, it might have been almost any city on a wintry night in the American Age. There was no reminder on the hotel balcony that at one time Caesar had ruled the ground below or that Michelangelo had argued with a Pope in the city or that kings had traveled across Europe to be crowned two miles away.

Chilled, Jack went back into the room, closing the long glass doors against the sound of the radio below. On the dresser, he saw the crumpled ten-thousand-lire note that the woman had forced on him. He smiled as he looked at it, thinking, I’ve shed blood for less. He decided to get a present for his children with it before he left Rome. He smoothed it out and folded it carefully and put it in his wallet, not in the money section, but next to his driver’s license, so he wouldn’t mix it up with his other money.

When the waiter came in with the ice, Jack poured himself a whisky and water. He took his shoes off and sat on the edge of the bed, sipping the whisky, feeling tired from his trip and uncomfortable from his puffy nose.

Sitting like that, his eyes half-closed, tasting blood, an image began to form hazily in his mind, the faint memory of another moment long ago when he had sat bent over like that, only it was on a wooden bench, with the flavor of blood in his throat. He closed his eyes completely, to concentrate, and it became clearer. It was on a spring afternoon and there was the smell of damp grass and he was ten years old and he was on the school baseball field and a ground ball had taken a bad hop and hit him squarely between the eyes and the bleeding hadn’t stopped for three hours, until his father had come home and held ice to the back of his neck and made him lie with his head down over the edge of the bed. “Next time,” his father had said cheerfully, while his mother hovered over him, worrying, “you won’t try to field ground balls with your nose.”

“It took a bad hop, Pa,” Jack had said, thickly.

“The world is full of bad hops,” his father had said, undisturbed. “It’s a law of nature. Learn to expect them.”

Jack smiled, remembering, and felt better. The taste of blood, linking him now with his childhood, made him feel younger. He put the whisky down half-finished and got a piece of ice out of the bucket and lay down on the bed, holding the ice behind his head, at the base of his skull. He was glad he had thought of his father, on a spring evening, when his father had been a young man.

He drowsed a little, not minding the thin cold trickle going down into his collar.
“Sangue, sangue,”
he said sleepily to himself. “Why couldn’t I remember a simple word like that?”

D
ELANEY WAS NOT IN
the bar when Jack arrived there. He had showered and his hair was wet and neatly brushed, and he was wearing the newly pressed suit. His nose was still puffy, but the bleeding had stopped and the shower had made him feel fresh and wide-awake and ready to enjoy the night in the city. The bar was crowded, with many Americans, solid and middle-aged, who had earned their cocktails with long hours in front of statues and altarpieces, visiting ruins and triumphal arches and arranging for audiences with the Pope. All the bar stools were taken and Jack had to stand and reach between a man and woman who were sitting there to get his martini.

“He said he didn’t understand German,” the woman was saying, in a thick German accent, “but I knew he was lying. All Jews understand German.”

“Where’re you from?” the man asked.

“Hamburg,” the woman said. She was red-headed and dressed in a tight black dress, cut low between her breasts. She was a plump, curved woman with a shrewd, perverse face and reddish, big, farm-girl hands. Jack had been in the bar at the cocktail hour three or four times during the past few years and each time he had seen her there, and her profession was plain. It was a polite bar and she waited to be asked, but it was obvious that she had an arrangement with the chief bartender.

The Germans, Jack thought, looking at her with distaste, ready to supply all the needs of post-war Europe. At least the whores in Paris don’t look so satisfied with themselves.

He turned his back on the couple at the bar, holding his glass in his hand, looking around the room, his view of the near corner obscured by a group of young Italians, marvelously barbered, with spreading, immaculate collars and pale neckties and narrow-waisted short jackets, who were standing close to him, talking desultorily, handsome, predatory, their eyes candidly appraising each new woman who entered the room, ready for money or vice or love or travel. Looking at them, Jack had a momentary sharp pang of envy, for their good looks, for their assurance, for their youth, but most of all for their openness. Like most Americans, Jack had the feeling that he had spent most of his life submerging almost everything that he felt, and this unattainable Italian overtness, this advertised zest and shameless availability made him feel unpracticed and foolishly innocent.

