Paul was well into his second drink before he seemed to remember why Lucy was here. “How about those pictures?” he asked her.
“They’re out in the car.”
“Want a hand with them?”
“No; sit still, Paul,” she said. “I’ll get them. There’re only four.”
She was already steeled for disappointment when she brought them in and arranged them on the floor against the living-room wall. She was ready to regret having come to this house in the first place.
“Well, these are nice, Lucy,” Paul said after a while. “Very nice.”
Mr. Santos had a way of saying “nice” that could fill you with pride and hope, but that wasn’t how Paul Maitland used the word. And he didn’t once look back from the pictures at Lucy’s face.
“I’ve never been much of a judge, as I told you,” he said, “but I can certainly see how the League’s been good for you. You’ve learned a lot.”
It took less time to gather up and stack the paintings than it had to set them out, and she carried the four of them easily under one arm as she went to the door.
Paul got up to wish her goodnight, and that was when he looked into her eyes for the first time, with the sorrow of an old friend’s apology for not having been able to say more.
“Come back and see us again soon, Lucy,” he said, and Peggy didn’t say anything at all.
Lucy went home just long enough to take a shower and change her clothes, because she had promised to be in Tom Nelson’s studio well in advance of the party crowd. And while she was brushing her hair a small, nice thing occurred to her before she could quite remember what it was: Charlie Rich would be thinking about her all the time.
Tom was playing the drums along with a Lester Young recording, and his face looked lost in the music, but he stopped at once and got up and turned off the record player when he saw Lucy come in.
“Now, listen, Tom,” she began. “I want you to promise me something. If you don’t like these pictures I want you to tell me so. If you can say why you don’t like them it might be helpful, because I might learn something, but the main thing is to let me have it straight from the shoulder. No fooling around.”
“Oh, that goes without saying,” he said. “I’ll be merciless. I’ll be brutal. Would it be okay if I tell you first, though, that you look terrific tonight?”
And she couldn’t fake much shyness when she thanked him for that, because she knew she did look good. She was wearing a new dress of the kind said to do wonders for her; her hair was exactly right, and her need to know about the paintings might well have brought a certain radiance to her face and eyes.
She placed the four pictures along the studio wall, not far from the trap drums, and Tom dropped nimbly to his haunches to examine each one. He took so long over them that she began to suspect he was stalling, using the time to figure out what he would say.
“Yeah,” he said at last, and one of his expressive hands followed a curving line in the painting she had decided she liked best. “Yeah, that’s nice, the way you did that. This whole area over here’s nice, too, and so’s this here. Then here in this other one, you got a nice design going for you. Colors are pretty, too.”
Then he stood up, and she knew that if she didn’t ask a question or two there would be no more talk at all.
“Well, Tom,” she said, “I didn’t think they’d take you by storm, exactly, but can you tell me one sort of general thing about these paintings? Do you think they’re a little on the amateur-night-in-Dixie side?”
“A little on the amateur what?”
“Well, that’s just an expression. I mean do you think they’re amateurish work?”
He backed away from her and sank both hands into the side pockets of his paratrooper’s jacket, looking irritated and compassionate at the same time.
“Aw, Lucy, come on,” he said. “What can I say? Sure they’re amateurish, dear, but that’s because you’re an amateur. You can’t expect to do professional work after a few months at the League, and nobody else can expect it of you, either.”
“It hasn’t been a few months, Tom,” she told him. “It’s been almost three years.”
“Can I peek?” Pat Nelson called from the kitchen, and she came into the studio drying her hands on a dish towel. After she’d peeked, after she’d inspected the four paintings for a conscientious length of time, she told Lucy they were very impressive.
But the first party guests would be arriving soon, so Lucy took the pictures out to the driveway where her car was parked. She placed the four of them on top of the other eight, then slammed and locked the trunk on them all – and with the finality of that slam she knew she would never go back to the Art Students League.
For a long time she stood alone under the high, heavily whispering trees and pressed her knuckles to her lips like Blanche Dubois, but she didn’t cry. Blanche had never cried either; it was Stella who did all the “luxurious” crying. Blanche had no need to cry because she was acquainted with despair, and Lucy felt she was coming to be acquainted with it too.
But despair would have to wait at least a few more hours, because this was a party night at the Nelsons’. Chip Hartley would probably be among the guests, but she’d learned long ago not to dread that: they had often met and talked pleasantly at these parties since the end of their time together. Once or twice – three times, actually – she had even gone back to Ridgefield and slept with him. They were “friends.”
And as she walked around to the Nelsons’ kitchen door she changed her mind about the League. She would go back there, but it would only be for the purpose of seeing Charlie Rich. He might turn out to be older than he looked; and besides, however treacherous the word “friend” might be, she knew she was going to need all the friends she could get.
In the humid brightness of the kitchen she stood with one hand on her hip like a fashion model and the other calmly smoothing her hair. She was thirty-nine and didn’t know much about anything and probably never would, but she didn’t need Tom Nelson or anyone else to tell her she had never looked prettier.
