Young Hearts Crying

by Richard Yates

  Yeah, Michael said silently, yeah, and you’d eat shit with a rusty spoon, too, wouldn’t you, Brock?

  He was halfway home from the White Horse, walking fast and tense with anger, before it struck him that he no longer needed to hate Bill Brock for having once had Diana Maitland, nor would he ever again have to long for Diana Maitland over impossible spaces of distance and time. The only reason he’d come out to drink with Brock at all tonight was that it was the first time he’d been alone in six weeks: Sarah Garvey had spent all the other nights with him; she’d be back again tomorrow; and Sarah Garvey was as fine, as fresh and as nourishing a girl as Diana could ever have been.

  Back in the apartment he found his unfinished resume rolled in the typewriter, where he’d left it when Brock called, and he stayed up late to get it done. He would give it to Sarah tomorrow; she would get it photocopied at the office of the Tonapac High School, and then he’d mail it out to the English departments of as many American colleges and universities as he could find in the public library.

  After years of swearing that an English teacher was the last thing he would ever want to be, he was ready for it now. And he didn’t care what part of the United States it might take him to because Sarah said she didn’t care either; she could probably find work in a high school anywhere, if that turned out to be necessary; if not, she wouldn’t bother. The only important thing, for both of them, was to start a new life.

  “Hey, Sarah?” he asked her a few nights later, when they were having dinner at a restaurant he liked called the Blue Mill. “Have I ever told you about this guy Tom Nelson, up in Kingsley? The painter?”

  “I think so, yes. Is he the one who works as a carpenter?”

  “No, that’s the other one; they’re worlds apart. Nelson’s an entirely different story.” And it seemed to take him a long time, then, to explain what an entirely different story Nelson was.

  “It sounds as though you envy him quite a lot,” she said when he was finished.

  “Well, yeah, I guess I do; guess I always have. We haven’t been on very good terms for years because we took a trip to Montreal once that turned out badly and I got pissed off at him; the only times I’ve seen him since then were at one or two of his gallery openings, and I only went to those because it’s a way of meeting girls. But anyway, he called me up today, out of the blue – very shy, very nice – and asked me to a party out there Friday night. I got the impression he wants to be friends again. And the thing is I’d really like to go, Sarah, but I don’t want to go unless you come along.”

  “Well, that’s not one of the more – ornate invitations I’ve received lately,” she said, “but sure. Why not?”

  Only a few cars were parked in the Nelsons’ driveway when they got there. Several men among the early arrivals were strolling nervously in the living room – and that room, with its intimidating thousands of shelved books, was enough to make anybody nervous until the drink began to flow. The women seemed mostly to be in the kitchen helping Pat, or more likely pretending to help, since Pat could always manage everything by herself, and Michael proudly steered Sarah out there to introduce her.

  “Good to meet you, Sarah,” Pat said, and she did look pleased that Michael had such a nice young girl; but there was a touch of amusement in her eyes too, as if he were in his fifties rather than his forties, and he didn’t like that part of it.

  When he asked her where Tom was, she made a face of exasperation. “Oh, out in the backyard playing with his toys – he’s been out there all day. Why don’t you go get him, Michael, and tell him his mother says it’s time to come home.”

  The backyard was long and wide, like everything else on the Nelsons’ place, and the first thing he saw at the far end of it was a girl standing with her arms folded across her chest and her hair blowing slightly in the wind; it took him a few more seconds, walking, to recognize her as Peggy Maitland. Then he saw Tom Nelson squatting near her feet and facing away from her, hunkered down over a ridge of dirt as intently as a boy at a game of marbles. And only then did he make out a third figure ten or fifteen yards away, a man reclining on his side and propped on one elbow, dressed all in denim: it was Paul.

  Across the carefully sculpted terrain of their battlefield, most of the combat troops were dead. All permissible field artillery fire was over – the two plastic dart pistols lay unloaded and cast aside in the grass – and now was the time for peace and commemoration.

  Tom Nelson greeted Michael heartily enough, saying it was great to see him, but he was almost jubilant in his need to explain that this had been one of the finest battles he’d ever fought.

  “This guy doesn’t just fool around,” he said admiringly of Paul. “He really knows how to protect his flanks.” Then he said “Wait right here, Paul, and don’t touch anything. I’ll go get the camera; then we can lay down some smoke and take some pictures.” And he hurried away toward his house.

  “I’ll be damned, Paul,” Michael said when Maitland had gotten up to shake hands. “I’d never’ve expected to find you here.”

  “Well, things change,” Maitland said. “Tom and I’ve become good friends in the last couple of years. We have the same gallery now, you see; that’s how we met.”

  “Yeah? I didn’t know you had a gallery, Paul; that’s terrific. Congratulations.”

  “Oh, well, they don’t sell much of my work, and they haven’t given me a show yet; still, it’s better than no gallery at all.”

  “Well, sure it is,” Michael said. “That’s really good news.”

