Young Hearts Crying

by Richard Yates

  “This time I’m trying for an entirely different kind of thing. I want it to be a quiet, deceptively modest piece of work. I’m trying for a kind of serenity and balance in the writing. I’m trying more for esthetic values, you see, than for dramatic effects.”

  They were standing at his door, with Lucy holding the manuscript in its manila envelope, and she had begun to wish he’d stop talking. She would rather just have been given the thing, and been allowed to read it the way any stranger would, but he couldn’t seem to let her go without all this explaining and instruction.

  “I think the best thing,” he was saying, “would be to go through it first at your normal reading speed, then go through it again more slowly to look for any places that you think might be improved – might be expanded or cut back or changed in some other way. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Oh, and listen: you know the old analogy of the iceberg? How seven eighths of it are under the surface and only the tip is the part you can see? Well, that’s sort of what I’m after here. I want the reader to sense that all these ordinary little events imply the presence of something huge and even tragic down beneath. Do you see how that works?”

  And she told him she would keep it in mind.

  In Tonapac that night, after a dinner with Laura and a talk with her that was long and careful enough to prove she was still a conscientious mother, Lucy went to bed early and settled herself to read.

  She read it through without quite being able to acknowledge how disappointed she was; then, after a fitful sleep and a small breakfast eaten without appetite, she sat down to read it again.

  She guessed she could appreciate the esthetic values, and she could certainly see what he’d meant by “modest,” if not by “deceptively” modest.

  It was tame, bland, boring stuff. Making her way through its technically perfect sentences, waiting and waiting for something to come alive on the page, she couldn’t believe this was the same writer whose other book had enthralled her with its bite and power and swiftly gathering momentum, and the comparison made her feel betrayed.

  There was a further sense of betrayal when she came upon the twenty pages that she’d once told him were “beautiful” – they seemed enervated now by being embedded in the larger dullness.

  And she could no longer believe that Carl had based the character of Miriam on his former wife, because no woman of flesh and blood could ever have been as insipid as this. The trouble wasn’t that he’d tried to make her excessively virtuous, it was that he’d allowed her always to be right. Her every perception was something Carl plainly agreed with and plainly expected his readers to agree with too; and hardly any of the dialogue rang true because she always said exactly what she meant.

  Miriam was prone to philosophical ruminations – shapely little essays that would interrupt the narrative for whole pages at a time, and their very shapeliness betrayed a fiction writer’s straining to meet the requirements of an alien form. Lucy couldn’t help but wonder, in one essay after another, if Carl had gone to all that trouble because he thought it was the way a college-educated man would write.

  There was probably enough “story” in the thing – he needn’t have worried about that – but it was the kind of story any competent, mediocre novelist could have told. Miriam was shown in the early chapters as a neglected child; then she was a lonely girl, briefly in love with several boys who had little time for her, until she met the man you knew she would marry, a poor and unstable young commercial writer with high ambitions, and that was as far as the first half went.

  But it seemed clear that almost anyone could guess at how the second half would go: you could already tell it wouldn’t be a successful marriage; you knew there’d be disagreements in which Miriam would always speak with the voice of reason; you knew she would emerge from the divorce as a brave and self-sufficient woman, and that her orderly, philosophical habits of thought would sustain her through the final page.

  If Carl Traynor ever did produce fifteen books, this one was almost certainly destined to be among those that would have to be apologized for. This particular iceberg would always be safe at any distance: there was nothing under the water.

  Even so, Lucy didn’t like the harshness of her own judgment. Walking alone in the shade of her big yard, on her last day before going back to the city, she tried to give the manuscript the benefit of every doubt. She was willing to admit now that she might have been unfair to it because – well, because she might be getting tired of Carl. And how could you ever tell when you were getting tired of a man? Any intimacy had to accommodate certain amounts of impatience and boredom; didn’t everybody know that?

  It often seemed that she’d been tired of Michael Davenport for years before their separation; still, she knew that if it hadn’t been for the acute discomfort of their final few months they might still be married. They might have found a renewal of interest in each other, and that might even have been a good thing, if only for Laura’s sake.

  The way to handle this business with Carl, she decided, was to offer encouragement. If she couldn’t say she “loved” the thing, at least she could express praise for the sentences and a few of the scenes; the more she thought it over, the more she found there were any number of nice things she could tell him that wouldn’t exactly be lies.

  So that was how she handled it, once she was back in his apartment, and he took it well. He was clearly disappointed, but it was clear too that his own interest in the book would be enough to keep him working until it was done. The analogy of the iceberg didn’t come up again, and she was glad enough to leave it alone: she was afraid that if she asked him what huge and tragic element was supposed to lie beneath the surface of Miriam’s story he might give her a ponderous look and say “The human condition,” or something like that.

  There were hot summer afternoons in Carl’s place when Lucy would torture herself by thinking of him as a failure. She would sit pretending to read a magazine but paying close attention to the subtly moving shape of his back as he hunched over his pencil, and for an hour or more she’d let her imagination do its worst.

