Young Hearts Crying (28 page)

“Okay.” And she put her arm around his ribs to let him know she was sorry.

In the morning she was even sorrier, because she could see then that much of her anger had come from jealousy of the drunken girl, so she delivered a demure, well-worded apology that he didn’t even let her finish because he was laughing and hugging her and telling her to forget it.

And it was always easy to put those clashes behind them, because so many weeks could pass in near-perfect harmony; still, there was never any telling when the next one might erupt.

“Have you kept in touch with Mr. Kelly at all?” she asked him one day.

“Mr. who?”

“You know; George Kelly, from the class.”

“Oh, the elevator guy. No, I haven’t. How do you mean, ‘kept in touch?’ ”

“Well, I was hoping you might have, is all. He was very helpful to me, and he always struck me as a remarkably intelligent man.”

“Yeah, well, sure, ‘remarkably intelligent.’ Look, baby, the world is crawling with these diamond-in-the-rough types, these salt-of-the-earth characters, and they’re
all
remarkably intelligent. My God, I knew half-literate guys in the Army who could scare the shit out of you with their intelligence. So if you’re running a writing course you’re glad enough to have one or two of those people in the group – you may even let ’em do most of the work for you, the way I did with Kelly – but when school’s out, it’s
out.
They know it as well as you do, and it’d be crazy to expect anything else.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Well, for Christ’s sake, Lucy, what the hell do you want to
do? You want to get on the subway and ride for an hour out into Queens so we can have a nice little evening with George Kelly? There’d be Mrs. Kelly serving up the coffee and cake and talking a mile a minute, wearing seven different kinds of costume jewelry for the occasion, and there’d be four or five little Kellys standing around the carpet and staring at you, all working on their bubble gum in unison. Is that what you want?”

“It’s curious,” Lucy said, “that for a man with a twelfth-grade education you should have such a highly developed sense of social snobbery.”

“Yeah, yeah, I knew you’d say that. Know something, Lucy? It’s getting so I can predict everything you’re going to say before you’ve said it. If I ever write a story about you, the dialogue’ll be a cinch. It’ll be child’s play. I’ll just sit back and let the typewriter do that part of it all by itself.”

And she walked out of his place that time, after a parting statement about how “hateful” he was.

But she came back three hours later, bringing four well-chosen Impressionist reproductions for his walls, and he was so glad to see her that he seemed almost in tears as he clasped and held her in a long, staggering embrace.

“My God,” he said later, after she’d carefully taped the pictures into place. “It’s amazing what a difference they make. I don’t know how I managed to live here all this time with nothing but bare walls.”

“Well, these are only temporary,” she explained, “because I have a plan. I’m full of plans where you’re concerned, did you know that? The plan is, as soon as I have enough paintings of my own that I like, and enough that Mr. Santos likes too, I’m going to bring them down and hang them here, and then they’ll be yours.”

And Carl Traynor said that would be the nicest thing he could
imagine. He said it would be an honor far beyond anything he could ever hope to deserve.

They were sitting on the edge of the bed now, holding hands as bashfully as children, and he told her he had never meant to be such a “pill” about George Kelly. He said he’d be perfectly willing to call George Kelly tonight, or this weekend, or whenever she liked.

“Well, that’s awfully nice, Carl,” she said, “but it’s something we can easily put off until you feel more comfortable with it. Wouldn’t that be better?”

“Okay. Good. Only there’s one more thing, Lucy.”

“What?”

“Please don’t ever take off like that again. I mean, God knows I can’t stop you from walking out of here – even walking out for good, if that’s what you decide you want to do – but next time try to give me a little warning first, okay? Just enough so I can do everything in my power to make you stay.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “I don’t think that’s the kind of thing we’ll ever have to worry about, do you?”

And the only way to spend the rest of that oddly exhilarating afternoon was to take off their clothes and get under the covers and be extravagantly in love.