  Paul Maitland worked his spine a little this way and that, wincing, taking the kinks of warfare out of his muscles, and his fingers adjusted the blue bandana around his neck. “No, but I’ve been really surprised at how much I like Tom,” he said. “Surprised at how much I’ve come to like his work, too. I used to think of him as sort of a lightweight, you know? An illustrator and all that? But the more you look at his pictures the more they sort of grow on you. You know what he does, at his best? He manages to make difficult things look easy.”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “Yeah, I’ve often thought that too.”

  And then Tom Nelson came loping back over the yard with his camera, causing Peggy Maitland to clap her hands in delight like a little girl.

  An hour or two later, when the party had come alive – there must have been fifty people in the house – Michael asked Sarah if she was having a good time.

  “Well, sure,” she said, “but you know. Everyone here is so much older than me that I sort of don’t know what to do or what to say or anything.”

  “Ah, just be yourself,” he told her. “Just stand there being the prettiest girl anybody’s ever seen, and all the rest of it’ll be easy. I promise.”

  There was an art historian currently engaged in a monograph on Thomas Nelson; there was an aging, distinguished poet whose next book would be published in a limited edition, at two hundred dollars a copy, and would contain a Thomas Nelson illustration on every other page. There was a celebrated Broadway actress, too, who said she had been drawn to Nelson’s house “as a moth to a flame” because she’d been so “moved” by an exhibition of his pictures at the Whitney Museum. And there was a novelist, recently acclaimed for having made no artistic mistakes in any of his nine books, who had never met Tom Nelson before tonight but now had begun to follow him through the rooms, clapping him on the back of his paratrooper’s jacket and saying “You said it, soldier. You said it.”

  After Sarah had gone into the kitchen to “hide” with a few other young people, and at about the time Michael was beginning to feel all the drink he’d taken in, Paul Maitland drifted over and asked him what he was up to these days.

  “Looking for a teaching job,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve made the same move,” Paul said. “We’ll be going out to Illinois in the fall – did Tom tell you this? – the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, or whatever it’s called. Funny.” And Paul fondled his mustache. “I’ve always vowe
d I’d never go into teaching, and I expect you have too; still, it does come to seem the only appropriate thing to do, at our age.”

  “Right. Sure does.”

  “And I imagine you’ll be pleased to be rid of Chain Saw Age.”

  “Store.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s called Chain Store Age,” Michael said. “It’s a publication for all kinds of retail stores that operate in – you know – in chains. Get it?” Then, slowly shaking his head in dismay, he said “I’ll be God damned. All these years, as long as Brock and I’ve been telling you what we did, you thought we were talking fucking chain saws.”

  “Well, I’ve got it straight now,” Paul said, “but yes; I did have the impression you were both concerned with – publicizing chain saws, and that kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, well, in your case I suppose it was a reasonable mistake. Because you never do listen very carefully, do you, Paul? You never have paid a hell of a lot of attention to anybody in the world but yourself, have you?”

  Paul stepped back a pace or two, blinking and smiling as if trying to discern whether Michael was serious.

  And Michael was serious, all right. “Let me tell you something, Maitland,” he said. “Way back when Lucy and I first met you and your sister we thought you were both exceptional. We thought you were superior beings. We’d gladly have bent our lives out of shape if that could’ve helped us be more like you, or brought us any closer to you – oh, shit, do you see what I’m saying? We thought you were fucking enchanted.”

  “Look, old man,” Paul said, “I seem to’ve offended you in some way and I certainly never meant to; whatever it was I’m terribly sorry, okay?”

  “Sure,” Michael said. “Forget it. No offense meant, none taken.” But he was weak with shame for the nakedness of his outburst: the line “We thought you were fucking enchanted” still hung in the room to be savored by other party guests; the only mercy was that Sarah was well out of earshot in the kitchen. “Wanna shake on it, then?” he asked.

  “Well, of course,” Paul said, and they were both drunk enough to make an excessively solemn business out of shaking hands.

  Then Michael said “Good. Now. Let’s play a game. You can go first.” He opened the coat of his only suit and pointed to the middle of his shirt. “Hit me as hard as you can,” he said. “Right here.”

  Paul looked bewildered only for a moment before he seemed to understand. This might have been a game once played at Amherst; in any case, the years of manual labor had kept him strong. His punch was fast and solid enough to send his man dancing backwards and fighting to keep from buckling over.

  “Nice,” Michael said as soon as he could speak, and he stepped back into range. “That was a nice one. Now it’s my turn.”

  And he took his time over it. He closely inspected Paul Maitland’s face: the intelligent eyes, the humorous mouth, the fearless iconoclast’s mustache. Then he set his feet, gathered his strength and put everything he had into his right hand.

  The remarkable thing was that Paul didn’t drop at once. He backed off wincing, with glazed eyes; he even managed to say “Not bad” in a small voice; then he turned away as if to seek a new conversational companion, and he took three or four wobbling steps before he fell sprawling over an antique wooden chair and lay unconscious on the floor, on his back.

  Among those close enough in the crowd to have seen the action there was a woman who screamed and another who shrank away and covered her face with both hands, and there was a man who took Michael firmly by the arm, saying “You better get out of here, buddy.”

  But Michael sized up the man in a glance and said “Fuck off, sweetheart; I’m not going anywhere. This is a game.”