“Pat?” she said. “As long as everybody knows I’m practically an alcoholic anyway, do you suppose I could fix myself a drink?”
PART THREE
Chapter One
For Michael Davenport, looking back, the time after his divorce would always fall into two historical periods: pre-Bellevue and post-Bellevue. And although the first lasted only a little more than a year, it came to seem longer than that in memory because so many things happened to him then.
It was a year of melancholy and regret – he had only to look into the infinite sadness of his daughter’s face to be reminded of that, even when she smiled, even when she laughed. Still, he soon found there could be an unexpected vigor in his days alone – a frequent quickening of the spirit, a brave and youthful readiness for anything; and it would always nourish his secret pride to know that within three weeks after leaving Tonapac he won a young and stunningly pretty girl.
“Well, sure it’s a good-enough place,” Bill Brock said, pacing around the cheap apartment Michael had found for himself on Leroy Street, in the West Village, “but you can’t just hole up here alone all the time, Mike, or you’re gonna go crazy. Look: there’s this big-assed party uptown Friday night – some advertising guy I hardly even know. He comes on like an extra-smooth gangster or something, but what the hell: almost anything might turn up at a party like that.” And Brock crouched over Michael’s desk to write down a name and address.
The door there was opened by a hearty man who said “Any friend of Bill Brock’s is a friend of mine,” and Michael ventured into a loud roomful of talking, drinking strangers who might have been picked at random off the street: they seemed to have nothing in common but their various kinds of new and expensive clothes.
“Pretty big crowd,” Bill Brock said when Michael had found him at last, “but I’m afraid there isn’t much good stuff – much available stuff, anyway. There’s an ex
traordinary little English girl in the other room, but you’ll never get near her. She’s surrounded.”
She was surrounded, all right: five or six men were trying to claim and hold her attention. But she was so extraordinary – all eyes and lips and cheekbones as she stood chatting in an upper-class English accent, like the prettiest girl in an English movie – that any chance of getting near her seemed worth the effort.
“… I like your eyes,” she told him. “You have very sad eyes.”
Within five minutes she’d agreed to meet him at the front door, “as soon as I can get away from all this”; that took five minutes more; then they spent half an hour having a drink in a bar around the corner, where she told him her name was Jane Pringle, that she was twenty, that she’d come to this country five years ago when her father was “appointed to direct the American part of an enormous international corporation,” but that her parents were now divorced and she’d been “sort of at loose ends for a while.” She wanted him to know, though, that she was wholly independent: she earned her living as a secretary in a theatrical press-agent’s office, and she loved her job: “I love the people there, and they love me.”
But Michael got her out of that bar and into a cab even before she stopped talking, and then in almost no time at all she was naked in his bed with her sweet legs locked around his own, writhing and gasping and having at last what she later declared, in tears, to be the first orgasm of her life.
Jane Pringle was almost too good to be true, and the best part was that she wanted to stay with him indefinitely – or, as she said, “until you get tired of me.” Their first days and weeks together may not quite have been the happiest in Michael’s memory – there were a few too many artificial smiles and sighs for that – but they let him know that all his senses had come alive again, in surprisingly fresh and vivid ways, and that was enough for the time being.
She was agreeably quick to remove all traces of her presence every other weekend, when Laura came into town to visit him; but on each of those Sunday nights, after seeing Laura safely aboard the train for Tonapac again, he knew he could ride the subway home and find his windows lighted on Leroy Street: Jane was always there and waiting for him.
Her nominal residence, where she kept most of her belongings, was the home of a “tiresome old aunt” near Gramercy Park. Didn’t the aunt wonder about her new living arrangement? “No, no,” Jane assured him. “She never asks questions. She wouldn’t dare. She’s fearfully bohemian herself. Oh, Michael, aren’t you ever going to take off your clothes?”
She found so many ways of saying he was wonderful that he might have come to believe it, if he hadn’t had to face the diminished self-esteem implicit in each day’s work. Nothing had come right in any of the poems he’d taken up since moving back to New York. At first he thought having Jane might make a difference, but after she’d been with him a month or two he was still struggling with the words.
He couldn’t complain of needing more time alone, because Jane was away all day during the week; but that in itself was part of the trouble: he missed her when she was gone.
And she did seem to love her job. She called it “a fun job,” no matter how often he told her “run” wasn’t an adjective; she never allowed herself to be late to work in the morning, or to be less than perfectly dressed and groomed, and he was always surprised in the evening to find how fresh and exhilarated she could be after those long secretarial hours. She would walk back into his life with her face smelling of the sharp fall weather, humming a song from a new musical comedy, sometimes bringing a bag of expensive groceries (“Aren’t you getting a little bored with restaurants, Michael? Besides, I love to cook for you; I love to watch you eat the things I’ve made.”)
Even at times when her job wasn’t fun, it was always a romance.
“I cried at work today,” she reported once, lowering her eyes. “I couldn’t help it – but Jake held me in his arms until I felt better, and I thought that was awfully nice of him.”
“Who’s Jake?” And Michael was startled at how quickly she could make him jealous.
