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

said. “Maybe they finally won’t be able to be talked into killing each other.” A much older, beloved brother had been lost at Aachen, and she was furious against war. When she read the news from Vietnam, and it was particularly bad, she cursed in barracks language, threatened to move to the South Seas with her son.
    As she had said the first night, she lived from hand to mouth, but dressed extravagantly. The couturiers of Paris loaned her clothes, knowing that in the places to which she was invited neither she nor their confections would go unnoticed. She left whatever bed she was in promptly at seven each morning to make breakfast for her children and send them off to school. Regardless of the night she had spent, she was at her desk promptly at nine A.M . Although Craig kept a suite in a hotel, the wide bed in her room overlooking a garden on the Left Bank became his true Paris address. Her children grew fond of him. “They’re used to men,” she explained. She had outgrown whatever morality she had been exposed to in Texas and ignored whatever conventions were in practice in the society or societies she adorned in Paris.
    She was straightforward, funny, demanding, unpredictable, gloriously formed for lovemaking, affectionate, eager and enterprising, only serious at those moments that demanded seriousness. He had been dormant. He was dormant no longer.
    He had fallen into the dull habit of not noticing or appreciating women as women. Now he was immediately conscious of beauty, a sensual smile, a way of walking; his eye had been re-educated, was youthful again, was quick and innocently lascivious for the flick of a skirt, the curve of a throat, womanly movements. Faithful to one, once more he enjoyed the entire sex. It was not the least of the gifts Constance had brought him.
    She talked candidly of the men who had come before him, and he knew there would be others after him. He contained his jealousy. Now he knew that he had been suffering from deep wounds when he had met her. The wounds were healing.
    In the quiet room, suffused only with the mild sound of the sea outside the window, he waited anxiously for the ring of the telephone, the darting, husky tones of her voice. He was prepared to say, “I am taking the first plane back to Paris,” sure that if she had any other engagement that evening she would break it for him.
    Finally the phone rang. “Oh, you,” she said. The tone was not affectionate.
    “Darling,” he began.
    “Don’t darling me, Producer. I’m no little starlet wriggling her hot little ass for two weeks on a couch.” He heard voices in the background—her office, as usual, was probably full, but she was not one to postpone rage because of an audience.
    “Now, Connie …”
    “Now, Connie balls,” she said. “You said you were going to call me yesterday. And don’t tell me you tried. I’ve heard that before.”
    “I didn’t try.”
    “You haven’t even got the grace to lie, you son of a bitch.”
    “Connie.” He was pleading now.
    “The only honest man in Cannes. Just my goddamn luck. Why didn’t you try?”
    “I was …”
    “Save your goddamn excuses. And you can save your telephone calls, too. I don’t have to hang around waiting for any goddamn phone to ring. I hope you’ve found somebody to hold your hand in Cannes because sure as Christ your franchise has run out in Paris.”
    “Connie, will you for God’s sake be reasonable?”
    “As of now. As of this minute I am purely, coldly, glacially reasonable. The phone’s off the hook, laddie boy. Don’t bother trying to get the number. Ever.”
    There was the angry sound as she slammed the instrument down six hundred miles away. He shook his head ruefully as he put the phone down in its cradle. He smiled a little, thinking of the dumb quiet that must have fallen among the young at her office and the frantic, professorial eruption from the adjoining room of her partner, galvanized out of his usual somnolence by her