  There could never be fifteen books in this uncertain, mistake-making, self-pitying man. There might at best be two or three more, each worse than the last; then he would talk and drink his way through the rest of his life, having girls and telling them about his other girls, getting teaching jobs and being as ineffectual in all of them as he’d been at the New School. He might die early or late, but he would die knowing that except in a single novel he’d had nothing to say.

  And she would despise herself for that pattern of thought. If she had so little belief in Carl Traynor, what was she doing here?

  Sometimes she’d get up and go into the kitchen, because the kitchen could always remind her of domesticity with Carl at its best, and there her bitterness would usually subside. It wasn’t “belief” in a man that mattered anyway – certainly not in terms of his professional future; if it were, there wouldn’t be hundreds of millions of women devoted to men with no discernible future at all. And besides, this second novel was only half finished. There was still a chance that he could find ways of bringing it to life. There was even a chance that she might help.

  “Carl?” she said one day, coming out of the kitchen in a determinedly casual stroll. “I think I have what may be a pretty good idea about Miriam.”

  “Oh?” he said without looking up. “What’s that?”

  “Well, this is nothing specific; it’s more of a general thing.” And she remembered at once that those were the words Jack Halloran had used, the night he said her whole performance had been stagey.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if you might be a little in danger of letting her develop into a strong person.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said, and he was looking steadily at her now. “Where’s the danger? What’s supposed to be the matter with a strong person?”

  “Well, I was thinking of something George Kelly said once.
He said the distinction between strong people and weak people always falls apart under scrutiny, and that’s why it’s always been too sentimental an idea for a good writer to trust.”

  “Oh. Well, look, sweetheart, I think I have what may be a pretty good idea too. Suppose we let George Kelly repair the fucking elevators, okay? And suppose we let me write the fucking novels.”

  One September afternoon the big-windowed, handsome old façade of the Art Students League had been made to glisten nobly in a very light, drizzling rain. Lucy could take time to study the way the building looked, almost as if she were planning to paint a picture of it, because she was comfortably settled in a bright delicatessen across the street. For some weeks now it had been her habit to come here every day after school for a bagel and cream cheese, with a cup of tea; that was the small reward she allowed herself for having worked hard and well. But she’d known from the start that it had another purpose too: it was a way of stalling, of killing at least half an hour until she had to go down to Carl’s place.

  And on this particular afternoon, from the moment he opened the door for her, she knew there was going to be trouble.

  “Jesus, talk about bad days,” he said. “All I did today was fight with my agent – he thinks I ought to have this book done by now – and throw away twenty-seven pages that must’ve cost me six weeks’ work.” She could tell from his voice and his breath that he’d been drinking whiskey. “How do other people get through their lives?” he demanded, and he pulled hard at the crotch of his pants. “I mean lawyers and dentists and insurance men and guys like that? I guess they play tennis and golf and go fishing, but all that’s out of the question for me because I’ve gotta work all the time. Oh, and I got a deadly little notice from the IRS this morning – they want a whole lotta money outa me. Everybody wants money outa me, even the phone company; even the landlord. I’m a month late with the rent and he’s making it sound like the end of the world. Course, I can’t expect you to understand this kind of thing: rich people don’t even know what money means. Or I guess they know what it means, but they don’t know what it costs.”

  They were seated across from each other in his dim living room now, and Lucy hadn’t yet said a word.

  “Well, I’m not wholly unfamiliar with what it costs,” she began, “but that’s something we needn’t go into now. The main thing now is that you shouldn’t be distracted by these financial problems. I can easily let you have whatever it’ll take to settle your debts.”

  And his face made clear that he didn’t know what to say. He had certainly wanted her to make the offer, but hadn’t thought it would come so quickly. If he accepted it at once, all the drama would go out of his evening; still, if he made some show of pride and defiance, he might not get the money.

  And so, for the present, he avoided both alternatives. “Well,” he said. “This is going to take a little thinking over. Get you a drink?”

  No other man she’d known had made drinking such a necessity – even made her feel incomplete without it – and for that reason it was extremely heartening tonight, as she took hesitant sips of a bourbon and water, to find that she didn’t really want it. She didn’t much care for the taste.

  She didn’t really want to be sitting in this big, awkwardly furnished room, either, and it was hard to believe that she’d spent so much time here for so long. If she had ever felt she belonged here, even at first, it wasn’t an easy thing to remember.

  Except for her house, where her daughter lived, there was only one place now where Lucy Davenport belonged.

  She had worked for nine hours today on a painting that was almost finished and almost excellent. In another day or two she’d have it – she’d know that it didn’t need another stroke or another touch – and Mr. Santos would know it too. That was where she belonged: in a bright, murmurous, fine-smelling studio where everything was light and line and form and color.

  “Okay,” Carl said. “I guess we might as well get down to business on this thing. The Federals want something close to five thousand dollars, and all the little bills’ll probably bring it up to six. How does a loan of six thousand strike you?”

