“Chip?” she said into the phone. “Are you terribly busy, or can you talk for a minute? … Oh, good. I just wondered if you’re – you know – if you’re free tonight, because I’d really love to see you.… Oh, that’s wonderful.… No, you say when; you say where. I want to place myself entirely at your disposal.”
“Mom? Mom?” Laura called urgently from the living room one evening, when Lucy was finishing up in the kitchen. “Mom, come and look, quick. There’s this neat new series on TV, and guess who’s in it.”
For a moment Lucy thought it might be Jack Halloran, but it wasn’t. It was Ben Duane.
“It’s all about this farm family, I think in Nebraska,” Laura explained when Lucy came to sit beside her at the mottled, droning screen, “and I think it’s really gonna be neat. It’s supposed to be back in Depression times, you see, and they’re very poor and all they’ve got is this little plot of—”
“Sh-sh,” Lucy told her, because the girl’s words were tumbling out too fast to follow. “Let’s just watch. I think I’ll be able to pick it up.”
Most of these television “series” entertainments were dreadful, but once in a while they stumbled onto a lucky formula, and this one did look fairly promising. The father was proud and taciturn, still a young man but prematurely aged by hardship, and the handsome mother was serene and patient to the point of nobility. There was a puzzled-looking boy just emerging from adolescence, and a girl a year or two younger – still a little coltish, perhaps, but large-eyed and brimming with incipient beauty.
Ben Duane played the spry old grandfather, and from the moment he came jauntily downstairs for breakfast you could tell he was going to be lovable all the way through. The scriptwriters hadn’t given him many lines in this opening or “pilot” episode – he would look up briefly now and then to deliver pungent wisdom over his bowl of oatmeal – but he got most of the laughs, or rather most of the spasms of “canned” laughter on the soundtrack.
“I bet the girl turns out to be the star, don’t you?” Laura said when the show was over.
“Well, or it could be the boy,” Lucy said, “or either of the parents. And with so many more episodes to work with, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they make Ben the featured player sometimes. He was a very distinguished actor, you know, for many years.”
“Yeah, I know. Anita and I used to think he was kind of a creepy old guy, though.”
“Oh? Why?”
“I don’t know. He never seemed to have enough clothes on.”
Then Laura got up, switched off the set, and wandered out of the room. She seemed to wander everywhere she went nowadays, rather than to walk. In a few more weeks she would be thirteen.
Peggy Maitland had studied drawing and painting at the Art Students League of New York for six months or so, before dropping out to devote her life to Paul, and she often said she had “loved” it there. The League had no entrance requirements and no formal program of study: beginners and advanced students were “all mixed up together,” and the teachers gave individual attention to each student according to his needs.
So Lucy decided to give it a try. She didn’t feel she needed drawing lessons – her drawing had been extravagantly praised by that much-admired teacher in boarding school, more than half a lifetime ago – but the challenge of oil painting on canvas would be something entirely new. And what did she have to lose?
The first thing she learned about oil painting, on her first day in one of the big, clean, light-flooded studios of the League, was that it smelled wonderful. It smelled like the very stuff of art itself. Then, slowly and with many mistakes, she began to learn more. Everything was light and line and form and color: you had a limited space, and your obligation was to fill it in a satisfying way.
“Now you’re getting something,” her instructor said quietly when he came to stand at her shoulder one afternoon – and God only knew how many weeks it had been since her enrollment. “I think you’re getting something, Mrs. Davenport. If you stay with this one, you’re going to have a picture.”
He was a short, tan, bald man named Santos, a Spaniard who spoke English with almost no trace of an accent, and Lucy had known from the beginning that he was a real teacher. There was neither fear nor carelessness in his method; he never flattered the dullards or the fools; he expected everyone’s standards to be as high as his own – and his highest praise, so rarely given as to make it exquisitely valuable, was to say “You’re going to have a picture.”
“And I love it,” she exclaimed in Chip Hartley’s house one Saturday night, whirling to face his chair in a way that made her skirt swing and float attractively around her legs. “I love the feeling that I’m doing something well – something I can do without any sense of strain or fear of failure; something I may even have been born to do.”
“Well, that’s great,” he told her. “Finding a thing like that does make all the difference, doesn’t it.” But he could look up at her only briefly because he was dismantling an expensive new German camera on the lap of his Bermuda shorts. Something had gone wrong with the thing this afternoon, spoiling the long day of picture-taking he had planned, and now his need to finger and scrutinize loose parts of it obliged him to sit with his thighs pressed together and his shoes pigeon-toed on the rug.
“I remember your saying about Tom Nelson’s work once,” she said, “that he gave you a sense of honest goods. Well, I’m beginning to think I might be able to do that, too – oh, not in his way, of course, but in a way of my own. Does that sound terribly immodest?”
“Sounds fine to me,” he said, holding up a small piece of the camera for inspection in the lamplight. “Speaking of honest goods, though, I’m afraid the Germans may have put something over on us this time.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to take it back to the store?” she inquired. “Instead of trying to fix it yourself?”
