The Young Lions (17 page)

"New York City," he said hoarsely, "must be quite frightening to a girl from the country."

"No," she said, "it isn't."

"The truth is," he went on, desperately, "that it is highly overrated. It puts on a big act of being sophisticated and cosmopolitan, but at heart it's unalterably provincial." He smiled, delighted with the "unalterably".

"I don't think so," the girl said.

"What?"

"I don't think it's provincial. Anyway, not after Vermont."

"Oh…" He laughed patronizingly. "Vermont."

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"Chicago," he said. "Los Angeles, San Francisco… All over." He waved vaguely, with a debonair intimation that these were merely the first names that came to mind and that if he had gone through the whole list, Paris, Budapest and Vienna would certainly have been on it.

"I must say, though," he went on, "that New York has beautiful women. A little flashy, but very attractive." Here, he thought with satisfaction, looking at her anxiously, here we have struck the right note. "American women, of course," he said, "are best when they're young. After that…" Once more he tried a shrug and once more he achieved it. "For myself," he said, "I prefer the slightly older Continental type. They are at their best when American women are bridge-playing harpies with spread behinds." He glanced at her a little nervously. But the girl's expression hadn't changed. She had broken off a twig from a bush and was absently running it along the stone fence, as though she were pondering what he had just said. "And by that time, too, a Continental woman has learned how to handle men…" He thought back hurriedly about the foreign women he had known. There was that drunk in the bar the night his father died. It was quite possible that she was Polish. Poland was not a terribly romantic place, but it was on the Continent all right.

"How does a Continental woman learn how to handle men?" the girl asked.

"She learns how to submit," he said. "The women I know say I have a feudal attitude…" Oh, friend, friend at the piano, forgive me for this theft tonight, I will make it up some other time…

After that it flowed freely. "Art," he said. "Art? I can't stand the modern notion that art is mysterious and the artist an irresponsible child."

"Marriage?" he said. "Marriage? Marriage is a desperate admission on the part of the human race that men and women do not know how to live in the same world with each other."

"The theatre," he said, "the American theatre? It has a certain lively, childish quality, but as for taking it seriously as an art form in the twentieth century…" He laughed loftily. "Give me Disney."

After a while they discovered they had walked thirty-four blocks along the dark, sliding river and that it had begun to rain again and that it was late. Standing close to the girl, cupping a match to keep out the wind so that they could see what time it was on his wrist watch, with the small fragrance of the girl's hair mingling with the smell of the river in his nostrils. Noah suddenly decided to be silent. This was too painful, this wild flood of nonsensical talk, this performance of the jaundiced young blood, dilettante and connoisseur.

"It's late," he said abruptly, "we'd better go back to the party."

But he couldn't resist the gesture of hailing a taxi that was cruising slowly past them. It was the first time he had taken a taxi in New York and he stumbled over the little let-down seats, but he felt elegant and master of himself and social life as he sat far away from the girl on the back seat. She sat quietly in the corner. Noah sensed that he had made a strong impression on her and he gave the driver a quarter tip although the entire fare had only been sixty cents.

Once more they stood at the closed door of the house in which he lived. They looked up. The lights were out and no sound of conversation, music or laughter came from behind the closed windows.

"It's over," he said, his heart sinking with the realization that Roger would now be certain he had stolen his girl. "Nobody's there."

"It looks that way, doesn't it?" the girl said placidly.

"What'll we do?" Noah felt trapped.

"I guess you'll have to take me home," the girl said.

Brooklyn, Noah thought, heavily. Hours there and hours back, and Roger waiting accusingly in the dawn light in the disordered room where the party had been so merry, waiting with the curt, betrayed, final dismissal on his lips. The night had started out so wonderfully, so hopefully. He remembered the moment when he had been alone in the apartment waiting for the guests, before Roger had arrived. He remembered the warm expectancy with which he had inspected the shabby, shelf-lined room that had seemed at that moment so friendly and promising.