Jack moved a little, so as to be able to see beyond the group of young men. Carefully, he looked at the faces of the other drinkers. After a moment, he realized he was looking for the man who had hit him and the two women with him. They were not in the bar. Annoyed with himself, Jack shrugged. What would I do with him if I found him? he thought.

He finished his drink and was about to order another when he saw Delaney come striding into the bar, still in the same coat, but with his cap jammed in his pocket, his pale, childish hair rumpled over the red face, marked by the lines of power and temper.

“We’re late,” Delaney said, without a greeting. “Let’s get out of here. I hate this joint anyway. It’s full of bloodsuckers.” He stared angrily at the group of Italians, at the German whore, at the monument-worn Americans.

Jack paid for his drink and started out with Delaney.

“What’re we late for?” he asked.

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” Delaney said, enjoying the suspense. Suddenly he stopped and squinted curiously at Jack. “What happened to your nose?” he asked.

“A drunk hit me outside the hotel,” Jack said, feeling embarrassed.

“When?”

“A minute after you left.”

“Did you know him?”

“Never saw him before.”

Delaney grinned. “It didn’t take you long to enter into the thrilling life of the Eternal City, did it? I’ve been here five months and I haven’t been hit yet.”

“But you’ve been here long enough to get lipstick on your collar,” Jack said as they started toward the exit.

Delaney’s hand moved guiltily toward his throat. “Now where in hell could that have come from?”

“Is Clara eating with us?” Jack asked, as they got to the door.

“No.” Delaney didn’t volunteer anything more.

They got into the green Fiat, assisted by the military doorman, who stared mournfully at Jack’s nose, as though it reminded him of a sin of his youth.

Delaney sat erect in his corner, glaring at the cars darting wildly past the street corners. “God,” he said, “the way Italians drive. Like kids out to make a new record in the soapbox derby.”

“Well,” Jack said, “it’s better than the way Frenchmen drive. As though they’re all trying to get to the bank to get their savings out before the bank fails. I once asked a Frenchman why they drove that way and he thought for a moment and said, “‘Well, we lost the war.’”

Delaney chuckled. “I guess by now you’re an expert on the French,” he said.

“Nobody’s an expert on the French,” Jack said. “Now, Maurice, tell me—where’re we going?”

“If ye have tears”, prepare to shed them now. Old Roman quotation,” Delaney said. “You’ll see soon enough.” He began to hum a song, smiling mysteriously. It was an old popular song, and Delaney had a croaking, almost tuneless way of hitting the notes, and Jack didn’t recognize it, although he had the feeling he should and that it carried some special significance for him.

The car drove up to the front of a movie theatre and stopped. “Here we are,” Delaney said. He got out and held the door for Jack. “I hope you don’t mind waiting for dinner.” He watched Jack closely as Jack looked up at the poster in front of the theatre.

“Oh, Christ,” Jack said softly, standing in front of the poster, which advertised a picture called
The Stolen Midnight,
directed by Maurice Delaney. In the list of actors on the poster was the name James Royal and in the small stills pasted up near the entrance there was a close-up of himself, twenty years younger, before the wound and the thickening of the jaw, thin, laughing, handsomer than he ever remembered himself.

“What an idea,” Jack said.

“I thought it might interest you,” Delaney said innocently.

“So would a hanging.” Now Jack understood why Delaney had hummed the song in the car. It was a song of the thirties, “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home,” and it was played several times in the picture and had been used as a theme behind several of the key scenes by the composer of the incidental music.

“The publicity department arranged it,” Maurice said. “Famous director doing picture in Rome, let the public see what he perpetrated when he was young.”

