Young Hearts Crying (35 page)

For a while Michael considered saying, Look, Tom: I think I might get somewhere with this Compton girl, so maybe you’d better take a hotel room and go on home alone tomorrow, okay? But the longer he watched her up there, talking and laughing and making little gestures in the air with her brandy snifter as if it were the very symbol of her triumph tonight, the longer he hesitated. When the party was over she might easily give him a quick, brandy-scented kiss, out on the sidewalk, and disappear into Montreal with some actor’s arm around her waist, while Tom Nelson stood watching – and if that happened, Nelson’s teasing would be merciless all the way back to New York.

No, getting rid of Nelson could wait: the first thing to do was get the girl. As soon as he had the chance he would go up and ask if he could take her home. If she said yes, the problem of Nelson would resolve itself: a few quick, amiable words would take care of it – or maybe only a significant wink, if Nelson was ready to be agreeable. Then the author of the original play would be free to find a taxicab for the girl and himself, and the rest of the night would be rich with promise.

And his plan almost worked: he had to shoulder his way through any number of smiling television people as they rose and turned away from the table at last, but he got the girl – or at least he got within speaking distance.

“Susan? Can I take you home?”

“Well, that’d be lovely; thanks.”

“Car’s right outside,” said Tom Nelson.

“Oh, wonderful,” she said; “you have a car.”

So there were three of them in the damned car, finding their way to some suburban fringe of the city, and Michael rode with a sense of defeat.

Susan Compton explained that she lived with her family – she hoped to have a place of her own soon, but the apartment shortage was terrible in Montreal – and when they arrived at her parents’ house all the windows were dark.

She led them in whispers down to the basement and flicked on the lights of a surprisingly spacious oak-paneled room, the kind of “game room” that upper-middle-class families always seemed to take pride in.

“Can I get you a drink?” she asked, and there was indeed what looked like a well-stocked bar at one end of this ample place. There were two or three deep, handsomely upholstered sofas, too, and Michael began to see that the night might still have possibilities if only Tom Nelson would get out of here. But
Nelson had a drink and then another one, strolling around the room to inspect the paneling as if for tiny imperfections, or perhaps for places where his watercolors might be hung to their best advantage.

“I can’t tell you how I wish we could’ve done the play the way you wrote it,” Susan Compton was saying. “All those changes were so cheap, and so unnecessary.”

She was settled in one of the sofas and Michael sat facing her on a leather hassock, feeling a pleasurable tension in his very posture.

“Well, I guess that’s what you have to expect in television,” he said. “Still, I thought your performance was beautiful. You were just the way I imagined the girl to be.”

“Do you mean that? Well, I think that’s the nicest compliment I could have hoped for.”

“It’s often seemed to me,” he said, “that acting and other kinds of performing must be the crudest of all the arts – cruel in the sense that you never get a second chance. You can’t go back and revise your work. Everything has to be spontaneous and finished at the same time.”

She said there was a lot of truth in that, and that he’d put it very well; and there was no mistaking the light that had come into her eyes: she thought he was “interesting.”

Then she said “Still, I think creative work is what I’ll always admire most – making something out of nothing; putting something into the world that wasn’t there before. Have you written many other plays, Michael?”

“Oh, some; mostly I write poetry, though. That seems to be what I do best, or at least what I’m most interested in.”

“Well, my God,” she said, “I can’t imagine a more difficult form than a poem. It’s all purity: it depends entirely on itself. Have you – published much?”

“Two books, so far. And I wouldn’t want to recommend the second one; I think the first is okay.”

“Is it still in the bookstores?”

“Oh, not anymore. You could probably find it in the public library, though.”

“Wonderful. And I’ll look for the other one, too.”

Then it was clearly time to turn the talk back to her, so he said “No, but really, Susan, I’m awfully glad I came up here for the show tonight. You really – you really gave me something I won’t forget.”

“Well, I can’t tell you—” And she lowered her eyes. “I can’t tell you how humble that makes me feel.”

