A Tragic Honesty (19 page)

It didn't take long. Within a week Yates had done his part by getting in touch with Stephen Benedict, who was then living in Paris. They needed an affordable two- or three-room apartment, Yates wrote, and hoped Benedict could help them “steer clear of the conventional Cook's-Tour-filthy-postcard set.” Benedict replied that a friend's place would fall vacant within a month or so, and in the meantime they could live cheaply in one of the pensions. For the sake of economy, though, he advised them to settle in the provinces eventually, and Yates assured him they'd probably head south for the winter: “Our only plans are that we want to stay in Europe indefinitely and I want to do an awful lot of writing.”

They sailed on April 14 aboard the
United States,
where a “cramped farewell party” was held in their tourist-class cabin. While Sheila changed the baby's diapers on the upper berth, a dapper-hatted Dookie sat below and regaled the guests (the Cains and Bialeks, plus friends from Botany Mills and Remington Rand) with odd bits of esoterica about the National Association of Women Artists. As she went on talking and drinking, her knees sagged apart until her underpants showed (“an old failing”)—but such ghastliness would soon be in the past, and Yates could afford to feel magnanimous: “I had luck, time, opportunity, a young girl for a wife, and a child of my own.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Getaway: 1951-1953

They arrived in Paris on April 20 and checked into a cheap hotel called the Atlantic. Yates went to the U.S. Embassy and arranged for medical care, which consisted of the usual weekly injections of air to maintain a partial collapse of both lungs. Meanwhile they waited for Benedict's friend to clear out of his apartment on the Rue du Bac in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and Yates took Sheila and the baby on long strolls around the Left Bank—where as a young GI he'd “walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves.” Five years later the secret was safe as ever, though they did find a café they liked, the Deux Magots, where at least they could be among a fair number of people who spoke English.

Yates was determined to “[grind] out short stories at the rate of about one a month,” and as soon as they were settled he got down to work. While he spent his days writing, smoking, and coughing, Sheila was obliged to find ways of keeping herself and the baby out of the apartment as much as possible—a pleasant-enough occupation, most of the time: She did the marketing, went to museums, shopped, explored, and consoled herself that at least it wasn't New York. But there were bad days when she felt at loose ends, anonymous—“that awful feeling of not quite being there when people look at you,” she later described it—and the baby served as a constant reminder (if a winsome one) that she'd committed herself to a man, a life, that didn't seem right no matter what the scenery.

She was free to do as she liked at night, when it was her husband's turn to look after “the Meat,” and before long she was recruited to act in a “dreadful” play. So negligible was this enterprise that Sheila hardly remembers the rather famous man who wrote and directed (novelist Meyer Levin, who later won acclaim as the author of
Compulsion
),
*
and has quite forgotten such matters as title, plot, character, or even how she got involved in the first place (she suspects she was hired with a group of other American and Swedish expatriates who were spotted at certain cafés). It was something to do. The evening rehearsals went on for a longish while, and finally on opening night there was a fairly large audience—then a bit fewer the next night, and hardly anybody after that. The play closed in less than a week. Yates attended one of the more uncrowded performances and seemed rather bemused by the badness of it all.

Sheila's steadiest companion was a former prostitute named Chantal, who was kept as a mistress by one of Yates's Avon acquaintances, a dull rich person whom everyone avoided as much as possible, and whose name is lost to posterity. Neither Chantal nor Sheila spoke the other's language, though they were compatible in other ways and managed to communicate quite effectively after a fashion. Once the play was over and Sheila again found herself with too much time to think, Chantal enticed her to explore some of the more raffish aspects of Paris—particularly the
bals musettes
where poor people went to amuse themselves on weekends, and where Sheila occasionally found herself in “sticky situations” with tough-looking laborers who wanted more than a dance. But Chantal knew how to handle such fellows, and in general their nights made for an exhilarating change.

