The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

by Richard Yates

  Making Susan laugh had never been easy unless you had something really funny to say, but it was always well worth the effort if you did. He could remember staying late in the office, when she was ten or twelve—or, hell, right on up through her high-school years, for that matter—in order to sort out all the funny things that came into his head and to save only one, the best, for trying out on Susan when he got home.

  Oh, she had been a marvelous child. And although it had seemed to surprise her, it was no surprise at all to him when she was accepted into one of the finest colleges in the country. They knew an exceptional person when they found one.

  But how could anyone have guessed she would fall in love with her history teacher, a divorced man of twice her age, and that she would then insist on going with the man to his new job at a state university, even though it meant forfeiting the Turnbull tuition that had been paid in full?

  “Dear, look,” he had said in the dormitory this afternoon, trying to reason with her, “I want you to understand this: It isn’t the money. That’s not important, apart from its being a little on the irresponsible side. The point is simply that your mother and I feel you’re not old enough to make a decision like this.”

  “Why bring Mother into it?” she said. “Why do you always need Mother to support whatever it is you want?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I’m not doing that. But we’re both deeply concerned—or I’ll put it this way, if you like: I’m deeply concerned.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I love you. Do you love me?”

  And so he had walked right into it, like a comedian walking into a thrown custard pie.

  He knew she might not really have meant it, even if she’d thought she did. Girls of that age were so busy being overwhelmed by romance and sex that they didn’t even know what they were saying half the time. Still, there it was—the last thing he had ever expected to hear from his favorite child.

  And he was ready to crumple up and cry all over again as he held the car down to the speed limit on the Interstate, but he fought back the tears because he had to keep his eyes clear, and because his wife and the younger girls were waiting at home, and because everything else that made sense in his life would be waiting there too; and besides, no civilized man would go to pieces twice in the same day.

  As soon as she was alone, Susan hurried to David Clark’s apartment and into his arms, where she cried for a long time—surprising herself, because she hadn’t meant to cry at all.

  “Oh, baby,” he said, stroking her shuddering back. “Oh, now, baby, it can’t have been all that bad. Come and have a drink and we’ll talk it over.”

  David Clark was neither strong nor handsome, but the bewildered look that had blighted his boyhood was long submerged now in a face that suggested intelligence and humor. For years he had made it a point of honor not to mess around with the girls in the classes he taught. “There isn’t any sport in it,” he would explain to other teachers. “It’s taking unfair advantage. It’s shooting fish in a barrel.” It was shyness too, and a terrible fear of rejection, though he didn’t usually mention those aspects of the matter.

  But the whole of that argument had vanished some months ago when he found he could get through a lecture only by letting his gaze go back time and again, like that of a man seeking nourishment, to Miss Andrews in the front row.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty,” he told her during their first night together. “Oh, baby, you’re like nothing else I’ve ever known. You’re like—you’re like—oh, Jesus God, you’re extraordinary.”

  And she told him, in whispers, that he had opened a whole new world for her. She told him he had brought her to life.

  Within a very few days she moved in with him, leaving only enough of her belongings in the dormitory room to make it “presentable,” and so began the happiest time in David Clark’s memory. There was never an awkward or a disappointing moment. He couldn’t stop marveling at how young she was, because she was never silly and often wise. He loved to watch her walk around his place, naked or dressed, because the look on her sweet, grave face made clear that she felt at home.

  “Oh, don’t go away . . .” That was the cry, or the plea, that had broken from David Clark’s mouth as if wholly beyond his control with almost all the women he’d known since his divorce. Several girls had seemed to find it endearing, others had been baffled by it, and one sharp-tongued woman had called it “an unmanly thing to say.”

  But after the first few nights with Susan he rarely fell back on that line. This magnificently young, long-legged girl, whose flesh held the very pulse and rhythm of love, was here to stay.

  “Hey, Susan?” he said once. “Know what?”

  “What?”

  “You make me feel calm. That may not sound like a very big deal, but the point is I’ve wanted to be calm all my life, and nobody else has ever made me feel that way.”

  “Well, that’s certainly a nice compliment, David,” she said, “but I think I can top it.”

  “How?”

  “You make me feel I know who I am.”

  On the afternoon of her father’s visit, when she tried to explain how she’d felt on seeing her father cry, David did his best to soothe and comfort her. But before long she withdrew from him to grieve in solitude, in another room, and the silence went on a little too long for his liking.

  “Look,” he told her. “Why don’t you write him a letter. Take three or four days over it, if you want, to make it nice. Then you’ll be able to put the whole thing behind you. That’s what people do, haven’t you noticed? People learn to put things behind them.”

  They were married a year and a half later, in a Presbyterian church near the vast university campus where David was then employed. They had a spacious old apartment that visitors frequently found “interesting,” and for a while they felt little need of anything to do except take pleasure in each other.

  But soon David began to worry long and hard about the outrage of the war in Vietnam. He lectured angrily about it in the classroom; he helped to circulate petitions and to organize campus rallies; and he got quietly drunk over it a few times, alone, stumbling to bed at two or three in the morning and muttering incomprehensibly until he passed out in the warmth of Susan’s sleep.

