Young Hearts Crying (6 page)

“Really?” Lucy looked as pleased as a child on her birthday. “Did he really?”

“Well, yeah, but you know how those things are. It may slip his mind. I mean it’s nothing to count on, or anything.”

“Couldn’t we call them?” she asked.

And he was silently exasperated. For a girl raised in the upper reaches of the upper class, she could be surprisingly dense about good manners. But then, perhaps good manners had never been
especially characteristic of millionaires in the first place; how could ordinary people ever know about that?

“Well, no, baby,” he said, “I don’t think that’d be too good an idea. I’ll probably run into him again on the train, though; we’ll work something out.” Then he said “No, but listen, let me give you the postscript to all this. When I finally got to the office my brains were kind of reeling. I knew I couldn’t face the job, so I went in to waste a little time with Brock, and I told him about Tom Nelson. When he’d heard it all he said ‘Well; that’s interesting. I wonder who
his
father is.’ ”

“Oh, that’s just
like
him, isn’t it?” Lucy said. “Bill Brock is always going on and on about how he hates cynicism in any form, but he’s really about the most cynical person I’ve ever known.”

“Wait, though; it gets worse. I said ‘Well, Bill, for one thing his father’s a pharmacist in Cincinnati, and for another I don’t see what the hell difference it makes.’

“And he said ‘Oh. Well, okay, then, I wonder whose cock he’s sucking.’ ”

Lucy was seized by a spasm of revulsion so acute that it forced her up from the table. The syllable “Ugh!” came from her distorted lips and she stood hugging herself with both arms as if chilled to the bone. “Oh, that’s vile,” she said, shuddering. “That’s the vilest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah, well, you know Brock. And anyway he’s been in a lousy mood for weeks. I think he’s having a few troubles with Diana.”

“Well, I’m not surprised,” she said as she began to clear the plates away. “I don’t know why Diana didn’t dump him long ago. I’ve never understood how she could’ve taken
up
with him.”

*

One Saturday morning Bill Brock called up, in unaccustomed shyness, to ask if he could come out to Larchmont alone that afternoon.

“Are you sure he said ‘alone’?” Lucy inquired.

“Well, he kind of slurred it, or elided over it, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. And he certainly didn’t say ‘we.’ ”

“Well, then, it’s over,” she said. “Good. Only, now we’re in for it: he’ll want us to sit around for hours while he pours out his broken heart.”

But it wasn’t that way – not, at least, in the first part of Brock’s visit.

“I mean, I’m all right in short-term relationships,” he explained to them, hunching forward on the sofa in readiness for a serious discussion of himself. “I know I am, because I always have been in the past. What I can’t seem to do is sustain a hell of a lot of interest over the – you know – over the long haul. I get
tired
of a girl, is what it amounts to. I get bored and then I get restless; simple as that. Frankly, I’ve never understood the concept of marriage. I mean, if it works for you people, fine – but then, that’s your business, right?”

For the past several months, he reported, Diana had been “making marriage noises. Oh, just a hint here and a hint there at first – those were easy enough to handle – but then it started getting worse. Finally I had to tell her, I said ‘Look, honey: let’s face a few facts, okay?’ So she agreed to move out of my place – she got an apartment with another girl – and we started seeing each other on a different basis, maybe twice a week at the most. That’s the way things were when we came out here that last time. And she enrolled in an acting class – you know how they have these little ‘Method’ classes all over town now, mostly run by broken-down actors trying to put a few dollars together? Well, that sounded like a nice idea; I thought it might be good
for her. But son of a bitch, it wasn’t more than a couple of weeks before she started going out with a guy she’d met in the class – some actor-boy, actor-twerp, actor-asshole; rich father out in Kansas City who pays him to stay away from home. Then three nights ago – and I swear to you, this was the worst night of my life – I took her out to dinner and she told me in this very cool, distant way – she told me she’d moved in with this guy. She ‘loves’ him, and all that shit.

“Well, Jesus, I went home feeling crippled, feeling like I’d been run over by a truck. I threw myself down on the bed” – here he lay back in the sofa and flung one forearm over his eyes to suggest a total abandonment to grief – “and I cried like a child. I couldn’t stop. I cried for hours, and I kept saying, ‘I’ve lost her. I’ve lost her.’ ”

“Well,” Lucy said, “it doesn’t sound so much as though you’d lost her, Bill; it sounds more as though you’d thrown her away.”

