Two Weeks in Another Town (41 page)

“You hate me,” Clara said, her pale, unpainted lips trembling. “Everybody hates me…”

“Don’t be foolish, Clara.” Jack reached out and tried to touch her hand reassuringly.

“Don’t touch me.” She pulled her hand back with exaggerated repugnance. “And don’t lie to me. You hate me. You think I’m heartless, selfish…You think I’m willing to let him die. I’ll tell you how heartless I am. If he dies, I’ll kill myself. Remember my words. The happiest day of my life was the day he asked me to marry him. You know when he asked me to marry him? I was sitting in his outside office, typing, and he came in, looking as though somebody had just clubbed him over the head, all white, with a funny look on his face, as though he was trying to smile, as though he thought he was smiling, only he wasn’t smiling…He’d just come from the front office and they’d told him they didn’t want him any more. His contract still had two years to run and they’d offered to pay him off. Pay him off in full. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it was worth it to them, just to have him
not
make pictures for them. Can you imagine what that meant to a man like Maurice Delaney? He sat on the edge of my desk, telling me all this, pretending to himself he was smiling, pretending it didn’t mean anything to him, and all of a sudden, without any leadup to it all, he asked me to marry him. That day. I still called him Mr. Delaney. But he knew where he had to go for help. For help when he was in
real
trouble. Mr. Delaney. We flew down to Mexico and we were married that night. He doesn’t have any of the money left, but he still has me. And he’s going to have me till the day he dies. I’d jump off a cliff if he asked me to, and he knows it. There’s nothing else in my life. No children, no work, no other men. Christ, I won’t even go to a movie without him. But I won’t go to see him. For his sake, as well as mine. We’ve got to get our lives straight, once and for all. He’s got to stop dividing himself up, throwing himself away, making a fool of himself in everybody’s eyes, doting on whores, buying them diamond bracelets, don’t think I don’t know about that, along with everything else, even when it takes the last penny out of the bank…If he’s ever going to be saved, it’s got to be now. After this, it’ll be too late, I’ll never have the chance again…”

She was weeping now, ugly, huge sobs shaking her narrow shoulders in the girlish pink robe, her head down, her hands clutching each other in her lap, her bare feet, with the frivolously painted toes, moving in a kind of aimless shivery dance, hanging down from the bed. “If you want to hate me,” she whispered, “go right ahead. Hate me. Let everybody hate me.”

“Nobody hates you, Clara,” Jack said softly, moved and embarrassed by her outbreak. He touched her shoulder. This time she didn’t pull away. “I wish I could help,” he said.

“Nobody can help,” she said. “Nobody but him. Go away now, please.”

Jack hesitated a moment, then started toward the door.

“Don’t worry,” Clara said tonelessly, gripping her glass in her two hands, “he’s too mean to die.”

Jack went out. He was certain that as soon as the door was closed behind him, Clara would go into the bathroom and pour her drink into the basin and then put the whisky bottle back in the bureau drawer, under the nightgowns, to be left there until she received her next visitor.

Barzelli lived out on the Via Appia Antica. There was very little traffic and Guido drove swiftly past the dark tombs and the ruined aqueduct, fitfully suspended in the watery reflection of the headlights. In the sunlight, the crumbling masonry bore witness to the pride, the industry, the cleverness of Guido’s ancestors. At night, like this, in the winter rain, they brought to mind only images of ruin, dissolution, and the emptiness of human vanity. The arches had carried water to a city that had deserved to fall; the tombs commemorated kings who did not deserve to be remembered.

Guido drove into the graveled driveway of a spreading, two-story flat-roofed house, set in a sloping garden. He had obviously been there many times before. All the curtains were drawn, but there was a light on by the side of the door.

“I won’t be long,” Jack said hopefully. He had a twinge of guilt about keeping Guido from his bed and his family. What’s Delaney’s heart to Guido, Jack thought, that Guido’s Sunday with his wife and three children should be spoiled because of it?

He rang the bell. From within, faintly, there came the sound of jazz being played. A butler in a starched white jacket opened the door.

“Miss Barzelli, please,” Jack said.