  “You know something?” he asked her one evening in the kitchen, when he was helping her wash the dishes. “I think Eugene McCarthy is going to emerge as the greatest political hero of the second half of this century. He makes the Kennedy brothers look sick.”

  And later that night he began to complain that he’d never liked academic life in the first place. “Teachers simply aren’t plugged in to the world,” he told her as he walked dramatically around the living room with a drink in his hand. She was curled up on the sofa with her sewing basket, mending a torn seam in a pair of his pants.

  “Christ’s sake,” he said, “we read about the world and we talk about it, but we’re never a part of it. We’re locked safe away somewhere else, off on the sidelines or up in the clouds. We don’t act. We don’t even know how to act.”

  “It’s always seemed to me that you do,” Susan said. “You apply professional skills to sharing your knowledge with others, and so you help to broaden and enrich people’s minds. Isn’t that acting?”

  “Ah, I don’t know,” he said, and he was almost ready to pull back from the whole discussion. Disparaging his work might only undermine the very foundation of her respect for him. And this was an even more chilling thought: there might have been a hint, when she’d said “Isn’t that acting?” that she meant “acting” in the theatrical sense, as if all those lectures back at Turnbull, when he’d paced the head of the classroom to the music of his own voice, pausing again and again to turn and look at her—as if all that had been nothing more than what an actor is expected to do.

  He sat quietly for a while, until it occurred to him that this too might be considered an act: a man with a drink in the lamplight, brooding. Then he was on h
is feet and in motion again.

  “Okay,” he said, “but look. I’m forty-three. In ten more years I’ll be wearing carpet slippers. I’ll be watching The Merv Griffin Show and getting peevish from wishing you’d hurry up with the popcorn—do you see what I’m trying to say? And the point is, this whole McCarthy thing is enormously attractive to me. I’d really like to be mixed up in something like that—if not with McCarthy himself, then at least with somebody who’s on our side, somebody who knows the world’s going to fall apart unless we can wake people up and make them—help them to see their—oh, shit, baby, I want to get into politics.”

  Many carefully worded letters went out over the next few weeks, and many nervous phone calls. Old acquaintances were revived, some of them leading to new acquaintances; there were interviews and lunches, in various cities, with men who could either help him or not and who often kept their secret until the moment of the parting handshake.

  In the end, when it was too late to do any useful work for the McCarthy campaign anyway, David was hired to write speeches for a handsome, vigorous Democrat named Frank Brady, who was then running for Governor of a heavily industrial Middle Western state and had been acclaimed in several national magazines for his “charisma.” And when Frank Brady won the election, David was retained in the State House as a member of the Governor’s inner circle.

  “Oh, it isn’t just writing speeches,” he explained to his wife when they were settled with their belongings in the drab suburban metropolis of the state’s capital city. “The speeches are only the gravy. A lot more of my time is spent in things like—well, like getting up position papers and keeping them fresh.”

  “What are position papers?” Susan asked.

  “Well, Frank has to be ready with well-reasoned opinions on all the issues—issues like Vietnam and civil rights, of course, but a lot of other stuff too: farm prices, labor-management relations, the environment and all that. So I do some research—oh, and there’s a really good staff of research people in the office to make it easy for me—and I put together four or five typewritten pages, something Frank can read and digest in a few minutes, and that’s his—that’s his position paper. It becomes the position he’ll take on whatever issue it is, whenever it’s being discussed.”

  “Oh,” Susan said. While listening to him talk she had decided that their sofa and coffee table didn’t look right where they were, against the far wall of this unfamiliar, oddly proportioned room. By moving them over here, and by putting these chairs over there, it might be possible to restore the pleasing order of their old “interesting” place. But she didn’t have much hope for her plan: the new arrangement probably wouldn’t look right either. “Well,” she said, “I see. Or at least I think I see. It means that apart from writing every word that comes out of the man’s mouth—except of course for the television talk-shows, when all he does is mumble and grin at movie stars—apart from that, you do his thinking for him too. Right?”

  “Oh, now, come on,” he said, and he gestured widely to show how foolish and how wrong she was. He wished they weren’t in chairs, because if they’d been on the sofa he would have taken her in his arms. “Baby, come on. Look. Frank Brady is a man who came up out of nowhere, who made his own way without owing anybody anything, who then waged a strong and inspiring campaign, and who’s been freely elected Governor. Millions of people trust him, and believe in him, and look to him for leadership. On the other hand, all I am is an employee—one of his aides, or what I guess is called a ‘special counsel.’ Is it really so terrible that I feed him words?”

  “I don’t know; I guess not. And I mean that’s good, that’s fine, everything you’ve said; only, listen: I’m really tired out. Could we sort of go to bed now?”

  When she became pregnant, Susan was pleased to discover that she liked it. She had heard any number of women talk of pregnancy as a slow ordeal to be endured, but now from month to month she felt only a peaceful ripening. Her appetite was good, she slept well, she was hardly ever nervous, and toward the end she was willing to acknowledge that she enjoyed the deference of strangers in public places.

