Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw

three dreamlike months. He didn’t tell Gail McKinnon about Anne or Brenner or the three months or the death of friendship or the secret undermining of love.
    What had happened to all the home movies they had taken that summer? He had no idea where the spools of aging, brittle film might be. Somewhere among the old theatre programs, old magazines, broken tennis racquets in the cellar of the house of Seventy-eighth Street he had bought so as to have room for the arrival of Anne, the house he had not visited since he had told Penelope he wanted a divorce, the house he would be able to walk through unerringly in total darkness until the day he died.
    He stepped on the accelerator, and the villa disappeared beyond a bend of the road. Lesson—Stay away from the places where you have been happy.
    The girl was silent for a moment. When she spoke, it was as though she knew exactly what he had been thinking of. “Murphy says your wife is a very beautiful woman.”
    “Was,” Craig said. “Is, perhaps. Yes.”
    “Is it a friendly divorce?”
    “As divorces go.”
    “The divorce in my family was silent and polite,” Gail McKinnon said. “Obscene. My mother just wandered away. When I was sixteen. She had wandered away before. Only this time she didn’t come back. When I was eighteen, I asked my father why. He said, ‘She is searching for something. And it isn’t me.’” The girl sighed. “She sends me a card at Christmas. From various parts of the world. I must look her up some day.”
    She was momentarily silent, leaning back now against the seat. Then she said, “Mr. Murphy’s not what you expect a Hollywood agent to be like, is he?”
    “You mean he’s not small and fat and Jewish, with a funny way of talking?”
    The girl laughed. “I’m glad to see you read me so carefully. Did you read what I left for you this morning?”
    “Yes.”
    “Any comments?”
    “No.”
    Again, she was quiet for a little while. “He’s an intelligent man, Mr. Murphy,” she said. “Before you came, he told me if your last picture were to come out today, it would be a hit. It was before its time, he said.”
    Craig paid attention to his driving, slowed down to avoid a family group in bathing suits crossing the road.
    “I agreed with him,” the girl said. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been a hit, at least in Mr. Murphy’s terms, but people would’ve recognized how original it was.”
    “You saw it?” Craig couldn’t help sounding surprised.
    “Yes. Mr. Murphy said the big mistake you made was not becoming a director. He says it’s a director’s business now.”
    “Maybe he’s right.”
    “Mr. Murphy said it would have been easy any time until 1965 to get you a picture to direct …”
    “That’s probably true.”
    “Weren’t you tempted?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Laziness, maybe.”
    “You know that’s not true.” The girl sounded aggrieved at his evasiveness.
    “Well, if you must know,” Craig said, “I felt I didn’t have the talent for it. At best, I would have just been pretty good. There would have been fifty better men than I at the job.”
    “Weren’t there fifty better men working as producers?” Now her tone was challenging.
    “Maybe five,” he said. “And maybe if I was lucky, they would die off or go on the booze or lose their touch.”
    “If you had it to do all over again,” the girl said, “would you do something else?”
    “Nobody has it to do all over again,” Craig said. “Now enjoy the scenery, please.”
    “Well, anyway,” the girl said placidly, “it was a nice lunch.”
    After that, she asked no more questions, and they drove in silence along the sea and through the town of Antibes, sleepy in the sun, and on the busy highway back to Cannes.
    He offered to drive her to her hotel, but she said it wasn’t necessary, it was only two minutes from the Carlton, and she enjoyed walking.
    There was a parking place open in front of the Carlton between a Jaguar and an Alfa. He