Evening In Byzantium Part 20

Craig was surprised into laughing. "After tonight ..." he began.

"Because of tonight," Anne insisted. "On the beach today he told me what good friends you'd been, what great times you'd had together, how marvelous he thought you were ..."

"That was a long time ago," Craig said. "The good times we had together. People wear away from each other. As for his thinking how marvelous I am-that comes as news to me. If you want to know the truth, I'm afraid it's something of an inaccurate statement about your father."

"Don't you run yourself down, too," Anne said. "Why should it only be people like Mr. Murphy who are sure of themselves?"

"Okay," he said. He took her elbow, and they started to walk slowly along the quay. "If there's anything I can do for him, I'll try to do it."

"You drink too much, too, you know," Anne said, walking beside him.

"I suppose I do," he said.

"Why do people over thirty try so deliberately to ruin themselves?"

"Because they're over thirty."

"Don't make jokes," she said sharply.

"If you don't have the answer to a question, Anne," he said, "you're liable to make a joke."

"Well, then, don't make them in front of me," she said.

They walked in silence, her rebuke between them. "G.o.d," she said, "I thought I was going to have such a wonderful time here. The Mediterranean, this great city, all these famous, talented people ... Being with you." She shook her head sadly. "I guess you shouldn't expect anything in advance."

"It's only one night, Anne," he said. "It's bound to get better."

"You're leaving tomorrow," she said. "You didn't tell me.

"It came up suddenly," he said.

"Can I come with you?"

"I'm afraid not."

"I won't ask why," she said.

"It's only for a day or two," he said uncomfortably.

They walked in silence, listening to the lapping of the harbor water against the boats tied up along the quay.

"Wouldn't it be nice," Anne said, "to get on one of these boats and just sail off?"

"What have you got to run away from?"

"Plenty," she said quietly.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"When you come back," she said.

Women, at all ages, he thought, have the knack of making you feel you are deserting them even when you are only going down to the corner for ten minutes for a pack of cigarettes. "Anne," he said, "I have an idea. While I'm gone, why don't you move over to Cap d'Antibes? The swimming's better, and you can use the Murphys' cabana and ..."

"I don't need any chaperone," Anne said harshly.

"I wasn't thinking of chaperones," Craig said, although he realized now that she had used the word that was exactly what had been at the back of his mind. "It was just that I thought you'd enjoy it more there, you'd have someone to talk to ..."

"I'll find somebody to talk to right here," she said. "Anyway, I want to see a lot of movies. It's funny, I love to see movies. I just hate what it does to the people who make them."

A car with two women in it came up alongside the quai and slowed down. The woman nearest them smiled invitingly. Craig ignored her, and the car moved off.

"They're prost.i.tutes," Anne said, "aren't they?"

"Yes."

"In the temples of ancient Greece," Anne said, "they prost.i.tuted themselves to strangers before the altars."

"The altars have changed since then," Craig said. Don't walk alone at night, Gail had told Anne when they had met on the steps of the hotel. Don't walk with your father, either, she should have added. Even wh.o.r.es, he thought angrily, should observe some rules.

"Have you ever gone with one of them?" Anne asked.

"No," he lied.

"If I were a man," Anne said, "I think I'd be tempted to try."

"Why?"

"Just once, to see what it was like," she said. Craig remembered a book he had read when he was young, Jurgen, by James Branch Cabell. He had read it because it was supposed to be dirty. The hero kept saying, "My name is Jurgen, and I will taste any drink once." Poor Cabell, who had been sure of his fame ("Tell the rabble/My name is Cabell," he had announced from what he had considered his enduring and disdainful eminence), poor Cabell, dead, discounted, forgotten even before his death, might now find consolation in the fact that a whole generation so many years later was living by his hero's disastrous slogan, was tasting any drink once, trying any drug once, any political position, any man or woman, once.

"Maybe," Anne said with a gesture of her head for the disappearing red lights of the wh.o.r.es' car, "maybe it would help define things."

"What things?"

"Love, maybe."

"Do you think that needs definition?"

"Of course," Anne said. "Don't you?"

"Not really."

"You're lucky," she said. "If you really believe that. Do you think they're having an affair?"

"Who?" Craig asked, although he knew whom she meant.

"Gail and Ian Wadleigh."

"Why do you ask?"

"I don't know," she said. "The way they behave together. As though there's something between them."

"No," he said. "I don't think so."

Actually, he thought, I refuse to think so.

"She's a cool girl, isn't she, Gail?" Anne said.

"I don't know what people mean by cool anymore," he said.

