Alone and silent again at the cream-colored table, he knew that everything he’d said was wrong. Would he always shoot his mouth off? Hadn’t the world taught him anything at all in fifty-three fucking years?
There was a clean pad of Sheraton notepaper on the table, with a white Sheraton pen beside it, and those fundamental tools of his trade were the only heartening things in sight.
Sometimes, if you wrote out your thoughts, it could help you put them in order. And so, bending over the job like a calm and steady professional, he wrote this:
Don’t torture me, Sarah. You’re either going to come here and live with me or you’re not, and you’re going to have to make up your mind.
That looked right; it seemed to achieve the right tone; it might even be the kind of lucky first draft that would never need revision.
Lucy Davenport’s address turned out to be one of the very old wooden houses considered the gems of the Cambridge real-estate business; that seemed entirely appropriate for a woman with something between three and four million dollars. But when she opened the door he thought at first that she didn’t look at all well: she was thin and gray, and there was something the matter with her mouth.
Very soon, though, when they were seated across from each other in a better light, he could see she was probably in excellent health. The small, strange contortions of her mouth must have been caused by a spasm of shyness in the doorway, of not knowing which of several kinds of smile to wear in greeting him (formal? reserved? friendly? affectionate?) and so, at the last flustered moment, of trying them all on at once. But her mouth was as controlled as the rest of her, now; and the rest of her-thin limbs, well-dressed gray hair and the kind of woman’s face called “handsome” – could be explained in an instant by her being forty-nine years old.
“You’re looking very well, Lucy,” he said, and she told him he looked very well, too. Was this the way long-divorced couples would always try to ward off silence when they began their hesitant little talks?
“I’m afraid I can’t offer you a drink, Michael,” she said. “I haven’t kept hard liquor in the house for years; but there’s some white wine. Would that be all right?”
“Sure. Fine.”
And while she was gone in the kitchen he looked around her place. It was as high and spacious as an heiress’s home ought to be, with a generous number of windows, but it was almost bare: a table, a sofa, and the fewest possible other places to sit. Then he noticed that none of her curtains matched. They were all hemmed to the same length and tied back with sashes made of their own fabric, but no two were alike. A red-and-white-striped curtain at one side of a window was paired off with a blue polka-dot curtain at the other; then in the next window a curtain of bright flowered chintz hung in contrast to one of rough, oatmeal-colored cloth – that was the way it went around the room. If he’d ever visited this house as a stranger, and especially as a boy, he would have thought some crazy lady must live here.
“What’s the deal on the – on the curtains?” he asked when she brought the glasses of wine into the room.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Well, I’m sort of tired of it now, but when I first moved in it seemed like an interesting idea: having everything clash on purpose. It wasn’t meant to suggest I’m an eccentric, you see, or that I’m a bohemian, either. It was meant more as a parody of both those possibilities.”
“A ‘parody’? I don’t get it.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything to ‘get,’ ” she said in some impatience, as if reproving the kind of dull-witted listener who assumes that every story must have a point. “Still, I suppose it was a little on the overly self-conscious side. I’ll probably put up regular curtains eventually.”
She wanted to hear about Laura, so he told her of a good time they’d had a year ago when Laura had brought three other girls over to the house.
“… And then toward the end of it they were all sitting around on the floor, giggling over inside jokes about boys and secrets, and I swear there wasn’t a single ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ or any other kind of smart-assed girl in the bunch of them. They were just girls, being silly together because they felt like it, acting younger than their age because they’d all had enough of trying to act older.”
“Well,” Lucy said. “That does sound – encouraging. I don’t quite see the point of graduate school, though. And why in Kansas? And why in a funny field like sociology?”
“Well, I think it’s mainly because she’s interested in a boy who’s in that department,” he explained. “That’s what girls tend to do, you see; they tend to go along with boys.”
“Yes; I suppose they do.”
Then she went to get a raincoat, hooked two fingers into the neck of it, and slung it jauntily over one shoulder, and he was reminded of a sweet Radcliffe girl who used to carry her raincoat around town the same way.
They walked several blocks to a dimly lighted restaurant called Ferdinand’s, the kind of place where you can tell at once that nothing on the menu will be worth half its price, and the way the headwaiter said “Good evening, Lucy” made clear that she was a regular customer.
“None of this faggoty stuff was here in the old days,” Michael said over his first drink.
“What faggoty stuff?” She looked as though she might be ready for an argument.
“Oh, well,” he said quickly, “I didn’t mean this place, necessarily, but there’s a slick, fake, ‘campy’ atmosphere all over Cambridge now. I keep seeing little cafés with names like the ‘Déjà Vu’ and the ‘Autre Chose.’ It’s as if everybody in town had decided to fall in love with bad ideas. And you can even see it beginning to happen in Boston itself.”
“Well, styles change,” she said. “There’s nothing anyone can do about that. We can’t have it be nineteen forty-seven forever.”
“No; no, we sure can’t.” And now he wished he hadn’t said anything. They weren’t getting off to a very good start. He kept his eyes down and didn’t look up at her face until she spoke first.
“How’s your health been, Michael?”