  “I almost wish this could go on forever,” she said to David. “It does slow you down a little, but it makes you feel—it really makes your body feel good.”

  “Good,” he said. “I knew it would. You’re a natural girl. Everything you do is so—so natural. I think that’s what I’ve always liked best about you.”

  Their daughter, who they named Candace, caused substantial changes in their lives. They had suddenly relinquished their privacy; they were jittery all day; everything looked fragile and smelled sour. But they both knew better than to complain, and so by finding ways to encourage and console each other they got through the early, most difficult months without making any mistakes.

  Several times a year David traveled to a distant Eastern town to visit the children of his first marriage, and those were never happy occasions.

  The boy was sixteen now and failing all his courses in high school—failing too, it seemed, in all attempts at making friends. He was mostly silent and evasive around the house, cringing away from his mother’s tactful suggestions about “professional counseling” and “getting help,” rousing himself only to laugh at the silliest jokes on television. It seemed clear that he would soon leave home to join the floating world of hippies, where brains didn’t count for much and friendship was held to be as universal as love.

  The girl was twelve and much more promising, though her sweet face was blotched with bad skin and seemed set forever in a melancholy look, as if she couldn’t stop contemplating the nature of loss.

  And their mother, once a girl on whom David Clark had believed his very life depended (“But it’s true; I mean it; I can’t live without you, Leslie . . .”), had become a harried, absentminded, stout and pathetically pleasant creature of middle age.

  He always felt he had blundered into a house of strangers. Who are these people? he kept asking himself, looking around. Are these people supposed to have something to do with me? Or I with them? Who’s this wretched boy, and what’s the matter with this sad little girl? Who’s this clumsy woman, and why doesn’t she do something about her clothes and her hair?

  When he smiled at them he could feel the small muscles around his mouth and eyes performing the courteous ritual of each smile. When he had dinner with them he might as well have been eating in some old and honorable cafeteria where tables were shared for convenience, but where all customers, hunched over their plates, respected one another’s need to be alone.

  “Well, I wouldn’t be alarmed about it, David,” his former wife said once, when he’d taken her aside to discuss their son. “It’s an ongoing problem, and we’ll simply have to deal with it on those terms.”

  Toward the end of that visit he began counting the hours. Three hours; two hours; oh, Jesus, one hour more—until finally, gulping fresh air on the street, he was free. All the way back on the plane that night, riding over half of America as he munched dry-roasted peanuts and drank bourbon, he did his best to empty his mind of everything and to keep it that way.

  And at last, trembling with fatigue at three in the morning, he carried his suitcase up the steps of his own house and into the living room, where he felt along the wall for the light switch. He meant to tiptoe quickly through the rooms and go to bed, but found instead that he had to stand a long time in the brightness, looking around, stunned by a sense of having never seen this place before.

  Who lived here? And he started down the shadowed hall to find out. The door of the baby’s room was only partly open and there wasn’t much light, but he could see the tall white crib. And between the slender bars of it, deep in the scents of talcum powder and sweet piss, he could see a lump that occupied hardly any space but seemed to give off energy in its very stillness. Someone alive was in there. Someone was in there who would grow up soon, and who might turn out to be anybody at all.

  He hurried to the other dark bedroom, where h
e allowed himself just enough light from the hall for guidance.

  “David?” Susan said, half asleep, turning heavily in the bedclothes. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re home.”

  “Yeah,” he told her. “Oh, Jesus, baby, so am I.”

  And in her arms he discovered that his life wasn’t over yet, after all.

  Susan found little to like in the capital city: it went on for miles, everywhere you looked, without ever really becoming a city at all. There were many trees—that was nice—but the rest of it seemed to be all shopping malls and gas stations and gleaming fast-food franchises. When the baby was old enough to ride in a stroller she hoped she might explore new parts of town and find better things, but that turned out to be as futile as wishing David hadn’t gone to work for Frank Brady in the first place.

  One warm afternoon, having ventured too far from home for comfort, she was on her way back, pushing the stroller, when it began to seem that she might not make it. There were only about three blocks to go, but in the shimmering haze of the day they looked like five or six, or more. She stopped to rest, breathing hard, and became very much aware of her heart—the approximate size and shape and weight of it, the feel of it, as well as its beating and its terrible mortality. The baby turned in the plastic seat to look up and to ask, with round eyes, why they had stopped, and Susan did her best to answer that look with a reassuring smile.

  “We’re okay, Candace,” she said, as if Candace could understand. “We’re okay. We’ll be home in just a minute.”

  And she made the distance. She even made the stairs, which were the worst part. She got Candace bedded down, got the contraption of the stroller folded flat and put away; then she lay on the living-room sofa until her heart came back to normal—until the big thumping threat of it receded and was absorbed once again into the body that had been made to feel so good in pregnancy.

  She was still on the sofa, wondering whether or not to take a nap, when David came home from work.