Free Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw Page A

tall, soft-spoken, ambassadorial-looking man, white-haired, beak-nosed, Roman in lineament, who had been a matinée idol and who had had to fight the drink all his life and who had been the lover of great beauties for thirty years and who had died in the arms of an assistant cutter in a hotel room, among the rebuilt ruins (“Kiss me, Hardy,” in the bloody surgery off Trafalgar), sitting up in bed and calling out the name of a girl he had known when he was twenty years old, a hundred women away.
    McKnight, small, hypochondriacal, violent in drawing rooms and on the edges of swimming pools. Killed in the war, run over by a tank. At the time they were making Stolen Midnight he had been a bit-part actor, trying to act like Cary Grant, whom he resembled faintly. “I have the gift of the comic spirit,” McKnight said, repeated, insisted, pleaded. “I would have been great in the twenties, when people still really knew how to laugh.” He was too short to be a star and he had nearly been killed when he had been thrown from a horse during the shooting of a Western picture at Universal, but he had been reserved for the tank in the Atlas Mountains, dislocated in time, the comic spirit.
    Lawrence Myers was dead, too. Sallow, dome-headed, in need of a haircut, with the shaky hands of a man of eighty. He had written the script and had fought bitterly with Delaney, who changed every line. He was married to a woman who was crazily jealous and who cut off the sleeves of the jackets of his suits with a knife when he failed to get home at seven o’clock in the evening. Myers was gaunt and sickly-looking and had tuberculosis. He squandered all his money and he died at the age of thirty-three, when he got up out of bed, leaving an oxygen tent, to go to a story conference at MGM for a musical comedy.
    Those were the dead, or at least the known dead, the remembered dead, and did not include grips, secretaries, cutters, publicity men, studio policemen, script girls, waitresses in the studio commissary, all of whom were alive, pushing, hopeful, with plans for the future, at the time the picture was made, and who might also be expected to have succumbed in a predictable ratio to the wear and tear of twenty years, in accordance with Jack’s mortality tables.
    To say nothing of the living…
    First among the living, Carlotta…
    Hell, Jack thought, sitting on the edge of the bed, with the cigarette between his lips, I’m not going to go through that again. He stood up briskly, like a man who knew what he was doing, and went, barefooted, dragging a blanket, to get away from the bedroom, the dream, the unleashed dead. He put on all the lights in the living room, the glass chandelier, the desk lamps, the wall brackets, and picked up the pink-covered script Delaney had asked him to read.
    He made himself comfortable on the couch, shivering a little under the blanket, and opened the script.
    FADE IN, AFTER CREDITS
    A four-motor plane landing at the Ciampino Airport, Rome.
    It has been raining and the runways are still wet.
    THE AIRPLANE taxis toward the point of disembarkation and the workmen run out with the ramp.
    THE DOOR OPENS and the passengers begin to come out. Among the passengers is ROBERT JOHNSON .
    HE walks a little apart from the other passengers, HE seems to be searching for something, HE approaches the camera and we see that he. is a man of about thirty-five, very handsome, with piercing, intelligent eyes. Jack sighed as he read the stale, familiar words, and thought again, in recurrent pain, of his dream, trying to sort out the symbols. The bull, dealing death, appeased momentarily by song and dance, deterred from his sinister intention by clowning and vaudeville tricks. What was that? The public? Unreasonable, brutelike, deadly—kept at bay only so long as you could jig and caper and howl amusingly? Jack remembered how he had felt before the curtain went up on opening nights and how shaky he had been, seated among the audiences at