As for Yates, he felt tired and ill at the end of the day, and apart from the odd drink at the Deux Magots he wasn't up to doing much or asking questions about whatever his wife was doing. He was happy to stay home with the Meat and consider his progress as a writer, and at least in this respect he must have felt gratified. Two stories he wrote in Paris, “A Last Fling, Like,” and “The Canal,” give a sense of his range and growth at this time.

The first is little more than a well-done pastiche of the Lardneresque monologue wherein a stock vulgarian reveals herself as such in some unwitting way. The “fling” in question is a trip to Europe the narrator takes prior to going ahead with her marriage to some nonentity named Marty. As she tells it to a girlfriend, she spent the vacation flirting with a number of lackluster men (evoked with Salingerian pathos: “[He] looked a little bit like Richard Widmark, but he was sort of on the plump side and his hands were always wet”) and having random misadventures, until she feels nothing but relief to be back in her familiar office-girl routine. Europe, in short, is a bust, though it does afford her a delicious chance to put Marty in his place when he protests that
he
wouldn't have gone gadding off to Europe before their wedding; as the narrator gleefully reports her riposte to the girlfriend: “‘Listen, brother, don't kid yourself.' I says, ‘You'd do it quick enough, if you had the money.'”

With “The Canal” Yates began to find his own voice, as well as a vision to go with it—indeed, the story is such an advance over “Fling” that one can hardly believe they were written within months of each other. That “Canal” is a far more personal story may explain its relative success, up to a point: That is, such an exercise served to steer Yates away from secondhand characters and situations, though it would be a long time before he got over the worst of his squeamishness toward what he feared was subjective, “unformed” work. Perhaps he was also uncomfortable casting such a cold eye on, say, his marriage and the sustaining illusions thereof—as when Lew Miller, in the frame-story of “Canal,” imagines how his wife perceives him at an awful party where he waxes reticent while a more prosperous man boasts about the war:

Miller realized uneasily that for Betty there was a special kind of women's-magazine romanticism in having a husband who never talked about the war—a faintly tragic, sensitive husband, perhaps, or at any rate a charmingly modest one—so that it really didn't matter if Nancy Brace's husband
was
more handsome, more solid in his Brooks Brothers suit and, once, more dashing in his trim lieutenant's uniform.

But the wife's “women's-magazine romanticism” is not so pronounced that she's immune to exasperation with her “modest” husband's dull refusal to discuss his own wartime heroics: “Darling,” she says after the party, “
why
do you let an ass like that eclipse you so in a conversation?” The answer, of course, is that Lew Miller is deeply ashamed of his relative failure as a soldier—a secret he's kept from his wife—and while he'd rather not admit as much, he refuses to tell self-aggrandizing lies about it either. Thus, while Miller's final outburst at his wife (“‘Will you shut up? Will you please for God's sake shut up?'”) is somewhat derived from similar moments in famous stories by Salinger and Hemingway,
*
it also faithfully represents the reality of Yates's life with Sheila, in a way that probably made both uneasy. He would have to find a way to distance himself from such material.

*   *   *

In October they moved to Juan-les-Pins, near Cap d'Antibes and Cannes on the Riviera—where the Fitzgeralds had frolicked with the Murphys and Hemingways, with Isadora Duncan and Picasso and Dorothy Parker (later a fan of Richard Yates); the very place where Scott had written much of
Gatsby,
and the place he evoked so elegiacally in
Tender Is the Night
.

It was a different story for Yates. By the time he arrived,
le beau monde
was long gone, and their shabby apartment at La Monada was a far cry from Gausse's Hotel in
Tender
. Nor were there any wacky waterskiing antics behind whooshing hydroplanes, or swimming in a “choppy little four-beat crawl,” or lounging on a raft where laughing expats sat clinking martini glasses. There was none of that: Yates was too sick to swim and didn't like the outdoors anyway. He couldn't even do the few things he'd enjoyed in Paris—walking around city streets, talking to English-speaking people in cafés—since they were almost two miles from town, and he was damned if he'd ride a girl's bicycle (with a child seat fixed to the back) to get there, even if he had the stamina to do so, which he didn't.

