The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

by Richard Yates

  Eileen and I had never known such a glow of success. Late one night I was trying to make plans, wondering aloud whether to go back to Remington Rand or look for a better job, when Eileen said, “Oh, listen: let’s do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “You know. Go to Paris. Because I mean if we don’t do it now, while we’re young enough and brave enough, when are we ever going to do it at all?”

  I could scarcely believe she’d said that. She looked, then, very much the way she’d looked acknowledging the applause after her scene from Dream Girl—and there was a touch of the old secretarial “toughness” in her face too, suggesting that she might well turn out to be a sturdy traveler.

  Because everything happened so fast after that, the next thing I remember clearly is the cramped farewell party in our cabin, or tourist-class “stateroom,” aboard the SS United States. Eileen was trying to change the baby’s diaper on an upper berth, but it wasn’t easy because so many people were crowded into the small room. My mother was there, seated on the edge of a lower berth and talking steadily, telling everyone about the National Association of Women Artists. Several employees of Botany Mills were there, and several other random acquaintances, and Dan Rosenthal was there too. He had brought a bottle of champagne and an expensive-looking hand puppet, in the form of a tiger, which the baby wouldn’t appreciate for another two years.

  This tense gathering was what I’d heard Eileen describe on the phone a few times as “our little shipboard soignée”—I didn’t think that word was right but didn’t know enough French to correct her. There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother’s throat. She wore a nice spring suit, with a rich little feathered hat that had probably been bought for the occasion.

  “. . . Well, but you see we’re the only national organization in the country; our membership is up in the thousands now, and of course each member has to submit proof of professional standing as an artist before we’ll even consider their application, so we’re really a very . . .” And the deeper she settled into her monologue the farther she allowed her knees to move apart, with a forearm on each one, until the shadowy pouch of her underpants was visible to all guests seated across from her. That was an old failing: she never seemed to realize that if people could see her underpants they might not care what kind of hat she was wearing.

  Dan Rosenthal was the first to leave, even before the first warning horn had sounded. He said it had been very nice to meet my mother, shaking hands with her; then he gravely turned to Eileen with both arms held out.

  She had finished with the diapering—finished too, it seemed, with all concern for any of the other visitors. “Oh, Dan,” she cried, looking sad and lovely, and she melted fast against him. I saw his heavy fingers clap the small of her back three or four times.

  “Take care of my friend the promising writer,” he said.

  “Well, sure, but you take care, Dan, okay? And promise to write?”

  “Of course,” he told her. “Of course. That goes without saying.”

  Then he let her go, and I sprang to his service as an escort upstairs to the main deck and the gangplank. We were both quickly winded in climbing, so we took our time on the sharply curving, paint-smelling staircase, but he talked a lot anyway.

  “So you’re gonna send back a whole bunch of stories, right?” he asked me.

  “Right.” And only dimly aware of paraphrasing his Levittown plans, I said, “I’m gonna write my ass off over there.”

  “Well, good,” he said. “So it turns out you didn’t need that shitty little art school after all. You’ll never have to sneak around pretending to be an artist and playing hooky all day, and conspiring with a bunch of very ‘casual’ Frenchmen to rob the United States. That’s good. That’s fine. You’ll be doing this whole thing on your own, with money you’ve earned from your fucked-up lungs, and I’m proud of you. I mean it.”

  We were up on the open deck now, facing each other in the cluster of people near the gangplank.

  “So okay,” he said as we shook hands. “Keep in touch. Only, listen: do me a favor.” He stepped back to pull on his topcoat, which flapped in the light wind, and to shrug and settle it around his neck; then he came up close and looked at me in stern admonishment. “Do me a favor,” he said again. “Don’t piss it all away.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, even after he’d winked to show he was mostly kidding, until it occurred to me that I had everything he must ever have wanted—everything he’d resigned himself, since his father’s death, never to wish for again. I had luck, time, opportunity, a young girl for a wife, and a child of my own.

  A great, deep ship’s horn blew then, frightening dozens of seagulls into the sky. It was the sound of departure and of voyage, a sound that can make the walls of your throat fill up with blood whether you have anything to cry about or not. From the railing I saw his thick back descending slowly toward the pier. He wasn’t yet far away: I could still call some final pleasantry that would oblige him to turn and smile and wave, and I thought of calling, Hey, Dan? Regards at home! But for once I managed to keep my mouth shut, and I’ve always been glad of that. All I did was watch him walk away between fenced-off crowds and into the heavy shadows of the pier until he was gone.

  Then I hurried back down those newly painted, seaworthy stairs to get my mother off the boat—there wouldn’t be many more warning horns—and to take up the business of my life.

  Saying Goodbye to Sally

  JACK FIELDS’S FIRST novel took him five years to write, and it left him feeling reasonably proud but exhausted almost to the point of illness. He was thirty-four then, and still living in a dark, wretchedly cheap Greenwich Village cellar that had seemed good enough for holing-up to get his work done after his marriage fell apart. He assumed he’d be able to find a better place and perhaps even a better life when his book came out, but he was mistaken: though it won general praise, the novel sold so poorly that only a scant, brief trickle of money came in during the whole of its first year in print. By that time Jack had taken to drinking heavily and not writing much—not even doing much of the anonymous, badly paid hackwork that had provided his income for years, though he still managed to do enough of that to meet his alimony payments—and he had begun to see himself, not without a certain literary satisfaction, as a tragic figure.

