Young Hearts Crying (27 page)

And she was halfway to the city that day before she fully understood that stories were no longer her business. She was a painter now. If she couldn’t be a painter – well, if she couldn’t be a painter she had better give up trying to be anything at all.

“Lucy Davenport?” said a strong and vigorous voice on the phone one evening. “Carl Traynor.”

It was well over a year now since the strain and awkwardness of their last phone call, and she could tell at once that he didn’t have company anymore.

“…  Well, I’d love to, Carl,” she heard herself saying, as if her voice were an instrument suddenly freed from her mind’s control, and “Actually, I’m in town every weekday now, so that should make it easy for us to – you know – to get together.”

The address he’d given her, as she might have expected, turned out to be the same little Sixth Avenue bar where they’d spent those hours the last time. And he was waiting for her at the same table, getting to his feet in a mote-filled shaft of afternoon sunlight as she came in the door.

“Well, Lucy,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind this place. I thought it might be sort of like taking up where we left off.”

He looked less skinny, though it might have been a gaining of self-confidence more than weight, and he was much better dressed. His hands were steady, too, even before the first drink, and she noticed for the first time that they were nice-looking hands.

He had spent six months in Hollywood, he told her, employed to write a screen adaptation of a contemporary novel that he’d always liked, but the movie project had fallen apart in the casting because “they couldn’t get Natalie Wood for the lead.” Now he was home and almost broke again, almost back where he’d started – except, of course, that his own first book was long behind him.

“It’s a beautiful book, Carl,” she said. “Did it sell well at all?”

“Nah, nah, not well, but the paperback sale was fairly nice. And I still get enough mail to let me know that a few people out
there are reading the son of a bitch; I guess that’s all I should ever really have hoped for. What’s bugging me now, though, is that I’m about a third of the way into another one and I can’t seem to get it off the ground. I’m beginning to see what writers mean about second-novel panic.”

“You don’t seem panicky to me,” she said. “Everything about you now suggests a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.”

He knew what he was doing, all right. In less than twenty minutes he had her out of that bar and up in the dim seclusion of his apartment, a block or two away.

“Oh, baby,” he murmured as he helped her out of her clothes. “Oh, my lovely. Oh, my lovely girl.”

The only trouble at first was that one small, cold-sober part of her mind floated free of the rest of her; it was able to observe how solemn a man could be at times like this, how earnest in his hairy nakedness, and how predictable. You had only to offer up your breasts and there was his hungering mouth on one and then the other of them, drawing the nipples out hard; you had only to open your legs and there was his hand at work on you, tirelessly burrowing. Then you got his mouth again, and then you got the whole of him, boyishly proud of his first penetration, lunging and thrusting and ready to love you forever, if only to prove that he could.

But she liked it – oh, she liked it all, and that traitorous little part of her mind winked out to nothingness long before it was over. Then, as soon as her breathing and her voice came back to normal, she told Carl Traynor he was “marvelous.”

“You always know how to say just the right thing,” he said. “I wish I could do that.”

“Well, but you can; you do.”

“Sometimes, maybe; other times not. I can think of one or
two girls who might want to give you an argument on that point, Lucy.”

His place wasn’t very clean – she had an impulse to fall heavily to work with a scrub brush and a bucketful of hot water and ammonia – and the bathroom appeared to be the grubbiest part of it. But when she stepped out of the shower she found two freshly laundered towels on the rack, hung there as if in readiness for her visit. That was nice, and it was nice too when he brought her a long flannel bathrobe to wear: it hung to her ankles and made her skin feel good all the way down.

She straightened up his bed, though he told her not to bother with it; then, walking barefoot on the naked floor, she explored the rest of his apartment. It was a lot bigger than it had seemed at first, high and well-proportioned and probably bright in the morning hours, though its windows were filled with the sadness of sunset colors now, but it was almost bare – sparsely furnished and without decoration. There weren’t even very many books, and what few there were had been so carelessly shoved and jumbled on the shelves as to suggest impatience with the whole idea of being expected to own any books at all.

