The Young Lions (5 page)

"Sure, Pal," said the man in the blue suit.

"Economics. Like everything else." Arney waved his cup suddenly, splashing whisky on Michael's sleeve. "Mr Parrish is a Communist and he knows. The basis of all human action. Greed. Naked greed. If they didn't think they could get another play out of me, they wouldn't care if I lived in a distillery." Looking at Laura he said: "Your wife is very pretty. Very pretty indeed. I've heard her spoken of here tonight in glowing terms." He leered at Michael knowingly. "Glowing terms. She has several old friends among the assembled guests here tonight. Haven't you, Mrs Whitacre?"

"Yes," said Laura.

"Everybody has several old friends among the assembled guests," Arney said. "That's the way parties are these days. Modern society. A nest of snakes, hibernating for the winter, everybody wrapped around everybody else. Maybe that'll be the theme of my next play. Except I won't write it." He drank deeply. "Marvellous tea. Don't tell Felice." Michael took Laura's arm and started to leave. "Don't go, Whitacre," Arney said. "I know I'm boring you, but don't go. I want to talk to you. What do you want to talk about? Want to talk about Art?"

"Some other time," Michael said.

"I understand you're a very serious young man," Arney said doggedly. "Let's talk about Art. How did my play go tonight?"

"All right," said Michael.

"No," said Arney, "I won't talk about my play. I said Art and I know what you think of my play. Everybody in New York knows what you think about my play. You shoot your mouth off too goddamn much and if it was up to me I'd fire you. I am being friendly at the moment, but I'd fire you."

"Listen, Pal…" the man in the blue-serge suit began.

"You talk to him," Arney said to Parrish. "He's a Communist, too. That's why I'm not profound enough for him. All you have to do to be profound these days is pay fifteen cents a week for the New Masses." He put his arm around Parrish lovingly. "This is the kind of Communist I like, Whitacre," he said. "Mr Parrish, Mr Sunburned Parrish. He got sunburned in sunny Spain. He went to Spain and he got shot at in Madrid and he's going back to Spain and he's going to get killed there. Aren't you, Mr Parrish?"

"Sure, Pal," Parrish said.

"That's the kind of Communist I like," Arney said loudly.

"Mr Parrish is here to get some money and some volunteers to go back and get shot with him in sunny Spain. Instead of being so goddamn profound at these fairy parties in New York, Whitacre, why don't you go be profound in Spain with Mr Parrish?"

"If you don't keep quiet," Michael started to say, but a tall, white-haired woman with a regal, dark face swept between him and Arney and calmly and without a word knocked the teacup out of Arney's hand. It broke on the floor in a small, china tinkle. Arney looked at her angrily for a moment, then grinned sheepishly, ducking his head, looking shiftily at the floor.

"Hello, Felice," he said.

"Get away from the bar," Felice said.

"Just drinking a little tea," Arney said. He turned and shuffled off, fat and ageing, his grey hair lank and sweating against his large head.

"Mr Arney does not drink," Felice said to the bartender.

"Yes, Ma'am," said the bartender.

"Christ," said Felice to Michael, "I could kill him. He's driving me crazy. And fundamentally he's such a sweet man."

"A darling man," Michael said.

"Was he awful?" Felice asked anxiously.

"Darling," Michael said.

"Nobody'll invite him any place any more and everyone ducks him…" Felice said.

"I can't imagine why," said Michael.

"Even so," said Felice sadly, "it's awful for him. He sits in his room brooding, telling everyone who'll listen to him that he's a has-been. I thought this would be good for him and I could keep an eye on him." She shrugged, looking after Arney's rumpled, retreating figure. "Some men ought to have their hands cut off at the wrist when they reach for their first drink." She picked up her skirts in a courtly, old-fashioned gesture, and went off after the playwright in a rustle of taffeta.

"I think," Michael said, "I could stand a drink."

"Me, too," said Laura.

"Pal," said Mr Parrish.

They stood silently at the bar, watching the bartender fill their glasses.

"The abuse of alcohol," Mr Parrish said in a solemn, preacher-like voice, as he reached for his glass, "is the one thing that puts Man above the animal."

They all laughed and Michael raised his glass to Mr Parrish before he drank.

