Evening in Byzantium Read Online Free PDF Page A

d’Azur to piece together the shreds of letters they found in wastebaskets.
    Patriot, veteran, law-abider, taxpayer, he refused to think about how his sixty or seventy thousand dollars would be spent by Mr. Nixon, by the Pentagon, by the FBI, by Congress. There was a limit to the amount of moral agony a man could be expected to inflict upon himself when he was, theoretically at least, on holiday. Maybe I ought to let Gail McKinnon read my mail, he thought. The readers of Playboy would be fascinated. Diaghilev at the mercy of a postage stamp.
    He reached for the letter from his lawyer, then thought better of it. He picked up the batch of yellow sheets, weighed them, held them indecisively over the waste-basket. He shuffled through the pages at random. He is forty-eight now and looks it, he read. What does a forty-eight-year-old man look like to a twenty-two-year-old girl? Ruins. The walls of Pompeii. The trenches of Verdun. Hiroshima.
    He sat down at the desk, started reading from where he had left off when the girl had gone out of the room. See yourself as the world sees you.
    “He does not seem like a self-indulgent man,” he read, “and according to all reports he does not indulge in others.
    “Because of this, in some quarters he has a reputation for ruthlessness. He has made many enemies, and among his former collaborators there are some who speak of what they call his disloyalty. In support of this it is cited that only once has he ever done more than one play by the same author and unlike other producers has never developed a favorite roster of actors. It must be admitted that when his last two films failed, for a total loss that is estimated at more than eight million dollars, there was little sympathy shown him in the movie colony.”
    The bitch, he thought, where did she get that? Unlike most other journalists who had interviewed him and who had rarely read anything more about him than they had gleaned from studio publicity handouts, the girl had arrived well prepared. Malevolently well prepared. He skipped two pages, dropping them on the floor, and read on.
    “It is common knowledge that at least on one occasion he was offered the top position at one of the most prestigious studios in the industry. It is said he turned the offer down in a brief telegram: ‘Have already deserted sinking ship. Craig.’
    “His behavior might be explained by the fact that he is a rich man, or should be a rich man if he has handled the money he has earned in a responsible manner. A director he has worked with has put it differently. ‘He’s just a contrary son of a bitch,’ is the way the director explained it. The actress Monica Browning has been quoted in an interview as saying, ‘There is no mystery there. Jesse Craig is a simple, charming, homemade megalomaniac.’”
    I need something to drink, he thought. He looked at his watch. It was ten twenty-five. So, it’s only ten twenty-five, he thought. He got the bottle and went into the bathroom and poured a slug of whisky and ran a little water into the glass from the tap. He took a sip and carried the glass with him back into the living room.
    Glass in hand, he continued reading. “Twice Craig has been invited to serve as a member of the jury in Cannes. Twice he refused the invitation. When it became known that he had made reservations for the entire festival this year, many eyebrows were raised. For five years, after the failure of his last film, he has kept away from Hollywood and was only intermittently seen in New York. He has kept his office open but has announced no new projects. He seems to have taken to wandering restlessly for good parts of the recent years around the Continent. The reasons for his retreat are obscure. Disgust? Disillusionment? Weariness? A feeling that his work was done and the time had come to enjoy its fruits in peace in places where he had neither friends nor enemies? Or was it a failure of nerve? Is the visitor to Cannes a spent man on a