“Oh, he’s one of the men; one of the partners. The other one’s Meyer, and he’s nice too, but sometimes he’s gruff. He shouted at me today and he’s never done that before; that was why I cried. I could tell he felt rotten about it later, though, and he apologized very sweetly before he went home.”
“So how big an agency is it? Just those two guys, or what?”
“Oh, no, there’s a staff of four. One of them’s Eddie; he’s twenty-six and we’re really good friends. We have lunch together almost every day, and once we tangoed all the way down Forty-second Street, just to be crazy. Eddie’s going to be a singer – is a singer, I mean – and I think he’s terrifically good.”
He decided not to ask any more questions about the office. He didn’t want to hear that stuff, and none of it would matter anyway as long as she came home eager to please him every night.
Bill Brock’s word “extraordinary” kept recurring to him as he watched Jane move around the apartment, as he walked with her in the evening streets, or sat with her in the old White Horse. She was an extraordinary girl. He had come to feel he could never have enough of her flesh, and his missing her in working hours seemed to suggest a gentler attachment, too. He scarcely even noticed her artificial smiles and sighs anymore – they were part of her style – but he often wished there weren’t such an abundance and variety of information in the story of her life.
She had been married at seventeen to a young teacher at the exclusive New Hampshire boarding school she’d attended, but the marriage was so “horrible” her parents had it annulled in less than a year.
“And that was the last time I had to depend on my parents in any way at all,” she said. “I’d never dream of asking them for anything again. They’re so busy hating each other now, and so busy being in love with their new people, that I’ve sort of come to despise them both. And the worst of it is they feel so guilty about me: God, that’s infuriating. It’s not so bad in my mother’s case, way out in California, but my father’s a real nuisance because he’s right here in town. And then there’s lovely Brenda – that’s his wife, you see; my stepmother. The curious thing is I was quite fond of Brenda at first: she seemed sort of like an older sister and we were very close for a while, until I began to learn what a manipulative person she is. Brenda would absolutely dominate my life if she had her way.”
But all this family bitterness could vanish in a breath. Jane sometimes used Michael’s telephone to call her father, and she would talk for an hour with an almost flirtatious enthusiasm, calling him “Daddy” in every sentence and helplessly laughing at his jokes, then asking to speak to Brenda and spending half an hour more in the kind of soft, cryptic, gossipy conversation that most girls reserve for their best friends.
And perhaps because he had a daughter of his own, Michael was mostly pleased with the harmony of those talks: he would even smile to himself as her sweet English voice went on and on at the phone across the room, and it occurred to him more than once that he’d like to meet her father someday. (“I’m so glad,” the man might say; “so glad Jane seems to have found a sense of stability and direction at last.…”)
Her father hadn’t always been a corporate executive, Jane explained after one of the phone calls; journalism was his first love, and during the war he’d been one of the top correspondents for a leading London newspaper. In an earlier version her father had spent the war in hazardous espionage work for the British government, but Michael didn’t call that to her attention because for all he knew it might have been possible for a journalist to serve as a spy.
There were further discrepancies, though, in some of the other things she told him.
It was her “horrible” former husband who had taken her virginity, so clumsily that the thought of it could still make her shudder; but happier memories once brought her back to the year she was sixteen, when she’d given “everything, oh, everythi
ng” to a boy she’d met at a lakeside resort in Maine.
The summer before last she had undergone an extremely painful abortion, in New Jersey; she’d been obliged to find the abortionist herself and to pay him out of her own salary, and the consequences of his bungled work had left her weak and ill for months; yet the summer before last was also when she had hitchhiked all over Western Europe with a boy named Peter and had a marvelous time until Peter’s father insisted he come home and go back to Princeton in the fall.
Michael tried to clear up a few points in some of her stories, but there were so many others that he lapsed into a bewildered silence most of the time. And then it began to seem that she was willfully testing the limits of his credulity, as troubled children sometimes do.
On one side of her exquisite face there was a small patch of scar tissue, suggesting that a boil or a cyst had once been removed from that spot, and Michael told her one afternoon, in bed, that he thought it made her all the prettier.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Well, I hate that scar, and I hate everything it stands for.” Then, after a significant pause, she said “The Gestapo wasn’t very well known for gentleness.”
He took a long breath. “Baby, where do you get the Gestapo? Please don’t give me the Gestapo, sweetheart, because I just sort of happen to know you were six years old when the war ended. Now, suppose we talk about something else, okay?”
“Well, but it’s true,” she insisted. “That was one of their techniques: torture the children in order to make the parents talk. And I wasn’t even six when it happened; I was five. My mother and I were living in Occupied France then because we hadn’t been able to get back to England. And I imagine it must’ve been difficult, having to sort of hide out all the time, but I still have wonderfully clear memories of the Normandy countryside, and the nice family of farmers we knew. And one day these dreadful men came clumping into the house demanding information about my father. Mummy was very brave, actually: she wouldn’t tell them anything until she saw the knife piercing my face – then she broke and told them whatever they needed to know. If she hadn’t I might have been killed, or I might have been mutilated for life.”
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