“Oh? Well, that’s – fine. What’s it called?”
And he recited the title but it went out of her head right away, like the name of some smiling stranger introduced at a party.
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m not sure I’d be able to say what it’s ‘about,’ ” he said, “but I can tell you what it is. It’s everything I’ve managed to learn about the world at the age of thirty-five.”
“Is it” – and here she asked the one question novelists were said to find tiresome, if not infuriating – “is it autobiographical?”
“Well, maybe,” he said as if he were thinking it over. “But only to about the same extent that Madame Bovary is autobiographical.”
And that struck her as an intriguing reply. He was rapidly becoming a new Carl Traynor – no tremor, no slump, no diffidence. He might still be tired and sad but he looked pleasingly cocky now, too, and for the first time she was able to imagine him having his way with a girl – perhaps even with any number of girls.
“Took me five years,” he was saying of his book, “and it cost me a hell of a lot more than I’ll ever want to remember, but I think it’s good. Fact is, I think it’s a whole lot better than good. It may not set the world on fire or anything swell like that, but people are gonna pay attention.”
“Well, I’ll – certainly be looking forward to it, Carl.” And she knew it was the first time she’d used his first name, but she felt he had earned it.
It wasn’t long then, as the day and the alcohol wore on, before he said he had thought her terrifically attractive ever since the first day of school. He had always wished he could get to know her better; wouldn’t it be only fair, now, for Lucy to tell him something of herself and her life?
“Well—” she began, and in the same breath she found she was more than a little drunk. She had lost all count of how many gin-and-tonics had been set before her and disposed of, each empty glass promptly replaced by a full one. She must have had at least as much to drink as Carl Traynor, who was now signaling for another round.
“Well,” she said again, and she launched into a monologue that she could never afterwards remember. She knew she told him a lot but not too much; she knew everything she said was true, but it was all the kind of carefully selective, drink-inspired truth that amounts to the stuff of flirtation.
It was no surprise when his hand came across the table and closed firmly around her own.
“Hey, Lucy?” he said huskily. “Will you come home with me?”
There was too much drink in her blood to let her make a quick decision, but she knew it would be awful to keep him waiting; she answered him as soon as she could.
“Well, no, I don’t think so, Carl. I’m not very good at these casual things.”
“Wouldn’t necessarily be all that casual,” he said. “We might find we can get something pretty nice going. Might even find we were made for each other, like people in the movies.”
But she only said no again, trying to soften it this time by covering his hand with hers. She knew saying no could easily be something she’d regret; still, more damaging regrets might arise in the consequences of saying yes.
Out on the street corner he gave her a quick kiss and a long hug, and she responded fully to the hug because it seemed an agreeable and tender way of saying goodbye.
“Lucy?” he said into her hair. “Why did you stop and wait when I ran after you?”
“Because I was sorry I’d made such a scene upstairs, I guess. Why did you run after me?”
“Oh, hell, you know; because I’ve wanted you all this time and I couldn’t let you take off that way. But listen, Lucy.” He was still holding her, and she felt no impatience to be free: she was holding him, too, and his raincoat felt nice. “Listen,” he said again. “There was another reason too. Will you try to understand this, if I tell you?”
“Of course.”
“It was because – oh, baby, because you called me a decent man.”
Chapter Five
Lucy worked on her Perry Street story for two or three months, but the material turned out to be subtle and slippery: it kept getting away from her. When she thought she’d brought most of it under control she devised a final episode that had, at least, the virtue of nobody’s coming to realize anything: Late one night the young wife flew into a jealous rage at her husband, after the girl had kissed them both and gone. The husband could make only feeble attempts to deny his “yearning” for the girl, which drove the wife into further anger and reproach; then a heavy, costly dinner plate was smashed in the sink, symbolic of the marriage soon to be broken, and that was the end.
She guessed this might be all right; it might “work,” except that – well, except that it hadn’t really happened, and so it seemed to cast an unhealthy glow of fraudulence over the whole story. How could you ever learn to trust the things you made up?
On days when she felt she couldn’t face that manuscript she would try to revise one or the other of her earlier stories, often hearing George Kelly’s voice in quiet counsel and sensing his presence as keenly as if he were standing at her chair and peering over her shoulder.
She knew he’d been right. The boarding-school story did require a more dramatic resolution, and there was indeed an embarrassing glut of words after what should have been the final section of “Summer Stock.”
One proud morning she found the right way to end “Summer Stock” – three sentences, terse but eloquent in their resonance – and it made her feel like a professional to tear up the old superfluous pages and drop them into her wastebasket.
But once that was done she began to find bad places back in the main part of the story: scenes that went on too long and others that didn’t go on long enough, paragraphs that weren’t pulling their narrative weight, sentences that had somehow eluded George Kelly’s standards of dignity, and far too many easy, poorly chosen words. The only truly professional approach now, it seemed, would be to write the whole damned thing over again.
