Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

reassures the natives.”
    She laughed. She had a rumbling laugh, almost vulgarly robust, unexpected in a woman as slender and as carefully put together as she was. She played with a long gold chain that hung down to her waist. Her bosom was youthful and high, he noticed. He had no idea how old she was. “You didn’t seem as crazy as the others about the candidate,” she said.
    “I detect a streak of ferocity in him,” Craig said. “I’m not partial to ferocious leaders.”
    “I saw you write out a check.”
    “Politics, as they say, is the art of the possible. I saw you write out a check.”
    “Bravado,” she said. “I live from hand to mouth. It’s because the young like him. Maybe they know something.”
    “That’s as good a reason as any, I suppose,” he said.
    “You don’t live in Paris.”
    “New York,” he said, “if anyplace. I’m just passing through.”
    “For long?” She looked at him thoughtfully over the raised glass.
    He shrugged. “My plans are indefinite.”
    “I followed you out here, you know.”
    “Did you?”
    “You know I did.”
    “Yes.” Surprised, he felt the trace of a blush.
    “You have a brooding face. Banked fires.” She chuckled, the disturbing, incongruous low sound. “And nice wide skinny shoulders. I know everybody else in the place. Do you ever come into a room and look around and say to yourself, ‘My God, I know everybody here!’ Know what I mean?”
    “I think so,” he said. She was standing close to him now. She had doused herself with perfume, but it was a fresh, tart smell.
    “Are you going to kiss me now?” she said, “or are you going to wait for later?”
    He kissed her. He hadn’t kissed a woman for more than two years, and he enjoyed it.
    “Sam has my phone number,” she said. Sam was the friend who had brought him along. “Use it the next time you come through. If you want to. I’m busy this time. I’m shedding a fella. I have to go now. I have a sick child at home.” The green dress flowed toward the hall where the coats were piled.
    He stood alone at the bar and poured himself another drink, remembering the touch of her lips on his, the tart aroma of her perfume.
    On the way home he had gotten her telephone number from his friend Sam, probed delicately for information, had not reported the full scene in the dining room.
    “She’s a man-killer,” Sam had said. “A benevolent man-killer. She’s the best American girl in Paris. She has some weird job with kids. Did you ever see such legs?” Sam was a lawyer, a solid man not given to hyperbole in his conversation.
    The next time he came through Paris, after Bobby Kennedy had been killed and the election over, he had called the number Sam had given him.
    “I remember you,” she said. “I shed the fella.”
    He took her to dinner that night. Every night thereafter while he stayed in Paris.
    She had been a great beauty out of Texas, had conquered New York, then Paris, a tall, slender, willful girl with a tilted, narrow dark head. Dear men, her presence demanded when she entered a room, what are you doing here, are you worth the time?
    With her he saw Paris in its best light. It was her town, and she walked through it with joy and pride and mischief, lovely legs making a carnival of its pavements. She had small teeth, a dangerous temper. She was not to be taken lightly. She was a Puritan about work, her own and that of others. Fiercely independent, she scorned inaction, parasitism. She had come to Paris as a model, during, as she put it, the second half of the rule of Charlemagne. Unschooled, she was surprisingly bookish. Her age was anybody’s guess. She had been married twice. Vaguely, she said. Both men, and others, had made off with money. She bore them no ill-will, neither the husbands nor the others. She had tired of modeling, gone with a partner, male, an ex-University professor from Maine, into the exchange-student business. “The kids have to know about each other,” she