And still Tom Nelson wouldn’t leave them alone. When he seemed to have tired of patrolling the walls he came back to sit down with them, and to ask Susan if she’d lived in Montreal all her life.

Yes; she had.

“You have a big family?”

“Well, three brothers and two sisters; I’m the oldest.”

“What kind of work’s your father do?”

And it went on that way until Susan Compton began to look less like a professional actress than a sleepy girl longing for the silence of her bedroom, where a dozen old stuffed animals might be lined up and waiting to remind her of childhood.

In the end she told them she would have to be back at the studio at ten in the morning to do a children’s show, so she guessed she’d better get some sleep. And she said they were welcome to spend the night here; there were blankets and stuff in the cabinet; she hoped they’d be comfortable.

Then she was gone, and the worst of it was that Michael found he couldn’t even say Christ’s
sake,
Nelson, why didn’t you take off? If he said that it would only spoil their long drive back
to New York; besides, nobody spoke to Thomas Nelson that way. Thomas Nelson had grown so accustomed to admiration and deference that he moved through the world with the serene absentmindedness of a man on whom anger would always be lost. He was too “cool” for reproach.

And Michael had to acknowledge too, as he turned and pulled a blanket over his shoulders, that it might have been hopeless anyway to think of having the girl in this basement room. Her whole family lay upstairs beyond a door that didn’t even lock; she might have frozen and recoiled when he made a move for her, whether she thought he was interesting or not. Well, the hell with it.

In the morning, while they folded their blankets and put them away, Tom Nelson said “Let’s get started soon as we can, okay? Because I really oughta get back to work.”

“Okay.”

Upstairs, in the front hallway of the house, they could hear the sounds of the family at breakfast behind a closed door.

“Know what’ll happen if you knock on that door?” Nelson said. “Some nice middle-aged lady’ll open it and put her head out” – he expertly mimicked the craning smile of a nice middle-aged lady – “and say, ‘Coffee?’ and we’ll be stuck in there for hours. Come on.”

It wasn’t until they were on the road again, with the drab Quebec landscape drifting past the car windows, that Michael was seized with a spasm of regret. Why
hadn’t
he knocked on that door? Why hadn’t he gone in and accepted a place at the family breakfast table, with Susan smiling tall and grown-up among the younger children? He could have gone along with her to the studio for her ten o’clock show; then afterwards he could have taken her to lunch, with martinis, and they might have held hands all afternoon. For Christ’s sake, there wasn’t
even any reason why he couldn’t have stayed for a week in Montreal.

And all this led quickly into a new, worse, uglier line of thought: Maybe it was cowardice. Maybe he’d been secretly frightened of Susan Compton all along, and secretly glad of the chance to escape. Maybe that ravaging week with Mary Fontana had left him so sick that he’d be frightened of any desirable girl, ever. Dreaming of seduction and terrified of impotence, he would be the kind of self-deceiving, self-defeating man who always balks and runs away.

That was when Tom Nelson began laughing to himself in the driver’s seat, as though something uncommonly funny had just occurred to him.

“Know what that girl probably thinks?” he asked.

Michael could guess at once what the answer would be, and he knew he wouldn’t care if he never saw Tom Nelson again.

Then Nelson delivered his punch line: “She probably thinks we’re a couple of fags.”

Things began to fall apart in August. He would get four hours’ sleep one night, three hours the next, and none at all the night after that; then sleep would hit him like a heavy blow in the daytime, and he’d wake in his twisted clothes with no idea of what time it was, or what day.

He could tell he was drinking too much because empty bottles were gathering on the kitchen floor. And he had to force himself to chew and swallow small amounts of food, at longer and longer intervals, because the smell and taste of any kind of food had come to repel him.

Was everything he’d written in the past six months trying to tell him how lousy it was? If so, that was something no professional would need to be told. He put all the manuscripts in
a brown paper bag one night, took it out to the street and pressed it deep into a municipal trash container, and that left him so exhilarated that he walked twenty blocks before he realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

On another night he stopped drinking with a theatrical finality: he smashed his last bottle of whiskey in the sink and stared down at the mess of broken glass like a victor; then he was dizzy with fear that he might now go into what drunks called Withdrawal, so he lay trembling and waiting for hallucinations or convulsions or whatever the hell else Withdrawal might bring.