“Well, of
course
,” he said, his arm still covering his eyes. “Of
course.
And isn’t that the worst kind of loss? When you don’t even realize the value of something until you’ve thrown it away?”

Bill Brock spent the night in their spare room – “I knew it,” Lucy said later; “I knew he’d end up sleeping here” – and he didn’t leave until after lunch the next day. “Have you ever noticed,” she asked when they were alone again, “how your sympathy for someone’s story – anyone’s story – tends to evaporate when they get to the part about how long and hard they cried?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, at least he’s gone for now,” she said. “But he’ll be back, soon and often; you can count on that. And do you know what the worst part is? The worst part is we’ll probably never see Diana again.”

Michael felt his heart contract. He hadn’t even thought of that, but from the moment Lucy said it he knew it was true.

“You’re
always
expected to take one side or the other when a couple breaks up,” she went on, “and isn’t it funny how that can seem to work out almost entirely by accident? Because I mean if it had been Diana who called us – and it might just as easily have been – then
she’d
be our friend, and it wouldn’t’ve been much trouble to sort of drop Bill Brock out of our lives.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it, dear,” Michael said. “Maybe she’ll call us anyway. She might call anytime.”

“No. I think I know her well enough not to expect that.”

“Well, hell, we’ll call her, then.”

“How? We don’t even know where she is. Oh, I suppose we could find out, but even so I don’t think she’d be very happy to hear from us. We’re all stuck with the way things are.”

After a while, when she’d finished with the lunch dishes, she stood sadly drying her hands in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, and I did have such high hopes of being friends with her,” she said, “and with Paul Maitland, too. Didn’t you? They’ve both always seemed to be such good – such good people to know.”

“Mike Davenport?” said a shy, light-textured voice on the phone a few nights later. “Tom Nelson. Listen, my wife and I were wondering if you folks might come over Friday night. Can you come for supper?”

And so it came to seem, for both the Davenports, that they hadn’t lost out forever in their need for good people to know.

“Place isn’t much, as you’ll see,” Tom Nelson warned them after he’d come hurrying down from his upstairs apartment to let them in at the glass-paned front door. “Hard to keep things nice when you’ve got four kids.” And at the top of the stairs his wife stood smiling in welcome, the girl whose once-stubborn Catholicism might almost have jeopardized her husband’s career.

Her name was Pat. There were remnants in her face of a devout and fearful child of Cincinnati as she bent in the steam to pierce the boiling vegetables, or as she crouched and squinted at the oven door to withdraw and baste the roast, but when she sat laughing with her guests in the small living room, with a drink in her hand, it was clear that the Museum of Modern Art had had its way with her. She held herself very straight but without tension, wearing a fashionably simple dress, and her large, attractive eyes and mouth were able, as if by nature, to look merry and responsible at the same time.

The three younger boys had been put to bed, but the oldest, a pudgy six-year-old named Philip whose round face looked nothing like either of his parents, had been allowed to stay up and peer suspiciously at the visitors. At his mother’s urging he passed around a plate of salted crackers spread with liver paste;
then, after depositing the plate on the coffee table, he went back to stand beside his mother’s knee.

“We’d begun to think there wasn’t anybody in Larchmont,” Pat Nelson was saying, “who wasn’t just – you know – who wasn’t just sort of all Larchmont, inside and out.”

And Lucy Davenport assured her, eagerly, that she and Michael had begun to think the same thing.

They didn’t talk of painting or of poetry, as the Davenports had thought they might, but it didn’t take the Davenports long to see how foolish that expectation had been: professionalism could be taken for granted in company like this. Instead they talked almost entirely of trivial things.

They all abhorred the movies, though all admitted to having seen a great many of them, and so they entertained one another with movie jokes. What if June Allyson had been cast as Scarlett O’Hara? What if Dan Dailey had been given the Humphrey Bogart role in
Casablanca?
Would Bing Crosby or Pat O’Brien be the better choice to star in a movie biography of Albert Schweitzer? Then Michael asked, rhetorically, if anyone would ever know how many hundreds of movies of all kinds – comedy, love, war, crime, or cowboy – had contained the line “Look: I can explain everything.” And that, to his own shy surprise, struck the others as the funniest thing that had yet been said.