The butler nodded and took Jack’s coat and laid it on a huge gilt and brocade chair, one of a pair that flanked the doorway in the wide marble hallway. Now the music was louder. A phonograph was playing Cole Porter, a woman’s voice was singing, “It’s too damned hot…”

The butler led the way toward a pair of high closed doors, carved and painted white, touched, too, with gilt. Barzelli likes the look of gold, Jack thought, she wants everyone to know how far she’s come from the village in Catania where she was born. The butler didn’t ask Jack’s name. He threw the door open without ceremony and waved Jack in. He seemed used to having men he had never seen before appear late at night and ask, in any language, to see the lady of the house.

Barzelli was dancing in the middle of the room with a tall curly-haired young man in shirtsleeves. She was wearing tight green slacks and a black blouse with a low oval neckline and she was dancing in her bare feet on the veined marble floor. Lounging in the room were two other young men, in dark suits. One of them was lying stretched out on a long woolly white couch, his feet, in their narrow pointed black shoes, comfortably crossed on the fluffy cushions. A glass of whisky rested on his breastbone. The men hardly looked at Jack when he entered—one incurious, heavy-lidded glance of dark, long-lashed eyes, opaque with drink, and then they languidly turned their heads again to watch Barzelli and her partner as they danced. They were not the same young men whom Jack had noticed at the bar of his hotel and later at the night club, but they were of the same type. Ordinary riflemen of the Roman legion, Jack thought, easily obtainable to fill in for casualties at the nearest replacement depot. There were no other women in the room. Even before a word was said, Jack had the feeling that everybody there, with the exception of Barzelli, had been drinking all Sunday.

Barzelli saw Jack over her partner’s shoulder. She smiled at him, and made a little slow gesture with her long fingers to welcome him, but she didn’t stop dancing. “The drinks are in the corner, mister,” she said.

Jack stood at the doorway, watching her. He felt uncomfortable, like a trespasser lured by mistake to watch a spectacle he had no wish to see. If there had been another woman besides Barzelli in the room he’d have been more at ease. This way, it was almost as if he’d blundered into a place where some obscure and unpleasant rite was being conducted, a rite that had been performed many times in the past, a rainy Sunday, Roman, Appian rite, perverse and disturbing, celebrating boredom, satiety, sensuality, parasitism, luxury.

The priestess danced, barefooted, in her ceremonial green and black, moving her tightly encased lovely hips in slow, obscene movements to the chant from the phonograph. Her hair loosened and swung in a dark mass over her bare full shoulders, from which the collar of her blouse had slipped. A distant, dreamlike smile was fixed on the soft, wide lips as she swayed, half leading, half led, close to her partner, whose silk shirt was stained with sweat. Jack had the feeling that they had been dancing like this, tranced, connected, mechanical, bored, titillated, for hours. The dark young men in their dark suits, acolytes, priests, worshippers, past and future participants, watched, bemused, making ritual slow trips to the bar to pour the accustomed libations. The light was garish and hard. A neon strip ran all around the room two feet below the high ceiling, behind a carved molding. There were roses everywhere, in tall glass vases, many of them faded and losing their petals. Three huge portraits of the lady of the house, by three different artists, were the only paintings on the dark blue walls. One of the paintings was a nude, Barzelli stretched out, with her arms above her head, on a red rug.

The temple was disorderly, as though its servants were underpaid or carelessly regulated, but all appointments were there for every occasion. The place of sacrifice was no doubt the long white couch, but the young man lying there with the highball glass on his breastbone was certainly not the chosen victim. An habitué of the sanctum, he made familiar use of the holy objects. The true victim, Jack felt, was lying behind a blank white door in a shadowed room, breathing oxygen through a tube taped onto his cheek.

The music came to a stop. The mechanical arm of the phonograph lifted slowly and fell into place on its rest as the turntable hushed into stillness. The dancers stood for a moment, arms on each other’s shoulders, hanging loose. They swayed gently, too weary or too inert to break away. Then Barzelli said something in Italian and her partner laughed, briefly, and went over to the glass table, piled with bottles, in the corner of the room, that served as a bar. Barzelli brushed her hair back with one hand, with a quick movement, and approached Jack. She stopped close to him, smiling at him, without friendliness, her hand on her hip, in a pose that betrayed her early years in the village in Catania. “You do not drink?” she said.

“Not for the moment,” Jack said.

“I suppose you have come to tell me something about poor Maurice.” Her tone was challenging, hostile.

“More or less,” Jack said.