And the manuscript of “Miss Goddard and the World of Art” just lay there for weeks, stubbornly refusing to come alive. The weakness of its ending had come to seem only part of the trouble: the main trouble, she decided after a long time, was that she didn’t like it. She wouldn’t have liked it if somebody else had written it. She even thought up a disparaging little summary of it that George Kelly might have approved of: it was an oh-what-a-sensitive-child-I-was story.
Still, rather than destroy it, she put it away in a bureau drawer. There might be parts of it she would want to salvage and improve some day, like the girl’s first meeting with Miss Goddard (“For a minute or two there I thought we might have some kind of lesbian story on our hands, but that was a wrong guess.…”)
By August she had begun to spend less and less time at her writing table. On bright days she would put on an old bathing suit – a blue cotton bikini that Michael Davenport used to tell her was enough to drive him crazy – take out a blanket, and lie sunbathing for hours in her big backyard, with supplies of gin and tonic and an insulated bucket of ice cubes close at hand. Twice or three times, in the late afternoons, she went back into the house to change into a fresh summer dress and set off up the road on the way to the Nelsons’, but each time she turned back after half the distance and came home again because she didn’t know what she would have said to either of the Nelsons when she got there.
At first she described all this to herself as being “blocked” – all writers were blocked sometimes – but then, while trying to sleep one night, she began to suspect she was finished with it.
Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look, and Lucy didn’t feel old enough for any of that. Even the pleasures of privacy and silence could sink into nothing but loneliness when your brains got tired. You might drink too much or punish yourself by staying away from it, only to find that eith
er alternative robbed you of writing itself. If your brains got tired enough, for long enough, some dizzying series of blunders might get you hauled away and locked into Bellevue, to be frightened and diminished for life. And there was still another hazard, one she couldn’t have discerned without working so hard on these first three stories: if all you did was write about yourself, total strangers might come to know you too well.
Once years ago, back in Larchmont, she had shyly criticized one of Michael’s poems by saying it seemed “too reticent.”
And he’d paced the floor for a while without speaking, hanging his head. Then he’d said “Yeah, that’s probably true. And it isn’t a good idea to be too reticent; I understand that. Still, you don’t ever want to drop your pants in Macy’s window, either, right?”
Right. And Lucy could see now, on the evidence of these apprentice stories, that dropping her pants in Macy’s window might be all she would accomplish, time and again, no matter what better things she might ever hope and try to do.
At one of the Nelsons’ parties, in the fall of that year, she met a man who almost literally swept her off her feet. She cared nothing at all about what he “did” – he was a stockbroker and a faithful collector of Thomas Nelson watercolors – but she liked his face and his big chest and his flat belly, and within five minutes she found that the resonance of his deep, courteous voice could send out subtle vibrations along both wings of her collarbone. She was helpless.
“I have a terrible confession,” she said when he drove her over toward Connecticut that night, on the way to his place in Ridgefield. “I’ve forgotten your name. Is it Chris something?”
“Well, that’s close,” he told her. “It’s Christopher Hartley, but I’ve always been called Chip.”
It occurred to her during that same drive that Chip Hartley was exactly the kind of man she might have married if she hadn’t met Michael Davenport first – the kind of man her parents would always have been comfortable with. Another thing she learned in his car that night, after a series of bantering but relentless questions, was that he too had been born rich: he had inherited almost as much money as she had.
“Why do you work, then?”
“Because I enjoy it, I guess. I don’t even think of it as ‘work’; I’ve always seen the stock market as a kind of game. You learn the rules, you accept the challenges and take the risks, and the whole point is trying to come out ahead. If I ever find I’m beginning to let my clients down I’ll get out of it, but in the meantime it’s stimulating; it’s fun.”
“Well, but isn’t a lot of it just boring? Just sort of daily routine?”
“Sure it is, but I like that part, too. I like the train ride into town every morning. I think The Wall Street Journal is the best daily newspaper in America. I like having lunch with my friends in restaurants where all the waiters know our names. And I even like the kind of afternoons when there’s nothing much to do but fool around the office until the clock says it’s time to quit. I often find myself thinking Well, okay, this may not amount to much, but it’s my life.”
Except for the handsomely framed Thomas Nelson pictures on every wall, there was nothing about his place to suggest excessive wealth. It was what real-estate agents call a carriage house – modest, stylish quarters appropriate for a childless man in the third or fourth year of his divorce – and from the confident way he steered her upstairs to the bedroom she could tell he rarely spent much time here alone.
Girls must always have spoiled this big, straightforward, plain-spoken man; each girl’s impulse toward reserve or coyness would probably have been checked by her knowledge that plenty of other girls were waiting. And he was a good lover, in ways perhaps similar to those that made him a reliable handler of other people’s money: he was thorough, attentive to detail, careful and adventurous at the same time, seemingly free of anxiety in every move.
He took her twice in the first night, then fell asleep with one hand still roaming her flesh until it came to a stop cupping one breast. When she awoke late in the morning, feeling good, she could hear the sounds of his puttering around in the kitchen downstairs. She could even smell the faint, drifting scent of coffee as she allowed herself a languorous stretch and then snuggled back under the bedclothes. This was nice.