"To Madrid," Parrish said, in an offhand, everyday way, and Laura said, "To Madrid," in a hushed, breathy voice. Michael hesitated, feeling the old uneasiness, before he, too, said, "To Madrid."

They drank.

"When did you get back?" Michael asked. He felt uncomfortable, talking about it.

"Four days ago," Parrish said. He lifted the glass to his lips again. "You have very good liquor in this country," he said, grinning. He drank steadily, refilling his glass every five minutes, getting a little redder as time went by, but showing no other effects.

"When did you leave Spain?" Michael asked.

"Two weeks ago."

Two weeks ago, Michael thought, on the frozen roads, with the cold rifles and the makeshift uniforms and the planes overhead and the new graves. And now he's standing here in a blue suit like a truck-driver at his own wedding, rattling the ice cubes in his drink, with people talking about the last picture they made and what the critics said and what the doctor thought about the baby's habit of sleeping with his fists in his eyes, and a man with a guitar singing fake Southern ballads in the corner of the room in the heavy-carpeted, crowded, rich apartment eleven storeys up in the unmarked, secure building, with a view of the Park through the tall windows, and the magenta girl with three breasts over the bar. And in a little while he would go down to the docks on the river that you could see from the windows and get on a boat and start back. And there were no marks on him of what he had been through, no hints in the good-natured, clumsy way in which he behaved of what was ahead of him.

"… money is the important thing," Parrish was saying to Laura, "and political pressure. We can get plenty of guys who want to fight. But the British Government's impounded all the Loyalist gold in London, and Washington 's really helping Franco. We have to sneak our fellows in, and it takes bribing and passage money and stuff, like that. So one day we were in the line outside University City, and it was cold, sweet God, it would freeze the nipples off a whale's belly, and they came to me and they said, 'Parrish, me lad, you're just wasting ammunition here anyway, and we haven't seen you hit a Fascist yet. So we decided, you're an eloquent lying son-of-a-bitch, go back to the States and tell some big, juicy, heartbreaking stories about the heroes of the immortal International Brigade in the front line of the fight against the Fascists. And come back here with your pockets loaded.' So I get up at meetings and just let my imagination ramble, green and free. Before you know it, the people are dying with emotion and generosity, and what with the dough rolling in and all the girls, I think maybe I have found my true profession in the fight for liberty." He grinned, his brilliantly even false teeth shining happily in his face, and he pushed his empty glass towards the bartender. "Want to hear some bloody tales of the horrible war for freedom in tortured Spain?"

"No," said Michael, "not with that introduction."

"The truth," Parrish said, suddenly sober and unsmiling, "the truth is not for the likes of these." He swung round and surveyed the room. For the first time, Michael could sense, in the cold, harsh, measuring eyes, something of what Parrish had been through. "The men running, the young boys that came five thousand miles suddenly surprised that they are actually dying, there, right there, themselves, with a bullet in their own sweet bellies. The French, stinking up the border and accepting bribes to let men walk on bleeding feet through the Pyrenees in the middle of the winter. The crooks and fourflushers and smart operators everywhere. On the docks. In the offices. Right up in battalion and company, right up next to you on the front line. The nice boys who see their pals get it and suddenly say, 'I must have made a mistake. This is different from the way it looked at Dartmouth.'"

A little, plump, forty-year-old woman in a school-girlish pink dress came up to the bar and took Laura's arm. "Laura, darling," she said, "I've been looking for you. It's your turn."

"Oh," Laura said, turning to the blonde woman, "I'm sorry if I kept you waiting, but Mr Parrish was so interesting." Michael winced a little as Laura said "interesting". Mr Parrish merely smiled at both women with an even, impartial lust.

"I'll be back in a few minutes," Laura told Michael. "Cynthia's been reading fortunes for the women and she's going to do mine now."

"See," Parrish said loudly, "if there's a forty-year-old Irishman with false teeth in your trouble."

"I'll ask," Laura said, laughing, and went off arm in arm with the fortune-teller. Michael watched her as she walked through the room, in her straight-backed, delicately sensual way, and caught two other men watching her, too. One was Donald Wade, a tall, pleasant-looking man, and the other was a man called Talbot, and they were both what Laura described as "ex-beaux" of hers. They seemed constantly to be invited to the same parties as the Whitacres. The term ex-beau was one which Michael sometimes puzzled over uneasily. What it really meant, he was sure, was that Laura had had affairs with them, and wanted Michael to believe that she no longer had anything to do with them. He was suddenly annoyed at the whole situation, although at the moment, turning it over in his mind, there didn't seem to be very much to do about it.