  His two small daughters frequently came in from the country to spend weekends with him, always wearing fresh, bright clothes that were quick to wilt and get dirty in the damp and grime of his terrible home, and one day the younger girl announced in tears that she wouldn’t take showers there anymore because of the cockroaches in the shower stall. At last, after he’d swatted and flushed away every cockroach in sight, and after a lot of coaxing, she said she guessed it would be okay if she kept her eyes shut—and the thought of her standing blind in there behind the mildewed plastic curtain, hurrying, trying not to shift her feet near the treacherously swarming drain as she soaped and rinsed herself, made him weak with remorse. He knew he ought to get out of here. He’d have had to be crazy not to know that—maybe he was crazy already, just for being here and continuing to inflict this squalor on the girls—but he didn’t know how to begin the delicate, difficult task of putting his life back in order.

  Then in the early spring of 1962, not long after his thirty-sixth birthday, there came a wholly unexpected break: he was assigned to write a screenplay based on a contemporary novel that he greatly admired. The producers would pay his way to Los Angeles to meet with the director, and it was recommended that he remain “out there” until he finished the script. It probably wouldn’t take more than five months, and that first phase of the project alone, not to mention the dizzying prospect of subsequent earnings, would bring him more money than he’d made in any previous two or three years put together.

  When he told his daughters about it, the older girl asked him to send her an inscribed photograph of Richard Chamberlain; the younger one had no requests.<
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  In someone else’s apartment a jolly, noisy party was held for him, closely attuned to the jaunty image of himself that he always hoped to convey to others, with a big hand-lettered banner across one wall:

  GOODBYE BROADWAY

  HELLO GRAUMAN’S CHINESE

  And two nights later he sat locked alone and stiff with alcohol among strangers in the long, soft, murmurous tube of his very first jet plane. He slept most of the way across America and didn’t wake up until they were floating low over the miles upon miles of lights in the darkness of outer Los Angeles. It occurred to him then, as he pressed his forehead against a small cold window and felt the fatigue and anxiety of the past few years beginning to fall away, that what lay ahead of him—good or bad—might easily turn out to be a significant adventure: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.

  For the first two or three weeks of his time in California, Jack lived as a guest in the sumptuous Malibu home of the director, Carl Oppenheimer, a dramatic, explosive, determinedly tough-talking man of thirty-two. Oppenheimer had gone straight from Yale into New York television during the years when there were still strictly disciplined “live” plays for the evening audience. When reviewers began to use the word “genius” in writing about his work on those shows he’d been summoned to Hollywood, where he’d turned down many more movie projects than he accepted, and where his pictures rapidly made a name for him as one of what somebody had decided to call The New Breed.

  Like Jack Fields, Oppenheimer was a father of two and divorced, but he was never alone. A bright and pretty young actress named Ellis lived with him, prided herself on finding new ways to please him every day, often gave him long, rapturous looks that he seemed not to notice, and habitually called him “My love”—softly, with the stress on “my.” And she managed to be an attentive hostess too.

  “Jack?” she inquired at sunset one afternoon as she handed their guest a drink in a heavy, costly glass. “Did you ever hear what Fitzgerald did when he lived out here at the beach? He put up a sign outside his house that said ‘Honi Soit Qui Malibu.’”

  “Oh yeah? No, I’d never heard that.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful? God, wouldn’t it have been fun to be around then, when all the real—”

  “Ellie!” Carl Oppenheimer called from across the room, where he was bent over and slamming cabinet doors behind a long, well-stocked bar of rich blond wood and leather. “Ellie, can you check the kitchen and find out what the fuck’s happened to all the bouillon?”

  “Well, certainly, my love,” she said, “but I thought it was in the mornings that you liked bullshots.”

  “Sometimes yes,” he told her, straightening up and smiling in a way that suggested exasperation and self-control. “Sometimes no. As it happens, I feel like making up a batch of them now. And the point is simply that I’d like to know how the fuck I can make bullshots without any fucking bouillon, you follow me?”

  And as Ellis hurried obediently away, both men turned to watch the movement of firm, quivering buttocks in her skintight slacks.

  By then Jack had grown eager to find a place of his own, and perhaps even a girl of his own, and so as soon as the screenplay was outlined—as soon as they’d agreed on what Oppenheimer called the thrust of it—he moved out.

  A few miles down the coast highway, in the part of Malibu that looks from the road like nothing more than a long row of weather-beaten shacks pressed together, he rented the lower half of a very small two-story beach house. It had a modest picture window overlooking the ocean and a sandy little concrete porch, but that was practically all it had. He didn’t realize until after moving in—and after paying the required three months’ rent in advance—that the place was very nearly as dismal and damp as his cellar in New York. Then, in a long-familiar pattern, he began to worry about himself: maybe he was incapable of finding light and space in the world; maybe his nature would always seek darkness and confinement and decay. Maybe—and this was a phrase then popular in national magazines—he was a self-destructive personality.

