Young Hearts Crying (22 page)

“Oh, sure. Got me up here, it’ll get me back. No, all I’m dreading now is the business of finding a place to live. Have to go through that every year, if I want to stay in New York. Still, it always works out; I always manage to hole up for the winter.”

“And this year it’ll be especially nice, won’t it,” she said, “because you’ll be holing up for the winter with Julie Pierce.”

The look on his face gave everything away. He seemed to know at once that there would be no further point in trying to keep his secret.

“Well, and so what?” he said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“If memory serves,” Lucy began, “she’s way too skinny and she hasn’t got any tits at all. She may be talented as hell but there’s something a little cracked upstairs.”

“That’s in very poor taste, Lucy,” he said when she was finished. “I’d think a girl of your class would have much better taste than that. I thought it was something you people were born with.”

“Ah. And what are
you
people born with? An endless capacity
for lust and betrayal, I imagine, and a crafty little talent for inflicting senseless pain. Right?”

“Wrong. We’re born with an instinct for survival, and it doesn’t take most of us long to learn that nothing else matters in the world.” Then he said “Ah, Jesus, Lucy, this is dumb. We’re talking like a couple of actors. Listen: is there really any reason why you and I can’t be friends?”

“It’s often occurred to me,” she said, “that ‘friend’ is about the most treacherous word in the language. I think you’d better get out of here now, Jack, okay?”

And the worst part – for both of them, it seemed – was that he had to make his exit with the two new suitcases hanging from his hands on either side.

She was cleaning up the kitchen the next morning, trying and trying to put him out of her mind, when he came to stand outside the screen door in exactly the way he had appeared the first time, a strikingly handsome young man with his thumbs in his jeans.

When she let him into the kitchen he said “Casimir Micklaszevics.”

“What?”

“Casimir Micklaszevics. That’s my name. Would you like me to write it down?”

“No,” she said. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll always remember you as – Stanley Kowalski.”

And he awarded her a wink. “Not bad, Lucy,” he said. “Pretty nice little curtain-line you came up with there. Guess I could never top a line like that. Well, anyway, listen: Have a good life, okay?” And he was gone as abruptly as he’d come.

Later, from a living-room window, she saw the snout of his old car coming around the trees at the far side of the dormitory
building. A gleam of sunlight eclipsed its windshield, and she turned quickly away and crouched and covered her eyes with both hands: she didn’t want to see Julie Pierce riding beside him.

Later still, when she lay on her bed and gave in at last to the kind of crying Tennessee Williams described as “luxurious,” she wished she had allowed him to write down his name. Casimir what? Casimir who? And she knew now that her nice little curtain-line about Stanley Kowalski had been worse than cheap and spiteful – oh, worse; worse. It had been a lie, because she would always and always remember him as Jack Halloran.

When Lucy finally did decide where to go, it wasn’t very far away. She found a solid, comfortable house at the northern edge of Tonapac, almost on the Kingsley town line, and arranged to buy it at once. She had been saying “rent” for so many years, aloud and in her mind, that the very act of walking into a bank to buy a house gave her a sense of brave beginnings.

She liked everything about this new house. It was high and wide without being too big; it was “civilized.” No neighbors were visible on any side because of tall shrubs and trees, and she liked that, too; but what she liked best was that there would now be only a short stretch of gently curving blacktop road between her door and the Nelsons’. She could walk over there any time she happened to feel like it, or the Nelsons could walk over here. On summer afternoons whole groups of the Nelsons’ guests might come strolling along in the dappled sunshine of this road, laughing and carrying their drinks, calling “We want Lucy! Let’s get Lucy!” and so the possibilities of romance were almost infinite.

The Maitlands would be more remote now; but then, she had come to think of them as being more remote in the other sense as well. If they wanted to persist in their willful poverty – if Paul was stubbornly determined to go on shunning the Nelsons and
all the bright opportunities implicit in the world of the Nelsons’ parties – then it might be only sensible to leave them behind.

She knew Laura would miss the Smith girls, and possibly the ragged expanse of the old estate itself, but she promised to take her back there for visits as often as she wanted to go. And the great practical advantage of staying within the limits of Tonapac, as Lucy explained several times to her mother and others on the phone, was that Laura wouldn’t have to change schools.

Within a very few days she bought a whole houseful of good new furniture, along with a few antiques of the kind called “priceless,” and she bought a new car. There was no reason why any of the things in her life should not be the best she could find.

All she knew about the New School for Social Research, in New York, was that it was an adult-education university. There had been rumors, some years ago, that it was a haven for old-line communists, but she’d never minded that because she had often considered that she herself, if born a decade earlier, could easily have been an old-line communist too. Some of her comrades might have despised her for her money, though her modest way of living would always have been beyond reproach, but others might have esteemed her all the more for it. Even in her own time she had never been impatient with communist talk except when it came from someone like Bill Brock, and that was because she’d always suspected that Bill Brock would be among the first to fold up under any kind of political pressure.

But now the surprisingly thick spring catalogue of the New School lay open before her on the new coffee table in the new living room of her new house, and she was taking her time over it, beginning to plan a new life.

The departmental section called “Creative Writing” offered five or six courses, each with a paragraph or two of descriptive material, and it didn’t take her long to figure out that each
instructor must have written his own course description in a painstaking effort to compete with the others.

One or two of the teachers were writers she’d heard of but hadn’t read; the rest were unknown to her. In the end she settled on one of the strangers, someone named Carl Traynor, and marked him heavily in the margin with her pencil. His credentials weren’t very striking (“Stories in numerous magazines and several anthologies”) but she’d found herself coming back time and again to his course description until she had to acknowledge it as her favorite.