  “I expected it to be more than that,” she said, “from the way you were talking.” And she got her checkbook out of her purse.

  “We can establish the payment period at whatever number of months seems reasonable to you,” he said. “And we’ll make it include whatever the current rate of interest is; I can find that out tomorrow at the bank.”

  “Oh, I don’t think any of that’ll be necessary, Carl,” she told him as she finished writing out the check. “I don’t think we need to talk about payment periods and interest rates. It doesn’t even have to be a loan, as far as I’m concerned.”

  He was up and walking, pulling at his pants again; then he turned on her, his eyes narrow and bright, and pointed to the check in her hand. “Okay,” he said. “So it doesn’t have to be a loan. Well, if it’s not gonna be a loan, I’ll tell you what you’d better do. You’d better take that check and turn it over; then on the other side, just above the place where I’m supposed to endorse it, you’d better write: ‘For services rendered.’ ”

  “Oh,” Lucy said. “Oh, that’s vile. Even if you’re drunk, Carl, even if you think you’re only kidding, that’s vile.”

  “Well, there’s a nice little new one for my ever-growing collection,” he said, walking away from her again. “I’ve been called a lotta things by a lotta girls, sweetheart, but nobody ever said ‘vile’ before.”

  “Vile,” she said. “Vile.”

  “So maybe this is the fight we’ve both been waiting for. Wouldn’t that be a break? Take us both off the hook? Maybe now you’ll never have to drag yourself all the way down here from art school when you don’t want to see me. Maybe I’ll never have to spend any more afternoons getting half smashed because I don’t want to see you. Jesus, Lucy, has it really taken you this long to figure out we’re bored half to death with each other?”

  She was on her feet and going through his closet, looking for things of her own. There were three or four dresses, a good suede jacket, and two pairs of shoes. But there was nothing to carry the stuff in – not even a paper shopping bag – so she shut the closet door on all of it with a resolute little slam.

  “I think I’ve been fully aware of this boredom,” she said, “or at least of my own intense boredom with you, for a great deal longer than you might care to believe.”

  “Good,” he said. “Swell. That means there won’t be any crying, right? There won’t be any recriminations or silly shit like that. We’re clean. Well: Good luck to you, Lucy.”

  But she made no reply. All she did was get out of there as fast as she could.

  On the long journey back to Tonapac that night she began to wish she had said “Good luck” to him, too. It might have lessened the clumsiness of her departure; and besides, he was a man who needed to be wished good luck. She couldn’t remember now whether she’d torn the six-thousand-dollar check in half or whether she’d dropped it whole and negotiable on his floor; but that didn’t matter. If the check was whole it would probably come back to her in the mail in a few days, along with a gracefully worded little note of apology and regret. And that would enable her to return it to him, with a very brief note of her own in which the phrase “Good luck” would be easy to achieve.

  Chapter Seven

  Laura gained forty pounds when she was fifteen, and there were other surprising changes in her too.

  Words like “cool” and “groovy” came to replace “neat” in her vocabulary, but the more remarkable thing was that she now only rarely employed her vocabulary at all.

  This child who’d been a chatterbox all her life, sometimes driving both her parents to exasperation by seeming never to know when to stop talking – this quick, nervous, skinny little girl had taken on the habits of silence and secrecy, along with all that excess flesh, and she wanted to be alone most of the time.

  Her bedroom, once
a place of teddy bears and scattered Barbie-doll clothing, was now a dim and private sanctuary for the sweet soprano wailings of Joan Baez.

  After a while Lucy found she could tolerate Joan Baez – there was even a faintly soothing quality in that voice, if you listened with only part of your attention – but she couldn’t bear Bob Dylan.

  What had given this college kid the arrogance to appropriate a poet’s name? Why couldn’t he have learned to write before writing songs for himself, or learned to sing before singing them in public? Why hadn’t this bogus folk troubadour taken a few lessons on his guitar – or even on his wretched harmonica before setting out to capture children’s hearts by the tens of millions? There were afternoons when Lucy had to walk around the backyard for an hour or more, hugging her arms or clasping her hands tight at her waist, just to escape the sound of him.

  When the Beatles broke out she thought they were agreeably spirited, disciplined performers, but in their first few recordings she wondered why they were trying to sound like American Negroes:

  Whin Ah-ah-ah

  Say thet suh’thin’

  Ah think you’ll unduh-stan’

  Whin Ah-ah-ah

  Say thet suh’thin’

  Ah wunna hole yo’ han’

  She liked them better later, after they’d relaxed into their own English accents.

  Most of the decorations in Laura’s room were giant photographs of singers, boys and girls, but one day Lucy found her putting up a new poster that had nothing to do with music. It seemed, in fact, to have nothing to do with anything at all: it was a reproduction of an abstract painting that might have been the work of an insane person.

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “Oh, it’s just psychedelic art.”

  “What kind of art? Can you give me that word again?”

  “You never heard of it?”

  “No, I never have. What does it mean?”