“Have you seen it yet?” Jack kept staring at the photograph of himself on the glossy, brilliantly illuminated paper.

“No,” Delaney said. “And anyway, I thought it would be a friendly idea to sit next to you while they were running it.”

“Friendly,” Jack said. “There’s the word. When was the last time you saw it?”

“Ten, fifteen years ago.” Delaney looked at his watch. “The hell with it,” he said. “The bastard’s late again. Let’s not wait for him. He’ll find us after the picture.”

“Who’s that?” Jack asked, following Delaney to the ticket booth.

“A French newspaperman who’s writing a piece on me for a Paris magazine,” Delaney said, shoveling money through the wicket. He handled Italian money as though it irritated the skin of his hands. “He says he’s an old friend of yours. Jean-Baptiste Despière.”

“Yes, he’s a friend of mine,” Jack said, pleased. He had known Despière for ten or eleven years, and they played tennis together in Paris, whenever Despière came back from his wanderings, and Jack knew that Rome would be made much more enjoyable by his presence. Despière had met him the first night he arrived in Rome, in 1949, and had made him drive around the Colosseum in the moonlight, in a fiacre, with two pretty nineteen-year-old American girls, because, he said, everybody on his first night in Rome had to see the Colosseum under the moon in the company of two nineteen-year-old American girls.

“Gay little bugger, isn’t he?” Delaney said as they entered the theatre.

“Some of the time,” said Jack, remembering times when Despière hadn’t been so gay.

“You might tell him,” Delaney said, in a hoarse whisper, following the usher through the darkness, speaking over the roar of the newsreel, “that in the United States newspapermen come early for appointments.”

They sat down close to the screen, because Delaney was astigmatic. He put on a pair of thick, horn-rimmed glasses, which he wore defiantly and, being vain, only when absolutely necessary. The newsreel, over which bubbled an excited Italian voice, was the usual mixture of disasters, processions, pronouncements by politicians—wounded Arabs being rounded up in Algeria by French troops, a riot in Northern Italy, the Queen of England visiting somewhere, the wreckage of a crashed airplane being inspected by men in uniform. While it was on, Delaney granted disapprovingly. He had stuck a piece of chewing gum in his mouth, and Jack could tell, by the loudness and the wetness of Delaney’s chomping, the comparative scale of his distaste for the events and persons flickering across the screen. “What a prelude to a work of art,” Delaney said loudly, as the newsreel came to an end. “Bloodshed and the faces of politicians. I’d like to see them do it at Carnegie Hall. Put on a man being broken on the rack, followed by a speech by a senator from Mississippi on the offshore-oil question, then play the Seventh Symphony. The movies…” He shook his head despairingly, contemplating the art to which he had given thirty years of his life.

There was a rhetorical fanfare of music from the screen and the title of the picture came on. Jack had an uncomfortable feeling of immodesty when he saw the card with the name James Royal printed on it, a feeling that he had had each time that he had seen this false, highly advertised, empty name in print or in electric lights, a feeling that he had almost forgotten in the years since the time when, in every town in America, that name had burned on the marquees of movie houses.

The head of the studio in Hollywood had given him the name, although Jack had already played on the stage in New York under his own name.

“John Andrus,” Kutzer, the studio head, had said, shaking his head. “It won’t do. I mean no offense, but it doesn’t sound American.”

“My family came here in 1848, you know,” Jack had said mildly.

“Nobody is impugning anything,” the head of the studio had said. “It is merely a matter of practical business, how it will look in lights, how it will strike the native ear. We are experts in these things, Mr. Andrus, trust yourself in our hands.”

“I trust myself in your hands,” Jack had said, with a little smile. He was young and he was excited by the idea of fame, even under an invented name, and he had been poor as an actor in New York and was hungry for the money that this man could offer him.

“Offhand,” the head of the studio had said, “I have no ideas. Come back tomorrow—” He looked at the appointment pad on his desk. “At ten fifteen
A.M.
, and I will have a name for you.”