Free Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw Page B

the previews of films in which he had acted—dry-mouthed, sweating, with electric-like little shivers in his elbows and knees. Was it because, after so many years, he was coming back to all that, even if it was only for two weeks and as the anonymous, paid voice of a shadow on the screen, that he had had the dream?
    And what about the man with the averted face, the enemy locked in the same place, confronted with the same danger, paralyzed by terror? And when you turned to know the face of the enemy, the face of fear, just at the moment of knowledge, of recognition, the doors broke down…
    He shook his head wearily. I will buy a dream book tomorrow, he told himself mockingly, in Italian. I will find out that I am to avoid traveling by water or by air or by land and that an uncle of whom I have never heard is on the verge of leaving me a large ranch in the Argentine.
    Maybe what it all means, he thought, is merely to get the hell out of here, leave the five thousand dollars, leave Delaney, leave my youth, leave the buried life buried. Maybe it’s as simple as that.
    But he read on dutifully, feeling pity and a little shame for all the souls, himself included, searching for fame or money or escape or amusement in this sad enterprise. He read through to the end, rapidly, in an impatient shuffle of pages, then dropped the script onto the floor and stood up, feeling bruised by the night, and went over to the windows. He threw the windows open and looked, without pleasure, at the dawn breaking cold and green over the narrow, yellowish Roman street. God, he thought, nagged by memories and premonitions, I wish these two weeks were over.

5
    T HEY SAT IN THE darkened projection room, Delaney, Jack, and Delaney’s secretary, watching the running of the film. Delaney had called for Jack at seven thirty in the morning. He had asked how Jack was feeling and had peered shrewdly and a little worriedly into Jack’s bloodshot eyes, but had grunted in satisfaction when Jack told him, falsely, that he was feeling all right.
    “Good,” Delaney had said. “We can get right to work.”
    Because Delaney wanted to keep Stiles, the actor whose voice Jack was dubbing, from finding out what was being done, they had gone to another studio than the one where Delaney was shooting the picture. Delaney had put on dark glasses and pulled his cap down low in a conspiratorial attempt to remain incognito, although everyone he passed on the lot said, loudly, “Buon giorno, Signor Delaney.” He hadn’t introduced Jack to anyone, not even to the slender middle-aged woman in flat shoes who was working as his secretary and who sat just behind Jack in the projection room.
    As the roughly cut sequences flickered past on the screen, Jack could see that, despite Delaney’s complaints the night before, he was enjoying himself watching what he had shot. He grunted approvingly, he laughed aloud two or three times, short, harsh bursts, he nodded, half-unconsciously, at the climax of two scenes. Only when the image of Stiles appeared on the screen, did Delaney seem to be suffering. He wriggled in his seat, he lowered his head and glared up at the screen from beneath his brows, as though he were protecting his eyes from a blow. “The son of a bitch,” he kept muttering, “the swilling son of a bitch.”
    Jack found the picture very little better than the script he had read. There were felicitous inventions here and there on the part of Delaney, and happy moments in the performances of some of the actors, especially that of Barzelli, the girl who played the leading part, but the general effect was heavy and lifeless and there was a leaden feeling that everybody concerned had done the same thing many times before. Stiles, as Delaney had said, looked all right, but his speech, when it wasn’t slippery and almost incomprehensible from drink, was stilted and wooden and even the rudimentary indications of passion and intelligence which the script had offered were