Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics)

by Richard Yates

  In the end Randolph had to wrestle him to the floor. The nurse brought a straitjacket; Randolph and Chadwick stuffed his arms into the sleeves of the thing, rolled him over and tied them behind him. When the straitjacket was secure they all retreated into the hall and Rose shut the door, which locked with an efficient click.

  “He’ll quiet down now,” Chadwick said.

  “Not necessarily, doctor,” Randolph said. “Not if I know him. He’s liable to go on like this for days.”

  “In any case,” Rose said, straightening his coat with trembling hands, “I doubt if we can keep him here.”

  It was hard to tell, from the thumping and shuddering of the locked door, whether Wilder was hitting it with his shoulder or his head.

  Through friends – and it often surprised him how many friends he had left – Chester Pratt had found a nice little house in the hills. It overlooked a foggy canyon, with the tops of palm trees rustling just below its porch, and it suited him perfectly: a good place to work, a good place to sleep, a good place to sit with a lemon Coke in his hand and watch the sun go down.

  All the poison was out of his system now. He was working well, if you could call writing a movie script “working,” and as soon as this job was over he would get back to his second novel. He would have to throw away a lot of what he’d done in New York and almost everything he’d done in Washington – bad work; bad work – but if he was lucky and careful he might finish the book in a year. And it would be good; maybe even better than Burn All Your Cities.

  Sometimes, bored with Munchin’s screenplay, he would get an idea for the book and drop everything until he’d written it out in the form of a note and stowed it away, face down, on the little pile of other notes that lay under a paperweight on one corner of his desk. And he took a miser’s pleasure in the accumulation of those papers: he liked to pick them up and test their thickness with his thumb. He was doing that when the phone rang.

  “Hi, baby,” he said. “… Hell, that’s okay; take your time. I won’t expect you till I see you…. Okay.”

  And he’d scarcely gotten settled at his desk when it rang again. “… Oh, hi, Bill,” he said. “… Tonight? Well, of course we’d like to; it’s just that I don’t know what time Pam’ll get back here. She just called and said she’ll be late. Well, look, let’s leave it this way: if you haven’t heard from me by six, that means we can make it. The Beverly Brown Derby at seven thirty…. Okay, Bill, thanks for calling. We’ll look forward to it…. Right. Okay, Bill….”

  Finally he was free of the phone and back at the manual labor of Munchin’s screenplay. How did a nice middle-class advertising man go crazy? Simple: he did it in a hundred and twenty-five pages of script, the first third of which were an easy rewrite of Jerry Porter’s turgid little Bellevue piece.

  At first he had planned to live in Hollywood only until he’d made enough money to go back East, but recently he’d changed his mind. He would stay here. This was, after all, the place where his luck had changed: the gentle climate, the good house, the lucrative job with Munchin, and best of all the marvelous coincidence of finding his little New Frontier girl again and getting her back. He didn’t quite trust her – she had left him before and might leave him again; and even though it had worked to his advantage he didn’t much like the way she’d treated this poor bastard Wilder – but it was fine to have her for the time being. She was like the glass of cold milk he drank at eleven o’clock each morning: she made him feel young and strong and full of good health. The future would take care of itself. He had learned in AA to take things a day at a time.

  He worked without interruption for two or three hours; then he heard her car pulling up to a stop outside and got up from the desk.

  “God, what an afternoon,” she said. “I don’t know if I can tell you about it or not.”

  “Sure you can tell me,” he said, “after you’ve had a drink.”

  He fixed the drinks – bourbon on the rocks for her and a lemon Coke for himself – while she arranged herself in one of the canvas chairs on the porch.

  “Oh, lovely,” she said after her first sip. “God, I needed that.” And then she told him everything: Chadwick, El Dorado, UCLA, and Rose’s saying “I doubt if we can keep him here.”

  “So where will they take him?”

  “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes and held the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “Oh, Chet, I don’t know, and I know it’s awful of me but I don’t much care. They’re doctors; they’ll work something out. At least he’s in good hands.”

  “Yeah,” Chester Pratt said. And he guessed she was right – there probably wasn’t anything she could have done – but he had to study her face for a second before deciding he still liked her.

  “… And I can’t help feeling this enormous sense of relief,” she was saying. “His problems are just – beyond me, that’s all; too much for me. He needs professional help, and that’s what he’ll get.”

  The sun was low. The light on the porch was the color of dry vermouth, and it flattered her face. How could anyone dislike a girl with cheekbones and eyelashes like that?

  “Are we eating in or out tonight?” she asked.

  “Out. We’re meeting Bill Costello at seven thirty.”

  “The awful little television man, you mean? The ‘Let’s Ask Daddy’ man?”

