Young Hearts Crying (11 page)

“Nelson?” Brock inquired. “Oh, yeah, the hotshot water-color guy. Well, fine, that oughta be nice; a party’s a party.”

When Tom Nelson greeted them at his bright front door he was wearing the field jacket of an airborne infantryman.

“Where’d you get the paratrooper’s jacket?” Michael asked him as soon as the introductions were over.

“Bought it off a guy, is all. Nice, huh? I like it because of the pockets.”

And Michael was nettled: the tanker’s jacket of Larchmont had been “bought off a guy,” too. What the hell was Nelson
trying to do – be a different kind of war veteran every time he moved to a new town?

The Nelsons’ big living room was swarming with people, and so was the studio beyond it. There were a few lovely girls among the women, almost as if a movie director had organized the scene, and the men ranged from youth to hearty middle age, some of them with beards. There were three or four Negroes who looked like jazz musicians, and the crisp recorded sounds of Lester Young seemed to lace all the disparate talk and laughter of the room into wave on wave of pleasurable discourse. At first sight, and even on closer inspection, there was nobody there who didn’t seem to be having a good time.

This was Arnold Spencer, a professor of art history at Princeton.

This was Joel Kaplan, a jazz critic for
Newsweek
and
The Nation.

This was Jack Bernstein, a sculptor whose new show had just opened at the Downtown Gallery.

And this was Marjorie Grant, a poet, who said at once that she’d been “dying” to meet Michael because she’d “loved” his book.

“Well, that’s very nice,” he told her. “Thank you.”

“I’m crazy about your lines,” Marjorie Grant said. “One or two of the poems themselves didn’t strike me as wholly successful, but I love your lines.” And she recited one of them, to prove she had memorized it. She was about Michael’s age and pretty in an old-fashioned way: she wore a heavy shawl drawn close around her upper arms and torso, and her blond hair was fixed in a thick, tight braid that circled her head like a crown. If you could get the shawl off her and take the hair apart, she might be great. But a tall, strong-looking man named Rex hovered close beside her, smiling patiently while she had her little
exchange with Michael, and it was clear that Rex was the only man in the world, for the present, who knew what she was like without the shawl and the braid.

“Well,” Michael said, “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your work, but that’s only because I don’t keep up nearly as much as I—”

“Oh, no,” Marjorie Grant answered him. “I’ve only had one book and it’s just a little Wesleyan University Press sort of thing.”

“Well, but Wesleyan’s one of the finest—”

“Yes, I know people say that, but in my case it doesn’t really apply. One reviewer called it ‘kittenish,’ and after I stopped crying I began to see what he meant. I’m working on some much better stuff now, though, so I hope you’ll—”

“Oh, I certainly will,” Michael told her. “And I’ll get the first book, too, whether you like it or not.”

“Marjorie?” Rex inquired. “Want to move on into the studio and look at some of Tom’s new things?”

When they’d gone Michael felt a happy glow from her praise – the line she’d quoted had never seemed especially good before – though he wished he could have found a way to ask which of the poems hadn’t struck her as wholly successful.

And after another drink or two, watching Tom Nelson move courteously among his guests, he decided he didn’t really mind the paratrooper’s jacket. Most of these people must surely know that Nelson hadn’t been an airborne soldier; and what if they didn’t? The war had been over for eleven or twelve years; wasn’t it about time for people to wear whatever they felt like? Wasn’t it essentially dumb and “square” to think otherwise? And maybe, in all innocence, Nelson did like it because of the pockets. What would be the matter with that?

“Know something?” Lucy asked, drifting up to his side an
hour or so later. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many intelligent-looking people in one place in my whole life.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“Well,” she amended, “with the exception of those two over there near the wall. They’re awful – I can’t imagine where the Nelsons ever dug them up, or why, but I’m glad Bill Brock is stuck with them now: they deserve each other.” One was a sturdy young man whose dark hair kept falling almost into his eyes as he talked; the other was a plain girl in a cheap dress that looked uncomfortable and moist at the armpits. Both their faces were so earnest and humorless, so charged with the effort of making their conversational points clear at all cost, that they didn’t seem to belong in this gathering. “Their name’s Damon,” Lucy said. “He’s a linotype operator in Pleasantville and says he’s writing ‘a work of social history’; she writes what she calls potboilers to help support their family. They’re some kind of communists, I think, and I mean I guess they’re nice enough, but they’re
awful.”
And she turned away from the sight of them. “You want to go into the studio?”