  Peggy Maitland went fluttering down to cradle her husband’s head in her arms, and Michael was afraid she would now look up with the same terrible reproach he’d seen in young Mrs. Damon’s face, long ago, but she didn’t.

  Between the two of them, Michael and Peggy brought Paul around and up to one trembling knee and then to a standing position, and they helped and guided him so carefully through the crowd that some observers might not even have known he was hurt.

  Paul managed not to vomit until they were out in the driveway, where nothing could be spoiled; then he did, and when the spasms were over he seemed to gain a little strength.

  It wasn’t hard to find the Maitlands’ car among all the others ranked in the moonlight: theirs was the only high, dull, stubby one, the only one made before 1950. When Michael opened the passenger’s door and helped Paul inside there was a heavy scent of gasoline and mildewed upholstery. The Maitlands would have a gleaming new middle-class car soon enough, when Paul became a professor in Illinois; in the meantime, this was the car of a nonunion carpenter who had tried for many years to paint pictures at home.

  “Hey, Paul?” Michael said. “Listen, I didn’t mean to hurt you; do you understand?”

  “Oh, of course. Goes without saying.”

  “Hey, Peggy? I’m really sorry about this.”

  “Little late for that now,” she said. “But okay. I mean I know it’s a game, Michael. I just think it’s a dumb, dumb game, that’s all.”

  And Michael turned back to confront the Nelsons’ big, brilliant house. The only thing to do now was walk around on the grass to the kitchen door, get Sarah out of there, and take off.

  Very few colleges replied to Michael’s application, and the only job offer that seemed worth considering was from a place called Billings State University, in Kansas.

  “Well, Kansas does sound a little bleak,” Sarah said. “Unnecessarily bleak, I mean. What do you think?”

  But neither of them could tell. He had grown up in New Jersey and she in Pennsylvania, and they were almost total strangers to the rest of the United States. He waited a little while to see if something better would turn up; then he accepted the Kansas job for fear it might be given to somebody else if he didn’t.

  And the only thing left to decide now was how best to spend the many weeks of Sarah’s summer vacation. They chose Montauk, Long Island, because it had an ample sweep of ocean beach but was far enough away from the more fashionable towns, “the Hamptons,” to be cheaper. Their summer cottage was so small and narrow that a single person might have found it unendurable, but it was a shelter with walls, and with windows for light and air; that was all they needed because all they did there, every afternoon and again every night, was get laid.

  As a boy he had believed that men in their forties, like his father, began to lose this kind of energy, but that only proved what false things a boy could believe. Another of his boyhood assumptions was that men in their forties usually settled for women of their own age, like his mother, while girls would always prefer to copulate with boys – but the hell with that one too. Young Sarah Garvey, fresh from the windswept beach and tasting of salt, had only to whisper his name to let him know she didn’t want a boy at all; she wanted him.

  Once when they were walking together along the firm part of the sand, close to the breaking water, she impulsively clasped his arm with both hands and said “Oh, I think we were made for each other, don’t you?”

  And looking back it would always seem that their plans for marriage had begun at that moment.

  By the end of the summer, only the details remained to be taken care of: they would spend a few days with Sarah’s family in Pennsylvania and arrange a simple wedding there; then, together, they would go out and face whatever “Kansas” might mean.

  Chapter Four

  The place they rented in Billings, Kansas, after they were married, was the first modern, efficient house Michael had ever known – and Sarah said it was the first of its kind in her life, too. It was built all in one story, a “ranch house,” and didn’t look like much from the road: you had to go inside to find how generously long and wide and high it was, with a bright hallway connecting its several spacious rooms. Each room held a window air-conditioner against the late-August heat,
and there were thermostats to control the brand-new furnace that promised steady protection in the winter. Everything worked.

  He would walk these solid floors despising the memory of the funny little house in Tonapac, chagrined that he could ever have imposed such daily discomfort on Lucy and Laura for what now seemed no reason at all. Still, only fools consumed themselves with regret; and whenever he looked ahead, thinking of Sarah, it surprised him all over again to know that the world was ready to give him a second chance.

  Sarah had been right on one important point, though: there was something unnecessarily bleak about Kansas. The earth was too flat, the sky was too big, and if you had to be outdoors on a clear day there was no way to escape the punishing sun until it finally, splendidly, went down. Cattle stockyards and a slaughterhouse lay a mile or two beyond the university, and when the afternoon breeze came from that direction it carried a faint, nostril-puckering stench.

  The house provided an excellent place to hide from all that for the first week or two – Michael even managed to complete a short poem called “Kansas” that seemed good enough to keep, though he would later throw it away – but then it was time for school.

  And except for that brief series of lectures in New Hampshire, where the very exhilaration of lecturing had apparently been enough to drive him crazy, he felt unequipped for this kind of work. Chain Store Age might have been a repugnant way to make a living all those years, but nothing about it had ever frightened him; now he was clammy with fear each time he walked into a classroom. He couldn’t read the faces of these young strangers, couldn’t tell whether they were bored or daydreaming or paying attention, and the allotted time for each period was always much too long.