Young Hearts Crying (40 page)
Read Young Hearts Crying Online
Authors: Richard Yates
He would walk these solid floors despising the memory of the funny little house in Tonapac, chagrined that he could ever have imposed such daily discomfort on Lucy and Laura for what now seemed no reason at all. Still, only fools consumed themselves with regret; and whenever he looked ahead, thinking of Sarah, it surprised him all over again to know that the world was ready to give him a second chance.
Sarah had been right on one important point, though: there
was
something unnecessarily bleak about Kansas. The earth was too flat, the sky was too big, and if you had to be outdoors on a clear day there was no way to escape the punishing sun until it finally, splendidly, went down. Cattle stockyards and a slaughterhouse lay
a mile or two beyond the university, and when the afternoon breeze came from that direction it carried a faint, nostril-puckering stench.
The house provided an excellent place to hide from all that for the first week or two – Michael even managed to complete a short poem called “Kansas” that seemed good enough to keep, though he would later throw it away – but then it was time for school.
And except for that brief series of lectures in New Hampshire, where the very exhilaration of lecturing had apparently been enough to drive him crazy, he felt unequipped for this kind of work.
Chain Store Age
might have been a repugnant way to make a living all those years, but nothing about it had ever frightened him; now he was clammy with fear each time he walked into a classroom. He couldn’t read the faces of these young strangers, couldn’t tell whether they were bored or daydreaming or paying attention, and the allotted time for each period was always much too long.
But he survived the lecture classes and the “poetry workshop” classes without incurring cause for shame, and survived the easier hours of conference with individual students as well; then, at home, he would hunch with a pencil over their lame, flimsy poems or their earnest and point-missing “papers” on poetry, and so he was able to believe he was earning his salary.
“Well, but why do you spend so much time at it?” Sarah asked him once. “I thought the whole point of a job like this was that it would give you some freedom for your own work.”
“Well, it will,” he told her. “Once I get the hang of this I’ll be doing it with my left hand. You’ll see.”
*
Only one drugstore in the college town carried the Sunday
New York Times,
and Michael bought it every week in order to frown for an hour over the Book Review section, learning of how younger poets he despised were building excellent reputations while older ones, a few of whom he liked, were rapidly losing ground.
Sometimes, after that small torture, he would pick through the theater pages too; that was how he found out that
Blues in the Night
had become the first smash hit of the Broadway season.
… Rarely if ever before on the American stage has a doomed interracial love affair been treated with the dignity, the delicacy, and the overwhelming gut-level power of this landmark work by Roy Kidd, under the brilliant direction of Ralph Morin.
It isn’t an easy play to watch – or rather it might not have been, if it weren’t for the extraordinary performances of Emily Walker as an aristocratic white Southern girl, barely out of her teens, and of Kingsley Jackson as her stubbornly defiant black lover. Both of these remarkable young people went out onto the Shubert stage as newcomers last Tuesday night, and both came back as stars. In at least one reviewer’s opinion, this show deserves to run forever.
Michael skipped the paragraph or two about the playwright because he didn’t want to know how young the son of a bitch was, and didn’t want to see him called a “dramatist”; then, further down in the column, he read this:
… Still, perhaps the highest accolades for this electrifying evening belong to Ralph Morin. As director of Philadelphia’s Group Theater for some years, he earned a reputation
for skill and sensitivity in any number of productions. But Philadelphia isn’t New York, and even a play as strong as
Blues in the Night
might have languished in obscurity if Mr. Morin hadn’t done everything right: assembled a near-perfect cast, drilled them with consummate artistry until every sound and silence was just to his liking, and then brought the show to town.
Interviewed in his Manhattan hotel suite yesterday, wearing a robe and pajamas though the hour was well past noon, Mr. Morin said he was “still in shock” over the play’s extravagant success.
“I don’t quite believe any of this,” he said with a disarmingly boyish smile, “but I hope it keeps on happening.”
At forty-two, with the kind of theatrical good looks that let you know he was once an aspiring actor himself, Mr. Morin can accurately be called a director who has paid his dues.