He had never used his kitchen for anything but making instant coffee and for chilling beer and milk, but it wasn’t long before she had it fully equipped with copper-bottomed pots and pans all hung in a row, with ample supplies of dishes and silverware, and even with a spice shelf. (“A spice shelf?” he asked her, and she said “Well, certainly, a spice shelf. Why
not
a spice shelf?”)

She often cooked dinner for them that winter and he was always touchingly grateful, but she came to understand that he
preferred restaurants because he “had” to get out of the place at night after working there all day.

His anxiety about his book seemed only to increase with the approach of spring. Sometimes it made him drink too much, which left him unable to work at all, but Lucy had at least a beginner’s knowledge of troubles like that. She helped him establish the right amount of alcohol each day – beer all afternoon, as required, but no more than three bourbons before dinner, and nothing afterwards; still, she couldn’t help him with the book itself. He wouldn’t let her read the manuscript because “most of it’s lousy, and anyway you could never read my handwriting – not to mention all the damn little marginal inserts I can hardly read myself.”

Once he typed up a twenty-page section for her and went into the kitchen to hide while she read it. And when she called him out and told him it was “beautiful,” his haggard face took on a look of tentative peace. He asked her a few questions to confirm that the parts he had hoped she would like were the very parts she’d liked best; then, after a minute or two, he began to look anxious again. She could almost see him thinking Well, okay, she’s being nice, but what does
she
know?.

She knew by now it would be a novel about a woman, told from the woman’s point of view – and that in itself was one of the big problems, he said, because he’d never tried a woman’s point of view before and didn’t know if he could sustain it in a convincing way.

“Well, it’s certainly convincing in this part,” she said.

“Yeah, well, okay; but twenty pages aren’t exactly the same as three hundred.”

She knew, too, from hints he’d dropped as well as from small indications in the excerpt itself, that the character, whose name was Miriam, would be substantially based on his former wife.
And she found nothing displeasing in that: he was much too good a writer to let the portrayal be distorted either by malice or nostalgia; besides, everybody knew it was a writer’s privilege to find his material where he could.

“And even if I do get the point of view under control,” he said, “there’s still an awful lot to worry about. I’m afraid there may not be enough happening to this girl. I’m afraid there may not be enough
story
in this thing to make a novel.”

“I can think of many fine novels that don’t have much ‘story’ in them,” Lucy said, “and so can you.”

And he told her once again that she always knew how to say just the right thing.

One night they came back late to his place, hours after having broken the three-bourbon rule. They’d had plenty to drink – easily enough to make them fuddled and unsteady and ready for sleep – but the pleasant thing about this particular night was that they both seemed to have “held” it well: they were in a keyed-up, conversational mood, as if talk tonight might be brighter and more interesting than talk at any other time. They even made new drinks for themselves before settling down companionably in facing chairs.

There was one troubling aspect of the woman’s-viewpoint problem, Carl said, that Lucy might be able to help him with. And he asked if she could tell him how it felt to be pregnant.

“Well, I’ve only been through it once, of course,” she said, “and that was long ago, but I remember it as an essentially peaceful time. You get physically slowed down and you worry about being ungainly, or at least I did, but your nerves are quiet and you have a nice sense of being in good health: good appetite; good sleep.”

“Good,” he said. “All that’s good.” Then his face changed just enough to show that his next question would have nothing
to do with research. “Have you ever had a hysterical pregnancy?”

“A what?”

“Well, you know. There are some girls so eager to get married they can fake pregnancy. They don’t just
say
they’re pregnant; they develop all the symptoms of it in a very persuasive way. I knew a girl like that, three or four years ago, kind of a nice, cute little girl from Virginia. She’d bloat up every month and her tits would swell until it looked exactly like the real thing; then, wham, she’d have her period and it’d be all over.”

“Carl, I think you’re getting into another one,” Lucy said.

“Another what?”

“Another bragging little anecdote to prove what a devil with the girls you’ve always been.”