“As a matter of fact, dear,” he said, “I came to that same conclusion half an hour ago. All I’m trying to do now is get it put together well enough to take it back to the store.”
This wasn’t the first time Chip Hartley had struck her as less than an ideal companion, and it wouldn’t be the last. He would probably sit here fretting over his broken toy until bedtime; then soon it would be Sunday, always the most tedious of their days together, and once the new week began the only spice of uncertainty in her life would be wondering which of them would call the other first.
Well, being Chip Hartley’s girl might not amount to much – it might even turn out to be little more than a way of waiting for something better to come along – but it would always permit some small things to be accomplished. Later tonight, for example, she could probably find a way to tell him that she’d never liked Bermuda shorts.
Whether she made her daily trips to New York by car or by train, it was necessary first to drive through the village of Tonapac and out along the winding asphalt road that took her past the weathered old sign for the New Tonapac Playhouse on one side and the base of Ann Blake’s steep driveway, with its “Donarann” mailbox, on the other – and one of the reasons Lucy had come to believe the League was better than the New School was that she could now acknowledge those poignant landmarks without a second glance. Sometimes, in fact, she would get all the way through to the parkway entrance, or to the train station, without having noticed them at all.
But one morning she came upon Ann Blake standing alone at the roadside, all dressed up in a nice fall suit, with bright earrings, so she brought the car to a stop and leaned smiling from the driver’s window.
“Can I give you a lift somewhere, Ann?”
“Oh, no, thanks, Lucy, I’m just waiting for the town taxi. They always hate to come up the driveway here, and I’ve never known why. I mean I suppose it’s bad, but it’s not that bad.”
“Taking a trip?”
“Well, I’m going to New York for an – indefinite period of time,” Ann said, though the small suitcase at her feet was the kind meant for carry
ing a single change of clothes. “Actually, I’m very—” And she lowered her false eyelashes in embarrassment. “Well, I might as well tell you this, Lucy; why not? I’ll be checking into Sloan-Kettering.”
And Lucy may have known at once what “Bellevue” meant, but it took her two or three seconds to realize that Sloan-Kettering was a hospital for cancer patients. She got out of the car – this wasn’t the kind of talk you could have through a car window – and went quickly to Ann Blake’s side without any idea of what she was going to say.
“Well, Ann, I’m terribly sorry,” she began. “This is a rotten break. This really is a lousy, rotten break.”
“Thanks, dear; I knew you’d be kind. And I suppose the world hasn’t dealt me a very good hand this time, but then I never wanted to be an old woman anyway, so who cares? As my husband always used to say, who cares?”
“A lot of people care, Ann.”
“Well, that’s a nice thought, but try counting them up on your fingers. Name me four. Name me three.”
“Listen, come along with me,” Lucy said. “Let me take you up to the station, and we’ll have a cup of—”
“No.” And Ann looked as though she couldn’t be budged. “I’m not leaving here any sooner than I have to. Walking down this driveway was the last concession I’m going to make, and I regretted every step of that. All I want to do now is stand here and wait until they come and – until they come and get me. Do you understand?” Her eyes were suddenly filled with tears. “This is my place, you see.”
When the cab drew up and stopped for her, she got into it so slowly and carefully that Lucy could tell she was in pain. She might well have lived in pain for weeks or even months, alone in her love-nest house, before allowing herself to call a doctor. And she sat facing straight ahead as if determined not to look back, as the cab pulled away, but Lucy stood waving anyway until it was out of sight.
From old habit it occurred to her then that there could easily be a story in Ann Blake. It could be a long story, essentially very sad but with funny moments all through it, and this taxicab scene could serve as its perfect conclusion. There needn’t even be anything to make up.
And she was halfway to the city that day before she fully understood that stories were no longer her business. She was a painter now. If she couldn’t be a painter – well, if she couldn’t be a painter she had better give up trying to be anything at all.
“Lucy Davenport?” said a strong and vigorous voice on the phone one evening. “Carl Traynor.”
It was well over a year now since the strain and awkwardness of their last phone call, and she could tell at once that he didn’t have company anymore.
“… Well, I’d love to, Carl,” she heard herself saying, as if her voice were an instrument suddenly freed from her mind’s control, and “Actually, I’m in town every weekday now, so that should make it easy for us to – you know – to get together.”
Chapter Six
The address he’d given her, as she might have expected, turned out to be the same little Sixth Avenue bar where they’d spent those hours the last time. And he was waiting for her at the same table, getting to his feet in a mote-filled shaft of afternoon sunlight as she came in the door.
“Well, Lucy,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind this place. I thought it might be sort of like taking up where we left off.”
He looked less skinny, though it might have been a gaining of self-confidence more than weight, and he was much better dressed. His hands were steady, too, even before the first drink, and she noticed for the first time that they were nice-looking hands.