His wife Diana came up from their Philadelphia home for opening night but had to return the following day to look after their three small sons. “So the next thing now,” he said, “as soon as I can get my act together, is to find some decent place here for all of us to live.”
And it would seem that neither Diana nor the boys need have a moment’s concern about that: Ralph Morin is very, very good at getting his act together.
“What’re you reading?” Sarah inquired.
“Ah, some bullshit, is all. Some Sunday puff-piece about a guy I met once; he’s married to a girl I used to know. He’s directing a hit play on Broadway now.”
“You mean what’s-his-name?
Blues in the Night
and all that? Where’d you know him from?”
“Well, it’s a long story, dear. You’d only get bored if I tried to tell it.”
But he told it anyway, going easy on the part about his long infatuation with Diana, telling of Paul in a way that required no mention of the traded punches; then he tried to round it off with a disparaging account of Bill Brock’s visit to Philadelphia, but he could tell her attention was wavering because Bill Brock was someone she’d neither read about nor ever met.
“Oh,” she said when he was finished. “Yes, well, I can see how it all would sort of – connect for you now. It does sound like kind of a trashy play, though, doesn’t it? Oh, very ambitious and ‘relevant’ and everything, but trashy anyway. If it were a movie they’d call it an exploitation flick.”
“Right,” he said, and he was glad she’d said it first.
One afternoon he drove home from school and found two bright new bicycles standing near the garage – a surprise from Sarah – and he went quickly into the house to thank her.
“Well, I thought it might be good to get a little exercise,” she said.
“It’ll be great,” he told her. “I think it’s a great idea.”
And he meant it. They could ride away down the road over this endless prairie every afternoon; he could work the poisons of the job out of his system by pedaling hard with the wind in his face, gulping fresh air. And by the time they got back to the house, to take hot showers and change into clean, soft clothes, his tingling blood and quiet nerves would feel so good that he might not need more than a drink or two before dinner.
But there wasn’t any pleasure in their first day on the bicycles. She flew away from him like a bird – he couldn’t imagine where all the power came from in that delicate body and those slender legs – while he struggled to keep his wheels straight on the
asphalt. He might still be able to deliver a knockout punch in Tom Nelson’s living room, but his legs had gone rotten; that was the first of his bad discoveries this afternoon, and the second was that his lungs were rotten, too.
He knew the only way to overtake her was to stand up on the pedals, hunch over the handlebars, and pump his heart out; so he did that, with burning knees and a loose-lipped gasping for breath, and although he was nearly blind with sweat he could tell when he’d drawn up alongside her bike and finally passed it.
“How’re you doing?” she called.
Then he was obliged to let her get ahead of him again, because any athletic coach in the world would have told him he needed a rest. He let the bike come to a stop, crouched to one side of it, and forcibly emptied one and then the other of his nostrils onto the road; if he hadn’t done that he would have had to retch and puke in order to breathe.
When he was breathing again he looked into the shimmering distance and saw that Sarah was much too far away to permit his ever catching up; then he watched her make a wide turn to the other side of the road and begin the long ride home. When she approached and came sailing past him she smiled and waved, seeming to say it would be all right with her if he wanted to start his own journey home from here, so he turned the bike around and trailed her at an ever-lengthening distance. The main trouble now was that he kept veering out to the very edge of the asphalt, where it flaked off into irregular crusts and chunks that shuddered his tires and his spine; whenever that happened, with tall yellow weeds beginning to whip at his spokes, he would have to wrestle the handlebars to bring himself up onto the solid part of the road again before he could make any headway.
He saw Sarah rise and stand on her pedals to pump swiftly up
the little hill of their concrete driveway, then coast into the shadows of their garage, and he vowed to save enough strength so that he too could accomplish that final bit of the ride with authority and ease; but from the moment he hit the base of the driveway he knew it was out of the question. He had to get off the damned bike and walk it up to the garage, hanging his head, holding his jaws shut tight to stop himself from greeting his wife with something like Well, I guess you think you’re pretty fucking young, don’t’cha?