"Can't you go home alone?" he asked bleakly. He hated her standing there, pretty, a little drab, with the rain wilting on her hair and her clothes.

"Don't you dare talk like that," she said. Her voice was sharp and commanding. "I'm not going home alone. Come on."

Noah sighed. Now, apart from everything else, the girl was angry with him.

"Don't sigh like that," she said crisply. "Like a hen-pecked husband."

What's happened? Noah thought dazedly. How did I get here? How did this girl get the right to talk to me this way?…

"I'm going," she said, and turned with purpose and started off towards the subway. He watched her for a moment, baffled, then hurried after her.

The trains were dank and smelly with the ghost of the rain that the riders brought in with them from the streets above. There was a taste of iron in the unchanging air, and the bosomy girls who advertised toothpaste and laxatives and brassieres on the garish cards seemed foolish and improbable in the light of the dusty lamps. The other passengers in the cars, returning from unknown labours and unimaginable assignations, swayed on the stained yellow seats.

The girl sat tight-lipped and silent. When they had to change trains at a station she merely stood with unbending disapproval and walked out on to the platform, leaving Noah to shuffle lamely after her.

They had to change again and again, and wait interminably for new connections on the almost deserted platforms, with the water from the rain and leaking mains dripping down the greying tiles and rusted iron of the tunnels. This girl, Noah thought with dull hostility, this girl must live at the end of the city, five hundred yards past the ultimate foot of track, out among the dump heaps and cemeteries. Brooklyn, Brooklyn, how long was Brooklyn, stretched in the sleeping night from the East River to Gravesend Bay, from the oily waters of Greenpoint to the garbage scows of Canarsie. Brooklyn, like Venice, was clasped in the waters of the sea, but its Grand Canal was the Fourth Avenue Local.

How demanding and certain of herself this girl was, thought Noah, glaring at her, to drag a man she had just met so far and so long through the clanging, sorrowful labyrinth of the Borough's mournful underground. His luck, he thought, with a present, murky vision of himself, night after night on these grim platforms, night after night among the late-riding char-ladies and burglars and drunken merchant seamen who made up the subway dawn passenger lists, his luck, with one million women living within a radius of fifty blocks of him, to be committed to a sharp-tempered, unrelenting girl, who made her home at the dreary other end of the largest city known to man. Leander, he thought, swam the Hellespont for another girl; but he did not have to take her home later in the evening, nor did he have to wait twenty-five minutes among the trash baskets and the signs that warned against spitting and smoking on DeKalb Avenue.

Finally, they got off at a station and the girl led him up the steps to the streets above.

"At last," he said, the first words he had spoken in an hour.

"I thought we were down there for the summer season."

The girl stopped at the corner. "Now," she said coldly, "we take the street car."

"Oh, God!" Noah said. Then he began to laugh. His laughter sounded mad and empty across the trolley tracks, among the shabby store fronts and dingy, brown stone walls.

"If you're going to be so unpleasant," the girl said, "you can leave me here."

"I have come this far," Noah said, with literary gravity. "I will go the whole way."

He stopped laughing and stood beside her, silent under the lamp-post, with the raw wind lashing them in rough, wet gusts, the wind that had come across the Atlantic beaches and the polluted harbours, across the million acres of semi-detached houses, across the brick and wood wastes of Flatbush and Bensonhurst, across the sleeping millions of their fellow men, who in their uneasy voyage through life had found no gentler place to lay their heads.

A quarter of an hour later the trolley car rumbled towards them, a clanking eye of light in the distance. There were only three other passengers, dozing unhappily on the wood seats, and Noah sat formally beside the girl, feeling, in the lighted car creaking along the dark streets, like a man on a raft, wrecked with strangers, relics of a poor ship that had foundered on a cold run among northern islands. The girl sat primly, staring straight ahead, her hands crossed in her lap, and Noah felt as though he did not know her at all, as though if he ventured to speak to her she would cry out for a policeman and demand to be protected against him.

