Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw

Author:Irwin Shaw
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Literary, Contemporary Fiction, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9781480413344
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2013-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

15

HE WAITED IN THE restaurant until two thirty and ate his lunch and dawdled over his coffee, but Veronica didn’t appear. He left the restaurant and went back to his hotel, but there was no message for him there. He was irritated with her and for a moment thought of forgetting her and going upstairs and trying to take a nap. He was exhausted from the night before and the session with Delaney in the dubbing room had been unpleasant and tiring. Delaney had nagged at him and been sardonic about the way he looked. “Christ,” Delaney had said, “if you’re going to stay up screwing all night, how can you expect to do your job right?”

He had cut Delaney short and had tried desperately to concentrate, but the effects of the night had been impossible to throw off. He knew that he needed sleep, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep unless he had tried to find Veronica.

He gave Guido the name of the hotel to which he had delivered Veronica the night before. Guido must have had a good lunch, because he was expansive and talkative, although Jack would have liked to be left in peace to doze in the back seat.

“France,” Guido said, roaring down on a traffic light and slamming on the brakes two feet before he hit an old man with a brief case who was crossing the street. “France—that is the country.” He spoke in French, their common bond. “They are blessed, the French. They have everything. All the riches in the soil, all the minerals, all the most beautiful women. And they are not crowded. That is their big blessing. They control the birth. It is not like here, like this senseless Italian incubator, where every day our women give birth to another twenty thousand unemployed. Why, in France, they even have to import, workers.” He shook his head at the unbelievable glory of this condition. “Imagine a country like that. The human being is king.” He sighed loudly. “I should have stayed there. When my battalion moved out, I should have had the sense to desert and stay. Later on, I could have constituted myself prisoner and then become a citizen. The happiest months of my life I spent outside Toulon. My captain was a crook and he hired us out to a lady he was in love with who owned a vineyard and we worked on the vines for one whole spring and summer. The lady who owned the vineyard and whom our captain loved was an aristocrat. She told us, ‘My poor children, you are going to lose the war and soon many of you will be dead, drink as much wine as you can now.’ The wine of that coast is heavy and powerful and she understood when we had to sleep under the olive trees in the hot afternoons and she never told the captain. If it is absolutely necessary to work,” Guido said authoritatively, “it is always best to work for an aristocrat.

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