Philip was sent to join his brothers in what must have been a crowded, double-decked bedroom, and soon after that the party moved to the kitchen table. It was big enough to serve as a dinner table for four, but just barely, and the kitchen was still too warm from the cooking. On one corner of the floor, beyond the table and away from the stove, Michael saw the flat piece of galvanized tin beside a cardboard box, advertising Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, from which several fresh rolls of shelf-paper protruded.
He supposed that the paints, the ink, and the pens and brushes must be kept in the same box.

“Oh, please take off your coat and tie, Michael,” Pat Nelson said, “or you’ll
die
in here.” Then, a little later in the meal, she gazed at one of the steamed-up windows as if it might open onto bright vistas of the future. “Well, at least we’ll only be here a few more months,” she said. “Has Tom told you we’re moving to the country this summer? For good?”

“But that’s
terrible,”
Lucy said, with more heartfelt emphasis than seemed warranted. “I mean it’s wonderful for you, but terrible for us. We’ll have hardly gotten to know you before you go away.”

And Pat assured her, kindly, that it wouldn’t be far away: they were only going up into Putnam County. That was the next county north of Westchester, she explained, and it was mostly rural – there was scarcely any suburban element at all. She and Tom had made several trips up there to look around, until they’d found what struck them as the right house on the right piece of land, near the village of Kingsley. The house itself needed work, but the work was being done now; they’d been promised it would be finished and ready in June. “And it’s only a short drive from here – what is it, Tom, a little over an hour or something? – so you see it’ll be easy to keep in touch with all our friends.”

Lucy cut into another slice of cooling roast beef, and Michael could tell from her face that she was hurt by the phrase “all our friends.” Hadn’t the Nelsons made clear that they
had
no other friends in Larchmont? But then, chewing, she seemed to understand that Pat had meant all their friends in New York – the Museum of Modern Art crowd and the Whitney crowd, all the well-heeled, admiring people who’d taken to buying as many Thomas Nelson pictures as they could afford, as well as the jolly,
witty, insiders’ crowd of other young painters who were rapidly becoming successful too.

“Well, it sounds great,” Michael said heartily. Since removing his coat and tie he had unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt and rolled up the sleeves; now, hunched over his wine and speaking in a voice that he knew might strike Lucy as being just a little loud, he was determined to suggest that he too might soon be a man unburdened of mundane necessity. “Once I can manage to get the damn job off my back,” he said, “we’ll be ready to make a move like that ourselves.” And he winked conspicuously at his wife. “Maybe after the book’s out, babe.”

When dinner was over and they moved back to the living room, Michael discovered a bureau bearing six or eight precise miniatures of British soldiers in the full-dress uniforms of historic regiments – the kind of collector’s items that might have cost a hundred dollars apiece. “Hey, Jesus, Tom,” he said. “Where’d you get these?”

“Oh, I made ‘em,” Nelson said. “It’s easy. You start with an ordinary tin soldier, melt it down a little to change the look of it, build it up here and there with model-airplane glue, and all the rest of it is in the painting.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” One of the soldiers held a tall staff with a partially unfurled Union Jack, and Michael said “How’d you make the flag?”

“Toothpaste tube,” Nelson told him. “Piece of toothpaste tube’ll give you a pretty good flag, if you can get it to wrinkle the right way.”

Michael felt like saying You know what you are, Nelson? You’re too fucking much. Instead, after taking a drink from the heavy glass of bourbon in his hand, he said only that the soldiers were beautiful.

“Well, it’s just something I do for kicks,” Nelson explained,
“and besides, the boys like to watch. But I guess I always have been hooked on soldiers. Here, look—” and he pulled open a deep drawer of the cabinet. “These are the combat troops.”

The drawer was packed with hundreds of jumbled tin soldiers from the dime store – riflemen in all firing positions, or hauling off to throw grenades, machine-gunners seated or prone, other men crouched at the tubes of mortars – and it brought an unexpected pang of longing to Michael’s throat. He had once thought he must be the only boy in Morristown, New Jersey, if not in the world, who went on loving tin soldiers after the age of ten, when all other boys gave them up in favor of athletics. He had kept his own hoard of them in a box in the shadows of his closet and would often take them out and play with them during the hours before his parents woke up in the morning, until his father caught him at it once and told him to throw the God damn things away.