Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw Page B

was a little tired, that’s all.”
    “Are you a healthy man, Dottore?” Despière asked.
    “Of course,” Jack said.
    “You look like a rock,” said Despière. “It would be too deceiving if a man who looked like you turned out to be riddled with disease. Myself, now, that’s a different story.” He chuckled. “When scientists look at me, they rush back to their laboratories and work night and day in the search for a serum, before it’s too late to save me. Do you know that I’ve taken injections made from the placenta of women who have just given birth and from the secret cells of young men who have died in accidents?”
    “What do you do that for?” Jack asked, half believing him.
    “To prolong my life,” Despière said lightly, waving at a man and a blond woman who were walking past the table. “Don’t you think I ought to be interested in prolonging my life?”
    “Does it work?” Jack asked.
    Despière shrugged. “I’m alive,” he said.
    The waiter put down Jack’s glass and poured the vermouth into it. Despière waved to two girls with long hair and pale faces devoid of make-up or lipstick who were parading past, on leave for the lunch hour from a movie set. He seemed to know half the people who passed the table and he greeted them all with the same languid wave of his hand and the same warm, brilliant, mocking smile.
    “Tell me, Dottore,” Despière said, slouching down in his seat, talking without taking his cigarette from his mouth, so that he had to squint a bit because of the smoke that continually blew into his eyes, “tell me, how was Delaney’s masterpiece this morning?”
    “Well,” Jack said cautiously, “it’s all in bits and pieces so far. It’s a little early to tell.”
    “You mean it’s lousy.” Despière looked amused.
    “Not at all,” Jack said. Despière was his friend, but so was Delaney, and there was no need to sacrifice one for the other just for a magazine article. “I think it’s liable to turn out to be a pretty good picture.”
    “It better be,” Despière said.
    “What do you mean by that?” This morning, Despière was making Jack uncomfortable.
    “You know as well as I do, Dottore,” Despière said, “that our friend Delaney is staggering against the ropes. One more stinker and he won’t be able to make a picture anyplace. Not in Hollywood, not in Rome, not in Peru…”
    “I don’t know anything about that,” Jack said shortly. “I haven’t kept up with the fan magazines.”
    “Oh,” Despière said ironically, “if I had his gift of commanding loyalty from my friends.”
    “Listen, Jean-Baptiste,” Jack said, “what’s this piece going to be like, anyway? Are you going to cut him up?”
    “Me?” Despière touched his chest in elaborate surprise. “Am I known as a man who would do things like that?”
    “You’re known as a man who would do a lot of things,” Jack said. “What’re you going to say about him?”
    “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” Despière grinned teasingly. “I am just a poor, honest newspaperman, serving the interests of truth, like poor, honest newspapermen everywhere.”
    “What’s it going to be like?”
    Despière shrugged. “I’m not going to cover him with roses, if that’s what you mean. He hasn’t made a decent picture in ten years, you know, even though he still behaves as though he’s the man who invented the motion-picture camera. Let me ask you something. Was he always like that?”
    “Always like what?” Jack asked, purposely not understanding.
    “You know what I mean. Lordly, impatient of the small, mean minds he’s forced to work with, gluttonous for flattery, deaf to criticism, turning out crap and thinking it’s great, not giving credit to anyone else for anything, jealous of anybody else’s work, splurging other people’s dough like Nero with his violin, grabbing other people’s women as though he had a license from the Irish National Stud to screw every pretty dame in