Young Hearts Crying (3 page)

Finding the right kind of work for his left hand, though, was a little more difficult. In the course of several interviews he began to suspect that a job in an advertising agency might drive him out of his mind; instead he settled for employment in the “permissions” department of a medium-sized publishing house. His duties there amounted to little more than idleness: he spent much of every office day at work on his poems, and nobody seemed to care or even to notice.

“Well, that certainly sounds like an ideal situation,” Lucy said – and it might have been, except that the paychecks he brought home were barely enough to cover the groceries and the rent. Still, there was a reasonable hope that he’d be promoted – other people in that sluggish department were sometimes “taken upstairs” to receive real salaries – and so he decided to stick it out for a year. That was the year his twenty-sixth birthday came
around and found his book still far from finished, because he had thrown out many of its earlier, weaker poems; it was also the year they discovered that Lucy was pregnant.

By the time their daughter Laura was born, in the spring of 1950, he had quit fooling around in the publishing house and found a better-paying job. He was a staff writer now for a slick, fast-growing trade magazine called
Chain Store Age,
hammering out copy all day about “bold, revolutionary new concepts” in the business of retail merchandising. It wasn’t exactly the kind of work he could do with his left hand – these guys wanted a hell of a lot for their money – and there were times at his clattering typewriter when he would wonder what a man married to a millionairess could possibly be doing in a place like this.

He was always tired when he got home, badly in need of a couple of drinks, and there wasn’t even any hope of seclusion with his manuscript after dinner, because the room he’d once used for writing was now the nursery.

He knew, though, even if he did keep having to remind himself of it, that only a God damn fool would complain about the way things were going. Lucy had become the picture of a serene young mother – he loved the look that came over her face when she breast-fed the baby – and the baby herself, with her petal-soft skin and her round, deep blue eyes, was a constant source of wonder. Oh, Laura, he wanted to say when he slowly walked her to sleep, oh, little girl, just trust me. Trust me, and you’ll never be afraid.

It didn’t take him very long to get the hang of the work at
Chain Store Age.
When he was singled out for praise on several of his “stories” he began to relax – maybe it wasn’t really necessary to knock yourself out over this shit after all – and soon he made friends with another staff writer, an affable, talkative young man
named Bill Brock whose disdain for the job seemed even greater than his own. Brock was an Amherst graduate who had spent a couple of years as a labor-union organizer for electrical workers – “the best, most rewarding time of my life” – and was now deep in the writing of what he called a working-class novel.

“Look, I’ll give you Dreiser and Frank Norris and those guys,” he would explain, “and I’ll even give you the early Steinbeck, but for the most part there hasn’t
been
a proletarian literature in America. We’re scared shitless of facing the truth, that’s what it amounts to.” And then at other moments, as if sensing something faintly absurd in his own passion for social reform, he would laugh it off with a rueful little shake of the head and say he guessed he’d been born twenty years too late.

When Michael asked him over for dinner one night he said, “Sure; love to. Be okay if I bring my girl?”

“Well, of course.”

Then when he saw Michael writing down the Perry Street address he said, “I’ll be damned; we’re practically neighbors. We’re only a couple hundred yards from you, over on the other side of Abingdon Square. Good, then; we’ll look forward to it.”

And from the moment Bill Brock brought his girl into the Davenports’ apartment – “This is Diana Maitland” – Michael began to be afraid he would find himself secretly, achingly in love with her forever. She was slender and black-haired, with a sad young face that suggested a fine mobility of expression, and she carried herself a little like a fashion model – or rather with the kind of heedless, lanky grace that any training as a fashion model might only have refined and destroyed. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her, and he could only hope that Lucy wasn’t paying attention.

When the four of them were settled over their first or second drinks, Diana Maitland cast a brief, twinkling look at him.
“Michael reminds me of my brother,” she said to Brock. “Don’t you think? Not so much in the face, I mean, but in the general build and manner; sort of the whole personality.”