“Mental health, you mean? Or the other kind?”
“Both kinds; all kinds.”
“Well, I don’t think my lungs are in very good shape,” he said, “but that’s nothing new. And I don’t even think about going crazy anymore because it’s fear that drives you crazy; then in the end it’s going crazy that leaves you with nothing but fear.”
It was the same thought he’d tried to express to Sarah, on the day of the bad picnic lunch, but this time he seemed to have put it more clearly. Maybe the difference was that Lucy’s curtains had made him suspect she might be a little crazy herself; or maybe – and this was probably closer to the truth – it was just that some things would always be easier to discuss with someone of your own age.
“There was a while there, back in Kansas,” he told her, “when I thought I might get a poem out of all that – make some big-assed statement about fear and madness – but I scrapped it. Dumped it. The whole idea began to seem morbid.” Only after saying “morbid” did he remember it was Sarah’s word. “And the funny part,” he said then, “the funny part is I may never even have gone crazy in the first place. Isn’t that possible? Maybe Bill Brock was more than a little out of line that night; maybe his signing that commitment paper says more about him than it ever will about me. I don’t want to insist on that, but it’s worth considering. And here’s another one: Isn’t it possible that psychiatrists give themselves a whole lot more credit than they ever deserve?”
Lucy looked thoughtful, but he wasn’t sure if he would get an answer until she said “Well, I think I see what you mean. I spent a very long time with that therapist in Kingsley, and afterwards it all did seem to have been pointless. Utterly pointless.”
“Good,” he said. “I mean, you know; it’s good that you see what I mean, is all.” Then he raised and held out his drink across the table. “So listen” – and he winked to let her know she could
take it as a joke if she wanted to. “Listen: Fuck psychiatry, okay?”
She hesitated only a moment before picking up her own glass and clinking the rim of it against his. “Okay,” she said without smiling. “Fuck psychiatry.”
This was better. It could almost be said that they were getting along.
When the waiter had set heavy plates before them, Michael thought it might be safe to open a new topic.
“What brought you back here, Lucy? Is it okay to ask you that?”
“Why wouldn’t it be okay?”
“Well, I just meant I don’t want to inquire into your personal life, that’s all.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose I moved back because it seemed sort of like coming home.”
“Yeah; I’ve had that sense of ‘home’ about it, too. But I mean everything’s so different in your case. You could easily go anywhere and do—”
“Oh, sure: ‘go anywhere and do anything.’ I can’t tell you how often those words used to occur to me. But the question is greatly simplified now, you see, because there’s hardly any money left. I’ve given almost all of it away.”
This was something that would take a little while to sink in. Lucy without money? In all the years he’d known her, he could never have imagined such a revelation: Lucy without money. And he didn’t even want to think of what his own life might have been if Lucy had been without money from the start. Better? Worse? How would anybody ever know?
“Well, Jesus, that’s – Jesus, that’s really something,” he said. “Would it be okay to ask who you’ve given it to?”
“I’ve given it to Amnesty International.” And she pronounced that name with a shyness and pride that let him know it meant the world to her. “Are you familiar with the work they do?”
“Well, just barely; just from reading the papers. But I know it’s an – admirable organization. I mean those people aren’t just fooling around.”
“No,” she said. “No, they certainly aren’t. And I’ve become very active with them now, too.”
“How do you mean ‘active’?”
“Oh, I serve on some of their committees and help organize some of their meetings and panel discussions, and I write a lot of their press releases; things like that. They may send me to Europe in a month or two; at least that’s what I’m hoping for.”
“Good. That’s very – that’s very good.”
“I like this work, you see,” Lucy said, “because it’s real. It’s real. Nobody can deny it; nobody can shrug it off, or make fun of it, or ever take it away. There are political prisoners. There is injustice and oppression all over the world. When you do this kind of work you’re in touch with reality every day, and that simply wasn’t true in any of the – any of the other things I’ve tried.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I heard you’d tried a few things.”
The quick, slight lifting and hardening of her face made clear at once that he shouldn’t have said that.
“Oh,” she said. “You heard. How did you hear?”
“Well, from the Nelsons, is all. And I think they really miss you, Lucy; they wanted me to be sure to give you their love.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “Well, they’re both very good at teasing, aren’t they, those Nelsons. Teasing in the sense of ridicule, I mean, as well as in the sense of eternally coy flirtation. It took me years to figure that out.”
“Well, now, wait. Where do you get ‘ridicule’? I don’t think anybody’s ever ‘ridiculed’ you. You’re too tough a girl for that.”
“Oh?” And she narrowed her eyes. “Would you like to bet? Well, listen: maybe you were spared from knowing this – and I think I must always have been at considerable pains to spare you from knowing it – but sometimes when I look back over my life I can’t find anyone there but a ridiculed, picked-on, wretchedly unpopular little boarding-school girl whose only friend in the world was her art teacher. And I may never even have told you about the art teacher, because she was one of my secrets for years until I tried to put her in a story once, long after you’d gone.