He had spent six months in Hollywood, he told her, employed to write a screen adaptation of a contemporary novel that he’d always liked, but the movie project had fallen apart in the casting because “they couldn’t get Natalie Wood for the lead.” Now he was home and almost broke again, almost back where he’d started – except, of course, that his own first book was long behind him.
“It’s a beautiful book, Carl,” she said. “Did it sell well at all?”
“Nah, nah, not well, but the paperback sale was fairly nice. And I still get enough mail to let me know that a few people out there are reading the son of a bitch; I guess that’s all I should ever really have hoped for. What’s bugging me now, though, is that I’m about a third of the way into another one and I can’t seem to get it off the ground. I’m beginning to see what writers mean about second-novel panic.”
“You don’t seem panicky to me,” she said. “Everything about you now suggests a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.”
He knew what he was doing, all right. In less than twenty minutes he had her out of that bar and up in the dim seclusion of his apartment, a block or two away.
“Oh, baby,” he murmured as he helped her out of her clothes. “Oh, my lovely. Oh, my lovely girl.”
The only trouble at first was that one small, cold-sober part of her mind floated free of the rest of her; it was able to observe how solemn a man could be at times like this, how earnest in his hairy nakedness, and how predictable. You had only to offer up your breasts and there was his hungering mouth on one and then the other of them, drawing the nipples out hard; you had only to open your legs and there was his hand at work on you, tirelessly burrowing. Then you got his mouth again, and then you got the whole of him, boyishly proud of his first penetration, lunging and thrusting and ready to love you forever, if only to prove that he could.
But she liked it – oh, she liked it all, and that traitorous little part of her mind winked out to nothingness long before it was over. Then, as soon as her breathing and her voice came back to normal, she told Carl Traynor he was “marvelous.”
“You always know how to say just the right thing,” he said. “I wish I could do that.”
“Well, but you can; you do.”
“Sometimes, maybe; other times not. I can think of one or two girls who might want to give you an argument on that point, Lucy.”
His place wasn’t very clean – she had an impulse to fall heavily to work with a scrub brush and a bucketful of hot water and ammonia – and the bathroom appeared to be the grubbiest part of it. But when she stepped out of the shower she found two freshly laundered towels on the rack, hung there as if in readiness for her visit. That was nice, and it was nice too when he brought her a long flannel bathrobe to wear: it hung to her ankles and made her skin feel good all the way down.
She straightened up his bed, though he told her not to bother with it; then, walking barefoot on the naked floor, she explored the rest of his apartment. It was a lot bigger than it had seemed at first, high and well-proportioned and probably bright in the morning hours, though its windows were filled with the sadness of sunset colors now, but it was almost bare – sparsely furnished and without decoration. There weren’t even very many books, and what few there were had been so carelessly shoved and jumbled on the shelves as to suggest impatience with the whole idea of being expected to own any books at all.
His writing table gave a first impression of jumble and impatience too, or even of chaos, until you saw the small, clean section of it where a portable typewriter had been shoved out of the way, where sharpened pencils were gathered in readiness, and where several pages of new manuscript lay face up, the top one showing almost as many words crossed out as words allowed to stand. It might not be Chip Hartley’s idea of a desk; but then, the idea of it was a far cry from anything in Chip Hartley’s understanding.
“Baby?” he asked from somewhere in the shadows behind her. “Can you stay awhile? I mean can you spend the night with me, or do you have to go back to wherever it is?”
And it took her no time at all to decide. “Well, if I can use your phone,” she said, “I think I’ll be able to stay.”
Soon she was spending three or four nights a week with him, and as many afternoons as she could manage; that was how they worked things out for almost a year.
There were times when she’d find him so lost in his ne
rvous pacing and chain-smoking, talking too fast and absently pulling at the crotch of his pants the way little boys do, that she couldn’t believe he had written the book she admired so completely. But there were other times, more and more often, when he was calm and wise and funny and always knew how to please her.
“You’re really a very shy man, aren’t you?” she said one night when they were walking home from a small, awkward party that neither of them had enjoyed.
“Well, sure I am. How could you’ve sat through all those gruesome little New School sessions without knowing that?”
“Well, you always did seem ill at ease there,” she said, “but you were never at a loss for words.”
“ ‘At a loss for words,’ ” he repeated. “Jesus, I’ll never understand why so many people think shyness means being tongue-tied and bashful and not having the nerve to kiss a girl. That doesn’t even begin to cover the subject, don’t you see? Because there’s another kind of shyness that has you talking and talking as if you’re never going to stop, has you kissing girls even when you don’t feel like it because you think they may expect it of you. It’s a terrible thing, this other kind of shyness. It can get you into nothing but trouble, and I’ve suffered from it all my life.”
And Lucy settled her hand and wrist more snugly in his arm as they walked. She felt she was getting to know him better all the time.
Carl said once that he wanted to publish fifteen books before he died, and to have no more than three of them – “or four, tops” – be the kind of books that would have to be apologized for. She liked the bravery of that ambition and told him she was sure he’d fulfill it; then later, secretly, she began to seek out an important place for herself in his career.