And the best part was that it soon turned out there were no other girls in his life just now: he wanted to spend all his leisure time with her, either in Ridgefield or Tonapac or New York. A good many weeks flew by without any apparent need to count their passing.
But he was the first man she’d known who didn’t have artistic ambitions of any kind, and that made him seem oddly incomplete. Well, but look, Chip, she wanted to say time and again, usually when their talk had flagged in some good restaurant, is this really all there is for you? Make money and get laid; get laid and make money? And she never asked that question for fear it would only make him look up blinking from his iced plate of oysters, or his hot platter of prime rib, and say Well, sure; why not?
“Is Nelson the only painter you collect?” she asked him one Sunday afternoon in Ridgefield.
“Yup.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, I think it’s because I like the no-bullshit quality of his work. You get a sense of honest goods. Most of the other stuff being done these days is either over my head or beneath my notice, and most of the time I can’t tell which, so I don’t want to mess with it either for pleasure or investment.”
“I’ve heard it argued,” she said, “that he’s more an illustrator than an artist.”
“Could be,” he conceded. “Still, I like the way it looks on my walls. And I like knowing that an awful lot of other people do too. They must, or he wouldn’t be so successful.”
And that seemed to settle it. Sundays, in Chip Hartley’s well-organized life, were given over entirely to rest, to measured amounts of alcohol, and to the reading of world news – just as Saturdays were given over to sports and entertainment; just as all five weekdays, except for their shrunken evenings, were given over to work.
Carl Traynor’s first novel didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but Lucy paid close attention to its several excellent reviews, and she bought it at once. The first thing she did was remove its ugly dust jacket – a cheap illustration on the front and a photograph on the back that might have been the picture of an unhappy college boy – then she settled down to read.
She was pleased with the “dignity” of the sentences and the clarity of the scenes, and along in the third or fourth chapter she could dimly begin to see what he’d meant about Madame Bovary. Parts of it were very funny, for a man who could never get a laugh at the New School, but there was a pervasive tone of sadness all through the story and a well-earned sense of impending tragedy toward the end.
It kept her sitting up in bed all night and it made her cry a little, turning away from the page to hide her loose mouth in her free hand; then, after trying and failing to sleep for most of the morning, she found his name in the Manhattan phone book and called him up.
“Lucy Davenport,” he said. “Well. Good to hear from you.”
And in a shy voice, fumbling for the words, she tried to tell him how she felt about his book.
“Well, thanks, Lucy, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m very glad you liked it.”
“Oh, ‘liked’ isn’t the right word, Carl; I loved it. I can’t remember when a novel has moved me so deeply. And I’d love to discuss it with you, but a phone call isn’t really – do you think we could meet somewhere in town for a drink? Soon?”
“Well, actually, I’ve got company here now,” he said, “and I’ll probably be – you know – tied up for some time; so maybe I’d better take a rain check on the drink, okay?”
And for hours after they’d hung up she was still bothered by the clumsiness of his message. Wasn’t “I’ve got company here now” a funny way of telling her he had a girl? And she hadn’t heard anybody say “take a rain check” for years, so that was funny, too – e
specially from a man with a writer’s abhorrence of clichés.
But she couldn’t deny that her own part of the talk had been all wrong – too open, too direct, too aggressive. If she’d had any sleep last night she would almost certainly have found a subtler approach.
And the worst thing, however she might dwell on the bungled little phone call, the worst thing now was that she was terribly, terribly disappointed. All night, and especially toward morning, she had repeatedly let her mind float away from Carl Traynor’s powerful story into romantic little reveries of the man himself. Her having misjudged and belittled him all those weeks seemed only to lend piquancy to their long afternoon together in that Sixth Avenue bar. She deeply regretted having said no to him that day – if she’d said yes, she might now be alone with him in rejoicing over this very book – and she knew she would never forget how good he had felt to her clasping hands in that lingering embrace on the street.
At the dead-silent hour of five this morning, when she’d put the book aside before starting to read the last chapter because she knew the last chapter was going to break her heart, she could remember whispering audibly against her pillow: “Oh, Carl. Oh, Carl …”
And now, though it wasn’t yet noon – wasn’t even time to allow herself a drink – there was nothing left to dream of. Everything was gone. Everything was desolation and wreckage, because Carl Traynor had said he’d better take a rain check.
She had found in the past that a voluptuously long, hot shower could be made to seem almost as health-giving as a night’s sleep; she had learned too that taking exquisite pains over the selection and putting-on of clothes could sometimes be as good a way as any of helping the hours to pass.
And luck was with her on this particular day: by the time she was ready to settle herself at the telephone table, with her first drink gleaming as deep and substantial as the love of a generous friend, it was after four. The New York Stock Exchange had been closed for more than an hour, and this might easily be the kind of afternoon when even a conscientious broker would have nothing much to do but fool around the office until the clock said it was time to quit.