Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [30]
Lang felt depressed. He did not understand what they had been doing, the exaggerations dismayed him, he didn’t believe in Iles, his energies, his insight, he didn’t believe in any of it. He tried to calm himself. He saw them at the biggest table, the producer at Anna’s elbow. They were talking, why was she so animated? They always come alive when the lights are on, someone said.
He watched Guivi. He could see Anna leaning across to him, her long hair, her throat.
“It’s stupid to be making it in color,” Lang said to the man beside him.
“What?” He was a film company executive. He had a face like a fish, a bass, that had gone bad. “What do you mean, not in color?”
“Black and white,” Lang told him.
“What are you talking about? You can’t sell a black and white film. Life is in color.”
“Life?”
“Color is real,” the man said. He was from New York. The ten greatest films of all time, the twenty greatest, were in color, he said.
“What about …” Lang tried to concentrate, his elbow slipped, “The Bicycle Thief?”
“I’m talking about modern films.”
II.
Today was sunny. He was writing in brief, disconsolate phrases. Yesterday it rained, it was dark until late afternoon, the day before was the same. The corridors of the Inghilterra were vaulted like a convent, the doors set deep in the walls. Still, he thought, it was comfortable. He gave his shirts to the maid in the morning, they were back the next day. She did them at home. He had seen her bending over to take linen from a cabinet. The tops of her stockings showed—it was classic Buñuel—the mysterious white of a leg.
The girl from publicity called. They needed information for his biography.
“What information?”
“We’ll send a car for you,” she said.
It never came. He went the next day by taxi and waited thirty minutes in her office, she was in seeing the producer. Finally she returned, a thin girl with damp spots under the arms of her dress.
“You called me?” Lang said.
She did not know who he was.
“You were going to send a car for me.”
“Mr. Lang,” she suddenly cried. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
The desk was covered with photos, the chairs with newspapers and magazines. She was an assistant, she had worked on Cleopatra, The Bible, The Longest Day. There was money to be earned in American films.
“They’ve put me in this little room,” she apologized.
Her name was Eva. She lived at home. Her family ate without speaking, four of them in the sadness of bourgeois surroundings, the radio which didn’t work, thin rugs on the floor. When he was finished, her father cleared his throat. The meat was better the last time, he said. The last time? her mother asked.
“Yes, it was better,” he said.
“The last time it was tasteless.”
“Ah, well, two times ago,” he said.
They fell into silence again. There was only the sound of forks, an occasional glass. Suddenly her brother rose from the table and left the room. No one looked up.
He was crazy, this brother, well, perhaps not crazy but enough to make them weep. He would remain for days in his room, the door locked. He was a writer. There was one difficulty, everything worthwhile had already been written. He had gone through a period when he devoured books, three and four a day, and could quote vast sections of them afterward, but the fever had passed. He lay on his bed now and looked at the ceiling.
Eva was nervous, people said. Of course, she was nervous. She was thirty. She had black hair, small teeth, and a life in which she had already given up hope. They had nothing for his biography, she told Lang. They had to have a biography