His writing table gave a first impression of jumble and impatience too, or even of chaos, until you saw the small, clean section of it where a portable typewriter had been shoved out of the way, where sharpened pencils were gathered in readiness, and where several pages of new manuscript lay face up, the top one showing almost as many words crossed out as words allowed to stand. It might not be Chip Hartley’s idea of a desk; but then, the idea of it was a far cry from anything in Chip Hartley’s understanding.

“Baby?” he asked from somewhere in the shadows behind her. “Can you stay awhile? I mean can you spend the night with me, or do you have to go back to wherever it is?”

And it took her no time at all to decide. “Well, if I can use your phone,” she said, “I think I’ll be able to stay.”

Soon she was spending three or four nights a week with him, and as many afternoons as she could manage; that was how they worked things out for almost a year.

There were times when she’d find him so lost in his nervous pacing and chain-smoking, talking too fast and absently pulling at the crotch of his pants the way little boys do, that she couldn’t believe he had written the book she admired so completely. But there were other times, more and more often, when he was calm and wise and funny and always knew how to please her.

“You’re really a very shy man, aren’t you?” she said one night when they were walking home from a small, awkward party that neither of them had enjoyed.

“Well, sure I am. How could you’ve sat through all those gruesome little New School sessions without knowing that?”

“Well, you always did seem ill at ease there,” she said, “but you were never at a loss for words.”

“ ‘At a loss for words,’ ” he repeated. “Jesus, I’ll never understand why so many people think shyness means being tongue-tied and bashful and not having the nerve to kiss a girl. That doesn’t even begin to cover the subject, don’t you see? Because there’s another kind of shyness that has you talking and talking as if you’re never going to stop, has you kissing girls even when you don’t feel like it because you think they may expect it of you. It’s a terrible thing, this other kind of shyness. It can get you into nothing but trouble, and I’ve suffered from it all my life.”

And Lucy settled her hand and wrist more snugly in his arm as they walked. She felt she was getting to know him better all the time.

Carl said once that he wanted to publish fifteen books before
he died, and to have no more than three of them – “or four, tops” – be the kind of books that would have to be apologized for. She liked the bravery of that ambition and told him she was sure he’d fulfill it; then later, secretly, she began to seek out an important place for herself in his career.

The idea of devoting her life to a man had stirred in her only once before, in the early days with Michael; and if it had come to nothing then, was that any reason to disparage the possibilities this time?

Carl might well be “hung up” in his second novel, as he kept saying he was, but Lucy’s presence could help him work it through. Then there’d be another book, and another and still others, with Lucy always faithfully at his side. And she knew there was no fear of Carl’s being intimidated by her money. He’d told her more than once – jokingly, but saying it anyway – that he’d love to let her fortune pay his way through life.

The difference in attitude here, she guessed, was that Michael Davenport’s stern independence arose from his never having known what poverty was. Carl Traynor had always known what it was, so he understood that it held no virtue – and he understood too that having an unearned income would imply no corruption.

There often seemed to be nothing Carl didn’t understand, or couldn’t understand after a moment’s reflection; that may have been part of what made him a compelling writer, and in any case it made him effortlessly kind.

Lucy discovered she could tell him things about herself that she’d never told anyone else – not even Michael; not even Dr. Fine – and that alone was enough to make her feel she had a profound investment in him.

And she would never have to give up painting. Her pictures might get steadily better and more plentiful with the years until
she became as thoroughly professional as he was, but there would never be any conflict – there’d be no basis for rivalry or even for comparison. The worlds of their work would be separate, and each might come to form a pleasurable complement to the other.

She could happily attend his publication parties or even go along on his book-promotion tours, if he asked her to, just as he could stand tall and proud and courteously smiling at the openings of her gallery exhibitions – lively, civilized gatherings where the presence of people like the Thomas Nelsons and the Paul Maitlands could always be taken for granted.

By the time they were both in their fifties, if not before, they might well command the admiration and envy of everyone they knew – and they might even be the kind of people that any number of strangers would give anything to meet.

But almost from the beginning there were harsh little troubles between them – quarrels that could sometimes seem bad enough to spoil everything.