Bill Brock frowned and didn’t seem to agree, but he said, “That’s a great compliment anyway, though, Mike: she’s always been crazy about her brother. Very nice guy, too; I think you’d like him. Little moody and morose at times, but essentially a very –” And he held up one hand to ward off any objection from Diana. “Well, now, come on, baby, I’m not being unfair. You
know
he can be tiresome as hell when he goes in for all this brooding, heavy-drinking, Great Tragic Artist horseshit.” And as if confident of having silenced her, he turned back to the Davenports and explained that Paul Maitland was a painter – “Damn good one, too, from what I hear, and I mean at least you gotta give him credit: he works hard as hell at it and doesn’t seem to care if he ever makes a nickel out of it or not. Lives way the hell downtown on Delancey Street or some awful place, in a studio as big as a barn that costs him about thirty bucks a month. Does rough carpentry to pay the rent and buy the booze – are you getting the picture? A real tough customer. Anybody ever came along and offered him a job like
we’ve
got – you know? As a commercial artist or something? – if that ever happened he’d punch ’em right in the mouth. He’d think he was being compromised. He’d say they were trying to make him sell out – and that’s exactly the way he’d put it, too: ‘sell out.’ No, but I’ve always liked the hell out of Paul, and I admire him. I admire any man with the courage to go – you know – the courage to go his own way. Paul and I were at Amherst together, you see; if it hadn’t been for that I’d never have met this creature here.”

The phrase “this creature” echoed in Michael’s head throughout their dinner and for a long time afterwards. Diana Maitland might be only a girl at the table, courteously praising Lucy’s
cooking; she might be only a girl in the conversational hour or two that followed, and still a girl when Bill Brock helped her on with her coat in the vestibule and they said goodnight and their footsteps rang and faded across Abingdon Square toward Brock’s place, “their” place – but once they were home, with the door locked behind them and their clothes on the floor; once she lay thrashing and moaning in Brock’s arms, in Brock’s bed, she would be a creature.

There were other visits back and forth across Abingdon Square in the fall of that year. Each time Michael would steel himself to take the risk of glancing quickly from Diana to Lucy, hoping Lucy might turn out to be the more attractive of the two, and he was always disappointed. Diana kept winning the contest time and again – oh, Christ, what a girl – until, after a while, he decided to quit making those wretchedly secret comparisons. It was a dumb, dumb thing to do. It might well be something other married men did now and then, for little other purpose than to torture themselves, but you didn’t have to be very smart to know how dumb it was. Besides, when he and Lucy were alone and he could look at her from different angles and in any kind of light, it was always easy to believe she was pretty enough to last him a lifetime.

One ice-cold December night, at Diana’s urging, the four of them rode downtown in a cab to visit her brother.

Paul Maitland turned out to look nothing at all like Michael: he did have the same general kind of mustache, which he touched and stroked with shapely fingers in the momentary shyness of meeting strangers, but even that provided no real similarity because it was far more luxuriant – a fearless young iconoclast’s mustache as opposed to that of an office worker. He was lean and limber, in a masculine version of his sister’s style,
dressed in a Levi jacket and pants with a merchant seaman’s sweater worn under the jacket, and he spoke very courteously in a light, almost whispering voice that made you bend a little toward him for fear of missing something.

As he led his guests across his studio, a big, plain loft once used for small-factory facilities, they found they couldn’t see any of his paintings because everything lay in shadows cast by the glare of a streetlamp beyond the windowpanes. But in one far corner a great many yards of heavy burlap had been hung from ropes to form a kind of tent, and it was within this small enclosure that Paul Maitland made his winter home. He lifted a flap to usher them inside, and they discovered other people sitting around with red wine in the warmth of a kerosene stove.

Most of the names were lost in the perfunctory introductions, but by now Michael was less concerned with names than with clothes. Seated on an upended orange crate with a warm glass of wine in his hand, he was unable to think of anything but that he and Bill Brock must look hopelessly out of place here in their business suits, their button-down shirts and silk ties, a couple of smiling intruders from Madison Avenue. And he knew Lucy must be uncomfortable, too, though he didn’t want to look at her face and find out.

