Read Online Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw - Free Book Online

cities. New York. I could live happily in New York, too. Although I think any American who manages to live there must end up with a crippled soul. What we need,” he declaimed with a wide sweep of his hand, “is an interchange of cities. A city should be regarded as a university—open to qualified and serious students, to be lived in for four or five years for the knowledge to be gained from it—and then to be left for other places—and to be revisited from time to time for brushing up on certain subjects and for sentimental reunion. In Paris,” he said, grinning, “I brush up on comedy and intrigue and camouflage and despair. In Rome on wine and love and architecture and atheism. When I am an old man, I intend to settle on a farm near Frascati, drinking the white wine, and each time I feel the approach of death, come into the city and have a coffee on the Piazza del Popolo…” He stopped and looked across, puzzled, at Jack. “What’s the matter, Dottore?”
    Jack was sitting with his head bent over his plate, his handkerchief up to his nose. He was rocking a little on his chair and the handkerchief was slowly turning red. “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He stood up, blinking his eyes because he couldn’t see very well. He tried to smile. “Sorry. I think I’d better go home.”
    Despière jumped up. “I’ll go with you,” he said.
    Jack waved him back. “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” he said. He started out of the restaurant, gagging, trying not to throw up, walking uncertainly, feeling the sweat come out on his face, not answering the headwaiter when the headwaiter said something to him on the way to the door. Outside, he leaned against the building, breathing deeply of the night air, tasting blood.
    I’m never sick, he thought, with an edge of panic, I’m never sick, what’s happening? He had an ominous feeling of change, of crossing over from one season to another, of a cold current suddenly flowing through him, of being exposed and vulnerable to accident. Standing there shakily, feeling the blood wet on his lips, his head tilted back against the cold stone, he had a dreamlike sense of events, words, people being translated into numbers and being put down in a long row of figures and the figures being added up mysteriously, endlessly, by an invisible, noiseless, unstoppable machine. If only I were drunk, he thought, I’d know I’d get over this in the morning. But he had only had half a glass of thin wine. Not velvet, he thought. Chaos begins at the top. Where is the man who hit me? “Arrivederci, Roma,” he heard the man’s voice singing, drunken and mocking. When the Doria went down.
    He shook his head and the bleeding stopped, as suddenly as it had begun. Now he felt the cold night air reviving him. He wasn’t dizzy or nauseated any more, just weary and hazily apprehensive, and he had to open his eyes very wide and take deep, conscious breaths to reassure himself that he was not on a station platform on a wet night, saying good-bye.
    He started walking back toward the hotel, pacing slowly, forcing himself to think about taking one step after another and making serious decisions about such things as curbstones and keeping from being run over and whether or not to buy a newspaper at the lighted kiosk on the street corner.
    He heard high heels coming up behind him and a woman passed him on the sidewalk and he saw that it was the German whore from the bar. Hamburg, he remembered, and the large reddened hands. Lewdly, he reflected on the nature of the business the red hands had been involved in that night. The woman was wearing red shoes. She was walking fast and she gave the impression of being angry, as though the night had disappointed her. Another number in the addition.
    He went into his hotel. From the bar downstairs came the sound of a radio playing a song he had never heard before. Upstairs, the corridors of the hotel were long and silent and dimly lit and the travelers’ shoes