Instead of becoming some lesser, latter-day version of Scott and Zelda, Rich and Sheila reverted to a pair of homely alter egos they dubbed “Pinner and Shirley”: Pinner was a clinging, doe-eyed invalid who resented his wife's unabashed enjoyment of the beach, the countryside, the long bike rides into town with the baby in tow for a pleasant day's marketing; Shirley was the caustic scold who tended to return from these outings wondering why on earth a man on death's door should keep smoking like a chimney and leaving ashes all over the place and couldn't he at least go for a
walk
now and then and get a little fresh air? And Shirley it was who put her foot down, finally, refusing to fetch her husband's cigarettes from Cannes anymore, no matter how pathetically he begged or threatened in her pedaling wake (“[Pinner's] old broken espadrilles slapping the dust,” as he recalled the scene). What made matters worse was that Sheila herself liked to have the odd smoke after dinner, and went right on having it (“
I
wasn't going to quit! There wasn't anything wrong with
me
!”) while her husband sat glowering but quiet because of the baby. Later he'd root her butts out of the trash and smoke them down to the last spark, but resented having to do so. “This was the principal source of friction,” Sheila recalled, with marvelous understatement.

Thankfully Yates had better luck with his art. Sheila's brother Charlie had sent a copy of Yates's latest story, “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” to an old show-business friend of the family, the agent Monica McCall, and on January 15, 1952, she replied:“Yates is without question a writer. There is an old cliché: ‘The ink is in the hair,' and he definitely has it.” And with that Yates made the single most important contact of his career, a woman whose support—professional, moral, and otherwise—would never flag, no matter how rocky the road became.

Monica McCall was one of five sisters born of Scottish parents in Leicester. Often described as “a perfect English lady,” sweet and devoted to her clients, she was also tough as nails and never to be trifled with. A grande dame who resembled “a pretty version of Margaret Rutherford” (as her protégé Mitch Douglas put it), McCall inherited the same quirky, determined nature that had spurred one of her sisters to leap off London's Waterloo Bridge after a failed love affair and another to become a nun who vanished at a tender age into a vow of silence. But Monica was nothing if not worldly, and her career is the stuff of legend in the publishing world. She was born in 1899 but refused to reveal that fact to anybody, not even to company insurance representatives, choosing rather to do without coverage. And when she and her longtime partner, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, were arrested with a crowd for lying down in the Senate visitors gallery to protest the Vietnam War, McCall insisted the police take her to jail along with everybody else, no matter what her age. On the other hand, she wasn't averse to acting enfeebled if it fit her purpose, as when she'd commandeer wheelchairs at airports, the better to sail through the crowd to her flight. She brought the same wily righteousness to her professional conduct—an elusive quality indistinguishable from tenderness with regard to her clients' interests. When
Esquire
wanted to put her at the “Red-Hot Center” of its “Literary Universe,” she declined, as she thought it beneath the dignity of herself and her authors. It was this sort of integrity that commanded Yates's respect and even love, such that he named his second daughter after her, a gesture McCall never forgot. She often inquired after her namesake, and once sent the child an antique brooch with “Monica” engraved on it.

Her curious mixture of warmth and savvy was evident from the start of their relationship. Two weeks after she remarked to Charlie Bryant that his brother-in-law had ink in his hair, she wrote to Yates directly and asked if she might “please call [him] Dick”: “Since I have known your fine Sheila since she was two years old, I don't believe I can address you as ‘Mr. Yates'!” That said, she then deflated the jubilant Dick by making it clear she hadn't, in fact, told Charlie that she was willing to handle him solely on the basis of “A Really Good Jazz Piano”—though in fact she
had
: “I'm delighted to read any other stories that you care, or he cares to send in,” she'd written Charlie in that first letter, “and furthermore to represent him.” (She later apologized for the error when Yates pointed it out to her.) She was, however, “very interested” to read more of his work, and would then decide whether or not to take him on as a client.