Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw

tirade. It was not the first time she had yelled at him. It would not be the last. From now on he would call her when he promised if it took hanging on the phone all day.
    He went down to the terrace, had his photograph taken with a lion cub, wrote on it, “I have found a mate for you,” and put it in an envelope and mailed it to her. Express.
    It was time for his lunch with the Murphys, and he went out under the porte-cochère and asked for his car. The doorman was occupied with a peeling bald man in a Bentley and ignored Craig. The parking space in front of the hotel was crowded, with the best places reserved for the Ferraris, the Maseratis, and the Rolls-Royces. Craig’s rented Simca was shunted around by the doorman to spots less exposed to public view, and sometimes, when the spate of expensive hardware was intense, Craig would find his car parked a block away on a side street. There had been a time in his life when he had gone in for Alfas and Lancias, but he had given all that up many years ago, and now, as long as a car carried him where he wanted to go, he was satisfied. But today, when the doorman finally told him that his car was parked behind the hotel and he trudged on the hunt for it past the tennis courts toward the corner where the whores loitered in the afternoon, he felt vaguely humiliated. It was as though the employees of the hotel had a subtle knowledge of him, that they were letting him know, in their scornful treatment of his humble rented car, that they did not believe he really belonged in the palace whose walls they guarded.
    They will be surprised at the size of their tip when the time comes, he thought grimly as he turned the key in the ignition and started toward the Cap d’Antibes and his luncheon date with Bryan Murphy.

M R. and Mrs. Murphy were down at their cabana, the concierge told him, and were expecting him.
    He walked through the fragrant piney park toward the sea, the only sound that of his own footsteps on the shaded path and the crackle of cicadas among the trees.
    He stopped before he reached Murphy’s cabana. The Murphys were not alone. Seated in the small patio in front of the cabana was a young woman. She wore a scanty pink bathing suit, and her long hair hung straight down her back, glistening in the sunlight. When she half-turned, he recognized the dark glasses.
    Murphy, in flowered swimming trunks, was talking to her. Lying on a deck chair was Sonia Murphy.
    Craig was about to go back to the hotel to call Murphy on the telephone and tell him to come up because he didn’t like the company at the cabana when Murphy spotted him. “Hey, Jess,” Murphy called, standing up. “We’re over here.”
    Gail McKinnon did not turn around. She stood up, though, when he approached.
    “Hi, Murph,” he said, and went over and shook Murphy’s hand.
    “My boy,” Murphy said.
    Craig leaned over and kissed Sonia Murphy’s cheek. She was fifty but looked about thirty-five, with a trim figure and a gentle, unlined, non-Hollywood face. She was covered with a beach towel and was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep from being sunburned. “It’s been too long, Jesse,” she said.
    “It certainly has,” Craig said.
    “This young lady,” Murphy said, gesturing toward Gail McKinnon, “tells me she knows you.”
    “We’ve met,” Craig said. “Hello, Miss McKinnon.”
    “Hello.” The girl took off her glasses. The gesture was deliberate, like the lowering of a disguise at a masquerade ball. Her eyes were wide, jewel-blue, but somehow evasive and uncertain, prepared for pain. Face grave and open, body not quite ripe, flesh satiny, she could have been sixteen, seventeen. He had a peculiar feeling that the rays of the sun were concentrated on her, a downfall of light, that he was looking at her from a distance, himself shadowed by a cloud with a dark promise of rain. She was perfect for the moment, poised quietly against the sea, the dazzle of the reflections from the water