"All right," she said, and stood up. Once more he followed her to the door. The car stopped and the door wheezed open. They stepped down to the wet pavement. Noah and the girl walked away from the trolley tracks. Here and there along the mean streets there was a tree, fretted with green in surprising evidence that spring had come to this place this year.

The girl turned into a small concrete yard, under a high stone stoop. There was a barred iron door. She opened the lock with her key and the door swung open.

"There," she said, coldly. "We're home," and turned to face him.

Noah took off his hat. The girl's face bloomed palely out of the darkness. She had taken off her hat, too, and her hair made a wavering line around the ivory gleam of her cheeks and brow. Noah felt like weeping, as though he had lost everything that he had ever held dear, as he stood close to her in the poor shadow of the house in which she lived.

"I… I want to say…" he said, whispering, "that I do not object… I mean I am pleased… pleased, I mean, to have brought you home."

"Thank you," she said. She was whispering, too, but her voice was non-committal.

"Complex," he said. He waved his hands vaguely. "If you only knew how complex. I mean, I'm very pleased, really…"

She was so close, so poor, so young, so frail, deserted, courageous, lonely… He put out his hands in a groping, blind gesture and took her head delicately in his hands and kissed her.

Her lips were soft and firm and a little damp from the mist.

Then she slapped him. The noise echoed meanly under the stone steps. His cheek felt a little numb. How strong she is, he thought dazedly, for such a frail-looking girl.

"What made you think," she said coldly, "that you could kiss me?"

"I… I don't know," he said, putting his hand to his cheek to assuage the smarting, then pulling it away, ashamed of showing that much weakness at a moment like this. "I… I just did."

"You do that with your other girls," Hope said crisply. "Not with me."

"I don't do it with other girls," Noah said unhappily.

"Oh," Hope said. "Only with me. I'm sorry I looked so easy."

"Oh, no," said Noah, mourning within him. "That isn't what I mean." Oh, God, he thought, if only there were some way to explain to her how I feel. Now she thinks I am a lecherous fool on the loose from the corner drug-store, quick to grab any girl who'll let me. He swallowed dryly, the words clotted in his throat.

"Oh," he said, weakly. "I'm so sorry."

"I suppose you think," the girl began cuttingly, "you're so wonderfully attractive, so bright, so superior, that any girl would just fall all over herself to let you paw her…"

"Oh, God." He backed away painfully, and nearly stumbled against the two steps that led down from the cement yard.

"I never in all my days," said the girl, "have come across such an arrogant, opinionated, self-satisfied young man."

"Stop…" Noah groaned. "I can't stand it."

"I'll say good night now," the girl said bitingly. "Mr. Ackerman."

"Oh, no," he whispered. "Not now. You can't."

She moved the iron gate with a tentative, forbidding gesture, and the hinges creaked in his ears.

"Please," he begged, "listen to me…"

"Good night." With a single, swift movement, she was behind the gate. It slammed shut and locked. She did not look back, but opened the wooden door to the house and went through it. Noah stared stupidly at the two dark doors, the iron and the wood, then slowly turned, and brokenly started down the street.

He had gone thirty yards, holding his hat absently in his hand, not noticing that the rain had begun again and a fine drizzle was soaking his hair, when he stopped. He looked around him uneasily, then turned and went back towards the girl's house. There was a light on there now, behind the barred window on the street level, and even through the drawn blinds he could see a shadow moving about within.

He walked up to the window, took a deep breath and tapped at it. After a moment, the blind was drawn aside and he could see Hope's face peering out. He put his face as close to the window as he could and made vague, senseless gestures to indicate that he wanted to talk to her. She shook her head irritably and waved to him to go away, but he said, quite loudly, with his lips close to the window, "Open the door. I've got to talk to you. I'm lost. Lost. LOST!"

He saw her peering at him doubtfully through the rain-streaked glass. Then she grinned and disappeared. A moment later he heard the inside door being opened, and then she was at the gate. Involuntarily, he sighed.