For days, waiting for the spring semester to begin, Lucy was almost at peace with the idea of herself as a writer. She pored over the two stories she had managed to finish during the past year or so, making small changes until it began to seem that any further revision might spoil them. The stories were there; they were adequate, and they were hers.

When you wrote it didn’t matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your “literary voice”) because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page
for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.

The morning was unusually mild and clear for February, and it felt grand to be walking down lower Fifth Avenue. This calm and stately neighborhood was where Michael Davenport had always said he wanted to live, “as soon as one of the plays pays off’; one day long ago she had made the mistake of reminding him that they could move here anytime – right away, if they felt like it – and that had brought on one of his fiercely frowning silences as they walked all the way home to Perry Street, letting her know that she’d broken the rules of their old agreement once again.

She had remembered the New School as a dark, Soviet-Union kind of place, and that part of it was still there, but now it was dominated by a new adjacent building, bigger and taller and all made of steel and glass, as bright and greedy-looking as the United States itself.

A silent elevator took her up to the appointed floor and she walked shyly into her classroom: a long conference table with chairs placed around it. Some students were already seated, looking uncertain about whether to smile at one another, and others were gathering. Most of them were women – this was disappointing because Lucy had dimly hoped for a roomful of attractive men – and except for one or two young girls they were all in middle age. She had a quick general impression, possibly mistaken, of housewives whose children were grown and gone, freeing them at last to pursue the ambition of their lives. Of the few men, the most conspicuous was a blunt-faced, truck-driverly fellow wearing a green work shirt with some company’s insignia on its left breast pocket – probably the kind of writer who would want to employ the word “fuck” as often as possible in his
clumsy stories – and he had struck up a tentative conversation with the smaller man beside him, who was so pale and bland in his business suit and his pink rimless glasses that Lucy imagined he must be an accountant or a dentist. Farther down the table sat a much older man, with white hair bristling from his scalp and tufting in his nostrils; he had probably come out of retirement to try his hand at this game, and his humorous lips were already moving very slightly as if in rehearsal for his self-appointed role as class comedian.

The last to come in, and to take his place self-consciously at the head of the table, was the teacher. He was tall and thin and looked at first like a boy, though Lucy could tell he was well over thirty by his slump, by the slight tremor of his hands and the heavy shadows under his eyes. “Melancholy” was the first word that occurred to her, and she decided that might not be a bad quality to have in a writing teacher, assuming there’d be livelier qualities too.

“Good morning,” he said. “My name’s Carl Traynor, and I expect it’ll take me a little time to find out who all of you are. Maybe the best way to begin is to call this roll they’ve given me; then if possible – and I don’t want anyone feeling obliged to do this, if you’d rather not – but if possible you might say a few words about yourself and your background when your name is called.” His voice was pleasantly deep and steady, and Lucy could feel herself beginning to trust him.

When he called her name she said “Yes; here. I’m thirty-four. I’m divorced” – and she wondered at once why she’d felt it necessary to say that – “and I live in Putnam County with my daughter. I’ve had very little writing experience except in college, many years ago.”

But at least half of the other students declined to provide personal information, and Lucy knew that if her name had come
later in the alphabetical order she would have made that choice too – she should have made it anyway. Reticence was important in a room where any amount of emotional nakedness might soon be on display. She could only wonder now if the odd little blunder of saying “I’m divorced” would make her uncomfortable as long as she stayed in this group.

With the roll call out of the way, Carl Traynor settled down to deliver his opening remarks. “Well,” he began, “I think I could probably tell you everything I know about fiction writing in half an hour – and I’d be happy to give that a try, because there’s nothing I like better than showing off.” Here he waited for a laugh that didn’t come, and his hands began to tremble more noticeably on the table. “But this isn’t a lecture course. The only way any of us can learn this craft is by saturating ourselves in examples of it, in and out of print, and then trying to put the best of what we’ve found into our own work.”

He went on at some length to explain what he considered the value of a “workshop” like this: each manuscript would attain a kind of publication, in that it would be evaluated by fifteen people. Then he talked about the kind of criticism he would expect from this group. Constructive criticism was always to be desired, he said, except when it amounted to a hedging of bets or a pulling of punches; still, “honesty” was a word he had come to distrust because it was too often used as a license for harshness. He hoped they would be able to achieve dispassion without discourtesy.

“We’re all strangers here today,” he said, “but over the next sixteen weeks we’ll come to know each other pretty well. And there’s something volatile in the very nature of a writing class; we’ll have raised voices here sometimes, and hurt feelings, too. So how’s this for a guiding principle: The work is more important than the personalities. Let’s be friends if we can, but let’s not be sweethearts.”

And once again there was silence where he’d expected laughter. He had put both hands out of sight now, dropping one of them to his leg under the table and sinking the other into his coat pocket. Lucy thought she had never seen a teacher so ill at ease. If talking made him nervous, why did he talk so much?

And he was still talking, though she might have stopped listening if he hadn’t brought his talk around to what he called “the procedure.”

“Now, unfortunately,” he said, “the New School doesn’t make mimeograph facilities available to any of these writing courses, so it won’t be possible for me to give out copies of each story to be read for the following week’s class. That would be much the best way, of course, but we’re stuck with things as they are. All we can do here is have the stories read aloud, either by their authors or by me, and base our discussion on what we’ve heard.”