Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    At ten fifteen A.M. the