  “Come on, Pam, that’s not fair. He’s a good friend. God only knows where I’d be if he hadn’t been my sponsor, first in New York and then here. He’s done more for me than I can ever—”

  “Oh, that’s nonsense. You did it yourself.”

  “I never could have done it without his help. Besides, he’s getting older and he’s lonely. The least we can do is—”

  “All right. If you’re in one of your sentimental moods there’s nothing I can do about it. Do I have time for a shower?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’ll I wear?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You always look good.”

  But nothing prepared him for the way she looked when she came out of the bedroom wearing a short, backless dinner dress: she looked stunning. He wanted to tear the dress off, pick her up and carry her back to the bed; instead he settled for a courtly little kiss on the neck.

  “Oh, Chet,” she said, stretching up on tiptoe to receive the kiss. “You’re so nice and tall.”

  Chapter Ten

  Janice Borg agreed with her husband that Southern California was much less interesting, much less stimulating than the northern part of the state. In San Francisco they had stayed in the Fairmont Tower; they had ridden the cable cars and visited North Beach, where they’d browsed in the City Lights Bookstore and sipped espresso in an Italian café that featured old Caruso recordings. Then, in keeping with the leisurely pace of this long and happy summer vacation, they had taken their time driving down the coast. Janice pronounced Big Sur the most utterly beautiful place she had ever seen, and Paul made her laugh by saying she had better look hard and remember it well, because there would be nothing but plastic and palm-lined squalor when they got to L.A.

  What neither of them mentioned, because they had discussed it thoroughly before leaving New York, was that she would want time alone in Los Angeles to go and visit her former husband.

  It was 1970, a troubled year in many ways but one in which Janice Borg could count her blessings. The unspeakable war in Vietnam was still going on, but she thanked God for Tommy’s student deferment. Richard Nixon had become President – a thing that could almost certainly never have happened if Robert Kennedy had lived – but Paul said he might grow in the job.

  Paul had been silent for many miles when they turned off the coast highway onto Sunset Boulevard, and his profile looked a trifle grim, but Janice knew better than to interrupt his silences. They often meant he was thinking about Natalie, and that was understandable: there were times, less often, when she was quiet because she was thinking of John. They never lasted long, though, these little breakdowns in com
munication; that was one of the many wonderful things about their marriage.

  “Which sounds better?” he said at last. “The Beverly Wilshire or the Beverly Hilton?”

  “You decide. You always know best about hotels.”

  He always knew best about everything. She didn’t say that aloud for fear of sounding silly, but it was true. She had never known anyone whose judgment was so totally reliable.

  “Oh, I think this is charming,” she said as the palm trees swept past their car, and when they pulled up to the Hilton she said it was “lovely.”

  Their room was lovely too, and so was their dinner; everything was lovely until the following afternoon, when the time came for her to leave Paul and make the drive alone out to Camarillo.

  “I won’t go if you don’t want me to,” she said. “He’ll never know we were here.”

  “No,” Paul told her. “You’d better go. It’s the right thing to do.”

  It wasn’t that she dreaded seeing him as she negotiated the Freeways and then the dreary local roads, it was simply that she didn’t know what to expect. That was what made sweat break out in her scalp and under her arms.

  The state hospital looked pleasant enough from a distance, but up close you could tell what it was. Patients dressed in grey or green twill work clothes idled in the sunshine around the main door of John’s building, and on the lawn near the parking lot a couple of heavy, slow-moving parents were bathing their grown son. They had removed his twill shirt to wash the upper portions of him, using a soaped washcloth and a plastic bucket of steaming water; then, after his father had turned him to face the building, his mother dropped his pants and carefully swabbed between his legs.

  “Hey lady, gimme a dime for a cuppa coffee?” a toothless old man asked her in the doorway, and before she got to the elevator another old man plucked at her sleeve.

  “Hey lady, gimme a dime for a piece a cake?”

  The linoleum of the waiting room outside John’s ward was being mopped, and the angry-looking black man who mopped it talked steadily to himself as he worked. There were only three or four other visitors sitting at chrome-and-plastic tables around the room. A short, grey-haired man in green came out, and she didn’t recognize him until he drew a chair out from her table.

  “Hello, Janice,” he said.

  It wasn’t only that he’d turned grey; his face had gone slack and his eyes bland. He looked like a middle-aged man to whom nothing had ever happened.

  “It’s good to see you, John,” she said. “You’re looking very well.”

  “You too. What’re you doing in California?”