“Jumping horses!” She snorted derisively. “He has no actors to dominate on Sunday, so he uses animals.” She eyed Jack, smiling coldly, waiting for him to answer. “You do not think so?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Jack said.

“Well,” Barzelli said impatiently, “what is it? What secret terrible message are you bringing?”

Jack looked around him. The dark, drunken eyes of the young men were on them, incurious but attentive. “Can we talk alone?” he said.

Barzelli shrugged. “If you want,” she said. She turned and walked toward a closed door at the other end of the room. Jack followed. Barzelli opened the door and they went into the dining room, a long bare room with an iron-and-glass table and spindly gilt chairs. Another portrait of Barzelli, this time in a black dress and black hat, hung over the sideboard, and an elaborate glass chandelier shed a harsh white light over the table. Jack closed the door behind him. Barzelli sat down at the head of the table, her elbows on the table top, her hands supporting her chin. Jack saw that she wasn’t wearing anything under her blouse, and her full breasts, which had contributed, as much as anything else, to her success, were clearly visible against the thin stuff of her blouse.

“Sit,” she said, indicating a chair on her right.

Jack sat down carefully. The chair looked so frail that he was afraid it would break under him.

“So,” Barzelli said, “what does the poor man want? He was supposed to have lunch with me today. I waited and waited. I was furious. Luckily, some friends dropped in…” With a twitch of her shoulder she indicated the room from which they had just come. “So the food was not wasted.”

They’ve been drinking since one o’clock, this afternoon, Jack thought. No wonder their eyes look like that.

“That Mr. Fogel finally called me at five o’clock,” Barzelli said angrily. “It hadn’t occurred to anyone before that that maybe the star of the picture should be told the director was dying. It is an unimportant little detail.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I should have done it.”

“It makes no difference.” Barzelli shrugged. “Mr. Fogel said he probably would not die, anyway.” She reached over in a long, stretching, fluent movement and picked a dried fig out of a glass basket of fruit in the middle of the table. She tore it in half with her strong, even teeth, and chewed loudly. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked indifferently. “Do we shoot tomorrow?”

“Report to the studio for your regular call,” Jack said. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“My poor dear man,” Barzelli said, “you do not understand the Italian movie business. Chaos. Maybe in three weeks they will straighten things out. So—I am to be on the set tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you came to tell me?” she asked, chewing loudly. “All this long trip so late at night?”

“No,” Jack said. “I…”

“Who is going to finish the picture?” Barzelli said. “Tucino? I warn you, if he goes near the camera, I walk off and I stay off…”

“It won’t be Tucino,” Jack said, surprised and grateful at this unexpectedly ally.

“Who, then?” Barzelli asked suspiciously.

“I’m not sure,” said Jack. He had decided this was not the time to have it out with Barzelli, alone with her, in her own home. He had the feeling he would need help with her when she found out he was taking over. “It will be settled sometime tonight.”

“It had better be settled to my satisfaction,” Barzelli said. “Tell them that.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“Then what?” Barzelli said. “What are you here to say?”

Jack took a long breath. What was he here to say? I bring a message from the depths of marriage; help rescue my friend where he drowns in fourteen years of love and hatred; understand the bitter, octopal twinings of a man and woman who have spent a good portion of their lives devouring each other, strangling each other, rising and diving in the treacherous element, surfacing into the air, plunging below, always terribly clasped, supporting, hurting, caressing each other. What was he there to say to this glittering, impervious woman with her shining white teeth, her glowing skin, her superb, victorious body, her perfect health, her cunning, self-adoring brain, her retinue of beautiful young drunkards on the other side of the door? What was he there to say? Learn pity in a moment, become human before midnight, weep one small tear for the suffering of a poor, foolish, desperate soul. He could say some of this, or all of this, to any other of the men and women he had met since he had come to Rome, to Bresach, to Max, to Veronica, to Holt and his wife, to Despière, to Tasseti, even, and hope to have some portion of it strike a sympathetic chord somewhere within them. But with Barzelli…He stared at her. She was leaning forward, displaying the smooth sweep of her breasts, chewing evenly on her dried fig, regarding him impassively, waiting, ready to reject any claims on her. Anybody but Barzelli, he thought. But he had to say something. Delaney, lying behind the blank white door, had the right to expect him to say
something
…The instructions, to the letter…