"When are you going back?" Michael asked.

Parrish looked around him, his blunt, open face taking on a ludicrous expression of guile. "Hard to say, Pal," he whispered. "Not wise to say. The State Department, you know… Has its Fascist spies everywhere. As it is, I've forfeited my American citizenship, technically, by enlisting under the colours of a foreign power. Keep it to yourself, Pal, but I'd say a month, month and a half…"

"Are you going back alone?"

"Don't think so, Pal. Taking a nice little group of lads back with me." Parrish smiled benevolently. "The International Brigade is a wide-open, growing concern." Parrish glanced at Michael reflectively and Michael felt that the Irishman was measuring him, questioning in his own mind what Michael was doing there, in his fancy suit in this fancy apartment, why Michael wasn't at a machine-gun this night instead of a bar.

"You looking at me?" Michael asked.

"No, Pal." Parrish wiped his cheek.

"Do you take my money?" Michael asked harshly.

"I'll take money," Parrish grinned, "from the holy hand of Pope Pius himself."

Michael got out his wallet. He had just been paid, and he still had some money left over from his bonus. He put it all in Parish's hand. It amounted to seventy-five dollars.

"See you later," Michael said. "I'm going to circulate."

"Sure, Pal." Parrish nodded coolly at him. "Thanks for the dough."

"Stuff it, Pal," Michael said.

"Sure, Pal." Parrish turned back to his drink, his wide, square shoulders a blue-serge bulwark in the froth of bare shoulders and satin lapels around him.

Michael walked slowly across the room towards a group in the corner. Long before he got there, he could see Louise looking at him, smiling tentatively at him. Louise was what Laura probably would call an "old girl" of his, except that, really, they had never stopped. Louise was married by now, too, but somehow, from time to time, for shorter or longer periods, she and Michael continued as lovers. There was a moral judgment to be made there some day, Michael felt. But Louise was one of the prettiest girls in New York, small, dark and clever-looking, and she was warm and undemanding. In a way she was dearer to him than his wife. Sometimes, lying next to each other on winter afternoons in a borrowed apartment, Louise would sigh, staring up at the ceiling, and say, "Isn't this wonderful? I suppose some day we ought to give it up." But neither she nor Michael took it seriously.

She was standing now next to Donald Wade. For a second, Michael got an unpleasant vision of the complexity of life, but it vanished as he kissed her and said, "Happy New Year."

He shook hands gravely with Wade, wondering, as always, why men thought they had to be so cordial to their wives' ex-lovers.

"Hello," Louise said. "Haven't seen you in a long time. You look very nice in your pretty suit. Where's Mrs Whitacre?"

"Having her fortune told," Michael said. "The past isn't bad enough. She's got to have the future to worry about, too. Where's your husband?"

"I don't know." Louise waved vaguely and smiled at him in the serious private manner she reserved for him. "Around."

Wade bowed a little and moved off. Louise looked after him.

"Didn't he used to go with Laura?" she asked.

"Don't be a cat," Michael said.

"Just wanted to know."

"The room," Michael said, "is loaded with guys who used to go with Laura." He surveyed the guests with sudden dissatisfaction. Wade, Talbot, and now another one had come in, a lanky actor by the name of Moran who had been in one of Laura's pictures. Their names had been linked in a gossip column in Hollywood and Laura had called New York early one morning to reassure Michael that it had been an official studio party, etc. etc…

"The room," Louise said, looking at him obliquely, "is full of girls who used to go around with you. Or maybe 'used to' isn't exactly what I mean."

"Parties these days," Michael said, "are getting too crowded. I'm not coming to them any more. Isn't there some place you and I can go and sit and hold hands quietly?"

"We can try," Louise said, and took his arm and led him down the hallway through the groups of guests, towards the rear of the apartment. Louise opened a door and looked in. The room was dark and she motioned Michael to follow. They tiptoed in, closed the door carefully behind them and sank on to a small couch. After the bright lights in the other rooms, Michael couldn't see anything here for a moment. He closed his eyes luxuriously, feeling Louise snuggle close to him, lean over and softly kiss his cheek.