Diana was plainly welcome in this gathering – there had been cries of “Diana!” and “Baby!” when she’d first come crouching in under the burlap – and now she sat prettily on the floor near her brother’s feet, talking in an animated way with a partially bald young man whose clothes suggested he was a painter, too. If she ever got tired of Brock – and wouldn’t any first-rate girl get tired of Brock soon enough? – she wouldn’t have long to wonder where to look next.

There was another girl called Peggy who looked no more than nineteen or twenty, with a sweet grave face, a peasant
blouse and a dirndl skirt, and she seemed determined to prove she belonged to Paul. She sat as close as possible to him on the low studio couch that was apparently their bed; she never took her eyes off him, and it was clear that she would like to have her hands on him, too. He seemed scarcely aware of her as he leaned forward and lifted his chin to exchange a few laconic remarks over the top of the stove with a man on the orange crate next to Michael’s, but then when he sat back again he gave her a lazy smile, and after a while he put his arm around her.

Nobody in that dry, overheated little makeshift room looked more like an artist than the man on the crate next to Michael’s – he wore white overalls daubed and streaked with many colors – but he was quick to explain that he was “only a dabbler; only a well-meaning amateur.” He was a local businessman, a subcontractor in the building trades: it was he who supplied Paul Maitland with the part-time carpentry work that kept him alive.

“And I consider it a privilege,” he said, hunching closer to Michael and lowering his voice so that their host wouldn’t overhear. “I consider it a privilege because this boy’s good. This boy’s the real thing.”

“Well, that’s – that’s fine,” Michael said.

“Had a rough time of it in the war, you know.”

“Oh?” And this was one part of the Paul Maitland story that Michael hadn’t yet heard – probably because Bill Brock, who’d been classified 4-F during the war and was still touchy about it, would not have been inclined to provide the information.

“Oh, God, yes. Too young to’ve seen the whole thing, of course, but he was up to his neck in it from the Bulge right on through to the end. Infantry. Rifleman. Never talks about it, but it shows. You can see it in his work.”

Michael pulled his necktie loose and opened his collar, as if
that might give his brains a better chance to sort things out. He didn’t know what to make of any of this.

The man in overalls knelt to pour himself more wine from a gallon jug on the floor; when he came back he took a drink, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and began talking to Michael again in the same tone of confidential reverence. “Hell, New York’s crawling with painters,” he said. “The whole damn country is, for that matter. But you come across a boy like this maybe once in a generation. I’m confident of that. And it may take years; it may not even happen in his lifetime, God forbid” – here he reached down and rapped his knuckles on a slat of his crate – “but some day an awful lot of people are gonna walk into the Museum of Modern Art and it’ll be Paul Maitland all the way. Room after room after room. I’m confident of that.”

Well, okay, swell, Michael wanted to say, but do you think you could sort of shut up about it now? Instead he nodded in slow and respectful silence; then he peered across the kerosene stove at Paul Maitland’s averted face, as if a close-enough scrutiny of it might reveal some gratifying flaw. He considered Maitland’s having gone to Amherst – didn’t everybody know Amherst was an expensive school for society boys and intellectual lightweights? – but no, all those stereotypes were said to have broken down since the war; besides, he might have chosen Amherst because it had a good art department, or because it allowed him more time to paint than he’d have had at other colleges. Still, he must have enjoyed at least a taste of aristocratic languor there, after all that infantry soldiering. He had probably joined in a general taking of pains over just the right cut of tweeds and flannels and just the right kind of light, witty talk, and in a general vying for perfection at knowing how best to spend each careless weekend (“Bill, I’d like you to meet my sister Diana …”). Didn’t all that suggest something just a little
ludicrous about this headlong descent into lower bohemia and odd-job carpentry? Well, maybe; maybe not.

There were still a few inches of wine in the glass jug, but Paul Maitland announced in his customary mutter that it was time for a real drink. He reached into some recess of the hanging burlap and brought out a bottle of the cheap blended whiskey called Four Roses – he sure as hell hadn’t learned to drink
that
stuff at Amherst – and Michael wondered if they might now be permitted to see the side of him that Bill Brock had disparaged: the brooding, heavy-drinking, Great Tragic Artist horseshit.