Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw

that he had been that good. After that he had been as good again only in the two other pictures he had made with Delaney, and his memory of himself from that time was overlaid with recollections of worse performances under other directors. This was Delaney’s best picture, too, made when he was in his prime, confident of his luck and savagely scornful of everything in the world but his own talent, before he had begun to repeat himself, before the many wives, before the big money and the interviews and the troubles with the income tax.
    When the climax of the picture came, the scene at night at the railroad station, shadowy and deserted in a lonely drizzle, when the boy appeared out of the murk to wait with the woman he had loved for the train which was to take her away and out of his life, Jack forgot that he was in a foreign city, five thousand miles and more than twenty years away from the buried innocent America of small-town railroad stations, of distant whistles across plowed farm lands, of lighted diner windows, Negro baggage handlers, old taxis waiting, dripping in the rain, with their drivers’ smoking cigarettes in the darkness and speaking in flat, desultory, unlovely voices of baseball scores and women and hard times.
    Caught in the sorrow of the fictional moment on the screen, watching the scratched old print, listening to the uneven sound track as the two lovers walked slowly down the platform, appearing and reappearing in the dim patches of light of the spaced station lamps, hearing the half-sentences of heartbreak and farewell, he was no longer conscious that it was himself he was watching, doing an actor’s job, no longer conscious that it was a woman he had lived with and who had been false to him who walked brokenly, for a last, despairing two minutes, beside the boyish shadow on the screen. For that moment, he was that age again, and he knew what it was like to be young and bereft in a place like that. And he felt, all over again, with all its old trouble, the powerful and endless desire for the body of the woman whose image, full and youthful and untouched by time, appeared and reappeared under the station lamps, the desire that he had thought had vanished forever in betrayal and recriminations and divorce courts.
    When the lights came up, he sat silently for a moment. Then he shook his head, to clear away the past. He turned to Delaney, who was slumped in his seat, his hand up to the earpiece of his glasses, looking tough and bitter, like an old catcher who had just lost a close game.
    “Maurice,” he said gently, loving him, and meaning what he said, “you’re a great man.”
    Delaney sat without stirring, almost as if he hadn’t heard Jack. He took off the heavy, thick-rimmed glasses and stared down at them, symbol of pride outraged, vanity at bay, of vision clouded and distorted by age.
    “I was a great man,” he said harshly. “Let’s get out of here.”
    Despière was waiting on the sidewalk outside the theatre. When he saw Jack and Delaney coming out with the last stragglers from the audience, he hurried over to them, beaming. “I saw it, Maestro,” he said. “Jolissimo. The tears still flow from my eyes.” He threw his arms around Delaney and kissed him on both cheeks. Sometimes it amused Despière to behave like a Frenchman on the stage. Two or three of the people who had been in the theatre stared curiously at the three men, and Jack heard a girl say, “I bet it’s him,” and knew, as usual, that he had been half recognized. “You must tell me just how it felt to be sitting there,” Despière was saying, “after all this time, watching reel after marvelous reel pass by.”
    “I won’t tell you a godamn thing,” Delaney said, pulling away. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to eat. I’m hungry.” He peered out into the street, looking for the car and the driver.
    “Delaney,” said Despière, “you must learn to be more charming to your admirers among the