  To rid himself of those thoughts he came up with several good reasons why he ought to drive into town and see his agent right away; and once he was out in the afternoon sun, with his rented car purring along past masses of bright tropical foliage, he began to feel better.

  The agent’s name was Edgar Todd, and his office was near the top of a new high-rise building at the edge of Beverly Hills. Jack had been in to talk with him three or four times—the first time, when he asked how to go about getting the inscribed photograph of Richard Chamberlain, it had turned out to be a matter that Edgar Todd could settle with a single quick, casual phone call—and each time he’d grown more and more aware that Edgar’s secretary, Sally Baldwin, was a strikingly attractive girl.

  At first glance she might not quite have fallen into the “girl” category because her carefully coiffed hair was gray, with silver streaks, but the shape and texture of her face suggested she wasn’t more than thirty-five, and so did the slender, supple, long-legged way she moved around. She had told him once that she “loved” his book and was certain it would make a wonderful movie some day; another time, as he was leaving the office, she’d said, “Why don’t we see more of you? Come back and visit us.”

  But today she wasn’t there. She wasn’t at her trim secretarial desk in the carpeted hall outside Edgar’s office, nor was she anywhere else in sight. It was Friday afternoon; she had probably gone home early, and he felt a chill of disappointment until he saw that the door of Edgar’s office was ajar. He knocked lightly, twice, then shoved it open and went inside—and there she was, lovelier than ever, seated at Edgar’s enormous desk with the spines of at least a thousand shelved, bright-covered novels forming a backdrop to her sweet face. She was reading.

  “Hello, Sally,” he said.

  “Oh, hi. Nice to see you.”

  “Edgar gone for the day?”

  “Well, he said it was lunch, but I don’t think we’ll see him again till next week. It’s nice to be interrupted though; I’ve been reading the worst novel of the year.”

  “You do Edgar’s reading for him?”

  “Well, most. He doesn’t have the time, and anyway he hates to read. So I type up little one- and two-page summaries of the books that come in, and he reads those.”

  “Oh. Well, listen, Sally, how about coming out for a drink with me?”

  “I’d love to,” she said, closing the book. “I was beginning to think you’d never ask.”

  And in something less than two hours later, at a small shadowed table in the bar of a famous hotel, they were shyly but firmly holding hands because it was clear and settled that she would come home with him tonight—and, by implication, for the whole weekend. Looking at her, Jack Fields had begun to feel as calm and strong and full of blood as if the notion of his being a self-destructive personality had never occurred to him. He was all right. The world was still intact, and everybody knew what made it go around.

  “Only, look, Jack,” she said. “Could we make another stop first? Here in Beverly? Because I’ll have to pick up a few things, and anyway I’d like you to see where I live.”

  And she directed his driving up the shallow grade that forms the first residential part of Beverly Hills, before the steeper slopes begin. He discovered that all the roads there were arranged in graceful curves, as if their designers had been unable to bear the thought of straight lines, and that there were very tall, elegantly slender palm trees at precisely measured intervals. Some of the big houses along those roads were handsome, some were plain, and some were ugly, but they all suggested wealth beyond the comprehension of an ordinary man.

  “Now if you take your next left,” Sally said, “we’re practically home. Good. . . . Here.”

  “You live here?”

  “Yup. I can explain everything.”

  It was a vast white mansion of the Old South, with at least six columns rising from its porch to its lofty portico, with a great many sun-bright windows, with a
long extension of itself in the form of a wing on one side, and, beyond a swimming pool, with several connected outbuildings of the same color and style.

  “We always go in this way, past the pool,” Sally said. “Nobody ever uses the front door.”

  And the ample room she led him into from the pool terrace was what he guessed would be called a den, though it might easily have been a library if she had somehow contrived to bring Edgar Todd’s thousand novels home from the office. Its high walls were paneled in pleasingly dark wood, there were deep leather sofas and armchairs, and there was a fireplace with small flames fluttering in it, though the day was mild. An arrangement of leather-padded wrought-iron benches was built out around the hearth, and on one of the benches sat a pale, sad boy of about thirteen, facing away from the fire and holding his clasped hands between his thighs, looking as though he had come to sit here because there was nothing else to do.

  “Hi, Kick,” Sally said to him. “Kicker, I’d like you to meet Jack Fields. This is Kicker Jarvis.”

  “Hello, Kicker.”

  “Hi.”

  “You watch the Dodger game today?” Sally asked him.

  “No.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “I don’t know; didn’t feel like it.”

  “Where’s your lovely mother?”

  “I don’t know. Getting dressed, I guess.”

  “Kicker’s lovely mother is an old friend of mine,” Sally explained. “She’s the one who owns this tremendous place; I just live here.”

  “Oh?”

  And when the boy’s mother came into the room a minute later, Jack thought she was lovely—as tall and graceful as Sally and even better looking, with long black hair and with blue eyes that lighted up in automatic flirtation at the sound of her name: Jill.