"She goes her own way," Anne said, "she doesn't depend on anyone. And she's beautiful, and she doesn't make anything of it. Of course, I only met her today, and I may be way off base, but she gives you the feeling that she makes people live up to the way she wants them to be."

"Do you think she wanted Wadleigh to end up the night puking his guts out because he behaved like a fool?"

"Probably," Anne said. "Indirectly. She cares for him, and she wanted him to see for himself what a dead end he'd reached."

"I think you're giving her more credit than she deserves," he said.

"Maybe," Anne admitted. "Still, I wish I could be like her. Cool, above things, knowing what she wants. And getting it. And getting it on her own terms." She paused for a moment. "Are you having an affair with her?"

"No," he said. "Why would you think so?"

"I just asked," Anne said offhandedly. She s.h.i.+vered a little. "It's getting cold, I'd like to go back to the hotel and go to bed. I've had a long day."

But when they got back to the hotel, she decided it was too early to go to bed and came up to his apartment with him for a nightcap. She also wanted to get a copy of his script, she said.

If Gail knocked on the door while Anne was there, Craig thought ironically as he poured the whiskies and soda, they could have a nice little family get-together. He could start the evening off on the right foot by saying, "Gail, Anne has some interesting questions she'd like to ask you." Gail would probably answer them, too. In detail.

Anne was staring at the t.i.tle page of the script when he brought her her drink. "Who's Malcolm Harte?" she asked.

"A man I knew during the war," Craig said. "He's dead."

"I thought you said you wrote the script yourself."

"I did." He was sorry that he had been so careless on the trip back from the airport and had told her he had done the writing himself. Now he would be forced to explain.

"Then what's another man's name doing on it?"

"I guess you could call it my nom de plume," he said.

"What do you need a nom de plume for?"

"Business reasons," he said.

She made a face. "Are you ashamed of it?" She tapped the script.

"I don't know. Yet," he said.

"I don't like it," she said. "There's something shady about it."

"I think you're being a little too fine." He was embarra.s.sed by the turn the conversation had taken. "It's in an old and honorable tradition. After all, a pretty good writer by the name of Samuel Clemens signed his books Mark Twain." He saw by the set of her lips that this had not convinced her. "I'll tell you the truth," he said. "It comes from uncertainty. Put it more bluntly. From fear. I've never written anything before, and I haven't the faintest notion of how good or bad it is. Until I get some opinions on it, I feel safer hiding behind another man's name. You can understand that, can't you?"

"I can understand it," she said. "But it still strikes me as wrong."

"Let me be a judge of what's right and what's wrong, Anne," he said with a firmness he didn't feel. At this stage of his life he was not prepared to live up to the dictates of his twenty-year-old daughter's stainless-steel conscience.

"Okay," Anne said, hurt, "if you don't want me to say what I think, I'll shut up." She put the script down on the desk.

"Anne, darling," he said gently, "of course I want you to say what you think. And I want to say what I think. Fair enough?"

She smiled. "You think I'm a brat, don't you?"

"Sometimes."

"I guess I am," she said. She kissed his cheek. "Sometimes." She raised her gla.s.s. "Cheers."

"Cheers," he said.

She took a long swallow of her whisky. "Mmmm," she said appreciatively. He remembered watching her drink her milk before bedtime when she was a little girl. She looked around at the large room. "Isn't this awfully expensive?"

"Awfully," he said.

"Mummy says you're going to wind up a pauper."

"Mummy is probably right."

"She says you're wildly extravagant."

"She should know," he said.

"She keeps asking me if I take drugs." Anne was obviously waiting for him to ask the same question.

"I take it for granted, from all I see and hear," he said, "that every student in every college in America has smoked pot at one time or another. I imagine that includes you."

"I imagine it does," Anne said.

"I also imagine that you're too smart to fool around with anything else. And that takes care of that," he said. "And now let's call a moratorium on Mummy, shall we?"

"You know what I was thinking all through dinner, looking at you?" Anne said. "I was thinking what a handsome man you are. With all your hair and not fat and those lines of wear and tear in your face. Like a retired gladiator, a little delicate now from old wounds."

He laughed.

"n.o.ble wear and tear," she said quickly. "As though you'd learned a lot and that's why the lines were there. You're the best-looking man I've seen since I came here-"

"You've only been here a few hours," he said. But he couldn't help sounding pleased. Fatuously pleased, he told himself. "Give yourself a couple of days."

"And I wasn't the only one," she said. "Every lady in that restaurant looked at you in that certain way ladies have-that little b.u.t.terball, Miss Sorel, that fabulous French actress, even Sonia Murphy, even Gail McKinnon."

"I must say, I didn't notice it." He was being honest. He had had other problems to think about during and after dinner.