“Not just yet,” Michael told her. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

“…  in a cardboard
box
,” Bill Brock’s loud voice was explaining to the Damons, while Karen clung to his arm as if for protection, “with a
string
around it. And that represents six and a half years’ work. So you see I can agree with everything you say, Al, and with everything you’re
likely
to say – but in political terms only. That kind of material simply doesn’t lend itself to the novel form. Probably never has, probably never will.”

“Ah,” said Al Damon, raking his hair back from his brow with nervous fingers. “Well, I’m not going to charge you with ‘selling out,’ my friend, but I’ll suggest that you’re chasing after false gods. I’ll suggest that you’re still hooked on the ‘lost generation’
crowd of thirty years ago, and the trouble is we no longer have anything in common with those people. We’re the
second
lost generation.”

And because Michael Davenport thought he had never heard anything quite as foolish as a full-grown man saying “We’re the second lost generation,” he moved over close beside Bill in order to meet the Damons.

“…  and I understand you run a linotype machine, right, Al?” he inquired. “In Pleasantville?”

“Well, that’s what I do for a living, yes,” Al Damon said.

“Makes sense,” Michael assured him. “Learn the trade, get the union wages and the fringe benefits; probably makes a lot better sense than what Bill and I do.”

And Bill Brock agreed that it probably did.

“And you look to be in pretty good shape, too, Al,” Michael said. “What do you do for exercise?”

“Well, I ride a bike to work,” Damon said, “and I lift a few weights.”

“Good; those are both good things to do.”

Mrs. Damon, whose name was Shirley, was beginning to look a little anxious.

“Tell you what, Al,” Michael said. “Let’s try something, just for laughs.” And he pointed to the upper part of his own abdomen. “Hit me as hard as you can. Right here.”

“You kidding?”

“No, I mean it. Hard as you can.” And Michael tightened and locked the muscles of his midsection, a trick that even amateur fighters are taught to do.

Damon’s foolish, uncomprehending smile gave way to an angry narrowing of the eyes as he gathered and set himself for the punch, and he drove his right fist powerfully into the appointed place.

It didn’t quite take Michael’s breath away and it sent him only two steps back, but it hurt more than he’d thought it would. He hadn’t played this game since college. “Pretty good one, Al,” he said. “Now it’s my turn. You ready?” And he placed his feet properly.

Michael’s fist traveled only a short distance but it was fast, it connected in just the right way, and Al Damon lay unconscious on the rug.

Shirley Damon fell beside him with a scream, and Lucy, appearing from nowhere, rushed up to grasp and shake Michael’s arm as if she’d just caught him killing a man with a pistol. “Why did you
do
that?” she demanded.

There was a light but general shriek of women around the room now, and a muttering of “Drunk … drunk” among the men. At first Michael thought they must mean Damon was drunk for having fallen down; then, as Lucy continued to shake and berate him, he knew the charge of drunkenness was meant for himself.

The high, wavering voice of Marjorie Grant could be heard across the room saying “Oh, I can’t bear violence; I can’t bear violence in any form.”

“Look, it’s a game,” Michael was explaining to Lucy and to anyone else who would listen. “It’s called trading punches. It’s perfectly fair; he hit me first. Jesus, I never meant to—”

Tom Nelson was smiling in the entrance of his studio, blinking through his glasses and saying “What’s the deal?”

Al Damon regained his senses after a few seconds; he rolled to one side, hugged his belly, and drew up his knees.

“Give him air,” someone commanded, but he had air enough to get unsteadily to his feet, with his wife’s help, at what would have been about the count of seven. Shirley Damon lingered just long enough to give Michael a look of withering hatred; then
she carefully steered her husband toward the front door, while someone else brought their coats, but they didn’t quite make it before Al Damon had to stop, crouch, and vomit on the floor.

