Young Hearts Crying (50 page)

“I know,” she said. “I enjoyed it, too.”

He took hold of her shoulder, very lightly, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Stay well, now,” he said.

“I will,” she promised him, and there was just enough light in the street to suggest that her eyes were glistening. “And you too, Michael, okay? You too.”

As he walked away and hoped she was watching his back – did other men ever want women to watch their backs? – it struck him that Sarah had scarcely come into his mind for three hours.

Well, his mind would be filled with her again soon enough. The words he’d written on that Sheraton note pad would still be there on the table – “Don’t torture me, Sarah” – and might by now have been picked up and scrutinized by some Sheraton chambermaid, working the late shift, who had let herself into the room to turn down his bed.

And what a lousy line! Maudlin, hysterical, asking for grief,
“Don’t torture me, Sarah” was about as bad a line as “Oh, don’t leave me” or “Why do you want to break my heart?” Did people really say things like that, or was it a kind of talk heard only in the movies?

Sarah was too nice a girl ever to be charged with “torturing” a man; he had always known that. Still, she had never been the kind of girl who would collaborate in allowing her future to fall apart, and that was something he’d always known about her, too.

Soon, now, fifteen hundred miles from here, she would be putting the Kansas house in order for the night: the child asleep, the television blind and silent, the dishes washed and put away. She might be wearing her knee-length cotton robe – blue, with a pattern of strawberries – the one he’d always liked because it showed her legs off well, and because it had always meant she was his wife. He knew how it smelled. She would almost certainly be thinking over what they’d said to each other on the phone this afternoon, and the little vertical crease between her eyebrows would be deep with perplexity.

The Sheraton was still some distance away – the glowing red sign on top of its roof could barely be discerned from here – but Michael didn’t mind walking; nobody had ever died of it. And he’d begun to find there were small satisfactions in having lived more than half a century: your very way of walking along the street could suggest how peaceful and responsible you had grown; there would be no more plunging ahead in pursuit of ephemeral things. Given good-enough clothes and shoes, you could always look dignified whether you were or not, and almost everybody could be counted on to call you “sir.” The bar at the hotel would be open for business; that was nice because it meant Michael Davenport could sit in its murmurous shadows, alone with his skepticism, and have a drink before going upstairs.

She might come and live with him; she might not; and then
there was another dreadful possibility: she might come and stay with him only a little while, in a spirit of tentative compliance, waiting for her better judgment to set her free.

“…  Everybody’s essentially alone,” she’d told him, and he was beginning to see a lot of truth in that. Besides: now that he was older, and now that he was home, it might not even matter how the story turned out in the end.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

From the moment of its publication in 1961,
Revolutionary Road
was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs. It is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70844-2

A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE

Robert Prentice has spent all his life trying to escape his mother’s stifling presence. His mother, Alice, struggles with her own demons as she attempts to realize her dreams of prosperity and success as a sculptor. As Robert goes off to fight in Europe, hoping to become his own man, Richard Yates portrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to his heroic ideals. With haunting clarity, Yates crafts an unforgettable portrait of two people who cannot help but hope for more even as life challenges them both.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-45595-6

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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