Later, after soaking in the shower and putting on a clean shirt and pants, he sat hunched over his whiskey in the living room and told her it wasn’t going to work. “I can’t do this, baby,” he explained. “I just can’t do this shit, that’s all. Just can’t.”
“Well, look, it was only the first time,” she began, and it chilled him to find that both her tone and her words were like Mary Fontana’s, or perhaps like those of any other nice girl trying to comfort an impotent man. “I know it’ll come back to you soon,” she was saying. “It’s only a knack, after all. The main thing is not to fight it, or strain for it; just try to relax. Oh, and next time I won’t be such a show-off; I won’t go tearing off way ahead of you like that. I’ll wait and ride along with you until you’re more comfortable, okay?”
Okay. And just as an impotent man might well be touched by such kindness in a nice, nice girl – knowing all the while that she didn’t know the half of it, fearing that the wretched business could never be set right – he agreed that they would go on “trying” with the bicycles every day.
There were faculty parties several times a month in Billings, and the Davenports went to most of them until Michael began to complain that they were all alike.
The walls in most faculty homes displayed giant black-and-white
photographs of old movie stars – W. C. Fields, Shirley Temple, Clark Gable – because this kind of decoration was said to be “camp”; in some houses too an entire wall would be given over to the spectacle of an American flag hung upside down, as proof of bitter and wholehearted opposition to the war in Vietnam. Once, finding his way to the bathroom in such a house, Michael came upon a mock recruiting poster:
Join the Army
Visit Exotic Places
And Kill People
“And I mean what kind of horseshit is that?” he asked Sarah as they drove home that night. “Since when has it made any sense to blame the war on the soldiers?”
“Well, it’s not a very good poster,” she said, “but I don’t think that’s what it was meant to suggest. I think the idea is more that everything about the war is wrong.”
“Then why isn’t that what it said? Christ’s sake, all the kids in the Army today are there because they were drafted, or because they couldn’t find work anywhere else. Soldiers are the
victims
of wars; everybody knows that.” Then, after a few miles of silence, he said “I don’t think I’d mind these parties so much if the people weren’t all so busy being ‘political.’ You get the feeling that if it weren’t for the Anti-War Movement they wouldn’t have anything in their lives at all. Or maybe all I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t mind them so much if I could ever count on getting a halfway decent drink. Jesus; wine. Wine on top of wine. And all of it warm as piss.”
So they found ways to avoid most of the parties, until one day when the English department chairman stopped Michael in the corridor, gave him a friendly tug of the sleeve, and made a half-joking
suggestion that it might soon be time for the Davenports to have a party of their own.
“Oh,” Sarah said that night. “I didn’t realize these things were sort of – obligatory.”
“Well, I don’t think they are, necessarily,” he told her. “But we have been acting a little aloof, dear, and that’s probably not a very good idea in a town as small as this.”
She seemed to be thinking it over. “Okay,” she said at last. “But if we’re going to do it, let’s do it right. We’ll have real whiskey, with a whole lot of ice, and we’ll put real bread and meat on the table instead of all this crackers-and-dip nonsense.”
On the afternoon before the party there was a phone call from a young man with a shy, hesitant voice. “Mike? I don’t know if you’ll remember me – Terry Ryan.” And the voice did sound familiar, but the name might not have helped if he hadn’t followed it quickly with “I used to be a waiter at the Blue Mill restaurant, in New York.”
“Hell, of course I remember you, Terry,” Michael said. “I’ll be damned; how are you? Where you calling from?”
“Well, the thing is I’m in Billings for a couple of days, and I—”
“Billings,
Kansas?”
And Terry Ryan gave a brief, self-effacing laugh that brought him instantly alive in Michael’s memory. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? It’s sort of my Alma Mater, after all – or at least it would have been, if I’d ever been able to pass the foreign-language requirement. All that was before I went to New York, you see.”
“So what’re you up to now, Terry? What’re you doing?”