  “Just a vacation.” There was a pause. “Tom said to give you his love. And wait – look.” It was a relief to busy herself with her handbag. “Here, I’ve brought you some pictures of him.” She laid three snapshots on the table. “I took these at Harvard. Isn’t he a fine-looking young man? I know his hair looks a little strange, but that’s the way they’re all wearing it now.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he looks good. He looks tall.”

  “Five foot eleven. Almost six feet.”

  “Wow. That’s really something.”

  “And in another year he’ll be ready for law school. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Yeah. You want these back?”

  “No, they’re for you. I want you to keep them.”

  “Thanks.” And he put the pictures away in his shirt pocket. “How’s Paul?”

  “Oh, Paul’s fine. He said to give you his – very best.”

  “You two getting along well?”

  “Very well.”

  “Good.”

  For a little while they sat like strangers sharing a table in a cheap cafeteria. Then she said “John? Is there anything you need? Anything I could get for you while I’m here?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You have plenty of cigarettes?”

  “Oh, sure. Anyway, I’ve cut ’way down. I smoke less than a pack a day now.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful. Are there any – you know – activities for you here?”

  “Oh, they keep us pretty busy. In the mornings we generally have OT.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Occupational therapy. I’m in woodwork refinishing. Tables, chairs, things like that.”

  “I see.”

  “Then in the afternoons we have sports. I’m on the softball team.”

  “Oh? Does that mean you get out and play teams from – other hospitals, or whatever?”

  “No. It’s intramural.”

  “Oh.”

  “And when it rains we do different things. Sometimes we have dance therapy.”

  “Well, I imagine you enjoy that; you always were a good dancer.”

  “Oh, this isn’t social dancing. It’s interpretive.”

  “I see.”

  She knew her next question would be a difficult one, but she decided to ask it anyway. She might never be in California again; she might never see him again. She had to wait for a swelling in her throat to go down before she could trust her voice. “John,” she said, “have you made any plans or – you know – given any thought to what you might do when you leave here?”

  He looked puzzled, as if she had asked him a riddle. “Leave here?” he said.

  That was when an orderly came out and announced that visiting hour was over.

  Also available from Vintage

  RICHARD YATES

  Revolutionary Road

  ‘A masterpiece’

  Tennessee Williams

  Hailed as a masterpiece on its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright and beautiful young couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates follows Frank and April in their efforts to break free and the tragic consequences of their illusions.

  ‘The Great Gatsby of my time … One of the best books by a member of my generation’

  Kurt Vonnegut

  ‘A novel worth attending to’

  Julian Barnes

  ‘Easily the best novel I have read this year’

  Nick Hornby

  ‘A deft ironic novel that deserves to be a classic’

  William Styron

  Also available from Vintage

  RICHARD YATES

  The Easter Parade

  ‘Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce …’

  Over four decades Emily and Sarah Grimes grow into very different women. Sarah settles into a suburban marriage while Emily resists anything so tame. But happiness is hard to find.

  ‘The Easter Parade is the best modern novel I have read this year’

  Julian Barnes

  ‘Like a softer, subtler, less salty Updike, Yates expounds a poignant, suburban American realism that is as touching as it is real, and as beautiful as it is sad’

  Time Out

  ‘The rediscovery of Richard Yates, America’s lost novelist, year after year gives a guarantee of a wonderful read. Revolutionary Road is now seen as a great novel of suburban America and, for me, The Easter Parade is no less fine’

  David Hare

  ‘A brave, brilliant book’

  Sunday Herald

  ‘Richard Yates's best novel, which makes it wonderful’

  Joan Didion

  Also available from Vintage

  RICHARD YATES

  Young Hearts Crying

  ‘By the time he was twenty-three, Michael Davenport had learned to trust his own scepticism …’

  Young, newly married and intensely ambitious, Michael Davenport is a minor poet trying to make a living as a writer. His adoring wife Lucy has a private fortune that he won’t touch in case it compromises his art. She in turn is never quite certain what is expected of her. All she knows is that everyone else seems, somehow, happier.

 
In this magnificent novel, at once bitterly sad and achingly funny, Richard Yates again shows himself to be the supreme, tenderly ironic chronicler of the American Dream and its casualties.

  ‘Bad couples, sad, sour marriages, young hopes corroded by suburban life … These are bitterly perceptive books’

  New Statesman

  ‘Yates is a truthful and ruthless writer. He intends to spare his readers nothing’

  Guardian

  ‘It's an agonising study of artistic mediocrity, of post-war men and women who would like to be artists without being much good at anything. Over the madness, the drink and the moving resilience falls the long shadow of the Second World War. Nobody combines the powerful passage of history with complete accuracy of emotion like Yates. A masterpiece’

  David Hare

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  Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books acquired by the prestigious hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes both great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present.