“Miss Goddard. A funny, lanky, lonely girl not very much older than me; very intense; very shy – oh, and possibly a flaming dyke, too, though that side of it never occurred to me at the time. But she told me my drawings were beautiful, and she meant it, and it was almost more than I could bear.
“I was the only girl in school allowed into Miss Goddard’s apartment to have sherry and English biscuits in the afternoons, and I felt sanctified. I felt awed and sanctified at the same time; can you imagine? Can you imagine a more wonderful combination of feelings than that, for someone like me?
“All I wanted then was to be eligible in some way – to qualify – as a participant in what Miss Goddard always called ‘the world of art.’ Isn’t that a sad, fanciful expression, when you think about it? ‘The world of art’? And for that matter, isn’t ‘art’ itself a maddeningly shifty little word? In any case, I think I’d like to propose another toast, if I may.” And Lucy brought her wine glass up to the level of their eyes.
“Fuck art,” she said. “I mean really, Michael. Fuck art, okay? Isn’t it funny how we’ve gone chasing after it all our lives? Dying to be close to anyone who seemed to understand it, as if that could possibly help; never stopping to wonder if it might be hopelessly beyond us all the way – or even if it might not exist? Because there’s an interesting proposition for you: what if it doesn’t exist?”
He thought it over, or rather made a grave little show of pretending to think it over, holding his own drink firmly on the table.
“Well, no, I’m sorry, dear,” he began, knowing at once that the “dear” should have been edited out of the sentence, “I can’t go along with you on that one. If I ever thought it didn’t exist I think I’d – I don’t know. Blow my brains out, or something.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she told him, putting her glass down again. “You might even relax for the first time in your life. You might quit smoking.”
“Yeah, well, okay, but listen. Do you happen to remember the long poem in my first book, years ago?”
“ ‘Coming Clean.’ ”
“Right. Well, that’s what got me hired here at whaddyacallit. At Boston University. The guy even wrote me a letter and told me so. He said – he said he thinks it’s among the finest poems written in this country since the Second World War.”
“Well,” she said. “Well, that’s certainly very – I’m very proud for you, Michael.” She looked quickly down, perhaps in embarrassment at having said as intimate-sounding a thing as “proud for you,” and he was embarrassed, too.
Soon, then, they were walking quietly back through the Cambridge whose style he no longer understood and wouldn’t even want to find out about now, if he could manage to settle on the Boston side of the river. But it was good to be walking with such a nice, brave, forthright woman – a woman who knew how to speak her mind when she felt like it, and who understood the restorative value of silence.
When they reached her house he waited until she’d found the key to her door; then he said “Well, Lucy, this has been really nice.”
“I know,” she said. “I enjoyed it, too.”
He took hold of her shoulder, very lightly, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Stay well, now,” he said.
“I will,” she promised him, and there was just enough light in the street to suggest that her eyes were glistening. “And you too, Michael, okay? You too.”
As he walked away and hoped she was watching his back – did other men ever want women to watch their backs? – it struck him that Sarah had scarcely come into his mind for three hours.
Well, his mind would be filled with her again soon enough. The words he’d written on that Sheraton note pad would still be there on the table – “Don’t torture me, Sarah” – and might by now have been picked up and scrutinized by some Sheraton chambermaid, working the late shift, who had let herself into the room to turn down his bed.
And what a lousy l
ine! Maudlin, hysterical, asking for grief, “Don’t torture me, Sarah” was about as bad a line as “Oh, don’t leave me” or “Why do you want to break my heart?” Did people really say things like that, or was it a kind of talk heard only in the movies?
Sarah was too nice a girl ever to be charged with “torturing” a man; he had always known that. Still, she had never been the kind of girl who would collaborate in allowing her future to fall apart, and that was something he’d always known about her, too.
Soon, now, fifteen hundred miles from here, she would be putting the Kansas house in order for the night: the child asleep, the television blind and silent, the dishes washed and put away. She might be wearing her knee-length cotton robe – blue, with a pattern of strawberries – the one he’d always liked because it showed her legs off well, and because it had always meant she was his wife. He knew how it smelled. She would almost certainly be thinking over what they’d said to each other on the phone this afternoon, and the little vertical crease between her eyebrows would be deep with perplexity.
The Sheraton was still some distance away – the glowing red sign on top of its roof could barely be discerned from here – but Michael didn’t mind walking; nobody had ever died of it. And he’d begun to find there were small satisfactions in having lived more than half a century: your very way of walking along the street could suggest how peaceful and responsible you had grown; there would be no more plunging ahead in pursuit of ephemeral things. Given good-enough clothes and shoes, you could always look dignified whether you were or not, and almost everybody could be counted on to call you “sir.” The bar at the hotel would be open for business; that was nice because it meant Michael Davenport could sit in its murmurous shadows, alone with his skepticism, and have a drink before going upstairs.
She might come and live with him; she might not; and then there was another dreadful possibility: she might come and stay with him only a little while, in a spirit of tentative compliance, waiting for her better judgment to set her free.
“… Everybody’s essentially alone,” she’d told him, and he was beginning to see a lot of truth in that. Besides: now that he was older, and now that he was home, it might not even matter how the story turned out in the end.
Young Hearts Crying Page 39
