Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw

Author:Irwin Shaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Contemporary Fiction, Maraya21, Literature & Fiction
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

HE was aware that it was light, that he was not yet awake, that there was soft breathing somewhere beside him, that the phone was ringing.

Without sitting up or opening his eyes, postponing the day, he groped for the phone on the bedside table. A faraway voice, through a curtain of mechanical buzzing, said, “Good morning, darling.”

“Who’s this?” he said. His eyes were still closed.

“How many people call you darling?” the thin, distant voice said.

“I’m sorry, Constance,” he said. “You sound a million miles away.” He opened his eyes, turned his head. The long brown hair was on the pillow beside him. Gail stared at him, the blue-flecked eyes fixed gravely on him. He was half-out from the sheet that covered her, and he had an enormous erection. He didn’t remember ever having seen his cock that size. He had to suppress a ludicrous impulse to grab at the sheet and cover himself.

“You’re still in bed,” Constance was saying. Distant electronic accusation across six hundred miles of inaccurate cable. “It’s past ten o’clock.”

“Is it?” he said idiotically. His cock swelled malevolently. He was conscious of the level glance from the next pillow, the shape of the body under the sheet, the neatly turned-down second bed in the room, still unslept in. He regretted having spoken Constance’s name, any name. “This is a late town,” he said. “How’re things in Paris?”

“Deteriorating. How’re things with you?”

He hesitated. “Nothing new,” he said.

Gail did not smile or change her expression. The weight of her glance was almost palpable on the insanely stalwart penis towering into the golden morning air like a permanent and shameless feature of the landscape. Gail reached over slowly, deliberately, and ran one experimental finger from its base to its flaming crown. A convulsion racked him as though he had been touched by a high-tension wire.

“Holy man,” she whispered.

“First of all,” the wavery, mechanical, almost unrecognizable voice was saying in the telephone, “I want to apologize …”

“I can hardly hear you,” he said, making an agonizing effort to speak calmly. “Maybe we’d better hang up and call the operator again and …”

“Is this better? Can you hear me now?” Suddenly the voice was clear and strong, as if Constance were in another room of the hotel or around the corner.

“Yes,” he said reluctantly. Desperately, he tried to think of something to say to Constance that would hold her off, give him time to put on some clothes and go into the living room and wait there for her to call back. But for the moment he didn’t trust himself with anything more ambitious than a monosyllable.

“I said I wanted to apologize,” Constance said, “for being so bitchy the other day. You know how I am.”

“Yes,” he said. Nothing had changed below.

“And thanks for the picture of the lion. It was a nice thought.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I have some good news,” Constance said. “At least I hope you’ll think it’s good news.”

“What’s that?” Slyly, surreptitiously, he had managed to cover himself almost entirely from the waist down with the sheet.

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