“No, wait,” he said, “that’s not fair. Whaddya mean, ‘devil’? If you’d known how scared I was every month you wouldn’t’ve seen anything ‘devilish’ about it. I’d be wringing my hands like some meek, timid little wretch. Then finally, maybe the seventh or eighth time she got that way, I took her to see this big-shot Park Avenue obstetrician. Cost me a hundred bucks. And you know what happened? That asshole came smiling out of his examining room and he said ‘Good news, Mr. Traynor, and congratulations. Your wife has a healthy young pregnancy going.’ Well, that was a jolt, as you can imagine, but two or three days later she got her period again. One more false alarm.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I did what anybody else in his right mind would’ve done. I packed her up and sent her back to Virginia, where she belonged.”

“Well, all right,” Lucy said. “But tell me something else, Carl. Have you never been the loser where a girl is concerned? Haven’t any girls ever broken up with you, or dropped you, or told you to get lost?”

“Oh, baby, don’t talk nonsense.
Sure
they have. My God, I’ve had girls walk all over my face. I’ve had girls act as if I were shit on a stick. Christ Almighty, you oughta hear my
wife
on the subject of me.”

In June or July Carl gave her a stack of a hundred and fifty typewritten pages – a little less than half the book, he said – and asked her to take it home to Tonapac for a couple of days.

“You’re going to find it’s nothing at all like my first book,” he told her. “There isn’t any thunder and lightning in it; there aren’t any stunning confrontations or surprises or anything like that. I don’t think the first book was necessarily more ambitious than this one, it was just ambitious in a more obvious way: it was a big, rich, ‘tough’ novel.

“This time I’m trying for an entirely different kind of thing. I want it to be a quiet, deceptively modest piece of work. I’m trying for a kind of serenity and balance in the writing. I’m trying more for esthetic values, you see, than for dramatic effects.”

They were standing at his door, with Lucy holding the manuscript in its manila envelope, and she had begun to wish he’d stop talking. She would rather just have been given the thing, and been allowed to read it the way any stranger would, but he couldn’t seem to let her go without all this explaining and instruction.

“I think the best thing,” he was saying, “would be to go through it first at your normal reading speed, then go through it again more slowly to look for any places that you think might be improved – might be expanded or cut back or changed in some other way. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Oh, and listen: you know the old analogy of the iceberg? How seven eighths of it are under the surface and only the tip is
the part you can see? Well, that’s sort of what I’m after here. I want the reader to sense that all these ordinary little events imply the presence of something huge and even tragic down beneath. Do you see how that works?”

And she told him she would keep it in mind.

In Tonapac that night, after a dinner with Laura and a talk with her that was long and careful enough to prove she was still a conscientious mother, Lucy went to bed early and settled herself to read.

She read it through without quite being able to acknowledge how disappointed she was; then, after a fitful sleep and a small breakfast eaten without appetite, she sat down to read it again.

She guessed she could appreciate the esthetic values, and she could certainly see what he’d meant by “modest,” if not by “deceptively” modest.

It was tame, bland, boring stuff. Making her way through its technically perfect sentences, waiting and waiting for something to come alive on the page, she couldn’t believe this was the same writer whose other book had enthralled her with its bite and power and swiftly gathering momentum, and the comparison made her feel betrayed.

There was a further sense of betrayal when she came upon the twenty pages that she’d once told him were “beautiful” – they seemed enervated now by being embedded in the larger dullness.

And she could no longer believe that Carl had based the character of Miriam on his former wife, because no woman of flesh and blood could ever have been as insipid as this. The trouble wasn’t that he’d tried to make her excessively virtuous, it was that he’d allowed her always to be right. Her every perception was something Carl plainly agreed with and plainly expected his readers to agree with too; and hardly any of the dialogue rang true because she always said exactly what she meant.

Miriam was prone to philosophical ruminations – shapely little essays that would interrupt the narrative for whole pages at a time, and their very shapeliness betrayed a fiction writer’s straining to meet the requirements of an alien form. Lucy couldn’t help but wonder, in one essay after another, if Carl had gone to all that trouble because he thought it was the way a college-educated man would write.