Once in their early weeks together, at an old steak-and-potatoes restaurant that Carl said was his favorite place in the Village, she asked him about the girl who’d been his “company” at the time his book came out.

“Well,” he said, “that’s a story that doesn’t reflect very favorably on me. I’ll tell you the whole damn thing sometime, but suppose we let it ride for a while, okay?” And he stuffed his mouth with bread as if that might put a stop to any further questions.

She was willing enough to let it ride, if that was what he wanted, but instead he began to tell her the whole damn thing only a night or two later, in bed and within minutes after their lovemaking, which struck her as curiously inappropriate. And it took a long time to tell.

The girl was very young, he said, fresh out of college and filled with dreamy ideas about what she always called “the arts.” And she was an extremely pretty girl, too: Carl Traynor had thought she was wonderful, and when she first moved in with him he remembered thinking If I can just help her grow up a little, she’ll be perfect. But before long she turned out to be the only girl he’d ever known who drank more than he did.

“She’d fall down in bars,” he said, “and she’d fall out of chairs at parties. She’d be smashed out of her mind every night, and that meant I always had to be the responsible one: every morning I’d have to get her out of bed and into her clothes and out on the street for a cab – it always had to be a cab because she said the subway was ‘terrifying’ – and off to whatever dumb little editorial job it was she had uptown.

“So when the screenwriting deal came through I sort of dumped her – told her I wanted to go to California alone – and that night she tried to open the arteries in both of her wrists with a razor blade. Well, Jesus, talk about scared. I wrapped her up as well as I could and then I carried her all the way up to St. Vincent’s. Can you imagine that? Carrying her? There was some young Spanish doctor on duty in the emergency room that night, and he told me she hadn’t touched an artery; all she’d done was slice into a couple of veins, and he said he could stop the bleeding with tight bandages. She knew more than I did, though – she knew that any attempted suicide in New York can get you an automatic six weeks in Bellevue – so as soon as the bandaging was done she was up and off that table quicker than a cat. She got out through an alley and went running down Seventh Avenue so fast not even the cops could have caught her. And when I finally got her cornered in the vestibule of her old apartment house, where she’d lived before moving to my place, all she said to me was ‘Go away. Go away.’ ”

He sighed heavily. “So that was it. I think I did sort of love her – probably always will, in a way – but I don’t even know where she is now, and I’m not in any hurry to find out.”

There was a considerable silence before Lucy said “That isn’t a very good story, Carl.”

“Well, Jesus, I know it isn’t a – how do you mean?”

“There’s a little too much pleasure on the narrator’s part,” she said. “It’s a self-aggrandizing story. It’s a sexual braggart’s story. I’ve never cared much for stories like that. Why, for example, was it necessary to stress your having carried her to the hospital?”

“Well, because the traffic runs
downtown
on Seventh Avenue, that’s why. A cab would’ve taken much too long, and for all I knew she was bleeding to death.”

“Ah, yes. Bleeding to death for love of you. Listen, Carl: don’t ever write that story, okay? At least not the way you’ve told it. Because if you ever do it’ll only damage your reputation.”

“Well, I’ll be God damned,” he said. “Here we are in my bed at one o’clock in the morning, and you’re warning me about ‘damage’ to my ‘reputation.’ You’ve got some nerve, Lucy, you know that? Besides, I
told
you it was a story that didn’t—”

“—reflect very favorably on you. I know. That’s one of your favorite expressions, isn’t it? It’s a way of whetting people’s interest, right? Put ’em off, make ’em wait; then, when it’s least expected, let ’em have it.”

“Are we having a fight now?” he inquired. “Is that the deal? Am I supposed to launch some counterattack so we can be up and shouting at each other all night? Because if that’s what you have in mind, sweetheart, you’re outa luck. All I want to do is sleep.” And he turned away from her, but he wasn’t quite finished. After a moment, in a carefully controlled voice, he said “In the future, dear, I think it might be helpful if you could refrain from advising me on what not to write or how
not to write it or any other horseshit along that line. Okay?”