But on what must have been the next day he was out and walking again, fast, dressed in the whole of his
Chain Store Age
costume: a dark winter suit and a silk necktie. People and things might have a funny, jiggling look on the street and he couldn’t always be sure they were there at all, but walking was important because staying home was worse.

For many days now his thoughts had been racing in the useless, desperate, circling way of incipient madness; whenever he could make them stop, even for a minute, he felt he was saving himself.

And he made them stop once at a newsstand on lower Broadway, somewhere near City Hall, long enough to grab up a copy of
The New York Times
in order to find out what day it was. It was Thursday; that meant he would have to be ready for a weekend with Laura tomorrow.

“Mister?” the newsdealer inquired through a mouthful of rotten teeth. “Want me to loan you a dime to buy the fucking paper?”

When he found he was sitting at home again, in different clothes, he couldn’t tell if it was Thursday anymore. His watch read nine o’clock but he didn’t know if that meant morning or
night, and the gloomy pinkish color of his windows might have meant either one. He dialed the old Tonapac number anyway – he
had
to dial it – and while talking with his daughter he heard a shy hesitation and then a rising, uncomprehending fear in her voice.

Then Lucy called him back: “Michael? Can you tell me what the trouble is? …”

It wasn’t very long after that before Bill Brock was at the door, smiling in a way that looked both canny and self-conscious – “Mike? You okay?” – and that turned out to be the end of the pre-Bellevue period.

When they let him out of Bellevue he found he was afraid of everything, all the time. The sound of a siren in the street, even in the distance, was enough to chill his blood, and so was the sight of a cop – any cop, anywhere. He shied away from young male Negroes, too, if they were big enough, because they looked as if they might be Bellevue orderlies.

If he’d owned a car then, he would have been afraid to drive it, or even to start the engine and put it into gear – any unspeakable thing could happen once you’d started a car and put it into gear. Walking was frightening enough, when it came to crossing wide streets; he didn’t even like to walk around corners because you couldn’t know what might be on the other side.

And it seemed to him now that this cowering timidity, concealed or not, had been at the core of his nature all his life. Hadn’t he always been secretly afraid of other boys in the schoolyard? Hadn’t he hated football and tried to play it only because he was expected to? Even boxing had frightened him badly at first, until he was taught how to move his feet and his weight and his hands. As for his service as an aerial gunner, the one part of his life that seemed to have impressed so many people for so many years, he had known all along that “courage” or “guts” weren’t the appropriate words. You were trapped in the
sky with nine other men; you did what you could, and what sustained you was the old Army virtue of keeping a tight asshole. You knew it was late enough in the war for the odds to be in your favor – no mission was really very likely to last forever – and it was always a pleasure, back in England, to hear the other guys say they’d been scared shitless too.

Now, trembling at the medicine cabinet, he swallowed his psychiatric pills at their appointed hours every day, never missing a dose; and once a week he crept faithfully back to Bellevue to see the Guatemalan psychiatrist in charge of his outpatient treatment.

“Consider your brain as being like an electrical circuit,” the man told him. “Far more complex, of course, but similar in this respect: if you overload a single element” – and he held up one forefinger to emphasize the point – “you blow the whole system. The circuit is dead; the lights are out. Now. In your case the danger is real, the source of it is clear, and there can be only one answer: Don’t drink.”

So Michael Davenport stayed away from alcohol for a year.

“For a solid year,” he would later insist to anyone who seemed to doubt it, or to others who didn’t seem to find it all that great an achievement. “Twelve months without even so much as a glass of beer – can you imagine that? – and all because some clown of a doctor scared me shitless by saying it’d short-circuit my brains. Well, I’m still scared shitless half the time, like everybody else in the world, but I’m not a God damn coward anymore and that’s the difference.”