“…  And if he’d vomited while he was still unconscious it could have gone into his lungs and killed him,” Lucy said. “Then what?
Then
how could you have laughed it off?” She had taken the wheel, as she always did when she wanted to prove that Michael was too drunk to drive, and it always made him feel humiliated – even emasculated – to ride on the passenger’s side.

“Ah, you’re making too much of it,” he said. “I traded punches with the guy, that’s all; there wasn’t any tragedy or any slaughtering of innocents. And most of the people
were
able to laugh it off. Tom
Nelson
certainly was – he said he wants me to teach him how to do it. And Pat said it was okay, too. She gave me a little kiss at the door and said I mustn’t worry about it. You
heard
her say that.”

“Personally,” said Bill Brock, riding in the back seat with his arm around Karen, “I was delighted to see it happen. The guy’s an asshole. His wife’s an asshole, too.”

“Oh, exactly,” Karen said in a sleepy voice. “Neither of them have any – you know – any charm or anything at all.”

“Well, she’s a drab little thing,” Lucy said on Sunday evening, after Bill and Karen had gone back to the city, “but she’s pleasant. And she’s certainly a lot more appropriate for Bill than Diana
Maitland
ever was.”

“Sure is,” Michael said, and he was heartened because this was the first civil thing his wife had said to him since the Friday night of the Nelsons’ party. With luck, they would now be on good terms again.

But they would never know what became of Karen, because
a very few weeks later Bill showed up with another girl. This one’s name was Jennifer, and she was blond, broad-shouldered and given to blushing smiles.

They were only passing through, Bill said. They were on their way up to Pittsfield to visit Jennifer’s parents, who wanted to look him over.

“Bill and I’ve only been seeing each other for about three weeks, you see,” the girl told them, “and I made the awful mistake of letting my parents know. What actually happened was, I happened to be taking a shower one morning when the phone rang, so I asked Bill to answer it and it was my mother. And the point is she and my father’ve both been worried about me since I moved to New York – oh, I know this sounds ridiculous because I’m almost twenty-three, but they’re very old-fashioned. They’re from another time.”

“Hell, I’m not worried,” Bill said, jingling his car keys. “I’ll charm their socks off.”

And he may well have done so, though it turned out that they’d never know what became of Jennifer, either, or of Joan or Victoria or any of the other girls he would bring for their inspection over the next few years; they could only assume that Bill, as he’d once explained to them, was all right in short-term relationships.

One Friday afternoon, a month after the Al Damon incident, there was nothing for the Davenports to do but sit reading magazines in different parts of their living room. Neither of them mentioned it, but they were eaten with anxiety that there might be another party at the Nelsons’ tonight and that they might have been dropped from the invitation list.

And then, that same day, Paul Maitland called up to say that Diana was out for the weekend again, with her boyfriend, and
that she’d love to see them both. Could they come over to Harmon Falls at about five?

During the short ride Michael steeled himself for this new meeting with Diana. Maybe she had become a silly girl, now that she’d spent all this time with her actor-boy, actor-twerp, actor-asshole – girls did change – but then, maybe not. And from the moment he saw her standing in the driveway with her brother and his wife and her tall young man, smiling in welcome as the car pulled up, he knew she hadn’t changed at all. She might as well have been the only person there: graceful and awkward at the same time, a girl so unique and complete that you’d have to be a fool to want any other girl in the world.

There were kissings and handshakes – Ralph Morin seemed determined to prove he could crush all of Michael’s knuckles if he felt like it – and then the party moved into a big fieldstone house that had been built for Walter Folsom, the retired engineer who was Peggy’s stepfather. In the main room of it, where Mr. Folsom and his wife rose to greet the young people, there was a great window overlooking a leafy ravine that fell away to a bright, rapid stream a hundred yards below. “All my life,” Mr. Folsom told his guests, “I’ve wanted a house equipped with a spigot in the wall that pours whiskey; so now you see I have my wish at last.”

Ralph Morin, sinking into one of the sofas that bordered the big window, was explaining to Mrs. Folsom that he always felt “this really great sense of peace out here.” And he flung one arm along the sofa back to illustrate his point. “If I ever lived in a house like this I’d spend all my time right here, beside this window, reading. I’d read all the books I’ve always meant to read, and then some more.”